Baby, I Could Be So Good At Loving You. The Friends of Distinction. 1969. RCA Victor.

The spell of good will cast by a certain kind of pop music is intensely short lived, and what is likely to remain of it, in trace form, is an iota of memory of having experienced the pleasure of fevered extremes. Executed with such an assured lightness of touch, Baby, I Could Be So Good At Loving You achieves a kind of commercial triumph by bringing together two popular genres—R&B and easy listening—without insult to either one. The group vocalist, Floyd Butler, shows us, with an astute and relaxed sophistication, just how far to pitch the voice of AM radio seduction without it tipping into a mimicry of overt sexuality. His performance follows in the tradition of the great sixties master stylists Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Johnny Mathis, artists who not only expanded the pop lexicon with jazz and Broadway musical influences, but who also, through artistic dynamism, helped establish a vibrant new paradigm of beauty and style, and whose pop art even manages to sidle into our dreams and fantasies, illuminating the way we think, and how we feel, about love and desire. Released in 1969 when the States was in the nascent grip of its now unending struggle to make social change a commonplace imperative, Baby, I Could Be So Good At Loving You worked at dislodging easy listening musical conventions from the kitsch conservatism into which it had become mired. Easy listening’s chauvinism was such an intrinsically American quality that most of its fan base could surely claim it as an extension of their patriotism. The dystopian tendency of mercantile institutional structures to want to influence and manage the value systems of a private citizenry is enough to make a sensible listener turn his back on what is freakishly normal—i.e., conservative—in culture, but we’re also irrationally loyal to our tastes. Once we recognize something’s appeal and assess its worth it more or less becomes ours. In this capacity we’re united in our willingness to collect from, and hoard to ourselves, the real world. Even if that means having to acknowledge work from the vampiric, shadow lives of Mitch Miller and David Foster.




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