Back Stabbers. The O’Jays. 1972. Philadelphia International.

The intimation of danger that starts Back Stabbers is thrilling in a uniquely American way because it excites our taste for modern tension. Like the intro to Gimme Shelter, it not only portends the threat of menace to come, but it extends the reach of the song’s themes. After a lead guitar plays the song’s key melody, a swell of strings arises, repeating the melody and goading our sympathies. Back Stabbers is a master work of urban treachery and domestic paranoia that its producers, the legendary and influential Gamble and Huff, scaled to address the national crises: the winding down of the Vietnam War and its associated horrors, the emergence at home of a brutal and sadistic media darling, the serial killer, Watergate, escalating racial and social injustices.  Despite the O’Jays tapping into and confirming our shared capacity for betrayal, the combined singing voices of Eddie Levert, Walter Williams, and William Powell determinedly create the illusion that, in the presence of the finest examples of pop music, we are never alone. They accomplish this by sustaining a reassuring vocal tone and timbre that, at the heart of its spirit of frustration, unfailingly engenders a potential fantasy of community. It’s ironic of course that a man who’s lost everything should find a voice inside himself to reach millions, yet this is the lesson of history. Accompanying the most extreme examples of how we consistently act in bad faith, there follows the inevitable morsels of redemption, the faintly visible signs of psychic maintenance that mitigate perfidy and loneliness, profound loss. Back Stabbers arrived at a time when fissures were beginning to appear in America’s self-mythologizing countenance, disclosing its fearsome multiple personality disorder. It remains a relevant link in the great American playlist, the longest running alternative resistance to our country’s ongoing sickness.


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