Body and Soul. William Onyeabor. 2013. Luaka Bop.

 Mystery is one of those ephemeral and lawless qualities of expression that draws you into a pop song, revealing surprising dimensions that keep you coming back to it for unexpected returns. The commercial disposability of the 45 rpm single’s microcosmic nature suggests an essence too narrow to properly situate mystery and all of its radical properties. Yet there it is, discernible in song after song, transparent or opaque, and eased into place by the force of artistic personality.  From start to finish, William Onyeabor’s Body and Soul is textured with adroit nineteen-seventies discotheque keyboard virtuosity, and the foreign spelling distinction is crucial; Onyeabor, following the dictum of Body and Soul’s lyric, “When I play my kind of music, I’m playing for your body and soul,” keeps the dance tempo suspended somewhere between disco’s refined finesse and funk’s sly instability. That resulting tension is then subsumed by the rhythm section which goes on to sustain it with a remarkably repetitive prowess for ten minutes. The creative duration is key for appreciating Body and Soul’s power to achieve greatness by a simple combination of only a few basic elements, as well as grip our imaginations with the fantasy of strangely darkened dancefloors, where, through cocaine windstorms, the promise of disco’s never ending song is always realized. But fantasy is a product of the idle mind and immersion in pop music throws the imagination into profound disarray; it’s like Ellen Burstyn running into her daughter’s bedroom and finding objects flying, furniture moving, curtains flailing. Nevertheless you  walk into this bedroom and commit yourself to infernal disarray as you would any other addiction only because it means choosing models of organization whose commercial wisdom is immediate and easily transmitted with clarity across stereo channels. For me the time when I began playing records coincided with that part of my churchgoing experience when I learned of the importance of ritual, but what powers of transmogrification were deployed with I enacted these boyhood bedroom rites? I am a cult of mystical, transcendental knowledge mostly rejected by current market trends. 

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