The Test Tube and the Scale

  What begins as a critique of Western imperialism becomes, in an epiphanic flash, a disclosure of empathy. Conquistador generates real listener excitement from its outset, a four beat introduction leading to Gary Brooker’s interrogative vocal, the sort of imploring probe we apply to all historical documentation as it begins revealing its sonorous evidence of real time narratives. Keith Reid’s lyric opens with an unnamed narrator’s first glimpse of the titular war monument, along with the biased observation, “like some angel’s hallowed brow, you reek of purity.” The line suggests a candidly modern skepticism of archaic European explorers’ destiny, a humanist perspective of the pompous colonialist ideal. Together with Robin Trower’s rhythm guitar and Brooker’s piano, staccato rhythm propels the narrator’s tale as it drifts from the present to the distant past and back again, a through line from the conqueror’s quixotic mission-oriented drive to the narrator’s steely, clear-eyed hist...

  If, out of the great American R&B record labels, Motown represented the hope-filled, sanguine possibilities of racial integration, and Stax the inner strength of black—and thus, human—consciousness, then Philadelphia International Records conveyed a fantasy of our easy surrender to sensual imperatives against an urban backdrop. Before the label could find its voice, however, there came a brief period of emulation of commercially proven models, and the mid-late sixties model for intersex, R&B duets was Motown’s Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Ersatz beauty is a common enough occurrence in rock and roll, so when it appears to us without guise, it’s as a sui generis aberration, and we never fully recover from its initial shock. The harmonies of Gaye and Terrell, though ubiquitous in the collective memory, have never been normalized to the extent that their appearance inspires fatigue in the manner of some overly familiar Motown mainstays. In a similar style, Bunny Sigler and ...