Older dancers know Edwards and Garrett’s single reaches back to “Abraxame,” an underappreciated track from the group Barrabas, which had some success in New York clubs in the early Seventies. Much like the Mary Jane Girls’ “All Night Long,” “Don’t Look Any Further” seems to exist on a rhythmic continuum leading from early funk to hip-hop. This was the only hit outside of the Temptations for Edwards - he gets a healthy assist from Garrett, who would go on to co-write Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” - but even without his longtime groupmates, he can shoot out words and phrases with the gravel-shotgun force of Teddy Pendergrass. Here lies yet another of the earth-shaking rhythm sections in Motown’s massive discography: an unchanging snare drum cruelly punching holes in a four-part bass riff stuffed with chubby notes. And amid all the hits, there are still lesser-known gems to be discovered. Even if you’ve heard them a million times or come across them in a dozen movie soundtracks, classics like “My Girl,” “Come See About Me,” or “The Tracks of My Tears” still sound almost impossibly fresh, just as the radical spirit of “What’s Going On” or “Living for the City” resonates perfectly in our present political moment. Postman,” by the Marvelettes, and yet the joy and power of this music hasn’t diminished even a tiny bit. This year is the 60th anniversary of Motown’s first Number One hit, “Please Mr. Getting down to a list of the 100 Greatest Motown Songs wasn’t easy. Motown stars like Robinson, the Commodores, Diana Ross, and Michael Jackson kept churning out great music through the funk, disco, and easy-listening eras, and hitmakers like Rick James, Lionel Richie, DeBarge, and Boyz II Me kept the label all over the radio in the slick Eighties and into the Nineties. “Because they were my brothers and sisters.”Īfter defining “the sound of young America” with the mid-Sixties pop elegance of Mary Wells, the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations, and the girl-group glory of the Supremes, the Marvelettes, and Martha and the Vandellas, the label’s two most visionary artists, Gaye and Stevie Wonder, pushed against Gordy’s dictatorial rule to create adventurous, socially conscious landmark Seventies albums like What’s Going On and Innervisions, which expanded Motown’s scope while staying true to its core hitmaking values. “I was so happy whenever I got a hit record on one of the artists,” said Smokey Robinson, the label’s greatest songwriting genius. Within a year, Motown had its first million-selling record, with the Miracles’ “Shop Around.” By 1969, the label would place dozens of records in the Billboard Top 10 as it reshaped the sound of pop music for a generation, thanks to its somewhat contradictory mix of assembly-line consistency and individual artistic brilliance, integrationist upward mobility and black self-assertion, fierce competition and familial camaraderie. borrowed $800 to start his own record label in Detroit. In 1959, an aspiring songwriter and record producer named Berry Gordy Jr.
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