Making The Best Of A Bad Situation
The only black music it's hip for a white boy or girl to like these days is reggae. Disco is for dead legs and anyway doesn't have a colour—just an aura of steely gray—and soul music has become confined to the slicker chains of supper clubs. All the great names of soul's and Motown's past still come here—the Supremes and Temptations, the Stylistics and Chi-Lites, Barry White and Tina Turner.
LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Making The Best Of A Bad Situation
by
Simon Frith
The only black music it's hip for a white boy or girl to like these days is reggae. Disco is for dead legs and anyway doesn't have a colour—just an aura of steely gray—and soul music has become confined to the slicker chains of supper clubs. All the great names of soul's and Motown's past still come here—the Supremes and Temptations, the Stylistics and Chi-Lites, Barry White and Tina Turner. They arrive with their identikit suits and steps and silks and slot into their identikit cabaret routines: old hit, kick one, old hit, kick two, old hit, whirl about, old hit, bow and off. And the applause is warm and polite from the spruce audiences of young parents, celebrating a rare child-free might out, remembering the heady days of courtship until music and scampi and Irish coffee blur into the rich atmosphere of a bit of class entertainment.