No late twentieth century popular icon has suffered vacillations in critical ardor as severely as Lionel Richie. Okay, lemme retract: has Richie ever warmed his feet to critical ardor? As singer and songwriter for the mildly funky Commodores, he showed far more interest in balladry and, interestingly, a polished studio kind of country-pop that would result in producing a Kenny Rogers album, an an Alabama collaboration, “Stuck on You” doing well on Nashville, and the 2012 sales phenomenon Tuskegee. Like most sales Goliaths, timing was key: Richie’s politesse and impeccable melodic instincts coincided with a renewed interest in MOR mush as disco waned commercially. When MTV’s acceptance of Michael Jackson and Prince and Richie’s surprising visual malleability proved fissile, Can’t Slow Down was the result: a diamond-certified sales monster that made Richie acceptable to grandmas of every ethnicity (i.e. my abuela, sixty in 1984 and who liked “Hello”).
As for the Commodores, Robert Christgau nailed it: pros “who understood funk’s entertainment potential the way John Denver understood folk music’s,” which meant their relationship to funk was theoretical rather than instinctual though I hesitate to call it cynical. This doesn’t smother the polite churn of “Brick House” and “Machine Gun”; put them against late seventies Isleys and they stick work, and the Isleys’ ballads could be worse than Richie’s. The shimmering electronic reminiscence called “Nightshift” would still triumph as an instrumental, but you’d have to forego the poignancy of new singer J.D. Nicholas and longtime drummer-singer Walter Orange; if Talk Talk had released it in 1985 it would’ve resonated as sublime ephemerality, a synth pop act honoring forebears with whom it has nothing in common — like the Commodores did in their elegy to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson. “Nightshift” anchors a dance scene in Claire Denis’ remarkable 2009 35 Shots of Rum.
1. Easy
2. Slippery When Wet
3. Stuck On You
4. Too Hot Ta Trot
5. Machine Gun
6. Lady (You Bring Me Up)
7. Running with the Night
8. Nightshift
9. Love Will Conquer All
10. Brick House
11. All Night Long (All Night)
12. You Are
13. Deep River Woman
14. Sela
15. Machine Gun
16. Just to Be Close to You
17. Old Fashioned Love
18. X-Ray Movie
19. Sail On
20. My Destiny
Humanizing The Vacuum 