I was about 17 when I first heard Sade. The xx (real heads know them as The 20), extremely poppin’ at the time, had a habit of name-dropping her in every interview they did, and after three or four instances thereof I was finally moved to give Promise a spin. It was a soothing presence in a turbulent time, an outside source of calm when all internal reserves had been biologically de-commissioned. Her legacy persisted in chill, 2010’s omnipresent musical descriptor, but the source material was far too kitschy and once-popular to have made it far up my list of musical priorities.

Sade’s is music that can live even in the absence of sound: long before I heard Diamond Life I knew that there existed a song called Smooth Operator, just as I know that Sufjan Stevens or XXXtentacion have at some point recorded music – the cultural signification of the artist subsumes the actual music to the point that there’s no real need to listen. Consider the role of Mos Def’s reference to Sweetest Taboo on Ms. New Booty or Kanye’s You a ‘Rico Suave’ n**** / ride round listenin’ to Sade n**** from All Day – both are meant to connote the same goofy baritone-and-slap-bass sensuousness, which evidently passed out of style sometime between 1999 and 2015 (but, I hear, is back for 2017!).

Insofar as any critical theory concept is useful for evaluating music (tenuous), the most useful insights on Sade probably come from the notion of camp. Inextricably tied to the LGBT community (the source of all culture), camp is an act of performance without concern for realism or believability – an embrace of bad taste, and of acute awareness that the act is first and foremost for consumption and observation, rather than to avoid detection. Camp is the realm of the larger-than-life, a refuge in any medium for levels of emotional intrigue usually reserved for the movies.

It is here that the clouds of the quiet storm gather. How would it sound to be made, forcibly. to relax? To reduce your existence, within the world of a song, to the distilled expression of a single emotion? This is tricky territory, a world where not even the fact that the man singing calls himself Peabo Bryson can break the spell. The imagery of the sound is compelling enough make any cheese factor more endearing than corny – it’s music of the night, music of the dark, music about a you and a me defined just vaguely enough to fit neatly into any listener’s personal experience.

Taking its name from a Smokey Robinson banger and made famous by a late-night radio program DJed by Melvin Lindsey on DC's WHUR, the Quiet Storm era is the origin point of the slow jam, a mellowing of r’n’b’s identity that would bridge the transition between its harder-edged rock- and rap-inflected interpretations. While the genre spawned a multitude of hits over its lifespan, singles don’t capture the experience. More than anything, the quiet storm is an instantly – a simmering hour or more during which mood and feeling are handed over to the artist for guidance.

Essential Joints
Debarge All This Love
Marvin Gaye Sexual Healing
The Temptations A Song For You
The Gap Band Yearning For Your Love
Lenny Williams 'Cause I Love You
Teddy Pendergrass Turn Off The Lights
One Way Something In The Past