Isaac Hayes: To Be Continued : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Isaac Hayes, along with partner David Porter, used to write and sometimes produce flawlessly funky songs for Sam & Dave. So he can't be all bad. Now he's making music so banal, so false, that it sounds like theme music and dialogue from some tired melodrama. Hayes' new album continues his practice of taking familiar material and expanding it — with introductory spoken monologue, jazz-styled orchestral filler or mere repetition (usually all three)—so that the song resembles a drowned and bloated body washed ashore after weeks at sea: pathetic, grossly misshapen, dead.

Everything winds up approximately ten minutes too long. An example: This album's talk-song (cf. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "I Stand Accused") is "Our Day Will Come," which altogether runs 9:24. Almost half of this is a one-sided conversational lead-in establishing a dude with troubles (his girl's parents don't approve of their relationship and she's crying and, oh yes, he's just been drafted) who seems resigned to it all. A little easy social significance here: "We're not the only ones goin' through changes like this. People all over the world been denied and discriminated. There's always messed-up situations — social and racial."

But Ike isn't going to resist the draft and he sure ain't about to join the Panthers with this rap. Politics aside, the monologue and the song that follows are fairly bursting with unconvincing, empty emotionalism. Hayes has managed to present the recorded equivalent of watching TV with the sound off: he seems to make all the right sounds, uses all the right soul cliches, does appropriate contortions — but nothing happens. I mean, there's really nothing there.

Same for music, which is jazz muzak with every once in a while an interesting phrase thrown in that will make you listen for a moment before it too gets sucked back into the over-all quicksand. "The Look of Love," especially, sounds like back-of-the-credits schlock from a third-rate James Bond film. On side two there is a whole six and a half minutes of this, used as an unnecessary appendage to "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," itself unnecessary in this 8:58 version.

This would be merely sad if it weren't for the fact that so many people eat this shit up. Both of Hayes' previous releases in this mold have "achieved gold record status" and remain firmly entrenched on best-selling jazz and soul album charts. As a result, Isaac Hayes is probably one of the most dangerous influences in the R&B business. Where Sly Stone has had a powerful revitalizing effect on black popular music, Hayes' introduction of the 11-minute song has acted as an energy drain. The packed-in power of the three-minute single, still the backbone of rhythm and blues, is dissipated and eventually lost when the song is stretched beyond reasonable limits.

Certainly, intense, creative things are possible in a longer framework — imagine Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder or Wilson Pickett roaming freely over six or eight minutes — if the performer remains hooked into the core or soul of the song. But Hayes and his less competent imitators seem unaware of what really matters in the music and go trailing off after extraneous effects, leaving the song itself to die a rather unnatural death.

Reportedly, Isaac Hayes has been chosen the number one jazz artist of the past year by one of the music trade papers. It's outrageous awards like this that make the man a threat, and I'm afraid we may see a lot of other performers going off the deep end into black muzak before everyone comes to his senses.