The Jackson 5: Skywriter : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Motown's bantamweight superstars have cranked out another one, and my guess is, the tumult having settled, a certain polarity greets Skywriter within the record-buying public. One either snaps it up right away or looks slightly askance at the total stranger who does, shaking the head with incomprehension. The Jacksons have become such established professionals in their lingeringly pre-pubescent milieu (and that's more of a paradox than it might sound) that there's no longer any need to apologize for voices about to crack or curfews broken for that last encore.

Apologize, indeed. Skywriter, while it doesn't contain more than a couple of individual cuts equalling the feral force of "I Want You Back," opts instead for an overall musical counterpart for the brothers' present incarnation. They're no longer a novelty act and as one of the front-running groups of the company, they're instrumental in forging the increasingly complex and eclectic tack Motown's music is taking.

But astride the music rides the myth, which one treats with kid gloves. They've refined the child's play of earlier songs ("ABC," "2-4-6-8," "Little Bitty Pretty One"), sublimating the sing-song, pseudo-nursery rhyme phrasing in the melodies, instead of featuring it outright in the lyric.

What used to pass for a youthful quintet self-consciously flaunting their relatively minimal chronological standing now sounds more and more like the ageless joy of gospel. "The Boogie Man" substitutes a good dose of funk for its banteringly literal intro. "Hallelujah Day," perhaps the best cut here, starts off with an infectious piano figure that spirals right back to the church.

A more interesting development is the introduction of more worldly songs, the best of which remains the prototype, Clifton Davis' "Never Can Say Goodbye." His "Uppermost" in its context is as rousing as "Hallelujah Day." The clean, off-handed vocal (Michael consistently skirts affectation for his own scatting individuality) and the insistent percussion erect an uncomplicated front for the incisiveness of the lyric. In those two songs, very distinct sets of emotions come across with a richness that rises above arbitrary limits attributed to age and inexperience.

"I Can't Quit Your Love" and "Touch" are almost as convincing, the first just missing Levi Stubbs' authority on the magnificent Four Tops version. The Supremes did "Touch" with shadings of mystery and sensuality that elude the Jacksons' more obvious reading. But the myth gets an added aura it never really had before and the wish-fulfillment "Touch" sparks will no doubt be rampant. The album closes with "You Made Me What I Am Today" testifying that the Jackson Five are keeping rock & roll alive in a black music that increasingly embraces its bastard offspring, rock.

One last, relatively unaesthetic complaint: Motown has inaugurated a norm of ten cuts per LP, which works fine with extended cuts. But none of Skywriter's exceed the three-minute mark by much. Two more songs of the caliber on this album wouldn't be very hard to take at all.