Post-disco
Post-disco is a term to describe an aftermath in popular music history circa 1979–1986, imprecisely beginning with an unprecedented backlash against disco music in the United States, leading to civil unrest and a riot in Chicago known as the Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979, indistinctly ending with the mainstream appearance of house music in the late 1980s. Disco during its dying stage displayed an electronic character that soon served as a stepping stone to new wave, old-school hip hop, euro disco and was succeeded by an underground club music called hi-NRG, its direct continuation. An underground movement of disco music, "stripped-down", featuring "radically different sounds" took place on the East Coast that "was neither disco and neither R&B", This scene known as post-disco catering to New York metropolitan area, was led by urban contemporary artists in response to the over-commercialization and artistic downfall of disco culture. Developed from the rhythm and blues sound as perfected by Parliament-Funkadelic, the electronic side of disco, dub music techniques, other genres.
Post-disco was typified by New York City music groups like "D" Train and Unlimited Touch who followed a more urban approach while others, like Material and ESG, a more experimental one. Post-disco was, like disco, singles-driven market controlled by independent record companies that generated a cross-over chart success all through the early-to-mid 1980s. Most creative control was in the hands of record producers and club DJs, a trend that outlived the dance-pop era. Other musical styles that emerged in the post-disco era include dance-pop and Italo disco and led to the development of the early alternative dance, club-centered house and techno music. Drum machines, sequencers were either or dominant in a composition or mixed up with various acoustic instruments, depending on the artist and on the year. Electronic instruments became more and more prevalent for each year during the period and dominated the genre by the mid 1980s. Darryl Payne arguing about the minimal approach of post-disco Producers are using a lot more sounds and a lot less instruments: the'Forget Me Nots' and'Don't Make Me Wait tracks' are empty, but there's a sophistication people can get into.
The main force in post-disco was the 12" single format and short-lived collaborations while indie record producers were instrumental in the musical direction of what the scene was headed to. The music that catered to dance and urban audiences managed to influence more popular and mainstream acts like Madonna, New Order or Pet Shop Boys; the music tended to be technology-centric, keyboard-laden, with funk-oriented bass lines, synth riffs, dub music aesthetics, background jazzy or blues-y piano layers. For strings and brass sections, synthesizer sounds were preferred to the lush orchestration heard on many disco tracks, although such arrangements would resurface in some house music. Soulful female vocals, remained an essence of post-disco. Bridging the so-called death of disco and the birth of house, all this early-to-mid-'80s music lacks a name beyond drably functional and neutral terms like "dance" or "club music." The term "post-disco" was used as early as 1984 by Cadence magazine when defining post-disco soul as "disco without the loud bass-drum thump."
New York Magazine used the word in an article appearing in the December 1985 issue. AllMusic states that the term denotes a music genre in the era between the indistinct "end" of disco music and the indistinct emergence of house music. In other historical instances the term had been used in a derisive manner. Spy implicitly mocked the usage of both the terms "post-punk" and "post-disco" in their Spy's Rock Critic-o-Matic article, whereas spoofing various music reviews published by Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and Spin. Cuban-American writer Elías Miguel Muñoz in his 1989 novel Crazy Love, in a passage where musicians after moving to America discuss what their "style" may be, used the term in a satirical manner. Midwesterners didn't want that intimidating style shoved down their throats Shortly after the "Disco Sucks" movement of disco bashing throughout the United States, American radio stations began to pay attention to other popular formats of music such as reggae, punk rock or new wave while top mainstream labels and record companies like Casablanca, TK Records or RSO went bankrupt.
Since disco music had been on the way of electronic progression, it split itself into subscenes and styles like Hi-NRG, Italo disco and boogie. The last one is associated with post-disco more than any other offshoots of post-disco. Brazilian record producer and fusion jazz pioneer Eumir Deodato, well aware of current trends in American underground music, turned around the career of a failing funk music group Kool & the Gang by adopting and pursuing a light pop–post-disco sound that not only revitalized the band's image but turned out to be the most successful hits in their entire career. B. B. & Q. Band and Change acts' creator Jacques Fred Petrus, a French-Italian hi-NRG Italo disco music record producer, reflects on his decision to shift from conventional disco music to post-disco " sound changed to more of a funky dance/R&B style to reflect the times." French-born songwriting duo Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali, creators of the successful Village People act, moved their former disco act Ritchie Family to RCA Victor to release their
Pop music
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form in the United States and United Kingdom during the mid-1950s. The terms "popular music" and "pop music" are used interchangeably, although the former describes all music, popular and includes many diverse styles. "Pop" and "rock" were synonymous terms until the late 1960s, when they became differentiated from each other. Although much of the music that appears on record charts is seen as pop music, the genre is distinguished from chart music. Pop music is eclectic, borrows elements from other styles such as urban, rock and country. Identifying factors include short to medium-length songs written in a basic format, as well as common use of repeated choruses, melodic tunes, hooks. David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop music as "a body of music, distinguishable from popular and folk musics". According to Pete Seeger, pop music is "professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music". Although pop music is seen as just the singles charts, it is not the sum of all chart music.
The music charts contain songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz and novelty songs. As a genre, pop music is seen to develop separately. Therefore, the term "pop music" may be used to describe a distinct genre, designed to appeal to all characterized as "instant singles-based music aimed at teenagers" in contrast to rock music as "album-based music for adults". Pop music continuously evolves along with the term's definition. According to music writer Bill Lamb, popular music is defined as "the music since industrialization in the 1800s, most in line with the tastes and interests of the urban middle class." The term "pop song" was first used in 1926, in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal". Hatch and Millward indicate that many events in the history of recording in the 1920s can be seen as the birth of the modern pop music industry, including in country and hillbilly music. According to the website of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the term "pop music" "originated in Britain in the mid-1950s as a description for rock and roll and the new youth music styles that it influenced".
The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that while pop's "earlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience since the late 1950s, pop has had the special meaning of non-classical mus in the form of songs, performed by such artists as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, ABBA, etc." Grove Music Online states that " in the early 1960s,'pop music' competed terminologically with beat music, while in the US its coverage overlapped with that of'rock and roll'". From about 1967, the term “pop music” was used in opposition to the term rock music, a division that gave generic significance to both terms. While rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of popular music, pop was more commercial and accessible. According to British musicologist Simon Frith, pop music is produced "as a matter of enterprise not art", is "designed to appeal to everyone" but "doesn't come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste". Frith adds that it is "not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward and, in musical terms, it is conservative".
It is, "provided from on high rather than being made from below... Pop is not a do-it-yourself music but is professionally produced and packaged". According to Frith, characteristics of pop music include an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology, an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal "artistic" qualities. Music scholar Timothy Warner said it has an emphasis on recording and technology, rather than live performance; the main medium of pop music is the song between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and a simple traditional structure. Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, with a focus on melodies and catchy hooks, a chorus that contrasts melodically and harmonically with the verse; the beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment. The lyrics of modern pop songs focus on simple themes – love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions.
Harmony and chord progressions in pop music are "that of classical European tonality, only more simple-minded." Clichés include the barbershop quartet-style blues scale-influenced harmony. There was a lessening of the influence of traditional views of the circle of fifths between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, including less predominance for the dominant function. Throughout its development, pop music has absorbed influences from other genres of popular music. Early pop music drew on the sentimental ballad for its form, gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel and soul music, instrumentation from jazz and rock music, orchestration from classical music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music, rhythmic elements from hip-hop music, spoken passages from rap. In the 1960s, the majority of mainstream pop music fell in two categories: guitar and bass groups or singers
Connecticut
Connecticut is the southernmost state in the New England region of the United States. As of the 2010 Census, it has the highest per-capita income, Human Development Index, median household income in the United States, it is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, Long Island Sound to the south. Its capital is Hartford and its most populous city is Bridgeport, it is part of New England, although portions of it are grouped with New York and New Jersey as the Tri-state area. The state is named for the Connecticut River which bisects the state; the word "Connecticut" is derived from various anglicized spellings of an Algonquian word for "long tidal river". Connecticut's first European settlers were Dutchmen who established a small, short-lived settlement called Fort Hoop in Hartford at the confluence of the Park and Connecticut Rivers. Half of Connecticut was part of the Dutch colony New Netherland, which included much of the land between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers, although the first major settlements were established in the 1630s by the English.
Thomas Hooker led a band of followers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded the Connecticut Colony. The Connecticut and New Haven colonies established documents of Fundamental Orders, considered the first constitutions in America. In 1662, the three colonies were merged under a royal charter; this was one of the Thirteen Colonies. Connecticut is the third smallest state by area, the 29th most populous, the fourth most densely populated of the 50 states, it is known as the "Constitution State", the "Nutmeg State", the "Provisions State", the "Land of Steady Habits". It was influential in the development of the federal government of the United States; the Connecticut River, Thames River, ports along Long Island Sound have given Connecticut a strong maritime tradition which continues today. The state has a long history of hosting the financial services industry, including insurance companies in Hartford and hedge funds in Fairfield County. Landmarks and cities of Connecticut Connecticut is bordered on the south by Long Island Sound, on the west by New York, on the north by Massachusetts, on the east by Rhode Island.
The state capital and fourth largest city is Hartford, other major cities and towns include Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury, Danbury, New Britain and Bristol. Connecticut is larger than the country of Montenegro. There are 169 incorporated towns in Connecticut; the highest peak in Connecticut is Bear Mountain in Salisbury in the northwest corner of the state. The highest point is just east of where Connecticut and New York meet, on the southern slope of Mount Frissell, whose peak lies nearby in Massachusetts. At the opposite extreme, many of the coastal towns have areas that are less than 20 feet above sea level. Connecticut has a long maritime history and a reputation based on that history—yet the state has no direct oceanfront; the coast of Connecticut sits on Long Island Sound, an estuary. The state's access to the open Atlantic Ocean is both to the east; this situation provides many safe harbors from ocean storms, many transatlantic ships seek anchor inside Long Island Sound when tropical cyclones pass off the upper East Coast.
The Connecticut River cuts through the center of the state. The most populous metropolitan region centered within the state lies in the Connecticut River Valley. Despite Connecticut's small size, it features wide regional variations in its landscape. Connecticut's rural areas and small towns in the northeast and northwest corners of the state contrast with its industrial cities such as Stamford and New Haven, located along the coastal highways from the New York border to New London northward up the Connecticut River to Hartford. Many towns in northeastern and northwestern Connecticut center around a green, such as the Litchfield Green, Lebanon Green, Wethersfield Green. Near the green stand historical visual symbols of New England towns, such as a white church, a colonial meeting house, a colonial tavern or inn, several colonial houses, so on, establishing a scenic historical appearance maintained for both historic preservation and tourism. Many of the areas in southern and coastal Connecticut have been built up and rebuilt over the years, look less visually like traditional New England.
The northern boundary of the state with Massachusetts is marked by the Southwick Jog or Granby Notch, an 2.5 miles square detour into Connecticut. The origin of this anomaly is established in a long line of disputes and temporary agreements which were concluded in 1804, when southern Southwick's residents sought to leave Massachusetts, the town was split in half; the southwestern border of Connecticut where it abuts New York State is marked by a panhandle in Fairfield County, containing the towns of Greenwich, New Canaan and parts of Norwalk and Wilton. This irregularity in the boundary is the result of territorial disputes in the late 17th century, culminating
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog digital recording. Acoustic analog recording is achieved by a microphone diaphragm that senses changes in atmospheric pressure caused by acoustic sound waves and records them as a mechanical representation of the sound waves on a medium such as a phonograph record. In magnetic tape recording, the sound waves vibrate the microphone diaphragm and are converted into a varying electric current, converted to a varying magnetic field by an electromagnet, which makes a representation of the sound as magnetized areas on a plastic tape with a magnetic coating on it. Analog sound reproduction is the reverse process, with a bigger loudspeaker diaphragm causing changes to atmospheric pressure to form acoustic sound waves. Digital recording and reproduction converts the analog sound signal picked up by the microphone to a digital form by the process of sampling.
This lets the audio data be transmitted by a wider variety of media. Digital recording stores audio as a series of binary numbers representing samples of the amplitude of the audio signal at equal time intervals, at a sample rate high enough to convey all sounds capable of being heard. A digital audio signal must be reconverted to analog form during playback before it is amplified and connected to a loudspeaker to produce sound. Prior to the development of sound recording, there were mechanical systems, such as wind-up music boxes and player pianos, for encoding and reproducing instrumental music. Long before sound was first recorded, music was recorded—first by written music notation also by mechanical devices. Automatic music reproduction traces back as far as the 9th century, when the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case, a hydropowered organ that played interchangeable cylinders. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "...cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century."
The Banū Mūsā brothers invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine. Carvings in the Rosslyn Chapel from the 1560s may represent an early attempt to record the Chladni patterns produced by sound in stone representations, although this theory has not been conclusively proved. In the 14th century, a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder was introduced in Flanders. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs, musical clocks, barrel pianos, music boxes. A music box is an automatic musical instrument that produces sounds by the use of a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc so as to pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb; the fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books. The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store a long piece of music; the most sophisticated of the piano rolls were hand-played, meaning that the roll represented the actual performance of an individual, not just a transcription of the sheet music.
This technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls were in continuous mass production from 1896 to 2008. A 1908 U. S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, there were between 70,000 and 75,000 player pianos manufactured, between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 piano rolls produced; the first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through the air was the phonautograph, patented in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings, called phonautograms, made in 1857, they consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a vibrating stylus that cut through a coating of soot as the paper was passed under it. An 1860 phonautogram of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was played back as sound for the first time in 2008 by scanning it and using software to convert the undulating line, which graphically encoded the sound, into a corresponding digital audio file.
On April 30, 1877, French poet, humorous writer and inventor Charles Cros submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris explaining his proposed method, called the paleophone. Though no trace of a working paleophone was found, Cros is remembered as the earliest inventor of a sound recording and reproduction machine; the first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The invention soon spread across the globe and over the next two decades the commercial recording and sale of sound recordings became a growing new international industry, with the most popular titles selling millions of units by the early 1900s; the development of mass-production techniques enabled cylinder recordings to become a major new consumer item in industrial countries and the cylinder was the main consumer format from the late 1880s until around 1910. The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone record credited to Emile Berliner and patented in 1887, though others had demonstrated simi
Tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, tape deck, or tape machine is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds using magnetic tape for storage. In its present-day form, it records a fluctuating signal by moving the tape across a tape head that polarizes the magnetic domains in the tape in proportion to the audio signal. Tape-recording devices include the reel-to-reel tape deck and the cassette deck, which uses a cassette for storage; the use of magnetic tape for sound recording originated around 1930 in Germany as paper tape with oxide lacquered to it. Prior to the development of magnetic tape, magnetic wire recorders had demonstrated the concept of magnetic recording, but they never offered audio quality comparable to the other recording and broadcast standards of the time; this German invention was the start of a long string of innovations that have led to present day magnetic tape recordings. Magnetic tape revolutionized both music recording industries, it gave artists and producers the power to record and re-record audio with minimal loss in quality as well as edit and rearrange recordings with ease.
The alternative recording technologies of the era, transcription discs and wire recorders, could not provide anywhere near this level of quality and functionality. Since some early refinements improved the fidelity of the reproduced sound, magnetic tape has been the highest quality analog recording medium available; as of the first decade of the 21st century, analog magnetic tape has been replaced by digital recording technologies. The earliest known audio tape recorder was a non-magnetic, non-electric version invented by Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory and patented in 1886, it employed a 3⁄16-inch-wide strip of wax-covered paper, coated by dipping it in a solution of beeswax and paraffin and had one side scraped clean, with the other side allowed to harden. The machine was of sturdy wood and metal construction, hand-powered by means of a knob fastened to the flywheel; the wax strip passed from one eight-inch reel around the periphery of a pulley mounted above the V-pulleys on the main vertical shaft, where it came in contact with either its recording or playback stylus.
The tape was taken up on the other reel. The sharp recording stylus, actuated by a vibrating mica diaphragm, cut the wax from the strip. In playback mode, a dull, loosely mounted stylus, attached to a rubber diaphragm, carried the reproduced sounds through an ear tube to its listener. Both recording and playback styluses, mounted alternately on the same two posts, could be adjusted vertically so that several recordings could be cut on the same 3⁄16-inch-wide strip. While the machine was never developed commercially, it was an interesting ancestor to the modern magnetic tape recorder which it resembled somewhat in design; the tapes and machine created by Bell's associates, examined at one of the Smithsonian Institution's museums, became brittle, the heavy paper reels warped. The machine's playback head was missing. Otherwise, with some reconditioning, they could be placed into working condition; the waxed tape recording medium was inferior to Edison's wax cylinder medium, Edison's wax cylinder phonograph became the first widespread sound recording technology, used for both entertainment and office dictation.
Franklin C. Goodale adapted movie film for analog audio recording, he received the patent for his invention in 1909. The celluloid film was inscribed and played back with a stylus, in a manner similar to the wax cylinders of Edison's gramophone; the patent description states that the machine could store six records on the same strip of film, side by side, it was possible to switch between them. In 1912, a similar process was used for the Hiller talking clock. In 1932, after six years of developmental work, including a patent application in 1931, Merle Duston, a Detroit radio engineer, created a tape recorder capable of recording both sounds and voice that used a low-cost chemically treated paper tape. During the recording process, the tape moved through a pair of electrodes which imprinted the modulated sound signals as visible black stripes into the paper tape's surface; the sound track could be replayed from the same recorder unit, which contained photoelectric sensors, somewhat similar to the various sound-on-film technologies of the era.
Magnetic recording was conceived as early as 1878 by the American engineer Oberlin Smith and demonstrated in practice in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen. Analog magnetic wire recording, its successor, magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetizable medium which moves with a constant speed past a recording head. An electrical signal, analogous to the sound, to be recorded, is fed to the recording head, inducing a pattern of magnetization similar to the signal. A playback head can pick up the changes in magnetic field from the tape and convert it into an electrical signal to be amplified and played back through a loudspeaker; the first wire recorder was the Telegraphone invented by Valdemar Poulsen in the late 1890s. Wire recorders for law/office dictation and telephone recording were made continuously by various companies through the 1920s and 1930s; these devices were sold as consumer technologies after World War II. Widespread use of the wire recording device occurred within the decades spanning from 1940 until 1960, following the development of inexpensive designs licensed internationally by the Brush Development Company of Cleveland and the Armour Research Foundation of the Armour Institute of Technology.
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Let's Get It On
Let's Get It On is the thirteenth studio album by American singer and producer Marvin Gaye. It was released on August 1973, by the Motown Records subsidiary label Tamla. Recording sessions for the album took place during June 1970 to July 1973 at Hitsville U. S. A. and Golden World Studio in Detroit, at Hitsville West in Los Angeles. Serving as Gaye's first venture into the funk genre and romance-themed music, Let's Get It On incorporates smooth soul, doo-wop, quiet storm, it has been noted by critics for its sexually suggestive lyrics, was cited by one writer as "one of the most sexually charged albums recorded". Following the breakthrough success of his conscious album What's Going On, Let's Get It On helped establish Gaye as a sex icon and furthered his mainstream appeal, it produced three singles—the title track, "Come Get to This", "You Sure Love to Ball"—that attained Billboard chart success. Let's Get It On became the most commercially successful album of Gaye's recording career, it further expanded his creative control during his tenure with Motown.
Its sexual balladry, multi-tracking of Gaye's vocals, seductive, funk sound influenced R&B artists and production. The album has been regarded by many music critics as a landmark recording in soul music, it furthered funk music's popularity during the 1970s, its smooth soul sound marked a change for his record label's previous success with the "Motown Sound" formula. Let's Get It On has been ranked on many critics and publications' lists of the best albums of all time. In 2001, it was reissued by Motown Records as a two-disc deluxe edition release. In the spring of 1972, Marvin Gaye was suffering from writer's block. Following the release of his most commercially successful album up to that point, What's Going On, the soundtrack album to the blaxploitation film Trouble Man, Gaye had struggled to come up with new material after Motown Records had renegotiated a new contract with him; the contract provided him with more creative control over his recordings. The deal was worth $1 million, making him the highest-earning soul artist, as well as the highest-earning black artist, at the time.
He was struggling with deciding whether or not to relocate to Los Angeles, following Motown-CEO Berry Gordy's move of the record label and replacement of the Detroit-based Hitsville U. S. A. recording studio with the Hitsville West studio in Los Angeles. Amid relocation and his lack of material, Gaye was struggling with his conscience, as well as dealing with expectations from his wife, Gordy's sister Anna. Gaye's separation from Gordy pressured him emotionally. During this time, he had been attempting to cope with past issues that had stemmed from his childhood. During his childhood, Gaye had been physically abused by his preacher father Marvin Gay, Sr. who disciplined his son under moralistic and fundamentalist Christian teachings. As a result, the meaning and practice of sex had become a disturbing question for Gaye; as an adult, he suffered with sexual impotence and became plagued by sadomasochistic fantasies, which haunted him in his dreams and provoked some guilt in his conscience. According to Gaye's biographer David Ritz, "his view of sex was unsettled, riddled with pain".
Gaye learned to cope with his personal issues with a newly found spirituality. He began incorporating his new outlook into his music, as expressed through the conscious album What's Going On, along with promotional photos of him wearing a kufi in honor of African traditional religions and his faith. By winning over record executives with the success of What's Going On, Gaye attained more creative control, which he would use, following his brief separation from wife Anna Gordy, to record an album, meant to surface themes beyond sex; as with What's Going On, Gaye wanted to have a deeper meaning than the general theme, used to portray it. In his book Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye, David Ritz wrote of Gaye and the musical inspiration behind Gaye's second landmark record: If the most profound soul songs are prayers in secular dress, Marvin's prayer is to reconcile the ecstasy of his early religious epiphany with a sexual epiphany; the hope for such a reconciliation, the search for sexual healing, is what drives his art...
The paradox is this: The sexiest of Marvin Gaye's work is his most spiritual. That's the paradox of Marvin himself. In his struggle to wed body and soul, in his exploration of sexual passion, he expresses the most human of hungers—the hunger for God. In those songs of loss and lament—the sense of separation is heartbreaking. On one level, the separation is between woman. On a deeper level, the separation is between God. In the album's liner notes, Gaye explained his views on the themes of sex and love, stating "I can't see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies. I think. After all, one's genitals are just one important part of the magnificent human body... I contend that SEX IS SEX and LOVE IS LOVE; when combined, they work well together. But they are two discrete needs and should be treated as such. Time and space will not permit me to expound further in the area of the psyche. I don't believe in overly moralistic philosophies. Have your sex, it can be exciting. I hope the music that I present here makes you lucky."
Gaye proceeded to record some more politically conscious material at the Golden World Records studio, known as Motown's Studio B, as well as the preliminary vocals and instrument
Regina Belle
Regina Belle is an American singer–songwriter and actress who started her career in the mid-1980s. Known for her singles "Baby Come to Me" and "Make It Like It Was", Belle's most notable for two hit duets, both with Peabo Bryson: "Without You", the love theme from the comedy film Leonard Part 6, recorded in 1987 and "A Whole New World", the main theme of the Disney's animated feature film Aladdin, recorded in 1992, with which Belle and Bryson won the Grammy award; the theme song "Far Longer than Forever" from the animated movie The Swan Princess, performed with Jeffrey Osborne, was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1995 for Best Original Song. Belle was born in New Jersey, it was at Englewood's Mount Calvary Baptist Church, Paterson's Friendship Baptist Church, that Belle began attracting attention with her vocal abilities. She sang her first solo in church at the age of eight, she attended Dwight Morrow High School, where she studied trombone and steel drums. After graduation, Belle studied opera at the Manhattan School of Music.
She attended Rutgers University and became the first female vocalist with the school's jazz ensemble. Belle's musical influences include Phyllis Hyman, Billie Holiday, Shirley Caesar, Patti LaBelle, Nancy Wilson, she was introduced to the Manhattans by New York radio DJ Vaughn Harper and began working as their opening act. She recorded the duet "Where Did We Go Wrong" with the group which helped to attract the attention of Columbia Records, they signed her to a record deal. In 1987, she released her debut album All by Myself, it includes her first hits "So Many Tears" and "Show Me the Way". In the same year, Belle recorded her first successful duet with Peabo Bryson: the song "Without You", the love theme from the comedy film Leonard Part 6 released in 1987; the song was her first single to appear on the Adult Contemporary, peaking at #8 and was her first single to appear in four charts, including the UK Singles, peaking at #85, her best position in this chart until 1989. Her follow-up album, Stay with Me, released in 1989.
Belle recorded a duet in 1991 with Johnny Mathis, "Better Together" which appeared on his album Better Together: The Duet Album. Continuing her tradition of duets, Belle teamed up with Peabo Bryson for four songs: "Without You", "I Can't Imagine", "A Whole New World" and "Total Praise". In 1993, she released her Platinum selling third album, Passion; the album featured the Disney hit, "A Whole New World". The theme song "Far Longer than Forever" from the animated movie The Swan Princess, performed with Jeffrey Osborne was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1995 for Best Original Song, she released Reachin' Back in 1995 followed by Believe in Me in 1998. In 2001, her cover of "Just the Two of Us" from the tribute album To Grover, With Love made a surprising return to the Billboard charts. Within months Belle would sign with the jazz-oriented independent label Peak-Concord Jazz, she released the album This Is Regina!, which featured the R&B hit single "Ooh Boy", released were, "Don't Wanna Go Home" and "From Now On" with Glenn Jones.
In 2004, she released Lazy Afternoon, produced by George Duke. The album included covers of the Isley Brothers' "For the Love of You" and Tony Bennett's "If I Ruled the World". In 2007, she collaborated with smooth jazz saxophonist Paul Taylor, co-writing and singing on his album "Ladies Choice". Belle released her debut gospel album Love Forever Shines on May 2008, via Pendulum Records; the 14-track collection features Shirley Murdock. On June 5, 2012, Belle released on Pendulum her second gospel album, called Higher, on which she stated: "I think that, with the second CD I had a better understanding of where I wanted to go ". Belle has appeared in concert with many other performers, including Ray Charles, Boney James, Paul Taylor, The Rippingtons, Gerald Albright, Will Downing, Frankie Beverly, Phil Perry, Al Jarreau, Stephanie Mills. Belle has been married twice, her first marriage was to saxophonist and flute player Horace Alexander Young from 1985 until 1990, together they had a daughter named Tiy.
Belle married former NBA basketball player John Battle on June 25, 1991. The couple has five children, three of which are adopted: Winter, son Jayln. After suffering miscarriages of two sets of twin boys, the couple had Nyla. Belle has two grandchildren from Winter and Joshua. Regina battled a brain tumor in 2009. However, she is now deaf in her left ear. Regina and her husband reside in Georgia. John is a pastor. 1997: Baby Come to Me: The Best of Regina Belle 2001: Super Hits 2006: Love Songs American Music Award 1991, Favorite Soul/R&B Female Artist Grammy AwardMTV Movie Awards 1993, Best Song From a Movie: "A Whole New World" List of number-one hits List of artists who reached number one on the Hot 100 Regina Belle official website Regina Belle at AllMusic Regina Belle 2016 Audio Interview at Soulinterviews.com
