Who Stops the World? Sade Stops the World.
Ava Duvernay is a remarkable woman. She directed “Middle of Nowhere” and “Selma” — exceptional, rousing achievements. She has found the time to roll out a visual feast of a TV show in “Queen Sugar” and give opportunity to diverse female filmmakers. She made a movie out of a book that was said to be unadaptable. She cast the charming, eloquent Storm Reid as its heroine and didn’t do too bad with the supporting cast: Oprah, Reese, Mindy. Along with Ryan Coogler, she just made history; for the first time, the top two films at the box office are directed by African-Americans.
But I’m going to put all that amazingness aside for just a moment because for many of us, there is one super-power Ms. Duvernay employed that nobody saw coming: she got a new song out of Sade. Yes, “A Wrinkle in Time” opened. But a surprise recording from Sade for the soundtrack was A Tsunami in the Cosmos.
My music fan friends posted about it. My gay friends posted about it. My gay music fan friends posted about it. Each DJ at my local NPR station took a turn playing “Flower of the Universe” (the gentle, tasteful remix version, of course) during their shows. The news immediately became a trending hashtag in the InstaSnapTwito-spheres. What else happened in the headlines last week? Oh, yeah, something something North Korea something something tariffs. But what brought the tribes of Pitchfork, The Root, Paste, Rolling Stone, and Vibe together? A lullaby, soothing and searching, sung with a simple and delicate strength. We were further unified by a question we all know is unanswerable but couldn’t help ask: Is there any chance this means a new album could drop sometime this quarter-century?
Sade is really the name of the whole band, but it’s the moniker we’ve all ascribed to the band’s singer, Helen Folosade Adu. In the 1980s, her singular, nightclub-of-your-fantasies “look” captured us in an era of garish prints and torn jeans. Sade’s music saturated the airwaves and video-bar screens, eventually to the point where I wanted to find the “Smooth Operator” and throttle him. That song’s opening sax seemed inescapable; it followed you from the hotel lounge to the laundromat, and to the extent it was used as a pillar for the radio platform and sonic crimes that came to be known as “The Quiet Storm”, it was easy to forget its initial appeal.
Then, in 2001 and just at a time when I thought (foolishly!) that I could dismiss Sade, a friend of mine unexpectedly said he and a group of cool folks were all going to see her at the Hollywood Bowl and I should join. “You’re kidding,” I thought, with every ounce of music snob I had in me. And then I went. Sade in a gown, hair pulled back, lush sultry tones on a summer’s night, more intoxicating than our Chardonnay. There was no valor in resisting, and everything to gain from becoming one of her loyal subjects.
I saw the band on their next rare tour, this time in New Orleans, with a stylish crowd, and the feeling of a party, of a crowd sexily rebuking middle-age. A decade after that, I bought a single ticket for an arena show in LA , on the “Soldier of Love” tour, and drove to Anaheim the next night to see her as well (that commute on a weeknight is the willing sacrifice I’m trying to note.). What people don’t tell you is that you may go in to a Sade show with the heavy dread of expecting light jazz, and you get instead deep, martial grooves that reverberate in your skull and bones. Think Massive Attack with a torch singer, head-nod beats wrapped in velvet. And then all that hypnotic thickness stops and Helen Folosade Adu belts out “Is it a Crime?” and that famously honeyed and mellow voice suddenly fills every inch of the rafters, the diva disclosed.
Besides their excellence, what all those tours had in common was their relative scarcity. Early global domination and success means this queen only has to leave home when the wind feels right, and that inviting hint of breeze is apparently quite elusive. Sade is Beyoncé for introverts. While Queen Bey aspires to a type of regal withdrawal, Queen Sade has perfected it. Where Beyoncé eventually allows a glimpse behind the curtain, Sade, with a hint of a smile, draws the shades.
It’s said that she’s happy living in the misty countryside; you don’t doubt it for a second, and you certainly hope so. You may want to read an interview with her, but you know she doesn’t grant them very often, and you can’t begrudge her for it. Few longtime artists have cultivated a mystique so effectively, perhaps because she cares so little to tend to it. Sade sings about love so intuitively, what intuitive could lack empathy towards her desire for privacy? So it’s been seven years since the last record? Let’s take a breath and be grateful for what we have today.
And what we have in the music world of 2018, surrounding this new release by this 59-year old woman, are emerging female singers like SZA, Kehlani, Syd the Kid and Solange, experimenting with R&B and jazz and hip-hop in interwoven, smoky tendrils. If you hear some “Sweetest Taboo” and “Cherish the Day” referenced in their work, it’s entirely intentional. Nearly 35 years after her debut, the music of Sade could not be more relevant, nor more essential. For a moment in this electric, frantic world last week, Sade gave us the gift of an acoustic pause. All hail the Queen! Here she stands: wrinkleless, timeless.
