Raphael and the Dream of Gospeldelic
Listening to Instant Vintage on vinyl is a new thing, even apart from the different sonics and mastering from my long-lost CD copy. It’s clear in the album’s structure that Tony! Toni! Toné! alum Raphael Saadiq is miles ahead of the neo soul pack even at this developmental stage in the sound’s progression from the alternative hip-hop of the 90’s (The Roots, Erykah Badu, et al) into today’s more boundary-pushing artists (Frank Ocean, SZA, et al). He was on something else entirely, and it shows here in full force.
The album opens with a fading-up rise of quickly-bowed strings; it reminds me of the beginning of an old film, or maybe more accurately how I think old movies should start. The dramatic build sets a vibe that proceeds through the rest of the LP. The feeling is that what the listener is about to hear is more than just a collection of songs, instead it is a curated thought product designed to push certain attitudes about what it means to live and love in a city and to be an artist in that same setting.
This intro track also tells us where we are in history: clearly audible is a newsman referencing the album by name. I can’t confirm that it is the voice of MTV journalist Sway (who is also native to Oakland, CA), but it’s hard for me to think that it isn’t. Either way, it’s a serious-but-credible tone like his that is displayed here in the sample. This all points to an era of self-aware music. Saadiq was using the idea of the music news cycle to his advantage, realizing that he could do so and then actually doing it at the very beginning of his solo debut. Instant Vintage’s release in 2002 firmly places it into a time in music when tricks were beginning to turn back toward the inside and widen their focus to include the music itself, and if there’s a better indicator of self-awareness I have yet to come across it.
Throughout the album, the songs are impossibly smooth and pulled off with aplomb in all aspects from Saadiq’s buttery voice and songwriting to all the playing and mixing. Songs like “Excuse Me” showcase the best of all worlds, Angie Stone and Calvin Richardson drop by to give contrasting guest vocals inside its delicious groove and Saadiq holds his own with them more than admirably. “Tick Tock” is all Saadiq and it incorporates the best of what he has to offer: expertly-helmed thematics, a catchy hook, and brilliant-if-simple song structure. “Different Times” features T-Boz from TLC and it imparts a bit more of a thoughtful Curtis Mayfield cross-section. Possibly the most effective section on this long and moving cycle is the second half’s near one-two punch of “Blind Man” and “Uptown”, which are two songs about the ideas of being grateful for what one has and the idea of leaving one’s hometown, whether that designation is real or adopted. In both instances Raphael uses something like blues music as a template to create portraits of strife, violence, resignation and connection that arrive in packages one never expected.
This is probably a good time to point out that Saadiq perhaps never saw this as strictly a “neo soul” album. Right there on the cover is a branded signifier of what he may have actually been going for, “gospeldelic”, and we can probably take this to mean he was looking to expand the mind like psychedelia from a technical foundation of gospel/blues music (or we can take him at his word). He had recently released music as a founding member of Lucy Pearl, a supergroup featuring members of A Tribe Called Quest and En Vogue, and it’s more than likely he wanted some separation from it right down to the subgenre. While subtle changes like that on the macro scale can offer interesting avenues for thought experiments (and they technically fit the bill), if no one else clings to or adopts them then the public is left to revert back to what we would have called the music on its own merits.
None of the remarkable songs here, of which there are many, fully capture what the album really is. It’s a meditation on inner-city life, a signpost for artists who don’t feel appreciated, an example of a finished product achieved with functionally zero limits or hand-holding. It becomes somewhat fitting then that this album brought about Saadiq’s exit from Universal Music Group when it didn’t perform as expected commercially. For every urban/soul neophyte out there, like me, there were several dozen knowledgeable people unaware of what the song cycle really represented; for every one of them that did, there were several dozen uneducated fans who didn’t even know about the existence of this masterwork.
All great art is ahead of its time to some degree. It could be so only by a matter of months, or it could be several years like it is here, and that’s only if there is mainstream consensus that this is a great album…but I’m not sure that’s the case, if only because not enough people outside the scene are aware of it. For twentysomethings like I was at the time, this album was undeniably amazing as a statement and could have even been foundational in how we listened to and accepted jazz and soul moving forward into our adulthoods. I keep thinking that this album will be seen, eventually, as a version of Velvet Underground’s debut, the kind that didn’t “do well” in its own time but inspired tons of music makers to get off their asses and make music. I will probably never know if that is the case, but I really hope that it is. I doubt anyone will ever be able to convince me otherwise.
