Op-Ed: An ode to Philly soul: La-la means more than 'I love you' (via latimesopinion)
When I was about 10 and my older brother a teenager, nothing captured my imagination like watching his band rehearse. On summer evenings they would gather in the garage in our backyard — my brother the drummer and lead singer, with a couple of other singers and musicians who were friends of his or who lived in the neighborhood — to practice.
That all happened in South-Central, but my brother’s preferred playlist, the songs that so captivated me, drew from an R&B subgenre known as Philly soul. It started in but was never limited to Philadelphia, and it was typified by bands like the Dramatics, Blue Magic, the Stylistics and of course the Delfonics. William Hart, the Delfonics’ lead singer, died late last week at 77. Hart had a wail of a falsetto that was a Philly soul hallmark.
Thom Bell, the mastermind producer of Philly soul, was known for lush, complex orchestrations that were lovely in one way but mournful in another. In 1972, I got bused to a mostly white elementary school that made the racism I’d been dimly aware of very real. The Vietnam War was still raging, something I heard about routinely, along with the fatality count, on television news. The world of possibilities I absorbed from records and radio was in its way just as dangerous, incomplete, unreliable; my heart, it warned, was bound to be broken.
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