404. Anita Baker, "Rapture"

 

"Is this KOIT?" my wife asked me when she walked into the kitchen where I was listening to this silky-smooth collection of jazzy R&B, and, indeed, this does sound like the kind of thing you'd hear in an optometrist's waiting room or piped into a mid-sized insurance company office.  I had two main takeaways from this; first, wow, what a voice!  Baker has such a powerful instrument.  Of course she can belt it, like on "Sweet Love," a song I guarantee you know, even if you don't know you know it.  But she can also modulate it, and give a song a quiet and introspective read when required, like on "You Bring Me Joy."

My second takeaway is that it really sounds dated now.  The 80's production here is like the Ur-80's production, with the sax and the compressed Roland Jazz Chorus guitar sound and the whole nine.  You hear it and you immediately picture Don Johnson in a pastel t-shirt and a different pastel color blazer.  Some records are timeless, but some are very, ummmm, timeful?  Like located very precisely in a certain time.  That's this record.

Oh I guess I have a third takeaway, which I alluded to earlier, and that's that I was surprised by how many of the songs I recognized.  I have never listened to this album but it was such a huge cultural force in the 80's that you couldn't escape hearing it.  So besides "Sweet Love," I recognized "Caught Up in the Rapture," "No One in the World," and "Same Ole Love."  That's pretty impressive.

Two final notes: there is on Facebook something called the Anita Baker Rapture Room which I can't figure out whether it's a physical location, like an escape room but for Anita Baker, or whether it's just an online hub for Anitaphernalia.  And Spike Lee's truly hallucinatory video for "No One in the World" is really something:

Anita will live forever in our hearts, or on your city's Quiet Storm.