After first turning heads as a backing singer on Bowie’s Young Americans album, the imperious Luther Vandross went on to become one of the most acclaimed vocalists of his generation
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WHAT IS IT?
Soul is a genre with many tentacles, from the salty R&B of Otis Redding to the swoonsome amour of Barry White and jet-engined power of Aretha Franklin. In the 80s, though, it was smooth soul – sometimes known as ‘quiet storm’ – that reigned.
As slick as caramel, as stylish as the most well-tailored sophisti-pop and often dreamily romantic, smooth soul was birthed not just from soul, but from funk, jazz and pop. Unlike its sonic cousin, pop-soul, smooth soul was mostly ballad-driven, something that a DJ might spin at the end of the night, as the clubbers got smoochy on the dancefloor. Of course, there are examples of smooth soul outside of that decade (hello The Stylistics and The Delfonics), but we’re sticking with the genre’s 80s superstars here, when that sound was the dominant force in soul, both in the UK and US.