FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Anita Baker - Rapture
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ON this visit…
to Vinyl Corner, I am exploring Anita Baker’s 1986 album, Rapture. It is an album that I would urge people to get on vinyl. It houses classics such as Sweet Love and Caught Up in the Rapture. The album is considered to be one of the very best from the 1980s. I don’t think there is anyone in music like Anita Baker. The second studio album from the legend, Rapture became Baker's breakout – going on to sell over eight million copies worldwide. Rapture also earned her two Grammy Awards. I think that Baker’s vocals are more restrained and composed than a lot of her contemporaries. There is so much soul and beauty that runs through Rapture. Her latest album, 2005’s Christmas Fantasy, is a marvellous one. I do hope that Baker releases more material. I want to bring in a couple of reviews for Rapture – for anyone who is not convinced by the album or has not heard of Anita Baker. In their review, this is what AllMusic said:
“Though Anita Baker got some airplay out of The Songstress, that promising solo debut didn't bring her financial security. In fact, Baker was earning her living as a legal secretary in her native Detroit when she signed with Elektra in the mid-'80s. Elektra gave her a strong promotional push, and the equally superb Rapture became the megahit that The Songstress should have been. To its credit, Elektra made her a major star by focusing on Baker's strong point -- romantic but gospel-influenced R&B/pop ballads and "slow jams," sometimes with jazz overtones -- and letting her be true to herself. Rapture gave Baker one moving hit after another, including "Sweet Love," "Caught up in the Rapture," "Same Ole Love," and "No One in This World." Praising Baker in a 1986 interview, veteran R&B critic Steve Ivory asserted, "To me, singers like Anita Baker and Frankie Beverly define what R&B or soul music is all about." Indeed, Rapture's tremendous success made it clear that there was still a sizeable market for adult-oriented, more traditional R&B singing”.
I think that Rapture is one of the greatest albums ever. In terms of showcasing a rare and untouched voice, Rapture is an album that demonstrates Anita Baker’s talents. In a separate review, Pitchfork offered up the following:
“Rapture didn’t align with the electro-R&B that was de rigueur in 1986 pop or the increasingly mechanistic and sexually-unbridled explorations of the genre’s most prominent svengalis, Prince and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. On its arrival, the album was dubbed retronuevo by the writer and critic Nelson George, who was trying to emphasize the older Black musical forms that Baker’s songs were rooted in. On the one hand, the emotions that rocketed through them felt enormous and electric enough to be gospel—hear the immensity with which Baker sings “myyyy joy” in “You Bring Me Joy.” But their expression was so controlled and stylized, painted in instrument by instrument, that it just as easily brought to mind the jazz, fusion, and soft R&B that preceded it.
Despite these traces of retro in the music, very little of Rapture sounded old by the standards of 1986. Its production is state of the art; if it were a sculpture it would be the kind where you couldn’t tell if hands had ever touched it. Each note touches down as an isolated unit of clarity, though the instruments are also steeped in enough reverb to sound like they recently walked out of a lake, their footfalls wrapped in wet echoes. The piano’s presence is so simultaneously thick and diffuse in the mix that hearing it feels like being embraced by a cloud of an ex-lover’s perfume. Every other instrument, whether percussion, bass, or guitar, acts as a texture, another beat in the riverlike rhythm, as on “Same Ole Love,” where the effect makes for a little perpetual motion machine of a love song. And though Baker expressed her own antipathy toward synthesizers around the time of Rapture’s release (“The sound is so thin,” she said), there are synths all over the album, and when they mix with the acoustic pianos they encase their tones in a layer of crystal.
Which is one of the reasons why Rapture as an R&B album doesn’t feel like an argument for nostalgia or authenticity as much as it does for continuity. It is not necessarily trying to emulate old soul music, even though it is certainly music with an old soul. Instead, styles from the past—soul music’s bottled feeling, funk’s unhurried step, disco and post-disco’s lush grooves, gospel’s power, jazz’s curiosity—are brought into the present and combined in such a way that one’s sense of time outside of the songs ceases to matter, creating a dream space where all of these displaced musical forms can blossom simultaneously and entangle with each other. Rapture is like a home Baker built, a hearth, a warm safe place where both the mystery of love and the history of Black music can be both explored and preserved.
Rapture’s agnosticism toward the contemporaneous intrigues of pop production made it oddly flexible across different formats and charts; it’s quiet storm trembled onto Adult Contemporary stations like a weather pattern itself, and the record eventually lodged itself in the Billboard Top 40. The presence of Baker’s voice in my childhood home was so constant as to verge on ambient, another piece of furniture in the house, or, in the period before I knew what furniture was, another murky voice cooing in the air above me.
Thirty years later, I saw Anita Baker perform at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, one of the stops on her farewell tour in 2018. Her stage presence was surprisingly exuberant, more so than the narcotic pull of her voice would necessarily suggest. She swung her arms around, grasping handfuls of air or strumming it as if she were able to touch her own music as it streamed by. But when she opened her mouth to sing, time collapsed, and I was the same age I was the moment I first regarded Baker’s voice with awe, thinking she was like a magician pulling silk scarves from her mouth”.
I am going to wrap things up in a second. If you are not overly-aware of Anita Baker’s Rapture, you can get it on vinyl relatively inexpensively – failing that, you can stream it and listen that way. With so many amazing songs throughout, Rapture is an album everyone needs to own. It is an album from a stunning singer who…
HAS inspired so many.