VARIOUS ARTISTS
?UESTLOVE PRESENTS BABIES MAKIN BABIES 2: MISERY STRIKES BACK…NO MORE BABIES
BBE Records
· The downside of love from Roots-man
Roots drummer ?uestlove follows his 2002 compilation, Babies Makin Babies
– 15 handpicked romantic classics (including Gino Vanelli) – with this, the other side of the coin. As Nick Hornby noted in High Fidelity, "People worry about kids playing with guns…. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."
But songs about heartbreak aren't just more plentiful than those about satisfaction, they're often better. So why does Babies Makin Babies 2: Misery Strikes Back…No More Babies (BMB2) fall short? It's not due to the structure of the disc, divided into four LP-styled sides, or liner notes that allow listeners to score themselves for applicability (add a point if you've broken up by text message, subtract four if you've left more than four messages a day – a score of 100 requires professional help).
One person's lament is another's wallow, and Al Green's unimpeachable "How Can you Mend a Broken Heart" gains little next to Albert King's lugubrious "I Almost Lost My Mind." Appropriately, highlights come from performers with high-profile exes – Betty Davis was Macy Gray before her time (1973, to be exact) and she provided salacious tidbits of her year-long marriage to Miles Davis over a Sly Stone-styled groove on "Anti Love Song." While Syreeta Wright divorced Stevie Wonder in 1972, their "Cause We've Ended as Lovers" from 1974 proves to be BMB2's finest moment, comparable to Minnie Riperton's psychedelic soul and as eloquent a kiss-off as you could imagine. Wonder was capable of the deadly "I Just Called to Say I Love You." BMB2 undermines itself with the sugary "You're Supposed to Keep Your Love for Me" by Jermaine Jackson (forever the second-best singer in the Jackson Five). You've been a good sport and let ?uestlove moan on for close to an hour, but it's time you both moved on – you to the record shop to hunt for Betty Davis and Syreeta.
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