1974 George McCrae: Rock Your Baby

The history of popular music is littered with crazes. They come and they go like the seasons. With Glam in its autumn days, its once green and bountiful trees were starting to look a little bare and from across the Atlantic a fresh wind was blowing in to rip the last leaves from its trees - disco. Just as thrash metal came to boil rock music down to the riff alone, the backbone of disco was the groove, and the more flexible that backbone the better - disco was a genre for the feet rather than the head - hedonism, not cerebralism was the order of the day.

Taking the funk lite, brass led, smooth Philly soul as its template, 'Rock Your Baby' was another of those glorious flukes that populate modern music. The backing groove was written and performed down by future members of KC & The Sunshine Band (who would themselves be major players in the genre) as an instrumental while a passing George McCrae provided a sweet and soulful Curtis Mayfield-like vocal that hangs just behind and underneath its sashaying rhythm to keep it from running away with itself. George is in no hurry.

What I like about 'Rock Your Baby' is just how organic it sounds, how human compared to what disco was to become (as a genre, 'soulnessness' was to become a common criticism). Cheaply recorded with just three musicians, the music holds the beat without ever sounding cold; there are spaces between the playing that McCrae fills with his vocal honey, repeating the 'Woman, take me in your arms. Rock your baby' title until it becomes a blissed out hypnotic mantra of desire that transports pillow talk to the dancefloor.* Slinky and sensuous, 'Rock Your Baby' stood light years away from the brash and bruising gangbang of Glam, and within its own genre it's a world away from the camp and coke fuelled gaudy excesses that disco would come to be reviled for.


* As an aside, the use of mantras to aid attainment of a higher level of consciousness have been a staple of Eastern religions since before the common era. Drones have also been present in ethnic music since time immemorial though their Western popularity was pioneered by La Monte Young in the 1960's. Drones and mantras were a staple of contemporary seventies Krautrock bands such as Faust, Can and Amon Dull II, and in the same year as 'Rock Your Baby', Charlemagne Palestine released 'Strumming Music', which was basically over 45 minutes of two piano notes playing in rapid alternation that slowly expand into clusters. Admittedly, you're not going to dance to any of this, but there's a thesis to be written on the power of musical repetition to transport you to another, perhaps more primal level, be it in the temple, the 4/4 slam backbeat at a rock & roll concert or the smooth grooves that wash over a disco dancefloor.