Motown Greatest Hits

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The group did come very close to having an album release on Motown’s Soul imprint – to the point where a master tape was sent to the pressing plant before the plug was pulled. The Detroit quartet’s cancelled Motown album released at last – with 13 bonus tracks, many previously unissued. The compilation features legendary Motown artists including The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Temptations, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, The Jackson 5 and Lionel Richie. Neither seems to have full control over their melodic “gush”; they almost never let anything get in the way of the vocal and sometimes their songs seem built for the sheer joy of singing.

It must be the weirdest ever song to carry co-writing credits by a husband and wife, but Anna Gaye (sister of Motown boss Berry Gordy) had already ceded her position in the Marv bedroom to Janis Hunter, jazz legend Slim Gaillard’s 17-year-old daughter. Brenda’s only up-tempo A-side for Motown, ‘Just Look What You’ve Done’, shows that she was more than capable of handling this kind of material. Within Universal, Motown was incorporated into various other subsidiaries including Universal Motown Records Group from 2000 to 2011 and later moved to Island Def Jam Music Group until both label groups were disbanded by UMG in 2014. After a slinky, subdued opener in Cleo’s Mood, Walker and his All Stars let rip with four uptempo, roadhouse rough dancers climaxing with the irresistible Shake And Fingerpop.The promise of Gaye’s sophisticated loving is all in his voice, coarser than the crystalline angeltone he employed on What’s Going On, but no less exquisite, and similarly augmented by a crosstalk of Marvindubs and brilliantly inventive backing vox (the impressionistic, dove-like coos from 3:50 in Let’s Get It On are astonishing). In 1972, Wonder’s continuing push towards studio self-sufficiency meant more work for TONTO (“The Original New Timbral Orchestra”), the polyphonic synthesizer created by Talking Book’s “associate producers” Bob Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil that announces the rubbery Maybe Your Baby, and of course, squelches all across the awesome Superstition, but it’s not the only sonic novelty. But Gaye’s own attitude to sex was complicated – his preacher father’s fire and brimstone prudery had planted a seedling of guilt that never withered – and Let’s Get It On would not be the great art it is if it were a mere carnival of zipless erotomania. Behind the heavenly love and dreams of elopement we find Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me) while Smiling Faces Sometimes pretend to be your friend. When they came over to Motown while their last Ric Tic hit was scaling the charts, bigger things looked set to follow.

Best is You Sure Love To Ball, bathed in warm fuzziness, guitars getting it on with harps with such empathy that they become almost indistinguishable, and Madeline and Fred Ross’s gasping and moaning errs just the right side of Lil’ Louis’s French Kiss. Talking Book is about the tunes, but it’s also about the times – and that’s the spoonful of medicine that helps the melodic sugar go down.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In fact, no other record sounds quite like Talking Book, an album borne aloft on bubbles, simultaneously light yet sophisticated on the jazzoid You’ve Got It Bad Girl, irresistibly bittersweet Tuesday Heartbreak and the autumnal folkfunk of Big Brother. Legend has it that when the first experimental batch of MDMA powder turned up on the streets of Detroit in the cold early months of 1971, one of the first curious recipients was Temptations producer Norman Whitfield. If 1972’s Talking Book saw Stevie Wonder merely hinting at the socio-political unrest of early-’70s America, then the following year’s Innervisions faced the darkness head on. marks the 60th year of Motown, widely regarded as the greatest, most successful and best-loved record label in music and to commemorate this landmark anniversary Motown are issuing this 'Greatest Hits' compilation, featuring 60 tracks from across their enormously influential and remarkable history.

This intuitive grasp of his own talent was never better illustrated than on 1965’s rip-roaring Shotgun. Every bit as fine as the album’s hit ballads, last track A Fork In The Road is no ordinary ‘road’ song. The first album released in 1975, was a top 10 hit in the UK, where it charted for 35 weeks, whilst Vol. Of course, like all drug highs, once you go beyond the pretty surfaces there are darker forces at work. Sadly they did not, and after two years in which the quartet recorded at least 30 sides and released just three non-charting 45s, their career at Motown was over.

In January 2023 under Chivon Dean's new leadership as president and CEO, Motown has been divested from the Capitol Music Group while remaining under the Universal Music Group. The 25 tracks here – more than half of which have never been heard anywhere prior to this CD – should delight everyone who has hoped for this package to happen. For items that are dispatched using our standard service, we ask that you wait 14 days from the date of dispatch before reporting any items as undelivered.