Long Live the Octogenarian Sex Record
After Smokey Robinson announced his upcoming album, many music listeners were aghast. The Motown legend, at the age of 82, unfurled the most blatantly sexual record title of his career: Gasms. It didn’t help that the album, which will be released in late April, includes songs such as “I Wanna Know Your Body” and, ahem, “I Fit in There.” Predictably, the subsequent volley of Viagra jokes alone could’ve crashed Twitter.
Yet Robinson’s catalog has given him every right to proudly unleash an octogenarian sex record—which, in the 1960s, but he also invented the subgenre known as “quiet storm,” named after his superb 1975 solo album, . On it, he crystallized a silky, sophisticated R&B that never tumbled into funky porn. Still, on the album’s No. 1 Billboard R&B hit, “Baby That’s Backatcha,” there’s no misinterpreting Robinson’s celebration of reciprocal lust: “Oh, baby, that’s tit for tat,” he sings. “I’m givin’ you this for that.” Many of Robinson’s peers in the ’70s—Barry White, Al Green, his Motown labelmate Marvin Gaye—rivaled his sultriness. But they all took cues from the maestro, who had long proved his ability to swoop from heartbreak to bravado in the span of a syllable.
