The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #132

#132: "Step in the Name of Love (Remix)" (2002) - R. Kelly

The most old-fashioned R&B song to hit the top ten in the past ten years, R. Kelly's "Step in the Name of Love (Remix)*" sounds like something Johnny Taylor or Z.Z. Hill or Marvin Sease could have released twenty-five to thirty years ago, a last concession to the more dance-oriented, disco market before these guys (and many of their contemporaries) were dropped from their major labels, only to find homes (if they ever did) at smaller labels (such as the Jackson, MS standout label Malaco), where their records would soon thrive again, but on a much smaller level and in a much smaller market. These artists would have to work the chit'lin circuit again, but Malaco (and it wasn't the only label for those whom the charts left behind, but it was the most prominent one) afforded these soul/blues artists a sense of independence that they never had at their major labels, where they had to record the dance/disco records that ultimately proved their undoing (on a national level).

Ironically, most of these artists (that didn't turn gospel) retained that part of that smooth disco style that buried them, and often, these hybrid disco-soul-blues records were their most lively, their most entertaining, as if this combination of styles seemed to squeeze out sparks when each rubbed against the other ones. There are a slew of great dance records from these Southern soul/blues/dance artists--from the late '70s up till today--with only a handful of songs ever reaching any national chart. Most of these great songs only resonate with older--primarily African-American--audiences in the South.

I've deejayed many a time and had numerous requests for, say, Little Milton or Denise LaSalle or Tyrone Davis, and all of these requests have come from folk older than thirty five. Many of these same older folk also frequently request "Step in the Name of Love" by R. Kelly. Why? Not only does this song sound like those older Malaco numbers, but it's also a song about dancing, about a particular type of dancing: stepping. Stepping derived from the Jitterbug, but over the years--via L.A. and later Chicago--the motion grew less frantic, the steps slowed down as the music did, and the focal point of the dance changed to the offbeat. Steeping--in its current variation--has been around now for about, oh, thirty years or so, but it started to grow beyond its Chicago/L.A. (and, via migration and transmigration, the Deep South) roots into a more national limelight with the (relative) popularity of the Spike Lee joint School Daze, in which fraternities have a stepping contest. Now, this type of stepping is different from the stepping dance, but the term got thrown about often, and eventually, we get what he have hear today: a song by a black man about a dance first made popular--sixty years ago--by white folk, only to have their dance adopted and adapted by black folk, only to....

It's all cyclical, mostly. R. Kelly doesn't originate anything new here; he just recycles, but he does so with panache and care and a melody half lifted from Marvin Gaye and a voice straight lifted from Marvin Gaye. Like Isaac Newton said, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and like R. Kelly said, we step in the name of love.

NOTES

*It's a remix that was issued on the same album as the original, and it's the remix version that hit.