Green's Perfect Way

On June 10, 1985, the British group Scritti Politti released their second album, Cupid & Psyche 85. It produced the single “Perfect Way” which was a No. 11 hit on the U.S. Hot 100 — and a No. 6 hit on Billboard’s dance chart. Lead by lead singer and songwriter Green Gartside, the album combines feather-light, MTV-friendly vocals with R&B, funk, reggae, and state-of-the-art synthesizer programming. It’s highly underrated, something you should listen to and today’s Throwback Thursday feature.

First, some background on the band: Scritti Politti started out as a post-punk band in the UK in the late 1970s, inspired by theorists such as Antonio Gramsci; one of Scritti’s early songs, “Hegemony”, was named after the Marxist concept of one state or social class’s dominance over another. This working-class consciousness applied to a transparency in the band’s business practices as well.

By 1985, Scritti Politti was just Gartside and a producer, arranger, and number of studio musicians that included Fred Maher (Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet). Cupid & Psyche 85 owed much of its sound to producer Arif Mardin, who had worked with The Bee Gees and Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway in the 1970s.

Where so much synth-pop was bubble gum-ish, Green focused his lyrics around ideas of language, work, and capitalism, while still producing songs that remained accessible to the general public. The lyrics of “Small Talk” reference a World War II propaganda campaign; “Careless Talk Costs Lives” becomes “Careless talk costs more than you bargained for”. The first single to be released from the album was "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)", its subtitle alluding to the Aretha Franklin song "I Say a Little Prayer" which producer Mardin had also worked on.

The album received very strong reviews including Spin Magazine stating that "no disco was ever this sublime" and that Green's mixture of pop music and intellectualism "benefits us by teaching us the vocabulary of emotion. Green's gilded, fabricated palace of sentiment makes you want to know more about these matters even as his clever-dick wordplay, woozy vocals and slick manipulation of modern dance music's subtlest syncopations lead you onto some empty dance floor of the soul." Elton John stated that he considered this album to be the best produced electronic album of the 1980s.

The band never achieved huge success and released three more albums before calling it quits. But thankfully we have Cupid & Psyche 85 to listen to and appreciate even 30+ years later.