Quiet storm is a radio format and genre of R&B, performed in a smooth, romantic, jazz-influenced style.[1] It was named after the title song on Smokey Robinson's 1975 album A Quiet Storm.[2]
The radio format was pioneered in 1976 by Melvin Lindsey, while he was an intern at the Washington, D.C. radio station WHUR-FM. It eventually became regarded as an identifiable subgenre of R&B.[3] Quiet storm was marketed to primarily upscale mature African-American audiences. It peaked in popularity during the 1980s, but fell out of favor with young listeners in the golden age of hip hop.[4]
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In the San Francisco Bay Area, KBLX-FM expanded the night-time concept into a 24-hour quiet storm format in 1979. In the New York tri-state late night market, Vaughn Harper deejayed the quiet storm graveyard program for WBLS-FM which he developed with co-host Champaine in mid-1983. In 1993, Harper took ill and Champaine continued the program as Quiet Storm II.[6][7]
Following in the footsteps of KBLX, Lawrence Tanter of KUTE in Greater Los Angeles changed his station to an all-day quiet storm format from January 1984 until September 1987, playing "a hybrid that incorporates pop, jazz, fusion, international, and urban music". Addressing the misconception that quiet storm was only for blacks, Tanter said his listenership was 40% black, 40% white, and 20% other races.[8] WLNR-FM in Chicago also changed in August 1985 to a 24-hour quiet storm program called "The Soft Touch", featuring more instrumental music and even straight-ahead jazz, a mix which sales manager Gregory Brown described as "not so laid-back" as other quiet storm shows. A notable feature of WLNR was that the four regular deejays were women.[8]
Because of the popularity of his show, Lindsey saw his annual salary increase from $12,000 in 1977 to more than $100,000 in 1985.[9] After signing a million-dollar, five-year contract with rival Washington DC station WKYS, he left WHUR at the end of August 1985,[10] continuing the quiet storm format on WKYS for five years starting in November with a show called "Melvin's Melodies".[8] Part of Lindsey's original style was to mix different decades of music together, for instance playing a Sarah Vaughan ballad in between more modern numbers.[11]
Lindsey died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 36, but the quiet storm format he originated remains a staple in American radio programming. WHUR radio still has a quiet storm show, and many urban, black radio stations still reserve their late-night programming slots for quiet storm music. WHUR operator Howard University has registered "Quiet Storm" as a trademark for "entertainment services, namely, a continuing series of radio programs featuring music".[12]
Quiet storm was most popular as a programming niche with baby boomers from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. During this era, it promoted a noticeable shift in the sound of R&B of the time. Quiet storm songs were in most cases devoid of any significant political commentary and maintained a strict aesthetic and narrative distance from issues relating to black urban life. Quiet storm appropriates R&B and soul "slow jams" and recontextualizes them into rotations with their peers and predecessors.[14]
Music journalist Jason King wrote, "Sensuous and pensive, quiet storm is seductive R&B, marked by jazz flourishes, 'smooth grooves,' and tasteful lyrics about intimate subjects. As disco gave way to the 'urban contemporary' format at the outset of the 1980s, quiet storm expanded beyond radio to emerge as a broad catchall super-genre."[4]
For some, the conception of quiet storm represented a shift in the gendered and sexualized musical landscapes of R&B and soul. Music journalist Eric Harvey claims that within the quiet storm genre, artists such as Luther Vandross were able to push the boundaries of gender normativity in both their sound and lyricism.[14] Author Jason King notes that through the genre and his music more generally, "Vandross toys with dominant conventions of male sexuality without engaging in androgyny or any explicit forms of traditionally feminine embodiment."[16]
In 2007, Premiere Radio Networks launched a nationally syndicated nightly radio program based upon the quiet storm format, known as The Keith Sweat Hotel. That program, in edited form, broadcasts under the Quiet Storm name (as The Quiet Storm with Keith Sweat) on WBLS in New York City.[20]
Strings, spacious arrangements and softness are features you might find in the quiet storm repertoire. Soul music was re-connecting closer with spirituals and no artist fits more within this crossroad than Roberta Flack, whose voice was heralded for its velvety texture and gospel roots.
As the radio format grew in popularity, what defined quiet storm began to broaden, including older material and new music written to fit within its spirit. However, quiet storm faced criticism for its apolitical nature and softness, while others contested it uniquely celebrated the Black experience.
Professor and writer Mark Anthony Neal points out that "Gamble and Huff perhaps exploited this phenomenon best by always carefully packaging their recordings with potential pop Top 40 singles and Quiet Storm-type album cuts." The O'Jays' 1978 song "Use Ta Be My Girl" has "become a quiet storm staple," Neal notes. Chic's magisterial "At Last I Am Free" is another prime example of a band making its name in one realm while having their slow jams moved to another, as is the Gap Band's "Yearning for Your Love" and Michael Jackson's crystalline Off the Wall cut "I Can't Help It". Smokey himself reappeared in 1979 with "Cruisin", from Where There's Smoke, and two years later with the gorgeous 1981 single "Being With You", his biggest hit since his Miracles days.
The other attack on Quiet Storm was aimed directly at the music. Though its late-night time slot, and obsession with tempo and content suggested particular intimate activities, in contrast to the disco and electro-funk populating the dial at the time, it was often negatively characterized as ambience. To certain ears, however, this description scans as resolutely positive. "Though the genre has been plundered over the years by record labels to produce endless recombinant hackneyed make-out compilations," King argues, "quiet storm might be best considered a racialized take on-- or redefinition of-- ambient music."
Baker's combination of "contemporary intelligence and old-fashioned pipes" led George to classify her as "retronuevo," a new category of R&B that acknowledged the past within the present. Baker's success with this approach came at a crucial juncture in black popular music, however. With Rapture still selling briskly in summer 1987, Eric B. & Rakim released their debut album, Paid in Full. Twenty-eight seconds into its first track, "I Ain't No Joke", Rakim asserts in no uncertain terms rap music's freshly asserted dominion over black music's past and present, as it hurtled toward the future: "Even if it's jazz or the quiet storm/ I hook a beat up, convert it into hip-hop form." At least initially, rappers were retronuevo in a clever and utilitarian sense: showing respect for the music that came before them by using its swagger and rhythm as the foundations for a radical new art form.
"In the mid-1980s, before hip-hop and R&B became inexplicably twinned," wrote Pitchfork's Jess Harvell in 2010, the London act Sade "helped to define the quiet storm era, when smooth grooves aimed at grown-ups were still a legitimate mainstream phenomenon. In 2010, Sade seems wholly unique." Unique, sure, but not totally out of place. Soldier of Love, the UK band's first album since 2000's Lovers Rock, debuted at the top spot on Billboard's album chart with a highly respectable 502,000 copies sold. (For perspective, this was less than a year after neo-soul crooner Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night did the same thing, and a year and a half before modern Quiet Storm tradition-bearer Jill Scott would hold Bon Iver out of the top spot with 2011's The Light of the Sun.) More than anything, Soldier demonstrated just how consistent Sade Adu and her band were, picking up more or less where their 1984 debut Diamond Life started. When that album ran up the pop charts, Rolling Stone's Charles Shaar Murray could only contrast Sade's "cool understatement" and "elegance based on an absolute simplicity" with the comparatively gaudy new romantic crossovers Duran Duran, Culture Club, Spandau Ballet, and Wham! There are fruitful class-based connections to be made there, but to many U.S. radio listeners, the band's contemporaries were much nichier: Baker, Atlantic Starr, Klymaxx, Stephanie Mills. The samba groove of the hit single "Smooth Operator" backed Adu's caramel-voiced tale of an irresistibly seductive globetrotting ladies' man; while Baker and Vandross were making soul for the suburbs, Sade sketched an instantly appealing set of images for a burgeoning demographic of business travelers, and ambient pop bliss for millions more.
A D.C. resident wrote a letter to the Post editor soon after, underscoring the breadth of Lindsey's impact. "In my sometimes troubled days he was there for me musically, as I'm sure he was for thousands of others. His soothing presence over the air waves and his perfectionist programming will be sorely missed. In 1985, when my companion was living with AIDS, it was Melvin Lindsey's program-- beginning at 7 p.m. with his Smokey Robinson theme song-- that helped us deal with our own quiet storm. How we looked forward to that time of day. It was one of the few times that we had the chance to just relax and listen to the beauty that only Melvin's music could bring."
In a 1996 "Saturday Night Live" sketch, Tim Meadows played "Champagne" Chris Garnett, a smooth-talking DJ imploring listeners to "grab your lady, hold her tight, and let her know it's time to grind." A station director played by Bill Pullman comes in and fires Garnett for refusing to change his playlists. But even when Garnett is angrily telling his boss "kiss my ass," and eventually threatening to kill him, his voice doesn't change from his serene, unhurried on-air presentation. As he gets angrier and angrier, his voice continues to blend in with Kool & the Gang's "Cherish", like Eno's raindrops and recorded harps. This, of course, is an inevitable part of Melvin Lindsey's-- and Quiet Storm's-- legacy: a supernaturally tranquil form of black musical entertainment, the quietly bizarre outcome of a psychographic mold in which playlists are curated to create a tranquil mood. e24fc04721
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