12 Aug 2008, National Post, YONI GOLDSTEIN
ygoldstein@nationalpost.com
Remembering a soul man
To the average adult music fan, Isaac Hayes will be remembered as a one-hit, flash-in-the-pan funkster. To younger pop-culture consumers, whose memories don’t extend to Shaft, he will be remembered as the voice of a vulgar Mr. Rogers-type South Park character.
This is unfortunate. Isaac Hayes was a musical genius — a pure artist who worked both behind the scenes with the legends of soul music as a songwriter and producer, and as the voice of the late-’60s/early-’70s popfunk-soul hybrid movement that saved one of popular music’s most revolutionary record labels.
Everyone remembers two great mid-’60s pop songwriting groups — Lennon-McCartney and JaggerRichards — but most tend to forget Hayes’ own phenomenal output during that same period. Working with Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the terrific blues-soul foursome and the house band at Memphis-based Stax Records, Hayes wrote, produced and arranged, among others, three of the greatest soul singles of all time: Soul Man, When Something Is Wrong with My Baby and Hold On I’m Comin’, all three for the duo Sam & Dave.
Then it was Isaac’s turn to shine. Hayes’ 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul is both a soul masterpiece and a rare moment of blissed-out musical weirdness that stands the test of time. The album, with a grand total of just four tracks, has no over-arching theme to speak of. But each track presents a story detailed and textured enough to stand alone as a musical narrative. Walk On By, the lead track, is a reinvention of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David original that builds to a crushing instrumental conclusion, a seven-note riff repeated endlessly over wah-wah funk guitar. The second track, Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic (the only Hayes original on Hot Buttered Soul), makes almost no literal sense ( just try pronouncing the title), but stands out as a fitting introduction to Hayes’ “Black Moses” persona, the low-register — almost rapping — gold-chained, sequined, larger-than-life leader of the burgeoning funk movement.
One Woman opens side two and tells the story of a man caught between two women — one who keeps his house, and another who satisfies his sexual desires. Hayes’ arrangement, and the tenor of his vocals, almost make the listener feel sorry for the song’s protagonist, infidelity notwithstanding. The album ends with a cover of By the Time I Get To Phoenix, reborn in typical Hayesian dramatic excess … with an eight-minute spoken-word prologue.
Two years later, he wrote and performed the theme to the 1971 film Shaft. The song, spoken word/rap vocals mixed with a cheesy repeated eponymous refrain, is not a great piece of art, but it was the perfect sound track for the equally cheesy Blaxploitation movement. Hayes, perhaps unintentionally, lowered himself so as to jibe with the low standards of Shaft and its ilk. Certainly, the film does not rival any of the tracks on Hot Buttered Soul in ingenuity or creativity, but by one of those weird twists of musical fate, it stands as Hayes’ largest commercial success.
Shaft would represent the height of Isaac Hayes’ musical career. He recorded only one other album of note, 1971’s Black Moses, then dabbled in film and TV through the ’70s and ’80s. In 2002, he was inducted in to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
His second career began in the late’90s, as the voice of animated South Park character Jerome “Chef ” McElroy. A typical Chef moment would involve the youngsters asking him to explain racial politics or some aspect of sociology, eliciting a response that quickly devolved into earthy songs about how to make love to a woman. Everyone who watched South Park knew that Hayes was the voice of Chef, and the character was the most beloved of the show’s secondary cast.
(That is, until Hayes got into a very public row with the show’s creators over an episode lampooning the cult of Scientology, with which Hayes was affiliated, leading him to quit in 2006. The next season’s premiere episode told the story of Chef ’s death, and his previously unknown exploits in a bizarre, pedophilic cult. The episode ended with a eulogy: “We shouldn’t be mad at Chef for leaving us, we should be mad at that fruity little club for scrambling his brains.”)
Shaft and Chef wouldn’t be a bad legacy for most artists, it’s true, but to remember Isaac Hayes for an unstylish song that has aged badly and a vulgar cartoon is an awful misrepresentation of the man’s massive contributions to music. For a brief period, Isaac Hayes was the most innovative man in music: originator and organizer of the pop-funk-soul musical trinity. His powerful creation has driven popular music ever since.
