Barry White’s classic ’70s albums have been reissued, both individually and as a box set.
Barry White’s classic ’70s albums have been reissued, both individually and as a box set. Universal

It’s unfortunate that the works of soul-disco maestro Barry White have become shorthand for swanky, horny love-jams. When your unfunny office mate makes that lame “wah chicka wah-wahhh” porn-music sound-effect, it’s White’s sound that he’s aping. Barry White’s immensely popular work has long been overdue for reappraisal, chiefly because his monumental talents have been overshadowed by the (equally unfunny) jokes about his monumental appearance. This week affords listeners the opportunity to correct the historical record and dive deep into the man’s soulful, sentimental body of work. Nine of White’s best, most groundbreaking albums have been given the 180-gram-vinyl treatment by Universal (and they’ve also issued a boxed set collecting all nine discs). It’s the ideal place to explore White’s creative and commercial peak, and discover (or re-discover) that this man was capable of a lot more than soundtracks for sex.

The reissues, due out tomorrow, cover all nine solo albums from White’s stint on 20th Century Records from 1973 to 1979, a period that included his most famous hits, “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up,” “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me,” and “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby” among them. If those song titles seem quaintly hilarious in their transparently romantic ardor, that’s all part of White’s charm. He was the unlikeliest of superstars, a behind-the-scenes music man whose not particularly svelte form was reluctantly thrust into the spotlight because of an amazingly deep, purring voice and a preternatural knack for crafting bedroom ballads.

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You can hear White’s tentativeness on 1973’s I’ve Got So Much to Give. It was the first record White made with his own name on the front cover, having been a songwriter and arranger for years, and most recently Svengali’ing a female singing group, Love Unlimited, onto the upper reaches of charts. Throughout the ’70s, White would juggle Love Unlimited’s career with his own—or, rather, integrate the two (he married one of them), as well as putting out lush instrumental records under the Love Unlimited Orchestra banner. From 1973 to 1975, the hyper-productive White would release a mind-boggling total of 10 albums either under his own name, with Love Unlimited, or as the Love Unlimited Orchestra, with an 11th album in the form of the soundtrack to Together Brothers. While Universal’s reissue campaign only covers White’s solo work, there’s an additional trove of stuff ripe for rediscovery.

White, oddly, kicked off I’ve Got So Much to Give with a Four Tops cover, perhaps due to nervousness or a desire to pay respect to his musical influences. But his take on “Standing in the Shadows of Love” immediately prove what he’s capable of, blowing out the song’s modest Motown proportions to a Shaft-soundtrack scope. If White doesn’t initially sound as confident as he would on later hits, you can hear his growth over the course of the album, the rest of which features his own compositions. A writer of hooky but uncomplicated tunes, White’s greatest gift comes in arranging and conducting these tracks—turning serviceable R&B songs into hi-fi fantasias, with sweeping gossamer strings, gilded harpsichord, seagull-call guitars, and crisp, persistent hi-hats. (On that hi-hat note: I’ll theorize that the makers of the Roland TR-808 hi-hat sample—omnipresent on every single trap-influenced song on pop and rap radio today—were trying to emulate the tight hi-hat heard on White’s records.)

White got the formula 100 percent right on the first try, and if any criticism can be leveled against subsequent albums, it’s that White rarely ventured from it. He would alternate between upbeat proto-disco (White was responsible for one of the genre’s most influential tracks with Love Unlimited Orchestra’s classic “Love’s Theme,” a number-one hit in 1974) and come-hither slow grooves, which are simultaneously adolescently horny in their seduction techniques and surprisingly, sweetly chaste. Monogamy was White’s jam, and his songs are best when they’re preoccupied with devotion rather than penetration; as the ’70s grew sleazier, White struggled slightly to keep up. The disco sound he helped pioneer grew faster and more coke-frantic, and White began to seem slightly at sea during the back half of the decade. Like the Howlin’ Wolf song, Barry White was built for comfort, not speed.

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His commercial peak was his third album, 1974’s Can’t Get Enough, a fantastic encapsulation of the Barry White experience and probably the album to get if you’re only going to get one. Bookended with two instrumental tracks (both called “Mellow Mood”) it’s the perfect exemplar of White’s god-given gift of shepherding romantic encounters from initiation to completion, one album side at a time. Alongside White’s two biggest hits (“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” and “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything,” both of which are still indelible wedding-dance classics), we hear him at his most tenderly romantic on the 10-minute “I Can’t Believe You Love Me.”

1976’s Is This Whatcha Wont? is nearly the equal of Can’t Get Enough, featuring the best instrumental sequence of this run of albums with the gushing, six-minute intro to “Your Love—So Good I Can Taste It.” And his final release for 20th Century, 1979’s I Love to Sing the Songs I Sing, is a winning delight, a welcome sign of reinvigoration following two relatively weak efforts that suffered from White reliance on outside songwriters. But I Love to Sing… also indicates that White’s sound, trendsetting during the middle part of the ’70s, was perhaps starting to exist out of time. The propulsive disco tracks are a slightly uncomfortable fit, and the candy-sweet ballads like “Girl, What’s Your Name” are starting to sound a little like retro throwbacks.

Nevertheless, apart from 1977’s Sings for Someone You Love and 1978’s The Man—both of which are good, but simply don’t feature enough of White’s own compositions—these albums are fully recommendable, and total blasts from start to finish. The new reissues are excellent, too, with pressings that are substantially better than the somewhat shoddy (and out-of-print) vinyl the records originally appeared on. The mastering is fantastic, crisp, and clear, unveiling new details and providing an aural stage big enough to showcase White’s widescreen vision of romance.

For Barry White, sex was impossible to separate from love, and no male songwriter of the pop era—except, possibly, Prince, who of course was hugely influenced by White—has captured romantic fervor so effectively. While we’ve been focusing on the salacious part of White's oeuvre for the last 45 years, a fresh listen to his first nine albums reveals that there was a lot more to the man, including a sex- and body-positive philosophy as well as an appreciation of women beyond physical attributes (although White certainly mentions those, too). While his lyrics might not be the equal of Rumi or Pablo Neruda, Barry White was more than just a documentarian of his own desires—with his gorgeously wrought orchestrations and decadent yet compassionate productions, he wove romance out of thin air, and then shared it with us.