Op-Ed: An ode to Philly soul: La-la means more than ‘I love you’

When I was about 10 and my older brother a teenager, nothing captured my imagination like watching his band rehearse. On summer evenings they would gather in the garage in our backyard — my brother the drummer and lead singer, with a couple of other singers and musicians who were friends of his or who lived in the neighborhood — to practice.

I would settle on the back porch in great anticipation, thrilling to the warmup twangs of guitar and the whining of amplifiers until they took their places at the mics, feet apart, hands behind their backs. The the bass drum kicked in and the band was off, soaring with melting harmonies and sharp, coordinated dance moves that entertained everybody else gathered there — other kids in the neighborhood who, like me, had become fans.

But I had a particular fascination. The band’s mostly slow-to-midtempo ballads spoke to everything I couldn’t yet: love, hope, failure, regret. It also spoke to recent history I didn’t know much about but could sense in the melodies. It was a whole world.

That all happened in South-Central, but my brother’s preferred playlist, the songs that so captivated me, drew from an R&B subgenre known as Philly soul. It started in but was never limited to Philadelphia, and it was typified by bands like the Dramatics, Blue Magic, the Stylistics and of course the Delfonics. William Hart, the Delfonics’ lead singer, died late last week at 77. Hart had a wail of a falsetto that was a Philly soul hallmark.

That sound pierced me, made me feel as well as think. And I decided even at 10 years old that Philly soul was more than what first met the ear.

“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” and “La-La (Means I Love You)” (Delfonics), “You Are Everything” (Stylistics) and “Side Show” (Blue Magic) — all R&B classics — were not seen as complicated songs but rather updates of a long tradition of soul ballads, a la the Platters, that are paeans to romance and first loves.

By the 1970s, those ballads stood in direct contrast to the urgently funky, more overtly message-oriented music of hit makers like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the Temptations, all musicians who had started out in the doo-wop era but whose musical consciousness got converted by the social realities of their time. The Delfonics, et al., seemed to offer a continuity that was reassuring — an escape from Black struggle, from all the turbulence wrought by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a movement that was hardly resolved by the early ’70s.

And yet to my ears, Philly soul wasn’t an escape. It was confirmation.

Like all blues, Philly soul operates on more than one level. What I sensed as a kid has only gotten clearer to me: Smooth soul lyrics that pine for love are also pining for a greater goal — racial justice — a quest that, despite the dramatic gains we’d seen by the time the music became popular, has proved elusive and frustratingly hard to achieve.

Thom Bell, the mastermind producer of Philly soul, was known for lush, complex orchestrations that were lovely in one way but mournful in another. (Bell claimed he was only out to entertain. He counted Henry Mancini and Burt Bacharach among his influences. Never mind: His version of entertainment couldn’t help but have other things going on as well.)

Wistfulness and uncertainty color the question “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” — code language for we came close, but we’re not there yet. “Side Show” suggests not just a lovelorn protagonist but the spectacle of a country caught up in tragedy of its own making, a spectacle we couldn’t look away from even if we wanted to. “Can’t afford to pass it by / Guaranteed to make you cry,” the refrain goes. Well put.

Philly soul wasn’t the only influential music that conveyed a post-’60s ennui to me: Don McLean’s “American Pie” and a whole host of rock and folk bands were starting to cut through the R&B I’d grown up hearing almost exclusively. The world was opening up for me, not without rude realization.

In 1972, I got bused to a mostly white elementary school that made the racism I’d been dimly aware of very real. The Vietnam War was still raging, something I heard about routinely, along with the fatality count, on television news. The world of possibilities I absorbed from records and radio was in its way just as dangerous, incomplete, unreliable; my heart, it warned, was bound to be broken.

And that’s what was so compelling about Philly soul, the idea that Black people had a heart, first and foremost. That we had hopes and wishes, that we all endured disappointments that hurt and bewildered us. Nothing else gave me that emotional foundation. I admired “the day the music died,” it even resonated with me, and I sang along with the chorus. But McLean was talking about the country at large, not me precisely.

As for Stevie and company, I loved them, but they were classic blues optimists: Despite the sobering lyrics about the real world, the songs were upbeat, undaunted.

Philly soul and Motown both followed the imperative of the blues — name the struggle and then defeat it in song. Motown — and Stax and other labels — did that consummately with music you could get happy with, that you could boogie to. But the blues isn’t all about overcoming. In slowing it all down, taking a step back, Philly soul pulled back the curtain on how difficult dancing could be.

Black folk of a certain age (that includes me now) complain that we don’t have music like the Delfonics anymore — R&B whose sensitivity reflects the best of what we’ve become and what we still aspire to. I beg to differ. We do still have Black music that speaks to the struggle and its long aftermath, to the unresolved problems of love small and large, personal and political.

Hip-hop may seem a long way from the dreamy orchestrations and tight choreography of the Delfonics and from the garage bands of my childhood that revered and replicated that sound. But it shares the same angst, which over time has only grown. Now it’s expressed very differently — less subtly, for sure. It doesn’t sound the same, but a crucial tradition of pulling back the curtain persists. You just have to listen.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing writer to Opinion.