Smokey Robinson – “Coincidentally” from A Quiet Storm (1975 Tamla/Motown)
With your permission I’d like to start at the end. The last forty-nine seconds of this track feature lazy bongos and the kind of soulful flute you might go to a mid-seventies soul record for, accompanied by the occasional impassioned vocal utterance from Smokey himself overtop a wind effect. I hear something like that and I’m all the way in.
Of course, I already was.
“Coincidentally” begins with a heavy funk riff played on the electric piano overtop some closed hi-hat eighth notes reminiscent of “Shaft” (but minus the wah wah guitar). The bassline at this point is sparse, letting the keyboards (some clean, some with a Stevie Wonder fart distortion a la “Superstition”) set the groove. That groove is layered with horns, and the whole situation is enough to almost get me to two-step around the room.
Almost. You think I know how to two-step? You’re too generous. Any attempt would almost certainly devolve within a minute to some kind of Heathcliff Huxtable* dance, and that dude is all the way canceled.
The juxtaposition of the lyrics against such a confident backdrop is striking**. The speaker is clearly still pining after an ex-lover, but trying to play it off. Poorly. “Well, I said I would never call…Hey, fancy you should answer mine/I only let it ring ten times, that’s all.”
We don’t need to get all up in my romantic history, but suffice it to say that in my younger years I could have won awards for how awkward I was in any unplanned meeting with an ex. This tune, then, is validating, sure, and also has an astringent quality to it, like peroxide on a wound.
And really, the speaker knows. Here are some clues: “Fancy meetin’ you here/right at the place I said I’d never be;” “There’s some things I don’t want you to know/like when you said goodbye it hurt me so;” “I let you know/my way/hey/accidentally on purpose now.”
Each of these lines collect like bubbles fizzing at the surface of a wound — it stings that they are so relatable. But it’s such a danceable pain. And anyway, I ended up in a good spot, and no doubt Smokey did as well. In any case, it gives the listener a lot to consider during those last forty-nine seconds or so.
*I searched and almost linked to a video of Cosby dancing, but decided not to. Here’s why: it was funny. And while I recognize that people are complicated and that Cosby, like the rest of us, is more than his worst behavior, I just couldn’t see clear to featuring him in a way that focused solely on his fun-loving entertaining side. And again, as I’ve intimated elsewhere on this blog, we all have to draw these lines for ourselves, and they’re seldom straight lines. But here’s mine.
**The Smiths were great at this, too. See the note above.
The Shuffler 