If you’re after a representative Sade album, you’re better off with their third, 1988’s Stronger Than Pride. But for all that Diamond Life typifies what the average listener might think Sade is about, it’s something of an anomaly in their catalogue: more uptempo and engaging than later work, seeking the approbation of its audience through the pyrotechnics of Stuart Matthewman’s flamboyant saxophone solos, and embedded within the cultural milieu of the London jazz scene. For many listeners, the group’s virtues are best displayed on their multi-million selling 1984 debut, Diamond Life, which spawned the group’s best known work (‘Smooth Operator’, ‘Hang on to Your Love’, ‘Your Love is King’). Unthreatening lounge-jazz made by an exotic, sexy chanteuse and her white male sidekicks for the consumption of yuppies and urban sophisticates - what could be more antithetical to serious music? What could be less worthy of discussion? Yet Sade have persisted over decades of music industry turmoil, showing a longevity that cannot be written off as merely the by-product of a good marketing campaign and rusted-on baby boomer listeners looking for a new salve to ease the pain of their third divorce. ![]() (3% voted for her “wild side”, which is particularly laughable given the remarkable poise of her public persona and her famously guarded privacy - if indeed Adu has a wild side, none of the readers of would ever have been privy to it.) In case you weren’t entirely convinced that such descriptors are voyeuristic and a little exploitative, readers of the site can vote on which of Adu’s features make her most desirable: 70% of readers go for her face, and 14% for her body, while only 9% find her intelligence to be her most salient feature. This puff piece on is an exemplar of the kind of coverage the band receives: Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul Denman are almost entirely sidelined, while Adu’s voice is described as “sensual” and expressing a “raw sexuality”. Worse still are the band’s appreciators, most of whom make the error of mistaking the part for the whole and focus their adoration entirely on Adu herself, often in creepily sexual and objectifying terms. “Aural wallpaper,” as Robert Christgau dismissed it. Part of it is socio-cultural: although Sade Adu herself is hardly a poster child of privilege, given her position as a Nigerian immigrant whose biography was profoundly shaped by her parents’ divorce, it is nonetheless undeniable that her group’s soft, anodyne grooves soundtracked many a yuppie party in the 1980s. It’s very easy to hate Sade, and it has been so ever since the group emerged from London’s jazz-club scene in the early 1980s.
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