The Isleys Brothers Are The Greatest American Band
Hello Victrola readers! Thanks for letting us into your life with this new feature we’ll be doing every week. But before we get to that, let’s talk about the past. The early 1900’s past.
It’s easy to forget, but when Victrola first launched, in those halcyon days of the Woodrow Wilson administration, it was maybe the most revolutionary electronic equipment ever set loose in the American home. Before Victrola, if you wanted to hear what banjo music from Mississippi sounded like, you needed to get in a car—or, more likely, a train—and drive to Mississippi and look for a guy carrying a banjo. If you wanted to hear a trumpet, or a sitar, or a singer from Europe sing, you needed to be in the physical presence of a trumpet, a sitar, or a Russian opera singer.
Victrola changed that: Thanks to our turntables, everyone could now hear any music they wanted to, provided it was on record. As such, one of our original slogans was “All the Music of All the World,” which is what the Victrola aimed to bring to every house. Every Victrola came with a copy of a book called How to Get the Most Out of Your Victrola, which aimed to inform Victrola buyers of all the different styles of music they might check out and play on their Victrola system. It was informative, and enthusiastic, and wanted people to listen to any music they could imagine.
We think the music world is missing that enthusiasm. Despite the barrier to entry never being lower—all music ever is in your pocket now, more or less—the vibe on the music internet is still tribal, still snobby, still exclusionary. When someone publicly admits they’ve never heard Fela Kuti the response is often “How can you be so stupid to not know Fela Kuti?,” instead of “Man, that’s awesome, he’s great, and you’re gonna love him. Here’s where to start.”
We want to be that latter voice for the people who buy turntables from us, and for people just looking for music they maybe have never actually spent time with. So, with that, welcome to All The Music of All the World, our new series where we share music we think you need to spend more time with, discover for the first time, or revisit.
For reasons of our American individualism, and the belief of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, America has long been a country of solo artists. If you go across the pond to the U.K., their greatest acts are all bands: the Stones, Oasis, Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles, Cream, Black Sabbath, Arctic Monkeys, Joy Division…you get the point. In America, we breed solo artists: Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and even though they both had bands, they had top billing: Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. So, the question of who the greatest American band is/was is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Talking Heads? Too short a run. Guns N Roses? They had too many music videos with dolphins. Ramones? Not popular enough. Grateful Dead? You’re getting closer, but same issue as Ramones. Steely Dan? Music is too heady. You could make the case for the house band at Motown from 1960-1967, or Booker T. and the M.G’s and the Memphis Horns who backed up every Stax single from 1962-1969. But house bands don’t feel big enough.
When you get down to it, there’s only one right answer for greatest American band of all time. The only band whose career literally touched Elvis’ and Ice Cube’s, who released albums in every decade from the ‘50s until the 2000’s, changing genres and sounds many times, and inventing multiple forms of American music along the way. They still tour and arguably have never lost a shred of importance: The Isley Brothers.
I know you’re probably thinking: “I’m closing this tab now.” But hear me out! The brothers Isley formed as a gospel family band in 1950’s Ohio and switched to rock to become part of the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll acts to go from regional curious to national superstars, in the wake of Elvis’s exploding fame. Their “Shout!” has endured as one of the best pre-Kennedy rock songs ever, soundtracking everything from Animal House to Fortnite emotes in the 66 years since it was released. I mean, watch this video of them doing it on TV in 1959:
Look at those moves! Those suits! Lead Isley Ronald’s pliant vocals soaring over his brothers, vamping and howling. This single alone would have guaranteed immortality on the par with ? and the Mysterians or the band that played “Louie Louie.” But square those rock chords and stylings with this:
That’s the next movement of the Isley Brothers’ evolution. After being indie successes, and running their own label, they decided to jump to Berry Gordy’s Motown for two albums and some loose singles in the late ‘60s, mostly to see if Gordy could get them into every house in white America. He succeeded. But after creative differences and Gordy moving Motown to Los Angeles at the end of the ‘60s, the Isleys went out on their own via their own T-Neck Records, their label named after their adopted New Jersey home base, where they dominated the next 15 years of music, launching eight platinum and two gold albums on their own in an era where you seemingly needed to be on a major label to have any success.
But what makes the Isley Brothers the best American band of all time isn’t just that indie success or longevity: They altered the sound of what was considered “black” music multiple times from 1969 to 1985 (when they went back to a major label). It starts with 1969’s It’s Your Thing, a response to Gordy (who told the Isleys they’d fail without him) where you can hear them, alongside Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, and Isaac Hayes, inventing funk from the embers of R&B and soul:
After two more albums perfecting funk, in 1971 the Isleys invented the covers concept album with Givin’ It Back, which finds them deconstructing and rebuilding hits from rock acts that covered them over the years (for instance, that Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” from Ferris Bueller is an Isleys cover). Listen to them break open James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” and realize the same band that made “Shout!” made this:
They then spent their next five albums exploding the funk form to its trippiest and poppiest ends; if Funkadelic were the jam band of funk, the Isleys were the Beatles, wrangling the wildest impulses of funk into albums and tracks that dominated radio for much of the ‘70s. 3+3 is my favorite album of this period. Check it out below:
But then, in 1977, just as funk felt like it had maybe reached its end with disco ascendant, the Isleys released their masterpiece: Go for Your Guns, a sprawling, funky album that took left turns to help invent the “slow jam” (“Footsteps in the Dark”), and provided such thick bedding of grooves that hip-hop producers are still jacking its breaks and beats for new material. No more famous than the defining Ice Cube single:
As the ‘80s dawned, like all funk and R&B bands, the Isleys had to reckon with the end of the disco explosion—which had taken over most party music, and many bands chased the disco boom-- and it took them a few years to find their footing in a world not trying to dance and party all the time. Like Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye (“Sexual Healing” being the big cut), the Isleys pivoted to making what would be called “quiet storm” R&B, a sensual, slow, silk-sheet type of music that was meant for a different kind of movement. Between the Sheets is the defining album of the genre, mostly because the Isleys could carry the requisite horniness over a whole album better than Smokey or Marvin.
The Isleys would slow down a bit in the later ‘80s and ‘90s, but experience a renaissance in time for the late ‘90s R&B boom, where a generation of artists raised on hearing the Isleys on the radio adapted their sounds for the Clinton era. The Isleys had three huge albums as the millenium turned over, the best of which being Body Kiss.
The group is still touring semi-regularly, playing big festival dates. Go see them if you can: National heroes don’t stick around forever.
The Isleys have endured lineup changes (reading their Wikipedia for when brothers and cousins drop out is complicated), genre changes, their music being sold on every format that has existed (more or less), and have influenced everyone from the Beatles to Ice Cube. There is no better lead artist for All the Music of All the World, because in a lot of ways, the music world we have now was made by the Isleys, and we’re just living in it.
You can buy the Isley Brothers' Greatest Hits compilation here.
