Slim Shady Lyrics

Sade equals intelligent passion

Former international porn star Slim Shady Sadie has successfully recast herself as a smoky, sizzling modern chanteuse named Sade . And in doing so, she has changed my life thanks to her sizzling, smoky-voiced show at the Schott Sunday night, which left me trembling in worshipful awe and total respect, not to mention deeply in love.

Oh, OK, I'm joking about the porn-star thing. She's anything but, being class personified. Yet if you were sitting where I was sitting, and if you were as entranced as I was entranced, you'd invent a fantasy or two about the utterly striking Sade, too.

Our beautifully aging beauty (now 52 and lookin' fine, fine, fine) came on to thunderous love from the locals, and she responded in kind. In fact, I could be wrong, but I think much of her love energy was personally directed at me because she liked seeing my hat bob up and down gently in approval of her mellifluous-voiced performance.

She started the show with "Soldier of Love," her faceless but stylistically faithful band of eight dudes in black laying down her soft-jazz/quiet-storm/adult-contemporary musical backing, none of which descriptive terms do Sade's music justice.

Sade is British (born in Nigeria to a Nigerian man and English momma) but moved to the UK isles early on. The British do style-as-substance and substance-as-style better than Hendrix did acid. There never has been a sound as seductive yet sublimely powerful as this super-fine lady's first three albums, Diamond Life (1988).

Each track of every album smolders like dry ice, being marked by passion controlled, but passion nonetheless. And smart lyrics, too, offering an emotional intelligence rare in pop, sort of a throwback to Billie Holiday's yearning for the right man.

Because at the heart of every Sade song is unbridled love, love that doesn't know better, love that subscribes to Woody Allen's cardiac philosophy: The heart wants what the heart wants. Even if it is an adopted orphan from your current wife's child menagerie.

Sade sings of being a slave to her passion. And while country music probably describes the follies of crazy love better than Shakespeare ever did, no one does it as well as Sade and her band of gnomes: jazzy and mellow, smooth yet deep, passionate but restrained. Who says the British got no soul?

The entire Sade concept can be described by cribbing part of a Spinal Tap line: "She's got the smell of groove." Not a single song lacks it. Each one turns slowly, like on a rotisserie, its parts slowly but surely developed to melodic succulence.