Earth, Wind & Fire "That's the Way of the World" [1975]

Beware of this album unless you want to hear what the Temptations would have sounded like if they'd gotten their asses kicked by Chicago (the band, not the whole city). "Prog-soul" was a sub-genre destined for disastrous failure; the only reason people let Stevie Wonder get away with it was they felt bad dissing a blind guy. But Earth, Wind and Fire are nothing if not shameless, allowing Philip Bailey to sing an octave above any of the Pointer Sisters and making the Spinners sound like punk rock by comparison. This album is the musical equivalent of synthetic cocoa butter. If the Ohio Players weren't such drug casualty fuck-ups, they might have been able to slap some sense into Maurice White, but it's possible the music industry wouldn't have cared anyway -- the cat of glossy smoothness was now out of the bag, and it was only a matter of time before label execs would conjure KC & the Sunshine Band to capitalize on the catastrophe with a suitably white group. Thus, instead of letting the raw soul of James Brown acolytes forge a new path, we were relegated to black Vegas' aural version of the Doug Henning magic show, which eventually was to create a wide opening for Lionel Ritchie, the black Barry Manilow. Yes, the 70s were a hideous embarrassment for everyone, but in no way did the coke-and-quaaludes crowd deserve anything as sentimentally sinister as this.