The man who killed Motown

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

I realize that a number of paeans were written for Norman Whitfield this past week, but this column pretty much encapsulates what Whitfield meant to soul music. The money passage:

[Once] Holland-Dozier-Holland stormed out of Motown in early 1968 in a row over profit-sharing, [Whitfield] wrote the hard-driving, socially aware Cloud Nine ... for the Temptations ... It changed Motown overnight.

Indeed it did—unfortunately, not for the better.

I said it then; I'll say it now: If I wanted to listen to drug-oriented songs, I could always listen to Jefferson Airplane. All of a sudden, The Temptations were asked to create a completely different kind of music, and for Norman Whitfield (and Berry Gordy) to have them sing such ridiculous lines as "There's no difference between day and night" and "You're a million miles from reality" was a true perversion of the Motown sound and spirit.

Once Whitfield came on the scene, I pretty much stopped listening to pop music.