Promise That You Will Sing About Me

Kendrick Lamar, SZA and the year of Luther.

Scene from the '“luther” music video (Screenshot via YouTube)

A playlist of the songs cited in this piece is available here.

A few moments after the music video begins, the sight of Kendrick Lamar in a wooden church pew is paired with the unmistakable sound of Luther Vandross. “If this world were mine…”

The accompanying track, “luther,” is a towering monument to one of the most underappreciated musical acts of the last half century: a poor, fat and probably gay Black kid from Harlem who, by the time he died in 2005, was acknowledged by anyone with the expertise to matter as one of the best to ever write, sing or arrange a musical note. Vandross constructed trailing transitions and towering bridges, then traversed them with effortless vocal runs. He sang all four verses of the hymn, not just the first, last and chorus. He excavated hidden treasures embedded in others’ long-forgotten works. He sampled and interpolated — generosity since returned. “You can never go wrong if you Let. Me. Hold. You.” Bow Wow and Omarion make a promise in that line. Luther’s version was a plea: Let, me, hold, you, tight, if only for one night. He was a master of both pace and space, melting his words into the voids created by carefully placed silence.

Were he hovering at my keyboard, Luther would demand we take our time and show you.

My childhood favorite was “Superstar /Until You Come Back to Me,” track No. 1 on the first side of the second cassette of 1989’s The Best of Love compilation, which lived for years in the tape deck of my mother’s forest green Chrysler minivan. Luther mixes a Karen Carpenter bop with a Stevie Wonder-written and Aretha Franklin-performed hit and creates what, for most acts, would have been a career-defining ballad. Are you go-a-onna be, say that you’re gonna be-e-e-e, still in love with me. Well well, well well. It is his nine-minute magnum opus. Play it for the aliens when it’s time to explain what R&B was, what true love was, what humanity was at its best. He chose to keep the sound of his instructions to the studio band in the final mix of the track. “We had got to that little point in the song that Luther likes to add after the song is supposed to be ended,” bassist Marcus Miller explains in a documentary released this year. “He’s telling me and the rest of the guys who like to play jazz, ‘Don’t jazz this thing up. Keep it right there. Play it easy.’” Luther crafts his real-time production into a captivating two-minute outro.

Play it easy, play it easy
Keep it right there, keep it right there
keep it right there-ere-ere-ere-ere 
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
when are you going to say it’s alright it’s alright?
oh baby it’s alright it’s alright, alright now 
I used to be sad, now it’s alright 
ooh baby, it’s alright it’s alright, al-right now
I wonder... I wonder...Where are you again tonight?
Are you holding someone else real tight?
 I wonder, I wonder, I won-der…

That’s how it went when Luther Vandross liked your song. He was an invasive species. You were Fats Domino. He was Elvis, smirking in the corner, about to strike it rich. Vandross was an apex predator. Ask Heatwave (“Always and Forever”) or Major Harris (“Love Won’t Let Me Wait”). He was Lil Wayne deciding that the beat of your early 2000s radio hit would sound great on his next mixtape: the song is still called “Upgrade U,” but it’s no longer by Beyoncé and her husband. Luther’s performance of “The Impossible Dream” will leave you convinced he was in Man of La Mancha’s original Broadway cast. Sometimes I forget that, before he serenaded Mariah Carey in their arrangement, “Endless Love” was a massive hit by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. Dionne Warwick has long acknowledged that “A House Is Not a Home,” is no longer her song.

Before Luther got to it, “If This World Were Mine” had been a sing-songy number penned by Marvin Gaye, who, in early 1967, was a Motown studio-session artist still years away from “Sexual Healing” and “What’s Going On.” He tucked the track into the final third of United, the first of three albums of duets he’d release with Tammi Terrell. It found modest popularity, but nothing like the album’s lead single, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Then, 15 years later, Vandross plucked the track from his record bin and went to work making magic.