Sade-Diamond Life

Dress cool.

In 1985, Paul Schaffer and the World's Most Dangerous Band wrote a song/shot a video for the Late Night Holiday Film Festival called "Dress Cool," in which he sang about meeting Sade for a date, and she rejects him because he's not dressed cool. At the time, it seemed like the ultimate slam, because NO ONE was cooler than Sade. That breathy voice was all about a jazzy coolness. The years have been more kind to Paul Shaffer's novelty tune than they have Sade's debut. Diamond Life is all about surface gloss, the kind that seems more in place on a smooth jazz radio station or a shitty piano bar. It doesn't get much better than the opening track/monster hit "Smooth Operator," and that song about a globetrotting gigolo is better remembered than actually played for fear that one would pay attention to the trite and geographically inaccurate lyrics. It's a bland, silly album, and I can't for the life of me figure out what drove its popularity in the first place. I'm gettin' this out of here.