Hyper-cool rocker Robert Palmer has died at 54. The Guardian has a good roundup of his musical career.
Fond of blending genres (once, unforgettably and perhaps unforgivably, engineering a marriage between heavy metal and bossa nova), he was often just far enough ahead of pop music's evolutionary curve to have missed the big payoff.Posted by Alan at September 26, 2003 09:45 PMPalmer was noted for the care he devoted to the visual presentation of his music. Some fans, particularly those whose tastes were formed in an era that prized authenticity, found this off-putting. Others, however, understood that he aspired to inhabit the space between Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye on the one hand, and Bryan Ferry and David Bowie on the other. Like Ferry and Bowie, he grew up loving the sound and attitude of black music, and wanting to project it with what Rickie Lee Jones later called "white-boy cool".
In any age Robert Palmer would have been a hipster, with a hot line to the coolest sounds, the sharpest threads, the latest pose. It is a hard stance to maintain, and occasionally he wobbled. But his last album, the recently released Drive, showed him enthusiastically returning to his roots with direct and inventive versions of songs by JB Lenoir, Willie Dixon, Robert Johnson, Little Willie John and others - and not a model girl or wardrobe credit in sight.