There comes a time in every great soul artist's life when they have to compete against their own myth. Myth plays a vital part in soul music because its roots come from the folklore of slavery, pertaining to the cross-currents of beauty and sorrow that come from the spirituals to the secular, populist, and deeply human aesthetic of the work songs. Because the greatest soul singers have been the most concise interpreters of both forms, it isn't surprising that they have assumed larger than life status. Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, serving as mythic preachers, who reshaped popular music in their own image with vocal sermon after vocal sermon. Sam Cooke, the chocolate brown Apollo who took his sweet song to the coliseums of middle-America only to be killed by the bereft armies of the music business when he wanted to sing for himself. Sly Stone, the frightfully gifted prodigal son who, throughout mountains of PCP and cocaine, never came home. Stevie Wonder, the golden child who, through the power of his Moog and his imagination, took the frenetic joy of the revival to Neptune.
I Can't Stop, Green's secular comeback album in 2003, succeeds in both showing how powerful and real the myth of Al Green is and in showing how the myth can differ from the artist as well. It articulates why he is considered as, arguably, the greatest soul artist of all time, but also the full range of the gifts that made him mythic in nature, as well as the deeply human element of his art that has compelled people to it for over three decades. Those looking for the master of controlled sensuality and nearly unbearable sexual tension that created hit after breathtaking hit in the '70s will leave slightly disappointed, for, unlike many middle-aged men, he doesn't act like a sexually charged teenager, nor does he try. Those looking for an artist whose grasp of his form is better than damn near any one on the planet, who still has a sense of the nature of his own art, and who still has the wherewithal that one needs to make great art will be satisfied; for I Cant Stop is a portrait of a great artist in nearly full command of his faculties, with the guts to use all of them.
Just because he's almost a wistful 60 doesn't mean that the Right Reverend has become a eunuch. The title track starts off where 1977's Belle, his epic last full-length secular album, ended. And this needs explanation. In "Dream," the final track to the album, Green kissed his muse goodbye in what can only be described as the musical equivalent of mind numbing breakup sex. "Dream" is a sensory overload, Green emptying out all of his sexual energy moan by ecstatic moan until the 9-minute track becomes a post-coital blur. It is precisely the way "Dream" ended, that left fans waiting for him to make a comeback, waiting for 26 years, buying his erratic gospel records and seeing him in his breathtaking stage performances in order to be satiated.
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