Bill Cosby - "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Charles Wright - "Express Yourself".

Let's see if you can follow this:

I aspire to dance like Bill Cosby.
Bill Cosby dances like he sings.
Bill Cosby aspires to sing like Charles Wright.
Charles Wright sings like so.

If you're able to follow this chain, you'll have learned that I aspire to dance like so. That is, like Charles Wright singing "Express Yourself". The secret to understanding how he sings this song - and to how I aspire to dance, - is in observing the way he drops the "uh". He doesn't so much drop it as set it down, plant it, make sure it's good-to-grow. He drops it like something dropped into Archimedes' bath, a moment before Eureka. He drops it like it's nothing special (& it isn't, it's just an uh, and a dance is just a dance), and like it's something special (& it is, it's a motherfucking uh, and a dance is never just a dance).

On dark afternoons it's possible to doubt the power that music can have. You imagine an inert dead body. You think of foreign wars. You watch the stars come out in silence. And at these times it's important to put on a song like "Express Yourself", one of the most potent human works ever created, a thing that says more in bass and horns and uh than I expect I'll manage to say in my whole unmusical life. Something more splendid than we, sinning and muddled, have any right to.

Bill Cosby's "Sgt Pepper" doesn't fill me with the same awe. But when he says "Boys", and is answered, well - it's really really funny.

(I've written about "Express Yourself" twice before, but I've still never ever been able to say it right. I'll keep trying.)