Hot Buttered Soul is the reason you buy a stereo. Even if you don't know the album when you buy that stereo, you make the purchase with the idea this kind of music exists somewhere in the universe.

The Isaac Hayes obits are only going to give the album a few lines, the same as his co-writing credits on Soul Man and Hold On, I'm Coming. But music and the arts always seem to bring out the oddness in obits that way. The style leads with the facts as the cumulative case for a full life and subverts the passion that brought the person's towering achievements and grace notes. Music exposes weakness here.

The art works on a canvas that goes pitch dark when silent, and the requirement to consolidate your expression — even if Walk On By runs a glorious 12 minutes — turns the recording details into footnotes.

Surveying the course of a life, the same model seems appropriate to consider, putting the relative footnotes in their place and interpreting passions as we may have lived but never concisely expressed them.

To have expressed them … that's why you end up on the front page. That's why the people buying the stereos find themselves wishing the sound field would cross whichever room needs the soul, day or night.

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