Critical Noir

"Just Be Good to Me": R&B's Forgotton Era (Part 2)

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:59:40 -0500

The real visionaries of R&B in the late 1970s were two recording industry veterans, who created recording labels out of the ashes of failed projects. Dick Griffey's SOLAR label was born after Griffey parted ways with Soul Train producer Don Cornelius ending their joint venture Soul Train Records. Clarence Avant founded Sussex records in the early 1970s, with Bill Withers as his most prominent artists. After Sussex folded for financial reasons in 1976 (Withers ended up at CBS), Avant returned in 1977 with Tabu Records. What the Griffey and Avant shared was an ability to discover and development new talent. Among the groups eventually signed to SOLAR were Midnight Starr (and their producing members, the Calloway Brothers), Lakeside ("Fantastic Voyage"), The Whispers ("And the Beat Goes On"), Shalamar ("This is For the Lover in You") and The Deele. Within the The Deele, Griffey identified the producing potential of Kenny Edmonds and Antonio Reid. One of Edmonds's early songwriting efforts was with label-mate Midnight Starr's classic "Slow Jam". By the end on the 1980s Edmonds and Reid were of course popularly known as LaFace, one of the dominant R&B production houses in the period. At their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, LaFace shared a friendly competition with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Jam and Lewis initially founded a group in Minneapolis in the early 1980s called Flyte Time. When Morris Day and others joined the group shortly thereafter, they became simply known as The Time and became a part of the musical camp Prince was developing in the Minneapolis area. The group's 1982 debut What Time is It? contains classics like "Gigolos Get Lonely Too" and "777-9311". At the time Jam and Lewis came to the attention of Clarence Avant, who signed the duo to produce the third album of Tabu's best known artists, The SOS Band with Mary Davis on lead vocals. The immediate product of that collaboration was "Just Be Good to Me", which began a string of hits for the SOS Band until Davis departed the group in 1987. When their production responsibilities began to conflict with their work with The Time, Jam and Lewis were famously fired by their management (Prince). Out on their own, they would produce Tabu artists like Alexander O'Neal and Cherrelle and others such as Cheryl Lynn ("Encore"), eventually leading to their groundbreaking work with Janet Jackson with Control (1986). The seeds to Jam and Lewis's vision can be found in that initial hit they had with the SOS Band. In "Just Be Good to Me", the audacity and brashness of this generation of R&B producers and performers can be easily discerned. The song begins with simple drum programming (and that familiar cowbell), followed by a cacophony of synthesized noise that suggest the coming of something grandiose (you can almost hear God coming over the horizon) before the song settles into a rapid staccatoed dance rhythm neatly packaged inside a rolling baseline. It was a sound, like the post-human noise the Calloway Brothers crafted for Midnight Starr on tracks like "Freak-A-Zoid" and "Wet My Whistle", that simply redefined the sound of R&B with traces of that moment still being heard in the rhythms of the Dirty South. In retrospect, there was no reason for these young producers to think so boldly of themselves, except for the fact that they could--and because R&B mattered so little to the bottom line of the music industry, no one was gonna call these folk on their brash designs. There no small irony that the major black crossover stars of the era--all unprecedented in many regards--like Prince, Rick James, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie (whose self-titled solo debut in 1982 was primed to be the Thriller, well before Thriller), Luther Vandross (though it took him longer than the others) and of course Michael Jackson, were all products of the very R&B world that their success helped to obscure. Yet this was the R&B World that kept black radio afloat and primed the success of contemporary artists like Mary J. Blige, Usher Raymond, and Beyonce two decades later. --Mark Anthony Neal

"Just Be Good to Me": R&B's Forgotton Era (Part 1)

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:41:00 -0500

As a practice, R&B music--the more formal corporate product of the post-1970s era--has been given short shrift by the critical intelligentsia. The volume of writing on Soul, Jazz, Hip-Hop and the more traditional Rhythm & Blues has easily dwarfed any significant critical forays into contemporary R&B music, save the brilliant work done by scholars and critics such as Sasha Frere-Jones, Daphne Brooks and Jason King on the hybrid musical landscape that R&B's furtive relationship with hip-hop production has wrought. Even the smart work that Oliver Wang is doing on the retro pop-Soul artists like Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and Nicole Willisis really a nod to the throwback days of the late 1950s and 1960s. And if such a gap in critical assessment of R&B exist, nowhere is it more pronounced than in the music produced in the early to mid 1980s--a time when mainstream pop-top-40 radio (after its homophobic and racist retreat from Disco), in concert with MTV's then musical apartheid approach to programming pop music, effectively undermined the social experiment that was pop radio in 1970s. Ironically this was only a few years after many of the major labels had invested heavily in black acts with the hope of crossing those artists over to white mainstream audiences. Enter the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s and what was left was a musical environment that was as segregated as it was when the "Hot Soul Singles" charts--soon called "Black Singles" charts--were still referred to as the "Race Music" charts. In this context a generation of artists and producers emerged, with new technologies at their disposal, like the first generation of Roland TR-808 and Linn LM-1 programmable drum machines and very little pressure to make music for the mainstream (read: white folk). For producers like James Mtume, Reggie Lucas, The Calloway Brothers (Reggie and Vincent), and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the period represented a chance to innovate, while reinvigorating the music in the aftermath of too much infusion of corporate cash. It was George Clinton who famously described the music as "rhythm and bullshit" in the late 1970s, as he called out for "One Nation Under a Groove." As many of these young producers cut their first rugs to Parliament Funkadelic they took heed: "Here's our chance to dance our way, out of our constrictions." While mixed company in post-Civil Rights, multicultural America can all hum Motown, Atlantic-era Stax, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, and The Stylistics, check the silence when names like Midnight Starr ("Curious"; "Slow Jam") Patrice Rushen ("Forget Me Nots"), The SOS Band ("Take Your Time"; "Weekend Girl"), Frankie Beverly and Maze ("We Are One"; "Before I Let Go"), Stephanie Mills ("Never Knew Love Like This"; "What Cha Gonna do with My Lovin'" ) Atlantic Starr (with Sharon Bryant on lead: "Silver Shadow"; "Send for Me"), The Deele ("Sweet November"; "Two Occasions"), Cheryl Lynn ("Encore"; "Got to Be Real"), Kashif ("Stone Love"; "Are You the Woman?"), Alexander O'Neal ("Fake"; "Criticize"), DeBarge ("Stay with Me"; "I Like It") and Loose Ends ("Slow Down"; ) are rolled out. There are of course exceptions. A cross-over figure like Chaka Khan managed to straddle the Funk world via her work with Rufus, while her solo career--"I'm Every Women" era Chaka--pivots with the emergence of contemporary R&B. The same can be said for George Benson, who transitioned from elite jazz guitarist to a major purveyor of pop radio-friendly R&B, largely courtesy of his chart-topping ballad "This Masquerade" (1976) and his foot-tapping live remake of The Drifters' "On Broadway" (1977). As with so much so-called black music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Benson's success on both the Pop and R&B charts is often forgotten. Musically, Benson's sound was enhanced by his work with band-leader and producer Quincy Jones, who began the 1970s with string of funk-heavy jazz releases (of which Body Heat is most typical) and began to push for a more pop-ish sound (with a nod to Gamble and Huff, I'd say) with the release of Sounds...And Stuff Like That in 1978. Sounds... featured the vocals of goddaughter Patti Austin, Ashford and Simpson, Chaka Khan, Gwen Guthrie and a then unknown Luther Vandross. For Jones, 1978 marked his first collaboration with Michael Jackson (on the soundtrack for The Wiz), which of course lead to their future accomplishments with Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987). Of the three albums Jones produced with Jackson, Off the Wall was likely the most influential in the R&B world (see Rod Temperton's song writing for the connection), as young R&B producers drew from the examples of Jones, Gamble and Huff, the aforementioned Clinton, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers (Chic) and the adult Stevie Wonder to create sounds pitched for the post-Bakke, B-Movie era (with a nod to Gil Scott-Heron). --Mark Anthony Neal

Great Expectations? Venus and Serena Set Their Own Bar

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:24:09 -0500

NBC's annual Breakfast @ Wimbledon broadcast was recently transformed into Breakfast with The Williams, as sisters Venus and Serena held center court. On the line, the Wimbledon Singles Championship at the All-England Club. Though the Williams sisters have long proven their abilities as elite tennis professionals, their presence at center court on a championship day at a Grand Slam event always generates interests--as much for the tennis as for the on-air commentary about their outfits, athleticism and general demeanor. Venus and Serena Williams have won 14 Grand Slam events between them, including the championship Venus just won against her sister at Wimbledon. Venus's victory--her 5th at Wimbledon, trailing only the legendary Billie Jean King (6), Steffi Graf (7) and Martina Navratilova (9) in number--establishes her as the best grass player of her generation. As for Serena, she has won at the All-England Club twice in her own right, to go with her six other Grand Slam championships. The sisters Williams are by far, the most recognizable current American tennis players. Nevertheless, on-air affirmation of the genius the Williams have displayed throughout their careers has been grudging. NBC commentator Mary Carrilo, perhaps raised the bar even more in this regard, as she admitted during the championship telecast some disappointment that the sisters hadn't lived up to expectations and become the all-round tennis champions that Chris Everett and the aforementioned King and Navratilova were during their careers. Carrilo went out of her way, while ostensibly congratulating the sisters on their collective performance at Wimbledon, to make that point that the grass courts at the All-England Club favor the most athletic players, hence the domination of the Williams sisters. And while this "brawn over brains" argument remains specious is most respectable circles, Carrilo evoked it to establish a bar between the greatest women players of this generation and the greatest women players of all-time. Fair enough. Perhaps realizing that she had crossed some line, Carillo quickly added that the Williams sisters had made the choice to engage in other activities, as opposed to someone like Navratilova who did little more than breathe and play tennis (and tearing down more than a few stereotypes in her own right) during a career that spanned four decades. But it is this very point that has made the sisters Williams so refreshing, as the sum total of their success would not be defined by their path-making achievements as black women tennis champions. This is a generational dynamic, established nearly two decades ago when black athletes such as Michael Jordan and Ervin "Magic" Johnson, in particular, sought to brand themselves beyond the arena. The sisters Williams have refined such attempts by becoming fully engaged in their various enterprises like Aneres and Eleven, while still at their athletic peak; a critical decision given how many professional tennis players peak in their mid-twenties. Father Richard has received much of the credit (and derision) for the success of his daughters, but perhaps the desire of Venus and Serena to be more well-rounded adults represents the influence of the woman who often sits at center court with her heart torn whenever the sisters are forced to play each other. Like Tina Knowles mother of Beyonce and Solange, Oracene Williams represents the kind of force of nature that creates greater expectations for her daughters and so many of our daughters--and this is the part of the story that the Mary Carrilos and John McEnroes of the world will never get right. --Mark Anthony Neal

Black Music Month '08: Perfect Combination--The Soul Duets

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:22:45 -0500

This is the third in a series Black Music Month Playlists that will explore common themes explored in the Soul Music Tradition. *** In 1984, Stacy Lattisaw recorded "Perfect Combination" with Johnny Gill. Lattisaw was a teen sensation recordings hits like a remake of The Moments' "Love on a Two Way Street" and "Let Me Be Your Angel." Atlantic hoped to capitalize on her success in order to break a teen-aged Boston vocalist by the name of Johnny Gill. It would still be years before Gill's body would catch up to his grown man vocals and eventually an audience that appreciated his talents. But "Perfect Combination" was an earnest attempt to capture that Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell magic. When Lattisaw was on the downside of her career and Gill's star was finally on the rise (courtesy of his spin with New Edition) the two collaborated again on "Where Do We Go from Here?" The songs with Lattisaw and Gill are a reminder of other great Soul and R&B duets, like those below. "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"--Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" borders on being cliché, as it is so often referenced as the quintessential Soul duet. True there's an innocence and sexiness that's palpable in this classic pairing of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell and Motown milked it for all they could releasing three album's worth of material by the duo including classics like "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing," "You're All I Need to Get By" and "Your Precious Love", the song that Terrell was signing when she collapsed in Gaye's arms at a concert in Virginia in 1967. Ironically, Gaye and Terrell weren't even in the studio together--Gaye added his vocals long after Terrell laid down hers. Yet the energy is real and for that we can thank the writers, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who gave Marvin and Tammi songs drawn from their own romance. Terrell died tragically in 1970 of a brain tumor. "Ain't Understanding Mellow"--Jerry Butler & Brenda Lee Eager Jerry Butler had been in the music business for nearly 15 years and was on the third stage of a career that began as the lead vocalist of The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield). Butler was on the downside of the most popular point of a career that was largely resuscitated courtesy of Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble (a few years before PIR) when he teamed with Brenda Lee Eager for the ultimate breakup song "Ain't Understanding Mellow." This was serious grown folk music about a man showing appreciation for a partner, who was honest enough to admit to her love for another man. In turn she shows appreciation for him understanding her situation. This ultimately a song about a couple who were grounded in friendship, even as the romantic relationship starts to sour. And yeah, what's the deal with that title? "At the Concert"--Roberta Flack & Michael Henderson Roberta Flack recorded a series of legendary duets with the late Donny Hathaway, much if it drawn from their 1972 recording Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway which included the lovely "Where is the Love?" and the nationalist era staple "Be Real Black." Hathaway was in a deep depression when Flack again found him with 1978's "The Closer I Get to You." The two had just finished two tracks when Hathaway fell to his death in January 1979. For her part, Flack found another willing partner in Peabo Bryson with "Tonight I Celebrate" in 1983. Less known is Flack's appearance on Michael Henderson's 1977 recording Going Places. Henderson, who at one time played with Miles Davis in his fusion band, possessed a vocal quality every much the peer of fellow bassist Larry Graham and other such as James Ingram. Though he lacked the promotional push that his talents deserved, "At the Concert" is a sprawling piece of jazzy Soul that very much represents a novel collaboration on the part Henderson and Flack. "Two Hearts"--Teddy Pendergrass & Stephanie Mills Teddy Pendergrass was at the top of his game and Stephanie Mills had finally delivered on the promise of all those nights on stage performing in The Wiz. For Mills, there was no better choice than Pendergrass to help maintain some of the momentum that would bring her greater popularity in the late 1980s. Pendergrass and Mills had collaborated the year before with a version of Peabo Bryson's "Feel the Fire." "Two Hearts" had a lighter touch perfectly pitched for the stepper-set. "Happy"--Teena Marie & Rick James Everyone remembers "Fire & Desire" the Teena Marie and Rick James classic that practically defines the slow burning R&B ballad. Rick James was living off of the brilliance of 1980's Street Songs and Marie was having her break through moment with It Must Be Magic when Quiet Strom programmers picked up on "Fire and Desire." And of course when Marie finally weighs in with "love them or leave them" midway through, the song took R&B to new heights making us all forget about the significance of their interracial desire as recorded on wax. When James went back in the studio for 1982's Throwin' Down, he again collaborated with Marie on the largely forgotten "Happy", though this time, he matches Marie note for note, marking one of his singularly great performances. --Mark Anthony Neal

Black Music Month '08: The Thom Bell Sessions

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:35:07 -0500

This is the second in a series Black Music Month Playlists that will explore common themes explored in the Soul Music Tradition. *** When Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, it put again placed a focus on the legacy of "Philly" Soul. The success of Philadelphia based acts like Boyz II Men, Jill Scott, The Roots, Musiq, Eric Roberson, Jaguar Wright and Kindred the Family Soul has helped give the very idea of Philly Soul contemporary cache. But all too often memories of the classic days of Philly Soul fail to recall the impact of Philly based doo-wop acts, which featured high-pitched lead vocalist and many of the forgotten musicians and producers that gave the city its signature sound. At the height of their power, Gamble and Huff managed Philadelphia International Records (the groundbreaking black boutique label) and presided over a music publishing company known as "Mighty Three Publishing." The third member of that triad was Thom Bell, a staunchly independent, Caribbean bred musician and producer who always resisted joining into the Philly International's camp. Instead Bell chose the role of the free agent, who would have the liberty to work with artist that he wanted to work with. The product of that independence are definitive Soul recordings from The Delfonics, The Stylistics and The Spinners. Here's a playlist of some of the best of the Thom Bell Sessions: "La-La (Means I Love You)"--The Delfonics The Delfonics were the first Philly Soul group that Thom Bell had regular success with. They would never reach the supergroup status of groups like The Stylistics and The Spinners, but like their New York City based peers The Main Ingredient, they were the quintessential East-Coast Soul harmony group of the late 1960s. And "La-La (Means I Love You)" is just timeless, from the simplicity of the lyrics: "Now I don't wear a diamond ring and I don't even have song to sing, all I know is la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la...la mean, I love you" to the earnestness of lead singer William Hart's soaring falsetto. The genius of the song was not lost on a young Michael Jackson--a big fan of Hart--who recorded his own classic version of the song on the Jackson Five's ABC (1970) recording. "People Make the World Go 'Round"--The Stylistics As would be a regular occurrence with Bell, once he did all that he could with a group, he would move on to the next challenge. That next challenge was Russell Thompkins, Jr. and the Stylistics. Thompkins, who is one of the most legendary falsettos of all time, fit perfectly into Bell's Philly-Soul sensibilities. With new writing partner Linda Creed in tow, the Stylistics recorded a string of simply classic recordings including, "You Make Me Feel Brand New," "Betcha by Golly Wow" and "Break Up to Make Up". Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and Al Green, notwithstanding, Bell's work with the Stylistics in the early 1970s was the definitive Soul sound. But I always go back to that very first album, when the stakes were less, and find the brilliance of "People Make the World Go Round." Powerful and subtle social commentary (with the winds of change literally blowing in the background) with an insurgent energy that aimed to find the human connection of it all. The song was never more powerfully employed that in the opening segment of Spike Lee's 1993 period piece Crooklyn. "You Are Everything"--The Stylistics "Today I saw somebody who looked just like you/she walked like you do/I thought it was you/As she turned the corner/I called out your name, I felt so ashamed, when it wasn't you..." Damn. Thom Bell and Linda Creed wrote those lyrics only a short time after Bell mistakenly believed that he saw someone he knew in the street. And I cite these lyrics to again highlight how Bell and Creed often took simple everyday experiences and turned them into lyrics and melodies that just tugged at the heart. I mean damn, who hasn't thought they saw a long lost boyfriend and girlfriend walking across the street or on a passing subway train and then spent the next hour lamenting about what could have been? Cards on the table, I'm a romantic cat, and Ne-Yo ain't writing nothing like this. "I'll be Around"--The Spinners When signed to Motown in the late 1960s, The Spinners were little more than an afterthought. After a still youthful Stevie Wonder provided them with the gift, "It's A Shame," in 1970, the group bounced to Atlantic (sans co-lead vocalist GC Cameron) with Philippe Wynne joining Bobby Smith on lead vocals. As the story goes, Atlantic offered Thom Bell the opportunity to record any act on their roster (which at the time included Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin) and he choose The Spinners. The rest is history, as the B-side of the first Spinners/Bell single, "I'll Be Around" can still be heard on cell phone commercials 35-years after its release. Classics like "Could It be I'm Falling in Love," "Mighty Love" and everybody's favorite mama song, "Sadie" would soon follow. "Old Friend"--Phyllis Hyman Bell's writing partner Linda Creed was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1970s and as Bell began to retreat from day to day activities in the recording industry, Creed sought other writing partners, including Michael Masser, with whom she wrote "The Greatest Love of All" (initially recorded by George Benson, but a major pop hit for Whitney Houston in 1986, the same year that Creed succumbed cancer. In the backdrop of Houston's success, the late Phyllis Hyman released her career defining release Living All Alone, which included one of the last major collaborations between Creed and Bell, with "Old Friend." --Mark Anthony Neal

Black Music Month 2008: In the Midnight Hour: Soul for Lost Love and Crises of Faith

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:41:49 -0500

This is the first in a series Black Music Month 2008 Playlists that will explore common themes in the Soul Music Tradition. Classic recordings like Wilson Pickett's "In the Midnight Hour" and Ray Charles's "The Night Time is the Right Time" gave witness to the magic of the night, but the midnight hour is also a time for reflection and prayer. The following playlist examines the themes of lost love and crises of faith as they might be experienced late in the midnight hour. Bobby "Blue" Bland--"Chains of Love" Not enough people talk about Bobby "Blue" Bland these days, though his signature hiccup (if you could call it that) is one of the more classic idiosyncrasies in the history of American pop music. Give Kanye West and Shawn Carter some credit for recovering "Ain't No Love In the Heart of the City," a great Bland track no doubt, but not representative of the classic sides he laid down for Duke in the late 1950s and 1960s. Tracks like "Turn on Your Lovelight" (see the opening montage in Eve's Bayou), "That's the Way Love Is" or "Cry, Cry, Cry" are quintessential Bland. As the latter song displays, didn't nobody beg better than Bobby "Blue" Bland in his day and "Chains of Love" is classic example. In the song Bland laments the power of a love that he can't extricate himself from ("now I'm a prisoner"), as he begs for his lover to stop holding him hostage if she's not gonna love him back ("if you gonna leave me, please set me free"). But it is the last verse that gets at the sense of despair as Bland sings, "well it's 3 O' Clock in the morning, lawd and the moon is shining bright...and I was just sitting here wondering, lawd (hiccup) where can you be tonight" and you can just imagine this man sitting on his porch rocking his body back and forth recalling the classic "Trouble in Mind" ("I'm going down to the river...if the blues don't get me, I might have to rock on away from here." Mable John--"Your Good Thing is About to End" Mable John is probably best known as the sister of the late and tragically forgotten Little Willie John ("Fever"), but she was also a vocalist on the Stax label in the mid-1960s. John languished as Stax for lots of reasons, including the inability of the label to better promote the women on its label, save Carla Thomas. But John did leave some gems and "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)"--laced with those classic Stax horns--is one of those gems. "Your Good Thing" presents the woman's view on the man whose taken her for granted, but it's John's voice which just screams defiance that makes the track such a treasure. The track was brilliantly featured in the recent documentary, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story, as the soundtrack to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. The scene in the film is a reminder that this music was never just about romance and partying, but that the very sound of the music resonated in the world that black folk struggled to make for themselves. Aretha Franklin--"So Long" Aretha Franklin was on fire when Atlantic released the oddity Soul '69. Having established herself as the centerpiece of American popular music in 1967, Franklin chose to stretch out and record tracks that spoke to her comfort with the genres of Blues and Rhythm & Blues such as Percy Mayfield's "River's Invitation" and "Today I Sing the Blues" (like the sides she recorded for Columbia prior to the legendary move to Atlantic in late 1966). "So Long" was one of those tracks. Coming in at nearly 5-minutes, "So Long" is one of Franklin's singular achievements as she channels the influences of Dinah Washington, Esther Phillips, Clara Ward and so many others as well as singing to the emotional dramas of her own life (her difficult marriage with Ted White). And yet she still simply holds up the blood-stained banner for the best of Soul music. "So Long" signals the beginning of Franklin's artistic peak (not commercial), culminating with Amazing Grace (1972) and the underrated If You Don't Think (1974) The Staple Singers--"You Gonna Make Me Cry" The Staple Singers came to Stax, after the great purge of 1967--Atlantic's taking of all of Stax's masters--and were a focal point of Al Bell's attempt to rebuild the label. They were largely known as a Gospel group--but began to transition into general uplift music with classic recordings like "Respect Yourself" and "I'll Take You There." Of course you can't talk about the Staples without chatting up sister Mavis (Dylan's secret boo) whose voice maps a range of pains, pleasures and desires that we've never had language to describe (though Daphne Brooks will one day). And that's why the not-often remembered "You Gonna Make Me Cry" deserves attention as one of the group's most important performances. This is a song about despair, but not simply that "you don't really love me no more " despair but that "the kids need knew shoes and what we gonna eat for dinner?" level of despair. This is a song of betrayal--as much about the betrayal of some man, as it is the betrayal of the State. Another quick reminder that the personal is the political. Dorothy Moore--"Misty Blue" A few years ago, Mary J. Blige gave "Misty Blue" a spin on her live recording and it seemed apropos for her to give some tribute to a performer who is remembered, at best, as a one-hit wonder--if she is remembered at all. For a few years though in the 1970s, while so many had become addicted to the rhythms of Disco, Al Green was in the midst of spiritual crisis and Soul music had generally lost it geographic bearings, Dorothy Moore held down Southern Soul. Tracks like "I Believe You" and her take on Willie Nelson's "Funny (How Time Slips Away)" never became national hits, but were emblematic of an artist that took the tradition seriously. "Misty Blue" (1976) was a major hit and achieves its success in its simplicity--Soul music with a country twang. It was the last commercial gasps for a generation of artists like Moore and Joe Simon, though many would remake themselves in the world of Gospel music. --Mark Anthony Neal

Vet Obama? How About (White) America Vet Itself

Fri, 30 May 2008 11:47:22 -0500

So once again technology and the mainstream media have conspired to manufacture a political firestorm regarding another preacher, another sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ and another repudiation from Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Father Michael Pfleger's humorous (damn funny, actually) and sexist mocking of New York Senator Hillary Clinton obviously deserves comment, but the idea that such a story deserved to be the lead-in on morning news programs is absurd. When NBC's Today Show chooses to use the Pfleger YouTube video as its lead in, it's as if the show's editorial leadership is lazily using the Clinton campaign's talking points for the day. One of Senator Clinton's major points throughout the campaign and one of the points she continues to berate uncommitted super-delegates with, is that Senator Obama is really an unknown entity that has not been properly vetted. As a Washington political insider for nearly 20-years, Senator Clinton argues that she--like presumptive Republican nominee Arizona Senator John McCain--has been properly vetted and thus would offer no surprises for the Republican Party to exploit in the general election. Fair enough. Electoral politics is largely a game of control--limiting the size of the electorate, gerrymandering congressional districts, relying on polling data as a means to discourage voters, and choosing national candidates who are well-known entities are all elements of controlling electoral outcomes and both national parties are complicit in these efforts. And indeed the questions about unknowns in Senator Obama's past and present raises questions among Democratic party traditionalists--even in comparison to Civil Rights standard bearers like Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson--as Obama's identity, his Electoral College strategy, and his compelling alliance of Black Americans, back-packer generation Whites and educated elites gives pause to party regulars who would rather exploit the usual fissures (i.e. whose speaking for poor and working class white folk, as if that hasn't been the same question the party has asked since the New Deal era?). Had Father Pfleger been Tim Wise or Howard Zinn or Zillah Eisenstein (or any number of White scholars and activists who critique the phenomenon of White Privilege ) sitting on The Charlie Rose show, nary an eyebrow would have been raised. In part, because the core of Father Pfleger's critique--the notion that the Clinton family had long felt a sense of entitlement with regards to this nomination--is a well circulated concept. Father Pfleger simply made plain the way that political privilege (which the Clintons or Bushes or even Kennedys can't deny) and quite specifically white privilege--that sense of entitlement that few White Americans are ever asked to interrogate--may have impacted how Senator Clinton has chosen to run her campaign. And yeah I'm not denying that Pfleger's feigned crying bit was over the top and sexist at that. Still, what is ultimately disturbing about this whole ordeal is that Father Pfleger's decidedly ghetto drag-queen style of performance, only resonates in the mainstream media because it reads as a curious oddity that can exploited as a spectacle(a white guy, acting black, critiquing white privilege, in a "suspect" black church) . Increasingly the mainstream media (Keith Olbermann, notwithstanding) has chosen to portray Senator Obama as if he too is part spectacle and oddity, that they are eagerly awaiting to vet in the name of ratings. Instead of vetting Senator Obama, mainstream media and (White) America more broadly would do better to vet itself to find the America that we have for so long chosen to ignore, mock and disparage. --Mark Anthony Neal

"Premature Autopsies" for the Unrepentant Race Man (ver. 1.0)

Mon, 19 May 2008 09:43:58 -0500

"If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy"--from "Premature Autopsies" (written by Stanley Crouch; Recitation by the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.) On his 1989 recording, Majesty of the Blues, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis paid tribute to the legacy of New Orleans Jazz. The centerpiece of the recording was a three-part suite called "The New Orleans Function." Arranged as a traditional New Orleans funeral on the occasion of "The Death of Jazz," the suite features a 16-minute sermon aptly titled "Premature Autopsies." Though "Premature Autopsies" was written by noted Jazz critic and curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, it is none other than the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who delivers the sermon on the recording. While Reverend Wright was largely unknown to most in America only two months ago, at the time he recorded "Premature Autopsies" he was already regarded among the black cultural vanguard as one of Black America's--if not America's--greatest preachers. Like the music that Marsalis "recreated" for Majesty of the Blues, Reverend Wright's preaching was the embodiment of what some might call "classical" Black American Culture--easily recalling examples like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Louis Armstrong, Mahailia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, the latter whom serves as the primary referent throughout "Premature Autopsies." Crouch composed "Premature Autopsies," in response the sense that classical Black American Culture was under assault in the marketplace and by a dismissive generation of young Americans. The sermon gives the strongest inkling to what drives Crouch's very public criticisms of rap music and hip-hop culture. But I also submit that the passion with which Reverend Wright delivers the sermon also explains the sense of indignity that was on display during the Q&A portion of Wright's recent talk at the National Press Club. As Crouch wrote prophetically 20 years ago, "we must understand that the money lenders of the market place have never ever known the difference between an office and an auction... they'll tell you that everything is always up for sale. They recognize no difference or distance between the sacred and the profane. For them everything is fair game to be used in their game." While there were clearly forces that designed to have the legacy and rhetoric of Reverend Wright undermine the legitimacy of Senator Barack Obama's campaign, what perhaps offended Wright and others, was the mainstream press's unwillingness to treat black theological beliefs--and I'm not saying all black theological beliefs--with the respect that sacred beliefs deserve. What seems to have offended Wright--and rightfully so--is the legions of mainstream commentators and casual observers that feel compelled to comment and judge Wright (I'm talking to you Dr. Phil) and his theological foundations without even a fleeting understanding of or interest in the tradition of Black Liberation Theology that he espouses. It is the role of white privilege in mainstream media that presumes that that which they don't know is illegitimate, as was the point of Reverend Wright's thesis of "different, but not deficient" at the Detroit NAACP gathering. Like Crouch, who traces the "majesty of the blues" and the "noble sound' of jazz to an "artistic language that uttered its first words way back on that first day that a slave sang a new song in this new and strange land," Wright views the religious beliefs he espouses as a "faith tradition" that has its roots "past Jim Cone, past the sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the transatlantic slave trade." The name Jim Cone is in reference the groundbreaking scholarly work of Dr. James Cone, who Wright has regularly cited in recent weeks. Cone's legacy begins with the publication of his 1969 text, Black Theology and Black Power. Cone explained to journalist Kelefa Sennah in last month's New Yorker that he was motivated by the violence that erupted in Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967 to create a theological framework that "speaks to the hurt in my community. I want a theology that would empower people to be more creative." Cone also understood, as Sennah further describes, that the "Black Christian Church" (broadly defined here) had public relations problem with regard to attracting young converts who were being drawn to Islam, Marxism and various incarnations of Black Nationalism. According to Sennah, the "urgency of [Cone's] prose reflected his anger but also his fear that the black Church was becoming obsolete." It was this tradition that Reverend Wright embraced when he ascended to the leadership of Trinity in 1972, trying to create a place and space of worship where the black church's role was as much about sacred concerns as it was secular ones--a church as committed to saving Souls as it was advocating for the political and social well-being of those Souls. If one were to have found a VHS of one of Reverend's Wright's speeches in March of 1984, perhaps it wouldn't have raised an eyebrow, particularly in contrast to the rhetoric emanating from Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan at the time (and what if YouTube existed then?), who was deemed to have damned any legitimacy to the Reverend Jesse Jackson's largely symbolic 1984 presidential campaign (though it bought a host of new voters to the polls, impacting other national, state and local elections). Reverend Wright's rhetoric then, as now, would have been perfectly in sync with the theological "race man' that has always been as the center of African-American and Black politics. Wright only reads as out-of-touch with mainstream Black Christianity in the context of a "Black" Church that in the last decade is seen as being largely devoid of any real political engagement. In the era of Black Televangelists like Bishop T.D. Jakes, Bishop Eddie Long and Minister Creflow Dollar who espouse a "gospel of prosperity" (hence Marc Lamont Hill's brilliant turn a of a phrase: "I Bling Because I'm Happy"), real political engagement takes a backseat to wealth accumulation and at times crass materialism. This is not to negate the importance of building wealth in Black America--and the "rappers" understand this as well as anybody in the pulpit--but it helps explain why Jeremiah Wright might seem odd or even anachronistic during this election cycle. For his part Wright remains the unrepentant Race Man, even as his 15-minutes disappears into YouTube's archives. --Mark Anthony Neal

Bigger Than One: Some Reflections on "The Franchise"

Wed, 07 May 2008 14:06:02 -0500

Yesterday was the Democratic Primary for President in North Carolina; It was also the 73rd anniversary of my father's birth. The alignment of the two events seemed logical to me as it was my remembrance of the first time that my father voted--for fellow Georgia native Jimmy Carter in 1976--that forced me off the political fence. As a young boy growing up in the Jim Crow south, my father had little expectation that he would ever be able to vote, let alone vote for someone who looked vaguely like him. I can remember the look of pride on his face when he cast his first ballot and it was that look that I specifically recalled when I decided to support Obama back in January. And it wasn't so much about Obama--there wasn't anything inherently progressive about his politics--but that his candidacy inspired a level of investment in the political process--or "the franchise" as the old-timers liked to call it, hence the term disenfranchisement--that I had not witnessed in my life. I celebrated the anniversary my father's birth by walking into my local polling spot, holding the hands of my two daughters, so that they could get a first hand view of participating in "the franchise". Indeed I was a little older than my 9-year-old is now when I was introduced to the political process working phone banks in the Bronx for Jimmy Carter's campaign. It was something that my 5-year-old said to me a few days ago though, that really forced me to think about what participating in the process really meant. Watching yet another round of political ads on TV, my youngest daughter asked "daddy, are we voting for [Ba]Rock Obama?" and I immediately recalled historian Elsa Barkley Brown's classic essay "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom." In the essay, Barkley Brown examines the voting practices of black communities in Richmond, VA after the Civil War. Though only black men had the legal right to vote at the time, Barkley Brown explains that the black community viewed "the vote as a collective, not an individual possession; and furthermore , that African American women, unable to cast a separate vote, viewed African-American men's vote as equally theirs. They believed that [the] franchise should be cast in the best interests of both." What Barkley Brown identifies is one of the most progressive concepts of democracy. As I walked into the voting booth on Tuesday, I was clear that I was not simply voting for myself, but voting for my father--who passed two weeks after the February 5th round of primaries--and my two daughters, who both anxiously await their opportunities to fully participate in the franchise. And it is this sense of community and investment in something bigger than ourselves that marks so much of the energy around Obama's candidacy as reflected in the recent DipDive production "We Are the One". Like its predecessor "Yes, We Can" this new Will.I.Am production speaks to a generational vision of "freedom" and citizenship--a vision that my two daughters already have a down-payment on. Mark Anthony Neal

And the Winner Is...Donny Hathaway, Mr. Soul

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:54:09 -0500

I've spent better part of that last 20-years--what seems like a lifetime--trying to write about Donny Hathaway. It's not as though I haven't written about Hathaway, but Hathaway's music, his Soul really, demands a level of emotional commitment that, frankly, overwhelms the logic of my vocations as writer and critic. I mean, after listening to Donny Hathaway sing and moan and hum and caress that piano/Fender Rhodes, what the hell else is there to write about?

Take for instance Hathaway's "Giving Up"--a song written by the late great arranger Van McCoy (he of "The Hustle"). Beginning, something like a dirge--and with Hathaway that always seemed his way, the pace and timing of his ballads akin to some centuries old funeral hymn--the song's second verse takes on a second musical life (or is it that a second sight) as Hathaway and his rhythm section, in seeming double-time, against the real-time of Hathaway's voice, narrate the heart palpitations of a man on the brink of losing his mind. And you know he's on the brink when he admits in the third verse, "whether she knows or not, she really needs me too," only to bellow a sinister laugh in admission that he's on the other side of his sanity. And then the song literally collapses into the familiarity of a fully-blown Blues groove.

"Giving Up" is a signature example Of Hathaway's ability to summon the well-spring of black musical idioms and bring them in conversation with emotional darkness of his Soul. And it is perhaps that darkness that has led so many writers to take their own (critical) lives, in an attempt to capture the emotional depth of Hathaway's art. This is what, in part, Ed Pavlic suggests in his brilliant and moving prose poem, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (University of Georgia Press).

Lacking the kind of archival material (beyond the music, of course) that has helped many a critic to bring Soul Men past alive on the pages of books and magazines, Pavlic, an award winning poet and scholar, was forced to use traces of Hathaway's emotional DNA (provided by the music, of course). As Pavlic writes in the acknowledgments, "Much of this book is a kind of dance between what I needed to know and not know about Donny Hathaway in order to find out what I had to say...the basic truth of the book is what I've made from the sound of Hathaway's voice, the rhythm of his work."

According to Pavlic, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced started as an attempt to write a biography about Hathaway, but as Hathaway's spirit seemed to stonewall attempts to get the story right/write, he gave in to the calling of the music. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced traffics in all of the rumor and innuendo surrounding Hathaway's life and tragic death (including his bouts with mental illness), but rather than read like a speculative fiction about the man, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced instead animates the traces of truth that Hathaway's music revels in.

In one particularly compelling section called "Interview: Graveyard Shift: Carr Square Projects: July 20, 1980: St. Louis, MO," Pavlic imagines a reporter traveling to the place where Hathaway grew up, querying residents about Hathaway's legacy the year after his death. One resident recalls seeing Hathaway in concert:

Women in the audience would call out to him when he'd pause/Other Women would answer them/Men didn't say a word/I know I didn't/The women'd have themselves a ball, a party, almost like they're watching themselves on stage/Not the men/He'd take your life like you knew he took his own life/He'd wrap it around his fist and lay it up side your head

Here Pavlic recalls those fabulous live recordings of Hathaway, in which the voices of the women in the crowd were always so audible--continuous "call and response" moments--and yet rarely do we hear the voices of the men. It is this attention to seemingly matter-less detail--what were these men thinking about, as Hathaway probed the very essence of their existence?--that provides Winners Have Yet to Be Announced so much of its--and I hate to use this word--authenticity or rather sincerity to borrow a thought from John L. Jackson, Jr.

Donny Hathaway remains an enigma among popular music audiences as his most well known songs, "Where is the Love?" and "The Closer I Get to You" are award-winning duets recorded with Roberta Flack. While those songs are brilliant in their own right, they capture little of the emotional and spiritual depth of Hathaway's own recordings. Hathaway's full length recordings like Everything is Everything (1969), Extensions of a Man (1972), and in particular Donny Hathaway (1970) demand a level of musical commitment, that there was little chance that he was going to earn a popular following, even as giants such as Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Jerry Butler sang his praises.

Ed Pavlic's Winners Have Yet to Be Announced shines a bright light on the legacy of a man, whose music has unfortunately been long removed to darkened corners of Soul's yesteryear. The book's title is taken from an obituary for Hathaway that appeared in the Washington Post: "the door to the room was locked and there was no evidence of foul play...He was nominated for a second Grammy in 1978. Winners have yet to be announced."

Obama Elitist? I'm Hearing Something Else

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:51:03 -0500

So in a recent conversation, Barack Obama tried a little too hard to make that connection between the disaffection of the white working class and the white poor, and their proclivity to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" as a way to make meaning of the diminishing returns of their lives. Guns and religion and "the other," the Senator from Illinois argued were the comfort foods of choice for many. The fact that Obama suggested that some folk in these communities might be tad bitter, should not in and of itself raise any eyebrows, but the speed and derision that the presumptive (I'm sick of this word) Republican nominee John McCain and New York Senator Hillary Clinton asserted that Obama's comments were "demeaning" and Obama, himself, out of touch, suggests that there is something else at play. There's no small irony that two of the wealthiest members of the Senate would describe a former community organizer as out of touch. But McCain and Clinton's responses have nothing to do with the black and brown urban poor that Obama broke bread with in Illinois, but rather the white working poor and working class in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where high-wage jobs are scarce and hope, increasingly even scarcer. I would argue that none of the candidates, including Senator Obama, are really in touch with what's happening in small town America. For instance, look how middle-class Philadelphia suburbanites have suddenly become the charmed constituency in the forthcoming Pennsylvania primary. Indeed Senator McCain as recently as at three weeks ago argued vehemently that the Federal Government should not alleviate the financial woes of those in the very communities that Obama talked about, who are losing their homes in record numbers. Bitter? I bet more than few in those communities are bitter in response to the Federal Government's essential bailout of Bear Sterns. In a country where God and the flag are held in the highest esteem and any bitterness expressed toward the government--particularly in the post 9/11 era--is viewed with suspicion by some, if not an outright act of treason (think about reaction to Michelle Obama's comments earlier this year.), it has often been easy for marginalized communities of all backgrounds, to identify scapegoats, be it in the form of racial conspiracy theories, anti-Black racism and the kind of xenophobia expressed in response to illegal, and likely legal immigration. In any other Presidential campaign and in any other historical moment, the depiction of an opposition candidate as "elitist" and "out of touch" is slick and potentially effective politicking; it's the reason why Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, dumbed-himself-down in 1992. But the assertion that Barack Obama--an highly educated, upper-middle-class and articulate black man--is an "elitist," is really code for "uppity nigger." In terms of instigating anti-Black racism and violence in this country, few things were more potent than the perception that black people, and black men in particular, did not know their place--whether it be an act of "reckless eyeballing" or too prideful of a demeanor. What McCain and Clinton are essentially signaling to the white underclass and working poor is that "this nigger thinks he's better than you." But these attempts are part of a dated racial politics that is increasingly giving way to what Ellen McGirt of Fast Company Magazine calls a "postboomer society" where Obama is reflective of an attempt to move "beyond traditional identity politics." Still, it's hard to imagine that there won't be a symbolic "lynching" in Senator Obama's future.

Hearing (Thinking) Black Death

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:06:28 -0500

The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson's new book April 4, 1968 reads: "You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death," to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There's a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death. Perhaps more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death--the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments--all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it's been in the province of black creative expression--Black Genius more broadly--that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea death, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right. When the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 "Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?" it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle. "Were You There?" was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang its words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible. "Were You There?" was featured on a brilliant recording by the late Max Roach called Lift Every Voice and Sing, which paired the legendary drummer's regular jazz band with the JC White Singers. "Were You There?" begins as a dirge--a literal death march--musically transporting listeners to the horse-driven carriage that so many boldly walked behind on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in April of 1968. But just as you could imagine the collective black body politic kneeling at yet another grave, for yet another murdered soul and succumbing to an unfathomable despair, the song's tone changes. Like the phoenix, the collective black body politic musically rises and when the JC White Singers ask the subsequent question, "Were You There, When They Rode away the Storm?" the place and space of death--the physical and psychic--had been transformed into something like a freedom--a freedom not explicitly in the traditional sense of the world, but something more philosophical as simply represented in a phrase like "I'm--We're still here." Roach's Lift Every Voice and Sing was among the many recordings released in the aftermath of King's murder. Nina Simone's "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)" is perhaps the most popular and one that was written explicitly with King's murder as inspiration. In the middle of Simone's live 12-minute version of the song, she directly addresses the crowd, recalling the then recent deaths of John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, and Otis Redding. Simone then asks aloud, "Do you realize how many we have lost?"--reinforcing the idea that at the time of King's murder, Black Death was literally in the air. The power of these songs--cultivated in the darkest and most dire moments of black life in the Americas--is that they are so easily recalled at moments of great distress. These songs were not simply emotional responses to loss, but really an important intellectual response--the way that Blackness thinks death.

Nothing But a Man: Remembering Ivan Dixon

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:44:25 -0500

It would be easy to think of Ivan Dixon, who died recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, as just another brilliant black actor or actress who never received the recognition that they deserved. Indeed if you placed Dixon's career alongside those such as Rosalind Cash, Roscoe Lee Brown, Gloria Foster and Calvin Lockhart, you'd have just an inkling of a level of genius that was tragically underutilized and overlooked. But Dixon, distinguished himself even among those stellar talents, by playing critical roles--as an actor and director--in two films that will forever serve as the most evocative examples of black masculinity and black radicalism in mainstream American cinema. For many, Ivan Dixon was simply the black guy on the 1960's sitcom Hogan Heroes. Set in a Nazi POW camp, the show poked fun at the very idea of Nazi imperialism at a historical moment, the 1960s, when the United States was the most resonant example of such imperialism. A critique of America's own imperialistic desire, was the not-so-deep meaning beyond the clowning of Colonel Klink--the hapless face of Hitler's ambition. Dixon's Sgt. James Kinchloe, though, offered the only so-called "black" perspective on Nazi imperialism that could be easily accessed in mainstream American culture in the 1960s. It's not like Band of Brothers gave any inkling of what the brothers were doing in Europe during World War II. For better or worse, Dixon's Kinchloe also presented one of the first African-American television characters who was defined by a more global perspective, an aspect of his career that frames his early success as the Nigerian exchange student Joseph Asagai in the original stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun. Dixon's most stirring role though, would be much closer to home, geographically and politically. Nothing But a Man (1964) directed by then 35-year-old German-born director Michael Roemer, depicts the life of Duff Anderson (portrayed by Dixon), a wandering day laborer, seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood in the poverty stricken American south. Dixon's wife in the film was portrayed by the legendary jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln. Critic John Nickel suggests that Roemer's film anticipated the infamous Moynihan Report on the black family, which argues that black families needed to embrace mainstream patriarchy in order be fully integrated into American society. In essence, future US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that black communities were hamstrung by the overarching influence of black women. Nothing But a Man's power come from also locating the impact of joblessness on the lives of black men (Roemer used NAACP field workers to help do research for the film), who felt as though they couldn't be men in their own households, if they weren't the primary financial providers in those households. Dixon brought a depth of humanity to this situation, particularly as he seeks out his own absentee father. Though Nothing But a Man lacks much of the nuance that three decades of black feminist scholarship has brought to bear on the dynamics of black gender relationships, the film remains a visual testament to the struggles of black men in the south, just as the Black Power Movement was about to erupt. The Black Power Movement is full blown, by the time Ivan Dixon made the move to work behind the camera instead of in front of it. Though Dixon had begun to direct television episodes, including The Bill Cosby Show (1970), his first job directing a full-length feature was the little regarded blaxploitation flick Trouble Man (1972), which starred Robert Hooks and featured a now-timeless soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. For his next film, Dixon partnered with novelist Sam Greenlee for a cinematic version of Greenlee's novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, which told the fictional tale of the first black FBI agent. In the film, the mild-mannered college-educated Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook), spends five years working at the FBI, essentially making photocopies. When he decides the leave after five years, he uses the expertise he learned in the FBI to equip black and Latino street gangs with the tools to mount insurrections in American cities. Freeman's mild-mannered radicalism is likely--along with Huey Newton--an inspiration behind Aaron McGruder's "Huey Freeman." The Spook Who Sat by the Door opened in 1973 and was gone from theaters within a week--the film's distributors United Artists perhaps a little too concerned about Spook's incendiary message. On the occasion of the DVD release of the film in 2003, Dixon, who also produced the film (raising nearly all of its $1million budget from black investors) told The Crisis that he was blacklisted for about a year after the film's release--he would later direct several episodes of The Waltons, which in 1974 was akin to Obama winning the Iowa caucus. But he added that the film, "expressed everything that I felt about race." According to Tim Reid, who with his partner Daphne Maxwell Reid procured the DVD rights to Spook, "we felt this movie was ahead of its time and deserved a wider audience. Even now, it stands out from the crowd in Black cinema." Though far too many people will only remember Ivan Dixon for his role on Hogan's Heroes, Nothing But a Man and The Spook Who Sat by the Door will remain as testaments to Dixon's critical role in two of the signature moments in African-American cinema.

of (Black) Men and Song (ver. 1.0)

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:07:59 -0500

Listening to Andy Bey is like dreaming about what you've never been. And perhaps this is what fueled Bey in the first place--the opportunity to imagine in sound, in phrase, and in melody a world yet to be inhabited by those singers male and black. It is all too easy to suggest that a vocalist like Bey might have been listening to Bobby Blue Bland, Solomon Burke or even Ira Tucker--as they all were--but there's something about Bey's delivery that suggest something more original and dare I say substantive--at least on the level of style. Bey is one of a kind--something you could only conjure in a dream, really. *** I often think about this notion of originality. A colleague of mine, an art historian of some stature, has suggested that no artist is influenced (inspired maybe?), but it's all about an active appropriation of something else(s) in route to something of their own. Ok, so Sinatra had Billie Holiday in his head and Marvin Gaye had Sinatra in his ("...in the wee small hours of the morning...) and Ronald Isley and Bobby Womack--peers and contemporaries of Sam Cooke--no doubt recalibrated because of Cooke (like Ms. Dinah did for Aretha and Nancy Wilson), though Cooke himself found the road to Damascus (that Norman is a funny Mfer) trying to sound like R. H. Harris. And nobody would say that any of these folk weren't American originals, so that's not my point. But sometimes there is simply little that can qualify or quantify talents that just seem to drop from space. Either these singular forces change the whole endeavor--like James "on the 1" or Ms. Billie's subdued, though still sublime field moans--or they go unrecognized simply because there's little logic behind their very presence. And indeed there are any number of women folk who I'm thinking of here--Linda Jones, Betty Davis, and Bettye LaVette to name a few, but I'm also thinking about men folk like Donald Smith (brother of Lonnie Liston), Terry Callier, Jon Lucien, (even) Will Downing and of course Bey, who are almost always an afterthought when we talk about the those singers male and black, who have been charged with moving mountains and parting seas with just the turning of phrase (call it black music's Moses complex). *** I dream men like Dwight Trible--these singers black, these singers men--even as they tug at those baritone and tenor strings that so embody the very idea of some pristine, immaculate dark masculinity. Their willingness to explore the full range of their expressiveness--emotiveness gone awry--simply undermines the comfort that the deepness of their voices presupposes. And it's not like this is a new phenomenon--figures like Jimmy Scott, Ronnie Dyson, Eddie Kendricks, and Rahsaan Patterson are standard bearers of sort for this thing, but because they live(d) in a register up-above, it has always been easy to dismiss their presence--and their art--as being less than something fully masculine (as if there was such a thing). And this is where men like Trible and Jose James (like Bey and Johnny Hartman) who force us to re-imagine our investments in masculinities that don't bend and don't break.. Dwight Trible--who can make you cry--has filled a void left by the great Leon Thomas (the only vocalist other than the late Phyllis Hyman to successfully match wits with saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders). A mainstay of the Build An Ark (let it rain, let rain) collective and Trible even has a foot in the hip-hop world via his work with The Life Force Trio (something like Archie Shepp unleashed on a Primo soundscape). But to understand Trible is to acknowledge those he's...ahem...appropriated. When asked about his "influences" Trible responds "Do you know Linda Jones?... She opened up the spirit and let it all out, you know I mean, Oh God she was something special and if you listen to a record by her, you'll probably hear her influences on me in there." And of course the notion that Trible was "influenced" by Jones, belies the fact that Linda Jones is one of those obscure geniuses that one would have to actively seek out; Linda Jones doesn't just fall out of the sky into your lap. The Living Water, Trible's grand opus (to date), is at once a tribute to the giants whose wells he replenishes from--Coltrane, Malcolm, Wayne Shorter, Abbey Lincoln, Freddie Hubbard, and the aforementioned Andy Bey--but also a measure of an art that literally flows, taking with it elements of all it comes in contact with. As such it's difficult to listen to Trible's breathtaking reimagining of Bey's "Celestial Blues" and not feel as though the full weight of this culture and this music ("this" as a signifier of "that" which we still struggle to adequately qualify and quantify as the force of blackness--a black hole if you will, which gives life and light) is coming through in every phrase and every note. And yet, this gets us back to this notion of originality--and thinking that perhaps artistic originality is ultimately about the willingness of an artist to speak back to that which she so thoroughly takes from.

(Covering) Strange

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:35:13 -0500

Location, location, location, as in when Fred Moten theorizes about the tropes and aesthetics of escape and fugitivity that power certain black expressive cultures, it is always almost understood this also about a devotion or incarceration (take your pick) to place. Simply put, there's nothing never to escape to or escape from if without this fidelity to someplace, somewhere. So when Stuart Gorrell got to thinking about "Georgia on My Mind" it was the sister of Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote the music) and we'll accept that the feminine can be a metaphor for place, but when Ray Charles sings "Georgia on My Mind" it can never be nothing but place. Lizz Wright's most recent recordings, Dreams Wide Awake and The Orchard, evoke the beauty of the pastoral south, which for African-Americans of southern heritage, animates the irony of loving (even aesthetically) the very Southern plantations that were the literal sites of our brutality; so desired because of that very beauty (amidst the betrayal) and the capacity of these places to generate a generational wealth that we hungered for. It's no surprise that many of the institutions in Black America have appropriated some aspects of the political economy of the plantation--including aesthetically--in order function as legible subjects in an American contexts. I can't help thinking about what's on Lizz Wright's mind. In publicity photos, Wright often possesses a sly look of bemusement, like someone whose very being is linked to a fated incarceration to the images that propel her into a relative celebrity among jazz contemporary aficionados. Wright's smile--something like an offhanded joke played out only in her mind or an all too secret shiver in her coital region--is less about the boredom of doing yet another photo-shoot where Verve can exploit her own pastoral beauty (in direct opposition in the girlish android-noids found in contemporary R&B), but an artful act that itself represents an engagement (not a masking) of the full weight of having to be in this place. To think this "Strange" place, to turn a phrase on Wright's cover of Patsy Cline's country classic, or to consider Chocolate Genius's invocation to chase said Strangeness (duly amen-ed by Wright), is to engage in an almost remembered mythology about how race and music are supposed to be imagined. And even as we hear the strains of Craig Street, with ample assistance from Toshi Reagon, order the very logic of The Orchard, it resists being an event; instead drawing from the everyday strangeness of the those who have struggled to make sense of our devotion to that which we should (and do) ostensibly hate. I mean, imagine Lizz Wright walking into a country bar in Macon in 1962 singing somebody's Patsy Cline. And yet, how many black folk might have shed a tear when Cline's voice was silenced, as they might have shed a tear for Hank Williams, Sr. a few years before? As such Wright's choice of covers--easily the strongest performances on The Orchard--give pause; demons (Ike Turner) and royalty (Sweet Honey in the Rock) and curiosities (Cline and Led Zeppelin) among them--the cynic in me wants to think that Wright (or likely her record company)was picking covers like one might pick peaches from an orchard in the month of June, but yet the execution of these covers suggest much more. Lizz Wright is not Norah Jones. Wright's performance of the Ike & Tina Turner's "I Idolize You" is rife with all of the dramatic irony that was wholly missing in Tina Turner and Beyonce's recent Grammy performance of "Proud Mary"; Ms. Turner and Ms. Knowles index the considerable distances between the worlds that they and Ms. Wright inhabit, where Ms. Wright finds a freedom--laying in the [strangeness]--to critique, speak back to, argue with, and even embrace the music that was produced in collaboration with one of the most volatile and violent relationships that pop music has ever known. With our second sight firmly recalled, "I Idolize You" gives more inkling to the unhealthy obsession that Ike Turner had for the woman who served as his idol, his inspiration, and his meal ticket. Wright's version, which forces us to taste everyone of those lyrics, manages to find something there needing our care, asking us to consider how Ike Turner might have been betrayed by that place and the people trying to make sense of the absurdity of that place. Got forward a few years and listen to how Ms. Turner screams "Nutbush." And if you've ever heard Robert Plant scream, it is perhaps apropos to ask what terror(s) he gives voice to. Plant's plaintive vocals on the original version "Thank You" sanction an emotiveness--and we can write Jeff Buckley into this also--that spoke to the boundary collapsing--politically, socially, aesthetically--of the late 1960s; boundary collapsing that was immediately policed (in some spheres they called it busing). We should read Wright's cover in that same light--of course a young black woman from rural Georgia should feel compelled to cover Led Zeppelin. Ask any black kid, who was bussed to a largely white school district (and this is my man Jon Caramanica's argument, by the way), and damned if they weren't fully present in that experience, if they tell you that they were never forced to listen to Led Zeppelin or some other version of Jesus Rock ("yes, I've seen the great guitar god!"). Perhaps ask Bettye LaVette what it means to speak back to that, though the same kids who claim to love Janis Joplin, ain't never heard of Bettye LaVette and that's the very reason why Lizz Wright has every right to sing Led Zeppelin or anybody else she so pleases to cover.