Perfect vibrato. (Deceivingly) effortless diaphragmic support. Excellent way of “crowding” the cadences with “just enough” sonic information before landing coyly in the next structural part of the song. Widest of ranges: hardly ever “bailed out” by flipping into falsetto. Used the falsetto flip as a subtle garnish. Impeccable intonation (builds “trust” in a listener). Grew more melismatic as time progressed–never overdid this, though–mostly clever twists at the ends of phrases or tossed in between plainly rendered melodic statements that allowed us to sing along at full voice, by ourselves, in the car. Through musical economy and powerful execution could shape the emotional contour of a song whether in long concert-versions or on a 4:00 minute record. A come hither/don’t come another step closer or I’ll call my cousin camera presence. She and “the voice” seemed like two separate entities: she performed it; allowed us to witness it, she obviously enjoyed it herself. But in the end it just couldn’t keep up.
Now that Dirk and the Boys from Texas have secured their franchise’s first championship last night, it might
Pacer and Pistons Duke It Out
be fun to go back to the vault and think about a classic moment in which the NBA and music history intersected provocatively.
Before game three of the 2005 NBA Finals, Stevie Wonder christened the televised festivities with a soulful rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Performed on his harmonica and accompanied by a string quartet, the spectacle was masterful. It worked on a number of levels, in how it deconstructed this classic song, reconstructed our views about contemporary music in American culture, and instructed about the impact of the notion “musical genius” within such.
As many have observed before me, the modern day NBA has promoted an image strongly indebted to hip-hop musical and visual culture. At all points on the globe, from New York to Milan and beyond, one can witness this arranged marriage on graffiti-sprawled walls, in record bins, on billboards and sportscasts. Along with
B-Ball, B-Boys, and Bling-Bling
this, the orchestrated and heavily marketed bad boy images of players such as Allen Iverson, Ron Artest, and Latrell Sprewell had become, at that time, staples of the NBA’s public corporate face—anti-heroes in the unfolding narrative dramas of a sports season.
Things were going well and business entirely usual until during a fall 2004 Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons match, an on-court physical altercation turned very ugly and spilled into the crowd. Following the melee, fines were levied and stiff suspensions meted out. The media saturated quickly with heated discussions about the intersection of race, sports, inflated ticket prices, humongous salaries, and the new entitled “super-fan,” whose electronic credit card transactions empowered them to hurl soda and loud obscenities.
Complicating matters, a few months earlier pop diva Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” revealed more than part of her anatomy. The internationally broadcast halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl caused a global crisis and a scandal of huge proportions (fear of a black tatah, no?). Debates about race, gender, sports, and pop culture swirled in all media outlets. Even the United States Congress weighed in with expected hypercritical political hype, mounting expensive hearings on the media and obscenity at the height of the Iraq war. (It’s funny to think about this last point what with all of the stories that have surfaced since about liaisons in airport bathrooms, twitter accounts gone wild, “side pieces” in Argentina, baby mama drama on the campaign trail, and the latest, Weiner-gate). More fines, damaged record sales, apologies and promises to do better followed.
Oops! Timberlake Loses Focus
How did the NBA and NFL clean up their respective acts? They did so with musical genius. Super Bowl 2005 featured Paul McCartney, a middle aged, foreign born, and thoroughly American icon. Middle America found solace in the capable arms and performance rhetoric of one of pop culture’s most adorned musicians. Somewhat past his prime in the mass mediated spotlight, McCartney’s performance was viewed as classic, non-offensive, and to some, a relieving alternative to contemporary pop music choices. An award-winning singer/songwriter, his performance was probably conceived to distance the NFL’s image from the “vulgarities” of present day pop, most obviously
British and All American
articulated in somestrains of corporate endorsed rap and rock music. Interestingly, what was once viewed as threatening national sensibilities of taste and decorum during the early 1960s would some decades later be chosen as a safe, traditional alternative to illicit language labels, waning moral codes, and faulty stitching in stage costumes.
Indeed, the McCartney example is instructive. The Beatles, a blues-influenced, working class rock quartet from a gritty British town launched McCartney’s fame within a larger cultural movement that was initially received in the United States as threatening the white middle-class status quo. Yet the Beatle’s music is now celebrated as fine works of art, attracting continued journalistic and scholarly reflection—and, thankfully now available on iTunes). Thus, the NFL chose a “universal,” “timeless,” and ironically, a very constructed sense of male musical genius to save the day and our all-American Sunday afternoon football.
Wonder’s performance did similar cultural work for the NBA’s public image. The shrill timbre and virtuoso runs, riffs, and glides of a typical Wonder harmonica performance is, indeed, a wonder. It is as immediately recognized as any musical voice of the twenty-first century some forty or more years after he burst on the scene as a child prodigy. Wonder seems to push the instrument beyond its expressive limits, compressing years of blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, jazz, and pop music into its tiny, hand-sized mass. A formidable companion to his florid, melismatic and energetic vocals, Wonder’s harmonica work embodies a singular voice in global pop. This is voice, and to many listeners, this is genius.
There are many lessons as well as lingering questions here, listed here in no particular order. It’s important to understand how historically situated ideas about musical value are. What at one time is seen as threatening the social order will certainly become a safe, child-friendly resource in time. Why does a corporation like the
Talk to the Hand: Jackson's advertising for her line of lingerie is no malfunction. An art history close reading would note where her fingers are pointing.
NBA cultivate images of edgy, hardened, urban, black culture as its lingua franca and express fake “outrage” when the same shows up at the party sometimes? The performance practices embedded in early Beatles work and in Stevie Wonder’s output generally were seen as counter to America’s “official” culture; but now these same black musical conventions are viewed as wholesome as our most revered elected politicians—wait no this doesn’t work—as anti-gay preachers in mega churches—nope—as Congress’s concern over children’s safe use of the internet—ummm—as a pop diva’s new clothing line. Okay, sometime clichés are easier: as a scoop of vanilla ice cream on apple pie.
Americans need to admit that our society is generally obsessed with violence and sex but don’t like to be. That level of hypocrisy can’t be cured by even a fistful of blues licks and rim shots. Until this underlying contradiction is squared, I’m afraid we’ll continue to pay for Congressional hearings on fake moral issues run by “freaks of the week,” (fund a school anyone?), violence against the most vulnerable in society, and, tweeted wieners in our inboxes.
Try to see things my way; Life is very short, but we can work it out! Enjoy classic Stevie singing one of those good Beatles songs.
Almost two years ago, on the 25thof June, during Black Music Month, the world said a very sad goodbye to
The Soul of Bubblegum
Michael Joseph Jackson, who had passed away too soon. Although he became a pop star, he was also considered larger than any generic label or marketing category because of the expanse of his vision and appeal. When he first burst onto the scene as a child, however, he and his brothers the Jackson 5 occupied the short-lived genre “bubblegum soul.”
Presumably targeted at teenagers, the Jackson 5’s appeal soon eclipsed this demographic, primarily because of the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement (the accident of good timing) and the riveting outsized talent of the group’s lead singer, Michael (a collusion of nature and nurture—on this last point, I’ll forego discussion of the abuse he suffered in childhood). MJ’s work during these early years set the stage for a later period during which he rose to international superstardom, and with that, an unmatched level of media scrutiny and subsequent scholarly reflection. Unfortunately, his star rose, went nova, and left him secluded, just as ridiculed as he was beloved; as ostracized as he was respected for his achievements and philanthropy. In her new book Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Nicole Fleetwood writes, “[p]rior to his death, Jackson had achieved a place in popular culture as dehumanized icon. He was no longer alive but also not dead. He had ceased being flesh; for years, he had performed a transmorgrification that had shifted his role in popular culture and fandom from beloved to shocking to lamentable to repulsive, for many.” What a fall from grace.
Let’s go back to that moment before hyper-stardom when MJ epitomized the paradigm of “Child Star” so generously described by critic Margo Jefferson in her book On Michael Jackson. I’ve been recently fascinated to discover some youtube acapella versions of MJ as a singing kid. Together with some great footage from the Ed Sullivan show we get to experience unadorned some of the musical details that fascinated the listening/viewing public. Before the numerous sex, skin, gender, and hair scandals over which much, much ink has been spilled, there was a genius of a musical architect named Michael encased in a small, animated body. He had mastered key elements of sound and the use of space. The mechanics of his art were, indeed, recognized and already in place in way that seemed to celebrate humanity on the formal level. And all this was at a time when being seen as “human” was very much on the minds of many African Americans.
The 1970 Number 1 hit, “Stop the Love You Save,” recorded on the Motown label in Los Angeles, was written by a group of songwriters named “the Corporation,” which included Berry Gordy and other studio musicians. When you listen to the following example you hear a prepubescent Michael as a boy soprano, working the life out of some high g’s with uncanny assurance. (That’s a little higher than the typical boy soprano). The song is in E, positioning those g’s as “blue notes.” He knew how to scrape it, milk it, and kick it with a sincerity and soulful aplomb beyond his years. Pitched at the very top of his range, when MJ implores a young girl to stop, he sounds like he really means it. Stripped of the accompanying band track, we can better hear how planned his breaths are, how secure the intonation and enunciation, how demanding he was on himself. The give-and-go call and response between MJ and Jermaine—complete with slick elisions—demonstrate the polished quality of the lead vocals. Michael sticks close to the melody in the Motown tradition: keep it simple, declarative, catchy. Michael delivered these goods but with a nuance showing the intense amount of care and study it took for him to give the musical director what he may have demanded AND toss in his funky stuff, too—mostly in the realm of timbre and subtle oral declamation.
The following clip is a lip-synced performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Two layers of practice are added to the mix: the musical accompaniment and the choreography. Although bubblegum soul was known for its simplicity, the song itself and the arrangement of it constitute elaborate pop music. Melodies and counter-melodies swim around during the introduction; the harmonies move sequentially; crash symbols and tambourines proceed in separate, strict patterns, the guitars’ division of labor—a constant rhythm strumming against a picked single note. The strings at the climax of the song add the cherry on top, a slick touch to an already dense and driving soundscape. What about dance and space? The visual element is equally packed due to MJ’s point and counterpoint with his brothers’ dancing. His charisma amazes as moves in and out of sync with his background dancers in the same way that his vocals do in the soundscape.
The Jackson 5’s popularity reached across racial lines. But at a
time when black stars were rare sightings on television, this group was held in especially high esteem in African American communities. Polished, youthful, confident, talented, and ambitious, they brought a new generation to Motown. And as a boy the same age as Michael, that perfectly round Afro was something to aspire to—me, the kid who grew the hair long before I got used to the idea of going through the bother of running a comb through it. Thank you, MJ.
