Black Music Month Day #25–In Memory of Michael Jackson
I was thinking about writing something new about Michael Jackson for Day #25 of my black music
Photo credit: Hope Rose
month series. It seemed only appropriate to commit some new words to paper to mark the occasion of him being gone for two years. But during the virtuoso super group Take Six’s set at the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, they broke into a musical tribute to the King of Pop with their own brand of mind-boggling tight-wire “edutainment.” Mere words will never match up to the honor and respect that their performance demonstrated. Can’t top it; won’t even try.
The Virtusos: Photo Credit Hope Rose
The kind of channeling demonstrated in their MJ tribute on “Remember the Time,” for example, has kept this group producing high quality, thought provoking music since they formed in 1980. So what’s so special about this primarily a cappella ensemble? After all, this kind of genre was wildly popular back in the early 20th century, sustaining its relevance mostly in the gospel tradition up to the 1960s. It’s really difficult to sustain audiences’ attentions performing a style that’s nearing its century benchmark. Where’s the appeal?
In Take Six’s performance I heard a veritable history of African American music making compressed into one set of music. Each of the members is phenomenally gifted with the gift of mimicry in vocal and instrumental timbres. And the arrangements—stunning in their complex craft and non-repetitious quality—are marvels to try and comprehend. The vocal histories embedded in a Take Six performance encompasses numerous rhetorical constructs, including: the early Quartet style; the chorale style made popular in historically black college groups; the tight-knit instrumentally-inspired harmonies made famous by Lambert, Hendrix, and Ross; the male group singing of male groups from the Temptations to the Boyz to Men, to Jodeci. And that’s not including the mesmerizing lead vocals in any one of these distinctive sonic settings.
Photo Credit: Hope Rose
Take Six also moves through numerous genre configurations: jazz-swing complete with walking bass lines, funk, gospel, and various forms of hip-hop. In each arrangement the members effortlessly trade lead vocals against plush harmonic backgrounds; create rhythm tracks plus percussion; provide horn lines and synth pads—they execute just about anything one can find in a historically specific composition. It was stunning to hear them beat box their way right into the hip-hop era and recreate digital sound organizations with the same authority and spot on delivery that they did in earlier styles.
Although I believe that all music is of its time and space, Take Six makes us to transcend the here and now. Clearly this group will be considered historic and singular; they can never be contained by the description: “Christian a cappella group.” They are the history of black music in the USA.
The Clifford Brown Jazz Festival affords an opportunity for local photographers to capture these moments up close and personal. One of them, Hope Rose, a local institution, has become an amazing chronicler of local Wilmington history. These photos of Take Six represent this great night of music through her eyes.
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.
“As much as I wanted to be minuscule the fact is, they’d only be happy with a minstrel actor, Sorry Mr. Charlie won’t chap dance, and f*ck the radio for tellin’ me to snap jam”
-Wale, “Mama Told Me” (Attention: Deficit, 2009)
Rap, in my view, no longer incorporates deeper messages in its “mainstream” work. Clearly, if you want success, the recording industry requires that you produce club bangers, dance music, and radio singles. This artistic chokehold constricts artistic output. Neil Postman, a media theorist and cultural critic believes complexity “is a superhighway to low ratings.” In the rap world, mainstream artists are compelled to invent catchy yet superficial lyrics, leaving the more “intellectual” lyricist to go underground. Wale, one of my favorite artists, has been around for some years now but continues to straddle the underground/mainstream line because while he is known in the inner circles of the rap world one can’t readily hear him on radio or other popular media. His very stimulating work goes beyond making clever pronouncements about being rich and getting girls. His music tackles everyday issues with creativity with which anyone can relate.
Wale’s criticism of the industry’s hindering of his visibility is a motif throughout his work. He refuses to produce hits solely to entertain and amuse the masses even as he references the late Charlie Chaplin’s famous dance routines. Wale has recently signed with Maybach Music Group, a record label founded by rapper/producer Rick Ross. Though entering a “hostile” territory for his particular brand of artistic expression, Wale tells his fans to “expect the same music, better energy”. It’s apparent through his lyrics that he won’t be compromising his intellectual skills to “chap dance” or “snap jam” anytime soon.
Check this: Video of Wale’s reference to chap dancing
Link to Henry Adaso’s blog about Wale’s signing with Maybach Music Group:
