The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (67 page)

AT ITS BEST, POP MUSIC PRESSES AN ANXIOUS ear to American society, amplifying our deepest desires and fears. At times, too, pop music almost unconsciously invites us to listen to ourselves in ways forbidden by cultural debates where complexity is sacrificed for certainty. In this vein, the re-ascent to the top of the charts of Mariah Carey’s most recent album,
Music Box,
signals more than her musical dominance.

One source of Carey’s significance—and undoubtedly the sharpest controversy around her—has nothing to do with the singer’s gargantuan musical gifts. Instead it derives from the confusion and discomfort that her multiracial identity provokes in an American culture obsessed with race. Though she has made no secret that she is biracial (her mother is white, her father a black Venezuelan), Carey’s candor evokes clashing responses from fans and critics. Some see her statement of mixed heritage as a refusal to bow to public pressure to choose whether she is black or white. But in light of the “one drop” rule—where a person is considered black by virtue of having one drop of black blood, a holdover from America’s racist past—many conclude that the issue of racial identity, for Carey and other interracial people, is settled.

To make matters more complex, Carey’s vocal style is firmly rooted in black culture. It features a soaring soprano and an alternately ethereal and growling
melisma that pirouettes around gospel-tight harmonies. So if she’s not clearly black yet sings in a black style, is she singing black music? And what difference does it make? Without even trying, Carey’s music sparks reflections about how race continues to shape what we see and hear.

Partly what’s at stake is the messy, sometimes arbitrary, politics of definition and categorization. What makes music “black music” and who can be said to legitimately perform it? Consider the fiery fusion of rock, soul, and blues performed by Lenny Kravitz (like Carey, the child of an interracial marriage) and Terrence Trent D’Arby, or the socially conscious hard rock of the group Living Color. Is theirs black music? Though the answer is often negative, the roots of their music can be traced to black cultural influences, from Howlin’ Wolf to Jimi Hendrix. The difficulty of fixing labels on what D’Arby, Kravitz, and Living Color do highlights the racial contradictions at the center of contemporary popular music.

Behind this painful, often protracted struggle to get at the “original article” is what can only be termed the anxiety of authenticity. Such quests are more than academic for black folk because of the history of appropriation and abuse of black musical styles by white performers and producers. While black artists like King Oliver and Chuck Berry initiated musical innovations from jazz to blues–based rock and roll, the public recognition and economic benefits due them evaporated, while derivative white artists like Benny Goodman and Elvis Presley reaped huge artistic and financial rewards.

Curiously enough, the debate over authenticity lies at the heart of hip-hop, though irreverence and transgression are staples of rap culture. But authenticity, even in a genre as closely identified with black culture as rap, does not strictly follow the rules of race. For instance, while the white rapper Vanilla Ice was greeted within hip-hop with derision because he came off as a white boy trying to sound black, white rap groups like Third Bass and House of Pain have been enthusiastically embraced because of their “legitimate” sounds and themes. Conversely, black rap artists like Hammer and the Fresh Prince have been widely viewed as sellouts because of their music’s pop propensities.

An even thornier issue is the belief in black communities that some artists obscure their racial roots in a natural but lamentable response to a racist environment. As a result, they benefit from being black (given the extraordinary popularity of black music) but do not identify with the black people who support them before they discover a crossover market. In the extreme, this circumstance leads to the ideal of the pan-ethnic, omni-racial artist; an exotic fantasy whose energy derives from an implicit denial of the inherent value of simply being black. While Carey has been scrupulous at award ceremonies to thank her black fans, and to mention her black father in interviews, artists like Paula Abdul (a self-described “Syrian-Brazilian-Canadian-American” who first gained public notice as a “black” cheerleader/choreographer for the Los Angeles Lakers) have increasingly underplayed their black heritage.

Still, as the old saying goes, the finger pointed at artists implies several others pointed back at ourselves. American culture is painfully redefining itself through bitter debates about “identity politics,” “multiculturalism,” and “universalism.” Music cannot be naively expected to triumph over social differences. Because of the schmaltz that often passes for conscience in pop, the dream of transcendence—whether of race, or for that matter, of sex and class—is often hindered by sappy appeals to brotherhood and oneness. What such impulses reflect is a desire to fix what has gone wrong in a culture intolerant of difference.

The anxiety of authenticity about what and who is really black in pop music is proportional to just how increasingly difficult it is to know the answer. As multiracial unions of sex and sound proliferate, the “one drop” rule may lose its power. And, as cultural theorists are now proud to announce, race is not merely a matter of biology but an artifice of cultural convention. Such a construction is often used to establish and reinforce the power of one group over another. This view does not mean that black music is solely the product of perception. Nor does it mean that black music’s power must be diluted to a generic form. What it does suggest, however, is that the meaning of race, like the art it molds, is always changing.

In the end, what Carey’s career may teach us is that paranoia about purity is the real enemy of black cultural expression, which at its best is characterized by the amalgamation of radically different elements. Creolization, syncretism, and hybridization are black culture’s hallmarks. It is precisely in stitching together various fabrics of human and artistic experience that black musical artists have expressed their genius.

“LISTEN BROTHER, YOU’VE GOT TO COME OVER HERE RIGHT NOW,” my friend and fellow church member James Pippin excitedly demanded after I answered the phone.

“What’s wrong, Pip?” I anxiously replied. “You all right?”

“Man, I’ve got a copy of an album by a gospel singer who’s gonna give Aretha a run for her money,” Pippin goaded me. He knew Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, was revered in my heart and that her pretty tones and thrilling shrieks often vibrated the walls of my small apartment. I didn’t have to tell him that to me his egregious comparison was sacrilegious.

“Look, bro, you don’t have to get all hyperbolic,” I defensively responded. “If you want me to come over, man, just say so. I’ll see you as soon as I can get there.” “Oh, by the way, she’s from Detroit.” He got in a final tease, chuckling as he clicked the receiver to its base.

Pippin was double-dipping in disaster. First, he had the nerve to challenge the Queen’s throne. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he attempted to exploit my native passions by pitting one homegirl against the next, and worse yet, a seasoned veteran—no, the reigning champion—against an untested newcomer. Nevertheless,
I hopped into my wife’s white mustang and made my way to Pippin’s house. On the long drive over, I couldn’t help but think of how big a presence Aretha had been in my life, how her voice had hovered over me and marked every stage of my transition from boy to man.

To the world beyond the church, Aretha’s freakish precocity seemed to emerge fully formed from obscure origins in the Detroit neighborhood where her father, C. L. Franklin, a noted preacher, brought her up. In fact, it was in Rev. Franklin’s legendary rhetorical womb that Aretha gestated before hatching her monumental talent. As a bronze gospel wunderkind, Aretha’s gift poured out in a theological prescience so striking that her father, a past master himself of the far-flung ecstasies and esoteric vibrations of the black voice, must have felt that a double portion of the Spirit,
his
spirit, had fallen on his woman-child. One can hear fourteenyear-old Aretha on her first gospel recording declaring with unforced believability that she was heading to a place where she would “Never Grow Old.” Like all great artists, Aretha was not so much speaking to us as speaking for us, at least for the fortunate phalanx gathered at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church where the recording took place. In Aretha’s mouth, the gospel standard temporarily dissolved its yearning for a distant heaven and seized her youthful form to embody its promise
right now
.

My love for Aretha was inherited from my mother, who frequented New Bethel when she arrived in Detroit from the South. Rev. C. L. Franklin was a “down-home” preacher, a lionized pulpiteer whose homilies spread over seventy-six recordings that found wide circulation in black communities throughout the nation. Ironically, I had to go all the way to the country—to the Alabama farm of my grandparents on which my mother was reared and where she picked cotton—to hear for the first time the oratorical wizardry of a Detroit icon. I listened raptly and repeatedly to Franklin’s rhetorical gifts churning through my grandfather’s archaic portable record player. He possessed a powerful voice with a remarkably wide range. Franklin could effortlessly ascend to his upper register to squeal and squall. He was equally capable of descending to a more moderate vocal hum and pitch, and then, at a moment’s notice, he could recompose in dramatic whisper. The velocity of his speech was no less impressive, too. Franklin was the greatest exemplar of “whooping,” or the “chanted sermon,” where ministers coarsen their articulation, deliberately and skillfully stress their vocal cords, and transition from spoken word to melodious speech. He was the shining emblem of folk poetry shaped in the mouth of a minister whose mind was spry and keen. Franklin’s style rarely undercut his substance.

Mama said that often, after Franklin finished his sermons, Aretha would rise and escalate the spirit to even more frenzied highs. Years later, after searching for a style to accommodate the magnitude of her art, Aretha would do the same in the secular realm. She carried into the universe beyond revival tents and sanctuary walls a religious passion for worldly subjects, among them the flourishing and failure of love affairs, and the pleasures of the senses. When Aretha switched from gospel to rhythm and blues, she followed a path carved by such luminaries as Ray
Charles and Sam Cooke. Because of their struggles, she didn’t have to confront the same degree of reproach they had endured. But she encountered her share of resentment and anger among the faithful who believed that she had betrayed her first love and highest calling. These same folk didn’t understand that when Aretha turned Otis Redding’s song “Respect” into a quasi-feminist manifesto, she was, intentionally or not, signifying on the lack of regard she faced as a woman in all her homes, secular and sacred. While women largely filled its gospel choirs and sanctuary seats, the church remained, in its powers, discretions, and privileges, a man’s world. Of course, so was the world outside the church, but at least women didn’t lose their dignity or self-worth by being asked to believe that God made it so.

Not even Aretha’s successful reentries into the gospel world of her youth, one in 1972, the other fifteen years later, have completely silenced the displeasure with her defection among those old enough to remember it. Since her departure, there has been an unspoken search for the next Aretha, for a successor who would stay the course and sing only for the Lord. Neither would her critics be mollified by C. L. Franklin’s adroitly defensive claim on Aretha’s 1972 gospel album,
Amazing
Grace
, that his daughter “never really left the church.”

I kept this debate in mind as I pulled up to Pippin’s brick house. Pippin and I had weathered some hard times under the same umbrella. I had come to Knoxville in 1979 to begin my freshman year at Knoxville College, a month shy of my twenty-first birthday. As a newly minted minister, I sought out a church home where I could stimulate my faith and exercise my gifts, and I landed at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Pippin, an older, wiser big brother, often gave me a lift to church since he worked nearby as a manager and disc jockey at a tiny radio station. He also occasionally played percussions in a local combo.

Still, we were both poor. I preached wherever and whenever I could. Pippin worked his various gigs to better financial effect, but it didn’t take much to top the $50 I received on a good day for a guest sermon. We often dined at “all-you-can-eat” buffets, going in early, eating late breakfasts and early lunches, then remaining to read papers and shoot the bull until we got hungry again for supper. Pippin also shared with me promotional copies of forthcoming albums and tapes that he received at the radio station. That’s how he came across this vaunted Aretha successor.

“Come on in, man,” Pippin greeted me at the door. “Gerri took the baby to visit Mother Rosalyn, so we’ve got the house to ourselves.”

Gerri was Pip’s wife and a fantastic gospel singer and pianist in her own right. Before I’d gotten married for the second time, Gerri, Pip, and I hung out regularly, and she agreeably joined in many of our shenanigans.

“Now who’s this singer you want me to hear?” I quizzed Pippin as I rested my coat but not my questions. “Is she Baptist or Pentecostal? What church did she attend? If she’s so bad, how come I ain’t never heard of her, and I’m from Detroit?”

“Take a chill pill and cool out, bro,” Pippin calmly deflected my hazing. “I’m gonna play her for you right now. I guarantee you that you’ll be blown away.”

I suppose if Pippin’s discovery had taken place in our more sophisticated technological era—a quick download and file sharing over the Internet—the mystery could have been quickly solved. Back then, in 1984, in a failed Orwellian future, we had to do it the old-fashioned way: stand before “The Stereo” and place the stylus over the rotating, compressed wax and allow the analog vibrations to brush across our soundscape and through our nearly busted woofers and tweeters.

As the familiar crackles and snaps surged through the speakers, and the needle rapidly unraveled the tightly configured lines on the album’s black face—and no matter how expertly you cleaned your vinyl disc it was bound to emit faint noises from a sharp object impressing a moving, flat surface—the turntable gyrated the first few seconds of Pippin’s latest find. I was unimpressed. It started with the synthesized sound of rushing wind. It was quickly followed by four strident, graduated chords hammered by a cheesy synthesizer, underwritten by a scaling piano smothered in the faux-symphonic bluster of organ and chimes. A hokey effect from an amateur outfit, I glibly, caustically concluded. I was slouched in my chair.

Then her voice broke in.

“Master,” she began in an understated, clear alto declaration, delaying her next words so we could fix our minds on the meaning of her lyrics as the piano pounded out her deliberate pace. “The
temp-ehhhhhhhhhest is
rayging.” Now I had straightened my posture and leaned in as if to grab every syllable as it spilled through the thinly wired netting of Pippin’s stereo speakers. My delighted host was grinning like a Cheshire cat. The singer slid up the word “tempest” like a plane effortlessly gliding into air, except she met self-induced sonic turbulence halfway through. But she navigated her voice expertly amidst the deliberate gruffness she evoked to stress the storm she was singing about. When she phrased “tempest” as she did, she was skillfully performing what might be termed vernacular onomatopoeia. Her volcanic melisma dissolved peacefully into “raging”—an irony, to be sure, as she contrasted, even opposed, the stormy condition she described by drawing her voice back, at least for the present, into a serenely reassuring soprano. I was intrigued. After singing about the billows tossing high in a steady voice, she got guttural and let loose a minor vocal eruption as she raced up the scale in quaking glissando, telling us the sky was “oh-oh-h-hh-vershadow-w-w-w-ed with blackness,” with “black-ness” crisply and succinctly articulated.

On and on it went, as the singer unleashed growling, groaning, lacerating syllables in wild succession, occasionally stopping on a dime to accentuate the inherent drama of her subject with an equally theatrical delivery. Okay, I thought, maybe she has some Aretha-like ways, but I wasn’t yet convinced she could hang with the Queen. That is, until the middle of the song. She gave voice to a series of otherworldly ejaculations that in their sheer force seemed to bend back the cast-iron sleeves on Pippin’s radiator. She built slowly to a pattern of repeating, swelling crescendos that only intermittently resolved in sweetly whispered affirmations of God’s peace in the midst of the storm. She rained down such ferocious
assurances of divine intervention, that the storm from which she promised God’s protection seemed my only refuge.

There was no room in Pippin’s house to hide from her voice, no spot untouched by her vibrations, no plane unaffected by her seismic emissions, no space uninhabited by her shaking, shouting, shivering, shearing sound. She unleashed an eviscerating orchestration of notes to proclaim Jesus as “the Master, I’m talkin’ ‘bout the Mas-turhhh”—and mind you, she’s wailing at the tip-top of her surging soprano—“of erher-herrrrrth and sky.” She wasn’t finished. “You see”—and in the background, the choir in staccato affirmation picks up her cue and chants “the oh-cean,” before she picks back up and finishes the thought—“ohhhhhhhhohhhhhohhh so sweet-lay, obey, they gonna obey, thy we-ee-ill.” I was all but done. She had led me to the highest point of her shattering articulation and suddenly, precipitously dropped me off a cliff of cascading sound into an ocean of humming tranquility. I could only slump in my seat and let her soothing, hushing, calming benediction roll over me as she and her choir called antiphonally for “pee-e-e-eee-e-e-eee-e-e-e-uh-yeece.” For the next thirty or so minutes, I was thrilled and thrashed by the merciless wave of sounds that alternately tiptoed and tore from Pippin’s speakers. In that time, I met Aretha’s sonic daughter, her gospel twin. It wasn’t that their voices were necessarily the same in construction—although they shared similarities of tone, pitch, and style at points. But they were identical in effect, since both possessed a mesmerizing, tantalizing, enthralling gift that demanded notice.

I had no idea as I sat in Pippin’s house, transfixed by a voice that I didn’t believe could exist—and perhaps, didn’t believe
should
exist—that six years later I would meet its owner as we journeyed together to London with Jesse Jackson. Like me, Jackson had heard that voice and was immediately smitten. He invited me into his office one day early in 1990—I was working with him on his autobiography—and he enthusiastically located a track on a gospel compact disc he had just received.