Keepin' the Beat: Who Owns Soul Music?

During the past year I’ve heard a lot about this little supposedly singin white girl, Joss Stone. She has this cover of The Isley’s “For the Love Of You”, and keeping in mind my previous post (peep my other blog www.bluetide.blogspot.com) on my crusade to end white girl soul music appropriation you can imagine that it was hard for me to listen to Ms. Stone’s performance with an unbiased ear. This is one of those times when I have to acknowledge my own racial hang-ups. I confess: I didn’t want Joss Stone to be any good. I confess: It does bother me when I think about how much has been, and continues to be co-opted from black people, and that here it is again, one of them trying to do us better than we do.

In a chapter entitled, “Bluebelles, Bell Bottoms, and the Funky Ass White Girl” in Mark Anthony Neal’s book “Songs in the Key of Black Life” he writes: “ ‘Blue-eyed’ soul shares an affinity with what Paul C. Taylor calls the ‘Elvis Effect’, where white participation in traditionally black avenues of cultural production produces feelings of unease.” The feeling of unease stems from a feeling of ownership of black musical forms by black people. If white people think, know, and act like they own commerce then black people surely know that we own music, and in that same vein, dance and the exhibition of rhythm. From this sense of ownership comes the shock and awe that white people may be, to borrow from my brother Eddie Cain Jr., tryin to take our style even tryin ta riff like us. Of course though, this phenomenon is nothing new. There have been a ton of white artists who made it by singing black musical forms either in an “authentic” sense (Namecheck Teena Marie and Lewis Taylor, two white folks who I know can bring a house down) or an “inauthentic” sense (should I even bother to name Elvis, and his modern day progeny Eminem, Brittney, and Justin?). The line between “authentic” and “inauthentic” is thin and when interpreted by black people can only be determined by the quality of the performance, and perhaps more importantly which black people co-sign on it.

Neal says that the presence of the funky ass white person who can, in terms of black cultural standards, sing “simply complicates—but doesn’t repudiate—claims that there is a such thing as ‘black singing’”. I must simply concur. The first time I heard Lewis Taylor sing “Damn, I’m in love with you, I don’t know where my mind has gone, don’t know right from wrong, I didn’t really want to be here but damn I’m in love with you”, I felt the same way about him. Until that moment, no space had existed for Lewis in my musical lexicon. Him singing those songs the way that he did was a space I had reserved in my mind for black men, for black people. It is indeed complicated, mostly because giving credit where its due, in this case, inadvertently means relinquishing some part of our treasured ownership. When you allow black music to equal black culture, which then equals black identity you find the rub. Black singing has become somewhat synonymous with our identity, and if you need evidence of that just check yourself the next time a white co-worker or friend remarks that you just “naturally” sing or dance so well. You get mad about it every time, but on some level you think its true, and even more than that you hold on smugly to the fact that your “natural” ability is something that white people don’t have. (Not that they don’t find ways to control it, but that’s a whole notha otha.)

The idea of “authentic” and “inauthentic” soul is, of course, a matter of interpretation but it is also an attempt on the part of black folks to safeguard the gates to soul. We want to decide who gets to join our ranks. However, the pop music machine has always found a way around that and singers who have gotten no such pardon walk off into the sunset wearing titles like “The King of Rock and Roll”, or “The Next Aretha Franklin” (this is what critics have been saying about Joss Stone).

But do we own it? I have to ask myself that in light of the Lewis Taylors and Teena Maries of the world. And, is my perception of the level to which we, I, possess this music real? Maybe things, art forms including hip-hop, cease to be “ours” once they become cross-over sensations. Is Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” the sole intellectual property of him, Motown, soul music, and black people or does it belong in some other category once it shows up on a California raisins commercial? The truth is that its hard to own anything, art or otherwise, in a system that favors cultural erasure and where anything can be bought or sold.
Now that I’m in the nitty-gritty of it I can see that this realization may be where my anger lies. Maybe I’m not really mad that Joss Stone turned up on my radio trying her damndest to sing The Isley Brothers. I’m mad because she can. I’m mad that there’s nothing to stop her, I’m mad that my ownership may be an illusion.