My Soul Says … ? : America's Divided Definitions of Soul

(originally written on May 23, 2006)

I must start this day off with a rant my friends. And I think you already know what this rant is about. I got home last night and went to bed rather late. I woke up on time but my attempts to catch the bus were foiled by a bad case of the runs. So, I was home when morning TV was on. Yes, I saw, briefly, Taylor Hicks singing "Living for the City". I was undone. Flabbergasted.
How can you sing "Living for The City" with a smile on your face? And in that same vein (as Z and I have discussed before) "Try A Little Tenderness" is not meant to be danced around on. I think that the interpretation of "soul" by white America actually translates into something more akin to : jovial, sexy (although Taylor scarcely manages this), vibrato, and any type of feigned rhythm. For them soul is not rage, emptiness, joy, pain, grace the way it is for us. When I listen to "Living for the City" I break down and cry....I DO NOT dance around in a purple suit. And maybe that's because I really am living for the city, trying to survive with what I got, makin it through on faith and hope. Taylor, you cannot communicate this. For you soul now amounts to anything that manages to be entertaining, while I know that my rage (while intriguing to you) certainly is not. How does a purple suit find itself anywhere near these lyrics:

Her brother’s smart he’s got more sense than many
His patience’s long but soon he won’t have any
To find a job is like a haystack needle
Cause where he lives they don’t use colored people
Living just enough, just enough for the city

Living just enough
For the city oh, oh

His hair is long, his feet are hard and gritty
He spends his life walking the streets of new york city
He’s almost dead from breathing in air pollution
He tried to vote but to him there’s no solution
Living just enough, just enough for the city

In Stevie's version, the chords are moody and futuristic, the organ is psychadelic, his voice somewhere between hope, disillusionment, rage, and death. I have thought on many occasions (often while riding home on the bus) that this song is a sonic masterpiece. Taylor's rendition was, to put it simply, white man in "black" face. And lets just remember that I didnt need to see the whole performance to diagnose that. All i needed was the glare of the purple suit and i was done.

I also felt that this performance and others like it are misinterpretations of the work of Stevie Wonder. It seems that in our post-70's, what my baby daddy Mark Anthony Neal often refers to as "post-soul" memory Stevie Wonder emerges as part genius, part entertainment maelstrom. Now, in his older age he is an artist that we trot out for showcases, nostalgia, inspiration and honor without giving much thought to the context and real content of his music.

More than making us dance or making us love Stevie created music that made us think. Perhaps the joy and grace that Stevie has always put into his music made it easy for us to ignore the pain, the anger, and calls for revolution. When you think Stevie you may automatically think of the pop magic of: "AS", "I Just Called To Say I Love You", "Always", or some of his early Motown recordings. But now as Stevie ages, and I age too, I'm thinking about him in light of the scathing criticism of "You Haven't Done Nothin", the storytelling on "Pasttime Paradise", the melancholy movement of "Superwoman" and the blues commentary of "Livin For The City". And maybe what I'm really learning about is passing the party and gettin down to the nitty gritty of the music that makes an artist relevant.

Soul is about more than how well you perform, how you dance, or get people to move. Sometimes its about actually "moving" people. When Otis sang "Young girls they may be weary..." he meant that shit. Cause young black girls really are weary, and I'm one of them. Sick and tired of this fake love, constantly misbehavin, and shamin love we get from white people. Leave me alone if you can't figure out what I mean in my entirety.

I am actually amused by Taylor thinking he is on the Soul Patrol. I watched the show last week and I died laughing when he sang "Try a Little Tenderness" and hugged himself like he was a damn Care Bear. That was great TV. I even told Z that at many homes across middle America wives were not washing the dishes that night b/c of Taylor (y'all know its true). So while Taylor is great TV, I cannot sit idly by while he crosses the line into that "place where no soul-less person shall enter". That place is in our blues, our gray area, the nuances of soul and how it is conveyed. It is there that I recognize black folks and soul music in their entirety. And that place is sacred. Amen.

The Madness in the Music: Getting a Clue About Michael Jackson

MJ: "Livin Off the Wall..." 

I was lying in bed surfing the net and I came across this Mark Anthony Neal joint titled: "White Chocolate", http://www.popmatters.com/columns/criticalnoire/021217.shtml
where he elaborates on his theories about white folks who sing "black music". I have been grappling with this issue of appropriation, for lack of a better word, and while I agree with what he had to say about white people’s relationship to soul music I have to take issue with this one sentence from his piece: "More a glam-rock track, "Lover Girl" catapulted [Teena] Marie to the top-ten pop charts in an era that was dominated by blah, blah over-the-top pop acts like MJ, Lionel Ritchie, Van Halen, Culture Club, and Cyndi Lauper. " Hold up. Did he just call MJ "blah-blah over the top"? Yes, I do think that Michael Jackson has lost his damn mind and that he really started to lose it after lets say the "Bad" album. I think that MJ started all the pop antics b/c the world needed him to and because he realized that he could, or maybe one of his agents realized he could, but that is beside the point. The real point is: What do we do with Michael Jackson? I’ve been thinking about this a lot in light of his sexual molestation trial. Even when faced with his criminal actions MJ fans, including myself, still reserve some space for him—a place where we pity him, a place where we remember him, and a place where we can still love him.

Friday night I was at the club feeling a little ready to go home, a little tired of the whole scene. There were several annoying things going on (in short: drunk white girls, too much cigarette smoke, and a lady with a really bad afro wig.) but all of that ended when I heard MJ sing:

“Cause we’re the party people night and day/ livin crazy that’s the only way/so tonight we gonna leave the 9 to 5 up on the shelf and just enjoy ourselves/ move/ let the madness in the music get to you/ life ain’t so bad at all/when you’re livin off the wall…”

Even the DJ felt the need to give him a shout-out as he instructed the crowd to “Party for Michael y’all!” I was movin and groovin fo sho at that point, and when I made what my friends call my signature “party-turn” on the dance floor I thought real hard about the public’s embattled relationship with MJ. Because, at that moment Michael Jackson was not a man on trial, he was not fodder for our fascination with the bizarre, nor was he a scared little black boy still looking for his identity. He was just a dude singing a really good song.

I think that there are two, or more, Michael Jacksons. There is the Michael that Black people and lovers of good dance music adore. This is the Michael that sang “ABC” and stole my mother’s and America’s heart—the same Michael that turned the Ed Sullivan Show all the way out dancin and singin with that huge afro. That’s our Michael. And then there are the great songs he made during the late 70’s and early 80’s. Try all the jams from the “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” albums that still cause people to stop what they’re doing and hit the dance floor. (Have you ever really listened to “Lady in my Life” brotha was sangin for real.) And then even still there’s the Michael of “Michael Mania” that caused little girls and grown men to faint, have asthma attacks, and get arrested from here to Stockholm, Germany. Make no mistake, Michael Jackson ruled the 1980’s. His persona created the likes of Britney and Justin, and changed how far we thought stardom could go.

Perhaps this point in his career, his pop deification, is where the disconnects become clear. I know that Mark Anthony Neal wasn’t referring to MJ circa his Jackson 5 or Motown days. He was talking about when the man became a phenomenon, the largest celebrity commodity in the world. It was also during this time that we began to see evidence of his weird behavior, his crazy metamorphosis into a race-less and sexually confused/ing being. Where did he go wrong?

I couldn’t imagine being Michael Jackson. We, the public, compartmentalize him because we have to. It would be impossible to reconcile our love for him alongside all the strange things he has done and continues to do. He also has the misfortune of being a part of not one, but two generations’ pop iconography. Think of it this way—he’s been a star for more than 20 years. Yes, in so many ways there are more than one MJ. Celebrity is a culprit, his undeniable talent, real life, and pop music itself are all partly responsible for the cracks that are so visible now. He does it to himself because in all this time that we used him as our escape, he was desperately trying to escape too. “let the madness in the music get to you…”, right?

I can’t even get into the pathology that may have caused him to molest children. That’s extremely heady subject matter, even for me. But what I do know is that we may be witnessing the consequences of celebrity, the erosion of genius, and the end of an era. And, that’s off the wall indeed.

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.

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