Neal - What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture

What the Music Said

What the Music Said

BLACK POPULAR MUSIC AND BLACK PUBLIC CULTURE

Mark Anthony Neal

Routledge

New York and London

Published in 1999 by

Routledge

270 Madison Ave,

New York NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park,

Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

Copyright 1999 by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Neal, Mark Anthony.

What the music said: Black popular music and Black public culture / Mark Anthony Neal.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-92071-X (hc : alk. paper). ISBN 0-415-92072-8 (pb : alk. paper)

1. Afro-AmericansMusicHistory and criticism. 2. Popular musicUnited StatesHistory and criticism. 3. Afro-Americans in popular culture. I. Title.

ML3479.N43 1998

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

Dedicated to my parents

Arthur Cleveland Neal

Elsie Eleanor Neal

and my wife

Gloria Taylor-Neal (supa-stah)

And in loving memory

of Jessie Hodges for introducing me to communal critique

in his Bronx barbershop,

Wanda Edwards, my intellectual sista/warrior,

for believing that I could do this

and Jimmy Lee Taylor, whose death reminds us all

to keep it real.

My earliest memories of Jessie Hodgess barbershop, located on 169th Street between Fulton and Franklin Avenues in the Bronx, have nothing to do with haircuts, but instead the discussions. Most casual discussions among black men gravitate toward sports, music, and maybe sex. I grew up in the 1970s, when the National Basketball Association was simply tolerated, not to be talked about until after the baseball season was finished, the Jets and Giants completed another losing season of football and hockey well, lets just say brothers werent quite digging New York Ranger goalie Eddie Giocomin. No baseball, in particular New York Mets baseball, is what dominated most summertime conversation in Jessies barbershop. In my early years I would witness the Miracle Mets win the 1969 World Series and challenge the Mighty Oakland As for world supremacy in 1973. Despite the teams relative success, conversations in the barbershop rarely addressed the Metss pennants or star white pitchers like Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Jon Matlack, but instead its lack of black ballplayers. Sure, John Milner was its imposing, though inconsistent first baseman, and the team brought the great Willie Mays back in 1972 to finish his Hall of Fame career. But this was the same team whose general manager, M. Donald Grant, ran fleet-footed outfielder Cleon Jones out of New York after he was found having sex with a young white woman during spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida. In a sport that was increasingly dominated and redefined by black athletes like Willie Stargell, Reggie Jackson, Joe Morgan, Vida Blue, Lou Brock, and Hank Aaron, the absence of a major black ballplayer in a media capital like New York City was astounding.

Most in the barbershop attributed this situation to racism on the part of the teams ownership and management, charges that were easily supported by the teams shoddy treatment of Jones, who still holds the team record for the highest single season batting average. Such charges were further validated as I learned more about baseballs segregated past and monitored media, fan, and management reaction to Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Doc Gooden as they emerged in the mid-1980s as the teams first black superstars and arguably the most talented players ever produced by the organization. Shortly before Hodgess death in 1987, brothers continued to debate about the New York Mets, though as the demographics of my South Bronx neighborhood began to change and the barbershops clientele became noticeably younger and poorer, many conversations began to center on whether Michael Jordans presence would render the moves of Magic Johnson antiquated or whether Rakim Allah was old school, new school, or a school unto himself.

The conversations were no less entertaining or intense in my aunts beauty parlor, where as a young boy I spent a significant amount of time being spoiled by black women of all ages, hues, and social status. The daily exchanges between the next-door grocer, Percy, a solid businessman and legendary drunkard, and the numbers runner who made twice daily visits in the afternoon, were just part of the daily interactions of my community. So were the summer evenings on the front stoop, where black folks ranging from two-year-old toddlers to old Folks sat on the stoop or on beach chairs listening to the sounds of Graham Central Station or the Three Degrees on somebodys portable eight-track player or the late-night show on WBLS while waiting for husbands, fathers, and children to come home from work. It would be a few years before I would acquire the intellectual language to understand that what I had witnessed all my life in barbershops, beauty parlors, and on stoops were examples of communal critique, governed by the sensibilities of black folks who fought the everyday struggle of survival in which white racism was only one of the more prominent of the many demons. It would be still later that I would understand that these shops, stores, and stoops were part of the formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere.

Despite its title, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture, is largely about communities, communities under siege and in crisis, but also communities engaged in various modes of resistance, critique, institution building, or simply taking time to get their swerve on. When Im pressed for a description, I often refer to it as the power, politics, and pleasures of black popular music. The books major premise is that the black popular music tradition has often contained the core narratives of these efforts to create and maintain concepts of community that embody a wide range of sensibilities, formations, and purposes. Some forms of community are expansive in size and influence while others are often very personal and simply linked to memories and the music that helps to reanimate them. For instance, my most intense childhood memories center on Sunday morning with my father, whose regular Sunday morning ritual included a breakfast of coffee, bacon, buttered toast (toasted by broiler as opposed to a toaster), eggs over easy, and five hours of The Mighty Clouds of Joy, The Highway QCs, the Soul Stirrers, the Swannee Quintet, only to segue way into two hours of B. B. King, and Hammond B-3 specialists Jimmy McGriff and Jimmy Smith. It was only during the beginning stages of this book that I realized that this routine was how my father resisted the impositions that a sixty-hour, minimum-wage workweek forced upon him, finding pleasure and stability every Sunday as he aurally re-created the Thompson, Georgia community he was born and raised in, temporarily transcending what is often referred to as northern pain.

Perhaps this project is really about resistance and the various guises of it that James C. Scott theorizes about in his book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, or my man Robin D. G. Kelley presents so eloquently in his work