Soul for Sale: The Marketing
of Black Musical Expression
Black political agency seems embedded in cultural performance with the performing revolutionary The selling of block political culture suggests a race discourse abstracted from material struggles and radical agency ... Where performance reigns, vacuous renditions of block revolutionary struggles take center stage. Performing blackness reworks the history of radicalism to market "Black power" as a commodity.
-Joy James
Forever emblematic of stark class divisions within the African-American diaspora, the Stax/Volt and Motown recording companies began the 1970s with equally divergent notions of progress. Despite its multiracial ownership, the Stax/Volt recording company had always maintained a privileged relationship with its black constituency, particularly those still based in the American South. Motown on the other hand made no secret about its investment in the mainstream consumer public as a vehicle for black middle-class mobility––a mobility that would remain largely symbolic for Motown's core black constituency. As Stax/Volt set its corporate vision inward to the complexities of black urban life, Motown set its visions upward into the higher realms of corporate diversity and development. In the aftermath of these developments, Stax/Volt faced bankruptcy as Motown fell prey to the very marketing and production strategies it helped to develop, as soul, both the music and its cultural icons, became mass-market fodder for corporate America's entertainment and marketing devices.
The corporate ideologies of Stax/Volt and Motown were parlayed through their investment in two singular cultural and social events in 1972. Although WattStax, an all-day outdoor concert featuring the Stax/Volt roster of artists, and the Motown-produced cinematic biography of Billie Holiday were both worthwhile social and cultural endeavors, both revealed a lack of attention to the quality music production that had grounded each company's success. Major corporate entities, perhaps sensing a major ideological shift on the part of black music producers and distributors, began to appropriate the music and the iconography of soul for use in the highly combative arena of cultural commodities. Within such a context, the black popular music tradition would be divorced from many of its organic sources, sources that often sought to invest the tradition with a highly politicized and critical consciousness. By the mid-1970s both Motown and Stax/Volt would be largely marginalized from the dominant positions in black popular music production, though for entirely different reasons, while the last great artist produced under the tutelage of Berry Gordy, Michael Jackson, would be poised to become the most popular recording artist ever, albeit while under contract with a major entertainment conglomerate.
Soul in the Hood. WattStax and Black Corporate Responsibility
Buoyed by their abruptly severed distribution deal with Gulf and Western and the popular and widely circulated expressions of black capitalism, personified in part by Jesse Jackson, his Operation Push organization, and the National Black Political Assembly, Stax/Volt began the 1970s captivated by notions of black corporate responsibility. In March 1972, the largest black political caucus in United States history was held in Gary, Indiana. The Gary convention stood on the two major pillars of black capitalism and black political empowerment. As Manning Marable explains:
The National Black Political Assembly was a marriage of convenience between the aspiring and somewhat radicalized black petty bourgeoisie and the black nationalist movement.... The collective vision of the convention represented a desire to seize electoral control of America's major cities, to move the black masses from the politics of desegregation to the politics of real Empowerment, ultimately to create their own independent black political party.1
The National Black Political Assembly represented the pinnacle of the grass roots and national political movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. The assembly remained a dominant influence on post-Civil Rights black political thought throughout the decade of the 1970s, particularly among those shaped by the modern black nationalist tradition. The Stax/Volt corporation was, perhaps, also impacted by these narratives of black empowerment, as witnessed by the many changes the company underwent in the early 1970s.
The immediate impetus for change was the emergence of Al Bell as the label's sole proprietor, in effect turning a highly successful integrated recording label into a highly visible black-owned one. Jim Stewart's exit from Stax/Volt coincided with the company's efforts to end its distribution deal with the Gulf and Western conglomerate.2 In some ways these events underscore Stax/Volt's fixation with the overwhelming shadow cast by the larger and more visible Motown recording company, particularly in the eyes of a core audience base who took pride in Motown's "black-owned" status. Stax/Volt could, of course, boast that its new "black-owned" status was not earned by cultivating a mainstream audience at the expense of the core constituency both companies claimed to represent. In an era when visions of black corporate development abounded, Al Bell's Stax/Volt cast itself as the more responsible corporate "big brother." The full weight of such responsibility would be realized with the ambitious WattStax project of 1972.
The Watts district of Los Angeles had been etched in the minds of the mainstream American public since violent upheavals in the summer of 1965. Those riots, along with similar exhibitions of urban unrest in Newark and Detroit, were emblematic, at least among mainstream white sensibilities, of the deteriorating conditions of urban life. In this regard the racial component of many of the urban riots of the 1960s were further examples of the black urban "horde" which threatened to undermine the sophistication of American urban life. Many critics identify these urban upheavals as a primary impetus for the white middle-class flight from urban centers during the 1960s that stimulated the deterioration of American urban life in the 1970s.3 Stax/Volt's relationship with the neighborhood underscored the need for responsible corporate intervention within inner cities, even if such support was limited to underwriting summer festivals.
Implicit to the notion of responsible corporate intervention are examples of savvy business acumen. Stax/Volt's core consumer constituency of southern blacks, had begun to migrate from the American South into industrial Los Angeles during the post-World War II period as part of the second phase of black mass migration from the South. Since the end of Word War II the black population in Los Angeles had grown by 400 percent by the end of the 1960s.4 Given the potential consumer constituency that Stax/Volt could cultivate through a relationship with the community, social responsibility could easily be equated with quality business decisions. With the exception of some support from the Schlitz beer company, the WattStax effort was entirely underwritten by Stax/Volt. The moment still remains an apex in black corporate community relations and probably informed the civic responsibility expressed by contemporary "gangsta rap" entrepreneurs like Suge Knight and Dr. Dre.5
The WattStax recordings (a second festival was recorded in 1973 under the banner of WattStax II) at once highlight the possibilities of corporate based community activism and the significance of communities of listeners that black popular music had begun to distance itself from. In an era when popular music concerts were increasingly held in large municipal stadiums, Stax/Volt dared present such a concert as a gift to urban black America, Essence magazine staff writer Vernon Gibbs wrote of WattStax II:
The concert, which was the climactic event in the Seventh Annual Watts Summer Festival, was sponsored by Stax records and featured members of the Stax line up exclusively.... In a very handy way, all good interests were served as we see a clear example of Black helping Black. If there is a nation united by something like a common ideology, these are the kinds of channels that constructive effort must take.6
Like the live recordings of Julian "Cannonball" Adderley and Donny Hathaway, the WattStax recordings presented black popular music in organic context that highlighted massive audience interaction with the music. Such efforts by Stax/Volt were laudable given the physical demise––a trend that portended a national trend in black urban spaces during the 1970s––of valuable institutions within the Watts community. The singular presence of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, again harking to Adderley and in particular the Country Preacher recording session at Jackson's Operation Breadbasket, suggested that the triad of black corporate responsibility, political activism, and quality aesthetics could serve as a paradigm for African American empowerment beyond the limitations of grassroots and organic movements. The ultimate failure of this paradigm in any sustained or significant manner underscores not only the limited vision of many black corporate entities, but, more notably, the overwhelming presence of mainstream corporate interests in the production of black popular music.
Motown Goes Hollywood: Diana Ross and Black Middle-Class Desire
Unlike his contemporary Al Bell, Berry Gordy saw black progress in terms of the integration of mainstream and elite American institutions by blacks with highly textured middle-class sensibilities. As Al Bell followed his black working-class constituency to Los Angeles, Gordy consciously abandoned his working-class constituency in Detroit in favor of the fast-paced and highly competitive culture industry of Los Angeles. While Gordy's decisions during this era spoke to a legitimate need to diversify the corporate interests of Motown, the company's relocation to Los Angeles and subsequent dislocation from black urban life served as an ironic and prophetic symbol of black middle-class development. If Motown was founded firmly on black middle class aspiration, the post-Civil Rights Motown was premised on black middle-class mobility.
Given Motown's investment in mainstream middle-class interests, the the urban riots of 1967 in Detroit made moving to the West Coast a logical transition. In this regard Motown's move mirrored mainstream middle-class movement, while portending black middle-class movement during the 1970s. Never driven by the communal responsibility that undergirded the Civil Rights movement or the later Gary convention, Gordy's abandonment of Motown's working-class constituency in Detroit did not seem problematic, particularly given the view that the company did represent a valuable symbol for black communal aspiration. Unfortunately, during the 1970s Motown would come to better represent the rather tenuous status of the black middle class, particularly in relation to sustained economic power.
Gordy's corporate desires manifest themselves under various guises, not the least of which was in the area of songwriting and production credit. Embroiled in a bitter legal battle with former Motown songwriters and producers Lamont Dozier, Eddie Holland, and Brian Holland (H-D-H), Gordy would recruit a second trio of staff writers and producers to usher Motown's sound into the 1970s. While the names Holland, Dozier, and Holland were nationally renowned, most would know the trio of Deke Richards, Fonso Mizell, and Freddie Perren only as "The Corporation."7 The "Corporation" was named as such to circumvent the type of popularity and ultimately power within the Motown Corporation that Holland, Dozier, and Holland held during their prime as definitive Motown staff writers and producers. Clearly an effort on Gordy's part to maintain the strict hierarchy at Motown, the name also underscored Gordy's quest for corporate maturity, as no "real" corporation should be beholden to the individual whims of its employees.8
The subtle elevation of Diana Ross within the Motown hierarchy personified Gordy's own quest for corporate/social mobility. Ross's calculated break with the Supremes to pursue a solo career was wholly supported if not inspired by Gordy. Diana Ross served as the commercial icon who would deliver Motown into the next phase of its development. By chance, Ross's emergence as solo artist coincided with the development of the first major body of black feminist work. Devoid of any particular political or racial agenda, Ross nevertheless came to represent the full articulation of black "divahood" for a generation of young divas in the making. Motown's development of a cinematic treatment of Billie Holiday's life would serve as the vehicle for Ross's superstardom and Gordy's middle-class aspirations. According to Nelson George, the screenplay for Lady Sings the Blues, partially written and fictionalized by Motown executives Suzanne DePasse and Christine Clark, "transformed Holiday's story into a parable of Motown's rise: a strong black man, played charmingly by Billy Dee Williams ... battles to harness a female singer's headstrong energy and ambition."9
A critical and commercial success, Lady Sings the Blues helped Ross earn a best acting Oscar nomination. Given the paucity of balanced portrayals of black women within the film industry––an industry notorious for positing Aunt Jemima-like figures Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen as dominant black female icons––Ross's Oscar nomination was well received within an African-American diaspora starved for positive representations. In this context, Ross's success at once highlighted a black woman's independence and mainstream acceptance for a black CEO from Detroit. Commenting on the film, Gerald Early writes:
When Gordy financed the film ... he insisted on so distorting the life of the famed jazz singer Billie Holiday, upon whose autobiography the film is supposedly based, that in effect he simply swallows the life of Holiday into an ocean of pop-culture kitsch for the benefit of Ross.... What interested Gordy most about the life of Holiday as a vehicle for Ross was precisely what interested Ross herself: that Holiday was the only sufficiently gigantic bitch-goddess of popular culture whose art could legitimate Ross's own standing as the reigning black bitchgoddess of her own day. 10
Gordy always believed that black women were the logical channel for a sustained mainstream commercial acceptance, in part, according to Early, because Gordy felt that "black women were less threatening and, in some ways, more comforting to the white public than a black man would be, especially with the intense sexuality and sensuality that the 'new' popular music of Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll suggested."11
Despite Ross's high visibility, her success, like the commercial success of Lady Sings the Blues, betrayed many of the sentiments expressed by a burgeoning black feminist movement, premised in part on the idea that black women would be the dominant agents within their lives and experiences. Ultimately, Gordy's calculated control over Ross for much of her career represented little change from the standard uses of black women within popular culture. Ross's image as an independent black woman was as saccharine as her singing voice, while Gordy parlayed this imagery into a limited victory for black capitalist patriarchy. Gordy's distortion of Holiday's life is even more disturbing in that it mirrors mass consumer culture's proclivity to divorce African-American expressive culture from its political and social roots, solely for the purpose of mass-market acceptance. In this regard, Gordy became the very corporate animal he aspired to become.
Ross and Gordy revisited their contradictory narratives of middle-class mobility and pseudoblack feminist imagery with the production of Mahogany in 1974. A commercial and critical failure, the film represented the problematic aspirations of Gordy and Ross. Within the context of Mahogany, the classic theme of "poor girl gets lucky, makes it big, and must choose between the big lights and her high school boyfriend" is weaved along the sensibilities of a burgeoning black middle class, lacking both identity and a sense of rootedness. Early writes of Mahogany:
A brilliant film, mythifying, in concise symbolic terms, the middle-brow black struggle for identity. Ross, whose acting is much better here because the role is much closer to her own experience, plays a ghetto-dwelling, struggling, department-store clerk who wishes to be a high fashion designer... In the meanwhile, she is torn between her love for Billy Dee William's character, a committed activist in the ghetto running for public office, and her love of success and the artsy European life which she has grown accustomed to. Gordy here has superbly conflated the old Hollywood formula of a woman torn between her career and her man with the identity struggle of the successful middle class black. 12
Within this context Gordy cast his lot with the well-intentioned activities of William's character, who is constructed in the vain of a "blaxploitation" staple: the committed, though inadequately empowered "brotherman." Within this narrative, the quest for black love is firmly set against the overwhelming "whiteness" of mainstream success. This narrative is perhaps buoyed by Gordy's tacit acknowledgment that Motown was outclassed and outfinanced by the larger corporate entities in the entertainment industry; a notion further enhanced by the fact that Gordy himself took over main directorial duties midway through the film.
Unfortunately Ross, who clearly must be seen as a metaphor for the black popular music tradition, is caught between the patriarchal struggles of two opposing corporate entities: the diversified corporate conglomerate and the independently owned black business. The periods in which Mahogany and Lady Sings the Blues were produced were in fact dismal for Ross's promising solo recording career, in that much of the sass and energy that her image suggested were stifled by Gordy's crossover fixation. Ross's solo career really did not reach its potential until the late 1970s and early 1980s, with recordings fittingly entitled "It's My House" and "I'm Coming Out." Ross left the company during the early 1980s.
Ironically a non-Motown-produced film mined the Motown catalogue––often brilliantly––to give rootedness and substance to the music's role in the lives of the black urban poor and working class of the Midwest. Directed by black director Michael Schultz and based on an autobiographical script by Eric Monte, Cooley High is the definitive cinematic portrait of black urban life during the 1960s. Released in 1975, the film documents the middle-class aspirations of a cadre of black males living on the boundaries of poverty in Chicago. Within this context, the music of Motown is woven in and out of the daily experiences of the film's protagonists, suggesting the pervasiveness of the Motown sound to the lives of the black masses. Further irony is realized in the fact that the main protagonist, played by Glynn Turman, aspired to become a Hollywood screenwriter.13
Ultimately, Gordy's quest for massive crossover appeal occurred not with a woman, but with a little black boy from the same Gary, Indiana which housed the 1972 National Black Political Assembly. The sudden emergence of Michael Jackson and The Jackson Five underscored several trends in the development of Motown and the marketing and distribution of black musical expression.
Soul for Sale: Blackness, Blaxploitation, and the Commodification of Soul
The Jackson Five was the last major act produced by Motown prior to its relocation to Los Angeles and, arguably, the most popular ever produced the company. Had Gordy completed his move before the end of the decade of the 1960s, the group might never have signed with the label; Gary, Indiana was part of the midwestern scene that Gordy felt so compelled to leave. To a certain extent, the Jacksons would never know the familial atmosphere of Motown/Detroit––they were the last act on the label who could bear witness to Gordy's guiding hand––and so Motown/Los Angeles held no special place for them. Critic David Ritz writes:
A transitional group merging with a transitional company, moving from factories to dreamland, from working class dreams to Hollywood reality, the J5 [Jackson Five] and their mentor discovered themselves at the start of a new cycle fueled by old drives and well worn patterns.... Gordy worked the boys harder than these hard-working children had ever been worked before. In contrast to Gary, LA looked like paradise, but the assembly-line sensibility of Detroit prevailed.14
While The Jackson Five was groomed exclusively in the early years by Motown staffer Bobby Taylor, Gordy made the conscious decision to base the group in Los Angeles, recording more than seventy tunes with the quintet during their first year on the West Coast. With Taylor's subsequent dismissal––representative of Gordy's own post-Detroit worldview, Taylor was accused of saddling The Jackson Five with an outdated sound––the group was firmly in the hands of "The Corporation."15
Aside from the group's first three releases, Gordy's fascination with Diana Ross and producing films increasingly kept him out of the very artistic loop that helped distinguished Motown's sound from other companies during the 1960s. As evidenced in Gordy's own belief that The Jackson Five was little more than a novelty act, the group's record sales dropped with their growing maturity. But their earlier success sent ripples through the recording industry, spawning a whole generation of copycat artists and producers trying to reproduce the doo-wop sound that foregrounded The Jackson Five sound. According to Nelson George, one Motown staffer and "Corporation" member was wooed away from Motown explicitly to re-create The Jackson Five sound in other groups, most notably The Sylvers family group.16
While the popular success of Michael Jackson can arguably be construed as a novelty or fad, the group represented a market segment that had never been exclusively targeted by black popular music producers, namely those in their early teens and younger. Michael Jackson's stature as a popular icon during the early 1970s was contingent on commercial support from those ages eight to fifteen. When Michael Jackson reemerged in the late 1970s and the early 1980s as the dominant popular music artist of his generation, he did so at the instigation of the Epic/Columbia recording company. The often surreal marketing of Michael Jackson is foregrounded on corporate America's appropriation and improvement upon the very strategies that Gordy developed during the 1960s. What is significant here is that the corporate annexation of black popular music began precisely at the moment that Motown was witnessing its greatest success marketing and selling black popular music in the form of Michael Jackson and The Jackson Five. It was only natural for corporate entities to attempt to reproduce the most successful of these strategies, and in this case that strategy produced a black popular music industry almost distinctly directed toward American youth culture. Regarding the value of youth culture to mass-market producers, Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen write:
Youth, embroiled in the "free market" courting practices of modernity, was perceived as a market whose most absorbing problem is that of personal adornment.... Such a definition of youth" cast the young as ideal consumers, unconcerned with questions of profligacy or waste; committed to an understanding of needs that placed them within the confines of a continually changing marketplace.17
Thus the musical taste of American youth culture, mecurical in its own right, was partly driven by the very volatility that Paul Gilroy argues is a structural component of black popular music because of the tradition's own attempts to resist intense commodification. This factor would hurt the quality of music, because of its inability to successfully develop lasting traditions both within and beyond the market place and the need on the part of corporate entities to divorce black popular music from its organic meanings.
Ironically, it would be The Jackson Five and Michael Jackson in particular who would attain the mainstream acceptance that Berry Gordy craved. After The Jackson Five, Motown never, with the exception of Lionel Ritchie, produced artists of the caliber of those who represented the company during the 1960s. In addition, Motown lost many of its artists and producers, including Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, The Jackson Five, The Spinners, Ashford and Simpson, and Gladys Knight and the Pips, to corporate entities. In the case of the Spinners, Ashford and Simpson, and Gladys Knight and the Pips this occurred before they reached their artistic and commercial maturity. While the subsequent demise of Motown as a major player could be blamed on Berry Gordy's decreasing involvement in the aesthetic process at Motown, the fact remains that with corporate entities increasingly dominating the production and marketing of black popular music, neither Motown nor any other independent black label would ever again be the singular conduit for new black talent.
The cornerstones of corporate America's annexation of the black popular music tradition were the implementation of strategies developed by Berry Gordy himself, namely to market soul music, if not blackness itself, young mainstream consumer base and as a purveyor of youthful sensibilities for older audiences, but also as a measurement of racial and social difference that could be construed as enticing, appealing, or wholly repugnant, as market taste demanded, particularly when mediated through that various prisms of race, class, age, geographical location, and sexual preference. Furthermore, many corporate marketing strategies aimed to exploit post-Civil Rights movement narratives that often implied the inclusion of African-Americans and African-American culture into the mainstream American life by, ironically, embracing modes of black nationalist discourse, but in reality rarely offered African-Americans significant autonomy and agency in their commercial products.
In an influential essay initially published in Esquire magazine, author Claude Brown writes, "The language of Soul––or, as it might be called, "Spoken Soul" or "colored English"––is simply an honest portrayal of black America. The roots of it are more than one hundred years old."18 Brown's commentary bespeaks the larger social and cultural connotations of the word soul. Generally associated with the genre of music that bore its name, throughout the 1960s soul became primarily linked to evocations of black communal pride. In this regard, soul came to represent an authentic, though obviously essentialized blackness that undergirded the Black Power and Civil Rights movements that soul music has come to be associated with.
With the subsequent annexation of black popular music, in which the soul genre was then the dominant popular form, the larger meanings of soul were also deconstructed for use within mass culture. Divorced from its politicized and organic connotations, "soul" became a malleable market resource merchandised to black and white consumers alike in the form of music, television shows, and hair-care products. This process underscores a major facet of contemporary mass consumer culture, which has often sought to separate the iconography of political struggle from the organic sources and purposes of such struggles. William L. Van Deburg writes:
"Soul" was closely related to black America's need for individual and group self-definition.... In this sometimes crazy quilt world of the cool, the hip, and the hustle, stylized forms of personal expression were developed which not only conveyed necessary social information, but also could be utilized to promote a revitalized sense of self. At its most fundamental, soul style was a type of in-group cultural cachet whose creators utilized clothing design, popular hair treatments, and even body language (stance, gait, method of greeting) as preferred mechanisms of authentication.19
The commodification of "soul" had a particularly compelling impact on African-American popular expression, in that political resistance was often parlayed as an element of style. This is not to suggest that the Afro hairdo or the dashiki were as politically meaningful as sit-ins of mass rallies, but that many of the icons of black social movement were invested with some vestige of oppositional expression. Nevertheless the mass commodification of soul reduces blackness to a commodity that could be bought and sold––and this is important––without the cultural and social markers that have defined blackness.
For instance, within the maelstrom of commodities exchange, the cultural meaning of the Afro hairstyle could be reduced to mass-market products that supposedly enhance the ability to grow or buy an Afro. Most importantly, these products could be accessed by a mainstream consumer public simply as an element of contemporary style, which in the case of Afro wigs could be easily removed when they proved socially problematic. Once emblematic of the increased militancy of the youth wings of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Afro simply represented a stylistic choice, though as the decade wore on the Afro again became demonized, along with a black youth underclass, as an element of a deviant criminal subculture of African-American men, personified in the form of hip-hop music and culture. Nevertheless, these earlier developments had particular implications for black social life because blackness, loosely defined as a broad-based and diverse black identity, largely grounded in the black communal experience, was also displaced from its organic sources. Paul Gilroy writes that black identity
is not simply a social and political category to be used or abandoned according to the extent to which the rhetoric that supports and legitimizes it is persuasive or institutionally powerful.... It is lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self. Though it is often felt to be natural and spontaneous, it remains the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires.20
Thus as the 1970s progressed and black public life began to exhibit signs of deterioration predicated on black middle-class flight, the demise of central cities, and the destruction of community institutions dating before the riots, black identity––in other words blackness––was largely mediated as determined by the mechanisms of mass consumer culture. Yes, Gordy's attempts at Hollywood filmmaking were efforts to broaden the scope and visibility of blackness, particularly as such efforts were related to black middle-class concerns about self-identity, but Motown was incapable of competing with the larger, more established corporations, who unfortunately often viewed black identity and the notions of blackness so integral to it as a medium to expand their market shares.
During the 1970s Sherman Hemisley's George Jefferson, Esther Rolle's Florida Evans, Ron O'Neal's Superfly, Pam Grier's Foxy Brown, and Antonio Fargas's Huggy Bear emerged as the dominant representations of blackness on the television and movie screens, in effect erasing political icons like Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Though images of the black buffoon, black maid, black superstud, oversexed blackwoman, and black pimp broke no new ground in black stereotypes among white Americans––the major political and cultural icons of the 1960s made distinct efforts to revise such stereotypes––these images represent the first that would be wholly consumed by African-American audiences as emblematic of black identity.
The desire for identity that foregrounds much of black expressive culture forced corporate entertainment industries to walk a fine line between diversifying their market activities while also acknowledging a black middleclass and working-class buying public. In their efforts to sell "soul to the masses," the short-lived but prolific era of blaxploitation, corporate America's uncompromising exploitation and revisioning of the meanings and icons of blackness introduced both cartoonish and surreal constructions of blackness to a mass buying public. Steven Haymes writes that these processes transform black culture "into signifiers, absent of historical references to black life and absent of signification other than making luxury consumer goods pleasurable to middle-class whites. This stripping of history and signification from black culture has reduced it to a simulacrum."21 The prevalence of absurd imagery like that of Shaft and The Mack suggested that the social crises of the 1960s and early 1970s could be solved by Hollywood during the course of ninety-minute voyages into hyperblack fantasies that often featured groundbreaking and award-winning musical soundtracks by soul performers like Isaac Hayes, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, and Curtis Mayfield; recordings that satiated both mainstream curiosities about blackness and African-American desire to consume their own images. Hayes's Shaft soundtrack and Curtis Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack were not only among the first generation of blaxploitation soundtracks, but were definitive examples of soul music in the era, if not in the careers of Hayes and Mayfield themselves. The conflation of black musical expression with black imagery in the form of blaxploitation cinema and network television afforded mainstream consumers unprecedented access to black popular expression.
Just as Hollywood and the Ziegfield Follies quelled the resistance of America's poor and working class in the 1930s, so mass consumer culture in the 1970s offered narratives of blaxploitation to the restless and unsatisfied masses of the African-American "nation." Furthermore, this strategy was aimed at the most uncritical segment of the black community, namely black urban youth, who did not have the benefit of the presence of a black middle class capable of presenting counternarratives of black struggle. Perhaps even more useful to this example is an examination of how commodified soul translated blackness, in audience-friendly ways, to a mainstream and burgeoning television-viewing public that was in part African-American. Two fairly popular, though short-lived television shows from the mid-1970s illustrate both the problems and possibilities of soul's commercial uses.
That's My Mama debuted in the fall of 1974. The sitcom was largely a vehicle for actor Clifton Davis; it also featured Theresa Merritt, in the role of Mama, and Ted Lange, better known to television viewers as bartender Isaac from The Love Boat series. Introduced the same year as Norman Lear's more successful Good Times, That's My Mama was perhaps the first television sitcom to use expressions of soul as a primary thematic device. The show was a caricature of itself, boldly pronouncing its pastiched blackness, especially in Lange's character, who served as a sounding board and prop for overly animated and decontextualized examples of black dress, black speech, and black style. The centrality of Merritt's 300-pound character to the story line validated it to its mainstream audience by reconstructing and conflating centuries-old caricatures of black women with contemporary black iconography. Primarily set in the barbershop owned by Davis's character, the sitcom missed a valuable opportunity to capture the multidiscursive and highly critical exchanges that have marked such spaces within the traditional Black Public Sphere. The barbershop exchanges, like the soul aesthetic that the show attempted to parlay, were often reduced to banal clichés of the black experience; clichés that were ultimately rejected by the show's primarily black audience.
Using many of the same clichés as That's My Mama, including a 300-pound Mabel King as the contentious mother figure, What's Happening was introduced to television viewers in the autumn of 1976. The sitcom proved more popular than its predecessor, in part because of its conscious playing to teenage sensibilities via its largely teenaged cast. The half-hour show scarcely missed an opportunity to validate mainstream America's perceptions of single-parent households, frivolous black youth, and the overstated tensions associated with black male-female relations. More important than what it confirmed to mainstream audiences are the issues that What's Happening failed to address, issues integrally linked to mass culture's proclivity to deemphasize black reality.
The show, set in the Watts district a decade after the riots of 1965, offered an ample opportunity for mainstream America to glimpse the everyday conditions of perhaps this country's most visible icon of racial tension. While the show succeeded, however humorously, in capturing the depressed economic state of Watts, it also offered a glimpse of a highly depoliticized Watts, This is ironic given the show's link to Watts's radical political past. The show's title was borrowed from the name of a real coffeeshop that served as a focal point for the district's burgeoning activist class. The Watts Happening Coffee House, which was emblematic of both the formal and informal spaces of the Black Public Sphere in Los Angeles, was a meeting place for the Black Panthers, Maulama Karenga's United Slaves organization, and other local writers and activists. What's Happening, which was largely set in "Rob's Coffee Shop," appropriated in name one of the more renowned social spaces of the Watts community yet totally ignored the vibrant political culture that was central to its namesake's legacy.22
Nevertheless What's Happening and That's My Mama remain two of the few examples of television programming that at least attempted to capture the realities of black public spaces however truncated. Ironically, such television programming occurred at the same time real institutions within the Black Public Sphere were under siege. Nowhere is this more evident than in the demise of affordable public venues for live music within the Black Public Sphere. In the early 1970s, Don Cornelius introduced a television concept that helped address the problems of affordable performances and in the process created one of the great commercial institutions within the African American diaspora.
Soul Train was one of the more successful venues to access black popular music. It was also one of the only venues available to black urban centers, which with specific exceptions––cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, and Memphis––had lost the very commercial venues in the black community that were integral to the Chitlin' Circuit dynamics that dominated the production, reproduction, and distribution of black popular expression before the Civil Rights era. The longest-running black television show in television history, Soul Train was born in 1971 and partly influenced by Dick Clark's successful American Bandstand. Cornelius attempted to use television as an apparatus to promote and distribute black popular music. Amazingly in tune with organic developments in the black community, the show's success was partly generated from the immediate exposure afforded to many of the newer dance styles within the black community. Sensitive to the various regional articulations of soul, the show in effect gave national exposure to the "local" within the African-American diaspora. Given the role of dance within traditional black social experiences Soul Train was a visual affirmation of the black communal ethic. In this regard––and ultimately the thing that separates Soul Train from American Bandstand––Soul Train served as an electronically derived audiovisual extension of the Chitlin' Circuit, privileging organic developments within black expressive culture.
Produced explicitly for syndication and remaining relatively untouched by a disinterested white corporate structure, the program gained a national following among segments of the African-American diaspora and mainstream consumers. Though the show did nothing to familiarize its young audiences with jazz and blues––Soul Train never broadened its scope beyond soul music––the program nevertheless remains one of the great examples of a black presence within the post-Civil Rights mass consumer marketplace. The success of Soul Train would presage the emergence a full decade later, of venerable black and urban institutions like Black Entertainment Television and Video Music Box, particularly as a inexpensive and accessible conduit for audiovisual representations of African-American music.
The developments of the early 1970s had radical implications for the nature, production, distribution, and meanings of black expressive culture in the postsoul era. Several genres and entities emerged as the decade progressed that addressed both the realities of African-American communal life and the mass commodification of black popular expression; others, however, affirmed and validated the new spatial and commercial terrain of black popular expression.
1 James Joy. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 1997.
2 George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 138-39.
3 Marable, Race, Rebellion and Reform, 123-24.
4 Brain Cross, It's Not About a Salary, 8.
5 Knight and Dr. Dre, who were the administrative and creative pillars of the highly controversial Death Row recording company have been known to furnish Mother's Day dinners for Compton and Watts area mothers as well as donating turkey dinners for poor and working-class individuals in these neighborhoods.
6 Quoted from the liner notes of the WattStax II recording.
7 Fonce Mizell would later team with brother Larry and introduce the Motown production line technique to jazz trumpeter and innovator Donald Byrd. Black Byrd, the initial product of this collaboration, would go on to become the best-selling record ever for the Blue Note recording label.
8 George, Where Did Our Love Go, 185-86.
9 Ibid., 191-92.
10 Early, One Nation Under a Groove, 119.
11 Ibid., 117-18.
12 Ibid., 121.
13 George, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies, 60-61.
14 Liner notes, Soulsation: 25th Anniversary Collection, 34.
15 Ibid., 37-39.
16 George, Where Did Our Love Go, 185-86.
17 Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire, 223.
18 Brown, "The Language of Soul," Rappin' and Stylin' Out, 135.
19 Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 195.
20 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 102.
21 Haymes, Race, Culture, and the City, 51.
22 Cross, It's Not About a Salary, 10.
FROM: Marc Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.