A Hip-Hop Canon?

As hip hop reaches its 40th year, the genre is more segmented than ever, by both regional styles (East Coast, West Coast, Dirty South) and in stylistic terms (Gangsta rap, conscious hip-hop, "alternative" rap). From these many parts a canon is emerging and today we debate its meaning. Joining us is Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University; and Brian Coleman, author of Check the Technique.

On Some Amy Winehouse Ish

A growing number of retro-soul singers from the UK are taking over the album charts. Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black" scored the highest ever debut for a British woman (number seven), and Joss Stone's "Introducing Joss Stone" followed a week later, debuting at number two. On today's show, LA Times critic Ann Powers, and music journalist Oliver Wang, join us to discuss how American culture is really driving the New British Invasion and what this means.

Critical Musings on the 2007 BET Awards

Critical Musings: The 2007 BET Awards
by Mark Anthony Neal

So the first four "stars" to appear on the 2007 BET Awards were Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Holiday, Mo'Nique and Dana Owens--I'm thinking that's a good thing for the self-esteems of thousands of black women who don't deem their bodies--real bodies--as bodies that matter and bodies deserving to be desired. Music videos aside, BET gets some credit here for recognizing the psychic and spiritual struggles of many of the women in their audience, with relation to their bodies. Call it the Debra Lee effect.

Read More at Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

Sound Opinions with Chuck D; Joan Morgan & Mark Anthony Neal

Ever since Don Imus uttered those controversial words on his radio show, hip hop has been feeling the heat. To make sense of recent debates about the genre, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with rapper Chuck D and Joan Morgan and Mark Anthony Neal about language, race, gender, and of course, music.

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About Sound Opinions

Based in Chicago, Sound Opinions is hosted by Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, two of the finest and best-recognized pop music writers in the nation. In addition, they are the top music critics and dedicated competitors at Chicago's two daily newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times (Jim) and the Chicago Tribune (Greg).

Every week, Sound Opinions fires up smart and spirited discussions about a wide range of popular music, from cutting-edge underground rock and hip-hop, to classic rock, R&B, electronica, worldbeat, or just about any other genre you can name.

Black Music Month 07: The Redemptive Soul of Linda Jones & Keyshia Cole

The Redemptive Soul of
Linda Jones and Keyshia Cole
by Mark Anthony Neal

Linda Jones’s music demanded an emotional investment—specifically, in the lives of Black women—that mainstream audiences, I’d like to argue, were likely incapable of making at the time. While Aretha Franklin is a seemingly clear example of a Black woman who attracted a broad mainstream audience in the late 1960s, I would argue that Jones’s performances were inspired by a depth of pain that Franklin’s music more actively attempted to transcend. While Jones had peers in this regard—the tragic career and life of Esther Phillips being a prime example—few could match her vocal calisthenics. As Rolling Stone critic Russell Gersten once commented, Jones sounded like “someone down on her knees, pounding the floor, suddenly jumping up to screech something, struggling to make sense of a desperately unhappy life.”

Read the Full Essay @ SeeingBlack.com

MusiQology 101 with Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.

MusiQology 101 with Dr. Guy
by Mark Anthony Neal

By day Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is a not-so-mild-mannered ethnomusicologist and college professor (and part-time baseball player), but by night he dons his Funkenstein cape and transforms into Dr. Guy, an accomplished pianist and leader of Dr. Guy’s MusiQology. Y the Q?, the first release from Dr. Guy’s MusiQology, pushes the boundaries of what some might refer to as “Smooth Jazz," and draws on references like Quincy Jones, Joe Sample, Toni Morrison (“Sula’s Groove, “Dorcas’s Lament” and “Milkman’s Dues”), Herbie Hancock and the Doobie Brothers, while giving love to the Philly community that he now claims.

Read More at CriticalNoir @ Vibe.com

Paul Mooney & Mark Anthony Neal on Juneteenth

NPR's Tell Me More w/Michel Martin
Embracing Freedom: Juneteenth Celebrations

June 19 marks the anniversary when slaves in Texas received word that they had been freed — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Author Mark Anthony Neal and comedian Paul Mooney offer a lively take on why the holiday is still worth celebrating.

Black Music Month 07: Sly & the Sanctified Church

I Want to Take You Higher: Sly Stone & the Sanctified Church
by Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Editor


Much has been made about the role of Soul artists like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke in the mainstreaming of the black church aesthetic. Surely when The Edwin Hawkins singers logged a major cross-over hit with “Oh Happy Day” in 1969, they could point to the aforementioned artists as well as Mahalia Jackson’s historic appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival as laying the groundwork for their success.

Less talked about is the role of Sly & the Family Stone in introducing the Black church aesthetic to pop music audiences. When the group debuted in 1967 with A Whole New Thing, the title could have been a reference to range of things, including the interracial and cross-gendered makeup of the band. But I’d like to suggest that Sly and the Family Stone not only helped introduce the world to the power of the Black church, but that the group more specifically, introduced American audiences to what the legendary James Cleveland, once called the “sanctified church”. The recently released Sly & the Family Stone: The Collection provides an opportunity to revisit the era when Sly Stone might have been the most popular Black Pentecostal mystic in the country.

Read the Full Essay at SeeingBlack.com

Aishah Shahidah Simmons on NPR's Tell Me More

NPR's Tell Me More, June 18, 2007

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one out of every six American women has been a victim of attempted rape or rape in her lifetime. The subject, in general, tends to be a difficult one to discuss. But when victims feel a need to protect their perpetrators, and sometimes the communities to which they belong, matters can become even more complicated.

These, among several other factors, inspired filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons to explore sexual violence in her new documentary, NO!. The film examines the reality of rape, and the attitudes it sometimes produces, particularly among African-American women. Simmons, herself, has been a victim of sexual abuse.

The completed documentary, an 11-year project in the making, features candid testimonials from survivors. With deep emotion, the women discuss their own paths to healing. They aim to live free from the oppression often associated with being a victim.

Simmons also offers a historical and cultural context, that sexual violence is far from unfamiliar to communities of color, stemming as far back as the slave trade.

Listen to the Conversation @ NPR's Tell Me More w/Michel Martin

Kate Winslet - Party At The Rodin Museum In Paris

Lindsay Lohan HQ From The Heart Truth Red Dress Collection

What's the News? A Conversation with Donnie

A Conversation with Donnie
By Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Editor


When Donnie came on the scene back in 2003 with The Colored Section, many were tiring of the senseless neo-soul vs. r&b discussions. Following the old Duke Ellington adage that there are only two kinds of music—good or bad—The Colored Section was simply good music.

Not lost within all the good vibes was the fact that Donnie was very comfortable thinking out loud as he did on tracks like “Big Black Buck” (musical accompaniment perhaps to Bill Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves) or the brilliant “Beautiful Me” where he stridently asserts “I’m not a nigger, I’m a Negro/When I become a nigger, I’ll let you know”. Donnie’s outspokenness about the world and the industry were clearly on display when I sat down with him by phone late last year during the recording of his latest recording The Daily News, which is being released June 19 by Soul Thought Entertainment.

MAN: How do you feel about the new release?

Donnie: I love it, I just can’t wait ‘till it comes out. I’m ready for it to drop. I’m ready to tour—all that kind of stuff.

MAN: For this project, producer Steve Harvey connected you with Craig Brewer at Soul Thought. What’s your label situation like this time?

Donnie: Some things are better about it. They haven’t had the chance to promote it, so I can’t say that it’s better in that sense. But I know, as far as doing what I want musically, it’s better. .

MAN: What are some of the differences between The Daily News and The Colored Section?

Donnie: The Daily News sounds more like today’s music. One thing I did not like [about] the last album, it was too 70’s sounding. I told them, I am an artist of today. And though my song writing is classic, I want it to sound like today. I want it to sound more hip. It was too warm and 70’s sounding.

MAN: With the release of The Colored Section, many wanted to include you among the cadre of Neo-Soul Arists. What’s you thought about that label?

Donnie: Just a name. People think that you get a Wurlitzer and a Rhodes, that you got neo-Soul. I like music. Period.


Read the Full Conversation @ SeeingBlack.com

Dance for My Father

Dance for My Father
By Mark Anthony Neal

Two years ago my mother asked for one of those favors that you really don't want to do but you know you ought to, particularly when you're an only child. For the last seven years, my father has suffered from a degenerative disease that has left him paralyzed from his waist down and with limited movement of his arms. Though my father has nursing assistants with him for up to ten hours a day, his health has also paralyzed my mother by limiting the amount of time she's able to spend outside of their home to trips to the store or visits to the doctor. Thus I really couldn't deny her request that I make the drive from upstate New York to spend the day with my father in their Bronx apartment — the same apartment I grew up in — while she took a trip to Baltimore Harbor to spend the day with some family and friends.

As a kid my father and I were reasonably close. Willie Mays was his favorite ball player, so when Mays was traded to the New York Mets in 1972, Mays became my favorite ballplayer and I've been a Mets fan ever since. But as I ventured into adulthood I can't say that our conversations ever broached subjects beyond sports, music and the more than occasional query about how much money I make. Understanding that I'd be spending some ten hours with homie, I copped some music for the day — The Best of The Dixie Hummingbirds, The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and The Mighty Clouds of Joy — and though we talked very little that afternoon, my father shared with me a lifetime of joys, pains, and hopes simply in the way he listened to the music. At one point as we sat there, he stopped me mid-sentence, so that he could hear Archie Brownlee, the original lead-singer of the Blind Boys of Mississippi, sing a riff. It was a reminder that with my father, it has always been about the music.

Indeed my earliest memory of hearing music came with my father sitting shotgun in my uncle's car while Junior Walker's "What Does it Take (To Win Your Love)" blared on the radio. That would have been the summer of 1969 and I would have been three. Most of the time that I spent with my father as a child was on Sunday mornings, his day of "rest" — he worked 60-hours a week, Monday through Saturday in Brooklyn — and I had to share him on those mornings with his music. Thus by the age of eight-years-old, I had already acquired a taste for black gospel quartets like the Highway QCs, The Swanee Quartet, The Pilgrim Jubilee Singers, The Soul Stirrers and of course Joe Ligon and The Mighty Clouds of Joy.

While my father clearly dug all of the quartet groups, including the Sam Cooke version of the Soul Stirrers, by far his favorite was The Mighty Clouds of Joy. It resulted in much of the Sunday music being devoted to them, most notably their recording In Concert: Live at the Music Hall (1966) which was recorded in Houston, TX. Founded in 1960 in Los Angeles, The Mighty Clouds of Joy quickly became the standard bearers of the quartet tradition, in large part because of their ability to bridge the gap between the black secular world and the black sacred one. That was undoubtedly part of the appeal they held for my father, who was never a religious man and who, as I recall, has been in a church less than ten times in my lifetime. Within the tradition of black vocal groups the legend of the Mighty Clouds of Joy rivals that of The Temptations and The Dells, and during their peak in the late '60s and '70s, The Mighty Clouds even shared a tailor with The Temptations. Their lead singer Joe Ligon, still with the group after 44 years, belongs to a small group of black male singers whose voices should be regarded as national treasurers — Marvin Gaye, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Donny Hathaway, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Marvin Junior, Teddy Pendergrass, Walter Jackson, Jerry Butler, Luther Vandross, Russell Thompkins, Jr., David Ruffin and Jeffrey Osbourne.

I've listened to Live at the Concert Hall hundreds of times, many of those times while sitting on the living room floor, not far from my entranced father. And of course this was back in the day when folks didn't have turntables, but record players, so my father often let that first side of Live at the Concert Hall play over and again. He listened to the first side so much so that when I hear that album today, it recalls a singular memory in my mind — that of my father getting up to do his version of the "holy dance." Never the most agile of men (something he definitely passed on to his son) my father's version of the "holy-dance" — a one-footed stomping affair, with almost Frankenstein-like finger-snapping gestures — was barely different than the dance he did while listening to Jimmie Smith, B. B. King and Jimmy McGriff (his listening pleasures, once he put the quartets to rest). Though most of the time he listened to his music in a sorta gangsta-lean, with a cigarette dangling from the ashtray, whenever The Mighty Clouds sang "I Came to Jesus" he was up on his feet. Years later, I can still hear the searing falsetto of one of the Mighty Cloud members —"I came…I came…I came" — while Little Joe begins to hoot and holler — "when I get happy, I do the Holy Thing! Hey!"

With my father in his current state, I think often about The Mighty Clouds of Joy and Joe Ligon singing "I Came to Jesus." The memories are bittersweet. Those days watching my father, my hero, were some of the best times of my childhood — what son didn't love the times he could share the world with his father? But I also realize that my father will never again dance to the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and that my daughters will never fully understand where their father gets his sense of rhythm from. Every once in awhile when I'm by myself, I'll put on Live at the Concert Hall and when "I Came to Jesus" comes on, I get up and dance — for my father.

Originally Published at SeeingBlack.com

Star-Spangled Freak

Star-Spangled Freak
by Mark Anthony Neal

There’s not been much to watch during this year’s NBA Finals, as Tim Duncan and the lunch-pail ethos that defines his team’s style of play has made for dreadful entertainment. The one breakthrough moment occurred as Ben Harper freaked the “Star Spangled Banner” on his slide guitar prior to Game 3. In another era, Harper’s performance might have elicited some derision (though I don’t know if Bill O’Reilly has weighed in yet), but at a moment when many Americans are feeling dislocated and disaffected, Harper’s angular rendition spoke to the vertigo of the moment.

Of course, Harper was just tapping into a larger tradition of artists who have performed unique versions of the “Star-Spangled Banner” before major sporting events. Perhaps the most well known was Jose Feliciano’s version, performed at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium prior to a 1968 World Series game between the Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals. Performed at the height of anti-Vietnam protests, the version by the Puerto Rican-born Feliciano resonated among those pushing for a new version of American democracy and raised the ire of those who thought his highly idiosyncratic version was unpatriotic.

Read More at Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

Gender & Hip-Hop Community Dialogue @ the University of Chicago

Gender & Hip-Hop Community Dialogue:
Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?

with David Ikard, Joan Morgan, Mark Anthony Neal, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, TJ Crawford, and Amina Norman-Hawkins


The Institute and Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago co-presents this two-day program addressing issues of gender, gender identity and representation in hip-hop music and videos, featuring a panel and community roundtable addressing the question: "Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?"

Moderated by Bakari Kitwana, co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, the panel features David Ikard, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee; Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Femininst; Mark Anthony Neal, author of New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity; Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, author of Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Young Black Women, Hip-Hop and the New Gender Politics; and TJ Crawford and Amina Norman-Hawkins of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, Chicago Local Organizing Committee. Please note: This reading contains sexually explicit language.

Recorded Saturday, April 28, 2007 at International House

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Black Music Month 2007: MARVIN GAYE & R. KELLY

© Redferns Music Picture Gallery 2006

from The Vault

THE TORTURED SOUL OF MARVIN GAYE AND R. KELLY
[3 November 2003]
by Mark Anthony Neal

The music of R. Kelly has always been rife with blatant contradictions. It has often been difficult to reconcile the man responsible for the 1990s motivational anthem "I Believe I Can Fly" with the man responsible for songs like "Sex Me", "Bump and Grind", and "Feelin' on Your Booty". Taken as a whole, these songs are clearly the musings of a thoughtful, passionate, and openly sexual individual. But Kelly, like many African-Americans raised in the bosom of the black Christian experience, has likely felt shamed and constrained by that experience, which at times has openly aimed to deny the full expression of black sexuality, not only within the walls of the church, but within those public, civic, commercial, and private spheres where the Black Church holds sway. One can only wonder if the often absurd and surreal sexual narratives Kelly has produced (including his illegal propensity for under-aged girls) is a product -- a response -- to the sexual repression of the Black Church and its institutional satellites (what'cha y'all think the sex scandals among Catholic priests are about?).

A close listen to Kelly's formidable body of work suggests that of a tortured soul -- a literally Tortured Soul. Kelly has at times been linked to the Soul Man tradition -- a tradition that has produced a litany of talented, even brilliant, men who often lived tragic and tortured lives. When one thinks of the lives and deaths of figures like Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway, Walter Jackson, or the tragic-comic dramas of Al Green, Teddy Pendergrass, Rick James, and Wilson Pickett, to name just a few, there seems a clear pattern. Many have suggested that these men, all products of black church culture, paid a price for their willingness to sell their gifts from "God" to the highest bidders, be they record companies or adoring female fans. None of these men can match the impassioned contradictions that were Marvin Gaye -- a preacher boy at odds with all forms of authority, including that which he felt was imposed by the women in his life and the father who eventually took his life, who shamelessly and shamefully explored the intersections of sex and spirituality with a clarity rarely achieved in any form of expressive art during the 20th century. While R. Kelly is no Marvin Gaye, the recent releases of Gaye's I Want You (Deluxe Edition) and Kelly's The R. in R&B Collection (Volume 1) place their tortured Soul in striking proximity with each other.


*Read the full essay @ Popmatters.com

**A version of this essay also appears in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004

Lest We Forget...Tricia Rose on Women MCs

NPR's News & Notes w/Farai Chideya
June 11, 2007

Hip-hop has sometimes been criticized for its portrayal of women, but female MCs also have played a role in the genre, from its beginnings to what it is today. Tricia Rose, professor of Africana Studies at Brown University and the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, talks with Farai Chideya.

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60 is the New 40: Frankie Beverly

60 is the New 40: Frankie Beverly
by Mark Anthony Neal

So we’re at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, North Carolina, a little bedroom community midway between Durham and Raleigh. Nothing but a sea of black folk, all congregating to see Mint Condition and the headliner Maze featuring Frankie Beverly. In many ways the pairing was inspired, much like the tour that sent Earth, Wind & Fire out with Chicago a few years ago (it’s about the horn sections, if you been sleeping on 70s era Chicago). Though Mint Condition and Maze have never achieved the crossover success of EWF, nevertheless both groups are the epitome of the self-contained R&B band—and two of the few examples of such bands to find lasting success since the late 1970s. Both bands are fronted by singular vocalists, Stokley Williams and Frankie Beverley, who in any other universe would have long decided to step out on their own and nobody would begrudge them. But taking a page out of the Levi Stubbs and Joe Ligon books on keeping the band together, Williams and Beverly have remained committed to their bands. For Beverley that’s meant 30-years of commitment and add a decade for the years that he toiled with Raw Soul, the precursor to Maze.

Read More at Vibe.com's CRITICAL NOIR

Tim'm West Returns to Durham

Tim'm West CD release Party and Book-Signing for Blakkboy Blue(s) and Flirting

Friday, June 15, 6:00pm to 9:00pm

The Clubhouse at New Haven Apartments and Townhomes
3001 New Haven Drive, Durham, NC

Phone: (202) 449-0624

***

Some of you remember Tim'm West from his time in North Carolina as a college student at Duke University in the early 90's. Since he's grown up and gone on to accomplish much--but has never forgotten his roots. Published author, poet, Hip Hop artist, educator, scholar, and activist, are among the titles he claims. Please join us in this exclusive event featuring readings from his new book, Flirting and a live performance of selected work from the new Family Ties release Blakkboy Blue(s). Tim'm is the author of Red Dirt Revival and released Songs from Red Dirt on Cellular Records in 2004. We will also be showing clips from Byron Hurt's Beyond Beats and Rhymes (PBS) and Alex Hinton's Pick Up the Mic (LOGO), both of which feature Tim'm as an artist on the verge of whatever lies next in the Hip Hop landscape.

As there is no charge and this is a CD and book release party, you are encouraged to support the artist. Books are $15, CDs' $10, and you can get a special discounted package including both for $20. Durham, NC is among the first of Tim'm's stops on what will be a national book/CD release tour, so let's make it a success!

The Complex Intersection of Gender and Hip-Hop

News & Notes, June 6, 2007 ·

News & Notes' series on hip-hop continues with a look at gender and rap music. Bakari Kitwana, author of The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture, Aya de Leon, a writer, performer and instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, and hip hop writer kris ex, co-author of 50 Cent's autobiography From Pieces to Weight, talk through the issues with Farai Chideya.

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Black Music Month 2007: LET'S GET IT ON

from The Vault

Spiritual Sex: Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get it On
by Mark Anthony Neal

Ask any of them. Ask any of the current crop of Chocolate Boy Wonders, who they listened to as up-and-coming shorties trying to get at the panties — with weak game and a soulful warble — there’s no doubt that Marvin Gaye will be the first name out of their mouths. In a recent British poll, respondents were asked to name their “soundtrack for sex” and two Marvin Gaye songs, “Sexual Healing” and “Let’s Get It On” topped the list. (Sunday Mail, December 15, 2002) First it’s that brief “wah, wah, wah, wah” intro by guitarist Melvin “Wah Wah” Ragin (bruh fo’ sure earned his rep) and then there’s Marvin, naked with emotion, “I’ve been really tryin’ baby/Tryin’ to hold back this feelin’ for so long…Let’s Get it On.” When the single “Let’s Get It On” dropped in June of 1973, black sexuality had never before been expressed so passionately and so brilliantly to mainstream audiences. Though Marvin Gaye had long had the reputation of being Motown’s leading “love man,” it was with the release of Let’s Get It On 30 years ago, that the late Soul Man became synonymous with “blue light in the basement” sexuality. But “Let’s Get it On” was never a song just about sex (“getting’ it on”), but a song about the spirituality of the sex act — the proverbial sermon in the sheets. This was a territory always hinted at in the gospel music of Sam Cooke (hell, there were woman who wanted to toss their panties up at the pulpit when he sang) and was later articulated in the music of his soulful sons, like Al Green (ya gotta hear his “Belle” to know what we talkin’ about here), Eddie Levert, and later Prince and R. Kelly. These were the men who had voices given from the most high, but who lamented in song, the fact that they could only sing of the flesh. This was the crisis of spirituality, and at times sexuality, that has defined the “Soul Man”— that legendary figure, often tragic (would you like some hot grits with that Bible?) who is arguably just as influential, if not more so, than the “Race Man” (who no doubt in his hour of need, found a blue-lighted basement, filled with the sounds of the “Soul Man” to salve the pain of speaking for the race.) As Teresa L. Reed notes in her important new book The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music, the tragedies associated with some of these figures “tend to conjure images of the Robert Johnson legend. In exchange for their stardom, some would say, the Devil had come to collect his due.”

The first side of Let’s Get It On is essentially a suite of music that was largely written by Ed Townsend, who had written and produced for the likes of Etta James and Nat King Cole. The opening track, “Let’s Get it On,” in one of the landmarks of sound-recording technology from that era as three distinct Marvin Gaye voices (and at times a fourth, with his falsetto) were layered on top of each other creating a cascading, ethereal choir of Marvin Gaye, that as many witnesses may testify, comes as close to sonic orgasm, as a pop recording ever has. Initially audiences were deprived of the song’s third verse, which was deleted for the single release. But the full version of the song was included on the album release and that verse was worth the price of admission alone as Gaye gleefully coos, “I know you know what I been dreaming of…(my body wants it, my body wants it, my body wants, my body wants it…).” And then there is the song’s climax, where Gaye just riffs “girl you give me good feelin’, something like sanctified.” Religious Sex. According to Townsend, who had just returned from rehab for alcohol addiction at the time he was tapped to work with Gaye, “Let’s Get It On” was initially as an inspirational song — one intended to reflect his own desires to get on with life. (Linear notes Let’s Get It On Deluxe Edition) There’s a demo version of the song on the Deluxe Edition of Let’s Get On (2001) that bears out this truth. But when Gaye finally laid down the vocals for the version of the song we know now, he had been smitten by 16 year-old Janis Hunter (mother of the actress and singer Nona Gaye), and the passion, energy, and improvised sensuality of the song was largely a tribute to her impact on Gaye, who turned 34 a week after laying down the song’s vocals. (This is where Gaye and R. Kelly are powerfully linked, but we ain’t goin’ there now)

Though “Let’s Get it On” is one of Marvin Gaye’s best known tracks, the songs that follow it on the side one suite of Let’s Get It On, including the extended riff of the lead single called “Keep Gettin' It On,” are arguably some of the most exquisite recordings of his career. The verses to “Please Stay (Once You Go Away)” prominently feature Gaye’s overdubbed vocals and essentially comprise two distinct songs — two totally different listening experiences — dependant on whether the listener is focused on his lead vocals or Gaye’s background “punch-ins.” It remains a tribute to Gaye’s craftsmanship, that he was so concerned with the quality of the background vocals, an art that has been lost on this generation of artists, save Luther Vandross and Dave Hollister.

But it is the haunting and eerie “If I Should Die Tonight” that is the signature performance of the opening side of Let’s Get It On. Townsend’s simple opening lyrics, “Oh, if I should die tonight, though it be far before my time, I won’t die too blue, ‘cause I’ve known you” express a depth of romantic love that even the most sexual of pop songs barely hint at. It would be hard to believe that Stevie Wonder and Prince did not have “If I Should Die Tonight” somewhere in their consciousnesses when they wrote their grand romantic opuses “As” and “Adore.” Townsend notes that initially Gaye couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of loving a woman so much, that he could accept a premature death simply because he had known her in the biblical sense. But after meeting Janis Hunter, Gaye purportedly told Townsend, “Get that tape. I can sing that son of a bitch now” (linear notes Let’s Get It On Deluxe Edition). In the initial mastering of Let’s Get It On, the final verse of “If I Should Die Tonight” was “accidentally” deleted. The original version of the song stood on its own for more than twenty years until, the deleted verse was re-inserted in a re-mastered CD of the recording in 1994. The missing verse captures the depth of love, infatuation, passion and obsession that Gaye felt for Hunter, who he would later share a volatile four-year relationship and marriage with. It is hard to not imagine Gaye on his knees, damn-near driven to tears in the studio as he openly queries “How many eyes have seen their dreams? /How many arms have held their dreams? /How many hearts (oh, darling) have felt their world stand still?” only to respond, “Millions never, no never, never, never and millions never will.”

Ed Townsend was not involved on any of the tracks that appear on side two of Let’s Get It On and would only work once more with Gaye on the latter’s 1978 double-disc recording Here, My Dear (the recording was done in part to pay alimony to Anna Gordy Gaye, Gaye’s first wife and sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy, who incidentally was nearly twice Gaye’s age when they were married in the early 1960s.) As hyper-sexual as the song “Let’s Get It On” seemed, side two’s “You Sure Love to Ball” (“ball” was slang for sex in the 1970s) took it to another level. Built around a smoothed-out Jazz groove (featuring the Detroit Hard-Bop heads known as “The Funk Brothers,” who were Motown’s house musicians. They are given tribute in the film Standing in the Shadows of Motown) the song opens with a women’s voice feigning orgasmic pleasure. This was straight-up adult music. Anybody could dig “Let’s Get It On,” but “You Sure Love to Ball” was the song you broke out when you were “gettin' grown” (folks just slept on Cee Lo). Gaye later revisited the simulated orgasm that opened “You Sure Love to Ball” on his album I Want You (1975) and former Delphonics lead Major Harris had his only hit with “Love Won’t Let Me Wait,” which upped the ante on the strategy.

The remaining three cuts on side two, were all songs that Gaye conceived of at an earlier point in his career. The Doo-Wop inspired “Come Get to This,” “Distant Lover” and “Just To Keep You Satisfied” were all songs that Gaye initially recorded while working on the legendary What’s Going On (1971). Regarded as one of the most important protest recordings of all time, What’s Going On marked Gaye’s transition from Motown’s “Sepia Sinatra” (as Nelson George describes him in The Death of Rhythm and Blues) to “serious” artist. In some regards Gaye’s travels from What’s Going On to Let’s Get It On mark his transition from protest to climax. The presence of these three What’s Going On era tracks on Let’s Get It On suggest that the transition was more seamless than most of us thought. Though the studio version of “Distant Lover” is fine in its own right, Gaye’s live version of the song, which was featured on his Marvin Gaye Live (1974) is arguably one of his best performances ever and one of the greatest live recordings in all of black pop, rivaled only by Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Reasons,” and Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace.”

Ultimately though, it is Let’s Get It On’s closing track, “Just to Keep You Satisfied,” that makes the project, a recording that you have to listen to, thirty years after it’s release. Gaye’s first wife Ann Gordy Gaye is given writing credit on the song, largely on the basis that she was the inspiration for the song. Men of Gaye’s generation were very familiar with the “Dear John” letters that war veterans received while serving abroad during World War II and the Korean conflict. “Just to Keep You Satisfied” was Gaye’s “Dear Anna” letter, where he essentially detailed the basis for their break-up and impending divorce. In a performance that is sparse and tragic, Gaye sings of wanting to keep his wife satisfied despite “all the jealousy, all the bitchin’ too.” In one particularly poignant moment he admits that he’d “forget it all, once in bed with you.” What makes listening to “Just To Keep You Satisfied” such a bone-chilling experience is that Gaye performs the song largely in a falsetto voice and though he gets little credit for it, he was one of the great falsettos of his generation (Eddie Kendricks, Ted Mills, Smoky Robinson, Russell Thompkins, Jr, please take a bow).

What’s Going On was the most important recording of Marvin Gaye’s career and rightfully so. But none of Gaye’s recording was as heartfelt, both in his performance and in the lives of those who have listened to it, as his Let’s Get It On. This was a recording that got at the very spirit of the man that was Marvin Gaye and thirty years after its release, it remains in the very spirits of all those who have been touched by his genius.

First published: May 23, 2003 @ Africana.com

“Baseball been berra, berra good to me”

“Baseball been berra, berra good to me”:
Where have all the African-American Ball Players Gone?
by Mark Anthony Neal

“Baseball been berry, berry good to me,” and thus were the words of “Chico Escuela”, a fictional Dominican Major League baseball player, who was one of the most popular characters performed by Garrett Morris during his run as the only black actor in the first cast of Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the late 1970s. At the time some understood “Chico Escuela” as a caricature of so-called “Latin” baseball players, who were presumed to be docile and accepting of their status as second-class citizens both within the league and the larger society. Morris, who is African-American, could apparently make light of the Latino presence in baseball at the time—some thirty-years after Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers—because African-American ballplayers were some of the league’s great resources as players like Bobby Bonds (late father of Barry), Dave Parker, Jim Rice, Reggie Jackson, Willie Stargell, Dusty Baker, George Foster, Joe Morgan, Eddie Murray, J.R. Richards, Ken Griffey, Sr. and Dave Winfield were at or close to their professional peak.

30 years later Major Leagues Baseball’s most cherished assets are named Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Zambrano, David “Big Papi’ Ortiz, Johan Santana, Miguel Cabrera and Jose Reyes. Indeed the fact that the general manager of the National League’s best team, The New York Mets, is named Omar Minaya is reflective of the unprecedented influence of Latino baseball players and administrators in professional baseball. The irony is that this same period also gives witness to the eroding presence of African-American (as opposed to black, which folk like Reyes and Ortiz, most certainly are) baseball players. Recently when GQ Magazine pressed Gary Sheffield, one of the most prominent African-American players, about the increased Latino presence, he suggested that it was because Latino players were thought to be easier to control. Chico Escuela lives.

Only those who weren’t watching the game closely could actually believe that somehow the Latino players of two generations ago, let alone their contemporary sports progeny, were being subservient. Just watch tapes of Roberto Clemente’s machismo inspired gait or Luis Tiant, Jr.’s dramatic windup or for the real fans, the way marginal first baseman Willie Montanez would flip the bat to the side, while running out of the batter’s box.

Read More at Vibe.com's CRITICAL NOIR

Jazz Town Hall Meeting @ the 2007 Soul-Patrol Convention

Moderated by Tee Watts, featuring Geri Allen, TS Monk, Onaje Allan Gumbs and Others.

Listen Here

Black Music Month 2007: LABELLE

from The Vault

SuperSheroes of the Soul Universe
by Mark Anthony Neal

“If Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul, then these three young women are the High Priestesses.”—Gail Berkley

Several decades before Patty LaBelle became the “voice” that always tears the house down, she was simply known as Patsy Holte, the lead singer of a group called the Blue-Belles (later Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles). That group, which included Sarah Dash, Nona Hendrix and Cindy Birdsong (before she defected to The Supremes to replace Florence Ballard in 1967) was a chitlin’ circuit favorite recording turn-table hits like “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and the initial version of Ms. LaBelle’s signature tune “Over the Rainbow.” Had the group not recorded another note after they were dropped from their label in 1969 there legacy as a solid, if not spectacular 60s girl-group would have been intact. But thanks to an intervention by Vickie Wickham, host of the British variety show, Ready, Steady, Go, the trio of Hendrix, Dash and LaBelle became one of the most revolutionary acts ever.

Patti Labelle and the Bluebells first came into contact with Vickie Wickham when the group toured the UK in the late 1960s. When the group was dropped by Atlantic, they decided to seek out new management. Wickham agreed to mange the group, but with one change—the group, now a trio, would simply be known as LaBelle. As Ms. LaBelle recounts in her autobiography Don’t Block the Blessings, Wickham had a clear sense of where she wanted the group to go: Labelle was “going to be bold, brash, brazen. It was going to be revolutionary.” And what Wickham meant by this, according to Ms. LaBelle, was that the group’s music was going to be “political, progressive, passionate…three black women singing about racism, sexism, and eroticism.” The group signed with Warner Brothers and released their debut Labelle in 1971. The first single from that recording was “Morning Much Better,” which celebrated, to Ms. LaBelle’s dismay, sex in the morning. LaBelle was not your mama’s girl-group—these were three grown-ass black women celebrating their femininity and sexuality in an era where all the rules about race, gender and sexuality were about to be re-written and the music of LaBelle would be a critical component of this brave new world.

The hallmarks of Labelle’s debut and follow-up Moon Shadow (1972) were genre-bending remakes of classic rock recordings and the provocative song-writing of Nona Hendrix. Moonshadow, for example features a remake of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (the opening theme to CSI Miami) and Cat Stevens’ (Yusef Islam) “Moonshadow”. When LaBelle sings the chorus to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (“I'll tip my hat to the new constitution/Take a bow for the new revolution”) the song is pregnant with the spirits of both the Black Power Movement and the burgeoning feminist movement, but with sensibilities that black women uniquely brought to both movements. In the case of Steven’s folk classic, Labelle takes the song and its intent straight to church for an extended 9-minute sermon. When one hears “Shade of Difference” (“we don’t care if you fade away/we gonna save the world today”), penned by Ms. LaBelle and Ms. Hendrix, it was clear that LaBelle was redefining what black women and women in general could sing about. As Ms. LaBelle told Africana.com last year “I think we did something. I think we helped make it easier for the girl groups like Destiny’s Child. Yeah, we did our work. We paid a few dues.”

Part of the price that LaBelle paid for their provocative style—both in music and clothing styles—was that it took a long time for the buying public and commercial radio to catch on. That all changed with the breakout success of “Lady Marmalade” (1974), which sold over a million copies. Like their very first single, “Lady Marmalade” celebrated not just sex, but women who were in control of their sexuality. The song is most well known for the French lyric “Vous lez vous coucher avec moi, c’est soir?”, which of course translates into “would you like to sleep with me tonight?” When LaBelle appeared on Cher in 1975, television censors forced to group to change the lyric and to also tone down their outfits. At the time, the only way most commentators could describe LaBelle was to called them “Space Age R&B”, to which Ms. LaBelle responded “We are futuristic…but we are not outer space or spaced out…we are about inner space.” Indeed LaBelle was before it’s time and when we hear the music of MeShell Ndegeocello, Erykah Badu and Ani DiFranco we are hearing the legacy of a trio of grown-ass black women who were willing to be just that.

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Originally published at AOL BlackVoices (2005)