Raheem DeVaughn’s performance of the Black Power era throwback “Bulletproof” begs the question; What is happening exactly in black culture and politics that necessitates this regeneration? What is going on that has forced DeVaughn to put “sexy” back in the closest in exchange for Black radical chic?
The Urgent Nostalgia of Raheem DeVaughn’s “Bulletproof”
By Mark Anthony Neal
For nearly a generation, R&B has been in a hopeless competition with its past. There hasn’t been a male R&B singer who has emerged in the past generation that hasn’t been burdened with the pressure of being this generation’s Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Curtis Mayfield. More often than not, when contemporary male R&B singers have laid claim to the legacies of the great Soul Men of yesterday, they have done so with requisite bedroom attire.
As political scientist Richard Iton astutely observes in his recent book In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press), “As a result of the gendered transition and classed transition from soul to disco to hip-hop, R&B has come to be seen increasingly as the music of women and hip-hop as a male-only domain, given their respective concerns: “love songs” in the case of the former and “everything else” in the case of rap” (276)
What this dynamic has meant for male R&B singers is that they have largely ceded political terrain to the rappers, who have mined the archives of the Soul generation better than anyone to find inspiration for contemporary moments of crisis; even Lil’ Wayne has been in conversation with Nina Simone. Consistent efforts on the part of male R&B singers over the last twenty years to explicitly address the social and political climate that they exist in are scarce. One literally has to go back to the late 1980s--the last moment R&B’s dominanance on Black (urban) radio—to find examples of socially conscious R&B—such as Paul Laurence’s “Strung Out,” Oran Juice Jones’s “Pipe Dreams,” and Tashan’s “Black Man.”
The absence of social and political commentary—what Iton identifies as part of a “private realm (female) versus public realm (male)” dynamic—has led male R&B singers to look inward; one can only gaze at the spiritual crisis and domestic drama that has marked the music, in recent years, of R. Kelly and Usher Raymond, two of R&B’s best known figures. While this more introspective view, often masked by a strident hyper-sexuality and hyper-masculinity (Jaheim immediately comes to mind), offers a fuller exploration of black masculinity than even the Soul generation was willing to engage, the fact that R&B has been mute when it comes to Black politics remains troubling. In steps Raheem DeVaughn, whose new single “Bulletproof,” featuring Ludacris, seems to be a concerted effort to fill a seeming void.
“Bulletproof,” which has been in heavy circulation on urban radio, finds DeVaughn musing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police brutality (personal aside: "really Barack? 30,000 more troops?"), poverty, homicide and sexual violence alongside the refrain “Living like we bulletproof/We bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang /I say we load it, cock it, aim and shoot.” Musically “Bulletproof” is the logical progeny of the soundtrack era of Soul music, clearly nodding to Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man and Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack. For the song DeVaughn even trades in his own yearning tenor for Mayfield’s signature falsetto.
This is not new terrain for DeVaughn, who prior to signing with Jive records a few years ago had established himself as a mixtape artist often melding traditional R&B balladry with a distinct street sensibility. Tracks like “Catch 22” and “Until” from DeVaughn’s Jive debut The Love Experience (2006) attempted to speak to more pressing social realities. Audiences instead gravitated to his “Guess Who Loves You More”—a bit of user-friendly R&B which heavily borrows from Earth Wind and Fire’s “Can’t Hide Love.” DeVaughn’s follow-up, Love Behind the Melody (2008), seemed calibrated to the club and the after-party, an attempt to take advantage of DeVaughn’s sexy (though unconventional) Soul Man looks (see the doe-eyes and full lips).
During a recent performance of "Bulletproof" on the Soul Train Awards, DeVaughn riffs on the sartorial politics of the Black Power era , dressed in all-black—turtle neck, leather jacket, sun glasses, black gloves and untied combat boots—recalling the stylistic choices of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and other black militants from the late 1960s and 1970s. Adding to the sense of urgent nostalgia, DeVaughn was joined on stage by Professor Griff and the S1Ws—Public Enemy’s famed faux paramilitary unit (modeled after the Nation of Islam’s Fruit of Islam). The presence of Black Power iconography—DeVaughn and the S1Ws raise a Black Power fist at the close of the performance—alongside the symbolic presence of hip-hop’s most political moment, suggest that DeVaughn embodies the regeneration of socially conscious black music.
Yet the DeVaughn’s performance begs the question; What is happening exactly in black culture and politics that necessitates this regeneration? What is going on that has forced DeVaughn to put “sexy” back in the closest in exchange for Black radical chic?
The murders of Shaniya Davis and Derrion Albert notwithstanding, I’d like to suggest that there is a general sense of crisis simmering in Black communities, that has little to do with the actual challenges facing black communities. What I am suggesting is that the crises experienced by black communities are no more daunting than they were prior to January of 2009, but with the first family Obama serving as the ultimate agents of Black respectability—there is suddenly added pressure within the black body politic to resist social deviance and to conform to notions of respectability. Such tensions are indexed in the erection of dress codes at historically black institutions and anxieties over innocuous black stereotypes (most pronounced in the hackneyed debates about the Lee Daniel’s film Precious).
In this context, “Bulletproof” is the kind of song that Raheem DeVaughn is supposed to make, because that is what respectable Soul Men are supposed to do; R. Kelly’s sexual ruminations on “Pregnant” and “Bangin’ the Headboard” or even Usher's midst-of-divorce broadside “Papers” are read as little more than deviant excesses. But the motivations for the social commentary of the Soul Men who clearly inspire DeVaughn—Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye —are instructive.
Mayfield, who penned many a Civil Rights anthem while fronting the Impressions in the 1960’s, is most remembered for his soundtrack recording for Superfly—a recording that was both a commercial and artistic success. Less remembered is the fact that Mayfield only agreed to record the album after reading a copy of the script of the film. It was in fact the film—as opposed to the reality of drug addiction in black communities--that Mayfield sought to counter with his soundtrack. According to Mayfield, “[W]hen I saw it visually I thought ‘this is a cocaine infomercial’…I did the music and the lyrics to be a commentary as though someone was speaking as the movie was going” (quoted in In Search of The Black Fantastic, 114). My intent is not to quibble with Mayfield’s choices—the recording was a clear boost to his post-Impressions career—but to highlight that he was responding less to Black crises and more to a Hollywood financed Blaxploitation film’s mediation of those crises—crises that were largely manufactured for a popular audience.
Similarly, Marvin Gaye’s soundtrack for Trouble Man was released as Gaye was trying to craft a following up to his groundbreaking What’s Going On?—a recording generally regarded as one of the quintessential protest albums of the era. In the spring of 1972 Gaye recorded the track “You’re the Man,” the intended lead single for a follow-up protest album with the same title. The song was directed at the presidential candidates during the 1972 primary season (rapper Brother Ali recorded a version of the song on the eve of Barack Obama’s election in November of 2008).
The album never materialized. As Iton writes in In Search of the Black Fantastic, “The failure of the single to cross over to the pop charts led Gaye to return to the mold—that of the singer of songs about male/female relationships…The subsequent success of his next [single] ‘Let’s Get It on’—originally conceived as ‘(Come On People) Let’s Get It On’—reinforced his anxieties about recording political material.” (99) Gaye’s decision to transition from the music of social protest to that of sexual climax would reverberate for nearly two generations of male R&B singers, ushering in an era of hypersexualized Soul—thinking specifically of Major Harris’s “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” which is accompanied by post-coital moans—that framed the careers of figures like Teddy Pendergrass, Rick James, R. Kelly and many others.
Marvin Gaye Let’s Get it On (1973) effectively put Black politics back in the closet, just as social policy began to reflect a retreat from the social gains of the late 1960s. Now more than thirty years, Raheem DeVaughn has pulled respectable black politics from the closet—at the expense of gender, sexuality and class—performing a urgent nostalgia that may ultimately ring hollow in this new age of Black Respectability.
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