High Negro Style: The Motown Effect
by Mark Anthony Neal
When Berry Gordy founded Motown records in January of 1959, his efforts were little more than a hunch and a hustle. At the time Gordy could not have imagined that his little Detroit-based record company would go on to produce some of the most timeless music of the 20th century. For all of the two-and-a-half minute classics that came off the label’s automobile-like assembly line, there is perhaps no more endearing tribute to Motown than the image of upscale sophistication that so many of the label’s artists embodied during the 1960s. Motown’s “High Negro Style” as one of its later heads would term it, is on full display on new the release Motown the DVD: Definitive Performances.
Andre Harrell took over the helm of Motown Records in 1995, when the label was well removed from its heyday as one of the premier record companies in the country. Harrell was faced with the daunting, and ultimately unsuccessful, task of making the label relevant to an industry that had long passed it by. Though the label boasted the talents of the platinum-selling group Boyz II Men on its roster—Harrell’s tenure with the label coincides with the beginning of the group’s descent from the top of the pop charts—the label’s most notable commodity was its tradition and back catalogue.
To his credit, Harrell understood the value of that tradition and began to place his own stamp on the aging brand as an example of what he called “High Negro Style”—upscale, urban, urbane, and just street enough to remind you that the Detroit housing projects supplied Motown with much of its talent in the early 1960s. “Ghetto glamour,” as Harrell described “High Negro Style” in a 1995 cover story for New York magazine, would have been incomprehensible for those audiences who flocked to Motown performances in the 1960s. There’s no denying though, that just below the sheen of respectability and mainstream acceptance that Gordy craved, were the gritty realities of the social world that made his hustle palpable.
Read the Full Essay @ Soul Summer
by Mark Anthony Neal
When Berry Gordy founded Motown records in January of 1959, his efforts were little more than a hunch and a hustle. At the time Gordy could not have imagined that his little Detroit-based record company would go on to produce some of the most timeless music of the 20th century. For all of the two-and-a-half minute classics that came off the label’s automobile-like assembly line, there is perhaps no more endearing tribute to Motown than the image of upscale sophistication that so many of the label’s artists embodied during the 1960s. Motown’s “High Negro Style” as one of its later heads would term it, is on full display on new the release Motown the DVD: Definitive Performances.
Andre Harrell took over the helm of Motown Records in 1995, when the label was well removed from its heyday as one of the premier record companies in the country. Harrell was faced with the daunting, and ultimately unsuccessful, task of making the label relevant to an industry that had long passed it by. Though the label boasted the talents of the platinum-selling group Boyz II Men on its roster—Harrell’s tenure with the label coincides with the beginning of the group’s descent from the top of the pop charts—the label’s most notable commodity was its tradition and back catalogue.
To his credit, Harrell understood the value of that tradition and began to place his own stamp on the aging brand as an example of what he called “High Negro Style”—upscale, urban, urbane, and just street enough to remind you that the Detroit housing projects supplied Motown with much of its talent in the early 1960s. “Ghetto glamour,” as Harrell described “High Negro Style” in a 1995 cover story for New York magazine, would have been incomprehensible for those audiences who flocked to Motown performances in the 1960s. There’s no denying though, that just below the sheen of respectability and mainstream acceptance that Gordy craved, were the gritty realities of the social world that made his hustle palpable.
Read the Full Essay @ Soul Summer
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