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

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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.

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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)