Preface: RJP and the Rhythm and Blues Imagination
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PREFACE RJP and the Rhythm and Blues Imagination And I will give you my heart / And I will always be true to you / And I will love you forever / If I could just make love to you. — Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Toni Braxton, Boomerang Soundtrack, “Give You My Heart” I’m telling you love / Boy makes things happen / You never know where it’s coming from / You never know who you’re gonna love / I’m telling you love makes things happen / You never know what you’re gonna do / Whenever true love takes hold of you. — Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and Pebbles, A Closer Look, “Love Makes Things Happen” Cause this life is no good alone / Since w e’ve become one, I’ve made a change / Every thing I do now makes sense / All roads end / All I do is for you. — Kenny Lattimore, Kenny Lattimore, “For You” Background to the Foreground Although too young to claim 8- tracks as a part of my generation, I am old enough to remember their significance in myh ouse hold. Along with 45s and 33s, 8- tracks introduced me to a host of rhythm and blues artists who, through their voice and soulful musical renditions, narrated love story a fter love story gone awry. Songs about love dreams deferred (Brian McKnight’s “One Last Cry,” and Anita Baker’s “Fairy tales”), relationships never actualized fully (Teddy Pendergrass’s “Love TKO”), affairs slowly dissipated (Shirley Murdock’s “As We Lay” and “Hus- band”), and steamy relationships abruptly ended (Guy’s “Goodbye Love”) engen- dered curiosity and intrigue as much as did songs that told of love that never ended (Johnny Gill’s “My, My, My,” Natalie Cole’s “Everlasting Love,” and Jerry But- ler and Brenda Lee’s “ Ain’t Understanding Mellow”). As Atlantic Starr’s “Secret ix x PREFACE Lovers” played on our home stereo system or in my m other’s Pontiac Grand Prix, fascination encapsulated me. Admittedly, I had yet to apprehend with certainty what a lover was, but the secret’s significance had not eluded me. If thew oman in the song was “hoping you call before anyone gets home” and “waiting anxiously, alone, by the phone,” then what ever a lover was, it had to be good. At the same time, the tethering of secrecy and/or silence to sexuality was a forewarning about the moral, social, and libidinal complexities of love, sex, and monogamy: In the next verse, the man begs the question “how could something so wrong be so right?” and then affirms, “I wish we didn’t have to keep our love out of sight.”1 For a young boy, the song’s evocation of right, wrong, secrecy, and wish fulfillment/deferral, delivered in crooning, enthralling voices, provoked what I would later learn to describe as cognitive dissonance. But in the late twentieth century, this critical acumen eluded me, and I had yet to develop the vocabu- lary or academic training to differentiate between the artist, the persona, and the per for mance, as con temporary scholarship in black music studies— Michael Awkward’s Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Strug gle for Artistic Identity in particular— wisely compels us to do.2 I wondered then, and now, as I became more prepared to analyze these songs and rhythm and blues music more generally, what did these songs, and artists, and black cultural production more generally tell us about black citizens’ desires, longings, and aspirations? My early fascination with “Secret Lovers” precociously prophesied what would later become my philosophical, intellectual, and personal skepticism toward monogamy in general and the institution of marriage in particular— not only as a personal choice, but moreover, as a socially prescribed remedy for black in equality. I immediately grasped that the song stirred mixed emotions insofar as the tempo and melody initially seemed to contradict the lament of the secret. I subsequently came to understand (by experience and cognition) that “Secret Lovers” more so embodies a complication than it does a contradiction to the pro- fessed ideal of love. That is, the conflict between the lovers’ inability to be together in socially recognized and valued ways functions as much as a critique of the norms of marriage and monogamy as it does as a lament about the lovers’ unful- filled desire to be together. More broadly, it attests to the complication that arises from our desires to have an all- encompassing, all- engaging romanticized love, with our experiential knowledge of the impossibility, impracticality, and improb- ability of finding and sustaining such a love. Even still, our desires and longings persist, and when we do not personally aspire to the norms, o thers proj ect the desires onto us, then question why we in fact do not possess these longings. I began to won der about the degree to which the desire for romantic love and monogamy undermined black people’s abilities to thrive, and whether roman- tic love and monogamy were stand- ins as a metonym for an interconnected set of material and psychic desires. Rhythm and blues music and culture, for rea- sons Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality clarifies, serve as crucial sites in which to imagine viable alternatives to roman- tic love and monogamy that can fulfill parallel psychic and material desires. PREFACE xi In this sense, “Secret Lovers” belongs to a robust set of songs, which include Mtume’s “You, Me, and He,” Cameo’s “Single Life,” Betty Wright’s “I’ll Be the Other Woman,” Kenny Lattimore’s “For You,” and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” that upset conventional expectations of romance (including monogamy) to offer alternative ways of imagining kinship, relationship, and nonmonogamous affil- iations.3 Upset here signals how black cultural production can push against norms, even while leaving them intact, and the examinations throughout this book investigate these nuances. These alternative imaginings in turn force us to reimagine the relationships that exist between black in equality and its po liti- cal and politicized discourses. Ad nauseam, we have heard in po liti cal discus- sions, public policy debates, scholarly papers, and everyday conversation that the black family remains under attack, that black marriage rates fall dismally low, and that the number of single- mother h ouse holds skyrockets. Such discourses take for granted the nuclear f amily’s stability as a pretext and prerequisite for black people to thrive; any configuration but the nuclear familial unit allegedly undermines the stability of black communities and threatens racial pro gress. Among many interventions, Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality investigates how rhythm and blues culture reframes such conversations— shifting our attention away from conventional, individualis- tic, neoliberal, and familial- based paradigms for conceptualizing black in equality, and calling into question the usefulness and costs of the normative, nuclear family model. Perhaps unexpectedly, given its reputation for romantic cliché, I show how R&B helps us to think about how the focus on the nuclear family obfus- cates how neoliberalism and post– civil rights era conservatism undermine black people’s abilities to thrive; and how it imagines new possibilities for kinship organ ization that have potential to reshape our public policy discourses. This study thus examines a constellation of discourses, cultural practices, industry factors, musical relationships, cultural influences, and interrelation- ships among texts (artists, m usic, musical per for mance) that demonstrate the complicated role that rhythm and blues culture has had in making and shaping black culture and politics. The examination both corrects and generates; it pushes back at formulations of progressive politics that valorize the respectable nuclear family; it instead poses new possibilities for how we think about choice, desire, and familial and social organ izations. Beyond the songs and artists that this proj ect examines, it also considers how entangled networks work across media sites to bolster the cultural work the art performs. Hence the book focuses on the broader culture in addition to the music. Although beyond the scope of this book’s study, the sonic (the sound of the music) further contributes to music’s meaning as the sonic per for mance also layers meaning that does not emerge fully, for example, in simply reading the lyr ics. As Romans 10:17 reminds, “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard through the word (of Christ)” (emphasis mine). While I may have inherited 8- tracks, 45s, and 33s (many of which remain still in my mother’s basement), I certainly owned more than my fair share of xii PREFACE cassettes and compacts discs (many of which are currently in my basement, and some of which I have since resurrected in the pro cess of working on this proj ect). Both the compact disc and the cassette collections grew exponen- tially thanks to the era of BMG and Columbia House, where ten CDs could be mine for just $0.99 (plus shipping and handling) and the promise to buy one CD per month for the next six- months.4 While I w on’t let memory, or lack thereof, overstate the effect that “Secret Lovers” had on me, I will note that I always had (and still do) an affinity toward love songs, and, going by a wide range of the listening public’s classification, sad and romanticized ones. And so, when one of my older cousins would play Guy’s “Goodbye Love,” I once again found the soulful per for mances as moving as I found the failure of the promise to stay faithful in the love affair salacious and provocative.