American Popular Music, from Meal, Who Started As a Street Ven- Edly Won 20 Encores
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he 1619 roject or centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. o wonder everybody is always stealing it. By Wesley Morris hoto illustration by ichael aul ritto NameCredit by Surname 60 ugust 18, 2019 61 he 1619 roject we go again. The problem is rich. If But there’s something even more blackness can draw all of this ornate fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn ’ve got a friend literariness out of Steely Dan and all Case, a musician who teaches at this psychotic origami out of Emi- Wheaton College, explained in an who’s an incurable nem; if it can make Teena Marie sing email that improvisation is one of everything — ‘‘Square Biz,’’ ‘‘Revolu- the most crucial elements in what tion,’’ ‘‘Portuguese Love,’’ ‘‘Lovergirl’’ we think of as black music: ‘‘The rais- andora guy, — like she knows her way around a ing of individual creativity/expres- pack of Newports; if it can turn the sion to the highest place within the chorus of Carly Simon’s ‘‘You Belong aesthetic world of a song.’’ Without to Me’’ into a gospel hymn; if it can improvisation, a listener is seduced animate the swagger in the sardonic into the composition of the song vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if itself and not the distorting or devi- it can surface as unexpectedly as it ating elements that noise creates. does in the angelic angst of a singer Particular to black American music as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if is the architecture to create a means it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s ‘‘I Can’t by which singers and musicians can Wait’’ remains the whitest jam at the be completely free, free in the only blackest parties, then it’s proof of how way that would have been possible deeply it matters to the music of being on a plantation: through art, through alive in America, alive to America. music — music no one ‘‘composed’’ It’s proof, too, that American (because enslaved people were music has been fated to thrive in an denied literacy), music born of feel- elaborate tangle almost from the ing, of play, of exhaustion, of hope. beginning. Americans have made What you’re hearing in black a political investment in a myth of music is a miracle of sound, an racial separateness, the idea that experience that can really happen art forms can be either ‘‘white’’ or only once — not just melisma, glis- ‘‘black’’ in character when aspects sandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats of many are at least both. The purity or sampling but the mood or inspi- that separation struggles to main- ration from which those moments tain? This country’s music is an arise. The attempt to rerecord it advertisement for 400 years of the seems, if you think about it, like a and one Saturday while we were certitude of Doobie Brothers-era opposite: centuries of ‘‘amalgama- fool’s errand. You’re not capturing making dinner, he found a station Michael McDonald on ‘‘What a Fool tion’’ and ‘‘miscegenation’’ as they the arrangement of notes, per se. called Yacht Rock. ‘‘A tongue-in- Believes’’; in the rubber-band soul long ago called it, of all manner of You’re catching the spirit. cheek name for the breezy sounds of Steely Dan’s ‘‘Do It Again’’; in the interracial collaboration conducted And the spirit travels from host to of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock’’ is malt-liquor misery of Ace’s ‘‘How with dismaying ranges of consent. host, racially indiscriminate about Pandora’s defi nition, accompanied Long’’ and the toy-boat wistfulness ‘‘White,’’ ‘‘Western,’’ ‘‘classical’’ where it settles, selective only about by an exhortation to ‘‘put on your of Little River Band’s ‘‘Reminiscing.’’ music is the overarching basis for who can withstand being possessed Dockers, pull up a deck chair and Then Kenny Loggins’s ‘‘This Is It’’ lots of American pop songs. Chro- by it. The rockin’ backwoods blues relax.’’ With a single exception, arrived and took things far beyond matic-chord harmony, clean tim- so bewitched Elvis Presley that he the passengers aboard the yacht the line. ‘‘This Is It’’ was a hit in 1979 bre of voice and instrument: These believed he’d been called by black- were all dudes. With two excep- and has the requisite smoothness to are the ingredients for some of the ness. Chuck Berry sculpted rock ’n’ tions, they were all white. But as keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins hugely singable harmonies of the roll with uproarious guitar riff s and the hours passed and dozens of delivers the lyrics in a desperate Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleet- lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick songs accrued, the sound gravitat- stage whisper, like someone deter- wood Mac, something choral, ‘‘pure,’’ Jagger and Robert Plant and Steve ed toward a familiar quality that I mined to make the kind of love that largely ungrained. Black music is a Winwood and Janis Joplin and the couldn’t give language to but could doesn’t wake the baby. What bowls completely diff erent story. It brims Beatles jumped, jived and wailed practically taste: an earnest Chris- you over is the intensity of his yearn- with call and response, layers of syn- the black blues. Tina Turner wrest- tian yearning that would reach, for a ing — teary in the verses, snarling copation and this rougher element ed it all back, tripling the octane moment, into Baptist rawness, into during the chorus. He sounds as if called ‘‘noise,’’ unique sounds that in some of their songs. Since the a known warmth. I had to laugh — he’s baring it all yet begging to wring arise from the particular hue and tim- 1830s, the historian Ann Douglas not because as a category Yacht himself out even more. bre of an instrument — Little Rich- writes in ‘‘Terrible Honesty,’’ her Rock is absurd, but because what Playing black-music detective that ard’s woos and knuckled keyboard history of popular culture in the I tasted in that absurdity was black. day, I laughed out of baff lement and zooms. The dusky heat of Miles 1920s, ‘‘American entertainment, I started putting each track under embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s whatever the state of American investigation. Which artists would the confl ation of pride and chagrin emotional police siren. DMX’s society, has always been integrated, saunter up to the racial border? I’ve always felt anytime a white per- scorched-earth bark. The visceral if only by theft and parody.’’ What And which could do their saunter- son inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, we’ve been dealing with ever since ing without violating it? I could hear You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white live-in-concert Whitney Houston and is more than a catchall word like degrees of blackness in the choir-loft boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here Prince on electric guitar. ‘‘appropriation’’ can approximate. Opening pages: Source photograph of Beyoncé: Mazur/Getty Kevin Images. Holiday: Shutterstock. right: Above Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, Library. Public via Getty Images. viaGai York Terrell/Redferns, Turner: Getty Images.The New From left: Above Images. Raglin/Getty Bennett Images. Lamar: via Getty Walter/WireImage, Chris Richards: 62 ugust 18, 2019 The blackface performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (T. D. Rice), who Sheet music of ‘‘Jim Crow Jubilee: A Collection of Negro Melodies,’’ pioneered the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ character, in a portrait from the mid-1800s. published in 1847. The truth is more bounteous and in, underscoring that black people Blackness was on the move before black man singing while grooming more spiritual than that, more con- have often been rendered unnec- my ancestors were legally free to a horse on the property of a white fused. That confusion is the DNA of essary to attempt blackness. Take be. It was on the move before my man whose last name was Crow. the American sound. Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: ancestors even knew what they On went the light bulb. Rice took It’s in the wink-wink costume It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly had. It was on the move because in the tune and the movements but funk of Beck’s ‘‘Midnite Vultures’’ identifi ed with black music, for real white people were moving it. And failed, it seems, to take down the old from 1999, an album whose kicky and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley the white person most frequently man’s name. So in his song based nonsense deprecations circle back Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Mack- identifi ed as its prime mover is on the horse groomer, he renamed to the popular culture of 150 years lemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New him: ‘‘Weel about and turn about jus earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, who made ‘‘The Harlem Shake.’’ Yorker who performed as T. D. so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz Sometimes all the inexorable Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted Jim Crow.’’ And just like that, Rice of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we mixing leaves me longing for some- after as ‘‘Daddy’’ Rice, ‘‘the negro had invented the fellow who would once called ‘‘blue-eyed soul,’’ a thing with roots that no one can rip par excellence.’’ Rice was a min- become the mascot for two centu- term I’ve never known what to do all the way out. This is to say that strel, which by the 1830s, when ries of legalized racism.