TRADITIONAL GOSPEL IS THE MUSIC OF mass choirs, ecstatic solos, and pounding, clapping rhythms. “Real gospel music is an intelligible sermon in song,” says Harold Bailey, who led the Harold Bailey singers in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout its history, this church music has influenced, and been influenced by, the popular music of its time.
Today’s acts—like Be Be and Ce Ce Winans, Sounds of Blackness, Take Six, Commissioned, Tramaine Hawkins, and the Winans brothers—have added highpriced producers, up-tempo arrangements, and pop instrumentations to traditional gospel. Thus armed, they are gaining airplay on so-called contemporary urban radio, home otherwise to acts like Michael Jackson, Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, and C&C Music Factory. As gospel music gains new acceptance, it is once again moving away from its roots.
Nash Shaffer, host of a traditional gospel program on Chicago radio station WNDZ, is one of a number of gospel devotees who object to the recent popularization of the music. “The reason young people like contemporary gospel music is because of the rhythm and its secular appeal,” says Shaffer, who is also the minister of music for the Vernon Park Church of God in Chicago. “The horns and the synthesizers override the message, and because of the instrumentation the message is vague and void. It gets lost in the beat and you end up having a shindig on Sunday morning.”
One group Shaffer is concerned about is Be Be and Ce Ce Winans, whose phenomenal success started with a Grammy Award–winning debut album on Word Records. In 1988 they signed with a mainstream label, and their first album on the Capitol/Sparrow label, Heaven, was the second gospel record in history to go gold, after Aretha Franklin’s success in 1972 with Amazing Grace. The current Winans album, Different Lifestyles, reached number one on the Billboard rhythmand-blues charts, a first for gospel.
The new album is a curriculum of musical diversity—from rap and up-tempo rhythm-and-blues to a sample of a gospel shout. But it doesn’t contain any purely traditional gospel. The single “I’ll Take You There,” which is at number seven on the rhythm-and-blues chart, is a remake of the Staple Singers, classic that allows the Winans to pay tribute to a seductive blend of 1970s gospel and pop. The album’s first single, “Addictive Love,” which went to number one on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart, makes codependency with the divine a palatable proposition. “We were blessed with a record company that put dollars into our budget,” says Ce Ce Winans, “so that we could come off sounding the way we feel gospel music should have sounded a long time ago.”
The Winans help make visible the implicit sensuality of gospel music, a sometimes embarrassing gift that draws forth the repressed relationship between body and soul. The suggestive ambiguity of their art is expressed in their songs, many of which can be read as signs of romantic love and sensuous delight or as expressions of deep spiritual yearning and fulfillment. In “Depend on You,” the Winans sing, “I never thought that I could ever need someone / The way that I have come to need you / Never dreamed I’d love someone / The way I’ve fallen in love with you.”
Such lyrics are exactly the problem, according to the traditionalists. “Whereas traditional gospel music talks about the love of God,” says Shaffer, “contemporary gospel music wants to make love to God.” Lisa Collins, who writes about gospel music for Billboard magazine, says she receives calls from unhappy listeners when she plays a new hit by Be Be and Ce Ce Winans on Inside Gospel, her syndicated radio show. “We get numerous calls from listeners who think that there’s not enough reference to Jesus,” she says, “that their music has strayed too far from the church, that they water down the lyrics or that their music is playing to a secular crowd. But,” she adds, “if you go to their concerts, there is no doubt that it is a ministry.”
Ironically, traditional gospel music initially faced its own barriers within the church. It was an offspring of blues, jazz, and ragtime music born in the black Pentecostal churches at the end of the nineteenth century; early religious music consisted of barbershop quartet harmonies sung a capella by mostly male groups. A Chicago blues pianist named Thomas A. Dorsey forever changed black religious music in the 1920s by featuring women (and later men) singing in a choir tradition backed by piano accompaniments dipped in a blues base and sweetened by jazz riffs. Before the belated embrace of gospel music by mainline black churches in the 1940s, gospel thrived in mostly lower-class storefront Pentecostal churches, stigmatized as a sacrilegious mix of secular rhythms and spiritual lyrics.
Traditional gospel greats, including the late Clara Ward, Marion Williams, Roberta Martin, and Inez Andrews, took the exploration of jazz and blues further. These artists harnessed the seductive beats of jazz to gospel’s vibrant harmonies and percolating rhythms, and transformed the anguished wails of the blues into holy shouts brimming with deferred joy. Performers as varied as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown started out singing gospel, and the music can be said to have spawned rhythm-and-blues, soul, and funk. Gospel music gained wide popular acceptance with Clara Ward’s appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957 and with the incomparable Mahalia Jackson’s numerous concerts at Carnegie Hall in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Clara Ward, in fact, was criticized in the 1960s for singing gospel music in Las Vegas.)
But gospel music’s real transformation into a popular and contemporary musical art form was quietly affected by Edwin Hawkins’s 1969 rhythm-and-bluesinfluenced arrangement of the traditional Baptist hymn, “Oh, Happy Day.” The groundbreaking song was captured on a two-track recorder in the basement of a California Pentecostal church and was performed by the North California State Youth Choir, eventually selling more than 2 million copies. Edwin Hawkins’s feat prepared the way for two divergent but occasionally connected developments in contemporary gospel music.
On the one hand, artists like Andrae Crouch and Hawkins’s younger brother Walter experimented with gospel within the boundaries of the religious world. Their work was performed in church concerts and secular music halls to a largely religious audience. Their appeal was primarily defined by young black Christians seeking to maintain their religious identity. On the other hand, Edwin Hawkins’s success also broke ground for groups like the Staple Singers, who performed primarily in secular musical arenas and whose themes and sound were adapted to popular culture sensibilities and recast as “message music.” Thus, instead of the traditional gospel themes of God’s love, grace, and mercy, the Staple Singers sang about redemptive community and self-respect.
On their 1971 reggae-influenced number one soul and pop song, “I’ll Take You There,” they claimed: “I know a place / Ain’t nobody cryin’ / Ain’t nobody worried / Ain’t no smilin’ faces / Lyin’ to the races / I’ll take you there.” And on their number two song, “Respect Yourself,” from the same album, BeAltitude: Respect Yourself, they sang: “If you disrespect everybody that you run into / How in the world do you think anybody ’sposed to respect you? / Respect yourself.” Their recordings from the 1970s showcase three crucial features of contemporary gospel: significant radio play on nonreligious formats, the broad use of pop music conventions to explore their musical ideas, and, at best, oblique references to divinity or God.
In the last few years, black gospel music also inspired a group of white religiously oriented singers like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, who are considered contemporary Christian musicians. (The dividing line between black gospel and contemporary Christian music is primarily racial, although black artists like Be Be and Ce Ce Winans, Take Six, and Larnelle Harris also show up on the contemporary Christian charts.) Traditional gospel music has never been completely comfortable with its parentage of black secular music. In the early parts of this century, frequenting nightclubs, blues bars, and dance halls was considered un-Christian and was forbidden. And there are still those who feel that the secular world should be kept out of the church. Harold Bailey, who is now the director of Probation Challenge, an organization that works with former prisoners in Chicago, says, “When we speak in terms of contemporary we are speak
ing of something temporary, of the moment, which is contrary to scripture. Those who want to rock will inevitably roll into hell.”
The sound of contemporary gospel, many devotees of traditional gospel say, is indistinguishable from new jack swing or technofunk, and it thrives on postmodern instrumentation, contemporary pop grooves, and religiously ambiguous lyrics. Some contemporary gospel, in fact, is called new jack gospel: Teddy Riley, who most recently produced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, also helped produce the Winans brothers’ album, The Return; and among contemporary gospel artists are rappers like Mike E.
But a gnawing skepticism about the church’s ability to address contemporary cultural issues, coupled with a steep decline in church membership, may modify the hard line taken by traditional religionists. Contemporary gospel music is helping the uninitiated to discover, and the committed to remember, the church. One contemporary gospel artist, Tramaine Hawkins, who was heavily criticized when her single “Fall Down” was played in discos, says that the song “opened up some real avenues of ministry” and brought listeners to more traditional gospel artists like Shirley Caesar. “I tried contemporary gospel,” confesses Caesar, “but it didn’t work for me.” She believes that she is part of a venerable tradition to which all gospel artists must return. “I’m part of the ‘be’ crowd,” she explains. “I’ll be here when they leave, and I’ll be here when they come back.”
Ce Ce Winans says that contemporary gospel brings a wider audience to the gospel message through high production values. “Being able to be played on mainstream radio without having any less quality than mainstream artists is important,” she says. Without serious record company support, she says, great gospel singers of the past were deprived of a wide audience. For all its controversy, contemporary gospel music continues to evolve and inspire. Groups like Take Six, which mixes a capella jazz with gospel themes, and the Sounds of Blackness—produced by Jam and Lewis and presently touring with Luther Vandross—prove that contemporary gospel is an art form as malleable as it is durable and innovative. And as contemporary gospel music continues to provide inspiration to its religious adherents and musical delight to all appreciative listeners, it preserves and extends the classic functions of traditional gospel music.
Twenty-Seven
MARIAH CAREY AND “AUTHENTIC” BLACK MUSIC
When Mariah Carey emerged as a musical superstar in the early 1990s, a great deal of attention was paid not only to her pipes but to her genes as well. As a biracial woman, Carey evoked ancient racial tensions in a culture that embraced her music even as it struggled to reconcile her identity to her artistry. After all, our country is obsessed with racial pedigree and purity. This essay, which first appeared in the New York Times in 1994, traces the racial tensions around Carey’s racial identity, and takes the occasion of her Music Box album’s ascent to the top of the charts to reflect on how we characterize “black” and “white” music. Interestingly, once Carey divorced husband and music mogul Tommy Mottola (who most recently gained notoriety for being called “racist and very, very, very devilish” by Michael Jackson), she became more radically identified with the black music she loves, especially the hip-hop culture from which she had been carefully steered away in her early career.
AT ITS BEST, POP MUSIC PRESSES AN ANXIOUS ear to American society, amplifying our deepest desires and fears. At times, too, pop music almost unconsciously invites us to listen to ourselves in ways forbidden by cultural debates where complexity is sacrificed for certainty. In this vein, the re-ascent to the top of the charts of Mariah Carey’s most recent album, Music Box, signals more than her musical dominance.
One source of Carey’s significance—and undoubtedly the sharpest controversy around her—has nothing to do with the singer’s gargantuan musical gifts. Instead it derives from the confusion and discomfort that her multiracial identity provokes in an American culture obsessed with race. Though she has made no secret that she is biracial (her mother is white, her father a black Venezuelan), Carey’s candor evokes clashing responses from fans and critics. Some see her statement of mixed heritage as a refusal to bow to public pressure to choose whether she is black or white. But in light of the “one drop” rule—where a person is considered black by virtue of having one drop of black blood, a holdover from America’s racist past—many conclude that the issue of racial identity, for Carey and other interracial people, is settled.
To make matters more complex, Carey’s vocal style is firmly rooted in black culture. It features a soaring soprano and an alternately ethereal and growling melisma that pirouettes around gospel-tight harmonies. So if she’s not clearly black yet sings in a black style, is she singing black music? And what difference does it make? Without even trying, Carey’s music sparks reflections about how race continues to shape what we see and hear.
Partly what’s at stake is the messy, sometimes arbitrary, politics of definition and categorization. What makes music “black music” and who can be said to legitimately perform it? Consider the fiery fusion of rock, soul, and blues performed by Lenny Kravitz (like Carey, the child of an interracial marriage) and Terrence Trent D’Arby, or the socially conscious hard rock of the group Living Color. Is theirs black music? Though the answer is often negative, the roots of their music can be traced to black cultural influences, from Howlin’ Wolf to Jimi Hendrix. The difficulty of fixing labels on what D’Arby, Kravitz, and Living Color do highlights the racial contradictions at the center of contemporary popular music.
Behind this painful, often protracted struggle to get at the “original article” is what can only be termed the anxiety of authenticity. Such quests are more than academic for black folk because of the history of appropriation and abuse of black musical styles by white performers and producers. While black artists like King Oliver and Chuck Berry initiated musical innovations from jazz to blues–based rock and roll, the public recognition and economic benefits due them evaporated, while derivative white artists like Benny Goodman and Elvis Presley reaped huge artistic and financial rewards.
Curiously enough, the debate over authenticity lies at the heart of hip-hop, though irreverence and transgression are staples of rap culture. But authenticity, even in a genre as closely identified with black culture as rap, does not strictly follow the rules of race. For instance, while the white rapper Vanilla Ice was greeted within hip-hop with derision because he came off as a white boy trying to sound black, white rap groups like Third Bass and House of Pain have been enthusiastically embraced because of their “legitimate” sounds and themes. Conversely, black rap artists like Hammer and the Fresh Prince have been widely viewed as sellouts because of their music’s pop propensities.
An even thornier issue is the belief in black communities that some artists obscure their racial roots in a natural but lamentable response to a racist environment. As a result, they benefit from being black (given the extraordinary popularity of black music) but do not identify with the black people who support them before they discover a crossover market. In the extreme, this circumstance leads to the ideal of the pan-ethnic, omni-racial artist; an exotic fantasy whose energy derives from an implicit denial of the inherent value of simply being black. While Carey has been scrupulous at award ceremonies to thank her black fans, and to mention her black father in interviews, artists like Paula Abdul (a self-described “Syrian-Brazilian-Canadian-American” who first gained public notice as a “black” cheerleader/choreographer for the Los Angeles Lakers) have increasingly underplayed their black heritage.
Still, as the old saying goes, the finger pointed at artists implies several others pointed back at ourselves. American culture is painfully redefining itself through bitter debates about “identity politics,” “multiculturalism,” and “universalism.” Music cannot be naively expected to triumph over social differences. Because of the schmaltz that often passes for conscience in pop, the dream of transcendence—whether of race, or for that matter, of sex and class—is often hindered by sappy appeals to brothe
rhood and oneness. What such impulses reflect is a desire to fix what has gone wrong in a culture intolerant of difference.
The anxiety of authenticity about what and who is really black in pop music is proportional to just how increasingly difficult it is to know the answer. As multiracial unions of sex and sound proliferate, the “one drop” rule may lose its power. And, as cultural theorists are now proud to announce, race is not merely a matter of biology but an artifice of cultural convention. Such a construction is often used to establish and reinforce the power of one group over another. This view does not mean that black music is solely the product of perception. Nor does it mean that black music’s power must be diluted to a generic form. What it does suggest, however, is that the meaning of race, like the art it molds, is always changing.
In the end, what Carey’s career may teach us is that paranoia about purity is the real enemy of black cultural expression, which at its best is characterized by the amalgamation of radically different elements. Creolization, syncretism, and hybridization are black culture’s hallmarks. It is precisely in stitching together various fabrics of human and artistic experience that black musical artists have expressed their genius.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 58
