The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Many fans of black music, including stalwarts of soul and R&B, most certainly agree. They simply add their music of preference, and perhaps their own string of modifiers, to Crouch and Marsalis’s list. (That’s because Aretha ain’t about democracy. She’s about the imperious demands of gospel genius as it baptizes and is transformed by secular sentiments. I’m not so sure that Crouch and Marsalis stand ready, however, to reciprocate. Whether Aretha, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, or Al Green count in their reckoning as much as, say, early Miles or middle Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald, or Ellington or Armstrong, is highly doubtful.) Despite the issues that separate black musical purists of any sort, their shared disdain for hip-hop culture’s claims to art unite them as citizens of the Republic of Nostalgia.

  The only problem is that, like hip-hop, jazz has a history of cultural attack. That history has been buried under an avalanche of nostalgia that hides jazz’s grittier roots. For instance, during the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, the response to jazz by a large segment of the black bourgeoisie, black intellectuals, and black artists anticipated the attack on rap. Such responses reflected, and were partly driven by, the negative response to jazz of large segments of white society. Jazz was viewed as a cultural and artistic form that compromised decency and morality. It was linked to licentious behavior and lewd artistic gestures. With its jungle rhythms, its blues base, its double entendre lyrics, and its sexually aggressive dancing, jazz, like hip-hop today, was the most widely reviled music of the ’20s and ’30s. Headlines in respectable publications asked questions like: “Did Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” According to the Ladies’ Home Journal, jazz was responsible for a “holocaust” of illegitimate births. A Cincinnati-based Catholic newspaper railed against the “sensuous” music of jazz. It said that “the embracing of partners—the female only half dressed—is absolutely indecent.” Blues pioneer W.C. Handy’s daughter, Lucille, was sternly admonished by the Colored Girls’ Circle of an elite school for “making a fool” of herself by singing and dancing her father’s blues and jazz. “It [continuing to sing and dance] will be under the peril of death and great danger to yourself,” the letter concluded.

  Many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals detested “gin, jazz, and sex.” The publications of black organizations, from the NAACP’s magazine, Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, to the Socialist Party–supported magazine, Messenger, edited by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owens (with assistance from George Schuyler), expressed opposition to jazz as well. For many Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, jazz was not viewed as a serious artistic achievement on par with European classical music. The great irony of blacks worshiping European music is that European composers such as Richard Strauss were, at the same time, expressing profound admiration for jazz.

  In 1926, one of the most important debates about the relation of black intellectuals to black mass culture took place in the pages of the Nation, between George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. In his essay, “The Negro Art Hokum,” Schuyler argued that there was no such thing as a distinct Negro art apart from American art. Schuyler said that Negro art occurred in Africa, but to “suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.” Schuyler argued that “slave songs based on Protestant hymns and biblical texts” and “secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues” were “contributions of a caste” in certain sections of America that were “foreign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes.” For Schuyler, defining art in racial terms was “hokum.”

  Hughes’s response, which ran a week later, became one of his signature essays. Entitled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes’s essay lamented the veiled desire of some black artists to be white. Such artists feared their own racial identity. Hughes argued that the black middle class was denying a crucial part of its heritage by denying the “beauty of [its] own people” and that Negroes should stop imitating “Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic air, Nordic art.” In their stead, he urged Negroes to embrace “the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised.” Hughes argued that the “common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.” For Hughes, the racial mountain was the inability of the black bourgeoisie to accept Negro art from the masses. Hughes exhorted his fellow Negroes to let “the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.” Hughes’s words are still relevant.

  By rehearsing this bit of jazz history—one that is conveniently overlooked by Crouch and Marsalis as they attack rap and proclaim jazz as America’s classical music—I am not arguing that we should romanticize black folk culture. Neither am I equating black folk art and pop culture. The big business of how black culture is packaged as a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace with billions of dollars at stake prevents such an easy equation. I’m simply arguing that all forms of black music have been attacked both within and beyond black culture. Blues and jazz, rhythm and blues, and soul have all been viewed as indecent, immoral, and corrupting of black youth. To be nostalgic for a time when black music offered a purer aesthetic or a higher moral vision is to hunger for a time in history that simply doesn’t exist. (Of course, another way of stating this is to say that all black music has an aesthetic appeal, and a moral vision, that will at first be assailed, but whose loss will one day be mourned and compared favorably with the next form of hated black music to come along.) Now as Marsalis, Crouch, and other critics perched aloft the wall of high black culture throw stones at hip-hop, they forget that such stones were once thrown at their music of preference. Bebop was once hip-hop. Ragtime was once rap. Bluesmen were once b-boys. What is now noble was once notorious.

  I’m not suggesting that there are no artistic differences between generations and styles of black music. Queen of Hip-Hop Soul Mary J. Blige is no Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin. (With Aretha’s gifts, very few have measured up. Those who do—such figures as Vanessa Bell Armstrong, Ann Nesby, and the late Marion Williams—flourish in the gospel realm.) And neither should she be. She couldn’t be even if she wanted to. Aretha’s art, in large part, draws from her sheer genius. The outsized technical ambitions encouraged in her by the gospel tradition of the black church. Her apprenticeship in sanctified emotion under gospel great Clara Ward and her famous preacher father, C.L. Franklin. And a voice whose only teachers were unrelenting pathos and undaunted passion. But Aretha’s greatest art has to do with a budding black feminist consciousness in the ’60s and ’70s. The demand for respect. The warning to men to think about their emotional intents with women. The prescription of feel-good therapies for sexual intimacy. And reckoning with the endless chain of fools produced by the quest for faithful love. In short, Aretha Franklin’s greatness is a product of its times.

  Mary J. Blige’s art is similarly a product of its times. True enough, hip-hop soul borrows the grooves, and the rhetorical gravity, of black soul culture. But hip-hop soul’s themes and rhythms occupy a distinct spiritual orbit. Blige says much of what Aretha said in the ’60s and ’70s, but she says it in the grittier, more explicit voice of hip-hop culture. Blige’s hip-hop soul feminism seeks real love. But it remakes edifying love confessions into gut-wrenching pleas of faithfuless. It makes self-love the basis of loving others. And it bitterly, defiantly refuses to accept sexual infidelity (though Aretha hinted as much when she said if men wanted do-right women they’d have to be do-right men). Blige is full of self-enclosed hip-hop angst. She also possesses, or at least she seeks to possess, a strong degree of hip-hop self-reliance. And she has a dark, stormy, rap-inflected (or is that infected?) artistic temperament.

  Blige’s art reshapes the blues at the bottom of Aretha’s soul feminism into a brooding female voice of resistance in an A
ge of Misogyny. Aretha’s generation certainly faced the same forces. But ’60s and ’70s sexism was cloaked beneath a chivalry and condescension that even black male versions of patriarchy could express. (Let’s not forget that there were plenty of brutal examples of black men mistreating black women at Aretha’s artistic peak. Lyrically speaking, male rappers talk a good game of ho-smacking and bitch-beating, but the likes of James Brown, Bill Withers, David Ruffin, Marvin Gaye, and a host of other artists allegedly abused wives, girlfriends, or lovers while singing sweet, rapturous praises to the fairer sex on wax.) Aretha Franklin’s and Mary J. Blige’s aesthetic values reflect, in part, the cultural and musical environments that shape their art. What they respond to—norms, practices, behaviors, expectations, ideas—has as great an effect on the character of their art as their particular musical gifts. While soul and hip-hop cultures embody virtues to which each musical style responds, the cultures contain vices to which each style reacts. (Franklin and Blige, of course, embody both the good and the bad of their respective traditions in their art.) The explicitness of hip-hoppers makes their limitations more obvious. But the subtlety of soul artists doesn’t make their limitations any less lethal.

  The problem with nostalgic blacks is that they place more artistic stock in the aesthetic form they are familiar with. (They often have what may be termed Hegel’s problem, named after the philosopher who believed that of all periods in history, the Zeitgeist, the world spirit, was best embodied in his own Prussian state during his life. For our nostalgic true believers, it translates into the notion that the best in black music happened to coincide with their own youth.) At the same time, they associate vice, or limitation, or smallness of artistic vision, with the aesthetic form most alien to them. While blues, jazz, soul, and R&B may share crucial assumptions, say, about women, the differences in their outward aesthetic forms makes us believe that one is more harmful or more foreign to black culture than the other. Thus, hip-hop’s misogyny is more jolting than the antipathy toward women that came through in some R&B. But within both hip-hop and what’s called urban contemporary music, there are artists who are appalled at the malevolence hurled at black women. And one need not look beyond these genres to find rich expressions of the seductive art of subtlety—as opposed to the “do me” explicitness common among current acts—practiced by artists of previous generations. Chante Moore and Tony Terry, Maxwell and Babyface, Prince Markie Dee and Heavy D are just a few.

  But nostalgia can’t explain every negative assessment of black pop culture. Even if it did, it wouldn’t mean that such judgments are necessarily wrong, even if they’re made for the wrong reasons. It may be that all the explanations about different artistic ages—and the limitations and possibilities each age presents—simply can’t change the fact that Mary J. Blige isn’t Aretha Franklin. Fine. But that’s not an indictment of hip-hop soul per se. It’s a value judgment about artists exploring similar though distinct genres at different times. I’m simply arguing that we respect the rules of each genre. We should adjust our evaluations of music based on the sorts of achievement that are possible, even desirable, in a given period. That doesn’t mean we can’t rank them. After all, some music is more complicated than other music. Some art forms take more mastery than others. But we should rank these different styles of music fairly. As important as it is, complexity of achievement is not the only value worth recognizing or celebrating in art. Plus, there are many kinds of artistic complexity that merit our attention.

  After all, our age has seen the likes of Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, and Mariah Carey, gifted artists of a greatly changed black sound, whatever that means, whose skills of delivery and interpretation far exceed the schlock that riddles so much contemporary black pop. (Still, each has contributed her fair share of misfires, as is true, of course, of the inimitable Ms. Franklin.) Contemporary hip-hop soul has also brought forth artists like D’Angelo. His young career holds promise for melding the wispy melodies of ’70s soul to hip-hop rhythms and occasionally raunchy sensibilities. And male groups Boys II Men and Jodeci, and female groups En Vogue and SWV rise above the mediocrity of their chosen idioms.

  But that’s just the point. Aretha outdid most of her peers whose names we have long since forgotten. Their failures, or better still, their relative successes, don’t invalidate the genres of black music in which they strived to make sublime art. Soul music is judged by its brilliance, not its blight. It is measured by its supreme visions, not its short-sighted trends. Like all great music, it is measured by the size of its aspirations—which are measured by the aspirations of its greatest artists, even the unsung ones—not simply by artists who managed to make the charts or to win the awards. (Donny Hathaway was never justly recognized for his extraordinary genius as a composer, artist, and musician. And Little Willie John was one of the greatest—some argue, the greatest—R&B singer, but few people know his name or work, except as it’s drained of its pathos by more famous but less gifted white artists.) Hip-hop is no different. It’s not the mindless, numbing pornography of the notorious 2 Live Crew that is the measure of hip-hop’s vitality, but the rhetorical, lyrical ingenuity of Rakim or Nas. Snoop Doggy Dogg’s seductive and highly accomplished rhyme flow, and Ice Cube’s narrative powers—plus Dr. Dre’s pulsating, harmonically complex G-funk—define gangsta rap’s metier. Not the mediocre rants of the late Eazy-E—although his brilliance as impresario and record producer, even talent scout, is undeniable. A lot of hip-hop is okay, more of it is good, and a little of it is great. Just like any other music.

  (Crouch, Marsalis, and other critics have argued against hip-hop even being called serious music. Of course, these critics hold the same grudge against latter-day Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, and almost any avant-garde jazz artist who championed unorthodox harmonies, departure from chord-based improvisations, atonal “noise,” and dissonant melodies. Neither Ellington nor Armstrong, heroes for Crouch and Marsalis—and for me, too—would be today what they were when they played. To be sure, they’d still be geniuses. But the character of their genius would be greatly altered. Their relentless reach for the edge of experience pushed them to keep growing, experimenting, and improvising. Conservative advocates of jazz end up freezing the form, making jazz an endless series of explorations of already charted territory. It’s a process of rediscovering what’s already been discovered. Such a process led Gary Giddins to remark that the problem with so much of contemporary neotraditionalist jazz is that Thelonius Monk couldn’t even win the annual contest that’s sponsored in his name! The very spirit of jazz—its imperative to improvise, which can often lead into dangerous, unmapped territory—is thus sacrificed in the name of preserving the noble, heroic traditions that grow out of a specific time in jazz’s history. What’s really being preserved is the product, not the process, of improvisation. But that’s another book.)

  At base, the perception of the aesthetic alienation of hip-hop culture is linked to a perception that black youth are moral strangers. I mean by “moral strangers” that black youth are believed to be ethically estranged from the moral practices and spiritual beliefs that have seen previous black generations through harsh and dangerous times. The violence of black youth culture is pointed to as a major symptom of moral strangeness. Heartless black-on-black murder, escalating rates of rape, rising incidents of drug abuse, and the immense popularity of hip-hop culture reinforce the perception of an ethical estrangement among black youth. In arguing the moral strangeness of black youth, many critics recycle bits and pieces of old-style arguments about the pathology of black urban culture. Widely popularized in Daniel Moynihan’s famous 1965 study of the black family—whose pathology was partially ascribed to a growing matriarchy in black domestic life—the notion that black culture carries the seeds of its own destruction is an old idea. The argument for black cultural pathology is really an updated version of beliefs about black moral deficiency as ancient as the black presence in
the New World.

  More recently, Cornel West has attempted to explain the problems of black culture by pointing to its nihilism. Since the nihilism argument has been used by many critics to prove the moral strangeness of black youth, I’ll explore it in some detail before arguing for an alternate perspective.

  For West, nihilism is “the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in black America.” West wants to unblinkingly stare down the problems of black culture, and to call a spade a spade: black crime is increasing, suicide is rising, hopelessness is spreading, and ethical surrender is pandemic. Yet liberals, West argues, simply close their eyes or believe that if they say what they see they’ll be thought of as cold conservatives. West also knows that mere moral corrosion, as argued by conservatives, is not large enough an explanation for what’s going on in black culture. West seeks to avoid the pitfalls of both conservative behaviorists and liberal structuralists by arguing for a complex vision of black culture that takes into account the “saturation of market forces and market moralities” in black life, while highlighting the crisis of black leadership. For West, such a strategy allows us to be frank in our discussions of black moral and spiritual collapse while refusing to scapegoat those blacks who are victimized by dehumanizing forces.

  West is right to grapple with issues of morality and behavior, matters that are largely taboo for the left. He’s also right to zoom in on the market forces and market moralities that besiege black culture. Still, as an explanation for what ails us, nihilism has severe problems. First, nihilism is seen as a cause, not a consequence, of black suffering. The collapse of hope, the spiritual despair that floods black America, the clinical depression we suffer, are all the pernicious result of something more basic than black nihilism: white racism. (The list includes economic suffering, class inequality, and material hardship as well, but I’ll get to those in a bit.) I don’t mean here just the nasty things many white folk believe about black folk. I’m referring to the systematic destruction of black life, the pervasive attack on the black sense of well-being, the subversion of black self-determination, and the erasure of crucial narratives of black self-esteem that are foundational to American versions of democracy. Nihilism is certainly self-destructive. That’s because black folk were taught—and have had it reinforced across time, geography, and ideology—that our black selves weren’t worth loving or preserving. Nihilism is the outgrowth, not the origin, of such harsh lessons. Without the destruction of white supremacy, black nihilism will continue to grow.