June 2007 Archives
Critical Musings: The 2007 BET Awards
So the first four stars to appear on the 2007 BET Awards were Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Holiday, Mo'Nique and Dana Owens-I'm thinking that's a good thing for the self-esteems of thousands of black women who don't deem their bodies-real bodies-as bodies that matter and bodies deserving to be desired. Music videos aside, BET gets some credit here for recognizing the psychic and spiritual struggles of many of the women in their audience, with relation to their bodies. Call it the Debra Lee effect.
Years ago I wrote that Diana Ross's image as an independent woman was as "saccharine as her voice." I don't feel that much different about her now. Ms. Ross benefited from songwriting and production that just crackled - listen to "Come See About Me," "Love is Like An Itching in My Heart," "Love Hangover" or anything on that Diana album, the gem that Nile
Rodgers and Bernard Edwards provided her in 1980. But Mary Wells, Brenda Hollaway, and a pre-Buddah label Gladys Knight had access to those same songs and production, and none of them has ever achieved the legendary status (Ms.
Knight, notwithstanding) of Ms. Ross. The bottom line is that Ms. Ross was a star and after 40 years that's all that matters.
Any credit I give Mr. Combs, I give quite grudgingly and even then, it's never with regards to his music. Admittedly I got a jones for Keyshia Cole, but there's just something about "Last Night" that's infectious. But how
progressive would it have been for Ms. Cole to have been the object of Mr. Combs's affections in the video for "Last Night" instead of the Eurasian staple that always accompanies him to the marketplace. Ok, if you're selling perfume, I get it, but how about a simple gesture to those round-away woman? Every time I hear Ms. Coles sing "I used to think that I wasn't fine enough" in those opening lines of "Love," I go shaking my head.
The JB tribute was nice and it's always great to see Public Enemy on stage one. But as contemporary R&B continues to be shaped by folk like Akon and Rihanna, who don't share in the nostalgia of an aging African-American (as opposed to Black or diasporic) public, I wonder how long slogans like "I'm Black and I'm Proud" will resonate for an increasingly "Afropolitan" audience.
The moment Birdman showed up on stage with his kids, the whole rapper with his kids thing was over. And we understand it's all a performance to show that they are engaged fathers. Whatever. Notice how you rarely see female performers traffic in their kids the same way, likely because it's assumed they are doing the parenting thing full time and thus there's little value in showing off their kids. That said, I have to side with Nelly, Akon and Lil Wayne when they suggested that hip-hop ain't supposed to be raising anybody's kids. If you got a 6-year-old who is watching hoochie-mama videos on BET, that sounds like a parenting problem to me. Turn the videos off - and then complain to your cable provider about the content of their programming, with the threat of contacting some of their advertisers if said cable provider isn't responsive.
"Appearing on tonight's show...Lil' Jon, Lil' Kim, Lil Wayne..." - high comedy indeed.
MusiQology 101 with Dr. Guy
By day Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is a not-so-mild-mannered ethnomusicologist and college professor (and part-time baseball player), but by night he dons his Funkenstein cape and transforms into Dr. Guy, an accomplished pianist and leader of Dr. Guy's MusiQology. Y the Q?, the first release from Dr. Guy's MusiQology, pushes the boundaries of what some might refer to as "Smooth Jazz," draws on references like Quincy Jones, Joe Sample, Toni Morrison ("Sula's Groove, "Dorcas's Lament" and "Milkman's Dues"), Herbie Hancock and the Doobie Brothers, while giving love to the Philly community that he now claims.
But let's be clear about the credentials; Guthrie Ramsey is not simply anybody's music teacher and frustrated musician. His day job is as Associate Professor of Music History in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. Ramsey is also the author of the award-winning and critically acclaimed Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2003), which was named outstanding book of the year by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). As one reviewer wrote about Ramsey and Race Music, "As a working jazz musician and former musical director for a church, Ramsey has a first-hand perspective on the intimacy between the music and the folk. As an interdisciplinary scholar trained as an ethnomusicologist he is also cognizant of the music and the formal academic modes of its study. The great success of Race Music is that Ramsey never loses sight of either of these worlds and that fact alone makes Race Music a groundbreaking addition to the fields of Ethnomusicology and African-American Studies."
In a world where ballplayers rap and rappers act, Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is the real deal, bridging the gap between what feeds our intellect and what feeds our spirit as well as the Ivory Tower and the Jazz club.
What the Hell is Juneteenth?
So let me get this straight: some two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation (freeing enslaved Africans in states loyal to the Confederacy, (but not those several “border” states who Lincoln didn’t want to piss off), word is finally delivered to a bunch of black folk in Galveston, Texas that they were free? Sounds like a skit from the lost season of Chappelle Show, but alas this is the stuff of American history. That day in 1865—June 19th—is now regularly referred to as Juneteenth and is currently a holiday in 14 States, including Alaska and California. I remember first hearing about Juneteenth 20 years ago when I was living near Buffalo, NY - northern outpost for black migrants from Alabama and Mississippi, hence the city’s well known affinity for Jheri curls well past their popularity - and wondering that someone surely must be joking. What the hell is there to celebrate about black folk being forced to live in slavery for two years longer than they needed to? And yet Juneteenth celebrations in cities like Buffalo, Galveston, and Durham, NC are a chance for blacks in those cities to affirm notions of community and survival with a steady flow of African dance and smoked pork butt (pulled-pork for the uninitiated).
Comedian Paul Mooney makes the point that there were likely whites who knew about the Emancipation Proclamation, but simply chose not to tell blacks they knew—some of whom that might have been kin. In that same spirit I imagine that there had to be blacks who were still unaware of emancipation even after June, 19, 1865. And then there’s the twisted irony of the many of those newly freed subjects who ended up back on the very plantations they often prayed to leave, working as share-croppers, in part, because of the comfort-zone that those plantations represented in a society that was not all that excited about the prospect of negroes flowing freely in the streets. But I can’t imagine what it must have been to be part of that generation of blacks, for which had been nothing more than a word and an idea, and who now could literally touch freedom and I guess it is for that memory them, that Juneteenth remains important.
Star-Spangled Freak
There's not been much to watch during this year's NBA Finals, as Tim Duncan and the lunch-pail ethos that defines his team's style of play has made for dreadful entertainment. The one breakthrough moment occurred as Ben Harper freaked the "Star Spangled Banner" on his slide guitar prior to Game 3. In another era, Harper's performance might have elicited some derision (though I don't know if Bill O'Reilly has weighed in yet), but at a moment when many Americans are feeling dislocated and disaffected, Harper's angular rendition spoke to the vertigo of the moment.
Of course, Harper was just tapping into a larger tradition of artists who have performed unique versions of the "Star-Spangled Banner" before major sporting events. Perhaps the most well known was Jose Feliciano's version, performed at Detroit's Tiger Stadium prior to a 1968 World Series game between the Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals. Performed at the height of anti-Vietnam protests, the version by the Puerto Rican-born Feliciano resonated among those pushing for a new version of American democracy and raised the ire of those who thought his highly idiosyncratic version was unpatriotic.
Nearly twenty-years later, it was Marvin Gaye who freaked the national anthem at the 1983 NBA All-star game at the LA Forum, with a drum machine, a reggae-styled backbeat and all the Soul-man swagger he could muster. It was a moment where Black Americans--and more than a few others--could again make a claim on American style democracy, by highlighting the pluralism that makes such a democracy work, especially as Reagan-era domestic policies put many people at risk. Performing a little more than a decade after his seminal protest recording "What's Going On," this was Gaye's last stand. A year later he would be dead, murdered by his father. That the NBA saw fit to revisit Gaye's moment, by staging a digitized duet between Gaye and his daughter Nona at the 2004 highlights how the radical underpinnings of Gaye's performance have been gutted from the popular imagination.
Ben Harper likely took his cue from Jimi Hendrix, who Woodstock inspired performance of the song in 1969, still brings into focus the jagged edges of this thing called America.
60 Is the New 40: Frankie Beverly
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.
Mint Condition dropped The Luxury Brown two years ago and are currently in the studio recording a follow-up. As opening acts go, you'll find few as professional and accomplished as Mint Condition. The audience was clearly excited as the band ran down some of its more well known hits like "Pretty Brown Eyes," "You Send Me Swinging" and "What Kind of Man Would I Be" and a little less enamored with some of the material from Luxury Brown, which comes closer to the avant-garde R&B that some of us thought Mint Condition represented when they first hit in 1991. Good music aside it was clear after about a half-hour that folks were ready to get their Frankie Beverly on.
Now for some perspective; Maze hasn't released any new material since 1993 and have been without a recording contract for more than a decade. Lead singer Frankie Beverly is 60 years old. The group has never had a song that cracked the Top 20 on the Hot 100 charts. And yet the audience that came together on Friday night couldn't wait long enough for the group to hit the stage greeting them with a standing ovation. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly is the closest thing that Black America has to a Grateful Dead and no doubt given the number of women who rushed the stage to get a piece of Beverly--who is attractive in that Ed Bradley vein--Maze likely has its own set of traveling (male and female) groupies.
As such the success of Maze speaks as much about the quality of the music--tracks like "Back in Stride", "Joy and Pain" (which made the group relevant to Generation Hip-hop courtesy of Rob Base) and "Before I Let Go" are simply timeless--as it does the notions of community that undergirded the music in the first place. A Frankie Beverly concert presents more of an integrated class portrait of contemporary Black America than many black churches do as the group appeals to the black middle class's decidedly upscale view of itself as well as the need of working class folk to revisit their humanity The same goes for the intergenerational dynamic--more than a few folks in the house--including my boy Bomani Jones--weren't even born before Maze was discovered by Marvin Gaye in a Bay Area club in 1976. Is Frankie Beverly and Maze a great testament to the genius of black music? Probably not, but Maze is music to "people to"--the kind of music where strangers can "shake a hand, shake a hand" and go home knowing that a good time was had. Here's to hoping that Frankie "60-is-the-new-40" Beverly has more than a few years on stage left in that 60-year-old body.
"Baseball Been Berry, Berry Good to Me": Where Have all the African-American Players Gone?
"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.
Thirty years later, Major League 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. The largely white commentators and analysts at the time had a name for players like Montanez: “hotdogs.” And yet these subtle flourishes were some of the ways that Latino players established their racial and ethnic identity in a sport that would rather whitewash them—flourishes that were not unlike the wild abandon that Jackie Robinson would steal home early in his career or the basket-catch that became Willie Mays’s trademark.
Years later quips like “that’s just Manny being Manny” in reference of the idiosyncrasies of Manny Ramirez, is a manifestation of Latino players trying to establish their individuality, especially at a time when many major league teams set up baseball academies in places like the Dominican Republic hoping that they can sign the next Jose Reyes—cheaply—at the age of 15. And in this regard Sheffield didn’t miss the mark—these academies are like finishing schools (or strip mines as Dave Zirin suggests) as franchises hope to have an increased ability to control, what they see as critical investments. Ironically it also points to one of the reasons, many African-Americans don’t pursue the sport seriously.
When Sheffield entered the major Leagues at a 19-year-old in 1988, he was on the latter cusp of the last major influx of African-American players. The 1980s produced African-American players such as Barry Bonds, Joe Carter, Fred McGriff, Ken Griffey, Jr. (all future hall of famers) Bo Jackson and the tragic examples of Darryl Strawberry and Sheffield’s uncle Dwight “Doc” Godden. When the latter two players broke into the Major Leagues with the New York Mets in 1983 and 1984 respectively, they were the first superstars produced by the team (this a team that once forced outfielder Cleon Jones to publicly apologize for having public sex with a white woman during spring training). Playing in the largest market in the country, Strawberry and Godden had the potential to be the flagship stars of the league for years to come. But rather than market the duo the way that the Chicago Bulls and the NBA marketed Michael Jordan, the Mets and the league seemed to take their African-American ballplayers for granted—as if the league was still living off the goodwill of allowing Robinson in the league. And remember this is also an era when Al Campanis, general managerthe Los Angeles Dodgers, stated on national television on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Robinson breaking the color-line, that he didn’t think African-Americans had the cerebral capabilities to be good managers (can somebody say Cito Gaston—two times!)
While the careers of Strawberry and Godden were ultimately derailed by their inability to use good judgment, particularly in relation to the cocaine that seemingly flowed freely in major league clubhouses in the 1980s, the reality is that the Mets never fully understood the pressures that were placed on two African-American men who were 21 and 19 respectively when they entered the league. In many ways the outspokenness of Sheffield and Barry Bonds’s arrogance and aloofness are a manifestation of that particularly moment in baseball. Indeed the Mets recently chided one of their only African-American players, Lastings Milledge, for recording a “gangsta rap” CD as if African-American players are not allowed to continue to live in the worlds that produced them in the first place—this twenty years after Strawberry was called out by white teammate Wally Backman for making a rap record (Strawberry in kind, called him a “redneck”). The reality is that with the Major Leagues unable and unwilling to market a new generation of African-American players, like Sheffield and Bonds, who they deemed as too difficult, young African-Americans turned to sports like professional basketball and football, where the stylish imprint of African-Americans—and increasingly hip-hop, to the dismay of both the NFL and NBA—could be easily discerned.
