Mark Anthony Neal

Critical Noir

Marvin Gaye's "song & dance" for Nike

Posted 08/13/2008 at 4:06 PM | 1 comment/s

Moments before the start of National Basketball Association's annual All-Star Game in February of 1983, the legendary Soul singer Marvin Gaye took center court at the Los Angeles Forum to perform the "Star Spangled Banner." . Armed with only a first generation drum machine (programmed the day before by Gordon Banks), his own vocal genius and the legacy African-American protest, Gaye offered the most soulful rendition of the National Anthem that most Americans had ever heard. That singular moment in Gaye's career has been recaptured in a recent Nike commercial featuring the so-called Olympic "Redeem Team."

Give Nike credit for mining the digital crates of Black American culture to make explicit comment on the hegemony of basketball, black music and their products in the world. It's difficult to watch images of Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Carmelo Anthony juxtaposed to classic footage of Marvin Gaye and not get warm fuzzies about America's role in the world and the position of black athletes and artists as ambassadors. The Nike commercial succeeds in part because it forces us to forget the silence of these same athletes on issues like China's support of the Sudanese government and Nike's own labor practices.

Years earlier Gaye sang the National Anthem before Game 4 of the 1968 World Series in Detroit. Months after the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the many riots that occurred that summer in cities like Detroit, there was some significance to Gaye's very traditional performance of the song. The next day, the National Anthem was performed by guitarist Jose Feliciano, who in contrast to Gaye, offered up a original Latino/a flavored version of the song, that shocked many who heard it.

Like so many artist who toiled in one of the most tumultuous moments in American history, Gaye was not immune to the realities of the Vietnam War, The Civil Rights Movement and the upheavals in the streets and on college campuses. Although Feliciano chided Gaye for playing it straight in 1968, as recounted in Michael Eric Dyson's book Mercy, Mercy Me: The Arts, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye, the artist was quite clear about his conflicted emotions on his seminal recording What's Going On.

Gaye never really returned to the political themes that marked tracks like "Inner City Blues", "Right On," and "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)," but it is diificult to view his later performance of the "Star-Spangled Banner" without hearing resonances of Feliciano's performance and What's Going On. As such, when one official at the Los Angeles Forum heard Gaye perform the song in rehearsal the day before the NBA All-Star game, he remarked "that's not the anthem I learned in grade school." Dyson notes, "By tying the [National Anthem] so explicitly to his gospel origins, and to a distinctly black sound...[Gaye] affirmed the value of his people's culture--and the struggles that made that sound possible."

Conversely, what's striking about the Nike commercial are the struggles that the ad silences and denies in its effort to celebrate its product, the privileged social status of black athletes and the managerial genius of the Olympic Basketball team's coach Mike Krzyzewski.. Forty years after the assassinations of King and Kennedy and Feliciano's musical protest, we're unlikely to see an athletic shoe ad that highlights the protests of African-American Olympic Sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. To acknowledge that moment, would call into question the very cultural imperialism and exploitation that Nike wants us to forget and the complicity of black athletes in that process.