Music Is History , livre ebook

I dedicate this book to all scientists of sound.

CONTENTS
Introduction
1971
STRETCHED ON HISTORY S WHEEL
1972
MUSIC IS THE MESSAGE
1973
PAST IS PROLOGUE-AND PROTEST
1974
COOL LIKE THAT
1975
THE POV LANE
1976
HAVING TWO PARTIES
1977
FUTURE TO THE BACK
1978
DISCO TECH
1979
AN IDEA RUNS WILD
1980
TEACH THE CHILDREN
1981
INSIDE OUTSIDE LEAVE ME ALONE
1982
HISTORY BY THE NUMBERS
1983
WHY DOES EVERYBODY HAVE A BOMB?
1984
FILE UNDER
1985
LONG FOR YESTERDAY
1986
AND YOU DON T STOP
1987
GREATNESS EXPECTATIONS
1988
TASTE! HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
1989
SEEDS OF CHANGE
1990
RETURN OF THE IMPRESSED
1991
FURIOUS STYLES
1992
ECHO PARK
1993
X MARKS THE SPOT
1994
IN THE SUN I FEEL AS ONE
1995
PRESENT, TENSE
1996
YOU VE GOT ME FEELING EMOTIONS
1997
MOVING LIKE YOU RE STANDING STILL
1998
FAIR AND UNFAIR USE
1999
THINGS FALL APART
2000
THINGS COME TOGETHER
2001
THE BAD MINUS
2002-PRESENT
OUR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Every Song in This Book
Every Song in This Book, by Artist
Index of Searchable Terms
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
As long as I can remember, I have been listening to music, and that means I have also been collecting it, categorizing it, building bridges between songs I loved from one era and songs I loved from another era, songs from one genre and songs from another. In retrospect, I was practicing a kind of history, though I wouldn t have used that word then, and I m a little reluctant to use it now.
Why? Because I remember how I approached history as a student back in school. I memorized what I was supposed to memorize and was lucky enough to have a good enough memory to get by, but I wasn t always sure what I was learning, other than how to memorize. What if history wasn t just a few big events keyed to a few big dates and a long list of names? What if it was everything else? People say that history was written by the winners, but what if it was written by the simplifiers. Or is that too simple?

A few years back, I was asked to contribute an original song to Kathryn Bigelow s movie Detroit . I was aware of the events the film related, more or less. It was set during the Long Hot Summer of 1967, which saw a number of American cities fed up with police violence erupt with civil unrest: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati-and that s just the beginning of the alphabet. Then came Detroit. I knew Detroit had burned, and that it was the site of a disproportionate amount of the violence in America that summer. But, at the time, I didn t know much about the specific story at the heart of the movie, the Algiers Motel incident, in which a group of young Black men at a Detroit motel were brutally beaten by police.
Kathryn screened the movie for me. Near the beginning, there was a scene inside a concert hall. A group was about to go onstage. Just before they could, the cops shut down the hall and sent the group packing. No show tonight. I got up out of my seat and found the projectionist. Is this the Dramatics? I asked. He nodded. I knew the Dramatics from history, or at least music history. In the mid- 60s they had released a song called Bingo by a small label under the control of Golden World, a Detroit indie operation owned by a man named Ed Wingate. A few years later, Motown took over Golden World, and the Dramatics released a regional hit, All Because of You. That night in 1967, they were scheduled to perform the song at a showcase. But events overtook them, and they got into their vehicle to head home.
As the movie went on, I learned that the Dramatics weren t just incidental to the plot. They were central to it. As they drove away, they were surrounded by protestors and had to split up. Some of them, including the vocalist Ron Banks, found their way home. Others, though, didn t. Another of the group s singers, Cleveland Larry Reed, and a young man named Fred Temple-a friend of the band who is sometimes called a bodyguard, sometimes a valet-instead ended up in a local motel, at which point they were pulled into the darkest heart of history. I won t say more. I don t want to ruin the suspense of the movie. Is that strange, to worry about suspense in a story from fifty years ago? Or is suspense more dependent upon what is known than what happened?
That s what happened. The Dramatics changed the way I watched the movie. They didn t make it more dramatic, ironically, but they made it more real. There was something about watching two strands of history intertwine, about watching the large textbook narrative ( Detroit, 1967 ) intersect with this very specific set of sense memories (hearing the Dramatics on the radio when I was a kid-though most of their songs were sung by Banks, who stayed with the group, rather than Reed, who was so shattered by his night in the Algiers that he left secular music for the church). There was the official record, and then these other records, which were actual records. The song that the Roots wrote for the movie, It Ain t Fair, with Bilal singing, made it more real all over again-it was a song about pain and injustice that we recorded at Diamond Mine in New York, where I thought we could get a sound like Motown s Studio A. I was trying to join up with the past in my own way. It Ain t Fair went on the movie s soundtrack album next to songs by Marvin Gaye, Brenda Holloway, Martha Reeves, and others. The song, about history, was placed in music history, and became both. (The entire soundtrack pays off that idea of the present overlaid on the past, sometimes in surprising ways. I m thinking of Grow, where the actor Algee Smith, who plays Cleveland Larry Reed, duets with the man himself.) Despite my overall discomfort with the execution of the film-when is Black pain art, and are there times when depictions of it cross the line?-we managed to turn the song around and get a frame around the film.

Detroit was an especially explicit version of something that had always been implicit. When I think about history-what I ve learned, how I ve learned, when in my life I ve been ready to learn-it s always connected to music. It s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I think of the America we live in as a series of songs, partly because I think of everything that way. When I remember my own childhood, almost every event is keyed to a song. My parents were touring musicians, which meant that they would go away for stretches and leave me and my sister with my grandmother, and that meant that songs I heard, whether on the radio or my small 8-track player, were not only burned into my brain but time-stamped. Rufus s Egyptian Song reminds me of the nights before they went away. Deniece Williams s Song Bird reminds me of when the loneliness of being at my grandmother s started to sink in. Those moments of personal history hang from those songs like banners.
Maybe the best metaphor isn t individual songs, but record albums. Back in the 1920s and 30s, when music was recorded on 78 rpm discs, companies would sell binders for storing a set of them. They came to be called record storage albums-like photo albums. Later on, after the LP was invented in 1948, multiple songs could go on the same round platter. When the record album was born, the record storage album died. But I still approach history the same way. When I go back through the past in my mind, I imagine flipping through pages.
What I have tried to do in this book is to move year by year through modern history-and by modern history, I mean the slice of the planet, and specifically America, that coincides with my life. I m starting in 1971. For each year, I am selecting a song that represents some idea connected to history: how it was experienced at the time, or how it is learned and understood, or what figures surface within it, or how different versions of it are reconciled, or how they cannot be. Sometimes I ll look at actual music history-who made which records when, and how the circumstances of their creation can teach us all about the art form and the society that defined (and redefined) it. And sometimes I ll use ideas about music to illustrate ideas about history. Why do some moments surge up the charts while others fall away? Are some events A sides, while others are B sides? What is history s equivalent of liner notes? In the Roots, when we thought of titles for our albums, we wanted them to have three layers of meaning: to refer to something that was happening within the band, something that was happening in the hip-hop world, and something that was happening in the world in general. I have tried for a version of that here.
Like many children of the 70s, I first came to know the band Chicago through their monster radio hits, like Saturday in the Park or 25 or 6 to 4. As time went on, I came to know them by their albums, too. For a little while, I was drawn to Chicago III , which came out the year I was born-and, even closer than that, the month I was born (it was released on January 11; I was released on January 20). That s the Tattered Flag cover, which shows the band s logo on a distressed American flag, which itself illustrates a moment in history-the Vietnam War was still going, and the record came with a poster of the band standing in front of a field of crosses that represented those lost in the war. But the song I gravitated to was about a larger kind of history. It was Mother, which was about birth, but not mine or the album s-it was about the way that the planet birthed us all, and why we should be more respectful of our time with it.
Now skip forward slightly to September 1971, the same month as John Lennon s Imagine , the debut album by Labelle, and Aretha Franklin s Greatest Hits (since supplanted by a million other collections, but if you ve seen the cover image once, you ve never forgotten it-it s the one where she s standing on a red staircase, between two escalators, wearing a dress that perfe