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Yeah, I'm nostalgic: When
Mary J. Blige first uttered the opening lines to "You Remind
Me," it was about making sure that hip-hop remembered that
R&B came from the same streets where crackheads roamed and
he same tenement vestibules where drama went down on the regular.
But as I listen to Mario's "Let Me Love You" for the
727th time, it is perhaps easy to suggest that R&B has lost
its Soul, or that Clear Channel, Radio One (luv ya, Cathy!), AOL
Time Warner and Viacom - a neo-plantation cabal if ever there
was one - ripped its heart out. Hip-hop may have sold out, but
at least it has sold out on its own terms. R&B, on the other
hand, has sold out on somebody else's, on a pop-chart paper chase.
Truth be told, U(r)sher was nothing more than a soon- past-his-peak
R&B singer before John Smith laced him with some crunk junk;
Ray J could have sang the hook on "Yeah!" and topped
the pop charts. And now, 10 million units later, we want to act
like Mr. Raymond is the second coming of Michael Jackson? I ain't
willing to grant him the second coming of Bobby Brown. And it
is not like we even knew Mr. Legend(in his own mind) and Ms. Queen
of Crunk n' B were in the room, until some hip-hop act sanctioned
their presence.
But what ails contemporary R&B is not just a matter of the
commercial success of John Legend - and Amerie and Ciara and Mario.
The current state of R&B comes not from a sudden decline,
but a process more than 30 years in the making. This story begins
in 1972, when a few enterprising master's students at the Harvard
Business School prepared a study, commissioned by one of Columbia's
execs, detailing how the Columbia Records Group could better integrate
the then largely independent black music industry into the mix.
The now infamous Harvard Report - officially known as "A
Study of the Soul Music Environment" - has often been referred
to as a sinister blueprint aimed at arming a litany of "culture
bandits" with the theoretical tools to return black culture
to a neo-colonial state.
There's no denying that this is exactly the situation we're staring
at now, but it has nothing to do with the Harvard Report. What
those MBA students articulated was a no-brainer marketing plan,
informed by the commercial success of Motown and the cynical (though
not mistaken) view that the Civil Rights "revolution"
likely had more to do with the realities that black folk had disposable
income and white folk consumed a hell of a lot of black popular
culture than anything to do with real structural change in American
society.
In response to those expecting more sinister designs in the Harvard
Report, David Sanjek rhetorically chimes, "why did [Columbia]
feel the need to document what they should have already known?"
(Rhythm and Business, 62). What Sanjek suggests is that eventually
somebody in the music industry would have come up with their own
version of the Harvard Report - say, Clive Davis, who incidentally
was a president at Columbia at the time that the report was commissioned.
The point is, with or without the Harvard Report, the takeover
was well underway.
Black music has always had a complicated relationship with big
business. That this relationship has typically had little to do
with actual music perhaps explains the often unbalanced quality
of this thing we've come to call R&B. This complicated relationship
also partly explains what exactly R&B is.
The term R&B is essentially a shortened version of "Rhythm
& Blues," but as a novice might discern, that which is
called R&B bears little resemblance to the musical landscape
created by Ruth Brown, Louis Jordan, Laverne Baker, Charles Brown
and the Coasters. And perhaps that was the point. Musical innovations
aside, R&B was essentially a marketing ploy that finally gained
a significant foothold during the late 1970s.
R&B was born out of competing logics - record companies tried
to negotiate the realities of black culture and identity within
the history of race relations in America while trying at the same
time to reach a wider audience of black consumers and white record
buyers. As black radio needed mainstream advertisers to court
the emerging black middle class (as much an ideology as a measurement
of economic and social status) and mainstream record labels became
fixated on crossing over black artists to white consumers, terms
like "Soul" and "Rhythm and Blues" quickly
became too black.
The same terminology turnover occurred during the late 1970s when
urban began to stand for radio stations that essentially programmed
black music. As Nelson George explains, "Urban was supposedly
a multicolored programming style tuned to the rhythms of America's
crossfertilized big cities.... But more often, urban was black
radio in disguise." (The Death of Rhythm and Blues, 159).
According to the Harvard Report, black radio was strategically
important to record companies because it provided "access
to large and growing record buying public, namely, the Black consumer."
The report is oblivious to the fact that the very birth of what
was called "race music" in the 1930s was premised on
selling goods and services to a uniquelydefined audience, namely
African-Americans constrained by Jim Crow segregation -- an audience
that might even buy a record or two, in the process of buying
furniture, cleaning supplies and an insurance policy.
Nevertheless, the report is cognizant of
the growth of an emerging black middle class, one that would prove
attractive not just to record companies but also advertisers eager
to fuel black desires to con -sume the fetishes of a post-Civil
Rights world.
In the aftermath of centuries of struggle,
exploitation and violence, some members of the black middle class
often viewed their ability to consume widely throughout mainstream
society as an emblem of the "freedoms" won during the
Civil Rights struggle.
To get a sense of what this urbane blackness
would look and feel like, think of the immensely popular early
1980s Colt 45 commercials featuring Billy Dee Williams. Twenty
years later, no one really blinked an eye when poet Sonia Sanchez
and Eric Benet used "smooth" R&B to hawk for an
automobile maker.
As R&B began to be viewed as the quintessence
of upscale blackness, the more gritter aspects of black popular
music --that which was, as Houston Baker Jr. describes it, "too
blackly public" (as in
embarrassing, like black folk eating watermelon in public) - began
to disappear from the program list of some urban radio outlets
in the late 1970s.
So-called Southern Soul -- the ZZ Hills, Denise LaSalles and Betty
Wrights of the world -- was an example of the kind of music that
vanished from urban radio. Though Southern Soul didn't disappear
- labels like Malaco and Ichiban continue to promote Southern
Soul artists to this day -- the more bluesier aspects of its sound
and its references to black southern culture were the very antithesis
of the post - Civil Rights worldviews of many African-Americans.
The popped-over P-Funk of Rick James - one of the best selling
black artists at the beginning of the post - Soul era was emblematic
of the brave new world of R&B. The challenge for record labels
at this point
was to come up with product to feed the R&B machine.
The Harvard Report was adamant that the Columbia Records Group
should not attempt to purchase any of the prominent Soul labels
(Motown, Atlantic, Stax) or poach from them any of their established
artists. (CRG eventually purchased Stax, but only after the label
was in serious decline.)
What the report did advise was that CRG
cultivate relationships with small independent labels, as was
the case when CRG began a relationship with Kenny Gamble and Leon
Huff. The product was Philadelphia International Records (PIR),
and the impact of this groundbreaking relationship continues to
reverberate 33 years later.
As some critics -- notably John A. Jackson
in A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul -have
observed, many of the Harvard Report's suggestions were already
in play at Columbia, and the relationship with PIR is one such
example.
This brings us back to Clive Davis, the point-person on both the
PIR and Stax deals. Dismissed from Columbia is 1973 for financial
irregularities (some have linked his dismissal to our jumble word
for the day: alopya), Davis had nonetheless instigated the distribution
and creative-resource relationship with PIR that would become
the defining model for relationships between large corporate labels
and black music, making Davis himself, arguably , the most prominent
figure in the story of R&B.
The language that the Harvard Report uses to describe the value
of indie Soul labels is undisputable: "These small independents
could provide a source of product, in the form of 'hot masters;'
talent which could have national potential; experienced personnel...in
the areas of promotion and production; and serve as a source of
captive independent producers."
Davis has claimed that he never read the
Harvard Report, though it's clear that he would have been one
of key figures that the authors of the report would have interviewed,
and Davis may well have provided them with substantive info regarding
the importance of indie labels.
Regardless of the source, what the report
details is the blueprint for the black boutique label - essentially
based on a model of neo-colonialism, where an imperialist power
exploits the raw materials and talents of its satellites under
the pretense that such satellites are autonomous. As Norman Kelley
observes, "In classic colonialism, products were produced
in raw periphery and sent back to the imperial motherland to be
manufactured into commodities, then sold in metropolitan centers
or back to the colonies. The outcome for the colony was stunted
economic growth, as it was stripped of it’s ability to manufacture
products for its own needs" (Rhythm and Business, 10).
Looked at within the context of artistic
production, the colonial model creates a context where black artistic
production is mediated by a commodity culture more interested
in "moving product" than cultivating art or developing
artists, and then sold back to the masses as "art,"
in the process stunting creative development. The irony is that
which could be defined as organic artistic expression is seen
illegitimate by the masses, who have been programmed to accept
corporate packaging as the real.
Clive Davis is probably less a sinister figure in the rise and
fall of R&B and more the embodiment of the corporate hustler.
But there's no denying that the very blueprint he outlined at
Columbia became the most bankable strategy for R&B, especially
as he ascended to the leadership of Arista. For example, the most
significant and successful black "boutique" labels of
the 1990s, LaFace and Bad Boy Entertainment, were developed in
Clive Davis's house.
Despite the negative impact that the corporate co - opting of
black culture has on black creativity, we're still left with the
brilliance of the boutique model, as witnessed by the success
of PIR. It all began with the production: the simple elegance
of Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones" or Harold Melvin
and the Bluenotes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" or
the glossy funk of The O'Jay's "I Love Music". The "Philly
sound" (include Thom Bell and Mighty Three Publishing in
this mix) became the soundtrack for an upscale blackness as far
removed from the plantations of the South as it was from the factories
of the Midwest.
Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were the real deal, and although they
were not the sole innovators of this sound - think of the symphonic
landscapes of Gene Page or the string arrangements of Paul Riser
- the promotional and distribution muscle of Columbia allowed
the duo to nationalize what was essentially a regional sound.
By the end of the 1970s strains of the PIR could be heard in virtually
every popular R&B song.
The boutique model was not necessarily about crossing R&B
over to the mainstream, but rather positioning the larger corporate
labels to better control the R&B market. As such, R&B
artists were less compelled to compete with so-called pop artists.
Although this meant that R&B artists
had less access to resources - particularly as the record industry
went through a financial slump in the late 1970s - it also created
conditions where the R&B sound could develop without the additional
pressure of attracting a wider audience. Very few soul artists
made the transition to the R&B world. Notable examples are
figures like Bobby Womack, whose Poet (1981) and Poet II (1984)
represented the best work of his career and Diana Ross, whose
Diana (1980), produced by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, represents
the apex of her solo career.
And then there's the case of Michael Jackson, who remade himself
into an R&B artist on his groundbreaking Off the Wall (1979),
three years after he sat at the feet of Gamble and Huff, who produced
The Jackson's first CRG album after the Jackson 5's departure
from Motown in 1975. Often lost in conversations about Jackson's
emergence as the "King of Pop" is that he was cultivated
in the R&B world - along with such other singular black pop
crossovers of the 1980s as Whitney Houston and Lionel Ritchie.
If there was one figure who defined the genius of R&B it was
Luther Vandross, who with the release of his eponymous debut in
1981 became the genre's dominant artist. By coyly distancing himself
from the black gospel vocal tradition, which grounded so much
of the soul music of the 1960s and 1970s, Vandross cemented his
appeal as the quintessential R&B singer.
Specifically, Vandross was trying to distinguish himself from
generations of "shouters" such as gospel artists Joe
Ligon (lead vocalist of the Mighty Clouds of Joy) and the late
Archie Brownlee (of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi) or soul
vocalists like Wilson Pickett, the late Otis Redding and James
Brown.
As Jason King and others have suggested,
Vandross was a student of various music traditions, notably black
female vocalists of the 1960s (Dionne Warwick, The Bluebelles,
Aretha Franklin), the Burt Bacarach and Hal David songbook, and
the background-vocal stylings of the Sweet Inspirations. In addition,
the lush orchestrations that figured so prominently in Vandross
ballads - he is the definitive balladeer of the last generation
of popular singers - suggested that he too was a fan of Gamble
and Huff and Gene Page.
Still others such as Stephanie Mills, Frankie Beverly and Maze,
Jeffrey Osborne, Anita Baker, Peobo Bryson, Atlantic Starr, Kashif,
Loose Ends, Alexander O'Neal, The Whispers, Kenny "Babyface"
Edmonds, and Chaka Khan (post Rufus) helped give R&B a cohesive
sound in the early 1980s. As R&B was about attracting upscale
"urban" audiences -- whether legitimate members of the
black middle class or working class strivers -- it was by definition
a genre targeted to mature audiences.
As the 1980s progressed, R&B was increasingly
out of touch with a generation of black youth consumers, who felt
little need to distance themselves from the realities of the Jim
Crow era, especially as they faced down the venomous edge of the
Reagan era. In real terms the R&B world was being challenged
by the embryonic sounds of hip-hop for the attention (and disposable
income) of "urban" audiences.
A telling sign was the success of Chaka Khan's remake of Prince's
"I Feel for You" (1984), which featured an opening rap
by Melle Mel (technically the first hip-hop and R&B collaboration,
though in my mind Jody Whatley's "Friends", which was
blessed by Rakim, is more significant.) The song remains Khan's
best-selling single. Khan's version of "I Feel for You"
began a tenuous relationship between R&B and hip-hop, one
which would finally earn hip-hop validationfrom the black mainstream
and ultimately render R&B irrelevant.
To read parts 2 and 3, log on to : www.popmatters.com
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