What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture.

Mark Anthony Neal. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp. $19.99.

Mark Anthony Neal's What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture interprets the volatile political and cultural issues that arise from the clash between black music's two separate but overlapping lives. The first is black music's single life, lived in "organic connection" to "formal and informal institutions of the Black Public Sphere." Symbolized by backwoods social clubs, or "jook joints," and the "Chitlin' Circuit," venues which served largely "segregated" audiences in the North and South, the music of this "sphere" provided (provides?) an autonomous soundtrack to black social life. For Neal, the second life of black music has been a "tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass consumerism-one in which black agency is largely subsumed by market interests." In many ways, What the Music Said is a "torch song" for black music's tragic entanglement in a bad marriage.

What the Music Said chronicles another bad marriage even more compellingly--if apparently unwittingly. That is the wedding of African American culture to the jargon of late-twentieth-century professional academic cultural critique. As it bears witness to this marriage, What the Music Said consistently distances, simplifies, even silences the musical voices whose complexity and struggle for "agency" is the point. While Neal opens the work with an invocation of the cultural critiques that happened in Jesse Hodges's barbershop in the Bronx and consistently invokes the "organic" call-and-response dynamics of "vibrant counterpublic(s)" in the Black Public Sphere, he devotes far more space to the problems of intra-racial class antagonism, inter-racial entanglement, and "mass-mediated" cultural events. For instance, Neal's attention to the most thoroughly commodified kinds of contemporary black music--hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced R&B--to the total exclusion of other forms--House, Techo, Go-Go-- which have "resist ed" mainstream market saturation and remained more "covert" signals the analytical preferences of the work.

In Literary Theory and the Claims of History Satya Mohanty suggests that one of the limitations of postmodern literary and cultural criticism has been how "anti-foundationalist epistemological" claims have eroded the perceived existence of facts. This philosophical issue has led to a methodological turn away from evidence. At times, the "evidence" supporting points of analysis is the mere "fact" that a present theorist's claim mirrors another theorist's previous theoretical claim. What the Music Said suffers from its reliance on circular references to the discourse of cultural critique where evidence apropos to the music itself might appear. As a result, in What the Music Said, the beauty and subtle complexity of the music, even that which occurs within the Black Public Sphere, is often ensconced in complex--long--sentences and simplified by conceptual abstraction. Among the abstractions which supplant historical evidence and primary accounts are the uniformly stifling effects of "liberal bourgeois models of black public life," "middle-class sensibilities," and "mass-consumer markets" on the "mass-mediated counternarratives" of the artists.

The strongest aspect of What the Music Said is Neal's meditation on the convergence of consumer economics, hip-hop, and the would-be legacy of oppositional Black Power rhetoric as score and soundtrack of contemporary inner-city black life. His work counters uncritical approaches to hip-hop which construe the music as the "authentic" voice of inner-city black youth and reveals the extent to which the integrity of the art is threatened by the "For the Love of Money" ethics which permeate much of American culture. Neal's portrayal of hip-hop artists' attachment to "the real" and their efforts to create the present through a reconstituted past presents a valuable portrait of artists' struggle for sovereignty in post-industrial America. In the face of fractured communities, Neal presents artists' efforts to conjure the vibrant sensations of community in live recordings like Donny Hathaway's classic montage "The Ghetto." He extends these concerns into hip-hop's creation of what he terms a "Digitized Aural Urban La ndscape." In spite of songs with titles like "It's a Jazz Thing" and albums entitled Jazzmatazz, Neal sells DJ's Premiere and Ali Shaheed Muhammad short by suggesting they "unwittingly reintegrated the sound of jazz" in their jazz/hip-hop fusions. But these minor incidents to the side, Neal's approach to hip-hop shows that he has indeed listened to much of the music and evinces a deep concern for the embattled lives of the young people involved in the culture and in their communities. So often, the energy of his obvious love for, and insight into, the music seems trapped in the discourse of critique.

What the Music Said presents the history of black popular music's interaction with American culture at large as a cautionary tale of diminished and distorted returns. When tied to particular moments of distortion, Neal effectively shows the ways that "mass-mediation" can strip "organic institutions" of their political fibre in the eyes of an uninformed consumer/public. Maybe the most resonant instance of this in the study is the case of the popular 1970s TV show What's Happening. Neal describes how the Watts Happening Coffee House in L.A., a meeting place for political activists in the area, becomes the coffee shop of black adolescent high-jinx in What's Happening. As a ten-year-old viewer, I remember wondering why Shirley, the apparent proprietor of the coffee shop in What's Happening, had such a bad attitude. Now I know. It's more than an anecdote. Set in Neal's critical context, the shift becomes what Ezra Pound called a "Luminous Detail," an image which exposes the process of history. In this case, the p rocess is the conversion of lived black culture into what Neal calls a "mass-mediated spectacle" of distortion.

Yet, even in reference to particular scenes, Neal's analysis has a tendency to simplify the dynamics in and between alternate spaces. For instance, the "covert" image Neal presents of Los Angeles Black Panthers and members of Ron Karenga's U.S. organization occupying the same coffee house certainly doesn't fit accounts of the antagonisms between the groups expressed in many contemporaneous accounts. I don't imagine Red Foxx's Fred Sanford ever read Karenga's 1968 essay "Black Cultural Nationalism," but in one "mass-mediated" episode, he shows his son Lamont that many black cultural nationalists in Watts showed no respect for him, or other "organic" parts of the "Black Public Sphere," by wearing new clothes, chanting in Swahili, and declaring the blues "invalid." Yet and still, Neal's skillful reference to the media-conversion of oppositional politics, "Watts Happenings," into universally available and stereotypical vernacular pleasantries, "What's Happenings," remains on par with all the gas/electric company PR jingles which recite the initials of the company followed by a benignly rendered falsetto, "Pow-er to the Pe-ople."

The tendency toward romanticism is not, however, Neal's creation alone. Drawing on the work of Patricia Smith, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, James Scott, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, Neal frames the "organic site" of black cultural production: "covert social spaces of the South ... that afforded safety, sustenance, and subversion among the black masses." In the case of What the Music Said, this approach leads toward an enclosed vocabulary of "covert social activity," "safe spaces," and "hidden transcripts," which is at odds with the work's overriding attention to "public culture" per se. The concept and practice of the "covert"-in-public through black rhetorical subterfuge, double-entendre, masking, signifyin(g) is--somewhat ironically--well-documented as part of the genius of black expression. But the razor-edged acumen of these practices assumes the presence of real risk and danger. Importantly, these dangers are both internal and external to the culture as a "whole," as well as to the specific performers and audi ences of the music. Without the danger, the practices become cliches and inert lecture material.

Of course, these black cultural locations did and do provide an important respite from direct white supremist surveillance and abuse. And the celebrations and stylized confrontations which occur therein are related in complex ways to individual and communal survival of daily life. But jook joints and blues clubs "safe"? The terminology radically misstates the texture and energy of the scenes, especially for the artists, and only makes sense in opposition to a danger without. In Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston's accounts of juke joints attached to the turpentine and lumber mills of the 1930s certainly portray a "covert" and vibrant cultural scene. And Hurston's brilliantly theoretical narration conjures a powerful sense of black cultural autonomy set apart from its location in the historical "facts" of North Central Florida. But, as Hurston found, the jooks were certainly not "safe." Many of the images and passages in the writings of Hurston, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Larry Neal, Toni Morrison, and others offer more than does the theoretical jargon of safety. In his 1962 essay "The Creative Process," James Baldwin attests to the kinds of communion possible in the black social clubs uptown in New York City. But he admonishes an unknowing reader that people who frequent places like Small's Paradise are aware that "dancing and love are meant to seem effortless, but are very difficult and dangerous activities," having seen "too many dancers, to say nothing of lovers, swept straight into the madhouse." As Baldwin suggested in The Fire Next Time, "safety" is a--probably the fundamental-metaphorically "white" sound; it's rooted in the fear of a terror that can't be accessed, and it sounds something like Pat Boone.

As witness to Mohanty's "hermeneutic circularity," Neal grounds his attention to history in simplified and stable theoretical concepts which distort the complexity and instability of the cultural past. The contradictory complexities of works like "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and The Souls of Black Folk are not reducible to the notion of "counternarratives." The recent cultural past is far more complex than Neal's theory of an organic safe space violated by mass media serving the black middle class lets on. Neal follows his claim that Motown "artists were exploited financially and restricted aesthetically" with little evidence of Berry Gordy's supposed "middle-dass values" and his commitment to "integration." Works like Nelson George's Where Did Our Love Go? present a more complicated picture of Motown.

At times the language of Neal's critique simply drains the fun and verve out of the music by converting it into ideological statements. For instance, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic's "Chocolate City" can be "read" as a utopian vision of urban black political empowerment. But the song resists ideological summary. The playful role call of would-be cabinet members in a black-controlled White House is much more a symbolic cultural pantheon than a political platform. From the opening line to the exclamation "Gaining on ya!," P-Funk taunts a paranoid white America checking over its shoulder from "vanilla suburbs" and already beginning to bristle under the lash and shackle of Affirmative Action as it tainted the great Platonic/American tradition of perfect equity to all. Much of the song is instrumental. Variations of the searching "horny-horns" sound atop descending piano scales, punctuated by calls to "Get deep, real deep." It's pure signifying, part of the P-Funk theory of "dancing through all we have to live through" while affirming fundamental democratic ideals of individualism and brotherhood. Still, Neal notes that "Clinton's narrative privileges electoral politics as the site of a nationalist assault on the urban landscape," and continues:

Clinton's referencing of this elite cadre of cultural workers [Muhammad Ali, Ike Turner--[look out!] Richard Pryor, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franidin] underscores the role that all played in the construction of communal persona of struggle and resistance, while using the democratic tenets of the transformed Black Public Sphere to bestow the recognition upon them that an undemocratic mainstream critical establishment was unwilling to grant.

To which George Clinton would be likely to reply "eeny-meeny-miney-wiggle-wiggle-baby!" Worse yet, Neal misses the organic complexity of the P-Funk cipher when he claims that "Clinton's narrative ... fails to acknowledge the increased class divisions of black public life." In "Aqua-Boogie," P-Funk's brilliant portrait of "Sir Nose"--who is too cool to get wet, and maintains, "I don't even sweat"--presents a caring and comic critique of--what could easily be--the uptight "poetics" of certain black middle-class folks. Importantly, this image of "Sir Nose" conserves what Ralph Ellison understood as the fundamental ethics of what Neal calls the Black Public Sphere: a grounding in the complexities of experience through blues humor, and tolerance. P-Funkateers lyrically witness the middle-class snobbery of "Sir Nose," who "can't get the rhythm of the stoke"; they invite him in, then they pull him back in the water to the sound of his frantic protests. Polished syntax already beginning to fail, Sir Nose wails, "Let go my leg!" Okay, "Sir Nose" isn't a character in the song "Chocolate City," but the least one can ask from "post-modernism" is a little intertextuality in the funk.

There are plenty of ways to approach the texture of the "organic" energy of the music and the culture. Academic jargon so often falls woefully short. And it's deeper than patronizing talk about accessibility. At bottom, it's about difficulty and the rewards of effort. It's about work and craft more than "constructed agents." Works like Ellison's essay "Golden Age, Time Past," John Coltrane's lyrical sheets and streamers amid Milt Jackson's vibes in "Bags & Trane," and Rakim's poly-rhythmic verses braided into Eric B's furious torrent in "Follow the Leader" are difficult to grasp fully. Often, like Rakim's riff "Follow me into a solo," they're grounded in paradoxes of what Gwendolyn Brooks called the "Warpland." But they're surprisingly easy to hear or read. They draw an audience in, that's why they become popular. Once more, they reward effort, the work of perception, because they lead into the tensions which animate the culture and eschew easy oppositions and ideological abstractions. In many ways, What the Music Said is a work of "translation" which has an extremely difficult time returning to the music the complexity it seems to assume the new language encodes.