The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (66 page)

What we get with Lee is Jungian archetype, frozen snapshots of moods in the black (male) psyche photographed to brilliant effect by Ernest Dickerson. Lee’s mission to represent the variegated streams of black life denied cinematic conduits before his dramatic rise, has led him to resolve the complexity and ambiguity of black culture into rigid categories of being that hollow his characters’ fierce and contradictory rumblings toward authentic humanity. And after
She’s Gotta Have It,
black women became context clues to the exploration of black male rituals of social bonding
(School Daze),
the negotiation of black male styles of social resistance
(Do the Right Thing),
the expansion and pursuit of black male artistic ambitions
(Mo’ Better Blues),
and the resolution of black male penis politics
(Jungle Fever).

It was precisely Lee’s cinematic representations of black male life that occasioned the sound and fury of proleptic criticism over his latest and most important project: his film biography of Malcolm X. Writer and social critic Amiri Baraka drew blood in a war of words with Lee, claiming that Lee’s poor history of representing black men suggested that he would savage the memory of Malcolm X, a memory, by the way, to which Baraka presumed to have privileged access. This battle between the two diminutive firebrands, ironic for its poignant portrayal of the only logical outcome of the politics of more-black-nationalistthan-thou, a game Lee himself has played with relish on occasion, was but a foretaste of the warfare of interpretation waged in light of Lee’s portrait of X.

Malcolm X is the reigning icon of black popular culture, his autobiography the Ur-text of contemporary black nationalism. His legacy is claimed by fiercely competing groups within black America, a fact certain to make Lee’s film a hard sell to one faction or the other. More importantly, X’s complex legacy is just now being opened to critical review and wider cultural scrutiny, and his hagiographers and haters will rush forward to have their say once again.

To many, however, Malcolm is black manhood squared, the unadulterated truth of white racism ever on his tongue, the black unity of black people ever on his agenda, the black people in ghetto pain ever on his mind. Thus, the films that represent the visual arm of black nationalism’s revival bear somehow the burden of Malcolm X’s implicit presence in every frame, his philosophy touching on every aspect of the issues the films frame—drugs, morality, religion, ghetto life, and especially, unrelentingly, the conditions of being a black man. For many, as for his eulogist Ossie Davis, Malcolm was the primordial, quintessential Real Man.

But, as with the films of Dickerson, Lee, Rich, Singleton, and Van Peebles, this spells real trouble for black women and for an enabling vision of black masculinity that moves beyond the worst traits of X’s lethal sexism. Gestures of X’s new attitude survive in the short hereafter Malcolm enjoyed upon his escape from Elijah Muhammad’s ideological straitjacket. Malcolm’s split from the Nation of
Islam demanded a powerful act of will and self-reinvention, an unsparing commitment to truth over habit. Lee’s film reflects this Malcolm, though not in relation to his changed views about women. Although there are flashes of a subtly nuanced relationship between X and his wife Betty in Lee’s film, as usual, Lee is silent on the complexities of black female identity.

Only when black films begin to be directed by black women, perhaps, will the wide range of identities that black women command be adequately represented on the large screen. Powerful gestures toward black feminist and female-centered film production exist in the work of Julie Dash in
Daughters of the Dust
and especially in Leslie Harris’s
Just Another Girl on the IRT.
Less successful is John Singleton’s flawed
Poetic Justice.
But until the collapse of the social, cultural, and economic barriers that prevent the flourishing of black female film, such works threaten to become exceptional, even novelty items in the black cultural imagination. In the meantime, black male directors remain preoccupied, even trapped, by the quest for an enabling conception of black male identity. But its full potential will continue to be hampered until they come to grips with the full meaning of black masculinity’s relationship to, and coexistence with, black women.

Black music is at the heart—some would argue, it is the heart—of black
existence, providing rhythms of consolation and inspiration to the sometimes
harsh, dispiriting experiences of a despised and troubled people.
Gospel music expresses the spiritual genius of black survival, while soul
music articulates the desire for freedom and black self-determination as
the civil rights movement unfolded. Rhythm and blues has captured the
gritty realities of secular black culture, while jazz music embodies the
democratic yearnings and improvisational urges of black life. Hailing
from Detroit, music of all sorts pulses through my blood, and I have
taken special delight in writing about it as both a scholar and critic—and
best of all, as a fan.

TRADITIONAL GOSPEL IS THE MUSIC OF mass choirs, ecstatic solos, and pounding, clapping rhythms. “Real gospel music is an intelligible sermon in song,” says Harold Bailey, who led the Harold Bailey singers in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout its history, this church music has influenced, and been influenced by, the popular music of its time.

Today’s acts—like Be Be and Ce Ce Winans, Sounds of Blackness, Take Six, Commissioned, Tramaine Hawkins, and the Winans brothers—have added highpriced producers, up-tempo arrangements, and pop instrumentations to traditional gospel. Thus armed, they are gaining airplay on so-called contemporary urban radio, home otherwise to acts like Michael Jackson, Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, and C&C Music Factory. As gospel music gains new acceptance, it is once again moving away from its roots.

Nash Shaffer, host of a traditional gospel program on Chicago radio station WNDZ, is one of a number of gospel devotees who object to the recent popularization of the music. “The reason young people like contemporary gospel music is because of the rhythm and its secular appeal,” says Shaffer, who is also the minister of music for the Vernon Park Church of God in Chicago. “The horns and
the synthesizers override the message, and because of the instrumentation the message is vague and void. It gets lost in the beat and you end up having a shindig on Sunday morning.”

One group Shaffer is concerned about is Be Be and Ce Ce Winans, whose phenomenal success started with a Grammy Award–winning debut album on Word Records. In 1988 they signed with a mainstream label, and their first album on the Capitol/Sparrow label,
Heaven,
was the second gospel record in history to go gold, after Aretha Franklin’s success in 1972 with
Amazing Grace.
The current Winans album,
Different Lifestyles,
reached number one on the
Billboard
rhythmand-blues charts, a first for gospel.

The new album is a curriculum of musical diversity—from rap and up-tempo rhythm-and-blues to a sample of a gospel shout. But it doesn’t contain any purely traditional gospel. The single “I’ll Take You There,” which is at number seven on the rhythm-and-blues chart, is a remake of the Staple Singers, classic that allows the Winans to pay tribute to a seductive blend of 1970s gospel and pop. The album’s first single, “Addictive Love,” which went to number one on
Billboard
’s rhythm-and-blues chart, makes codependency with the divine a palatable proposition. “We were blessed with a record company that put dollars into our budget,” says Ce Ce Winans, “so that we could come off sounding the way we feel gospel music should have sounded a long time ago.”

The Winans help make visible the implicit sensuality of gospel music, a sometimes embarrassing gift that draws forth the repressed relationship between body and soul. The suggestive ambiguity of their art is expressed in their songs, many of which can be read as signs of romantic love and sensuous delight or as expressions of deep spiritual yearning and fulfillment. In “Depend on You,” the Winans sing, “I never thought that I could ever need someone / The way that I have come to need you / Never dreamed I’d love someone / The way I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Such lyrics are exactly the problem, according to the traditionalists. “Whereas traditional gospel music talks about the love of God,” says Shaffer, “contemporary gospel music wants to make love
to
God.” Lisa Collins, who writes about gospel music for
Billboard
magazine, says she receives calls from unhappy listeners when she plays a new hit by Be Be and Ce Ce Winans on
Inside Gospel,
her syndicated radio show. “We get numerous calls from listeners who think that there’s not enough reference to Jesus,” she says, “that their music has strayed too far from the church, that they water down the lyrics or that their music is playing to a secular crowd. But,” she adds, “if you go to their concerts, there is no doubt that it is a ministry.”

Ironically, traditional gospel music initially faced its own barriers within the church. It was an offspring of blues, jazz, and ragtime music born in the black Pentecostal churches at the end of the nineteenth century; early religious music consisted of barbershop quartet harmonies sung a capella by mostly male groups. A Chicago blues pianist named Thomas A. Dorsey forever changed black religious
music in the 1920s by featuring women (and later men) singing in a choir tradition backed by piano accompaniments dipped in a blues base and sweetened by jazz riffs. Before the belated embrace of gospel music by mainline black churches in the 1940s, gospel thrived in mostly lower-class storefront Pentecostal churches, stigmatized as a sacrilegious mix of secular rhythms and spiritual lyrics.

Traditional gospel greats, including the late Clara Ward, Marion Williams, Roberta Martin, and Inez Andrews, took the exploration of jazz and blues further. These artists harnessed the seductive beats of jazz to gospel’s vibrant harmonies and percolating rhythms, and transformed the anguished wails of the blues into holy shouts brimming with deferred joy. Performers as varied as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown started out singing gospel, and the music can be said to have spawned rhythm-and-blues, soul, and funk. Gospel music gained wide popular acceptance with Clara Ward’s appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957 and with the incomparable Mahalia Jackson’s numerous concerts at Carnegie Hall in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Clara Ward, in fact, was criticized in the 1960s for singing gospel music in Las Vegas.)

But gospel music’s real transformation into a popular and contemporary musical art form was quietly affected by Edwin Hawkins’s 1969 rhythm-and-bluesinfluenced arrangement of the traditional Baptist hymn, “Oh, Happy Day.” The groundbreaking song was captured on a two-track recorder in the basement of a California Pentecostal church and was performed by the North California State Youth Choir, eventually selling more than 2 million copies. Edwin Hawkins’s feat prepared the way for two divergent but occasionally connected developments in contemporary gospel music.

On the one hand, artists like Andrae Crouch and Hawkins’s younger brother Walter experimented with gospel within the boundaries of the religious world. Their work was performed in church concerts and secular music halls to a largely religious audience. Their appeal was primarily defined by young black Christians seeking to maintain their religious identity. On the other hand, Edwin Hawkins’s success also broke ground for groups like the Staple Singers, who performed primarily in secular musical arenas and whose themes and sound were adapted to popular culture sensibilities and recast as “message music.” Thus, instead of the traditional gospel themes of God’s love, grace, and mercy, the Staple Singers sang about redemptive community and self-respect.

On their 1971 reggae-influenced number one soul and pop song, “I’ll Take You There,” they claimed: “I know a place / Ain’t nobody cryin’ / Ain’t nobody worried / Ain’t no smilin’ faces / Lyin’ to the races / I’ll take you there.” And on their number two song, “Respect Yourself,” from the same album,
BeAltitude: Respect Yourself,
they sang: “If you disrespect everybody that you run into / How in the world do you think anybody ’sposed to respect you? / Respect yourself.” Their recordings from the 1970s showcase three crucial features of contemporary gospel: significant radio play on nonreligious formats, the broad use of pop music conventions to explore their musical ideas, and, at best, oblique references to divinity or God.

In the last few years, black gospel music also inspired a group of white religiously oriented singers like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, who are considered contemporary Christian musicians. (The dividing line between black gospel and contemporary Christian music is primarily racial, although black artists like Be Be and Ce Ce Winans, Take Six, and Larnelle Harris also show up on the contemporary Christian charts.) Traditional gospel music has never been completely comfortable with its parentage of black secular music. In the early parts of this century, frequenting nightclubs, blues bars, and dance halls was considered un-Christian and was forbidden. And there are still those who feel that the secular world should be kept out of the church. Harold Bailey, who is now the director of Probation Challenge, an organization that works with former prisoners in Chicago, says, “When we speak in terms of contemporary we are speaking of something temporary, of the moment, which is contrary to scripture. Those who want to rock will inevitably roll into hell.”

The sound of contemporary gospel, many devotees of traditional gospel say, is indistinguishable from new jack swing or technofunk, and it thrives on postmodern instrumentation, contemporary pop grooves, and religiously ambiguous lyrics. Some contemporary gospel, in fact, is called new jack gospel: Teddy Riley, who most recently produced Michael Jackson’s
Dangerous
, also helped produce the Winans brothers’ album,
The Return;
and among contemporary gospel artists are rappers like Mike E.

But a gnawing skepticism about the church’s ability to address contemporary cultural issues, coupled with a steep decline in church membership, may modify the hard line taken by traditional religionists. Contemporary gospel music is helping the uninitiated to discover, and the committed to remember, the church. One contemporary gospel artist, Tramaine Hawkins, who was heavily criticized when her single “Fall Down” was played in discos, says that the song “opened up some real avenues of ministry” and brought listeners to more traditional gospel artists like Shirley Caesar. “I tried contemporary gospel,” confesses Caesar, “but it didn’t work for me.” She believes that she is part of a venerable tradition to which all gospel artists must return. “I’m part of the ‘be’ crowd,” she explains. “I’ll
be
here when they leave, and I’ll
be
here when they come back.”

Ce Ce Winans says that contemporary gospel brings a wider audience to the gospel message through high production values. “Being able to be played on mainstream radio without having any less quality than mainstream artists is important,” she says. Without serious record company support, she says, great gospel singers of the past were deprived of a wide audience. For all its controversy, contemporary gospel music continues to evolve and inspire. Groups like Take Six, which mixes a capella jazz with gospel themes, and the Sounds of Blackness—produced by Jam and Lewis and presently touring with Luther Vandross—prove that contemporary gospel is an art form as malleable as it is durable and innovative. And as contemporary gospel music continues to provide inspiration to its religious adherents and musical delight to all appreciative listeners, it preserves and extends the classic functions of traditional gospel music.