Part two of this series is more of a reflection. I have heard from several
other Black folks that they did not like the BET awards because it is “corporately
sponsored” music, or the same thing every year, etc. For me, however, the
experience was completely new. I don’t watch network television, so as I was
having my hair done on the Monday afternoon after the awards, my stylist just
happened to put on a few videos from the show that were on YouTube. I must tell
you, since I have never seen the BET awards (well...I might have 25 years ago)
it was a “first time” experience. It was sensational – like the first time one experiences
ice cream or any other tasty food. I mean, the colors, the staging and the spectacular
dancing! As a musician, to see songs brought to life with smoke plumes, fantastical
costuming and the sheer power and entertainment force of large numbers of
people dancing in sync was amazing to watch. Yes, I know I sound like I just
joined the 20th and 21st century, but I have no shame in
being a recluse when it comes to television. Now, all of that being said, I
move into my second ethnomusicological observation of Black American music vis
a vis the 2019 BET Music Awards.
One of the videos we watched was of Mary J Blige – her acceptance
speech for the lifetime achievement award and the mini-concert that she
performed. Now, I remember when Mary J Blige “came out” (an African American colloquial
term for a music artist’s song debut). This was when I was…in the 7th
grade I think. The song was “What’s the 411” or something like that. What I really remember was Mary J’s voice. I liked her singing. As I moved through middle
school into high school, and listened to the black radio stations of DC, her songs
became kind of like a sound track to my life…not my life with my parents and
family, but my inner life with my peers. And I have distinct memories of those
life moments marked by her songs. "You Remind Me" marked the spring of my 7th grade year. I remember. Her re-make of Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing”
reminds of me of the autumn of my 8th grade year, my boyfriend at
the time, and sleep overs at my friend Ryane’s house. “Loving You” reminds me
of the first day of spring of that same school year, and pretty much soundtracks
all of the intoxicating (and destructive) emotions that swirled around in my
young heart regarding that year-long relationship with the above mentioned boyfriend
(who I saw as a tawny-light-brown-skinned, basketball playing, blue-eyed dream…in
PG county where I grew up, the evidence of the extreme mental colonialism that
we all suffered from was a collective adoration of black boys (and girls) who had
genetic aberrations like “light eyes”…hazel, green or blue, and/or were either
bi-racial, or looked like it). My 9th grade year memories are marked
by Mary J’s “Reminisce” – which also chronicled the traumatic autumn break up
that I experienced with that same young man. Anyway, the fall of my 10th grade
year was marked with another of Mary J’s songs “All I really want is to be
happy…” The next year, I stopped listening to pop radio in exchange for the
jazz stations of the city.
I suppose, through this reflection, that I understand why she
was given a lifetime achievement award. She made a lot of extremely popular and
successful recordings. Now, no disrespect to her with what I am going to say
next. It is hard for me to take that award seriously when the standard to me for
Black female vocalists and their impact are legends like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald,
Billie Holiday, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and figures like that. But, if,
without my even trying hard to remember, her songs and sensual voice were the soundtrack for a
critical time in my young life, then her music must have also been for
countless others in my “cultural cohort” (Turino 2008): middle class African
American girls in the urban and suburban US areas who came of age in the early and
mid-1990s. This brings me to my first point.
In ethnomusicology we cite how a music figure can serve as
an expression of group identity, how singers, for instance, can serve as a
voice for many. This is completely true for Black America. In African America
singers are like members of the family. We completely identify with them, to
the point where we refer to them by first name… “Sing Patti" ...Sing it Aretha!” You might hear that exclamation
coming from Black women about their favorite singer in response to a performance
at a live concert, video, or to melodies that float in their cars through the radio
airwaves. My mother was on a first name basis with Luther Vandross for years.
At my grandmother’s funeral in 2004, my divorced parents saw each other in the limousine
on the way to the burial site for the first time in years. My father chose to break
the awkward silence during the ride by asking my mother “So how’s Luther?” My
mother even traveled from DC to NYC to attend his funeral.
We talk about the details of our singer’s personal lives as
if we know them. We call them by nick
names. When we hear certain singers, they are telling our stories and singing
our pain, our excitement and marking our personal and collective experience. “Take
it from me, one day we shall all be free…” our dearly departed Donnie Hathaway
sang for us all at the height of the Black Power Movement. An African American colleague
shared with me how he felt a personal loss when Aretha Franklin died last year
in 2018. He said he felt as if an aunt had died. I felt the same way. The
palpable family ethos of Black America is a part of our Africanity. In
many African societies, all women and men, regardless of whether they are blood
relations are not, are called mother or father. It is socially expected, in
Botswana and Ghana as I have experienced, to greet all other black people, even
if you are in the elevator with them for two minutes. The extent to where this
does not happen is measured by many Africans as a black culture’s stepping away from traditional values. I was warned, as I headed to Johannesburg in
2017, that the black folks “don’t even greet,” which the speaker emphasized in
order to illustrate Jo’burg’s black’s assimilation to "mainstream" cultural mores. (To my South African brothers and sisters who are reading this,
please correct me if the speaker was wrong.) My overall point is that we, as African
Americans, treat our singers like family, and think of them as such, because of
the African part of our identity.
For many young women Mary J Blige is their singer, and they think of her like a personal friend, sister, older cousin or
perhaps even like a young aunt. She is their cathartic collective voice. Scholar and Columbia University Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin was even told by a group
of her young black women students that Mary J was like “their Billie Holiday.” Hmm…
this role that she fulfills for some black women actually leads me to consider several
curious implications regarding Black female identity, and Black American regional
identities, that I did not have the experience and insight to detect when she first
rose to fame.
First, a brief musing on the Black American regional
identity that Mary J embodies. From what I observed
at the awards show, Mary J is NYC all the way. I lived in New York City for 13
years and spent time with all kinds of black folks from all walks of life. Everything,
from her mannerisms, to her speech, to her fashion sense was NYC. My hair stylist
(who also lived in New York for years) said that she can really see the Bronx in
her. Technically, she is from Yonkers, which is just above the Bronx (10 minutes). They are essentially the same area. This all must inevitably influence her music. I mean, when she got on
stage with that long blond weave jetting out under the white fitted hat turned
backwards, I was like wow – that’s really New York. (many, many black women in
New York wear very long, straight weaves, while in DC most black women wear their
hair in natural hairstyles – including the author). More experience, field
work, or discussions with cultural insiders from the particular section of the city where she is from would be necessary to dissect all of how Mary J’s African
American experience in the Bronx/Yonkers is evident in her music. I just listened back to the song “What’s the
411” – wow. She is rapping with a strong Bronx NYC accent, using the name “hun”
just as many black women do from that area. Her appearance on the album – the straight
hair with the hat is so typical of the “Boogie Down Bronx.” This tells me that Black
American popular music cannot be viewed as a ubiquitous expression of our
people as a whole. We are decentralized and live in large concentrations in
several major urban centers and the Southern US. That’s it. When a music artist
“comes out,” he or she is representative of the black sounds of the area that
they grew up in. And these
considerations bring me to my second point. What was the impact of Mary J Blige,
and singers like her, on contemporary Black female identity? Hmm….please be
warned – I am about to make some rather controversial points. I will frame them
in terms of a series of musings and then questions. And I mean no disrespect.
 |
| Sarah Vaughan |
Let’s think about this. In the past, where were the popular
Black singers from and what was the public image that they presented? Sarah
Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Etta James, Nancy Wilson... They were mostly
from cities that were the destinations of the Great Migration - Newark, Chicago,
Baltimore, Ohio. And no matter how outrageous, disreputable, conventional or “clean”
the lives of these singers were, and no matter how much they might have come
from a background of poverty and struggle, they always presented themselves
well in public AND their personal lives, no matter how messy, stayed personal.
(Or perhaps in Lady Day’s case, as mysterious and unverifiable as she could keep
it.) They all spoke well, wrote well and were class acts. Could the politics of
respectability have greatly influenced the decisions they made about their public
presentations? Absolutely. I think Sarah Vaughan might have had four, five or
nine husbands. As outrageous as the higher of those numbers might be to many,
we, the public, do not associate her with the automatic life judgments that
one might make on a woman who has had that many husbands. And that is because of
how she presented herself on stage and on public. It is even said that she
shrugged Billie Holiday off when Lady turned up backstage after one of her
shows, just after Billie had been released from jail. What was Sarah’s
explanation for turning up her nose and ignoring the great Lady Day? “She just
got out of jail,” she said. Whether it was right or wrong (definitely wrong), she
did not wish to be publicly
associated with anyone who was associated with the criminal element.
To further illustrate the effects of black respectability politics
on the public personas of the Black Women singers of yesteryear, let’s stay on
examples from Sarah Vaughan. Sarah Vaughan sang and recorded live on radio. I
have several of these recording in my collection. One song that she performed
was a jazz standard called “I Get a Kick Out of You.” There is a line that has
rather questionable, eye-brow-raising lyrics about illicit drug use. It goes
like this: I get no kicks from cocaine, I’m
sure that if I took even one sniff, it would bore me terrifically too… But I get
a kick out of you. Sarah Vaughan chose not to sing this lyric on the radio
the way it was written by Cole Porter. She sang I get no kicks from perfume...I'm sure that if I took even one sniff... even though the word "perfume" did not rhyme with anything else in the song. I can only guess that it was because she
did not want to be associated with using cocaine and thought the line was
generally inappropriate. And I must say that an elder who was her drummer, the
late Grady Tate, did tell me that Sarah “loved blow.” He actually said it like
this, “Sarah looooved blow.” Sarah Vaughan did use cocaine in her private life.
(I feel funny about even revealing this publicly about her. Again, respectability
politics is a potent emotional force – a feeling of protectiveness of the
Black image). But isn’t it interesting that she chose to never publicly
associate herself with the drug? Just as her four husbands were never a part
of her public persona (I confirmed the number during this writing process). And
let’s face it, we all have things that we have done wrong and that we are not
proud of. We all have pasts. But we do not all choose to publicly air our
personal business.
 |
| Cocaine - the big lie (remember that commercial!) |
This is not necessarily the case for Mary J Blige and
singers in her set. There seems to be no such misgivings about personal life being
public with Mary J, no matter how sordid the details. Without even trying, and not engaging with network television since 2003, or doing an internet search for this writing, I somehow know that Mary J had a
relationship involving domestic abuse with KC from Jodeci, and that they had, at
one point, “beef” backstage at a concert or two that delayed the show. Somehow,
I know that she became involved with a man named Kendu (?) who was married when
they met, and then he married her after divorcing his wife, and that she was fiercely
devoted to him. Somehow, even in my mass media insulation, I know that he cheated
on her, they had a messy divorce and that he demanded alimony from her. I also
heard something about a cocaine habit. Is any of this true – not sure (you all
tell me!), but my point is this. How in the world do I know so much of Mary J’s
business? And as I understand it, many of her songs, like the rather dark “I’m
Going Down,” chronicle her tumultuous relationships and life events. Please
know that I am writing this in no way to judge her. We all have life
circumstances and heart issues to overcome. But the fact that the issues of her life are openly
linked to corresponding songs and consumed as one by her black women listeners
does raise my concern.
So now for my questions. Does Mary’s persona that is
directly connected to "emotional-crisis" songs make relationship drama, rejection,
heartbreak and man-woman relationship dysfunction seem like it is, and should
be, a part of everyday life for Black women? If so, is that healthy? Also, other thoughts towards
respectability politics. It seemed that before 1980, Black musicians and other cultural
figures put their best foot forward in public and were protective of the Black
image in this White majority country. There were certain things that many black
folks just would not do in public, especially anything associated with minstrel
stereotypes. Did the advent of hip-hop
and associated musics push to the fore people as representatives of the Black community
who were less responsible with the Black image, to the point of recklessness and
even minstrelsy? Recklessness with the Black image in music includes the use of
the N word, discussion of participation in the drug trade, drug use, calling
women derogatory names, discussion of sexual escapades, sexual usury and general
“street” behavior. If this is true, how does Mary J’s private-business-in-songs-and-public-persona fit into that trend? I guess you can tell
that I am writing this from a specific perspective, and I can’t help it. I was
raised in and by an upper middle-class Black family with respectability
politics that governed our everyday lives. Of course they did – my mother was a
doctor and my father worked in corporate America. In those settings, a person
has to constantly monitor their black image and behavior because the perception of their personal
black image as professional and respectable (and perhaps even "exceptional" I hate to say) is linked to their continued employment and thus, their family’s
survival. And let’s face it, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a time of egregious
and very public Black failure. Crack addicted Blacks were on the nightly news,
as was “the war on drugs.” Drug dealing, car- jackings, drive-by shootings and
the like all were represented on all forms of news media to have been solely
perpetrated by black folks. In Washington DC the mayor of the city was busted
for illegal drug use in an infamous FBI sting, and video footage of him using
crack with his mistress (Rashida Moore) was all over the national news – for months.
The early 1990s saw the “advent” of “Gangsta rap.” Groups like NWA were being prominently
marketed with their jheri curls, gold teeth, guns and swear words, and were totally
associated with those who lived in public housing projects, and other black
folks who were in the lower socio-economic bracket. Black people like my family
wanted to put as much distance between themselves and those viewed as public “Black
failures” – or as my mother called them “the element.” I don’t mean to sound
elitist ya’ll, but I have to tell the truth. How then would ladies like my
mother, grandmothers and aunts view a singer like Mary J? Considering the
information that I have just shared, I will leave that up to your imagination.
In closing I will say this. The power and broad-based appeal of Mary J Blige to many Black folks was evident at the BET awards. The combination of her Bronx sensibilities, amazing voice, stunning honey-brown beauty and plain-down good songs were/are a tantalizing combination. Folks were dancing in the aisles to "You Remind Me" and it seemed that every woman in the building was singing the words to "Happy" while standing in a tight huddle with her women friends. Even more, her music transported me back to the exact time in my life when the songs were first made popular. Her performance at the award show took me back to those younger years, and it made me feel nostalgic for suburban Maryland, car rides with friends, house parties and everything else that made up my young life at the time. Her melodies and dance movements made me remember. They made the audience remember. And this is the testimony of the power of the Black woman singer in African America.
