Sunday, June 30, 2019

The Ethnomusicology of the BET Awards: Part 2 (Musings on Mary J Blige, Black Female Identity, Black Women Singers and the Politics of Respectability)


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.

Cocaine - the big lie
(remember that commercial!)
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.

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.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

The Ethnomusicology of the 2019 BET Awards: Part 1



Did you notice that the BET awards that aired just a few nights ago was a study of the regionalism of Black American music-cultures? (And perhaps even a lack thereof...does all of Black America have a distinctive music-culture not informed by mass marketed popular songs? DC - yes, New Orleans - yes, the Mississippi Delta - yes, etc.)

I start with the representation of Washington DC, my hometown. A music-culture that has been caught in the cross-hairs of the most rapid and displacing gentrification project in the country. Caught to the point that Go-Go, DC's native Black music, has been deemed "Black noise" and criminalized by the gentrifying newcomers to the city. (At the corner of Florida and Georgia Avenues, it is now a misdemeanor to play “bucket drums” on the sidewalk.) Hence, the #Don'tMuteDC sign displayed prominently above the stage. But moving on with my point.



Was not the Go-Go performance featuring EU, and DC natives Regina Hall and Taraji Henson a study of Black American kinetic orality (Gaunt 2006)...and/or...Black Girl Magic...and the Africanity of Black America? And about the song "Da Butt." To the young folks, or to those unfamiliar, it might have sounded crass. However, the song, which is written and performed by a group of Black men (the band EU) about Black women, speaks to a point made by ethnomusicologist Dr. Kofi Gbolonyo in a 2016 lecture that he gave in Ghana: "In Africa, a woman's 'bottom' is a beauty ideal." And of course, the most beautiful are a specific shape and size...well you all know what he meant. (Dr. Sylvia Boone also reports this in her book Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art, 1990.)






And if this is true in many African cultures, then it is certainly true in African - America as evidenced in songs like..."Da Butt." (Of course the sexual objectification also implicated by the song is another discussion) Then, another layer of Black American Africanity that was presented in the BET Awards performance is the actual dance “da butt” when it is performed by a couple. I noticed during my field work in Southern Africa that in traditional dance in Botswana and South Africa, the same kind of simulated "coupling" between male and female dancers takes place. Hence, "Da Butt" as a song and dance, and DC's Go-Go music culture, from the instrumentation, to Taraji Henson's DC girl "attitude" that she displayed so well, tells us that we are All Africa. Thank you to the 2019 BET awards for illustrating this point so well. What do you think?