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Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth

      Barry White in the Early 1970s

      One early beneficiary of the 1970s revival was the magnificent songwriter, producer, and singer, the late Barry White. A gigantically imposing figure with resonant bass voice to match, White had been absolutely central in the development of disco, one of the 1970s’ hallmark styles, and his music flourished during its years of popularization. With the arrival of the Reagan years, disco was widely reported to have died, and its artists were carried along to mainstream oblivion. But disco never really died, of course, and neither did Barry White (until 2003, that is). The unmistakable sign of White’s crossover revival was his early 1990s cameo on The Simpsons as an Orpheus of Soul; ample confirmation continued to arrive in the form of successful tours and TV commercials focusing on the grand spectacle of Barry White in performance, seemingly unchanged since his days of disco glory. But his newly vital presence in the world of crossover popular culture depended equally on his continuing presence in the domain of hip-hop. The rapper Big Daddy Kane created part of his own image as a super-black super-player by summoning his chief precursor back to the stage.1 Such evocations of Barry White might well sound like a barefaced recovery of 1970s sexism, but the case was not so simple, as was shown in the 1993 collaboration between Salt-n-Pepa and En Vogue, “Whatta Man,” describing a black masculine ideal: “My man’s cool like Barry and his voice got bass. . . .”

      

      In the wake of his early 1990s recuperation, Barry White became an icon, along with his proto-disco counterpart the late Isaac Hayes, who also returned effectively in cartoon form as the voice of Chef on Comedy Central’s South Park.2 (In fact, White was reportedly the first choice to provide Chef with an oleaginously sensuous voice. It is not clear why this did not work out.) By the later 1990s, White’s image, his bedroom voice, and snatches of his most famous songs were everywhere in television commercials and evoked in new pop songs, if anyone knew to listen for them. Barry White eventually emerged as the tutelary spirit of passion for the quirky character John Cage on the popular television show Ally McBeal (1997–2002); a characterological joke on the show concerned Cage’s inability to behave seductively unless he imagined a Barry White song as his personal soundtrack. This personal soundtrack, however, showed a tendency to leak out of Cage’s head, spilling over onto other members of his law office and pulling them into White’s love-centric disco world. The gesture, which encouraged the audience to love Cage in the way that he loved Barry White—a curious mixture of emotions maybe best described as fondly serious dismissal—was so attractive that the show resorted to it repeatedly. By the series finale, it was surely a foregone conclusion that White would make a final appearance by way of insouciant benediction. And he did appear, and it was memorable.

      The apotheosis of White’s music as the very sound of love, however, had come a few months earlier in 2002 at (of all places) the shark tank of National Sea Life Center (NSLC) in Birmingham, England. A CNN broadcast on Valentine’s Day reported a moment of inspired silliness among scientists: because it is generally challenging to breed sharks in captivity, and because the center’s denizens had been reluctant to get it on, researchers decided to broadcast tunes by Barry White into the tank to see if it would put the sharks in the mood. The news item included this bit of dialogue between the CNN correspondent Marga Ortigas, NSLC representative Josie Sutherland, and an unidentified woman:

      Sutherland: They seem to be swimming around. They’re following the females a bit more.

      Ortigas: And with any luck, catch them hook, line and sinker.

      Unidentified Female: It worked for me! It might help.

      CNN could not resist (who could?) contacting White for commentary. Though clearly bemused, he played along and offered a charming anecdote in return. No, he hadn’t known about experiments of this nature with his music:

      White: But something very strange in my home—I have saltwater fish too. And when I would come home from the studio and I played my music—when I walk in the room, the fish would be swimming frantically. And as soon as I started playing the music that I had recorded that day in the studio, I would notice that they start swimming in a very relaxed mode. I just thought it was me. I didn’t know that they could actually hear, even.

      Obviously, we have no clear idea what a fish hears in these cases, and what—if—it thinks about the music that is played for it. But it matters immensely that we want to think the fish respond the way we do. This story, as all the participants tacitly acknowledged, is really about our own desires as they move to the music.3

      This was a long way from the antidisco backlash at the end of the 1970s. Then, brandishing the slogan “disco sucks,” rabid rock fans burned disco Records and dissed every aspect of the subculture in which Barry White had figured so prominently. All the world knows by now that “disco sucks” was a response of thinly disguised homophobia: disco’s ostentatious focus on promiscuity and the appurtenances of a luxurious lifestyle, plus its rejections of the values usually read in a rock context as “authentic expression,” made it the bane of those who feared and despised the sexual revolution. Disco’s luscious arrangements betokened lots of money and little sense of restraint in its use. Its lyrics glorified sexual desires of the most undiscriminating kind. It offered visibility to sultry vamps, foreigners, and men in whom there was always an edge of effeteness. It ignored teenagers and favored hustling a slightly older, more moneyed crowd. Especially as it made its way out of the gay ghettos, disco took up the spun-sugar illusions of celebrity culture à la Studio 54. It was, all of it, just too gay.

      But less frequently noted in discussions of the music is the way that the rejection of disco registered an unease with ways of representing the agency of black men that had their roots in cultural developments in the 1960s and 1970s. These constructions of black masculinity, finding their widest representation and distribution through film and music, were new and potentially dangerous, especially to white audiences for whom their economic strength was as frighteningly disreputable as their sexual vigor. The force of such portrayals was all the more alarming because these new black masculinities emanated from Hollywood, at the heart of the American image machine. There were two sides to this unease. On one side were those for whom the very idea of sexualized portrayals of black men were frightening or distasteful, probably as much for the autonomy the men were shown to possess as for the blunt steaminess of their images. On the other side were those for whom the question of the kind of man allowed erotic authority was most important. And not very far from this second damning crowd were pop music critics and listeners uncritically wedded to the notion that the only “true” music arose from the authenticity communicated in the expression of insight gained through poverty, suffering, and oppression, and that the only “true” music that preserved its value was that which most resolutely resisted commercial pressures. Barry White was unquestionably black, and presented himself as just as unquestionably gifted with incomparable musical and sexual prowess. He and his music alike were thus too black, too strong. But at the same time, this performer, this music, could never be black enough, strong enough. All this disco-laden nouveau richesse? Where was the struggle? Where the evidence of masculine autonomy? Where was the turbulent record of genius? Surely not under all that velvet, those spangles and sequins!

      White, who had long been part of the complex ecosystem of the Los Angeles entertainment business, operated under different terms. Though born in Houston, he moved to California with his mother when he was a young child. He had already worked for most of a decade as a session player, arranger, producer, and head of A&R (artists and repertoire) in various LA companies, and had even composed the music for the Banana Splits’ TV cartoons, when in 1969 he became the impresario for a female vocal group he christened Love Unlimited. By the time he signed himself and Love Unlimited to 20th Century Records in 1973, however, he had been talked into recording his own versions of some of the songs he had been writing for others.4 The result of these sessions was his debut album, I’ve Got So Much to Give (1973), which rapidly went gold, beginning a long stream of hits that enabled a number of related projects. As of 1994, when White released his platinum album The Icon Is Love, he had been involved as a solo artist, conductor, or impresario in far over thirty albums, most of them very successful.5 And the smell of money—new money, the kind most dramatically visible in the

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