The Persistence of Sentiment - Mitchell Morris

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a C# as the swirling violins of the opening reappear, further adorned by harp glissandi in a paroxysm of fanciness.

      After the melody emerges for one more round, the song launches into a proto-break: the orchestra drops out to leave only guitars (lead, rhythm using the wah-wah pedal, and bass) and hi-hat cymbal. The harmonic motion of the counterpoint between lead and bass guitars tells us that this breaklike passage is built out of the last phrase of the melody, a perfectly reasonable strategy for breaks in later disco songs. What keeps it from being fully realized as a break, however, is White’s continuation. Instead of an accretionary reintroduction of the various instruments in the orchestra, he brings back the full orchestra together on the final phrase of the melody, and repeats it as an outro. The song exits the dance floor on its exultant high point, fading to clear the way for the next song.

      Although this description of “Love’s Theme” has emphasized the intricacy of the arrangement as an occasion for listening and dancing, this elaborate staging of rhythms, pitches, and timbres nevertheless falls on the ear with a great deal of ease. There is nothing difficult to hear in this song. It would be contrary to its designs to offer up anything a listener must work for. Rather, the point is to display a welter of glittering musical baubles for delectation, and the direct qualities of the melodic structure, the harmonic language, and the rhythmic character of the song stay simple to expedite the pleasure of shifting our attentions freely among pretty things. Each musical object therefore assumes a status something like that of an individual record in a record store, and that commodificatory ease is exactly what troubled listeners committed to more strenuous pleasures. Would-be pop music ascetics might well have asked how it was possible to value something that they—that anyone—could so easily buy, missing the listening drama of cognitive anxiety mastered that would underwrite their favorite kinds of meaning.

      But the sparkling musical bibelots that enliven “Love’s Theme” were absolutely central to White’s intentions. Remembering his live performances during the 1970s, he has said, “There’s no sound with four violins. I was using twenty or thirty. Rich. Five french horns, but it sounded like angels blowing on them.”9 It seems to me that White’s comments emerge from a sense of security in the simple pleasures of opulence generously made free for any listener who might happen along. Too much of anything is wonderful, and it sells well, too. Such attitudes could not help but lead to purist charges of “commercialism.” And it was so. But commercialism in the hands of a black artist at the beginning of the 1970s meant something rather different from what it would have meant to the average reader of Rolling Stone. I want to show something of this difference in this chapter, but I must do so by sketching out three related areas of historical development during the 1960s, then turning to their intersections in music and film: first, the institutional and economic transformations that led to the promulgation of “black capitalism” in the first Nixon administration; second, the changes in the record industry that helped bring about a positive response to this ideology; and third, the images of black masculinity that developed in conjunction with the Black Power movement.

      

      BLACK CAPITALISM AND THE BUSINESS OF BLACK MUSIC

      The concept of black capitalism was introduced into American political discourse to shore up the responses—weak from the beginning and rapidly deteriorating—of the federal government to the economic demands of the civil rights movement. Although the Great Society programs approved by the Johnson administration aimed to extend the franchise of the New Deal across racial lines, the financial demands of the Vietnam War and conflicts between different levels of bureaucracy began to damage them as soon as they were begun.10 A number of alternatives to the Johnson administration’s proposals came from within the black community, dissatisfied by the weakness of the Great Society, but the Democratic administration was in no position to discard its model programs. The weakness of the Great Society programs, coupled with the Democratic Party’s necessary commitment to them, left Republican challengers free to offer counterproposals. In April and May 1968, a two-part speech by Richard Nixon entitled “Bridges to Human Dignity” touted increasing black ownership of the means of production as a solution to the difficulties (economic, social, and political) of minorities in general, black folks in particular. Nixon reinterpreted various points of view within the Black Power movement as a summons to greater capitalist endeavor. In retrospect, Nixon’s endorsement of black capitalism was less about empowerment than about his larger ideological goals; at the same time that he advocated black private enterprise, he systematically famished Johnson’s programs by reducing budgets for the Office of Economic Development.11 And contemporary bipartisan legislation designed to facilitate black economic enterprise eventually failed as the result of combined opposition from the established (and conservative) business interests of the black bourgeoisie and organized labor. Nevertheless, the government’s rhetorical involvement had ensured that black capitalism would be taken seriously as a political proposal.12

      In part, this new interest in black capitalism occurred during the 1960s because the numbers of middle-class blacks increased dramatically, exceeding in one decade the total increase in numbers of the fifty years preceding.13 This growth in the middle class can certainly be attributed to the combined effects of the civil rights movement’s moral suasion manifested in new equal employment laws and the continuing general prosperity of the U.S. economy.14 Though the Great Society programs were aging badly (until they were smothered on the sickbed), the U.S. economy was strong enough to supply increasingly large numbers of black folks not only with substantial improvements in financial security but a greater number of life choices. Even through the economic dislocations of the early 1970s, the size of the black middle class continued to increase—particularly in pop music.

      If black capitalism worked anywhere already in the late 1960s, it was in the record industry. Heavily courted by the Republican Party in those years before its Reaganification and attracted by its notions, even a figure as emblematic as James Brown had endorsed Nixon in 1972!15 But on all levels, the business responded enthusiastically to the call for black entrepreneurship and greater participation; the industry was happy to entertain speeches on behalf of black capitalism from political figures and executives and to endorse fuller integration within its own ranks.16 Of course, an unusually high level of integration in commercial music already existed because it was one of the few occupations addressing a general public that had been accessible to blacks. Motown had long been the largest black-owned and black-operated company in America, and other companies as well as studios both great and small depended on heavy black involvement (some were even fully integrated). The attention paid off; by 1972, black artists occupied 44 percent of the singles charts and moved toward 20 percent of the album charts.17

      This efflorescence went hand in hand with a tremendous explosion of style and genre at the very beginning of the 1970s in all forms of soul. In an intensive restructuring of the record industry at the end of the 1960s, the major producers of black music lost part of their market dominance, creating room for new in dependent labels to flourish. These 1970s labels lost no time in emulating their predecessors in creating a luxuriant sound world to accompany and even to help direct the dreams of their newly empowered clientele.18 Motown had always been upwardly mobile and mainstreaming in practice, with Berry Gordy’s ambitions pushing the company’s image and the role of its artists ever closer to a Hollywood–Las Vegas aesthetic. At the same time, largely through the influence of the talented producer Norman Whitfield on the sound of the Temptations, Motown had pioneered elaborate, increasingly orchestral productions. These served as the template for the early 1970s fusions of soul with various breeds of more “classical” music.

      As went the sound, so went the self-portrayals of the artists and producers. Booker T. Jones, leader of the house band at Stax, had been a music major at Indiana University, but his formal training never figured prominently in his public image as a performer. By contrast, Thom Bell, the most influential of the producers at Philly International records, by his own account was raised on the “classical” repertory and did not hear any popular music until he was fourteen years old.19 Bell advanced this claim as proof of his musical seriousness and of his aspirations to musical comprehensiveness. This attitude toward the merger of popular and classical elements perhaps reached a peak in the case of Barry White, who has described

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