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if we place the primary beat one unit lower) is often quite sloppy, which thickens the sound as if it is a metaphor for the difficulty of the conversation between mother and children. All in all, the rhythmic language of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” taken with the near-cinematic collage of its despairing musical gestures and set against the “Theme from Shaft,” suggests that we hear the Temptations’ song as an account of one kind of masculinity and its costs.

      On the other side of Shaft belong notions of masculinity that preserved the hedonism of the player lifestyle but replaced the macho toughness with the stances of a soul-inflected “sensitive New Age guy.” As I will discuss more specifically in chapter 3, groups such as the Chi-Lites and especially Gamble and Huff’s Stylistics projected a late version of doo-wop that adapted itself especially well to emotional and material opulence. The transformative quality of the love evoked in the songs is meant to resonate with the abundance of the music. Trappings of wealth—wealth as understood on as many figurative levels as possible—afford the space for love in the dialect of soft soul doo-wop. In these cases, understandings of a black-centered masculinity were in conflict with the influential model represented in the “Theme from Shaft.” Yet all these notions of masculine authority enabled representations that emphasized depth and complexity of character. In the context of their time, they spoke to the broadening possibilities for representing black men in the mass media.

      REGARDING BARRY

      To show the way in which Barry White’s music participates in constructions of black masculinity developed in the early 1970s, we need only focus on his first solo album, I’ve Got So Much to Give.³⁷ The first feature worth noting is the album cover, available through any five-second Internet image search: Barry White stands facing the camera; his hair is conked and done up in the style of James Brown, but he also has a closely trimmed beard; he is a very large man, and dark-skinned; he is cupping his hands to hold up four miniature women, three black and one white. Who are these women, and why are they so small? It could very well be, of course, that they are supposed to be recognized as the members of Love Unlimited—their visual presentation shows them to be in a special relationship to Barry White—but nothing on the album identifies them as the backup group. Certainly, it would be easy to read this image in a conventionally sexist way: these are all Barry’s girls, and his abundant manliness can satisfy all of them. But the album’s songs, when taken into account, suggest a different interpretation.

      The opening song on side one of the album is a Holland-Dozier-Holland tune originally performed by the Four Tops, “Standing in the Shadows of Love.” White’s cover begins with a lengthy instrumental introduction structured by the gradual addition of instruments and licks that eventually move into a double time to create the groove. No surprise, there: this device is the same as in “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and the “Theme from Shaft,” something of a common coin in early 1970s soul. And yet the musical imagery is quite different. The introduction begins with a brief tap on the cymbals that is left hanging unconnected to the piano chords that follow after a pause. We are dislocated in time, captured by a state of anticipatory unknowing. What is the meaning of this space that comes between the cymbals and the piano? It will only begin to make sense when the first verse of the song arrives.

      The orchestration of the introduction, while enriched by classical instruments just as in the case of Hayes’s or Whitfield’s Temptations, is nevertheless atypical: an oboe, an electric guitar altered to sound like a sitar, a heavy string complement, including cello and bass as well as violins often playing pizzicato, vibraphone, and electric harpsichord. Continuous hi-hat licks like those in the songs previously discussed do not appear; instead the end-weighted cymbal figure that opened the track continues to repeat, punctuating the end of each bar of the first twelve and then moving on to steady impulses on each quarter until the double-time section that begins at m.28. The instrumental figures are “classicistic” in their melodic shapes and in their frequent quasi-imitative relationships with one another, and have little to do with the characteristic turns of soul styles. Through most of the introduction’s slow section, the harmony consists of an oscillation between C# minor and B major, each decorated with weighty suspensions. There are twenty-four repetitions of this progression, so when the twenty-fifth C# minor chord suddenly turns and leads down through E major and an A major seventh to head toward G# major (the dominant, at last), the music’s harmonic activity and its metrical modulation seem sparked off one another.

      The influx of musical energy leads to the entrance of the backup voices (the women of Love Unlimited elles-mêmes) to strike up an emblematic rendition of the song’s chorus. Since the women sing in a fairly unmodulated unison, the instrumental glitz that drapes their unsubtle vocals might lead us to imagine we are in the presence of an inexperienced Supremes knockoff newly arrived in Vegas. But Love Unlimited has merely prepared the way for the real event—over an enormous vamp (twenty-two measures!) on the dominant seventh chord, Barry White begins his work. For the first stretch of the dominant vamp we hear White intoning sensually on the leading tone as the syncopated strings reach continually stretch upward in register along the chord. As the vamp heads toward its close, White gives up his moans for a deep spoken “Lord have mercy” as more and more the instruments begin to drop out to leave the bass portion of the groove exposed. As White enters with the first verse of the song, there is a moment of metrical confusion: the downbeat simply disappears in the arrangement, and the syncopations of the vocal line override any metrical inertia that might simplify the moment. The expectation might recall the mysterious space between the cymbals and the piano at the beginning, but now the sheer push of harmonic direction coupled with the confused but steady continuity of impulses lets us know that we are heading in a direction, whatever disarray may characterize the journey.

      It is hard to listen to this chorus plus vamp section of the song in any public space other than on a dance floor, where bodily motion has at least a chance to take away part of our self-consciousness—just as hard as it would be to watch even an intense soft-core love scene in public. The music makes demands on our attention and physical response that would be indecorous to concede to in front of others. This sudden out-bursts of Love Unlimited and especially of Barry White are meant to shock, to force us to think almost exclusively about sex. The music only fixes our attention on the act for a moment before going on to place the energy summoned up at the service of something else. We can think about this in another way by noting the disjunction between the rigidly organized, even obsessive vamp, and the seemingly spasmodic vocals. The common word for such inarticulate yet affect-laden outbursts is of course the term “ejaculations”—in this case, almost hilariously appropriate to the substance of the music. But what makes us prone to shame when we listen to it is the very thing that attracts us to it: its physical rigidity coupled with its affective disorganization, as if it were the sonic equivalent of someone being shattered into pieces by ecstasy. And to be so shattered is to be vulnerable in the face of others.

      Barry White’s persona on this album is in fact occupied with ringing the changes on vulnerability: pleading, loneliness, desire, gratitude, comforting tenderness. Furthermore, all of the songs are first person, and aimed at an unspecified “you.” The openness of the pronouns make it possible for listeners to assume either position in the conversation, identifying with Barry, the person he addresses, or alternating between them. White’s sensitivity, however, is expressed through the means of his fantastically resonant bass voice, suggesting the intense masculinity being channeled into such soft expressions. Given such an emotional sound-scape, perhaps it would be better to read the women in Barry’s hands as his past loves, to whom he is singing as he documents his relationships. He is not displaying them as members of a harem; rather, they are all the girls he’s loved before. And perhaps he loves them still, and perhaps he will continue to do so.

      Why would this cluster of musical and visual themes have been appropriate for Barry White’s mode of crossover, for his appeal to an eclectic mixture of races, genders, classes, and orientations united only by an interest in this kind of sexual hedonism? Much of the answer lies in the domain of timbre. Barry White’s orchestrational choices and favorite licks on this album certainly scream “classical,” but it is doubtful that they are meant to do so directly. The indirection is made more clear when we note how the introduction and first lyrics of “Bring Back My Yesterday,” the song that follows “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” evoke

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