R&B (Rhythm & Business): The Political Economy of Black Music Norman Kelley, Editor Akashic Books, 2002 $24.95 334 pp. Buy this book

A different method of discussing The Political Economy of Black Music comes through the anecdotes that history has piled up over the decades. While I think it's fair to say all races are screwed by record companies, a concentration on crimes perpetrated against black artists could fascinate, and could suggest unique ways they have been undone by the business. Such slanted histories amount to intellectual B.S., but they do serve a function. When Noam Chomsky avoids fair assessment by focusing on American atrocities, he makes a point that might otherwise be cluttered by stories about Indonesian assholes -- i.e. that we're assholes too. Along the same lines, a focus on black artists could at least drive home the fact that the Fats Dominos and Bobby Womacks have all given America far more than they've received. From my perspective, it's easy to make that argument, but the writers here often fail when they try.

The book's editor, Norman Kelley, is the primary culprit. "Notes on the Political Economy of Black Music", his launching pad essay, is merely a celebration of his personal politics. It annoyed me instantly when it declared, one paragraph in, that black music has "become a commodity that is indeed easy -- easy to exploit" ("Notes", 6). The entire point of mainstream music (which for him, in "short hand", is "black music" (7)) is to make as many people as possible want to hear it, so you have to make it a commodity. You find something in the song or artist that can attract the 12-year old buyer -- be it Jennifer Lopez's ass, Slick Rick's criminal record or Luther Vandross' chic appeal -- and you stamp it all over the product. Degrading? Quite possibly -- but so what? Artists can't just assume that they're an open book that says, in big bold letters, "I'm a genius". When a record is not made into a commodity, and pushed into the world without promotion (like Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear), it has no chance of becoming the Thriller of the year. As Prince himself should know by now, to sell or get ahead on talent alone is a pipe dream.

The further you get into Kelley's essay, the more it takes on a fervent "blacks-have-been-wronged-like-motherfuckers" tone. Kelley does cite an economist -- but an economist aligned with the Jesse Jacksons in the race-issue business. Amartya Sen says "American blacks" make less than "American whites" (okeydoke), and that they die sooner than "low-income Indians in Kerala and the Chinese" (11). Try to connect the latter statement to the article at hand, and you'd expect Kelley to argue that the record business has tampered with black musicians' genetic makeup! Oh, if we were that lucky. Sadly, this essay proves itself typical, not goofy. It claims blacks can't live longer than other races who make less, because they lack in "five instrumental freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective securities " (11). Kelley and that chickenshit economist gloss over the possibility of food habits, because that would lay some blame on black culture. You can't say eating too much pork or chicken is the problem, because that sounds racist.

Well, half the essays in this book sound racist to me. Armed with an easy hypothesis to prove -- that black musicians should make more money than they do -- the writers squander the opportunity through unnecessary, compulsive wishes to serenade black musicians ("Black pearl, let me put you up where you belong"). It's been forty-some years since people stopped celebrating Pat Boone as the man behind "Tutti Frutti", but the writers act like Little Richard's wound hasn't healed. These "who stole the soul" writers have joined to create an extended aria about "Odin", that symbolic black character who could fly like a hawk in the film O, when all the whites could not. R&B has accepted Muddy Waters' famous statement -- that rock-n-roll is the blues' child -- as unalterable, indisputable fact, where songs like "Wake Up Little Susie" are charged with imitating "African call-and-response procedures" ("Crossing Over", 133). Recalling the Chuck Berry interview in his Chess box set, perhaps that "call-and-response" thievery is why "Wake Up" (and "Every Breath You Take") were among the songs he wished he wrote. Of course, Reebee Garofalo (the essayist now being cited) plays at fairness within his essay, but this paragraph on hillbilly music indicates his slant:

"...Rockabilly is hillbilly rock and roll," insists Nick Tosches. "It was not a usurpation of black music by whites because its soul, its pneuma, was white, full of the redneck ethos". "It was that to a degree," acknowledges Arnold Shaw, "though it would probably be more accurate to describe it as the sound of young, white Southerners imitating black bluesman" (136).

The Political Economy of Black Music shouldn't make arguments down this line. Aside from the fact they are irrelevant to the topic -- artists aren't paid for their influence, or the fact that their race is collectively clever -- they throw readers so far away from any thoughtful statement they might make. When the NAACP concludes a recent report with inflated rhetoric ("structure of the (recording) industry allows for total white control and domination" (56)), it's just another way for them to say, "We won't help you", because no business takes heed of such exaggerations. To my mind, it would seem a whole lot better to simply proclaim the brilliance of a Bobby Womack or Ephraim Lewis, then show how he was ripped off, than to speculate on how he would have influenced Bach, or how his inflection was ripped off from ABBA, and his tight pants stolen by Justin Timberlake.

As Garofalo at least acknowledges the existence of country music as a vital American music (after using a Ray Charles quote to imply the steel guitar takes its "cry and whine" sound directly from the blues (132)), Norman Kelley receives the reward for most directly stating the oversimplified crap that I've heard off and on throughout my life -- that everything sprang from blues and soul, how jazz is America's greatest musical export, and how Elvis was a racist. He steers the book down its sorry path, arguing that "African-Americans, collectively and individually, have set the standards for both performance and expressivity in American popular music, and, to a certain degree, in popular culture in general" (7).

Here, music is not the great equalizer and liberator -- the art form that brings us together ("We Shall Overcome"), wakes us up ("Biko"; "Free Nelson Mandela"; "Gimme Hope Jo'Anna"), and helps us endure karaoke ("I Will Survive") -- but a string of ditties used for bullets in you-against-me politics. This not only sucks, but stands opposed to everything that makes tunes like "Everyday People" popular in the first place.

In Mark Anthony Neal's "Soul for Sale", the writer makes the case that blackness is bottled, and he can tell when its mixture has been diluted. He goes after those like Berry Gordy, who, as businessmen, always quested for a larger audience. Among his debatable conclusions, the Jackson Five's popularity dropped solely because Gordy saw them as "little more than a novelty act" ("Soul", 167). When a band changes musical direction, adopting to styles of the day, and increases their own creative input, couldn't there be other reasons why a Get It Together got together with no one? As for his criticism of What's Happening?, I'm personally thrilled that producers "totally ignored the vibrant political culture" found in the Watts Happening Coffee House (from which the show got its name). The result was a great sitcom about people, not a show with slogans and fictional chicks who quote Sonia Sanchez or Ntozake Shange. Yes, God bless What's Happening for staying domestic.

There are some very good articles in this collection, but most of them get lost in the muck. Danny Goldberg's "Ballad of a Mid-Level Artist" is the smart numbers-filled essay that Political Economy should have made its bread and butter, while David Sanjek's "Tell Me Something I Didn't Know" is a very articulate sociological piece. The latter examines and pokes good fun at the "Harvard Report", something Kelly also tackles in his opening essay. The Harvard Report seems to have been used as a primer for white-owned corporations on whether or not to buy certain black-owned music labels. It includes a lot of definitions for soul music that are laughable, and it's a shame the report itself could not be printed verbatim. Sanjek's essay does a good job covering the label relationships that developed from it (between CBS and Philadelphia International, and between CBS and STAX), and it's done with a fair eye. Gamble and Huff were the primary cause of Philadelphia International's downfall, according to Sanjek, as they just didn't keep up with trends.

For all his apparent sensibility, Sanjek is ripe with at least one oddity all his own: he acts baffled as to why CBS did not want more "Disco Lady" songs from Johnnie Taylor (72). Perhaps, unwittingly, he found the single instance in which a major label was looking out for an artist, as that's the only awful Johnnie Taylor track in existence.

Frank Kofsky's "If You're Black, Get Back" appeared less fair than the Sanjek piece, and I got the impression that it created its mountain of text from something that was barely even a molehill. Kofsky's essay asks why Columbia produced far more jazz recording sessions from 1957-1965 than the ten years that followed, and the answer just seems too easy: jazz became less popular. Just look at our own record collections; while we may like Bitches' Brew, or are at least pleased to own it, are we fans of the trends it helped to start? The most popular-selling jazz CDs today are the Wynton Marsalis throwbacks to the classic fifties style, and that has to say something. At the very least, it says more than Kofsky's emphatic disbelief (in John Hammond's remarks) that a jazz record needed to sell about 15,000 units to break even. Admittedly, I doubt that's true either, but you can't refute it, as Kofsky does, simply by mentioning that records from the fifties stayed in existence by selling just 500 copies a year. The music world changed a lot in the twenty years before Hammond made his 15,000-or-else remark, just as it has changed tons more since the advent of MTV and the Internet. You can't compare statistics from completely different periods of time and derive anything but the most basic conclusions from them.

In its defense, Kofsky's article is at least a page turner -- a point that can be made for every piece in the book. The essays that stray far from the book's stated objectives (to document how the music industry has stolen from the blacks) shouldn't have been included, but they are often the more enlightening pieces. They seem to acknowledge the fact that the music business screws everybody, including consumers who only want the best efforts an artist can give them. Danny Goldberg's "The Ballad of the Mid-Level Artist", for example, is fascinating when it tells how Mercury traded a high portion of their royalty cut in exchange for Shania Twain rushing them new product. The whole reasoning behind this tradeoff was for Polygram numbers to be high enough at the end of the year that bigwigs could keep their jobs (78). It's a case of gambling-with-numbers, ENRON-style. As Shania Twain songs from Come On Over still pop up in commercials, radio and Britney Spears films, I guess all parties were pleased with that rush job.

The "Senate Testimony" of the Future of Music Coalition is informative reading too, though it can be found online for free, while Courtney Love's "Letter to Fellow Recording Artists" actually produces one of the most powerful arguments ever made in defense of the artists by stating the obvious: record executives should not be allowed to have a 95 percent failure rate and keep their jobs (331). A new business model could demand more from the executives, and force them to actually do a good job -- which seems like a requirement any corporation should impose. Of course, if this means a complete restructuring of the system, in which bands like Hole lose their contracts, so be it. I don't think Hole wants anything to do with major labels anymore, anyway. It was on those bastard major labels that Fats Domino, Buckwheat Zydeco, Ivory Joe Hunter, Lou Rawls, Little Richard, Cassandra Wilson and Charley Pride all covered Hank Williams songs...

-- Theodore Defosse