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CHAPTER 1
The Price of the Beat
Black Popular Music and the Crossover Dream
It is only in his music ... that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
— James Baldwin, "Many Thousands Gone," 1955
The year 1979 — when James Baldwin's Just Above My Head hit bookstores — was technically one year before the 1980s began. Yet the Reagan revolution was already well underway. Having served as Governor of California from 1967 to 1975, Reagan made his first run for president in 1976. After a fiercely contested primary with Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, Reagan came just 117 delegates short of the nomination. Ford eventually lost to Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter in the general election.
Reagan officially announced his second candidacy for president of the United States on November 13, 1979, in New York City — the same season in which Just Above My Head was published. America was in a bleak mood. The 1970s had been a rough decade for the country, from Vietnam to Watergate, from spiking divorce rates to a steep decline in national morale. While Jimmy Carter promised to restore honesty and integrity to the office of president, his tenure provoked disappointment and anger from both the Left and the Right. Inflation and unemployment kept rising, while the energy crisis had the public in a panic. News stories showed labyrinthine lines at gas stations. Several major cities, including New York City, were forced to close gas stations due to overwhelming demand. Some politicians proposed gas rationing as a solution.
By the summer of 1979, President Jimmy Carter's approval rating was lower than Richard Nixon's at the height of Watergate. After huddling with advisors at Camp David, the beleaguered president delivered, on July 15, 1979, what would become perhaps his most famous speech. Often referred to as the "malaise speech," Carter spoke not only of the country's energy crisis but also of "a crisis of confidence." "It is a crisis," he asserted, "that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America." Carter proceeded to speak bluntly about the emptiness of overconsumption and materialism, about apathy and despair, about "paralysis and stagnation and drift," about "wounds that have never been healed." It was a remarkably honest and astute diagnosis, and initially the American public seemed to respond positively, as Carter's approval rating jumped 11 points.
But in the months to come, as the Iran hostage crisis compounded perceptions of Carter's, and by extension America's, ineptitude, the speech came to be associated with accepted failure. Critics claimed Carter wallowed in negativity and weakness — that he accepted a diminished future for the United States and failed to provide clear solutions to the problems he identified. The speech, and circumstances, offered the perfect opening for the charismatic, always-optimistic Ronald Reagan. In his own campaign-announcement speech that fall, Reagan rejected leaders who "tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where — because of our past excesses — it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don't believe that. And, I don't believe you do either." Reagan's alternative vision was about possibility. He spoke of his own life growing up during the Great Depression, seeing his father lose his job and his dignity, but refusing to give up. Through hard work, faith, and ingenuity, his family made it. Reagan held himself up as the living embodiment of the American Dream: an ordinary boy from Illinois who made it to Hollywood, an ordinary actor who now aspired to the highest office in the land. If he could do it, anyone could. If he could succeed, so could America. It was a persuasive story, one with deep roots in the American psyche.
This context is significant to understanding Just Above My Head, a novel profoundly interested in the efficacy of the American Dream. Not surprisingly, Baldwin's narrative complicates Reagan's myth — most obviously by recognizing its entanglement with race, gender, and sexuality. Yet it does so, ironically, by zooming in on a "success story": the success of an individual who pursues and achieves his dreams, and the success more broadly of black music in America. "You're going to see my life," declares the novel's protagonist, Arthur Montana, renowned gospel singer, in the opening pages. "I don't want to hide anything from you, brother." This desire to be seen and understood is at the heart of James Baldwin's final novel. Yet it is tangled, ironically, by the protagonist's fame — the fact, that is, that so many people "know" him. Unlike musician characters in Baldwin's earlier works, Arthur Montana is not an obscure singer in the streets or church or club — or rather, he does not remain obscure. By the time of his death — which opens the novel — he is known throughout America and the world. From humble circumstances, he becomes a star, living and grappling with the "crossover" dream. For Baldwin, however, this dream, and the progress it seems to signify, is as complex as the individual who embodies it.
He would know. Baldwin, after all, bears many resemblances to his protagonist. In a 1984 interview with the New York Times, he mused:
There is a decidedly grave danger of becoming a celebrity, of becoming a star, of becoming a personality. Again, I'm very well placed to know that. It's symptomatic of the society that doesn't have any real respect for the artist. You're either a success or a failure and there's nothing in between. And if you are a success, you run the risk that Norman [Mailer] has run and that I run, too, of becoming a kind of show business personality. Then the legend becomes far more important than the work. It's as though you're living in an echo chamber. You hear only your own voice. And, when you become a celebrity, that voice is magnified by multitudes and you begin to drown in this endless duplication of what looks like yourself. You have to be really very lucky, and very stubborn, not to let that happen to you.
In the same interview, Baldwin compared being a celebrity to
a garment I wear. But the celebrity never sees himself. I have some idea what I'm doing on that stage; above all, I have some idea what sustains me on that stage. But the celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would've had to become a celebrity in order to survive. A boy like me with all his handicaps, real and fancied, could not have survived in obscurity. I can say that it would have had to happen this way, though I could not see it coming.
Of course, as Baldwin's novel demonstrates, surviving in notoriety can be just as challenging as surviving in obscurity — or at the very least, it presents its own set of obstacles. Published at a crucial turning point for black music, black America, and American culture more broadly, Baldwin's novel offers a version of the American Dream that refuses to accept the terms of popular discourse.
Baldwin himself was of course deeply influenced by music. It was perhaps the most valuable gift he took from his time in the church. It was the means by which he discovered his own voice as a writer in the mountains of Switzerland. From the beginning to end of his career, his work is packed with song lyrics, riffs on the effects of music, and allusions to musical artists. Among the many names that populate his work are Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, James Brown, Mahalia Jackson, Billy Preston, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson.
Several chapters and articles have deftly engaged with Baldwin and music, including Josh Kun's "Life According to the Beat: James Baldwin, Bessie Smith, and the Perilous Sounds of Love," Warren Carson's "Manhood, Musicality and Male Bonding," and D. Quentin Miller's "Using the Blues: James Baldwin and Music." Perhaps the most comprehensive overview of Baldwin's important relationship with black music is Ed Pavlic's 2015 book, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener. In volume 2 of the James Baldwin Review, Pavlic also compiled a playlist of songs that mattered to Baldwin and "offer his readers access to deeper meanings in his work." Scholarship focused specifically on Just Above My Head has been rather thin but has begun to garner more attention in recent years, including work by Craig Werner, Lynn Orilla Scott, Julie Nash, D. Quentin Miller, Ed Pavlic, and Christopher Hobson. This chapter attempts to add to this growing body of work by focusing specifically on what Just Above My Head reveals about the complex mediation of black music and musicians in the late twentieth century as it emerged as one of the most influential forces in American culture. How have black popular artists been read, represented, and evaluated in American media and culture? What was the price of "crossing over," of playing to increasingly mass, cross-racial audiences, of working for white labels, of conforming to the demands of a white industry? Why was black success so often accompanied by tragedy?
For Ronald Reagan, the American Dream was a simple story of persistence and bootstrap individualist achievement. For Baldwin, however, success, as traditionally understood, was elusive for many Americans; and for those who did "make it," it remained replete with obstacles. This chapter explores why the story of black music — and the black artist — were particularly important to Baldwin, and what his final novel reveals about the complexities of the "crossover dream."
Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough
In the late 1970s, black music was at an important crossroads. Long marginalized as "race music," it was on the cusp of leaping to unprecedented levels of mainstream success. While the music industry as a whole was struggling, black music was adapting, evolving, and innovating. The late 1970s marked the birth of hip hop and the beginning of a new pop renaissance that would transform the sound and look of the 1980s. According to estimates, black records accounted for more than 25 percent of the music industry's $4 billion in sales in 1978; by the mid-1980s that number had doubled. Gloria Gaynor's anthem, "I Will Survive" and Sister Sledge's classic, "We Are Family" debuted in 1979; it was the year of Donna Summer's Bad Girls, Earth, Wind & Fire's I Am, and Prince's eponymous breakthrough album. Perhaps most prominently, it was the year of Michael Jackson's first solo album, Off the Wall. Produced by music legend Quincy Jones, Off the Wall quickly became the bestselling album to date by a black artist. Fueled by crossover hit singles, "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" and "Rock with You," the album sold an estimated 9 million copies in just two years. Eventually, it spawned four Top Ten hits, a record at that point for a solo artist on one album. Just as important, it set up Jackson's stratospheric rise in the 1980s.
Yet the album's reception provides a window into the struggles and paradoxes of black popular music in America, particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite its commercial success, Jackson's album was slighted at the 1980 Grammy Awards, where it was passed over for all major awards, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year (white artists won in each of these categories). Like that of many black artists, Jackson's work was dismissed as frivolous dance music, was relegated to racialized categories like "R&B" or "disco." That same year, popular music's most visible magazine, Rolling Stone, refused to put Jackson on the cover despite his clear cultural significance. In a note to Jackson's manager, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner wrote that while the magazine was willing to consider the artist for an article, Jackson did not merit front-cover status.
This treatment spoke to broader racial biases in popular music. The infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago, when piles of disco albums were burned to the delight of an overwhelmingly white male crowd, also occurred in 1979. The event, charged with racial and homophobic epithets, nearly led to a riot. "Disco sucks" became a mantra for rockists in the early Reagan era, whose intense hatred for the genre seemed to cross far beyond aesthetic preferences. As Craig Werner writes, "The attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism, and homophobia." In addition to public demonstrations, critics dismissed disco and other black-associated musical genres as formulaic, inauthentic, and shallow. White rock, by contrast, was described as authentic, serious, and important.
Such evaluations led directly to programming decisions on radio, and eventually to cable television channels such as MTV. In our tendency to think of race relations in America as a linear story of progress, we often forget that music became increasingly segregated over the course of the 1970s. As Nelson George notes, "The best year for crossover was 1970, when fifteen of the top black songs in America reached the top fifteen on the pop chart, and seven went to number one [including four by the Jackson 5]." The best period for racial diversity on the charts to that point had been from 1967 to 1973, the height of Motown's influence. The years 1974 to 1982, however, saw a steep decline in black crossover hits on the charts and in airplay. FM radio in particular banished black music from the airwaves, favoring instead safe white rock bands that catered to their target demographics, groups like the Eagles, Journey, and REO Speedwagon. "In this environment," notes Steve Greenberg, "number one urban contemporary hits, such as Roger Troutman's 'Heard It through the Grapevine' or 'Burn Rubber' by the Gap Band, failed to even crack the Top 40. Prince's '1999,' which would later emerge as a pop culture anthem, flopped at Top 40 radio even as it soared up the urban chart. A black superstar like Rick James could sell over 4 million albums while remaining unknown to most listeners of white-oriented radio."
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, then, black music found itself in a familiar position: commercially popular and culturally influential, yet simultaneously marginalized and critically devalued. This indeed had been the story of black popular music throughout the twentieth century, going back to jazz, gospel, and the blues. There were ebbs and flows in its "mainstream" success and recognition; but the overarching story was plagued by marginalization, exploitation, appropriation, and misrepresentation (or no representation at all). James Baldwin spoke to such issues in his 1979 essay, "Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption." The essay uses white music historian James Lincoln Collier's book The Making of Jazz (1979) as an illustration of how the story of black music has been distorted and misunderstood. The history Collier presents, Baldwin writes, is as "precise as [it] is deluded." He cites one passage as indicative of the book's fatal flaw: "There have been two authentic geniuses in jazz. One of them, of course, was Louis Armstrong, the much loved entertainer, striving for acceptance. The other was a sociopath named Charlie Parker who managed ... to destroy his career — and finally himself."
Against such a narrative — first, the absurd assertion that there are only two "authentic geniuses" in the history of jazz, and second, that they can both be neatly reduced to caricatures — Baldwin writes that he feels an "obligation to attempt to clarify the record." He does not want future generations to believe this "comprehensive history," written by a man who seems to see and hear so little, where Baldwin sees, hears, and feels so much. Baldwin feels compelled, that is, not simply to offer a corrective of any one particular reductive black biography or history, but to reframe the story with an entirely different vocabulary. While the European author of The Making of Jazz may have conducted meticulous research, he misses its soul and its context — that is, the true story.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "James Baldwin and the 1980s"
by .
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