Copyright 2000 www.cosmopolis.ch Louis Gerber All rights
reserved.
Motown and the cultural politics of Detroit
Berry Gordy's soul music
label and the civil rights movement. Dancing in the Street - The study by Suzanne E. Smith, HUP.
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Motown sheet music click here.
Suzanne E. Smith, assistant professor of history at George Mason University,
examines the relation between soul music's hit factory and the politics
and culture of Motor Town, USA, in Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of
Detroit.
The author refers to the British press which asked Martha Reeves (of Martha
and the Vandellas) if she was a militant leader and if Dancing in the
Street was a call to riot. The query was absurd because, as she later
remarked: "My Lord, it was a party song." It was associated
to historical events (e.g. the Watts uprising) taking place at the same moment
which the record company could not control. Other such songs were Nowhere
to Run and Shotgun. But Suzanne E. Smith argues that Dancing in
the Street was "never just a party song". According to her, the
Motown songs (and other tunes as well, of course) "clearly illustrate how
the sounds of Detroit's streets could articulate the needs of African
Americans." The Motown sound was the most celebrated and famous of the
60s. The company transformed the American popular music scene. "Never
before had a black owned company been able to create and produce the musical
artistry of its own community, and then sell it successfully to audiences
across the racial boundaries."
"Record companies first began marketing "black" music as
"race records" in the 1920s in response to the popularity of blues
singers such as Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. Billboard
magazine monitored these records on its "Harlem Hit Parade", which
eventually became the "Rhythm and Blues" chart." Other labels
such as Don Robey's Duke-Peacock label in Houston and Vee-Jay Records in
Chicago succeeded in the R&R market before Motown, but it was Motown which
brought down the segregation of the music industry when its records began to
sell outside the traditional black markets.
Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown in Detroit in 1958 with an $800 loan from his
family. From the small house on West Grand Boulevard, which the staff quickly
dubbed "Hitsville, U.S.A.", Motown's soul music was to conquer
America and the world. According to Suzanne E. Smith, it was the civil rights
movement which "created the environment in which broader cultural
integration - as typified by Motown's wide appeal - could occur." Many
have argued that Detroit is not critical to understanding the Motown
phenomenon which could have happened anywhere - at least in others cities with
a large and vital African American population such as Chicago, New York,
Pittsburgh or Cleveland. These people "emphasize individual ambition
rather than community life, urban geography, economic structures, or race
relations as factors in Motown's rise to the top of popular music."
Suzanne E. Smith does not stress Motown's crossover success to white
audiences, but its relationship to African American audiences, and specifically
to black Detroit. Motown had "a distinct role to play in the city's black
community, and that community - as diverse as it was - articulated and
promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas" which reflected
the "unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban
North". They responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights
campaign.
The author's analysis is based on "the theoretical concept of cultural
formation to understand the role of the black commercial culture in the
development of a black urban community." Dancing in the Street
starts with Motown's founding in the late 1950s and its dominance on the
popular music charts in the mid-1960s and ends in 1973, when Motown left
Detroit and its decline already had begun.
Besides Motown, African American Detroit of the late 1950s and 1960s
produced a series of cultural, economic, political, religious and historical
institutions such as the Broadside Press (one of the first black-owned
publishing houses), the Concept East Theater (the first black theater company
in the urban North), WCHB (the first radio station built, owned and operated
by African Americans), the Booker T. Washington Trade Association (one of the
largest chapters of the National Negro Business League) and the Dodge
Revolutionary Union Movement which became the League of Revolutionary Black
Workers.
The author writes that Berry Gordy Jr. was "extremely wary about
affiliating his business with any organization or movement that might
negatively influence his company's commercial success. Nevertheless, both
Motown's music and its entrepreneurial acumen emerged from an urban black
community that regularly asserted its "politics" through cultural
and economic means." Like Nat King Cole, Gordy believed that
"cause" music did not sell records and avoided it at all costs. But
there are also exceptions such as Stevie Wonder's rendition of Bob Dylan's Blowin'
in the Wind of 1966, Aretha Franklin's Respect of 1967, I Care
about Detroit by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles from 1968 and Motown's
hiring of Junius Griffin and and Ewart Abner in order to promote black causes.
Motown vigilance is reflected in the fact that the company did not dare to let
The Temptations sing the Whitfield song War, but gave it to the
relatively unknown Edwin Starr. The song reached number one on the American
pop charts in the summer of 1970.
Other topics: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Smokey Robinson and The
Supremes, Poets of the Revolution and the anthology New Negro Poets, Henry
Ford's assembly lines and hit-production at Motown, the Watts uprising and the
Black Muslim movement, Berry Gordy's business practices and the departure of
several stars and songwriters from Motown. In her
mosaic-like book, Suzanne E. Smith shows these and other black people, movements and efforts and their
relation with Motown, America's most successful black business. Unfortunately,
there are some unnecessary repetitions in her analysis and the relation
between the different subjects does not always become clear. Despite the
author's intention, the Motown company and the civil rights movement partly
appear as two separate phenomena. Nevertheless, Dancing in the Street
contains a lot of useful information. - Get the book from Amazon.com.
