Читать книгу A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race And The Soul Of America - Craig Werner - Страница 7

Introduction: “What’s Going On”

“When would the war stop? That’s what I wanted to know. . . the war inside my soul.” That was the question that inspired Marvin Gaye to create the great 1971 album that provides the title of this section. He could have been speaking for the country. On the cover of What’s Going On, Gaye gazed out over a nation torn by conflicts: the war in Vietnam and a racial war raging sometimes in the streets, but always in our hearts. Nearly three decades later, we’re still looking for answers to Gaye’s question. Voices of despair sometimes seem to have carried the day. Difference is real, they say; there’s no point in trying to change human nature. War, like the poor, will be with us always. That’s just the way it is.

They’re wrong.

A Change Is Gonna Come is my attempt to help renew a process of racial healing that at times seems to have stopped dead. Like Marvin Gaye, I believe that black music provides a clear vision of how we might begin to come to terms with the burdens of our shared history. During nearly two decades of conversations with students desperately seeking ways to make sense of their lives, I have found that black music and the not-quite-white music that responds to its calls can provide many with insight that allows healing to begin. It’s a wisdom grounded in process; it can’t be reduced to “Aretha’s Little Book of Life,” “The Wit and Wisdom of Miles Davis,” or “Ten Ways to Beat the Blues.” The best way to get a sense of what black music offers is to follow its story through the decades that have shaped the world we live in today.

History never happens in straight lines. The lines connecting events extend across space and time in tangled, irreducible patterns. All forms of storytelling oversimplify the patterns, but music simplifies less than most. Structurally, music mirrors the complications of history. Moving forward through time, music immerses us in a narrative flow, gives us a sense of how what happened yesterday shapes what’s happening now. But the simultaneous quality of music—its ability to make us aware of the many voices sounding at a single moment—adds another dimension to our sense of the world. When a jazz trumpeter incorporates a Louis Armstrong riff into her solo or a hip-hop DJ samples James Brown, music transcends time. When a London remix of a Jamaican version of a Curtis Mayfield classic plays in a Tokyo dance club, music conquers space. When “glory hallelujah” is the line that follows “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” and no one finds that confusing, music captures the paradoxes of the human heart.

A Change Is Gonna Come makes no attempt to tell a definitive story. Rather, I look at what’s happened in America since the fifties from as many angles as possible. At times, I stick close to the chronological sequence of events; at others, I deliberately create dialogues between songs released years apart. In all cases, my underlying intention is to suggest useful ways of thinking about the problems that keep America from realizing its own democratic ideals. There are no more compelling statements of human potential than the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But, perhaps because the ideals are so visionary, there’s probably never been a nation that more consistently failed to live in accord with what it imagined itself to be.

Nowhere has that been clearer than in America’s experience with race. From the moment the first slave ship landed at Jamestown in 1619, America has struggled—sometimes heroically, sometimes evasively—with the reality of a multicultural society. The attempt to express the inner meaning of that struggle gives American art its unique power. You can feel it in the novels of Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville and William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Leslie Silko, in the collages of Romare Beardon and the photographs of Dorothea Lange. But its strongest expression comes in music. Since the barriers imposed by legal segregation began to come down after World War II, music has provided a unique forum for dialogue—sometimes harmonious, sometimes angry—between black and white voices.

The primary goal of A Change Is Gonna Come is to tell the story of that beautiful and complicated dialogue. It’s a story of how music radiates healing energies, how gospel and soul and reggae help us imagine a world where we can get along without turning off our minds. But it’s also a story about how history erodes hope, how the lures of money and power tempt us to betray our best selves. And how often we give in.

The music of the last four decades refuses to forget either part of the story. If we forget where we’ve come from, we have no chance of knowing who we really are, what we can become. Frequently the music tells a truer story than the ones recorded in the newspapers or broadcast on TV. Rapper Chuck D’s claim that “rap music is black America’s CNN” applies equally well to the gospel music that powered the freedom movement, the soul music that carried the message of love through the sixties, the funk, reggae, and disco that testify to the confused crosscurrents of the seventies.

It’s not just a black thing. A Change Is Gonna Come places black music at the center of the story for reasons that have a lot to do with history and nothing to do with the melanin content of an individual’s skin. Most of the people taken into slavery came from West African cultures that understood how developing individual character contributed to the health of the community. When West Africans confronted the nightmare realities of slavery, they improvised ways of surviving that have come down to us through the voices of Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke, the instruments of Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, and the communal explorations of Sly and the Family Stone and the Wu-Tang Clan. While those strategies are grounded in the specific history of blacks in what Bob Marley called “Babylon,” they’re available to anyone who doesn’t call Babylon home. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Steve Cropper have their place in the story that, today, is being passed on by blacks and whites, Asians and Latins. The spirit doesn’t check IDs.

In telling this story, A Change Is Gonna Come uses a conceptual framework derived from gospel, jazz, and the blues. Together, the musical “impulses”—the term originates with Ralph Ellison—provide a way of thinking through the most fundamental human problems. Readers who prefer to begin with the concepts can consult the definition sections (see pages 28, 68, and 132) before plunging into the story. The blues, jazz, and gospel impulses highlight black music’s refusal to simplify reality or devalue emotion. Even when they force you to accept uncomfortable truths, the blues never explain away how things feel. They make you deal with the evil in the world and the evil in your head, help you find the strength to get up and face another blues-haunted day. Testifying to the power of love, gospel gives us the courage to keep on pushing for a redemption that is at once spiritual and political. Gospel reminds us we’re all in it together, though the definition of “we” varies. Jazz is innovation; it refuses to accept the way things are, envisions ways of reaching a higher ground we’re only beginning to be able to imagine.

Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On gives voice to all of these currents. Introducing Gaye’s main concerns, the title cut opens the album with the sounds of a party, the celebration of black family and community. But the three-song sequence that continues with “What’s Happening Brother?” and “Flying High” collapses the distance between the gospel feeling of unity and the isolation experienced by a Vietnam veteran returning to a world of unemployment, political confusion, and drugs. As the story unfolds, Gaye moves back and forth between the visionary hopes of “Save the Children” and “God Is Love” and the hard-edged realism of “Mercy Mercy Me” and “Inner City Blues.” Warning of a time “when the world won’t be singing,” he calls out in words that have echoed down the decades: “Makes me wanna holler / throw up both my hands.” However bleak the prospect, the sound of the music holds out the hope that, someday, we’ll arrive in that promised land where our actions correspond to our ideals.

Marvin Gaye didn’t make it. The last years of his life disintegrated into a hell of self-doubt and withdrawal. When he was shot and killed by his father, it seemed all too emblematic of what had happened in black America since the sixties. Part of the story I’m telling has to do with lost hope, the death of the dream shared by Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and the hundreds of thousands who responded to their calls. When you look at the personal stories of the men and women who created the music, there’s a temptation to sign on with the cynics.

Too many have died. Sam Cooke, Flo Ballard of the Supremes, Jimi Hendrix, Phyllis Hyman, John Coltrane, Janis Joplin, Elvis, Dinah Washington, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain, Motown’s brilliant bass player James Jamerson, Jim Morrison, Tammi Terrell, Peter Tosh, Memphis drummer Al Jackson, DJ Scott LaRock, Sylvester, John Lennon, Biggie Smalls, Otis Redding, Bob Marley, Donny Hathaway. The deaths of the stars sometimes obscure the many thousands gone whose names most of us don’t know. The names lined up in military rows on the black marble walls of the Vietnam memorial, the names embroidered in the heartbreaking and celebratory squares of the AIDS quilt, the names of the young black men in the newspaper reports of drive-by shootings, the women whose lives are destroyed by rape and abuse. It doesn’t detract from our sadness over Tupac or Donny Hathaway or Marvin Gaye, to understand their deaths as part of a larger tragedy.

But the music insists that tragedy isn’t the whole story. A Change Is Gonna Come seeks out moments of resistance, celebration, joy. It’s important to savor even the momentary victories, to remember what worked and why. To adapt the lessons to the changing world we’ll encounter tomorrow and the day after. To understand that the struggle for love and justice will be a long one, but that, for anyone who resists the notion that humanity can be measured in dollars, it’s what makes life worth living. Even as we mourn the dead, it’s crucial that we honor the living, the elders who have shown us the path and the new voices who continue to explore how to keep it real: George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, Rakim, John Fogerty, Stevie Wonder, Cassandra Wilson, Prince, Dianne Reeves, Al Green, Dorothy Love Coates, KRS-One, Mavis Staples, Bruce Springsteen, Curtis Mayfield.

In the course of writing this book, I was privileged to speak with many of the musicians who have given the music its meaning. All of them insisted that music can help bring the world back into harmony. Charles Wright of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, best known for “Express Yourself,” stated the shared feeling with unmistakable intensity: “Our purpose is to try to keep the healing process going. I want to make music of the nature of the healing heart. Music has to do with the heart and the bloodstream.” Like many who have watched the changes in America since the sixties, Wright fears for the future: “I feel like we’re missing out, like we’re going in the wrong direction. Music has to turn it back in the right direction. If we don’t then the world is on its way to doom.”

When Mavis Staples echoes Wright, she’s drawing on her long experience in the worlds of gospel, soul, and popular music. “It’s healing, music is healing,” testifies one of the few artists who can claim to have traveled the gospel highway during the sixties, had number one soul hits in the seventies, and recorded with Prince in the nineties. Mavis’s belief that the key to realizing music’s healing power lies in an understanding of history carries special weight: “We have a history that needs to be known. We have been through some stuff and the world needs to know about it. The stories need to be known to the young people so they can know what we’ve gone through to get them to where they are.”

My deepest hope is that A Change Is Gonna Come spreads some of those stories in a way that helps the healing begin. My primary regret is that I simply don’t have room to tell all the stories that have made a difference to me. A Change Is Gonna Come concentrates on the public dimension of the story. Whenever I’ve had to decide what to include and what to leave out, I’ve gone with the better-known music, in part because real dialogue requires a shared vocabulary. One of the costs of this approach is that I spend much less time writing about jazz than I spend listening to it. As I wrote this book, I frequently went to Charles Mingus’s music, especially “Meditations on Integration” and “Haitian Fight Song,” to renew my spiritual energy and intellectual focus. An intensely introspective man, Mingus knew that even the loneliest work takes its meaning from how it relates to the larger world. Capturing the complicated energy of the freedom movement, “Haitian Fight Song” provides a way of thinking about the relationship between intellectual work and social movements. Alone and confused, Mingus gathers his thoughts and begins to test his voice in the bass solo that opens the piece. Gradually other instruments enter, echoing phrases, helping Mingus figure out what works and what doesn’t. A compelling rhythm takes shape and Mingus moves out into a public world, calling his community to join in the struggle. The rhythm changes, staggers, regains its focus, encounters resistance, but always moves ahead. As Mahalia Jackson sang in one of her most powerful songs, “Keep your hand on the plow.” What it’s all about is setting ourselves and our people in motion on what the Staple Singers called the “Freedom Highway.”

It’s a model and a vision that helped me through the difficult stages of writing A Change Is Gonna Come. Often people asked me why a white boy from the Rocky Mountains was spending so much energy, and felt so much passion, for music that wasn’t, in any simple sense, his own. Sometimes I responded by quoting what John Fogerty said when I asked him a similar question, “I wasn’t born on Tibet or Mars.” This is the music I’ve heard all my life. Sometimes I talked about the fact that I grew up in a home where the freedom movement was taken seriously, where democratic values weren’t just words. But the real answer is A Change Is Gonna Come itself. The answer isn’t a stock phrase, it’s a story, the kind of story Mingus tells in “Haitian Fight Song.” It’s a story about how individual voices find their truest tones when they commune with others, how we come to terms with our limits, share our insights, band together to try and change the world. In “Haitian Fight Song,” Mingus creates a complicated soundworld where the voice he found in darkness undergoes changes as other voices enter and leave, in frustration and in triumph. His meaning is clear: We can never separate who we are from the people around us. Their fate is our own.