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CHAPTER 2

Black Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth

Barry White in the Early 1970s

One early beneficiary of the 1970s revival was the magnificent songwriter, producer, and singer, the late Barry White. A gigantically imposing figure with resonant bass voice to match, White had been absolutely central in the development of disco, one of the 1970s’ hallmark styles, and his music flourished during its years of popularization. With the arrival of the Reagan years, disco was widely reported to have died, and its artists were carried along to mainstream oblivion. But disco never really died, of course, and neither did Barry White (until 2003, that is). The unmistakable sign of White’s crossover revival was his early 1990s cameo on The Simpsons as an Orpheus of Soul; ample confirmation continued to arrive in the form of successful tours and TV commercials focusing on the grand spectacle of Barry White in performance, seemingly unchanged since his days of disco glory. But his newly vital presence in the world of crossover popular culture depended equally on his continuing presence in the domain of hip-hop. The rapper Big Daddy Kane created part of his own image as a super-black super-player by summoning his chief precursor back to the stage.¹ Such evocations of Barry White might well sound like a barefaced recovery of 1970s sexism, but the case was not so simple, as was shown in the 1993 collaboration between Salt-n-Pepa and En Vogue, “Whatta Man,” describing a black masculine ideal: “My man’s cool like Barry and his voice got bass. . . .”

In the wake of his early 1990s recuperation, Barry White became an icon, along with his proto-disco counterpart the late Isaac Hayes, who also returned effectively in cartoon form as the voice of Chef on Comedy Central’s South Park.² (In fact, White was reportedly the first choice to provide Chef with an oleaginously sensuous voice. It is not clear why this did not work out.) By the later 1990s, White’s image, his bedroom voice, and snatches of his most famous songs were everywhere in television commercials and evoked in new pop songs, if anyone knew to listen for them. Barry White eventually emerged as the tutelary spirit of passion for the quirky character John Cage on the popular television show Ally McBeal (1997–2002); a characterological joke on the show concerned Cage’s inability to behave seductively unless he imagined a Barry White song as his personal soundtrack. This personal soundtrack, however, showed a tendency to leak out of Cage’s head, spilling over onto other members of his law office and pulling them into White’s love-centric disco world. The gesture, which encouraged the audience to love Cage in the way that he loved Barry White—a curious mixture of emotions maybe best described as fondly serious dismissal—was so attractive that the show resorted to it repeatedly. By the series finale, it was surely a foregone conclusion that White would make a final appearance by way of insouciant benediction. And he did appear, and it was memorable.

The apotheosis of White’s music as the very sound of love, however, had come a few months earlier in 2002 at (of all places) the shark tank of National Sea Life Center (NSLC) in Birmingham, England. A CNN broadcast on Valentine’s Day reported a moment of inspired silliness among scientists: because it is generally challenging to breed sharks in captivity, and because the center’s denizens had been reluctant to get it on, researchers decided to broadcast tunes by Barry White into the tank to see if it would put the sharks in the mood. The news item included this bit of dialogue between the CNN correspondent Marga Ortigas, NSLC representative Josie Sutherland, and an unidentified woman:

Sutherland: They seem to be swimming around. They’re following the females a bit more.

Ortigas: And with any luck, catch them hook, line and sinker.

Unidentified Female: It worked for me! It might help.

CNN could not resist (who could?) contacting White for commentary. Though clearly bemused, he played along and offered a charming anecdote in return. No, he hadn’t known about experiments of this nature with his music:

White: But something very strange in my home—I have saltwater fish too. And when I would come home from the studio and I played my music—when I walk in the room, the fish would be swimming frantically. And as soon as I started playing the music that I had recorded that day in the studio, I would notice that they start swimming in a very relaxed mode. I just thought it was me. I didn’t know that they could actually hear, even.

Obviously, we have no clear idea what a fish hears in these cases, and what—if—it thinks about the music that is played for it. But it matters immensely that we want to think the fish respond the way we do. This story, as all the participants tacitly acknowledged, is really about our own desires as they move to the music.³

This was a long way from the antidisco backlash at the end of the 1970s. Then, brandishing the slogan “disco sucks,” rabid rock fans burned disco Records and dissed every aspect of the subculture in which Barry White had figured so prominently. All the world knows by now that “disco sucks” was a response of thinly disguised homophobia: disco’s ostentatious focus on promiscuity and the appurtenances of a luxurious lifestyle, plus its rejections of the values usually read in a rock context as “authentic expression,” made it the bane of those who feared and despised the sexual revolution. Disco’s luscious arrangements betokened lots of money and little sense of restraint in its use. Its lyrics glorified sexual desires of the most undiscriminating kind. It offered visibility to sultry vamps, foreigners, and men in whom there was always an edge of effeteness. It ignored teenagers and favored hustling a slightly older, more moneyed crowd. Especially as it made its way out of the gay ghettos, disco took up the spun-sugar illusions of celebrity culture à la Studio 54. It was, all of it, just too gay.

But less frequently noted in discussions of the music is the way that the rejection of disco registered an unease with ways of representing the agency of black men that had their roots in cultural developments in the 1960s and 1970s. These constructions of black masculinity, finding their widest representation and distribution through film and music, were new and potentially dangerous, especially to white audiences for whom their economic strength was as frighteningly disreputable as their sexual vigor. The force of such portrayals was all the more alarming because these new black masculinities emanated from Hollywood, at the heart of the American image machine. There were two sides to this unease. On one side were those for whom the very idea of sexualized portrayals of black men were frightening or distasteful, probably as much for the autonomy the men were shown to possess as for the blunt steaminess of their images. On the other side were those for whom the question of the kind of man allowed erotic authority was most important. And not very far from this second damning crowd were pop music critics and listeners uncritically wedded to the notion that the only “true” music arose from the authenticity communicated in the expression of insight gained through poverty, suffering, and oppression, and that the only “true” music that preserved its value was that which most resolutely resisted commercial pressures. Barry White was unquestionably black, and presented himself as just as unquestionably gifted with incomparable musical and sexual prowess. He and his music alike were thus too black, too strong. But at the same time, this performer, this music, could never be black enough, strong enough. All this disco-laden nouveau richesse? Where was the struggle? Where the evidence of masculine autonomy? Where was the turbulent record of genius? Surely not under all that velvet, those spangles and sequins!

White, who had long been part of the complex ecosystem of the Los Angeles entertainment business, operated under different terms. Though born in Houston, he moved to California with his mother when he was a young child. He had already worked for most of a decade as a session player, arranger, producer, and head of A&R (artists and repertoire) in various LA companies, and had even composed the music for the Banana Splits’ TV cartoons, when in 1969 he became the impresario for a female vocal group he christened Love Unlimited. By the time he signed himself and Love Unlimited to 20th Century Records in 1973, however, he had been talked into recording his own versions of some of the songs he had been writing for others.⁴ The result of these sessions was his debut album, I’ve Got So Much to Give (1973), which rapidly went gold, beginning a long stream of hits that enabled a number of related projects. As of 1994, when White released his platinum album The Icon Is Love, he had been involved as a solo artist, conductor, or impresario in far over thirty albums, most of them very successful.⁵ And the smell of money—new money, the kind most dramatically visible in the entertainment business—always hung about his music. When he was talked about, it was in admiring Billboard magazine terms: “the multi-digit figures beside . . . [the titles in White’s] royalty statements emphatically show it’s the producer who’s the creative controller, and therefore the dollar earner, of modern-day soul.”⁶ His performances were famous for their lavishness, with the man himself draped in yards of expensive material, backed up by extravagances such as an orchestra composed of eighty women selling out Radio City Music Hall in a Liberacean maneuver.⁷ And even for those who did not know these things, there was the opulence of the music: “Love’s Theme,” composed and conducted by Barry White with the Love Unlimited Orchestra, was one of the first hits to come out of the disco underground and achieve popular success. It was everywhere in 1973, alerting mainstream audiences to the possibilities of glamour and sensual enjoyment within a newly empowered subculture. More than anything, this was signaled by the combination of soul grooves with rich orchestration and classicizing musical figuration, carefully modulated by shifts in the character of the mixing. Since “Love’s Theme” emblematizes important aspects of the appeal of Barry White as a musical icon, it will repay a little reflection.

LOVE FOR SALE

“Love’s Theme” opens with a swirling run up the D major scale in the violins, along a dominant seventh chord, from a¹ to a³. There are no rhythm tracks present yet, so although we already know that we are in a metrical frame, what stands out more strongly than the background ordering of strong and weak beats is the headlong forward motion, made more pronounced by hints of rhythmic disarray, of the strings’ glittering ascent. Brief but extravagant introductions such as this one are useful formal devices for disco songs in general, and the string run in “Love’s Theme” is no exception: utterly recognizable, it signals listeners that a song they love is about to play and gives them a moment to grab a partner and head out to the dance floor. An additional frisson comes from its recollection of an endless series of similar gestures in cinematic music—upon first hearing, we might be excused for thinking that we had happened upon the overture to a film by RKO Pictures or 20th Century Fox. But there’s more to this intro than its aspect of fanfare, and its larger purposes begin to become clear when the strings reach their high a³ and hold it as an arrested gesture, allowing the rhythm tracks and accompanimental figures to take the stage.

The moment the strings reach a³ is the moment that the groove begins to materialize. Its first clarification takes place in the lower strings, accentuated and echoed by electric guitar, which establishes a primary unit of organization (2 + 2 bars as the norm) and sets out rhythmic and metrical tensions to be resolved by the body of the song. The underlying harmonic progression of this opening is four bars long, from a D major triad enriched by appoggiaturas from A major, through a brief and plain version of A major onto a minor seventh chord on B, with the same pattern of appoggiaturas. In the conventions of tonal harmony, this might seem to be nothing more than a simple move from the tonic through the dominant to a slightly enriched submediant, but the both the weak metrical placement of the whole A major chord and the progression’s clear goal of the b⁷ chord attenuate our sense of D major as the key of the song. Furthermore, the melodic and rhythmic details of the piece will shape the harmonic progression in such a way that A major seems not to pull toward D major; the reduced connection between dominant and tonic, taken with the metrical power of the song’s subdominant harmonies, tends to override the importance of D major. We are not so much in a key as in a key signature.

EXAMPLE 1. Introduction to “Love’s Theme.”

In any case, at the opening of the piece any functional understandings of harmony matter less than the rhythmic effect created by the lower strings’ ornamental tones. The “dissonant” notes in the accompaniment at m.3 of “Love’s Theme” fall ever so slightly at variance with the primary structure of beats; in a transcription of the rhythm, we would probably write it as syncopated sixteenth notes, as in example 1, but the rhythm as heard does not quite feel like that, but rather something a little looser, a little bit closer to triplets urging themselves forward. The hint of raggedness in this rhythm gains additional heaviness from the voluptuous dissonance between the appoggiaturas and the bass, such that the beats that prepare the resolution begin to feel as important as their ostensible goal. Imagine an anapest in which the weak beats also feel something like spondees (thus, short/short/long), and you have another auditory image that matches this effect. The halting effect of the rhythm in this case threatens to disrupt the flurrying continuity of the violin opening and poses the problem of how these are to be reconciled to allow the song proper to begin.

If the opening swirl of violins has captured the foreground of our attention, the ponderous motions of the lower strings with their guitar highlighting sound like an attentional middle ground—not the Schenkerian kind familiar to music scholars—mapping out a musical space at once below and, thanks to the modulations of the mix, moving forward and backward around what we might have imagined as the nucleus of a forthcoming melody.⁸ At m.5, a hi-hat cymbal, marking out every beat, begins to emerge from the back of the mix in a steady crescendo over the next three two-bar units. (It may be that part of the excitement conveyed in this regular cymbal marking comes from our retrospective hearing; after our initial hearing of the song, we may be aware upon subsequent listenings that the hi-hat will be marking sixteenth notes for the rest of the song, some unconscious memory of its normative tempo probably remains with us and adds an anticipatory excitement to what we hear.) In any case, the hi-hat’s strict timekeeping signals the basic pulse to listeners and dancers at the same time that it adds the rhythmic drive that will propel the song into an actual tune. The last materials that kick the introduction into the body of the song, a glissando on the piano and a quick drum riff, appear on the second half of beat three in m.10, at the very end of the fourth two-bar phrase. The contrast between the abrupt end-stopping of the drum riff and the liquidity of the glissando duplicates at a more immediate perceptual level the tension between the forwardness of the violins and high-hat and the thick anapests of the lower strings and guitar figure.

Perhaps the most memorable feature of “Love’s Theme,” however, is the melody that begins in m.11 and falls into regular units of 2 + 2 bars grouped so that the whole contains an expository phrase, its heightened variation, an intensificatory segment, and a closing. (The absolutely conventional nature of this structure is important because it frees up the attention of listeners and dancers to focus on other musical domains.) The distinctive aspects of the tune come from the way its luxuriant long tones, each one framed by derivations of the opening groove, sail over the rhythmic impulses of the accompaniment until they arc downward, fold into the full anapests of the groove at their primary rhythmic level, recharge, and vault upward again to pick up the primary pitches (C# and D) of the middle register’s figuration and carry them to a closing set of downward appoggiaturas (see example 2). This action occurs over the seductive churnings of the groove, which scatters the opening figure of the groove into multiple rhythmic planes; the anapest and its variations appear at the quarter-, eighth-, and sixteenth-note levels, at some moments almost moving toward the shagginess of funk. By gradually incorporating the groove’s anapests, the melody thus effects a reconciliation of the tensions in the introduction, which allows it to rise to its exultant climax; and because the melody is, beyond this synthesis, non-developmental, listeners and dancers will have the pleasure of hearing this climax repeatedly.

EXAMPLE 2. Main melody of “Love’s Theme.”

Sixteen-bar blocks comprise most of the song’s body and all of its melody, but an important passage, formally close to a genuine B section and followed by a variation on the intro, moves away from the melody to allow its refreshed return. This B section begins with a French horn fanfare bursting out of the orchestral texture, playing on the important pitches of C#/D/A, immediately followed by an intense pulsation in the orchestra that repeatedly ratchets the melody from D to E through the intervening half-step, moving the harmony from D major to the e minor seventh chord that strongly marks the melody’s third phrase. Each repetition of this thrust up to E calls forth a flute lick that swaggers a little bit more on each occurrence, and dialogically summons the strings to dance in place between B and A on the closing rhythm of the melody before delicately leaping up to a C# as the swirling violins of the opening reappear, further adorned by harp glissandi in a paroxysm of fanciness.

After the melody emerges for one more round, the song launches into a proto-break: the orchestra drops out to leave only guitars (lead, rhythm using the wah-wah pedal, and bass) and hi-hat cymbal. The harmonic motion of the counterpoint between lead and bass guitars tells us that this breaklike passage is built out of the last phrase of the melody, a perfectly reasonable strategy for breaks in later disco songs. What keeps it from being fully realized as a break, however, is White’s continuation. Instead of an accretionary reintroduction of the various instruments in the orchestra, he brings back the full orchestra together on the final phrase of the melody, and repeats it as an outro. The song exits the dance floor on its exultant high point, fading to clear the way for the next song.

Although this description of “Love’s Theme” has emphasized the intricacy of the arrangement as an occasion for listening and dancing, this elaborate staging of rhythms, pitches, and timbres nevertheless falls on the ear with a great deal of ease. There is nothing difficult to hear in this song. It would be contrary to its designs to offer up anything a listener must work for. Rather, the point is to display a welter of glittering musical baubles for delectation, and the direct qualities of the melodic structure, the harmonic language, and the rhythmic character of the song stay simple to expedite the pleasure of shifting our attentions freely among pretty things. Each musical object therefore assumes a status something like that of an individual record in a record store, and that commodificatory ease is exactly what troubled listeners committed to more strenuous pleasures. Would-be pop music ascetics might well have asked how it was possible to value something that they—that anyone—could so easily buy, missing the listening drama of cognitive anxiety mastered that would underwrite their favorite kinds of meaning.

But the sparkling musical bibelots that enliven “Love’s Theme” were absolutely central to White’s intentions. Remembering his live performances during the 1970s, he has said, “There’s no sound with four violins. I was using twenty or thirty. Rich. Five french horns, but it sounded like angels blowing on them.”⁹ It seems to me that White’s comments emerge from a sense of security in the simple pleasures of opulence generously made free for any listener who might happen along. Too much of anything is wonderful, and it sells well, too. Such attitudes could not help but lead to purist charges of “commercialism.” And it was so. But commercialism in the hands of a black artist at the beginning of the 1970s meant something rather different from what it would have meant to the average reader of Rolling Stone. I want to show something of this difference in this chapter, but I must do so by sketching out three related areas of historical development during the 1960s, then turning to their intersections in music and film: first, the institutional and economic transformations that led to the promulgation of “black capitalism” in the first Nixon administration; second, the changes in the record industry that helped bring about a positive response to this ideology; and third, the images of black masculinity that developed in conjunction with the Black Power movement.

BLACK CAPITALISM AND THE BUSINESS OF BLACK MUSIC

The concept of black capitalism was introduced into American political discourse to shore up the responses—weak from the beginning and rapidly deteriorating—of the federal government to the economic demands of the civil rights movement. Although the Great Society programs approved by the Johnson administration aimed to extend the franchise of the New Deal across racial lines, the financial demands of the Vietnam War and conflicts between different levels of bureaucracy began to damage them as soon as they were begun.¹⁰ A number of alternatives to the Johnson administration’s proposals came from within the black community, dissatisfied by the weakness of the Great Society, but the Democratic administration was in no position to discard its model programs. The weakness of the Great Society programs, coupled with the Democratic Party’s necessary commitment to them, left Republican challengers free to offer counterproposals. In April and May 1968, a two-part speech by Richard Nixon entitled “Bridges to Human Dignity” touted increasing black ownership of the means of production as a solution to the difficulties (economic, social, and political) of minorities in general, black folks in particular. Nixon reinterpreted various points of view within the Black Power movement as a summons to greater capitalist endeavor. In retrospect, Nixon’s endorsement of black capitalism was less about empowerment than about his larger ideological goals; at the same time that he advocated black private enterprise, he systematically famished Johnson’s programs by reducing budgets for the Office of Economic Development.¹¹ And contemporary bipartisan legislation designed to facilitate black economic enterprise eventually failed as the result of combined opposition from the established (and conservative) business interests of the black bourgeoisie and organized labor. Nevertheless, the government’s rhetorical involvement had ensured that black capitalism would be taken seriously as a political proposal.¹²

In part, this new interest in black capitalism occurred during the 1960s because the numbers of middle-class blacks increased dramatically, exceeding in one decade the total increase in numbers of the fifty years preceding.¹³ This growth in the middle class can certainly be attributed to the combined effects of the civil rights movement’s moral suasion manifested in new equal employment laws and the continuing general prosperity of the U.S. economy.¹⁴ Though the Great Society programs were aging badly (until they were smothered on the sickbed), the U.S. economy was strong enough to supply increasingly large numbers of black folks not only with substantial improvements in financial security but a greater number of life choices. Even through the economic dislocations of the early 1970s, the size of the black middle class continued to increase—particularly in pop music.

If black capitalism worked anywhere already in the late 1960s, it was in the record industry. Heavily courted by the Republican Party in those years before its Reaganification and attracted by its notions, even a figure as emblematic as James Brown had endorsed Nixon in 1972!¹⁵ But on all levels, the business responded enthusiastically to the call for black entrepreneurship and greater participation; the industry was happy to entertain speeches on behalf of black capitalism from political figures and executives and to endorse fuller integration within its own ranks.¹⁶ Of course, an unusually high level of integration in commercial music already existed because it was one of the few occupations addressing a general public that had been accessible to blacks. Motown had long been the largest black-owned and black-operated company in America, and other companies as well as studios both great and small depended on heavy black involvement (some were even fully integrated). The attention paid off; by 1972, black artists occupied 44 percent of the singles charts and moved toward 20 percent of the album charts.¹⁷

This efflorescence went hand in hand with a tremendous explosion of style and genre at the very beginning of the 1970s in all forms of soul. In an intensive restructuring of the record industry at the end of the 1960s, the major producers of black music lost part of their market dominance, creating room for new in dependent labels to flourish. These 1970s labels lost no time in emulating their predecessors in creating a luxuriant sound world to accompany and even to help direct the dreams of their newly empowered clientele.¹⁸ Motown had always been upwardly mobile and mainstreaming in practice, with Berry Gordy’s ambitions pushing the company’s image and the role of its artists ever closer to a Hollywood–Las Vegas aesthetic. At the same time, largely through the influence of the talented producer Norman Whitfield on the sound of the Temptations, Motown had pioneered elaborate, increasingly orchestral productions. These served as the template for the early 1970s fusions of soul with various breeds of more “classical” music.

As went the sound, so went the self-portrayals of the artists and producers. Booker T. Jones, leader of the house band at Stax, had been a music major at Indiana University, but his formal training never figured prominently in his public image as a performer. By contrast, Thom Bell, the most influential of the producers at Philly International records, by his own account was raised on the “classical” repertory and did not hear any popular music until he was fourteen years old.¹⁹ Bell advanced this claim as proof of his musical seriousness and of his aspirations to musical comprehensiveness. This attitude toward the merger of popular and classical elements perhaps reached a peak in the case of Barry White, who has described his own history with beguiling boastfulness: “By the time I got grown and decided to go in the record business, I had a knowledge of Gospel music that was incredibly broad. I had an intellect of symphonic music that was incredibly broad. What did Barry White do with his music? He fused them both together.”²⁰

Part of the mystique of Barry White’s earliest Records was tied to his claim that this fusion was unprecedented; the various styles he was conversant with had always been, one might say, “segregated.” Under the aegis of black capitalism, this segregation was to be no more, and now the musical style could show it.

BLACK MASCULINITY TRANSFORMED

In the development of black culture during the 1960s, masculinity was an important issue of discussion and debate. Black Power, particularly as formulated within the Nation of Islam, included an emphasis on the careful maintenance of traditional gender roles and the concentration of power within male hands. As Malcolm X would have it: “The true nature of a man is to be strong, and a woman’s true nature is to be weak, and while a man must at all times respect his woman, at the same time he needs to understand that he must control her if he expects to get her respect.”²¹

The sexism of Malcolm X’s ideal was of course still resolutely patriarchal in the 1960s; the most distinctive features of sexual politics in the Nation of Islam arose from its determination to link ideals of masculinity and femininity to a general revolutionary austerity. The proper relations between men and women were of a piece with sobriety and lawfulness. Black Muslims were separatists, but they were not exactly freethinkers.

The increasing celebrity of Cassius Clay (soon to be Muhammad Ali) offered a way for the Nation of Islam to have its notions of black masculinity affect the general public. As Cassius Clay, he had won his first title in 1964 in a celebrated match against Sonny Liston in Miami Beach and defeated him again in the following year. Almost as important as his superlative athletic ability was his virtuosity in “signifying,” making those rhyming boasts about his skill and handsomeness that were the verbal equivalent with his boxing skill.²² It is also worth remembering the resolutely embodied quality of these chants of triumph—Clay’s body, proud sexuality included, was always center stage as the ground of his confidence. The intense controversy around Clay’s refusal of the draft in 1967, which led to a court conviction and a prison sentence, heightened public awareness of the personal costs of racism in an enormously productive way; his conversion to Islam and assumption of the name Muhammad Ali during this period only added to his symbolic weight. By the time the Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction, he was on his way back to championship in boxing. The legendary 1974 fight between Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (since 1997, The Democratic Republic of the Congo)—“The Rumble in the Jungle”—was a visible sign of the pride fostered by the Black Power movement, as Ali’s other slogan for the fight, “From the Slave Ship to the Championship,” showed.

Ali’s impact on rising black power consciousness was thus enormous. Boxing seemed the quintessentially masculine sport, as Eldridge Cleaver observed, all the more in the 1960s because it offered a way to refocus the traditional image of masculine aggression, keeping it from being transvalued into nothingness.²³ But to have a “free” black champion like Ali—that is, one who proclaimed his allegiance to a totally whiteless organization and who maintained a conspicuous detachment from boxing’s usual engines of celebrity—this dramatically opened the possibilities for representing black men as autonomous agents with “dangerous” sexuality intact.²⁴ (Consider a later example in the 1975 pop song “Black Superman [Muhammad Ali],” by Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band, which was released soon after “The Rumble.” Using a strongly reggae-inflected style well before reggae had acquired a demographically lucrative listenership in the United States, Wakelin and his band celebrate Ali’s career in Ali’s own signifying language as a Black Power apotheosis. For a one-hit wonder that peaked at number twenty-five on the charts, it achieved a lot of important work.) When detached from the conservative moral positions of the Black Muslims, Ali’s image could help reinforce the ideas of masculinity circulating among groups such as the Black Panthers. Of course, Ali’s strict adherence to the sober lawfulness of the Nation of Islam limited his usefulness to more rebellious groups; his physical presence and his courageous defiance of the draft board, though, were so powerful that they circulate far and wide.

In fact, a crucial difference between the Nation of Islam and the Panthers came from their contrasting attitudes toward law and negotiations with white power structures, with inevitable consequences for representations of black sexuality. The Panthers, interested in using violent language and symbolic action to set the conventional power dynamics of American race relations into disequilibrium, found it helpful to imagine possible links between criminality and the empowerment of black men. Because anxiety over masculine privilege and concomitant misogyny was at least as intense among the Panthers as among their white counterparts (on the left) and adversaries (on the right), the rhetorics of criminality more often than not acquired a strongly sexual character.²⁵ In effect, the Panthers sometimes deliberately incited the racist panic about the untrammeled sexuality of black men that had partly grounded the white rationalizations for Jim Crow. They did this as part of a general assertion of patriarchal privilege, with the added excitement of upsetting the white majority. To the extent that the image of racialized sexual violence at least raised the larger question of individual sexual autonomy as shaped by the pressures of racial categorization, the Panthers performed a service for many people, white as well as black.²⁶ But the symbolic terrors of black male sexuality ran much too deep to be played with in this way without backlash.

The fate of the Panthers in the mass media is instructively shaped around the issue of black male sexuality, and the strategies by which journalists shaped public opinion by calling the Panther’s sexual imagery into question resonate strongly and dishearteningly with the “Disco sucks” campaign. Although most newspapers and magazines had treated the Panthers with relative neutrality during the late 1960s, the increased animosity of the federal government in 1969, especially by means of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), sparked an intense burst of media representation in the service of creating a moral panic.²⁷ Charges by the Panthers that they were targets of government persecution were received with sympathy by some well-known liberal white public figures, sending some journalists into a frenzy of character assassination. The most well-known attack came in Tom Wolfe’s famous article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” which appeared in New York magazine on June 8, 1970, and was later reprinted in book form.²⁸ In a masterpiece of barely veiled bigotry—racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, and class hatred—Wolfe explicitly links the Panthers’ unruly black masculinity with their politics and portrays Leonard Bernstein and his guests alike as hot with desire at the very thought of proximity to such primal virility. And in Wolfe’s terms, to imagine a politics driven by eros is to trivialize that politics automatically. In frameworks such as Wolfe’s, “Too black, too strong” suddenly means “too attractive, too frivolous.” Disco sucks. The verb says it all. And yet the ground of this condemnation can be turned back upon the condemners.

THE HOLLYWOOD MODEL

Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, released in 1971, condenses some of the issues I have been sketching. The title character is a heavily exploited sex worker in the LA ghetto who, witnessing the especially brutal beating of a black militant by two LA cops (imagine that!), suddenly rises up out of his abject state to take on the police. In doing so, he becomes the special target of the LAPD: the rest of the movie revolves around Sweetback’s escape from a vicious police chase. While getting out of LA and safely across the Mexican border, Sweetback finds several occasions to display his sexual and combative prowess. (These episodes make him very different from the figures played by Sidney Poitier, the only other black leading man that mainstream white American filmgoers of the time were likely to have seen.) Accompanying all this action is a brilliantly dissonant, difficult score by the early lineup of Earth, Wind and Fire. Their music is situated within a dense soundscape that often approaches musique concrète; in this context it is worth remembering Van Peebles’ strong connections to the European Art cinema. Although essentially an avant-garde film, Sweet Sweetback was an enormous success within the black community and alerted Hollywood to the large amounts of money that could be made by designing films with black audiences in mind.

Sweet Sweetback was the progenitor of the entire black action film genre commonly known in its 1970s phase as “blaxploitation.” Usually set in or near the ghetto, these films follow a black protagonist (either male or female, interestingly enough) through an adventure in which white people usually appear only in a subsidiary role: as cops good and bad, as assorted other villains, or as attractive women available to the black male hero. The greatest crossover success of the blaxploitation films was Shaft, also released in 1971. It has been observed that the script was originally written with a white actor in mind, then darkened up to take advantage of the attention following Sweetback.²⁹ The submerged racial crossover behind the genesis of Shaft could seem to damage the film’s projection of an iconic black masculinity because from one essentialist point of view it could be said that this blackness was merely a cloaked whiteness. On the other hand, the implicit equation of black and white masculinities could as well be regarded as allowing black men representational access to the fantasy images of autonomy that had previously been reserved for white men alone.

For whatever reasons, Shaft improved the status of its hero, turning him from a Van Peebles’ oppressed-victim-turned-revolutionary into an autonomous but more conventional masculine type. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a black private detective in New York City; he has an expensive wardrobe in the highest early 1970s style, a luxuriously-appointed apartment in the Village (it has two stories and lots of expensive furnishings), a beautiful girlfriend as well as the occasional pickup, and an unequaled command of sex and violence. We know all this about him almost as soon as the movie begins and Isaac Hayes’s famous title track begins to run. Both the visuals and Hayes’s music tell us so.³⁰

The first shots of the film show Times Square back in its vibrantly sleazy days. When the hi-hat cymbal enters to begin the song, Shaft is shown emerging from one of the 42nd Street/Broadway subway entrances. The phrase structure and some details of the groove on the soundtrack obviously match the camera shots and the action—the result of editing to the music rather than shaping the music to follow the film. During postproduction, Gordon Parks would receive tapes of Hayes’s soundtrack and then look for material to fit the score: “I sometimes cut something to fit his music . . . And there were times when I said, ‘Wow, I wish I had something here to fit this in—how can we use this.’”³¹ But on vinyl, even without the accompaniment of the film, Hayes creates a notably cinematic quality in his music by establishing and maintaining an “irregular,” desultory quality in his layering of motives and components of the groove.³² Furthermore, the lavish instrumental sound serves double duty by evoking not only the exciting hubbub of the street but also the lush way of life of the title character. In this connection, it is especially worth noticing the unusual proportions of the song’s structure. As it was released on record, the 94 bars of the song break up thusly: introduction, 54 bars; body of the song, 28 bars; closing and outro, 12 bars. The expansive nature of the introduction might be taken as a direct consequence of the song’s location in the film’s opening credit sequence, if it were not for Hayes’s previous success in inventing the extended soul song a few years earlier.³³ In any case, the extended introduction of Shaft was influential because of its accretionary procedure of filling up the groove as well as its clever play with the song’s metrical structure.

When the body of the song finally begins, Hayes and his backup singers tell us about the dominant characteristics of our hero. The playful call and response of Hayes and his backup is mirrored in the diagrammatic structure of the violin countermelody, which repeats a single phrase with alternating endings:

Isaac Hayes		Backup Singers
Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?
		Shaft!
You’re damn right!Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother, man?
		Shaft!
Can you dig it?Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about?
		Shaft!
Right on!They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother-
		Shut your mouth!
But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft!
		Then we can dig it!
He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman.
		John Shaft!

The hypersexism of the portrayal is utterly faithful to the mores of the period: not only is Shaft by nature a Black Power übermensch, he has also taken on some of the characteristics of Hugh Hefner’s ideal playboy as well. This is especially apparent in the film’s two love scenes. The first takes place between Shaft and his woman, at her place, to the accompaniment of a kind of easy-listening jazz sweetened up with a few more “classical” instruments. The second is between Shaft and a white woman he has picked up in a bar, at his bachelor pad (and it really does look like something out of Playboy in the 1960s).³⁴ The representation of Shaft’s rich single existence not only fits well with Playboy style, it also resonates strongly with pre-civil rights black styles that emphasized consumption of luxury items all the more because more durable goods were out of reach by segregationist law and custom.³⁵

A final twist on black masculinity as represented in the “Theme from Shaft” came from the physical presence of Isaac Hayes himself. His facial hair and phallic shaved head matched his resonant bass voice perfectly, and because his image was foregrounded on his albums, anyone interested in his music would have had ample opportunity to know what he looked like.³⁶ Appearing on the 1972 Academy Awards show bare-chested but for a thick gold chain, Hayes visually epitomized the intense black sexuality that his award-winning song had enacted. But even as Hayes embodied this particular strain of masculinity, the radio’s top-forty list showed that there were critiques and alternatives available as models for black male subjectivity.

ALTERNATIVE BLACK MASCULINITIES

The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” was released a year after Shaft and represents an implicit critique to the archetype that the film and its theme song were updating: the paragon of manhood who is irresistible to women, but who in the end walks alone. Such an exemplar of American masculinity might work well in the noirish space of a black action film, but translated into the instances of everyday life, it rapidly comes close to the model of the sweet-talking player who inevitably abandons his wife and children. The song executes a remarkable balance between extreme bitterness and a clear-sightedness that almost verges on acceptance through its dramatic scenario of children who never really knew their father; gathered around their mother at his funeral, they ask her to deny the disapproval of the neighbors and receive nothing but the reply of the song’s chorus. And what is most extraordinary about the song is the way that the performers, guided by Norman Whitfield, are able to construct such an uncanny frame for the song’s bleak memorial. The extended introduction to the song presents an accretionary process much like the one heard in the “Theme from Shaft.” Undergirding the process is the obsessive bass riff, always defined against the equally obsessive tick of the hi-hat cymbal that recurs throughout the song.

This bass riff is made enigmatic by a blurring of pitch from occurrence to occurrence. It is often unclear whether the lower boundary of the bass guitar’s musical space is Ab or because the pitch as heard is frequently in between and because the scale step in question is functionally the seventh degree; thus its ambiguation tends to evacuate the dominant as a productive harmony. The song rides atop a continuous and desolate Bb minor triad. Nevertheless, within this space the bass riff supports a variety of musical figures, including the manic jazzy trumpet with its echo effects, the violent pulse of the guitar’s wah-wah pedal, the uncanny violin clusters that almost evoke the sound of the shō in gagaku, and the alternately drooping and muttering violin tunes that sporadically emerge from the mix. As the introduction wends its way toward the body of the song, these figures, though relatively undefined in emotional content, acquire tremendous weight through a gradual increase in textural density and dynamics. When they suddenly vanish, the effect is like that of a sudden lapse away from feeling into a pure anticipation of dread. Papa’s children are waiting for an answer that they already know will give no one any joy.

Equally crucial to the dark effect of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” is the ambiguous location of the beat; the music seems to move below the level of a primary beat that has been suppressed. Moreover, the activity that occurs at the level of the sixteenth-note (or eighth-note, 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 two kinds of music from the 1960s. First, in melodic contour and rhythmic shape, the initial word of the body of the song, “Yesterday,” is an obvious gesture toward the Beatles. Rather than summoning up a song from the group in their teen idol or hippie aspects, however, White’s music refers to a classicizing-folkish strain perhaps more appropriate for adult listeners. Second, we can make connections between White’s orchestration and another grown-up style. At the forefront of the instruments in the opening of “Bring Back My Yesterday” are the electric harpsichord and the oboe playing gentle figures in a moderate triple meter as the harmony sways between Eb and Bb major. Supporting the solo instruments are the gentle cymbal taps and echoing guitar chords.

This combination of instruments evokes a particular tradition of easy-listening music popular during the 1950s and 1960s.³⁸ Take, for instance, the hit record “Love Is Blue” (L’Amour est Bleu) by Paul Mauriat, which occupied number one on the Billboard charts for five weeks in 1968.³⁹ Mauriat’s arrangement takes much of its character from the emblematic timbres of electric harpsichord and oboe, poised somewhere among classical and folk idioms. The song was sold explicitly as a kind of crossover music: the corny-hip prose of the album cover blurb, for instance, delights in noting that in “Love Is Blue,” “rock-beat [sic] is combined with chamber music styles.”⁴⁰ These specific intersections of musical genres and styles in 1968 point to the primary social location of Mauriat’s music among single adults who are mostly likely out of college but still young—or at least wish to appear so. In the context of “Bring Back My Yesterday,” this music ironically supports a series of White’s piteous spoken confessions of failure in a relationship and pleas not to break up. The lachrymose sensitivity atop the elevated orchestration suggests that this vulnerability arises because emotionally and materially (if these can be musically distinguished) the singer can sustain the cost. Furthermore, it places White’s song within the hedonistic imaginative world that was by this time associated with the image of the bachelor, yet connects these comfortable circumstances to an understanding of masculinity more focused on the particularities of a love relationship than on homosocial solidarity. There is no other man on this record anywhere; no one but “you,” regarding Barry.

The music of I’ve Got So Much to Give concentrates on vulnerability and eros as a key to masculinity and reaches its peak in the final cut on the album, “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby.” This is the first song in the series of what might be called Barry White’s bedroom raps, in which the emotional and physical dynamics of sex and jouissance govern the shape of the song, most notoriously perhaps its accretionary introduction. If this song is noticeably less classicistic than the songs on the album’s A-side, it may be because in “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby,” the music’s interest lies in representing a more focused progress of desire. The steamy G-minor bass lick that initiates the musical intimacy after the drum kit’s opening two measures is given to the harpsichord (see example 3). Earlier on the album, the harpsichord’s timbre might well have been heard as a sign of money and the upward aspirations that might be apparent in Barry White’s accessories. Here, however, it seems like a veritable musical alter ego, its contours a metaphor for his voice and his hands as they bespeak his desire.

EXAMPLE 3. Opening bass line of “I’m Gonna Love Just a Little More, Baby.”

The piano figure that grows out of the harpsichord’s bass figure centers our attention, so that the other materials as they are introduced begin to give the impression of things that had already been present before we noticed them. After it enters at m.13, this piano suspension is present through the overwhelming majority of the song, disappearing only during a brief bridge at mm.97–104 and the six-bar choruses that appear at mm.51–56, 77–82, and 125–130. During all the passages in which the piano provides this structural armature, the harmony is relatively static in a fashion familiar from passages in the rest of the album; in this case, an ornamented suspension from A to G that ceaselessly repeats, with a G minor eleventh chord as the evolving background. The spoken lyrics are a direct imitation of bedroom talk, with White describing his actions and asking for feedback from his partner. The close miking creates a muffled intimacy in White’s spoken voice, as if heard through pillows, sheets, and a nurturing fierce dark. When the song finally turns toward the sung voice, the arrangement builds toward the threefold chant of the chorus, where White, in declaring his intention to “love,” “need,” and “want you” in amorous descending phrases that enact the intimacy they describe.

And it all goes on for so long! The stretches of music dominated by the piano suspensions, since they repeat their two-bar units so inexorably, are quick to baffle analytical ears. The G minor eleventh chord does not need to resolve; it would rather glory in its thickness and in how its multifarious components can take on new connotations by simple shifts in voicing, instrumentation, and rhythmic articulation. An explicit token of this condition might be the soaring violin melody that drifts along for the twenty measures between the song’s bridge and the final appearance of the chorus. Its long tones and separation from the rest of the mix might be reminiscent of the violins in “Love’s Theme,” but this tune meanders; we never have a sense that the melody is heading anyplace special. This melody seeks neither climax nor cadence. It simply enjoys being. Considered broadly, then, this song is about the time it takes for pleasure and the will to have more of it. Would such a mode of consciousness been representable in soul before the beginning of the 1970s? In some of the work of James Brown, perhaps: otherwise, it is doubtful. Barry White’s evocation of gratified desire pays the kind of attention to the complexities of interior experience that would not have been heard by the record industry before the end of the 1960s, at least not in soul. And his appeal to individualistic luxury could not have found a hold in an audience not able to afford it.

In the early 1990s, whenever he was asked his opinion of the disco era, Barry White remembered it as

the most glamorous of our time. Guys was wearing jeans with studs, two hundred dollars a pair. Bleached-out with different colors, two, three hundred dollars . . . That was the only time when you could go into clubs and couldn’t tell the star from the consumer buyer. They both was dressed alike. It was the only era that allowed the consumer to pretend that he was an entertainer. They dressed in that era. . . . Then came the Eighties. The era of greed. That’s when I started hearing more songs that was written for money than I ever heard in my life.⁴¹

Such Dionysian habits could propel star and fan into a vertiginous, blissful identity. This identification was one of the crucial reasons for disco’s appeal; it pulled listeners and dancers into a complex fantasy world where desires worked themselves out through material objects all the more attractive because they seemed to be instruments of the search for love rather than (or in addition to) things wonderful in themselves. As times grew colder and illusions of abundance were dispelled in energy crises and inflation, Barry White’s image came to seem ridiculous, out of touch with the anxieties of his audience. But recycling triumphs over all: those costly 1970s clothes are now sometimes available at any good thrift store, along with the old vinyl that gave soundtracks to the fashion show—if they haven’t already been snapped up by another dreamer. If we buy them now, it is because they represent an abundance to be measured in our dreams rather than in our realities. Barry White’s style of black masculinity can still matter because even when it spoke to us of wealth, what it meant to promise was expressive freedom and desire.