Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 190

Invisible Blackness with Adrian Younge – Understanding Cultural Comedy, an Interview with Russell Peters

'Russell Peters knows the power of using comedy to challenge the status quo and how to make light of unconscious bias. In this episode of Invisible Blackness with Adrian Younge, Russell discusses the expression of cultural intelligence through comedy, the power of hiphop to inspire identity and the subtitles of understanding intention when applied to humor.'

PBS Short Film Festival | Highway Mike (dir. Sriyanka Ray)

'Highway Mike is the story of Mike, a formerly homeless addict who used to live below the bridge in a park where hundreds of users gather every day to do drugs. Now he does outreach work to prevent overdoses in that same park. Mike tries to balance his past with his present as he leads us into the underbelly of one of New York City’s most overlooked communities, and gives us a firsthand glimpse of what the opioid crisis looks like in urban spaces. Producer and director, Sriyanka Ray is an award-winning video journalist, storyteller and producer from Kolkata, India. She covers race, inequality, youth issues and the criminal justice system. Much of her work has been at the intersection of journalism, film and social change.'

To Love And Not Forgive: A Conversation with Ashley C. Ford

'For much of her childhood, Ashley Ford's father was incarcerated, and her mother struggled to raise her while grappling with her own upended life plans. In her new memoir, Somebody's Daughter, Ford looks at how these formative conditions shaped her understanding of childhood, authority, forgiveness and freedom.' -- Code Switch

Marcia Chatelain examines McDonald’s’ mixed impact on Black America

'Fast food is a staple of American culture, but in recent decades there has been a new focus on health and wage inequality. PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown talks to Pulitzer Prize winning author Marcia Chatelain about the complicated history of McDonalds in the Black community: how the fast food giant supported Black franchise owners, but was a trap for unhealthy diets and low wages. It’s part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.'

“How do you color a sound?”: The ‘Wonder Bread’ Soul of the 5th Dimension by Mark Anthony Neal

“How do you color a sound?”: The ‘Wonder Bread’ Soul of the 5th Dimension  by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

What is a more mainstream example of America, than a sandwich made with white bread? And that is perhaps what Motown’s Berry Gordy was thinking when he launched a short-lived merchandising partnership with Schafer Bakeries in Lansing, MI. “The Supremes Special Formula White Bread”, featured Motown’s flagship trio, The Supremes, on its packaging. Long-forgotten, especially after the Supremes were featured in an ad for Coke in 1968, the endeavor might be best remembered as an unintended metaphor for the comparative blandness of the Motown brand, as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Sly & the Family Stone took Soul music metaphorically “higher” towards the end of 1960s.  The irony of Motown’s white bread dreams is that there was another group, one that Gordy passed over, that was even more white bread than Gordy could have ever conjured. For a brief period in the late 1960s, the 5th Dimension fully realized the post-racial crossover success that Gordy had imagined for his stars, while raising the legitimate question of what is means to sound Black in music.

The 5th Dimension always preferred to describe their music as “Champagne Soul”, a term that captured the ambitions and aspirations of a cohort of Black Americans, not quite fully formed in the late 1960s. To listen to the 5th Dimension was to hear a mélange of middle-of-the road Pop, show-tunes, folk music, with flourishes of Jazz, Soul, and a tinge of Gospel. If music were to sound like America, it might sound like the 5th Dimension – at least in the 1960s.  For many though, the group is remembered as a quintet of Pop music performers, whose choice of songs and style of singing betrayed any idea that they were, in fact, Black Americans. Recording and performing for more than 50 years – the group was one of the first Black acts to have a regular residency in Las Vegas – The 5th Dimension’s most classic lineup of Billy Davis Jr., Lamonte McLemore, Ronald Townson, Marilyn McCoo, and Florence LaRue solidified in 1966 and stayed intact until 1975, when Davis and McCoo departed (and scored their chart-topping single “You Don’t Have to Be a Star” in 1976).  

The trio of Davis, McLemore and Townson were all natives of St. Louis, MO, and found themselves hustling on the fringes of the entertainment industry in the early 1960s.  They were joined by McCoo, a New Jersey-born daughter of two physicians, who moved their family out to Los Angeles in the early 1950s. McCoo was an undergraduate at UCLA competing in the Miss Bronze California Pageant contest when she was spotted by McLemore who was working as a professional photographer. McLemore met the fifth member Florence LaRue the same way; she won the Miss Bronze California Pageant – in the era before Black women were allowed to compete in mainstream beauty contests – the year after McCoo competed.   Initially named the Versatiles – considering the versatility of their voices – the group shopped their demo to labels in the Los Angeles area, specifically targeting Motown, whose West Coast office was run by Marc Gordon.   "Oh, man, they're really good songs, you know," McLemore recalls Gordy saying, “But I don't hear no hit."  Gordon, though, heard enough in the group that he agreed to manage them.  Shortly thereafter the group recorded their first single, “I'll be Lovin' You Forever”, a song that sounds right out of the Holland-Dozier-Holland songbook, for Johnny Rivers’ fledgling Soul City Records, a subsidiary of Liberty Record.  Rivers, who was a successful solo artist with hit songs like “The Poor Side of Town”, “Secret Agent Man'' and a rather credible cover of The Four Tops’ “Baby, I Need Your Lovin'” was looking for a Soul act for his label.  “I'll be Lovin' You Forever'' made little impact, but the group was open to Rivers' suggestion that they change their name. With an assist from Townsend and his wife, The Versatiles became the 5th Dimension.  In addition, the group also shed the withering Motown sound of that era, at least after they were introduced to a young White singer-songwriter named Jimmy Webb, who   incidentally, had been a writer for Motown’s publishing arm Jobete. One of Webb’s early credits was “My Christmas Tree,” which became a Christmas standard of sorts for Motown as it was recorded by The Supremes, The Temptations, and the Jackson 5 among others.   In a lengthy interview with HistoryMakers, McLemore recalls the group was sitting with Gordon, and Webb (who Gordon also managed), and as the group lamented their need for songs, Webb similarly lamented the need for folk to sing his songs.  Webb was working on “Up, Up and Away” (inspired by hot air ballooning) and gave the song to the 5th Dimension to record.  The pairing proved fruitful for both the 5th Dimension and Jimmy Webb, who contributed five original tunes to the 5th Dimension’s debut Up – Up and Away and eleven songs to their follow-up The Magic Garden (both released in 1967). 

“Up, Up and Away” made the 5th Dimension stars, but not without the pitfalls the group faced within an industry that didn’t quite know what to do with them given that their music didn’t soundBlack. For example, the first single from their debut album was a cover of The Mama and the Papa’s "Go Where You Wanna Go", a song that originally appeared on the Mama and Papas debut album that featured certified “middle-of-road” pop classics like “California Dreaming” and “Monday, Monday.” The 5th Dimension’s lead single, which outperformed the Mama’s and the Papa’s version on the pop charts, placed the 5th Dimension firmly within the aesthetic of “Sunshine Pop”.  A group like The Association (“Cherish”) was a particular reference point, as the 5th Dimension doubled-down on the sound by bringing in Bones Howe, who produced the Association's big hits “Never My Love” and “Windy”,  for their subsequent albums.

Yet even within the 5th Dimension’s parent company Liberty Records, there was doubt that the group could sell “sunshine pop”. The Fifth Dimension may have found their initial home on pop radio stations, but according to McCoo “when [stations] found out we were Black, they weren't so anxious to play our music.”  This fact was borne out when label-mates, the “Lilly-White”  Johnny Mann Singers recorded a version of “Up, Up and Away” after hearing the 5th Dimension’s version, hoping to take advantage of pop radio’s reticence at supporting a Black group that sounded “White.” As McLemore recalls to HistoryMakers, “We were on the same label now, and they did our song...we're going up the charts with our own company, competing against it. Fortunately, ours won out.” Even though the Johnny Mann Singers earned a Grammy in the category of Best Performance by a Chorus at the 10th Annual Grammy Awards, the 5th Dimension won six Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year, Best Performance by a Vocal Group and Best Contemporary Pop single.  

Yet the 5th Dimension’s early Grammy success offered a striking dissonance from what was happening in the world of Soul and Rhythm & Blues, as evidenced by those same 1967 Grammy Awards where Aretha Franklin won her first two Grammys in the Rhythm & Blues category for “Respect,” Sam & Dave won a Grammy for “Soul Man,” and in the Jazz category Julian “Cannonball” Adderley won his only Grammy for “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” -- three songs that represent a potent cross-section of where Black popular music was in that moment.  Indeed, none of the five singles released on Up – Up and Away and the follow-up The Magic Garden appeared on the Rhythm & Blues chart. There was something visually arresting about the cover art to Up – Up and Away – five “Negroes in a Hot Air Balloon,”  while cities like Newark and Detroit were going up in flames during Black protests against police brutality and demands for Civil Rights.

The group felt the disconnect with Black audiences intimately, touring the college circuit and being  confronted by Black students – 1967 being the year of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and “I Got the Feelin’” – who didn’t think the 5th Dimensions’ music represented them. “We felt like, why don't they even give us a chance, you know?” McCoo tells Here & Now, “It was a little hurtful at that time.”  As McCoo shared in the film Summer of Soul, a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969,  “Sometimes we were called the black group with the white sound...Our voices sound the way they sound. How do you color a sound?”

The irony of the 5th Dimension’s eventual Soul breakthrough in 1968 with “Stoned Soul Picnic”, is that they did so singing the music of another relatively unknown White singer-songwriter in Bronx-born Laura Nyro. The title track to their third album, “Stoned Soul Picnic” was the first 5th Dimension record to chart on the Soul/R&B charts, peaking at #2  making it the group’s highest charting single on the so-called “Black Music” charts, and one of two songs  during the group classic formation that fared better on the Soul/R&B charts than the Pop charts where it landed in the third spot in July of 1968. 

 

The group was introduced to Nyro’s music via David Geffen, who managed both Nyro and 5th Dimension producer Bones Howe.  After hearing a version of “Stoned Soul Picnic” sung by Nyro, which was included on her not-yet-released second album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, the group decided to cut a version of the song along with Nyro’s “Sweet Blindness”, with Howe’s proclamation,  “I’ve got a No. 1 R&B record for you guys.”  As the late Michele Kort writes in Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro, “By the time Rolling Stonefinally reviewed [Eli and the Thirteenth Confession] Nyro’s music had already made the Billboard charts – but not in her own voice. It was the 5th Dimension – who made the songs palatable to the record buying masses.” As Kort describes it “The 5th Dimension had smoothed out Nyro’s intensity, while highlighting the song’s lilting quality” in what would become, perhaps, the defining quality of the group’s interpretation of the Great American Songbook of that late 1960s and early 1970s. 

 

The success of both “Up, Up, and Away” and “Stoned Soul Picnic” ultimately paled to that of " Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)", a medley of songs poached from the breakout musical Hair, which opened Off-Broadway in 1967 as the inaugural production of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, and On-Broadway in April of 1968. In the Broadway production, Ronnie Dyson – another Black artist whose vocal qualities and choice of material often confused listeners – opens  the show with “Aquarius”; “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)” featuring a young Melba Moore, closes out the musical at the end of the second act. 

 

As McCoo recalls, “Bones Howe put the idea together of doing 'Aquarius' and 'Let the Sunshine In' because the group wanted to record the song so badly. And we just really believed like we were gonna have a big hit with it.”  The medley was the 5th Dimension’s first number one Pop single, but not without some last-minute seasoning at the behest of their producer Howe: “okay, Billy, now go on in there and, and take it home, put in the gospel influence” McCoo recollects to HistoryMakers.  Davis, “took it to church” and created one of the most transcendent moments in 1960s pop music.

 

"Medley: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)" was the lead single from The 5th Dimensions album Age of Aquarius (1969) and after the follow-up “Working on a Groovy Thing” stalled on the pop charts, the group returned to the Laura Nyro songbook recording “Wedding Bell Blues”, which originally appeared on Nyro’s debut More Than a Discovery (1966). Famously the song’s lyrics would mirror the personal lives of McCoo and Davis; the duo was married in 1969, with LaRue also marrying the group’s manager Marc Gordon the same year. 

 

By February of 1970 the 5th Dimension were featured on an episode of the Robert Wagner crime drama It Takes a Thief, where they debuted their single “One Less Bell to Answer”, which peaked at #2 on the Pop charts, and #4 of the Soul/R&B Charts.  The song appeared  on one of the group’s most cohesive albums, which included the single “Save the Country” (another Nyro cover) and a ten-minute medley that included the lyrics to the “Declaration of Independence”,  a cover of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” and the Rascals’ “People Gotta Be Free.”  The medley was as political as the group ever was, and the performance felt like a coda on the political and musical upheavals of the previous decade, and the innocence that their music represented in contrast.

 

Indeed, the group’s 1971 outing Live, Lines, Angles made little impact during a calendar year that featured the releases of a series of iconic albums from Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Marvin Gaye, Sly & the Family Stone, George Harrison, Isaac Hayes, the late Janis Joplin, to name just a few – albums that would have lasting impact on the sound of American pop music for years to come. To their credit, the 5th Dimension never wavered from their sound, even as so-called “Sunshine Pop” became Soft Rock in the 1970s.

 

The oddly titled, yet telling following album, Individually & Collectively featured lead vocals from all of the group members, including Davis covering Elton John’s “The Border Song”, and Nyro’s “Black Patch” where all five members took a turn at lead.  The single "(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep at All," which featured McCoo on lead vocals was the group’s last top-five Pop single.  The group’s finest album, Living Together, Growing Together(1973), and in particular the single “Ashes to Ashes,” with its lyrics of longing for a passing era, finds the group symbolically staving off what was going to be the inevitable break-up of the original lineup. 

 

Indeed, McCoo and Davis departure in the Fall of 1975 seemed a fait accompli when none of the group’s singles from 1973 to 1975 reached the top-40, and the two singles released from the original lineup’s final album Earthbound, a one-off on ABC Records, failed to make  Pop or R&B charts. ABC did release two singles from the 5th Dimension in 1976 including “Love Hangover” with new members Danny Beard  and Marjorie Barnes, and featuring LaRue on lead vocals. The group’s last appearance on the charts was short-circuited by Diana Ross’s version of the song that was released around the same time and became the Motown’s diva’s third number-one hit as a solo artist. Coming full circle, the group’s final studio albums, Slow Dancing and High on Sunshine(both from 1978), were released on the Motown label, Berry Gordy perhaps paying penance for undermining their last chance at a hit two years earlier.

 

Since those last studio albums, the 5th Dimension have continued to tour, including a few reunion dates with McCoo and Davis. With Townsend’s passing in 2001 and McLemore’s retirement, LaRue remains the only original member still in the group. More than 50 years after they first topped the Pop Charts, the 5th Dimension have largely receded from public memory, save oldies radio stations and satellite channels. The 5th Dimension might have remained forgotten if not for the footage of their performance from the film Summer of Soul. 

 

The 5th Dimension were not culturally legible to many of the young Black folk who witnessed their performance during the Harlem Cultural Festival.  Indeed, it was the first time the group had performed in Harlem, a rather incredulous fact, given the cultural significance of Harlem and its iconic venue, The Apollo Theater. Then as now, the group offered a contrast to some of the other acts featured in the film, including Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, Max Roach, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, The Staple Singers and Stevie Wonder,  whose iconic statuses within Black America are owed, in part, to  the relative familiarity of their music and perceptions of their political and cultural resonance to an era largely remembered for the Black Freedom Struggle. 

 

With their many musical influences, the 5th Dimension's music defies simple categorization as Soul music or is not easily recognizable as even “Black” music. Certainly the 5th Dimension were not alone. On the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum, acts like The Chambers Brothers, Baby Huey & the Babysitters, Jimi Hendrix, and to a lesser extent, Sly & the Family Stone, were pushing at the boundaries of mainstream Soul and Rhythm & Blues.  Yet none of those acts, save Sly & the Family Stone, achieved any of the commercial success or industry honors that the 5th Dimension did.  And while Hendrix has been lionized after his death and Sly & the Family Stone are remembered as icons of the counter-cultural movement, the 5th Dimension have been seemingly lost to history.

 

While the 5th Dimension don’t have a “Say It Loud”, “Young Gifted and Black” or “What’s Going On” to hang their collective hats, it didn’t mean that the group didn’t have a lasting impact on how Black artists could sound and where their music could be heard. As Usher Raymond has recently ended a residency in Las Vegas and New Edition prepares for one in the coming year,  McLemore’s recent comments to his hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hold true: “It was two groups, the Supremes and the 5th Dimension who opened doors for other Black singing groups to headline in Vegas in our heyday era. And everyone knew our first and last names…just like the Beatles.”

 

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Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books including the forthcoming Black Ephemera: The Challenge and Crisis of the Black Archive (NYU Press). Follow him on Twitter: @NewBlackMan

 

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Amid Haiti's Upheaval, Rapper Mach-Hommy Sees The Country's Resiliency In Focus

'Mach-Hommy's latest album, Pray For Haiti, was released in early 2021 on the respected Griselda Records and is already being considered one of the year's best. Simultaneously, a place he cares deeply about sinks further and further into crisis. As a member of the country's diaspora, the artist says he's used to holding disparate thoughts, like these, in his head at the same time. Hommy says the political and social issues Haiti grapples with today were inherited from its forefathers. But, the resilience of those living through the present moment and the promise of future generations give him hope.'

REEL SOUTH: Missing Magic (Directed by Anissa Simone Latham-Brown)

'As uprisings spread across the country, a young poet in Birmingham, Alabama becomes involved in local protests against decades of police brutality. As he tries to reconcile the city’s modern image as a diverse and welcoming metropolis with its violent and complex civil rights history, he suddenly becomes a part of the story when he’s arrested at a demonstration. Missing Magic is directed by Anissa Simone Latham-Brown.

Whitewashing History and Suppressing Voters Go Hand in Hand by Ben Jealous

Whitewashing History and Suppressing Voters Go Hand in Hand 

by Ben Jealous | @BenJealous | NewBlackMan (in Exile)

There’s been a lot of news about the Democratic legislators in Texas who fled the state to prevent Republicans from pushing through sweeping new voter suppression laws. Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to have them arrested to force them to attend a special session of the state legislature. Now it turns out that voter suppression is not the only “special” project Abbott has in mind. He and his fellow Republicans are pushing a far-reaching “memory law” that would limit teaching about racism and civil rights. 

 

Abbott already signed a bill last month restricting how racism can be taught in Texas schools. But he and other Republicans in the state don’t think it went far enough. The Republican-dominated state-Senate has voted to strip a requirement that white supremacy be taught as morally wrong. Also on the chopping block: requirements that students learn about civil rights activists Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.  

 

It’s not just Texas. Just as Republicans are pushing a wave of voter registration laws around the country, they are also pushing laws to restrict teaching about racism in our history, culture, and institutions. CNN’s Julian Zelizer recently noted that such laws downplay injustices in our history and lead to teaching “propaganda rather than history.” 

 

Here’s a good example:  Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the new legislation is meant to keep students from being “indoctrinated” by the “ridiculous leftist narrative that America and our Constitution are rooted in racism.” If Patrick really believes it is a “ridiculous” idea that racism was embedded in our Constitution from the start, he has already put on his own ideological blinders. And he wants to force them onto teachers and students. 

 

Some of these state memory laws specifically ban teaching that causes “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” As educators have noted, that’s a recipe for erasing and whitewashing history. 

 

“Teachers in high schools cannot exclude the possibility that the history of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression will make some non-Black students uncomfortable,” history professor Timothy Snyder wrote in the New York Times Magazine. Those laws give power to white students and parents to censor honest teaching of history. “It is not exactly unusual for white people in America to express the view that they are being treated unfairly; now such an opinion could bring history classes to a halt.” 

 

Snyder also explained how new state “memory laws” are connected to voter suppression. “In most cases, the new American memory laws have been passed by state legislatures that, in the same session, have passed laws designed to make voting more difficult,” he wrote. “The memory management enables the voter suppression.” 

 

“The history of denying Black people the vote is shameful,” he explained. “This means that it is less likely to be taught where teachers are mandated to protect young people from feeling shame. The history of denying Black people the vote involves law and society. This means that it is less likely to be taught where teachers are mandated to tell students that racism is only personal prejudice.”  

 

As I wrote in The Nation, far-right attempts to suppress honest teaching about racism is meant to “convince a segment of white voters that they should fear and fight our emerging multiracial and multiethnic democratic society” and to “help far-right politicians take and hold power, no matter the cost to our democracy.”  

 

That’s also what voter suppression bills are designed to do. We cannot tolerate either of these assaults on democracy.   

***

Ben Jealous serves as president of People For the American Way. Jealous has decades of experience as a leader, coalition builder, campaigner for social justice and seasoned nonprofit executive. In 2008, he was chosen as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the NAACP. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he has taught at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.

Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady: Ursula Burns on the Dangers of Exceptionalism

'In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Ursula Burns joins Roxanne Coady to discuss her new memoir, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are, out now from Amistad Press. Ursula M. Burns was the chair and CEO of VEON from mid 2019 to early 2020, a senior advisor to Teneo LTD, Nestlé, Exxon Mobil, and The Ford Foundation among others. She is a member of the board of directors of Uber. She served as CEO of Xerox from 2009 to 2016, and as chairwoman from 2010 to 2017. In 2014, Forbes rated her the 22nd most powerful woman in the world. She was a leader of the STEM program of the White House from 2009 to 2016, and Vice Chair and then Chair of the President's Export Council for the Obama Administration. She lives in London and New York.'

MICHAËLA DANJÉ /// AfroTrans (interview by Amélie Tresfels)

'In this conversation, Amélie Tresfels asks Michaëla Danjé about AfroTrans, which gathers essays, interviews, poetry, and fictions by Black trans women, men, and non-binary persons, from and about their lived experience, in a resolutely political approach but without ever essentializing trans identities. They also talk about collective creation, Black resistance, the importance of language and, crucially, love.' -- The Funambulist Podcast

The Funambulist Podcast · MICHAËLA DANJÉ /// AfroTrans (interview by Amélie Tresfels)