Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 491

You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody [Sings] You: Tributing Blackness

You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody [Sings] You: Tributing BlacknessBy Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
“Boy, you sound like Nat King Cole” -- these words from Gregory Porter’s mother are how the Grammy Award winning singer remembers being introduced to Nat King Cole as a child.  As Porter reflects, “I remember thinking how strange that name was...seeing his image: this elegant, handsome, strong man sitting by a fire.”  Porter’s introduction to Cole comes full circle with the release of Nat King Cole & Me, a collection 15 songs associated with the legendary vocalist and musician, who died of lung cancer in 1965.
Porter is, of course, not the first artist to record a collection of Nat King Cole standards; Cole’s late daughter Natalie Cole had her biggest commercial success in 1991 with the Grammy Award winning  Unforgettable... with Love, anchored by the then groundbreaking digital duet between father and daughter on the title track -- which Porter wisely stays clear of. A second duet with her father, “When I Fall in Love,” earned Cole a Grammy in 1996, and she won her last Grammy for a deep dig into the American Songbook, that was inspired by her father’s music.
Cole’s tributes to her father are, of course, deeply personal, as is Porter’s tribute, which he suggest was inspired by this idea of hearing Cole as a father figure: “I put the vinyl on the player and out of those speakers came that voice, that nurturing sound. It filled a void in me. My father wasn’t in my life.”  Yet Porter’s performance of Cole, comes at a time -- more than 50 years after his death -- when Cole’s repertoire represents an untapped resource for a generation of young Jazz audiences, drawn to Porter, who are largely unfamiliar with Cole, save “Unforgettable” and “The Christmas Song”, which Porter does cover.   
No one is questioning the sincerity or legitimacy of Porter’s connection to Cole’s music -- you can hear the influence in Porter’s voice. The fact that such a recording might have also been prompted by the commercial desires of  Porter’s label Blue Note Records to mine Cole’s catalogue cannot be dismissed though -- both Blue Note and Cole’s longtime label Capitol Records are owned by the Universal Music Group. Nat King Cole & Me is Porter’s third album for the “major” label after recording two stellar albums on the independent Motéma Music label.
The tensions at play in the commercial impetus for tribute albums, were certainly there, in an earlier tribute recording to Cole.  Less than 10 months after Cole’s death in February of 1965, Motown released Marvin Gaye’s A Tribute to the Great Nat "King" Cole.  The Cole tribute was released between Gaye’s How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You (1965) and Moods of Marvin Gaye (1966) -- albums that produced four top-15 pop singles, and Gaye’s first number one R&B singles (“I’ll be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar”). A Tribute to the Great Nat "King" Cole, in contrast, produced no singles, and was generally overlooked in the context of Gaye’s ascent as a pop star.  
Yet Motown’s desire to market Gaye as the heir Cole’s legacy -- even before Cole’s death, Gaye had recorded several Cole-like pop standard albums such as The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye, When I'm Alone I Cry, and Hello Broadway -- was also major reason for the relative fast tracking of the recording. In the 1960s, Gaye was long rumored to portray Cole in a biopic of his life.
The genius of Berry Gordy and Motown Records, was Gordy’s ability be self-reflexive about commercial opportunity yet remain attentive enough to the everyday within Black culture to know when to give pause to those ambitions, given the tenor of the era. Certainly this was the case with Motown’s Black Forum label, which issued spoken-word poetry performances and political speeches or one of the label’s more obscure recordings, We Remember Sam Cooke,  a tribute album recorded by The Supremes.  Though seemingly an odd choice -- Cooke was killed months before Cole, so why not Gaye or The Four Tops? -- Cooke set a path to the mainstream that Motown and The Supremes very much admired. The trio’s The Supremes at the Copa (1965) -- a venue that Gordy long craved for the label’s flagship act -- was released a year after Cooke’s own Copa recording was released.
The commercial aspects of tribute recordings notwithstanding, within the economies of Black cultural production, particularly in the era when Black artists were largely marketed to segregated Black audiences, such recordings took on greater significance and relevance. In his book Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Remakes and the Struggle for Artistic Identity (Duke University Press), which examines Aretha Franklin’s tribute to Dinah Washington, Michael Awkward, note that Dinah Washington had anointed Aretha Franklin as the “next one.”
But “having failed to that point to produce recordings that proved indisputable that she was worthy of such praise,” Awkward writes, “Franklin’s remakes of songs associated with the recently deceased Queen of the Blues can be seen as her attempt to demonstrate that she was indeed ready to wear her idol’s crown.” (17)   According to Awkward, Franklin’s Unforgettable: a Tribute to Dinah Washington (1964), is a “compelling manifestation of this singer’s early attempts to master the nuances of black vocal traditions.” (28)
At the time of her death, Dinah Washington might have also felt the pressure to fill the stilettos of the previous “one”; When Billie Holiday died in July of 1959, Washington was the most natural heir her legacy, and thus of heir to a broader tradition Black vocalists.  That Franklin’s tribute to Washington was called Unforgettable, is a reminder that even Cole  cast a shadow over Washington, as Unforgettable was also the title of a 1961 album of pop standards by Washington, that included covers of Cole songs like the title track and “When I Fall in Love.”  The album, her second for the Mercury label, after string of recordings on Mercury’s Jazz subsidiary, was a deliberate attempt to cross Washington over to a pop audience. Indeed, Washington's most well known songs “What a Difference a Day Makes” and “This Bitter Earth” were recorded with Mercury in this period.
In the late 1950s, Washington recorded tribute albums for Bessie Smith and Fats Waller, in what might be an example of Washington apprenticing within the Black Blues songbook -- still yet to be correctly identified as The American Songbook. Such an apprenticeship might have been what Sam Cooke had in mind when he recorded a tribute to Billie Holiday in 1959, shortly after her death.  Tribute to The Lady is easily the most obscure of his recordings as a pop singer, and Cooke’s stilted execution of Holiday’s catalogue only adds to the oddity of the recording.
Yet what Cooke reminds us, is that for the generation of Black artists prior to the incorporation of independent Black music into the mainstream of popular music, the politics of crossover had less to do with individual access to a larger audience, but was born out of a communal ethic to broadly share the aesthetic and spiritual practices of Blackness or what might more applicably be described as Negro-ness.  
This is what you hear in Cooke’s tribute album to Billie Holiday; clean, smooth, playful even, Cooke’s versions of Holiday’s classics don’t attempt to overshadow the spirit -- the darkness and the trauma -- of her own recorded history, but aims to make the genius of Holiday palatable, even legible, to an audience that could never -- even still, some almost sixty years after her death -- see, hear or feel Holiday’s genius for what it was.  
That Cooke largely fails in this endeavour -- that he is indeed still finding his voice is not lost here -- only highlights the difficulties of refracting such brilliance.  Yet it is the gesture that most matters, and a gesture that still matters as Gregory Porter introduces the music of Nat King Cole -- a Holiday contemporary -- to a whole new generation.

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and Professor of African + African-American Studies and Professor of English at Duke University.
 

#BackChannel: Rapsody Talks ‘Laila’s Wisdom’ & Jemele Hill Punished for Speaking 'Facts'

On her new album Laila’s Wisdom, North Carolina rapper Rapsody delivers messages about community, confidence and creative control. The Snow Hill native grew up with a big family and says the album’s title is dedicated to her grandmother and her teachings. Such teachings would not be lost of ESPN host Jemele Hill, who was recently suspended by the ESPN/Disney for her social media commentary, in the backdrop of massive "take a knee" protests among NFL players. State of Things host Frank Stasio talks about Laila’s Wisdom and the politics of free speech in sports with Natalie Bullock Brown , professor of film and broadcast media at St. Augustine’s University in Raleigh, and Mark Anthony Neal, chair of the department of African and African American studies at Duke University in Durham. They are also joined by rapper Rapsody to discuss the process behind her new album.

Jemele Hill on Being a Black Woman in Sports Journalism

'Jemele Hill talks about being a black woman in sports journalism and how it's the right time to be unapologetic.' -- The Root

Haitian History, Art & the Harlem Renaissance

'Jerry Philogene (Dickinson College) discusses the uses of history in the field of Haitian art. Taken from "Memory and History in Haitian Art," a panel discussion with Anthony Bogues (Brown University) and Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié that took place at the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke University.' -- Scholars and Publics
 

Edwidge Danticat Reads “Sunrise, Sunset”

'Edwidge Danticat reads her story “Sunrise, Sunset” from the September 18, 2017, issue of The New Yorker. Danticat is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novels The Dew Breaker and Claire of the Sea Light. Her most recent book is the memoir The Art of Death, which was published in July.' -- Tiny Podcast
         
       

Bill Rhoden on Black Athletes Taking a Stand (or a Knee)

'Colin Kaepernick has yet to set foot on the football field this season, but the protest movement he launched a year ago has taken on a life of its own, after the President went on a tirade against protesting players, suggesting that “that son of a bitch” be fired. The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb reflects with Bill Rhoden, a writer-at-large for ESPN’s “Undefeated,” on the fifty-year history of black athletes embracing politics on the field. Is it time, they ask, to retire “The Star-Spangled Banner” from football?' -- The New Yorker Radio Hour
         
        

Gregory Porter - Nat "King" Cole & Me (Album Trailer)

'For Gregory Porter, the influence of Nat King Cole on his life and music runs deep, a through-line that reaches back into some of his earliest childhood memories, and culminates in the release of the two-time GRAMMY-winning vocalist’s stunning fifth studio album Nat King Cole & Me, a heartfelt tribute to the legendary singer, pianist, and Capitol recording artist. “He was one of a kind. He left such great music – such beautiful things to listen to that you can’t help but be influenced by that extraordinary timbre, style, and ultimate cool,” Porter enthuses.' -- GregoryPorterVEVO

A Genealogy of Possibilities: Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

A Genealogy of Possibilities: Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical Historyby Nicole Higgins | @nicoledhiggins | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (Duke University Press, 2016) generously allows the anti- or inter-discipline’s most central thinker to serve as guide through its theoretical genealogy. This is accomplished through eight transcribed lectures delivered by Stuart Hall at the groundbreaking 1983 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, and Boundaries” teaching institute. Hall transparently offers personal experience as his grounding context for the work of Cultural Studies, and insists on its ongoingness as a political—not intellectual—project, rather than a fixed alleviatory conclusion. Modeling his articulation of process, he both acknowledges and grapples with the foundational ideas of Hoggart, Williams, Marx, Althusser, and Gramsci, ultimately reverberating most loudly in the moments wherein he is able to riff on the “possibilities of new subjectivities” (197), especially within Rastafarianism and its musics. It is precisely the notion of possibility that keeps Cultural Studies 1983 engaging where accessibility might otherwise falter.
The overarching assertion for Hall is that “the first task [of] Cultural Studies turns out to be the last task as well: to do some work in conceptualizing culture more adequately than had been done in the traditions which were available” (19). Lectures 1 and 2 situate these beginnings in the tactical break of New Left thinkers steeped in literary criticism but working in the community as educators from the existent Marxist tools to analyze the cultural shift in the economic affluence of postwar Britain. While methodologies borrowed from the disciplines of literature, anthropology, and sociology offer some intervention to the limitations of the base-superstructure model, these, too, require additional, nuanced attention to developing patterns and distinctions around the experiences and interpretations of lived circumstances (32).
Some degree of pleasure in the work and delivery is evidenced in Lecture 3, wherein Hall explores structuralism’s non-Marxist roots via “(at least) three Durkheims[’]” sociological notion of norms (55) and a particularly illustrative account of Levi-Strauss’ linguistic model for understanding the construction of myth. Here, a tiger, a stream, and a mythmaker echo (within their specific representative context—endlessly rearrangeable, they demonstrate how many different myths and meanings might emerge from the same basic elements) (64) Hall’s own rigorous engagement with the possible orientations of culturalism. The lectures which follow sustain this rigor, albeit with varying returns for readers not already deeply invested in Marxist theoretical frameworks.
Those who find footing in the earlier lectures may feel swept away by Lecture 4’s painstaking treatment of both the evolution of Marx’s thinking and its moments of failure around the relationship between movement in the base and superstructure to accurately represent historical change. Lectures 5 and 6 intervene in this complexity with Althusser engaging with and departing from or reworking the less useful of “classical” Marx’s theoretical formulations. Lecture 6 focuses this rethinking specifically on the connection between ideology and cultural force. Particularly memorable and helpful here is Hall’s personal experience of the vastly different contexts of being “hailed” as “coloured” to mean “black” or “not black” in England and Jamaica, respectively (146-147). Again, it is these moments when the textual apparatus falls away which grant the deepest impact of Hall’s theoretical labor.
Lecture 7 acknowledges the contributions, finally, of Gramsci to the foundation of Cultural Studies, with significant attention to his conceptualization of hegemony and moments of political struggle. Hall argues that “Gramsci’s opening of Marxism to the possibility, indeed the necessity, of differentiated forms of political struggle grounds a useful effort to adapt the forms of class struggle to the historically emerging conditions of capitalism between the two world wars” (177; italics mine). He returns, here, and again in Lecture 8, to the guiding “first task” when he discusses black British youth finally becoming visible to themselves despite poorer economic and political conditions than those experienced by the previous generation (204). This recalls to mind the Hall I first encountered in his more widely circulated “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Culture?” when he says, “Now, cultural strategies that can make a difference, that’s what I’m interested in—those that can make a difference and shift the dispositions of power” (24). Published nearly a decade prior, this notice is reenergized by the deep and sustained commitment demonstrated by Hall in Cultural Studies 1983.
In its thorough rehearsal of constitutive recognitions, ruptures, and revisions, I try to imagine Cultural Studies 1983’s ideal reader. The first, too easy notion is that it is written to academics—perhaps meant to be read by members of a graduate seminar and re-theorized—but then I remember those early thinkers, Hoggart and Williams, working with communities not at all interested in pursuing degrees or theoretical formulations to better understand the effects of capitalism. I think of Hall’s own assertion that the project of Cultural Studies is not an academic exercise—that it emerges from and works toward a concrete political aim. This tension is at once complicated and mitigated by his hesitancy to publish the 1983 lectures at all. I am compelled by the possibility that something communicable within a space equipped to accommodate a range of responses might be less so in bound pages which represent a fixed certainty. The potential barriers to entry—much less engagement—posed by the book’s presuppositions about readers’ theoretical grounding are, in a sense, acknowledged and eased by his insistence on the frame of a work in progress. Even as the collective eight lectures represent North America’s introduction to British Cultural Studies, I remain unconvinced of their collective utility as an introduction to Hall for audiences lacking more than a cursory engagement with Marxist theory; however, there is certainly still much to be gained for readers who may have previously encountered Hall through isolated essays or not at all. Ultimately, the work—first at the teaching summit, now here in the text—extends an invitation to participate in Hall’s collective and ongoing task.
Works Cited
Hall, Stuart, et al. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2016.
Hall, Stuart. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Black Popular Culture.Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. 21-33.
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Nicole Higgins is a poet and PhD student in English at Duke University. Her research interests include poetics, music and sound studies, and critical pedagogy.

Left of Black S8:E5: Michaela angela Davis on Image + Beauty + Power

' Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined in studio by image activist, Michaela angela Davis for a free-ranging conversation about Black women, beauty and representation. Davis is the creator of MADFREE: Liberating Conversations About Image Beauty and Power, a multi-platform conversation project with revolutionary women. A frequent contributor to CNN, Davis has served as  fashion editor at Essence, the first fashion director at Vibe and the editor in chief of Honey.'


Left of Black is hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced by Catherine Angst of the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and in collaboration with the Center for Arts + Digital Culture + Entrepreneurship (CADCE) and the Duke Council on Race + Ethnicity (DCORE). 
***  Follow Left of Black on Twitter: @LeftofBlack

Black Star: 'Mila' -- Director Michael Williams Captures a Portrait of a Transgender Star at Sundown

'For his episode of Black Star, which sees rising directors share their vision of the future of the Black experience on screen, director and sculptor Michael Williams turns his lens on Mila Adderley, a New York-based singer-songwriter, who performs a passage inspired by a quote from American writer and political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry about the visibility of black women.' -- NOWNESS