From the Digital Crate: of (Black) Men and Song (ver. 1.0)

From the Digital Crate: of (Black) Men and Song (ver. 1.0) by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan
Listening to Andy Bey is like dreaming about what you’ve never been. And perhaps this is what fueled Bey in the first place—the opportunity to imagine in sound, in phrase, and in melody a world yet to be inhabited by those singers male and black.  It is all too easy to suggest that a vocalist like Bey might have been listening to Bobby Blue Bland, Solomon Burke or even Ira Tucker—as they all were—but there’s something about Bey’s delivery that suggest something more original and dare I say substantive—at least on the level of style.  Bey is one of a kind—something you could only conjure in a dream, really.***I often think about this notion of originality.  A colleague of mine, Richard J. Powell,  an art historian of some stature, has suggested that no artist is influenced (inspired maybe?), but it’s all about an active appropriation of something else(s) in route to something of their own.  Ok, so Sinatra had Billie Holiday in his head and Marvin Gaye had Sinatra in his (“…in the wee small hours of the morning…) and Ronald Isley and Bobby Womack—peers and contemporaries of Sam Cooke—no doubt recalibrated because of Cooke (like Ms. Dinah did for Aretha and Nancy Wilson), though Cooke himself found the road to Damascus trying to sound like R. H. Harris?  And nobody would say that any of these folk weren’t American originals, so that’s not my point. 

***

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities (New York University Press). He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.