The Way of the World: A Tribute to Maurice White by Emily J. Lordi

The Way of the World: A Tribute to Maurice Whiteby Emily J. Lordi | @EJLordi | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The summer I finished writing a book was the summer I quit smoking. People who have been, or are now, both smokers and writers will know what bad timing this was: how over the years a smoke break can come to seem like the whole point of disciplined work. To be writing intensively with no such reward in sight—not in an hour, not at the end of the day, not… ever? I felt unmoored. I sought to break old rhythms and forge new ones by moving temporarily to New York and listening constantly to Earth, Wind & Fire.
That summer Wax Poetics ran a cover story about the band in which Ericka Blount Danois described Maurice White’s “clean-cut lifestyle”—a philosophy that included “healthy living, vegetarianism, spirituality, astrology, and Egyptology.” Far from the body-shaming, death-denying capitalistic cult of good health, here was a fundamentally political insistence on black well-being, a way of linking physical self-care with spiritual and creative renewal.
Maurice himself told Rolling Stone that EWF’s music aimed to offer black people “greater freedom from restrictions we had placed on ourselves in terms of our individual potential.” It often worked: fans credited the group with helping them quit heroin, start over.
According to singer Phillip Bailey, “Our mission was to tell people, ‘Hey, you’re naturally high, and you can maintain that natural high by discovering who you are—by opening your third eye.’ We weren’t just saying it, we were living it.” In a decade of anti-black “benign neglect,” the group modeled collective ascendance—the paradox of clean living in the service of the funk.
The group’s gift to American pop was to make manifest—and deliciously imminent—the sound of such transformation. Take, for instance, their 1975 hit “That’s the Way of the World.” Composed by Maurice and Verdine White and master arranger Charles Stepney, the song begins unhurriedly: mellow keyboard intro, rising trumpet line, steady backbeat. Maurice White and Phillip Bailey’s layered falsettos enter in time: Hearts of fire creates love desire / Take you high and higher to the world you belong.
In the first of many expansions, the words burst like tiny sparklers: fiyah, desiyah, take you hiyah. The song is sung from a “we” to a “you” that needs encouraging—we come together on this special day to sing our message loud and clear… Stay young at heart, cause you’re never, never old—and it doesn’t so much progress as it blossoms. Not only do White and Bailey’s vocal lines yield new colors and complexities but, as Nate Chinen notes, bassist Verdine gradually “starts anticipating the changes, leaning on the passing tones.” So the song owes its subtle pull (come along to the world where you belong) to even subtler collaborations.
Slowly, the titular “world” starts to turn, from a cold, hard place into a shrine. Hearts of fiyah, love desiyah, higher hiyah. The space widens as Bailey’s ethereal vocals ascend while White’s gritty sound rounds out the bottom. White’s earthy, funky adlibs solidify the world whose way the group is lighting and model the process of making it up as you go along, with a whole band of outsiders to help you. You can climb inside and ride the music for as long as it takes to get someplace better.
Godspeed, Maurice White, who led the way and beat us to it. 
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Emily J. Lordi is the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and a forthcoming book on the album Donny Hathaway Live. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.