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Okay, here goes.
See, I came of age in the mid-1980s, in a predominantly-white cowtown in Massachusetts. And a lot of the way I relate to music comes back to that time and that place. I don’t think I’m unique in that—as regards taste, ages 16-20 or thereabouts are really the formative years for just about everybody.
Now, I’m not here to argue for the superiority of the music in that time (although I still love much of it), but to talk about an overall cultural vibe. It may just be the poison of nostalgia clouding my perception, but it seems that the worlds of black and white music were more fluid, once upon a time. In 1983-1988, everybody listened to Michael Jackson, rock kids and pop kids alike, just as everybody listened to Prince (and it was not lost on us that The Revolution was mixed-race and mixed-sex). Pop was the Pointer Sisters and Anita Baker and Peabo & Roberta. Philip Bailey was making records with Phil Collins. There was a black guy in the Thompson Twins, there was a black guy in Big Country. Half the Talking Heads touring band was black. Sting was fronting an all-black band. Graceland came out the same year that Peter Gabriel was bringing Youssou N’Dour to US arenas. Living Colour’s first record came out a year after that. The stoners were listening to the holy trinity of Zeppelin, The Doors, and Jimi—and I was listening to Sugar Hill Gang 12-inches and Billy Idol. We danced to Rick James and Billy Squier, to the Clash and Cameo.
During the summer of 1984, I worked in a warehouse in Boston, and the secretary kept her radio tuned to an “urban” station—a tiny, dawn-to-dusk AM outfit. And except for the ads, I heard nothing on that station I wasn’t hearing on pop radio. David Bowie was being played on black radio, for chrissakes. So was Teena Marie. So was Madonna.
And I don’t remember people thinking or talking in terms of “crossover” or “tokenism.” This was just the way things were. This was the future. It seemed like the beginnings of a pop music landscape that was post-racial.
There were only a handful of black kids in my hometown, in those days, and one of them was my best friend. Prez was a guitarist, and we played in half-a-dozen bands together—always him and me, and a rotating cast of others. I played bass, and I liked R-n-B and funk and U2: Prez played a Gibson Flying V, polka-dotted like Randy Rhoades’s, and he dug heavy metal. We played Police covers and Prince covers and Rush and Curtis Mayfield. His father hated the music, but not because it was “white” music: he thought all pop was a waste of time, and that Prez should’ve been a classical violinist.
Everybody has a rough time in high school, but Prez went through the fucking wringer—mainly for personal reasons: the normal parental conflicts (and his father’s domineering nature) were horrendously exacerbated by his mother’s protracted dying of cancer, halfway through his senior year. We kept playing—playing through it. I would’ve gone to Hell and back for that kid, if I thought it would’ve helped.
After graduation he went off to school—to Howard, a historically black university; his father was an alumnus, and there had never been any serious discussion of his going anywhere else. He was gone for a long time, with only brief visits home. And that’s when we began to drift apart.
In retrospect, I can only imagine the shit he must have gone through in those first months away at school, the culture shock, the black kid from a white town with his Night Ranger records at the back of the milk crate. But on those occasions when we got back together, we were no longer speaking the same language. The thin end of the wedge had been driven. And I felt betrayed and angry—though not at Prez. Outside cultural pressures had fucked us over. Both of us.
And as below, so above. The culture began to change again: white music got whiter, losing its soul inflections (and its bottom end) as hair-metal and grunge ascended (as did country, which surged in tandem with, and in reaction against, hip-hop). Radio station formats grew polarized. Playlists tightened. Bonnie Raitt made her return and Anita Baker was no longer getting played on white pop radio; she was no longer necessary to White America. Black critics started to wonder aloud if Prince and Michael Jackson were still “relevant,” because of their “failure” to properly “embrace” hip-hop. (Wondering! if Prince! was still fucking relevant!) And Prince withdrew, and Michael went crazy, and black and white music charted parallel courses as they hadn’t since the 1950s, before Motown became “the sound of Young America,” and through most of the 90s I couldn’t find anything on the radio that I wanted to listen to.
And I wonder if it had to be this way, and why it seems we were doomed to blow it: like the song says, Didn’t we almost have it all? |
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