Arthur Kempton
Author
of
Boogaloo talks with Robert Birnbaum
Arthur Kempton was born in New Jersey and was formally schooled
at Harvard University. He has been a senior administrator in the
Boston Public Schools and an educational consultant. He has also
been a radio disc jockey and in Boston took over the legendary Sunday
morning radio program "For Lovers Only" on the then WTBS
(before MIT sold the call letters). He has been a contributor to
The New York Review of Books and has recently published
Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music. He
lives with his wife in North Carolina.
Boogaloo is a detailed history of Black American music
using gospel patriarch Thomas Dorsey, soul singer Sam Cooke, entertainment
mogul Berry Gordy and visionary George Clinton as touchstones for
examining both black culture and black music against a larger social
context. Luc Sante observes in the New York Review of Books,
"It is difficult to do justice to Kempton's book in a brief
review, since while his primary story line is concerned with the
sorry evolution of African-American pop-music enterprise, much of
the book's heart lies in asides, in brief studies of lesser figures—his
account of the deep and versatile but lower-keyed singer-songwriter-producer
Curtis Mayfield is, in a few pages, as rich as anything in the book."
I was an avid fan of "For Lovers Only " and for years
before and after, the music that Kempton so dearly loves. Boogaloo
is a both a respectful compendium of details about black popular
music and a shrewd and thoughtful overview of the intersection of
black and mainstream culture. As a sombre grace note Kempton in
his Afterword quotes the man he calls the hip-hop nation's Billy
Graham. Louis Farrakhan addressing a conclave of music industry
players intones, "You're already leaders of the world, and
it's frightening folks in power. All over the world you have taken
the children of the rich…and now those in power are asking,
'How do we get our children back?'"
Robert Birnbaum: Boogaloo would be a
fine as a text for 20th century American history course. What was
the starting point for writing this book on Black American music?
Arthur Kempton: A life-long passion. I was raised
in a household, apart from some opera and some classical music that
was almost entirely devoted to black music. Mostly jazz and a lot
of Joe Turner. My father was a devotee. By the time I was seven,
eight, nine years old I had been taken to black churches all over
New Jersey and became a kind of choir groupie. By the time I was
eleven, I was waking up—in what was then my mother's house
in suburban New Jersey—on Saturdays saying, "I have to
get out of here." Sneaking away, having saved lunch money and
pitched quarters in school bathrooms, and getting on the bus and
going to the Apollo Theater—you're from Chicago…
RB: Yeah, I went to the Regal Theater.
AK: My favorite all time form of entertainment
was the urban stage show.
RB: You got your money's worth, for sure.
AK: The going price then in 1964, maybe, was $1.65
for six or seven acts and a movie. If you got there before noon
on a Saturday you got in for 65 cents and a free record. Growing
up almost equidistant from New York and Philadelphia I spent my
childhood in the Uptown [Theater] in Philly and the Apollo [Theater].
I got a job pretty much as soon as I could in a record store and
then I went into radio so I could get free records. I have been
thinking about this [subject] for forty years. I am at an age and
have had to do enough of it where I am just not interested in explaining
myself. Suffice it to say I had the benefit of as good a human education
as an American could have. I understood early that if you are interested
in American history, in some way the purest lens that you can have
on it is black American history. I was also conscious from the time
I was thirteen or fourteen years old that this music was, in effect,
a literature of the street and I developed a kind of literary sense
about it. Moreover, I got to college and become aware black intellectuals
were interested in jazz, mostly. Popular music was devalued and
has continued to be in many ways. There has not been a lot of serious
writing about it.
RB: None.
AK: Well, Peter Guralnick wrote a book called
Sweet Soul Music that was mostly about Stax [Records].
RB: I looked at your bibliography and the one
book that looked enticing to me was on the Chess Brothers, Phil
and Leonard.
AK: Do you know Robert Pruter's work?
RB: No.
I
understood early that if you are interested in American history,
in some way the purest lens that you can have on it is black
American history. |
AK: You ought to. It's called Chicago Soul.
He's not a writer, it's not a "written" book, but he's
published two books. He's a researcher. One of these guys, who is
like me in a way. I say in the book that I am my only original source.
Basically, what I am doing is illuminating old facts. But he is
one of these guys that clearly was around, of our age. And it's
almost an encyclopedic book about—he's written two—one's
called Doo Wop, about '50's Chicago groups and one is called
Chicago Soul. I would recommend both. The University of
Illinois Press, by the way, probably does more interesting black
music stuff than almost anybody else—both of those books are
printed by them.
RB: As I started to think about placing your book
in the pantheon of music books, I thought of Guralnick, David Hadju's
Lush Life and Positively Fourth Street and the
Nick Tosches' books on Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis because I
see these books as putting their subjects within a social/historical
context.
AK: That's kind of you, This book has been out
a couple of weeks, mostly the critical reaction is coming from the
hinterlands. Luc
Sante's reviewed it in the New York Review of Books.
The fact that he wanted to do it suggests that he gets what this
is. In many ways this book is a reproach to rock critics who, as
far as I am concerned, are the ashcan of journalism—which
is a fairly degraded profession anyway.
RB: I don't remember anyone pointing out that
Mick Jagger looted American culture or that Janis Joplin was a second-rate
screamer. No one lately, if ever.
AK: I would only suggest that you listen to Erma
Franklin's version of "Piece of My Heart" and then listen
to what Janis Joplin did and dare you this disagree with me.
RB: I know the song and I agree with you.
AK: Mick Jagger. As you may recall their first
American hit was “It's All Over Now" but Jagger is a
note-for-note copy (of the Valentino's version). The second hit
was “Mercy Mercy” by Don Covay. There was always this
side of me, even then that said it was wonderful that these English
kids love and respect black music but when do you love something
enough to leave it alone. And they really didn't. None of them as
far as I am concerned, ever produced anything worth listening to.
My tastes are cardinal…
RB: I remember radio stations [I think they were
black stations] having contests between the Beatles and the Temptations…
AK: That didn't happen in…I grew up in the
Philadelphia cultural orbit. Philadelphia was this strange, hermetic
culture where there was no British invasion. The white kids in Philadelphia
danced as well if not better than 80% of the black kids in the rest
of the country.
RB: No British Invasion? What about American Bandstand?
AK: American Bandstand was not of Philadelphia.
There was this guy named Jerry Blavat who was this Jewish street
kid fell in love with Frankie Lyman in the late '60s and used to
run around and bust up shows where Frankie Lyman imitators like
Little Butchie Saunders and others were. He then graduated to radio
and became this huge figure in mid '60s Philadelphia youth culture
and had the best music show ever, on television. Everybody who came
on performed live. He gave his entire show in 1965, forty-five minutes
except for commercials to James Brown, so he did forty-five minutes
live. So yeah, Philadelphia was a very interesting place. I remember
seeing a group called the Magnificent Men who were some white boys
from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who had a very strong regional hit
in the summer of 1967 called “Piece of Mind.” They opened
the show at the Uptown with the Temptations, the Four Tops and the
Impressions, and turned out the show, albeit basically on novelty
appeal. So there was this interesting cross culture going on. That
stuff passed over me. I don't own a Beatles record. That stuff was
never relevant to me.
RB: So you are an R&B, soul, boogaloo purist?
Do you listen to other kinds of music?
 AK:
Absolutely. Well, sure I listen to jazz. In 1971 I spent a couple
of weeks listening to Jamaican music but always preferred the Meters,
frankly. Joseph Modeliste, who I believe was the greatest of all
boogaloo drummers…New Orleans music is American reggae, reggae
complexified. So, yeah, I am a purist.
RB: When did you start writing Boogaloo?
AK: Here's how it happened. In 1991 I began to
write occasional pieces for the New York Review of Books.
I was mostly in the public education business from thirty years.
Then an editor at Pantheon called me up and said, "Are you
interested in writing a book?" I said, "Yeah." This
book took four years for me to write, so I guess [I started in]
1998 but in some sense I began the work that resulted in the book
in 1991 when I wrote a piece called "Native Sons," sort
of about sneakers and hip hop for the NYRB. I waited a long time
actually, out of sense of…
RB: Waiting for someone to ask you? [laughs]
AK: For somebody else to do it. Actually in the
early '80s I began a show on WILD here called "The Arthur Kempton
Time Tunnel." I had a sense that there was this large upscale
generation of black kids who comprise what I call the "equal
opportunity generation." More kids had gone to school and had
gotten middle-class jobs then any other generation in the history
of America. I got this sense that there was this fairly significant
up scale Essence magazine, Black Enterprise market for
this music because they had grown up on it and that really wasn't
being addressed at all. So I started this show and in the course
of this show I began to do, musical biographies. Along the lines
of what is now like Behind the Music, that VH-1 does—that
kind of thing. Writing radio scripts—about eighty of them.
In a sense, I began researching the book that long ago. North Carolina
Mutual, which was the largest black insurance company, had a brief
fling in radio where they had string of five stations. So the program
director at WILD who became a friend of mine left to become program
director of those stations and for about six months I was doing
the "Time Tunnel" on a syndicated basis. I would say that's
when it began, in the writing of those radio scripts.
RB: Tell me about the title. Boogaloo was a specific
dance. But in this context you are using it in more sophisticated
way.
AK: Beginning in the late '60s some of us began
referring to what was then called soul music as boogaloo. Interestingly
enough, also in the late '60s there was in New York a kind of fusion
going on between Latin and black music personified in Joe Bataan.
RB: Joe Cuba also?
AK: Yeah, although he preceded it. They named
their musical genre after dances and so hence the beginning of Latin
bugaloo.
RB: Spelled differently. Spelled b-u-g-a-l-o-o.
AK: It's interesting because you know of course,
Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo. It was a really seminal
piece of work in 1970. You might remember his concept of "jus'
grew." The term boogaloo, as I was writing it, began to assume
that. When I discovered this wonderful remark by George Clinton.
Someone asked him "Where did you come up with this idea of
'all around the world for the funk'?" And he replied, "Did
you ever read Mumbo Jumbo?" But that came later. Basically
the term 'boogaloo' was meant to apply to soul music.
RB: There are lots of anecdotes and information
but one of them really made me laugh hysterically. The quote from
Morris Levy, "If you want royalties go to the England."
AK: He's the model for that character on the Sopranos,
Hesh. Morris Levy is a fascinating character. When I began writing
this book. Frankie Lyman was going to be in it but he basically
had a one-year career. There wasn't enough story there. But Morris
Levy is a real story. One of the best scenes in Fredrick Dannen's
book Hit Man is at a UJA dinner for Morris Levy where all
these old scoundrels who used to run the music business get together
and talk. He grew up with the Gigante Brothers, Vincent the Chin.
The other brother is Father Gigante who redid housing in the South
Bronx during the Seventies. He, Levy, grew up with these guys and
was an associate of the Genovese family. There was a very interesting
book by a reporter from the LA Times, about how Levy subverted
MCA records and that whole cutout business was a Mafia business
and Levy was indicted and going to trial when he died. And Irving
Azoff, who makes a brief appearance in my book, and the rest of
those guys were all involved in that.
RB: Morris was an equal-opportunity thief. He
stole from everyone.
AK: Absolutely. Sure. The funniest remark was
Ruth Brown's about Atlantic, and how when you dealt with Morris
Levy you expected to be raped, but with Ahmet Ertegun it was more
like date rape. And given the social class distinction that sums
up the nature of the business.
RB: In Boogaloo you carefully dissect
two figures, Berry Gordy and Suge Knight. Are you assuming neither
is ever going to read this book?
In
many ways this book is a reproach to rock critics who, as
far as I am concerned, are the ashcan of journalism—
which is a fairly degraded profession anyway. |
AK: [Berry] Gordy, of course, comments on nothing.
I'd be interested in his reaction. In some ways, he is the hero
of this book. One of the things that has been asked by a few interviewers
(who really haven't read the book,) "did you discover any thing
in the process of writing this book?" The answer is probably
no, but what I have discovered is a deepened appreciation of Gordy.
To my mind, he is as great an American industrialist as JP Morgan
or John D Rockefeller, and a robber baron. He invented the modern
music business, in many ways.
RB: Your admiration is somewhat diluted because
of the script you are running along his story, the Iceberg Slim
quotes.
AK: Well behind every great fortune is a great
crime. Of course, Gordy became a pimp in the music business after
having been a trick.
RB: Not much of a pimp. He had to take the bus
to his stroll.
AK: When he was a songwriter and his lawyer explained
to him that he really wasn't going to get paid the thousand dollars
he was owed, he built a vertically integrated fortress around himself
to fend off the predations of the business. There must be thirteen
memoirs written by former Motown people and in every one of them—almost
every one of them—there is a scene where somebody is half
way out the door. And they come to see Gordy and Gordy says, "Don't
worry I'll always take care of you." That was the Godfather's
kiss. A really remarkable, complicated man for whom I have a lot
of admiration— partially because he comes out of a tradition
which is mostly lost. That old school that understood at a certain
level that it's always unwise, no less unwise today, for a black
man in America to appear to have too much money or to be seen too
conspicuously with white women. He never had partners. These current
entrepreneurs start out with partners and are basically share cropping.
Gordy cashed in half a billion dollars and has said nothing. I would
love to sit down with Berry Gordy. He will never acknowledge any
of this that has been written.
RB: I first thought about this when I read Thomas
King's book on David Geffen — that out of context one tends
to vilify these guys. But then when you think about the shark pools
they swim in…
AK: Absolutely. That's one of the things I hoped
to show, if not tell because I tried to be assiduous about that.
You look at the careers of a Geffen and Azoff and the advantages
that they had. And also a Neil Bogart, for example. Then you contrast
that with Gordy. Whatever can be said about Gordy, his accomplishment
is really quite extraordinary. Do you remember this fraudulent artist
in the early '80s, Mark Kosabi that had this workshop on the Lower
East Side of New York and he had this whole group of kids who mass-produced
pictures under his signature. What Motown accomplished would be
as if there were two or three Mark Kosabi paintings hanging in every
great art museum in the world. I remember, as you remember, in the
late '60s when public tastes especially of the newly minted rock
critical establishment began towards wilder strains, Motown was
disparaged as a factory. There has never been anything like it in
the music business. You had talent stacked so deep there that George
Clinton got turned away and Ashford and Simpson, after having written
all those Margin Gaye-Tammy Terrell hits, had to leave. It was really
most extraordinary. And two things that stick in my mind, his two
maxims. One is evoked in this scene of Gordy storming through the
office at Motown at five thirty on a Friday afternoon seeing who
is there and who is not and saying, "Money is not on strike."
And then this when he would remind subordinates that "he wasn't
the boss, logic was." A fascinating man!
RB: When you mentioned the remark that Motown
was a factory I was thinking about the Standing in the Shadows
of Motown film and the Funk Brothers. In your book you mention
that Eddie Holland is chewing out one of the studio musicians and
the guy says, "You all's music all sound the same anyway."
AK: They were all jazz musicians. Detroit was
this extraordinarily fertile jazz town, and they had absolute contempt
for Holland, Dozier and Holland. One of the most gratifying things
that has come out in the last couple of weeks after the book has
come out, I have done a lot of interviews on black radio. And there
is a guy in DC, Joe Madison, who is a rather big deal thereabouts.
He said to me he was talking to Duke Fakir of the Four Tops when
his producer brought the book into the studio. And Madison said
he looked in the index under Four Tops and started reading passages
of the book to him. I'm not terribly complimentary of the Four Tops.
And Fakir said, "It's all true."
RB: You said Jocko Henderson was the greatest
deejay ever. Who was he?
 AK:
Jocko Henderson claimed—he may still be alive, if he is he
is in his eighties—to be the original rapper. One of the reasons
hip hop has always interested me more as sociology than as art is
because I grew up in the era of black personality radio. Jocko was
an artist. Jocko rhymed everything. And had voice, had delivery
and diction and had gone to college… and he was a master.
There was very little that I heard thirty years later that I hadn't
heard before. There was this whole school of shit talking black
radio disc jockeys that were stars at seventy five dollars a week.
RB: And the all the payola they could get.
AK: Oh sure. But Jocko was in a class by himself.
RB: Pervis Spann the overnight disc jockey at
WVON [in Chicago] affected this country bumpkin kind of character
and I think he was a rhymer.
AK: Let me ask you a question? There is a performance
description of Gene Chandler in there.
AK: One of the things that I tried to evoke was
the feeling at those shows
RB: Reading that triggered my own recollections
of the shows at the Regal.
AK: I am hoping they are similar memories. You
know, the first six rows would be teenage girls and it was a very
different audience than the mindless screamers who would attend
the Beatles. They would look to find something wrong first. They
would demand a certain quality of performance before they would
submit themselves to it and if they didn't get I they could be absolutely
brutal. I remember a case of guys walking out on stage with their
zippers open or people showing up…there was this really fine
group out of Detroit called the Fantastic Four who had a lead singer
named "Sweet" James Epps. He was a three hundred-pound
man in a continental suit. He was so big the toes of his white loafers
were curled up and there was this collective "ugh' emitted
from the front rows when he came on stage. To watch guys—and
that's what the preface is about—to watch guys overcome that
on the strength…
RB: Like Billy Stewart.
AK: On the pure strength of performance, galvanized
me. It always did. I've heard it said that a lot of writers wanted
to be singers but If I could do that I would have traded anything—I'm
not even sure the game is the same anymore—it wouldn't mean
anything anymore. And, of course, those moments became rarer and
rarer. I remember twenty five years ago at Paul's Mall here [in
Boston] when a group called Bloodstone had a song out called "Outside
Woman" and Harry Williams—who was another one of those
fat, greasy, ugly men—walked out into the audience and sang
"Outside Woman" for twenty minutes, sweating in people's
drinks. And everybody was transfixed.
RB: Well, the game has changed. Can you imagine
such venues these days?
AK: A lot has happened that I find distressing.
It is true I am a cultural conservative. That has nothing to do
with they way that term is ordinarily applied. This music really
was the map of an emotional landscape for me when I was fourteen
or fifteen. The content about the music was mostly about relationships.
I don't know what kids use for that anymore? Most of what passes
in the widely disparaged rhythm and blues genre these days—
to call something rhythm and blues is to dismiss it —is so
vapid. One of the things I did in answer to the question of "what
did you discover in doing this?" I wouldn't call it a discovery
but who would have thought— it has something to do with historical
perspective and the lessons of history—I don't know who among
us would have ever thought that the most influential singer of the
last quarter century would turn out to be Donny Hathaway.
RB: Really?
AK: If you listen to these kids today they are
all second and third generation echoes of Donny Hathaway but on
Prozac, the emotion is absolutely flattened out. As you know Hathaway
apart from the work he did with Roberta Flack, never made any money
to speak of as a singer. The only successful record he had was that
Christmas record, which is a fine record and gets played every year.
RB: Didn't he do successful cover of Leon Russell's
"A Song for You"?
AK: Yes, he did a lot of fine work but had no
commercial appeal to speak of, on his own. And has this enormous
influence and these kids have no idea who he is. What began to happen
is that some time around the middle '70s people started to concern
themselves less with making great music than with making perfect
records. And so what you have now is the logical outcome of that
—which is all these voices which are indistinguishable to
me, one from the other, all the emotional content of the songs flattened
out, all the rough edges gone. All the stuff that used to appeal
to me, what I am is what the jazz people used to call a "moldy
fig."
RB: [both laugh] You were asking about what the
model is for relationships, and the first thought I had was, "Did
you ever hear the use of the word 'whatever' so much?" As if
that word is a sufficient answer or response. It's hard to believe
that there is such a diminution in affection and connection
This
is a society increasingly distanced, people just exist in
these small compartmentalized worlds, seen through computer
screens and video games. |
AK: And literacy. One of the points that I tried
to make in this book is that those semi-anonymous Motown writers…the
literary quality of those songs. I mean what does it say about what's
happened to public education? Curtis Mayfield was a tenth grade
drop out, okay. Smokey Robinson did a year or two of junior college.
Chicago and Detroit are two of the worst public school systems in
America, but if you at look those ninth-grade English teachers back
then, you remember that they taught us a little Shakespeare. When
you look at Mayfield's ability—there is a song he did early
on, called, "Can't You See." "I'm a ship tossed and
driven under thundering clouds above/and one day I'll drop my anchor
in the harbor of your love/And we'll go sailing, keep right on sailing/On
the breakers of our love." The combination of those old Reverend
Tindley church hymns and the ninth grade English curriculum in Wells
High school produced some real passable literature. The fact of
the matter is that that is an extremely well turned extended metaphor.
While the rappers are capable of flashes of verbal flair and occasionally
real originality, metaphor doesn't exist.
RB: The most interesting person in the book for
me, or most mysterious, is Tupac Shakur's mother. Is there more
of a story there?
AK: Well there is a whole era to talk about there.
Afeni Shakur had the starring role in the Panther 21 trial…if
you look at the arc of her life, it really describes what has happened
to this country between 1968 and today. I have never met her. My
father [much admired journalist Murray Kempton] knew her and always
spoke highly of her. In fact, she came to my father's funeral. I
think he would have found tremendous irony in this, a revolutionary
who ended up turning her aggressions on the tending of her son's
estate. Tupac—and I don't own a Tupac Shakur record—for
whatever reasons, was the James Dean of his generation. He's a poster
on walls all over the world.
RB: I think your take on him will be a revelation
to readers of your book as opposed to the public perception.
AK: One of the things that fascinated me about
what is going today is the fact that seventy per cent of the kids
that buy gangster rap are white suburban kids. The only other time
really in my lifetime when music percolated up from the urban streets
unmediated was the doo-wop era. It can be argued that what the doo-wop
era did—for the first time large numbers of white kids were
developing indirect relationships with black voices and I think
imagining the people behind those voices, prepared—certainly
in New York and several other places— a generation of white
kids for the civil rights movement. What is hip-hop preparing its
generations of white aficionados for? Part of the point I was trying
to make is that black kids who buy this music understand that at
a certain level this theater. I don't think that the suburban white
kids do. This is a society increasingly distanced, people just exist
in these small compartmentalized worlds, seen through computer screens
and video games. So here you have white kids buying this music,
and they are not at all interested in knowing or meeting the people
who are making this music or even thinking of them. What they are
buying is attitude.
RB: I'm reading a novel, We Need to Talk about
Kevin, in which the narrator's teenage son goes to school one
day and shoots and kills a dozen people. And the story reminds you
if the shootings from Paducah to Columbine. Now, I have no argument
that links anything to this adolescent violence, but it is telling
that white kids are attracted to this gangster style. I don't know
what it is but it's in a context.
AK: I don't know either, but a lot of it has to
do with …in a lot of ways although I don't participate in
it, to speak of the cyber culture is a really fascinating phenomenon.
Where you can be whoever you want to be. But at the same time living
in a culture these days where people actually leave husbands and
wives to run off with people that they have only just met in cyberspace.
That says a lot about what happens to those kids in a certain way.
That there is a fundamental human disconnection going on. That makes
it possible for kids to mistake an abstraction for what's real.
I do think there is something about that makes it possible for these
kids to pull triggers on flesh-and-blood people and somehow not
think of it as being real. And then when they are sitting in jail
say, "I really didn't think of it." That extraordinary
distancing mechanism makes it possible for a lot of the young white
consumers of gangster rap music to think of it as being real. And
of course it isn't. Part of what I hope comes through in my treatment
of the hip-hop business is that they are mostly actors. There is
a wonderful scene of Suge Knight doing Robert DeNiro, in Good
Fellas taking out a victim's driver's license to ensure his
silence. It's all from movies and there is a lot of that going on
too.
RB: I want to talk a little more about Tupac's
mother. She was a revolutionary, then she was a busted-out, crack
head street whore.
AK: I don't know about the street whore part,
she had a crack cocaine problem, you know. And she is now the executor
of a very lucrative estate.
RB: Does it strike you that she has concerns about
the purity of Tupac's legacy?
 AK:
I think it is more like a franchise. I suspect and I don't know
that she is concerned with promoting the mythology of his life.
That is after all commercially useful. I didn't get a sense that
they were close. I suspect she might suggest that there was a purity
to his life, but I don't know what that could have been.
RB: So here we are at the beginning of the 21st
century and black people have been the model for hipness and coolness
since at least WW II. Why still?
AK: One can make the case that black Americans
have been a despised tribe and as such have an iconical outlaw status
and that will always be. That will always be cool. It is now a huge
global business. That outlaw status—one of the things that
I did learn because—we are not really taught much about the
post Civil War Reconstruction era was about the generation of black
men in the immediate post Civil War who looked at things and said,
"I'm just not going to play this game," and migrated to
cities and hung out and hustled and outraged and scared white people,
some of whom called them "masterless men" and scandalized
respectable black society. This is exactly what's going on now.
It's almost as if the current cultural dominance of a descendant
class of urban black youth is the "masterless men's" revenge
on America. As Minister Farakhan put it when he was addressing that
convocation of rap moguls, "You have their children now."
But how little has changed in that respect is an interesting irony.
RB: We have come full circle, when we started
talking I observed that this book would be an excellent text to
use for US history. If you go back and look at our history texts,
none of this information was there. The black migrations, the zoot
suit wars, the race riots, the depravations of the post Civil War,
40 acres and a mule were there. Are they now?
AK: No, not really. In a lot of ways the purest
lens on American history is black history as in some ways a pure
lens on Czarist history would be to look at the history or experience
of Jews in Russia. Since black Americans have been here as long
as the Cabots and the Lodges and Randolphs and the Masons, you have
that whole epic sweep of American history that you can look at.
And, of course, the music business affords the opportunity to look
at the creation and rise of the youth market. One of the ways of
looking at this book is that since their manual labor became obsolete—black
America's popular culture has been its most fungible natural resource.
The last hundred years have really been about this battle over who
is going to control the exploitation rights. And now we live in
a time where of much what America exports is its popular culture.
And the popular culture of black youth is a disproportionate amount
of that. The global spread of rap music is phenomenal. I saw a book,
an academic tome, that looks at Italian rap, Polish rap, Algerian
rap, which is now driving the bourgeois French crazy because all
their kids are running around talking like Algerian project kids.
It's extraordinary for me to contemplate that the hip-hop era has
now lasted longer—than almost any other period that you can
identify in black popular music. The so-called golden age of gospel—a
really undiscovered treasure in American popular music—lasted
about twenty years. The music that is the centerpiece of this book
lasted about fifteen years. Hip-hop is now over twenty years old
and has driven almost every other form of music off to the side
and shows no signs of slowing down. What is also clear there isn't
any music made by white kids for white kids that white kids want
to buy.
RB: What about these boy groups?
AK: The market has been driven down to eight-year-olds,
the pre-teen market. Whenever such a vacuum has occurred as it did
right before the British invasion, black music has always filled
that void and apparently there's been a void for twenty years, because
my impression is what's happened to white youth music is that it's
now splintered into twenty different small factions.
RB: The trade magazine lists seem to reflect that
fracturing. I look at what people are buying and listening to and
I don't know much of it.
AK: The names you do recognize are mostly being
marketed to twelve-year-olds. Brittany Spears…
RB: The way I hear new music is on movie sound
tracks. Most of the music I listen to is music I have been listening
to for years.
AK: I don't know how I feel about that. It's somewhat
sad, in a way. I stopped doing radio because I couldn't find any
new music I wanted to play and doing oldies at certain point gets
old. What's interesting to me is that it seems like every other
black woman America is writing a novel and the others are reading
them. One of the things in Boogaloo is that white people
who run cultural commerce continually rediscover that there is this
huge market among black Americans for cultural commerce that is
about them whether in movies books or records.
RB: What's next for you? Is there a volume two?
AK: It may be that I have to come to terms with
the fact that what I am really interested in, is music. Well, that's
not true. We are living in a society that is leaving most of us
gasping for air. I was living in Brooklyn for eight years, and Brooklyn
is this extraordinary place. One out of every six Americans, at
one point, has lived in Brooklyn. It will satisfy all desire for
foreign travel because it is all right there. I got close to a couple
of Yemeni families. Most of the bodegas in Brooklyn are now run
by Arabs. The new style of immigration is called "sojourner
immigration" because folks don't come here with the idea of
becoming Americans. They come to make money, send as much as they
can back home and eventually go back. But that's not true for their
kids who can't help but feel American, however grudging official
America's feelings are about them. So there is this new, fascinating
to me, assimilation story going on. It also seems an interesting
time to look at what is happening to a couple of these Yemeni families,
at this particular point in American history.
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Posted:
October 20, 2003
