I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B
Abstract
I Hear a Symphony opens new territory in the study of Motown’s legacy, arguing that the music of Motown was indelibly shaped by the ideals of Detroit’s postwar black middle class; that Motown’s creative personnel participated in an African-American tradition of dialogism in rhythm and blues while developing the famous “Motown Sound." Throughout the book, Flory focuses on the central importance of “crossover” to the Motown story; first as a key concept in the company’s efforts to reach across American commercial markets, then as a means to extend influence internationally, and finally as a way to expand the brand beyond strictly musical products. Flory’s work reveals the richness of the Motown sound, and equally rich and complex cultural influence Motown still exerts.
... Beside this, many things happened: urban blues forged its modern sound using electric guitars and harmonicas; cool jazz, played also by white people, launched a more commercial and clean style; gospel influenced both doo-wop, (a-cappella music performed by groups of black singers imitating crooners) and RnB, where black female singers played with a jazz or blues band. The 1960s saw an explosion of genres: countrypolitan, an electric and easy form of country music, became the most commercialized genre in the US; the first independent labels (in particular the Motown) turned doo-wop into well-arranged and hyper-produced soul music with a good commercial success [10]; ska, a form of dance music with a very typical offbeat, became popular outside of Jamaica; garage (and also surf) rock arose as the first forms of independent commercial rock music, sometimes aggressive and sometimes easy; in the UK, beat popularized a new style of hyper-produced rock music that had a very big commercial success; blues rock emerged as the mix of the two genres; teenypop was created in order to sell records to younger audiences; independent movements like beat generation and hippies helped the rise of folk rock and psychedelic rock respectively [6]; funk emerged from soul and jazz (while jazz turned into the extremely complex free jazz as a reaction against the commercial cool jazz, but remained underground). In the 1970s progressive rock turned psychedelia into a more complex form, independent radios contribute to its diffusion as well as the popularity of songwriters, an evolution of folk singers that proliferated from latin america (nueva canción) to western Europe. ...
Is it possible use algorithms to find trends in the history of popular music? And is it possible to predict the characteristics of future music genres? In order to answer these questions, we produced a hand-crafted dataset with the intent to put together features about style, psychology, sociology and typology, annotated by music genre and indexed by time and decade. We collected a list of popular genres by decade from Wikipedia and scored music genres based on Wikipedia descriptions. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, we find trends in the musical preferences and use time series forecasting to evaluate the prediction of future music genres.
... Beside this, many things happened: urban blues forged its modern sound using electric guitars and harmonicas; cool jazz, played also by white people, launched a more commercial and clean style; gospel influenced both doo-wop, (a-cappella music performed by groups of black singers imitating crooners) and RnB, where black female singers played with a jazz or blues band. The 1960s saw an explosion of genres: countrypolitan, an electric and easy form of country music, became the most commercialized genre in the US; the first independent labels (in particular the Motown) turned doo-wop into well-arranged and hyper-produced soul music with a good commercial success [10]; ska, a form of dance music with a very typical offbeat, became popular outside of Jamaica; garage (and also surf) rock arose as the first forms of independent commercial rock music, sometimes aggressive and sometimes easy; in the UK, beat popularized a new style of hyper-produced rock music that had a very big commercial success; blues rock emerged as the mix of the two genres; teenypop was created in order to sell records to younger audiences; independent movements like beat generation and hippies helped the rise of folk rock and psychedelic rock respectively [6]; funk emerged from soul and jazz (while jazz turned into the extremely complex free jazz as a reaction against the commercial cool jazz, but remained underground). In the 1970s progressive rock turned psychedelia into a more complex form, independent radios contribute to its diffusion as well as the popularity of songwriters, an evolution of folk singers that proliferated from latin america (nueva canción) to western Europe. ...
Is it possible use algorithms to find trends in the history of popular music? And is it possible to predict the characteristics of future music genres? In order to answer these questions, we produced a hand-crafted dataset with the intent to put together features about style, psychology, sociology and typology, annotated by music genre and indexed by time and decade. We collected a list of popular genres by decade from Wikipedia and scored music genres based on Wikipedia descriptions. Using statistical and machine learning techniques, we find trends in the musical preferences and use time series forecasting to evaluate the prediction of future music genres.
Writing about jazz often emphasizes urbanity and focuses on a geographically bounded scene. This can obscure what people do with jazz to affirm community across distances, in the context of Black suburbanization. Likewise, the construction of jazz as an art music oriented around a canonical past does not allow a full understanding of what musicians do with commercial culture to construct community in the present. In this article, I present the notion of sonic suburbanization to foreground the ways Black people exert agency through musicking, claiming suburban space and affirming community across urban and suburban lines. This is live performance that is “both/and”: Both suburban and urban; both community and commercial. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cleveland, this research focuses on the ways live smooth jazz performers invoke multiple musical histories while congregating heterogeneous Black identities across boundaries. To demonstrate the crossovers of live smooth jazz, I begin by outlining the idea of sonic suburbanization. I then note the proximity of Black music genres in a context of racial segregation. Despite suburbanization's role in dislocating Black geographic cohesion, live musical performance continues to affirm a crossover Black community through interposing an array of sensibilities. Finally, I point to the conceptual schemas of musicians in the scene who foreground continuity with jazz, pop, and gospel. Live smooth jazz performers take pride in rhetorical effectiveness and genre versatility as part of connecting to the audience. Although some scholars attend to smooth jazz outside “real jazz,” musicians in the scene view smooth jazz as real jazz.
This article briefly recounts recent work identifying the most common lyric formulas in early blues and then demonstrates the prevalence of these formulas in early country music, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. The study shows how the preference for certain formulas in prewar country music—like the preference for the same formulas in prewar blues—reflects the social instability of the time, and how the de-emphasis of these same formulas in rhythm and blues and rock and roll reflects the relative affluence of the early postwar period. This shift in textual content is the lyrical counterpart to the electrification, urbanization, and growing formal complexity that mark the transformation of prewar blues and country music into postwar rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
This essay demonstrates the oft-dismissed centrality of critical race thought to posthumanist studies by excavating the neglected writings of the New Yorker magazine’s earliest black staff writers. Within this early post–Civil Rights archive of “The Talk of the Town” columns and a Russian travelogue, this essay uncovers conditions of possibility for the emergence of racially anomalous strains of contemporary black narrative that have long discomfited canon-makers. Analyzing how the implicitly white persona of “The Talk of the Town” functioned as an avatar of the liberal humanist subject, I show how Andrea Lee, Charlayne Hunter, and Jamaica Kincaid undermined or appropriated this figure of Man. Their experiments with racial legibility in their unsigned columns would give rise to what I term black anaesthetics: narrative practices that disable the reader’s capacity to make meaning of race even as they disclose traces of racialized blackness. Working thus both in and out of touch with racial reality, black anaesthetic texts such as Lee’s Russian Journal (1981), Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” (1983), and Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) suspend processes of racialization vital to the production of Man’s human Others. In doing so, they invite us to rethink the descent of what has come to be called posthumanism.
Motown Records churned out hit singles with remarkable efficiency, thanks largely to a stable of skilled professional session musicians. However, exactly who played on their most iconic recordings remains a mystery because, as was standard within the music industry, no Motown release in the 1960s credited these musicians for their work. These practices have led to conflicting accounts, the most famous of which concerns bassists James Jamerson and Carol Kaye. To this day, Kaye alleges that she played on numerous classic Motown recordings but has been purposefully omitted from Motown history. Conversely, Jamerson—who died more than thirty years ago—continues to be vehemently defended by acolytes such as biographer Allan Slutsky, who see Kaye's claims as blasphemous. Drawing on previously unexamined sources, this article reconstructs Kaye's involvement with Motown and, in so doing, reevaluates the merits of the Kaye/Jamerson controversy. Building on the work of Andrew Flory, I explore the role of session musicians in Motown's creative process and argue that critics and fans have propagated a problematic discourse in which Jamerson has been valorized and Kaye has been dismissed. Ultimately, Kaye's story not only provides a useful corrective to the historical record, it also demonstrates the need for further research into session musicians’ contributions to popular music.
De entre todos los conflictos en los que ha tomado parte Estados Unidos durante el s. xx, la guerra de Vietnam ha sido la contienda que ha dejado una cicatriz más profunda en la sociedad del país. Anunciada como un conflicto en defensa de la democracia, los estadounidenses pronto se mostraron en desacuerdo con esta visión. Como reflejo de esta disconformidad, la sociedad se manifestó mediante diferentes vías tales como la literatura, el cine o la música. En esta última se aúnan las inquietudes de la generación beat, el movimiento hippie y aquellos que se oponían al conflicto a través de un género: la canción protesta.
Este artículo plantea el análisis de este género a través de una selección de cantautores y canciones como fuente acompañada de una exhaustiva documentación bibliográfica sobre la cuestión. Con ellas pretendemos demostrar cómo afectó el conflicto a la sociedad estadounidense durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970 y cómo aquel fue objeto de crítica en materias tales como la industria armamentística, el reclutamiento, el movimiento antibélico y las muertes ocasionadas, estableciendo a partir de este esquema un retrato del conflicto y sus consecuencias. Del mismo modo, indagamos en la evolución posterior de un género que, si bien ha existido, parece haber languidecido después de este periodo de hiperactividad.
This article explores the sometimes tricky question of tonality in pop and rock songs by positing three tonal scenarios: 1) songs with a fragile tonic, in which the tonic chord is present but its hierarchical status is weakened, either by relegating the tonic to a more unstable chord in first or second inversion or by positioning the tonic mid-phrase rather than at structural points of departure or arrival; 2) songs with an emergent tonic, in which the tonic chord is initially absent yet deliberately saved for a triumphant arrival later in the song, usually at the onset of the chorus; and 3) songs with an absent tonic, an extreme case in which the promised tonic chord never actually materializes. In each of these scenarios, the composer's toying with tonality and listeners' expectations may be considered hermeneutically as a means of enriching the song's overall message. Close analyses of songs with fragile, emergent, and absent tonics are offered, drawing representative examples from a wide range of styles and genres across the past fifty years of popular music, including 1960s Motown, 1970s soul, 1980s synthpop, 1990s alternative rock, and recent U.S. and U.K. #1 hits.
DISCUSSES THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT "SOUL." THE HISTORICALLY IMPERMEABLE BARRIERS TO NEGRO ADVANCEMENT HAVE BEEN SLIGHTLY LOWERED TO MAKE SUCCESS POSSIBLE. THIS CHANGE HAS CREATED THE NEED FOR A PHILOSOPHIC ALTERNATIVE TO THE TYPE OF SUCCESS DEFINED BY MAINSTREAM, WHITE IDEALS; "SOUL" PROVIDES A SATISFACTORY SELF-CONCEPT AND CULTURAL SOLIDARITY THROUGH APPRECIATION FOR "NEGRONESS." GHETTO MEDIA (RADIO, THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, AND STAGE SHOWS) CONTRIBUTE TO THE VOCABULARY OF "SOUL" WHILE THE ORIGINS AND REASONS FOR ITS CHARACTERISTICS CAN BE SEEN SYMBOLICALLY IN "SOUL" FOOD AND MUSIC: PROVISION OF A MODICUM OF HISTORICAL TRADITION, EXPRESSION OF A LACK OF CONTROL OVER THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT, AND UNSTABLE PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS. IT IS AN INTERNAL, CULTURAL CONCEPT RATHER THAN A MOVEMENT SUCH AS BLACK MILITANCY. HOWEVER, AS A CULTURAL FORCE, IT COULD BE HARNESSED TO CREATE ALLEGIANCE TO A BLACK NATIONALIST POLITICAL MOVEMENT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)