Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic

4. “People Get Ready!”: Music, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Black Arts Movement

4 “People Get Ready!” MusiC, revoluTionary naTionalisM, and The BlaCk arTs MoveMenT a liberated aesthetic African American Musical Production, Politics, and the Black Arts Movement “Theme music . . . every hero needs to have some,” says the hero of Keenan Ivory Wayans’s underappreciated spoof of Blaxploitation films, I’m Gonna Get You Sucka (1988). For the African American heroes of the struggle for social justice, this was undoubtedly true. Historically, African American culture has regarded musical genres as arbiters of heroic proportions for Black styles, behaviors, and mores. African American music in turn has also repeatedly thematized heroism, tying it to collective action for social change to the extent that the struggle for social change has been reflected in every genre of every period of African American music. In the Black Power era, politically inspired aesthetic innovation would cause John Coltrane to record the elegiac “Alabama” as Nina Simone lamented “Mississippi Goddamn!” in a song she proclaimed to be “a show tune whose show has not yet been written” (Best of Nina Simone). The self-consciously political innovations of avant-garde jazz, including pieces like Albert Ayler’s “The Truth Is Marching In,” Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz,” Max Roach’s “Garvey’s Ghost,” Archie Shepp’s “Attica Blues,” and Pharoah Sanders’s “Red, Black and Green,” would help to recreate avant-garde jazz as “the artistic signal of the imminent maturation and self-assertion of the black man in an oppressive American society,” as A. B. Spellman would proclaim in Black Fire! (160). “PEOPLE GET READY!” 125 Politically inspired aesthetic innovations were not only occurring in the established genres of gospel, blues, and jazz, however. The evolving popular genres of soul, funk, and rhythm and blues synthesized and commodified the older African American musical forms in a manner that posed a significant challenge to every level of African American musical production in the United States, not only in production and consumption, but also in terms of formal and stylistic innovation. The experimentation across genres, blending across categories, and the creation of new categories that occurred during the Black Arts Movement resulted in a musical era that Rickey Vincent has rightfully characterized as “a celebration of the entire spectrum of the black music tradition” (32). This experimentation across genres and categories created a liberated aesthetic that inculcated a reverence for past struggles even while it demanded and created new expressive idioms. According to Vincent, the category-defying nature of the era “was not appreciated by the music industry,” since the industry had “made a killing by separating black acts into Motown style soul, pop-jazz, and token rock or pop acts” (24). The very innovations in style and form that the industry resented were enabled by changes in cultural production that were creating the opportunity for African American musicians to have unprecedented creative freedom and control in the creation of popular music. Artists such as Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Ray Charles, and Sam Cooke were able to pioneer innovative new approaches to the production of traditional African American genres and sounds largely because they did so at labels and studios that they created and owned. Blues People toward an African American Music Criticism In the same way that musicians were attempting to lay claim to the economic capital of African American music production, an intense battle for the symbolic capital of African American music began to emerge within critical and analytic circles. In 1963 LeRoi Jones published the brilliantly polemical Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed from It to contest the status quo of Black music criticism. In “Jazz and the White Critic,” an essay originally published in the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1963, Jones had declared his methodological challenge to established music criticism: This is not a plea for narrow sociological analysis of jazz, but rather that this music cannot be completely understood (in critical terms) without some at- 126 sPectAcUlAR BlAckness tention to the attitudes that produced it. It is the philosophy of Negro music that is most important, and this philosophy is only partially the result of the sociological disposition of Negroes in America. The blues and jazz aesthetic, to be fully understood, must be seen in as nearly its complete human context as possible. People made bebop. The question the critic must ask is: Why? But it is just this why of Negro music that has been...