A Sole Response

Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. By Brian Ward. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998. 576 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).

Reading Brian Ward's Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations reminded me of my craziest dance floor experience. About six or seven years ago, my wife and I were invited to a dance party at a colleague's house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Knowing the racial and generational landscape of academia, we always traveled with our own music. We wanted to dance but were not in the mood for three hours of the best of Motown, Bob Marley, Rolling Stones, or miscellaneous African pop. While we love this music too, it has been our experience at predominantly white academic parties that this is all they serve. So we did our usual thing, spiking the sonic punch with a ninety-minute TDK mix tape crammed full of all kinda funk, hip hop, house--Old School, New School, you name it: Jungle Brothers, Craig Mack, Funkadelic, Bootsy Collins, Monie Love, Chaka Khan and Rufus, Rick James, Prince, Queen Latifah, De La Soul, among others. Sure enough, as soon as I invaded the tape deck the party started jumping off and the ratio of dancers to kitchen dwellers practically evened out. Everything was cool until, about seven songs into the tape, we started rocking to "Ragtime" by rap group Brand Nubian. The funky sampled guitar riff is so dominant that most dancers could not hear or understand the lyrics--that is, until the very end of Derek X's chorus, which closes with "gettin' knowledge like Farrakhan." Well, you would have thought someone just got shot. Suddenly half the room stopped dancing and huddled together for an impromptu meeting in the middle of the floor. I'm assuming they discussed what they heard, what it meant, whether or not it was impolitic to continue dancing or to stop dancing. In any case, the dance floor thinned out considerably and within minutes our tape was replaced by some Francophone Afropop.

I was reminded of this story because reading Ward's book felt like I was overhearing a conversation about black music between liberal white people standing in the middle of a dance floor. I hear Ward as a simpatico in this circle of confused or outraged white folks, a sane voice resisting efforts to turn off the stereo or throw on something else less offensive. But it is nonetheless a conversation about what this music means to them, what they think those Brand Nubian Negroes were thinking when they made this music, and what they think we (as dancers/ "DJs"/ the black community) saw in this music.

In many ways, Ward has produced an incredible resource: a dense, encyclopedic history of early rock 'n' roll, R&B, and Soul, set in the context of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. While limited by a biracial framework (there is no mention of Chicano rock 'n' roll, the Asian American movement's serious engagement with black musics, the kind of American Orientalism that drew jazz and rock artists to the musics of East and South Asia in the 1960s, or even the fact that most of the "whites" he names in the industry were Jews, whose own history of marginalization goes completely unacknowledged) Ward sets out to complicate our common sense understanding of race and postwar popular music. He is less interested in what this music meant within black communities than what it represented in terms of race relations. Rejecting simple narratives of "white" theft of "black" music, on the one hand, and the more romantic interpretation of postwar popular music as a space of interracial harmony and oppositional politics, on the other, Ward paints a picture of cultural hybridity, interracial tensions and racial violence, intraracial exploitation, and a surprising level of political apathy. He sets out to prove that white musicians and performers were no...