Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture

The Shadows of Texts: Will Black Music and Singers Sell Everything on Television?

KENNELL JACKSON The Shadows of Texts Will Black Music and Singers Sell Everything on Television? Turn the channel, there is Dinah Washington singing “Destination Moon” to sell Nike sneakers. —Valerie Gladstone, arts critic, 1998 She [Erykah Badu] actually asked about appearing in the ad because she does wear Levi’s. —Kojo Bentil, Kedar Entertainment, 1998 I really like it when I hear my songs in an elevator . . . I am a big fan of elevator versions of my songs. It just strikes me that it [my song] has penetrated the culture as far as it can get . . . when it is background music in an elevator, it has reached everybody. —Paul Simon, singer, interview on Weekend Edition, June 12, 2004 For them [Run-D.M.C.], it [a Coke ad] meant they had made it. —Russell Simmons, hip-hop mogul She was tiny and bubbly in the vintage manner of child stars. Though only six years old, she was being billed as “the Pepsi spokesperson.”1 She was white, but her costar was an African American woman. For over forty years, this African American woman had sustained a most impressive singing career, earning for herself the folk accolades of “the Queen of Soul” and “Soul Sister No. 1.” In 1986, she had had a cameo role in the ‹lm Blues Brothers, but she was not known as a ‹lm star. The tiny girl also had been in movies and charmed the hosts of late-night talk shows, but was not known widely for her singing. In crucial ways, these two stars were different. 88 Maybe because of their differences, their cultural and status mismatch, they—Hallie Eisenberg and Aretha Franklin—were brought together to make one of the most discussed television commercials of recent years. Shown in 1999, the one-minute commercial debuted on Academy Awards night in March. Placement in such a highly visible spot revealed the ad creators ’ ambitions. Using a full minute of air time also revealed the dollars poured into the ad’s making. The ad was warmly received, resulting in more air time. In the ad’s opening scene, Hallie is standing on a countertop in what appears to be a retro diner. Music is in full swing, and Hallie begins to dance. Suddenly, out comes a powerful voice, seemingly from her. The soaring voice moving through Hallie is lifting Pepsi’s new anthem “The Joy of Cola.” It can be easily recognized as Aretha’s voice, with its characteristic clarity and range. One cannot help wondering, though: it is Aretha’s voice, but where is she? To answer that question, the camera pulls back. Aretha is shown sitting in one of the diner’s booths. She has witnessed Hallie’s performance and she salutes her with “You go, girl.” Here, as in African American social life, is a forward-urging statement of woman-to-woman solidarity . After a summation by Pepsi, the commercial ends.2 This essay uses the Pepsi ad as its launching point. It draws also on an insight from the French cultural critic Roland Barthes—a critic skilled at bringing to the surface subtextual communication. Barthes remarks, “There are those who want a text (art, painting) without a shadow . . . but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile fact. The text needs its shadow.”3 Barthes urges us to look more carefully at what might be referred to as “background” for texts, in this case television commercials, to take the “shadow” more seriously, as more than an offstage performance. The main argument of this essay is that in the process of traf‹cking in black musical performances, television commercials have taken on an additional “fecundity,” a fertility of ideas and cultural styles. This fecundity is double-sided: it is captivating to viewers and is a powerful assist to promoting traf‹c in goods; at the same time, it is problematic because of an aggressive stance with regard to black cultural material. Television ads incorporating black musical performances are a challenging cultural presentation to analyze because they have an undeniable seductive capacity, but they also represent a manipulation of black cultural material in ways that can be troubling. It is the same problem presented by the art gallery as a marketplace, as a bazaar for what has been idealized as noble art. In a The Shadows of Texts 89 gallery, a capitalist subsystem is purveying and maneuvering art...