“Stand Up and Be Counted”: Aretha, Sixties Soul, and Power

Curtis Price

Music

I was never a fan of Motown and sixties R&B; it came a decade before I came of age and I was never retroactively especially drawn to it. But that musical era still brings back memories as an early teenager growing up in a majority Black neighborhood in northwest Baltimore, of the one-room corner record store – dark and filled with black lights and psychedelic posters – at Gwynn Oak Junction blaring the latest soul from two outside speakers; a neighborhood where you could find (if you searched just a little), Afro-Cola in sky blue cans with an outline of Africa filled in with red, black and green bars (it tasted like Royal Crown). Aretha, of course, was the personification of the style and time: an unmistakable voice, powerful, and full of emotional resonance, able to shift effortlessly from exuberance to more reflective inflections.

But she was not alone. In nearly all of that eraโ€™s R&B music, there was an intensity that captured all the social hope of the times. Although political issues were not always a major theme , the music in form was political by definition. The vocals delivered an unmistakable message of โ€œnow I am freeโ€; joy itself became an act of defiance. The most overt political messages often came out in the secondary groups, whose work is brilliantly captured in the two volumes of โ€œStand Up and Be Counted,โ€ obscure R&B songs like the Voices of East Harlemโ€™s โ€œRight On, Be Free,โ€ Gary Byrdโ€™s โ€œAre You Really Ready for Black Power?โ€, and Esther Morrowโ€™s โ€œThings Ainโ€™t Rightโ€ that โ€“ and Iโ€™m just guessing here โ€“ were produced on small labels for the Black R&B market that, unlike Motown, had no reason to compromise lyrics in that elusive chase for white cross-over dollars. Even the Black Panther Party briefly had a house band.

But in the best 60s era R&B, it wasnโ€™t just the vocal techniques, but often moods evoked by lyrics and music together that most stood out. Otis Reddingโ€™s โ€œSitting On The Dock of the Bayโ€ and Brook Bentonโ€™s โ€œRainy Night in Georgia,โ€ for example, skillfully combined loss, regret, resilience and a need to โ€œkeep on keeping onโ€ despite devastating setbacks in complex songs that shifted emotional gears several times in little over three minutes. And yes, while itโ€™s true that the Supremes and Temptations mostly sang lyrically predictable love songs, singers like Dinah Washington captured more of a poetry laced with a blues sensibility in lyrics such as those to her minor hit, โ€œThis Bitter Earthโ€:

โ€œThis bitter earth/Well, what a fruit it bears/What good is love/Mmh, that no one shares?/And if my life is like the dust/Ooh, that hides the glow of a rose/What good am I?/Heaven only knows/Oh, this bitter earth/Yes, can it be so cold/Today you’re young/Too soon you’re old/But while a voice/Within me cries/I’m sure someone/May answer my call/And this bitter earth, ooh/May not, oh be so bitter after all.โ€

The contrast with todayโ€™s R&B couldnโ€™t be greater. Singers like Beyonce, Rhianna, and Chris Brown have limited vocal range; the lyrics rarely get beyond simple Boy/Girl/ I Miss/Love/ You So and the powerhouse belter of 60s R&B is banished to the musical netherworld. Yes, there are exceptions: the late Whitney Houston, Jennifer Hudson, and Ceelo Green stand out, but, except for Whitney, most artists using that style are second and third tier performers (in popularity at least) and use it in a conscious nod to the past rather than innovating the style further, with the outstanding exception of Ceelo Greenโ€™s Gnarls Barkley work with Danger Mouse in songs such as โ€œWhoโ€™s Gonna Save My Soulโ€ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOz0rxmeWD4). And more telling, even if their vocal prowess matches up with sixties R&B, with more recent singers, lyrics are mostly conventional and one-dimensional, rarely capturing the emotional heights, nuance and tone of the best of 60s R&B. Many more others, such as rapper/singer Nikki Minaj, โ€œsingโ€ as if they are breathing heavy; only the Auto-Tuning and studio trickery pumps-up and disguises their muffled, weak voices.

In R&B now, there is almost a self-stifling compared to the past, a distinct flattening of affect that impacts both music and lyrics. Some perceptive critics such as David Masciotra have traced the decline of soul to the waning influence of gospel (โ€œYou Buried The Queen of Soul But Soul Was Already Deadโ€, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/you-buried-the-queen-but-soul-was-already-dead/) Masciotra argues that passion is out in contemporary R&B as well as in Country too because passion conflicts with todayโ€™s โ€œcoolโ€ sensibility:
โ€œFor the emotional exchange of music to transpire, the singer must start with the element of passionโ€”something that a producer cannot inject into a song using a button on a computer and that a marketing specialist cannot achieve no matter how sophisticated the packaging and promotion.โ€

Itโ€™s telling that the word โ€œsoulโ€ is no longer used, replaced with the blander description โ€œRhythm and Blues.โ€ But I think the issue is larger than just an absence of passion and feeling; those are the symptoms and not the cause. I choose to believe thereโ€™s more of a profound change in substance at work. Popular music never operates in a vacuum; it instead turns out to be a โ€œcanary in the coalmineโ€ for larger shifts in social conditions. Popular music reflects and sometimes even shapes these conditions, soaring up when optimism, struggle, and change thrivesโ€“ or, as in today, crashing down when thereโ€™s little of any of these much in view.

3 thoughts on ““Stand Up and Be Counted”: Aretha, Sixties Soul, and Power”

  1. Your criticism of contemporary soul, unfortunately, exposes your lack of familiarity with the genre. How can you suggest that folks aren’t making equal, if not more powerful, musical contributions today? I’m talking Benjamin Clementine, Lizbet Sempa, Saul Williams, LA Salami, Fantastic Negrito… to name a few. Shit man, does it even get anymore soulful-political than Michael Kiwanuka’s ” Black man in a white world,” released in 2016? I don’t see optimism, struggle and change “crashing down” today…quite the opposite in fact.

    https://youtu.be/-TYlcVNI2AM

  2. I really enjoyed this Curtis. As a kid growing up in the 90s I totally consumed mainstream R&B and loved every boyband and girlband there was. In high school we listened to Faith Evans, Dru Hill, En Vogue, and who can forget Tony Braxton (I played this on repeat for many crushes back in the day). For me the 90s catapulted R&B into the mainstream and most songs were about love in some shape or form. I do think however that is changing a bit today. I don’t agree that Rihanna and Beyonce are the main representatives of today’s R&B. They are super pop. There is actually a really interesting set of new black artists (Daniel Cesar, SZA, Frank Ocean, Janelle Monae) that are vulnerable and in many instances political.

    Janelle Monae’s new album “Dirty Computer” is all about sexual liberation. Here is one of her videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaYvlVR_BEc

    Also these artists are really challenging the ‘cool’ sensibility. I think vulnerability was always a big aspect of R&B. In the 1990s Mario Winans was literally crying in a bathtub about love (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frvg9hfJYBo) . Now compare that to the hardcore rap of that era you had these different expressions of masculinity. Anyways, getting sidetracked. Today the feels are coming back in a major way.

    Another favorite artist of mine SZA (who grow up muslim in NJ you can imagine what thats like) shares a lot of the vulnerabilities of this generation (from love to not knowing where you are headed because of how much the markers of adulthood have changed). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azqv46WFxZE

  3. Thanks to everyone for their critical comments. The points I was making was that todayโ€™s R&B, compared to soul, is flat, with little affect. The lyrics lack the nuance and complexity of sixties soul and the power vocal of 60s soul linked to this lyrical nuance and complexity is out of style. I link the assertiveness and power of 60s soul to social conditions in times when there was a viable movement unlike today. Stubbornly, I still stand by these points.

    My idea for these observations came roundabout from real life. I live in an apartment complex where everyone plays their car stereo music loud and some sit on the balcony blasting boom-boxes. Not only that, younger people gather at the adjacent 24 hour self-service car wash and crank up their systems to the max, so loud in fact that the bass booms and the ground shakes like a T.Rex on the prowl. There is an โ€œold headโ€ that plays classic soul loud when he drives past and it was after three or four cars went past and his followed, the light bulb suddenly blazed bright: this new stuff is not like the old, having listened to a large amount of the former, willingly or unwillingly, over the past two years.
    Besides the dreary monotony of gangster hip-hop, the R&B songs that younger African-Americans play is in a style popularized by Trey Songz in โ€œHeart Attack,โ€ a half-spoken, half-pleading.

    Now, it could be argued that perhaps this is a regional preference confined to the South, in the same way the โ€œDirty Southโ€ style in hip-hop was regionally specific. Except it isnโ€™t. I heard the same preferences up north, with younger co-workers who insisted to me that Drake and Nikki Minaj were genuine singers.

    Yes, itโ€™s true there are many contemporary singers such as the ones mentioned who are trying to incorporate classic soul into R&B. But these are niche singers. Janelle Monae may be played in hipster and college circles, but she is not being played in housing projects or on street corners.

    Nor are the traits I describe confined to R&B. A perceptive article in the Guardian, โ€œWhy Stars Are Choosing Breathy Intensity Over Vocal Paintstrippingโ€ (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/11/whisperpop-why-stars-choosing-breathy-intensity-over-vocal-paint-stripping, โ€œ points out the same trend in the โ€œwhisperโ€ pop style. Contemporary Country and Western too lacks the fervor and lyrical range of classic Johnny Cash. I believe โ€“ and here is where my argument might get contentious โ€“ that this self-stifling is related to times such as today when collective agency is at low-ebb. An equal valid counter-argument could be made that this is a case of correlation and not cause. But what I donโ€™t believe can be disputed is that todayโ€™s R&B (along, true, with other genres) doesnโ€™t represents a narrowing of affect and a retreat from the type of released collective joy expressed in the best of 60s R&B. And I say this as someone not particularly drawn to old-style soul.

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