Making The Best Of A Bad Situation
The only black music it's hip for a white boy or girl to like these days is reggae. Disco is for dead legs and anyway doesn't have a colour—just an aura of steely gray—and soul music has become confined to the slicker chains of supper clubs. All the great names of soul's and Motown's past still come here—the Supremes and Temptations, the Stylistics and Chi-Lites, Barry White and Tina Turner.
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LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Making The Best Of A Bad Situation
by
Simon Frith
The only black music it's hip for a white boy or girl to like these days is reggae. Disco is for dead legs and anyway doesn't have a colour—just an aura of steely gray—and soul music has become confined to the slicker chains of supper clubs. All the great names of soul's and Motown's past still come here—the Supremes and Temptations, the Stylistics and Chi-Lites, Barry White and Tina Turner. They arrive with their identikit suits and steps and silks and slot into their identikit cabaret routines: old hit, kick one, old hit, kick two, old hit, whirl about, old hit, bow and off. And the applause is warm and polite from the spruce audiences of young parents, celebrating a rare child-free might out, remembering the heady days of courtship until music and scampi and Irish coffee blur into the rich atmosphere of a bit of class entertainment.
These aren't rock fans (though they once were) and there's probably a bigger gap between rock and black music now than there's ever been. It s iust the same with you lot in the States. Rock as recorded in CREEM, or Rolling Stone or Hit Parader, is music for white folk now just like it was in 1958 and 1968. There are token exceptions, of course—Stevie Wonder, the Funkadelic mob (though even the latter mean nothing to British rock audiences)—but, by and large, blacks don't share rock's culture and rockers don't share blacks' culture and all those notions of breakthrough back in the days of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin and B.B. King at the Fillmore seem sadly dated.
Despite all this, the best concert in Britain this month was Millie Jackson's in Birmingham. The first soul show I've been to for ages, it was wonderful and weird. Wonderful because soul shows still have the old fashioned professional virtues of starting on time and flawless backing bands and pace and shameless crowd control; wonderful because Millie Jackson is a very fine singer and a very funny talker and, on her first trip to Britain, did all her hits even going back to an ancient dancing classic, "My Man A Sweet Man," which she had totally forgotten; but in Britain soul fans never forget.
What was weird was the gap between what Millie Jackson thought of the audience and what it actually was. Millie treated us like a bunch of stiff upper lips, strangled vowels and clipped consonants, quailing before such an unBritish outfront sexual woman. I'm like that, sure enough, but round about me the people were as black as Millie—West Indians, dressed up and giving her back as good as they got and responding with a big chuckle to her constant appeals to "you cold British."
This was the black British culture that punky reggae partyers choose to ignore—comfortable, confident, disdainful of rasta and rudies and all the other marks of the Jamaican poor. These Birmingham dudes were precisely the subjects of Millie Jackson's sagas of bad marriages and badder mistresses, of adult hassles and glee. Cold British huh! Not the kind of people punks like to associate with.
The punk/reggae relationship is like the old hippie/blues one—a thing of purism and shiny-eyed passion. What matters is roots—poverty and locks and politics. All very noble but decidedly distant: punk discos concentrate on heavy dub; Johnny Rotten's favourite record is by the eccentric Doctor Alimentado; even Althea and Donna's peppy "Up Town Top Ranking," which made its way to the top of the hit parade, is an obscure slice of Kingston patois. The more Jamaican the better and, meanwhile, black British pop culture, excellent bands like Real Thing and singers like Billy Ocean, get the snub. Too showbiz, my dear!
The people who've suffered most from such snobbery are Hot Chocolate/ who've been Britain's premier pop band for years and years and years. They're black and white, actually, but their mastermind is writer and singer Erroll Brown, who shaves his head like a wrestler and manages to make the most banal love lyrics burn with a sensuality that isn't common on Top Of The Pops. But he's still too respectable to be a punk hero, still too successful and straight and unrebellious.
And the final irony of all this is that for the teenage generation of black British, who've never set foot in Jamaica and for whom rastafarianism is as exotic a cult as it is for me, Erroll Brown isn't much of a hero either—not angry enough, not street-wise, not streetproud. For these kids, the punk stance makes better sense and Kingston music hits more chords. There's now a cluster of young reggae bands—Steel Pulse, Merger, Black Slatfe—who sing a British social realism harsher than white folk, who despise superstar Bob Marley like their punk brothers and sisters despise Rod Stewart, and who are a hell of a lot easier to dance to than Clash. Maybe, if punk ever does make it in the States, it'll be via this route—as a form of rebel soul music.
