Sheet Music
Summer Reading
By Raoul Hernandez, Fri., June 6, 2003
Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power
by Gerald PosnerPantheon, 350 pp., $24.95
Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music
by Arthur KemptonPantheon, 496 pp., $27.50
The saga of Motown Records, like that of the entire African-American music continuum -- or "boogaloo" as Arthur Kempton streets it -- is a multivolume, Pulitzer Prize-winning prism through which U.S. apartheid, genocide, and segregation is flayed bare. Think 1,000 riveting pages of Taylor Branch's 1998 civil rights saga, Parting the Waters -- with a lot more music, money, and sex. Not that either Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power or Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music approach such historical significance. They just flirt with it.
Gerald Posner, a former Wall Street lawyer turned reporter, opens his ripping read by acknowledging the inspiration for breaking investigative ground on soil as fertile as the Mississippi Delta: Fredric Dannen. Author of one of the most compelling music industry probes ever, 1990's Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business, Dannen is no dummy; Motown is essentially the tale of America's first black mogul. Berry Gordy, the grandson of a Georgia slave and her plantation owner, not only manufactured "the Sound of Young America" like Fords off the assembly line in his Detroit home of the early Sixties, he made it colorblind. Unfortunately, Berry also treated the talent (Mary Wells, the Miracles, Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops, etc.) like sharecroppers. One doesn't make a half-billion dollars in 20 years without being a shark.
Gaining entrance to the basement archive of the Wayne County Courthouse in downtown Motown, Posner emerges with an armload of 2648 West Grand Blvd., better known as "Hitsville U.S.A." ("More than 20 of those creaky file cabinets are filled with just litigation between Gordy and his top songwriting team, the Holland brothers and Eddie Dozier.") It's a swift, lurid morality play, the narrative barreling along with golden sounds paving Berry's yellow brick road. Principal players like Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye are rendered in fast, loose sketches, until halfway through Motown, when the downturn begins. When Berry relocates the label to Hollywood in the late Sixties and later sells the company, then his publishing, in the Eighties, only a closet full of corpses (Florence Ballard, David Ruffin, James Jamerson) are left. That and a catalog of timeless boogaloo Posner excuses himself from harnessing as "a journalist who was not necessarily a music writer."
A black culturalist, Arthur Kempton isn't necessarily Charles Shaar Murray (Crosstown Traffic), but he writes his damnedest with Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music, an insightful, if a tad too erudite, three-part rumination on black popular music. Beginning with "Sight-Seers in Beulah: Original Soul, Thomas A. Dorsey, Sam Cooke, and the Classic Age of Boogaloo," Kempton knits the blues of Charley Patton ("the Snoop Doggy Dog of his day") with the gospel dynasties of Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson to produce Sam Cooke. The early voice of American civil rights, Cooke then gives rise to modern R&B, everyone from the forgotten "Duke of Earl," Gene Chandler, to rock & soul's humble prophet, Curtis Mayfield. The first section's intricate weave will spin heads like the jitterbug.
"First I Look at the Purse: Motown and Memphis" takes up the story through the macrocosm of Berry Gordy and Stax Records' Jim Stewart and Al Bell. Kempton knows a grand-scale epic when he truncates it, and one gets the sense that Fred Dannen should've suggested Motown to Boogaloo's mover first; Gordy's chapters are the most compelling in the book. By contrast, Stax gets somewhat short-shrifted, while the third and final portion of Kempton's essaying, "Negribusiness (Sharecropping in Wonderland): George Clinton and Hip-hop" tries to cover far too much ground in its contemporary summation. Suge Knight, Tupac Shakur, and Dr. Dre are all A-list ancestors of Ma Rainey, but like Russell Simmons, who ends Boogaloo, their final exits feel crammed. If anything, 400-plus pages for America's Popular Music reads like half of what was called for.
