By Mark Anthony Neal | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Thursday, February 21, 2013.
It was simply a
brief introduction to the career of Rod Temperton, the British-born songwriter,
who first came to prominence with the group Heatwave. Specifically I was
reminiscing about Heatwave’s “Always and Forever,” a classic Soul ode to
longstanding love and romance. Unfortunately my class of 60-plus millennials
were not quite as excited by the nostalgia that had begun to overtake me.
For my generation, “Always and Forever” was part of a ritual of romance, likely
the first song we ever slowed danced to—or dragged to as my parents might have
said. When I segued into Michael Jackson’s “Lady in My Life”—another
Temperton classic—it became clear to me that my students weren’t just
unfamiliar with the music, but had no idea what to do with the music, a point
that was made when I asked several of them to dance to the song. “What do
y’all slow dance to?” I asked; “we don’t” was the emphatic answer. When a few
students, offered that they “twerked”—me: “what the hell is that?”—I had to
resist the urge to get all sociological about the fact that we are raising a
generation of young folk for which sex has became a stand-in for
intimacy. And don’t get me wrong, I fully endorse sex—fully and between
consenting adults—but intimacy (and the pursuit for it) is one of those things
that have sustained Black folk for centuries here in the West.
The fact that
many young Blacks don’t slow dance, is as much about their relationship to the
music, as it is their relationship to their bodies. For many Black
Americans, music was the site in which intimacy could be realized, and as
Angela Davis points out in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,
there were political ramifications. Writing about Black life
immediately after emancipation, Davis notes “For the first time in the history
of the African presence in North America, masses of black women and men were in
a position to make autonomous decisions regarding the sexual partnerships they
entered. Sexuality thus was one of the most tangible domains in which
emancipation was acted upon and through which its meaning were expressed.” (4)
With the advent of the phonograph
and more access to the private consumption of music, the connection between
music and Black intimacy became more concrete. As Davis attest about the
Blues tradition that emerges in the 1920s, “the most obvious ways in which
blues lyrics deviated from that era’s established popular musical culture was
their provocative and pervasive—including homosexual—imagery.” (3). This
was the music of a generation of Black folk—two generations removed from
slavery and still suffering Jim Crow—for which the sensual and sexual use of
their bodies were acts of survival, sustenance, pleasure and even
resistance. Though raucous forms of Blues may have had a hearing in
publics spaces (where everyone was an adult and up for a goodtime), in
many cases this was music intended for consumption in the private spaces of
Black life, as was the case with Jelly Roll Morton’s 17-minute “Make Me a
Pallet,” which contains the classic line "Come here, you sweet bitch, give
me that pussy, let me get in your drawers/I'm gonna make you think you fuckin'
with Santa Claus."
Yet there was a public intimacy
that was also sought by Blacks, particularly in the dancehall. As
playwright Brent Jennings notes in his essay “Initiation of a Desire,” there
was a component of public intimacy that was directly correlated to notions of
racial uplift. Recalling his first “sexual” encounter in a segregated third
grade classroom, Jennings remembers a teacher whose “main desires for her third
grade students was that we become perfect gentleman and respectable ladies. She
felt that in order to accomplish this, we had to become ‘comfortable with each
other,’ so she made the boys and girls sit side by side, adjacent to one
another. We were seatmates.” (The Black Body, ed. Meri
Nana-Ama Danquah, 110).
In another classroom theater,
journalist Kenji Jasper recalls a time in 8th grade when he trusted
a “big butt and a smile,” sitting behind a classmate that he calls “Tosha
Jones” and being drawn to what he describes as “Two fudge colored cheeks with a
sheet of khaki stretched across, their mass squeezing through the chrome
reverse “U” in her chair back.” (The Black Body, 161) Jasper goes on to
describe what more than a few of us remember as “the feel up,” both entranced
by her ass, and perplexed by her lack of recognition of his groping,
until—three minutes later—she handed him a note that stated, “you have to stop
now. People are looking.” Taking her note into account, “Tosha’s” silence
could at once be read as her investment in comporting herself in a way that
“good girls” should—“people are looking”—as much as it might have been an
articulation of the pleasure she might have derived from Jasper’s touch.
Dismissing for a moment the
compulsory heterosexual socialization that was also taking place in these
stories and the easy ways that “feeling up” can cross the line into predatory
sexual behavior (as Jennings admits in his own classroom story), the close
proximity of pubescent bodies and sexual desires created the context for that
time-tested ritual: the school dance. For young Blacks school dances (and
cotillions) were a means of introduction to acceptable public forms of
affection and sexual desire, that also hung on notions of glamour,
sophistication, and, of course, respectability.
Yet in another public/private
iteration, there was also the house party, in which the private intimacy—the
kind that might be outlawed if you were a teen living in your parents’
house—literally morphed into the public intimacy of a living room or basement,
amongst a relative mass of folk, themselves pursuing all manner of desire and
intimacy. One might recall Luther Vandross singing about “Bad Boy” trying
to sneak out the house, to the house party, in a song—“Bad Boy/Having a
Party”—that was an extended riff on Sam Cooke’s own celebration of the house
party. While Vandross, sings, “roll back the rugs everybody, move all the
tables and chairs, we gonna have us a goodtime tonight,” there was always that
other moment, a later moment, and often the last moment, when the lights
got dimmed—the proverbial “blue light in the basement”—and intimacy was
crafted in tight spaces, where partners got to feel the contours of each
other’s waist, hips, shoulders…and to literally take in the smell of sexual
desire and intimacy.
And of course there’s the music,
preferably a side that pushed towards a 5-plus minute mark, which was a
challenge in the pre-digital era, when someone actually had to be in charge of
changing the record. The genius of Isaac Hayes was his understanding of
such dynamics, hence side-two of his classic Hot Buttered Soul (1969),
which only features “One Woman” (5:10) and his seminal remake of Jimmy Webb’s
“By the Time I Get to Phoenix” which logged in at 18-plus minutes—or more than enough
time for a little public foreplay.
And then there’s Marvin Gaye, whose
recordings Let’s Get it On (1973) and I Want You (1976) were both
recorded as extended suites, in which one could experience the full gamut of
sexual intimacy. Though Let’s Get It On is the more remembered of the
two recordings, in no small part to Gaye’s deliberate blurring of the sacred
and the sexual—“something like sanctified” as he sang—I Want You is a
masterpiece of unbridled sexual desire. The album begins with the invocation
of desire—“I want you, and I want you to want me too”—touring through tracks
such as “Feel All My Love Inside,” “Come Live with Me Angel,” and fittingly
closing with the vocal rendition of “After the Dance,” as the dance (with the
Ernie Barnes’ original “Sugar Shack” providing visuals) was the original site
of desire.
There’s no doubt that the young
folk will find their own grooves of intimacy—it just won’t look, sound and feel
like the intimacy of my youth. For now, I got a playlist loaded with Marvin,
Isaac, a little Al Green, Gloria Scott and Teena Marie’s “Portuguese Lover.”…
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books including the forthcoming Looking For Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, which will be published by New York University Press in April of 2013. He is professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University and the host of the Weekly Webcast Left of Black. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.