Affirmative Actions, Part 3

Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George

(Page 3 of 4)

At our starting point, black culture is in the mainstream to a degree. There are blacks in sitcoms and on local news. Several major cities have black mayors and desegregation is public policy in all fifty states. We are coming into a new era; Afros and dashikis can still be seen, but fades and baggy pants are on the rise.

American Mavericks, a festival of independent feature-length films, begins at an East Village theater in Manhattan. Among the young auteurs in the festival is Martin Brest with Hot Tomorrows, a film he writes and directs about the afterlife very different from the movie that will make his reputation a few years later, Beverly Hills Cop.

The one black film in the festival is an hour-long documentary called Streetcorner Stories, made by Yale graduate Warrington Hudlin, which focuses on a group of men who congregate on a New Haven, Connecticut, street corner mornings before work. Using the popular cinema veritè style with no narrator, Streetcorner Stories captures the rhythms and rituals of black working-class life by the careful accumulation of detail. Hudlin opens with a quote from Ralph Ellison about the "tragic comic" quality of the blues, which Hudlin, a product of the tough Midwestern working class of East St. Louis, uses as a template for this gritty film.

Hudlin, who lives in Harlem, is part of a community of black independent filmmakers on both coasts who've been toiling throughout the '70s, mostly ignored by Hollywood and mainstream (white and black) media. Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's BaadAsssss Song in 1971 was the last independent black film to get a significant commercial release and a large audience. Independent black filmmakers like Hudlin fund their films via grants from art organizations or family, or they make them at film schools they attend or teach at. Seen mostly at festivals or museums, the modest films rarely have stars, usually have very strong political or social themes, and never have an advertising budget, which is why popular black newspapers and magazines like Ebony give them token coverage. One of the recurring topics in the panel discussions of the Mavericks festival is how non-Hollywood black cinema can gain more exposure.

Jamaa Fanaka's movie Penitentiary is a whacked-out jailhouse version of Rocky, and sex symbol Leon Issac Kennedy is quite engaging as Too Sweet, the reluctant hero. Fanaka is a product of the serious Los Angeles school of black indie filmmaking but has his own warped world view. As a student at UCLA he became notorious for a short about a brother whose penis was so long it could be used to strangle his enemies. Penitentiary is a product of the same surreal mind-set and becomes a B-movie hit that spawns two sequels. Though unheralded by critics, Fanaka and Kennedy create the first black movie franchise of the decade.

The Black Scholar, an important journal of black intellectual thought, dedicates the May/June issue to "The Black Sexism Debate." The issue is inspired by an angry review in the March/April issue by Robert Staples of Michelle Wallace's book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Staples's essay was called "The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists."

Wallace's book, published early in 1979, had been hailed by white feminists as a landmark look at male chauvinism in the black nationalist movement, placing black women under a double burden of white racism and black machismo. Ms. Magazine had featured the young author on its cover. Black men, still smarting from their damning portrayal in Ntozake Shange's Broadway hit, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, a few years before, viciously attacked Wallace. The Village Voice's Stanley Crouch was typical, writing that whites in the media were "promoting a gaggle of black female writers who pay lip service to the woman's movement while supplying us with new stereotypes of black men and women." This issue of The Black Scholar boasts an impressive list of contributors: Ron Karenga, Askia Tourè, Harry Edwards, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Robert Staples, Ntozake Shange, Alvin Poussaint, Kalamu ya Salaam, Julianne Malveaux, and others.

Reflecting on this debate five years later in The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life, Calvin Hernton observed, "it was clear that the men were the ones who were angry....The men claimed that the women had fallen prey to white feminist propaganda. They said that black women, like white women, had been duped into turning against their men. The most truculent assertion was that the writings of black women were ëdivisive' to the cohesion of the black community."

The cries of "Disco sucks!" ring out across the land. Just a year after the massive pop cultural impact of the movie and soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, a severe backlash against this musical-cultural movement is under way. Rock fans have always hated disco's self-conscious attempt at sophistication and faddish touch dancing. Others find its blending of the black, Latino, and gay club world frightening, upsetting, even dangerous.

At the dawn of the new decade, "disco" is still muttered by many as if a curse word, but the dance music scene it catalyzes will thrive and splinter into several dance genres driven by the DJs who would, as tastemakers and music makers, turn using turntables into a creative act.

New Jersey independent label Sugarhill Records releases Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang, the first commercially successful expression of the rapping style that's been popular in New York area parks and clubs for several years. Though it will evolve and, eventually, revolutionize world music, Rapper's Delight is at this point essentially just another approach to dance music. The groove the three performers talk over in rhyme a.k.a. rap is culled from one of the last great disco anthems, Chic's "Good Times."

Closer to the disco tradition is the scene at the West Village's Paradise Garage. Led by the visionary black gay DJ Larry Levan, the Garage becomes the most devout temple in a city that is the dance music mecca. Voted the best club with the best sound system in '79 and '80 at the Billboard Disco Convention, the Garage attracts a rabid, multisexual, multiracial throng every weekend. Because of its prominence in dance culture and the varied taste of Levan, the Paradise Garage is the spawning ground for a wide variety of dance music styles.

Halfway across the country, Frankie Knuckles, a black gay DJ from New York and intimate of Levan, spins at a club called the Warehouse in Chicago, where a huge crowd gathers on the weekends at a three-story factory on the city's west side. At the Warehouse dancing is known as "jacking" and the music, because of the club's name, is dubbed "house." Initially, the music played at the Warehouse is not very different from what dancers at New York's Paradise Garage might hear Philly International dance hits, Euro-disco, and funk. But as the Chicago scene expands, drawing in more straights and musicians, "house" takes on a distinctive identity.

Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, produced by the former jazz and movie arranger Quincy Jones, sells several million copies, becoming the biggest-selling album by a male vocalist ever, establishing the former child star as an adult artist. Jackson, at the time of this album's release, is still remembered by most of America as the cute lead singer of Motown's bubblegum group, the Jackson 5. Michael and his four older brothers enjoyed a string of number-one hits at the beginning of the '70s ("ABC," "The Love You Save," "I Want You Back," "I'll Be There"), the last gasp of the production line that made Motown "the sound of young America."

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Nelson George is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, the Village Voice, Essence, and many other national magazines, as well as writing and producing television programs and feature films.