It's interesting listening to Stevie Wonder in retrospect. Today I happened to catch him in my iTunes back to back.
Living for the City
I can remember where I was the first time I heard the second part of Living for the City. I had no idea that it was the second part of the same song that just wasn't played on the radio. It was many years before I actually owned the LP of 'Songs in the Key of Life' or any Stevie Wonder records. This takes me to an interesting memory. I can remember going to the house of Whitman Mayo and listening to the entire album with all the adults.
Whitman Mayo is known and loved by the world as the character of Grady from Sanford & Son. He lived right off of Arbor Vitae in Inglewood. He ran a travel agency whose office was on Manchester just a block or so east of Crenshaw. I don't remember how it came to be that pops knew Mr Mayo, but there we were one Sunday afternoon listening to Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life knowing that he was the most brilliant, deeply prophetic talent on the planet. So what was it? Songs in the Key of Life or What's Goin' On? Either way it was black socially conscious music that was transforming American consciousness. Ahh the conscious brothers!
Anyway I simply didn't have any Stevie Wonder albums at home, not even this the greatest until I was making my own money and bought Hotter Than July. So when I heard the second part of Living for the City I was just shocked. It was in the dining room of my house on Wellington and the entire vignette with the poor country boy that gets sent to jail for running a five dollar drug errand hit me like a ton of bricks. And then the minor key harmonics of the chorus and the Stevie's gutteral voice was just too much. Overwhelming. Deep. Profound. That's what it is, man. A total gas!
I know what kind of consciousness is sustained by that sort of poetry. It was my sung science in the early 70s.
Gary Byrd
The first time I really thought about Gary Byrd or had any idea who he was came during the 80s. He put out a rap album with his group called the GBE for Gary Byrd Experience. It was deep, and all the DJs used to speak about him in hushed tones of reverence. Like he was at once very dignified but the sort of native intelligence that puts him at risk in the industry. He was one of those who could be said to be speaking truth to power - outside of the dance and the gospel, our only understanding of art.
It turns out that if you look at all of the political statements of Songs in the Key of Life, they come from the mind of Gary Byrd. While today they seem trite, pedantic and on the verge of scary, at the time they were the edge that made Songs more than just songs. Without Village Ghetto Land and Black Man, Songs in the Key of Life is not political at all it is singing about love from the heart.
The stentorian recitations of Black Man from the kids like me were part and parcel of being young, gifted and black. I think back on those days in the terms of 'afro-bets'. That was our homeschooled gruel of black radical youth, the kind of thrashing of necessity to rage oneself out of the reductions placed on us by racial expectations - not only of our societies but of our parents. There is probably a great lot that could be written about how it is that parents find in their children those shameful things they associate with their own black weakness. Shouting down those demons with afrobetic facts went a long way to assert bold strengths. Things forgotten like old Trivial Pursuit Negro Edition were part of the Byrd pedagogy. Channeled through Stevie's music, he had us all rapt.
It all sounds like foolishness to my old ears now. Music to love by, to march by, to think by. Hard to say if anyone can do all that in one album with didactic lyrics. Perhaps there are some national anthems that strike the balance. But upon reflection of a great album, I am struck on how it falls today. Songs in the Key of Life contains one of the songs I have always promised to stop whatever I'm doing to give my wife affection. If you would have been at my wedding, you would have seen and heard 'Knocks Me Off My Feet' in that way.
Excuse me, I'm playing it and I have to call.
OK I'm back. What was I saying? Nevermind.
Oh yeah. GBE. Here are trenchant lyrics from The Crown, Byrd's most popular work.
It's not Star Wars it's not Superman it's not the story of the Ku-Klux-Klan. The crown will appear in the G.B.E. but it's never seen on your T.V. It's in black and white in your gold mind a picture so old it defies time. Alex Haley drew it in his book it's what Kunta kept in his other foot. Ghana Songhay and old Mali they are the roots of your own family tree. Kingdom so vast and knowledge wiseThey removed cataracts from human eyes.
And yet today some refuse to see
and live in fear of their discovery.
Now in fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed to ocean - true.
But years before in Alkebu a ship set sail with a chocolate crew.
2000 years before Columbo came
the Olmecs paid tribute to their fame.
Stone heads with faces eight feet high
that the Hulk could not lifl to his thig
Though the facts historians avoid
first to arrive was the Africoid.
It may shock the House and Shockley too
One of those criticism that I deserve on occasion is that I tend to be fairly cynical towards some of the fighters on my 'home team' in the culture wars. It's not easy for me to determine how rough I should be on this sort of pop revisionism. On the one hand, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it. On the other hand, you couldn't possibly teach at the college level much but a kind of simple minded radicalism with its meat. Most importantly I think is how my own revisiting of the subject illustrates how far we've come and what kinds of basic stuff we need to redo. The verdict on Afrocentrism is in, and Barack Obama, for one has washed all that nonsense away. It's all about America now, for sure.
Was it that when Gary Byrd wrote The Crown that blackfolks had nothing else to be proud of? Was it really the KKK vs Ghana? Hmm.
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