For this guest presentation, we have a great public scholar, author Mark Anthony Neal. Thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for having me. Before we jump into the topic of music and sound of which you've written a great deal about, because of it shares a lot with what we've been trying to do with the MOOC, I'd love for learners to kind of hear a little bit about your Left of Black series. So, can you tell us like what Left of Black is and how it came about? So, we've been shooting Left of Black for eight years now. It's a video podcast. It features black scholars activists. We're not black scholars and activists but folks who work within the fields of African-American studies and African diaspora studies, who would be scholars, some writers. We've had poets. We've had musicians. It's really a way to present in a short 20-minute, 25-minute platform to introduce folks to some of the work that's going on in African-American studies. Over the years, I mean, you've published several books, some of them on kind of black culture broadly, masculinity and so on but for the topics of our course, I thought we should go straight to what the music said. This fantastic book where you deal with like kind of the musical influence and the cultural influence of African and African diasporic communities worldwide. So, what would you say are kind of the most important, the biggest contributions of African and diasporic artists to the world of music, broadly speaking? Well, I think definitely in the African-American context, it's kind of the introduction of black spirituality to the mainstream. When you start to hear the innovations of Ray Charles in the 1950s, folks like Sam Cooke, when you see the arc of Aretha Franklin's career in the 1960s, where for a period of time, she is the most well-known black woman in the world legitimately, and what they were able to do was to mainstream black spiritual practices in the context of the music. So, folks were listening to what were traditional R&B with those, but they were also hearing these melodies they were taken directly from the black gospel experience. So, in a way, like that secularized version of what is effectively a spiritual traditions. It's absolutely right. It really is about the secularization of the blacks' real tradition, and I would argue that the black churches probably have been much more influential in the United States in the secular world than it has been the spiritual world And that makes some people immediately think of, of course, soul. That's probably the prime example but, of course, blues and even jazz have been part of that culture and all the way down to hip hop and rap. So, are there unusual examples that you can think of where we don't expect this spiritual connection to come out? I think blues is an interesting space to talk about because when we think about gospel music or spiritual music, we're actually thinking about genres and styles. But the lyrics are sometimes much more complex. So, you'll have hip hop records that are talking about spirituality. There's a song I love, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, They Reminisce Over You, and it's really a memorialization of a dead colleague. You don't think they hear that in hip hop, but it's also doing some very interesting spiritual labor in that context. I think it distorted the blues, particularly right after emancipation, black folks because of slavery had been denied all kinds of notions of sexual relations, how they interacted with each other, ideas of privacy and intimacy were largely lost to them. They begin to be able to explore that post-emancipation, and you start to hear it in what some folks would think of as the vulgarity of blues music. But these were folks who were working out the parameters of what their sexual lives could be in freedom. And you hear that in the music. So, when you read someone like Angela Davis in her book, Blues Legacies and she has all the lyrics of these early blues songs from the late 19th century up until the early 20th century and they're virtually all written by black women, and their stuff that you don't normally associate with women talking about sexuality. But again this was an era where they began to explore with some sort of freedom, the idea of who they were sexual beings. Right. And in a way, it's hard to think of any musical genre, globally speaking. Perhaps classical music, but I would say even there, that has not been influenced by the specific musical traditions that you spend your life studying. The key I think for black music is like you're thinking about a group of people who are in a particular society. Their access to traditional literacy is limited. They are not being schooled correctly even when they're in schools, and prior to the civil rights movement, some of the schools are not preparing them necessarily before literate lives in that sense. The music becomes part of the literacy, and what was so appealing to me about black music is that if you wanted to find out what was happening in the black community in any period of time, you could listen to the music and understand what was going on socially, culturally, even politically in some cases. Well, I think there's always been a direct correlation to when the music becomes political when it's connected to social movements. So, when you think about some of the folk songs and gospel songs have become really the rallying cries for the civil rights movement. "We Shall Overcome" in many ways, started as a labor anthem and then becomes part of the mainstream civil rights movement. When you start to see black artists in 1960s, folks like Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, his great song, A Change is Going to Come being one example of this, you start to hear the music become much more political because the folks in the street, if you will, were pushing for music that would be much more political. So, by the time we start to see folks like Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets, even Marvin Gaye who was raised as the Prince of Motown, gives up his career being this romantic crooner to record a political album that Berry Gordy, the head of Motown, and at the time, "This is going to destroy your career." But what it actually opened up was not only a new space for Marvin Gaye but a new space for social commentary in the music. And after that, what you get is Curtis Mayfield and Superfly, hip hop hits 15 years later. And then when you talk about groups like Public Enemy and KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, Eric B & Rakim, Poor Righteous Teachers. We could go on and on. Suddenly, when there's a crisis in the inner city particularly with young black folks, and R&B is no longer attending to that, soul is no longer attended to that, hip hop becomes the music that articulate with young folks are feeling, just the way soul music did that in the 1960s and blues did that for a generation even before then. And what's, to me, fascinating is that this kind of tradition has its manifestations even in the most mainstream versions of black culture like Beyonce and Formation at the Super Bowl, like the musical equivalent of kneeling at the anthem with Kaepernick. James Brown's most well-known political songs is a track called, Say it Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud and one of the funny jokes about the song said because he was on tour all the time, so he would record after they performed three or four shows. They go into the studio and record stuff. He had the idea for a song, and he wanted some young kids to sing the hook with him. And the only kids they could find were a bunch of white and Asian kids who happened to be in the neighborhood where he's recording. So, when you hear these kids voices singing loud I'm black and I'm proud, there are no black kids there. It's basically white and Asian students. I would love to see a film or video of that, but I guess it was before me. It would make a great YouTube intervention. Absolutely. But in a way, it does reflect this very complex identification where people who are not born of the diaspora identify with it. Absolutely. And want to call it their culture. Hip hop is created largely in the shadow of the 1965 Immigration Act. You can't have hip hop without that combination of Spanish-speaking immigrants coming from Spanish-speaking nations but also migration from Puerto Rico. So, you have folks from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic. You also have Afro Caribbean too who are coming from Jamaica and other nations, and they all land in the Bronx. With two or three generations of African-Americans who had migrated from the south, plus Afro Caribbean who had migrated earlier in the 20th century, and there's still working-class white folks there, white working-class Italian and Irish in these communities, and hip hop is born of this moment of all these folks trying to make space physically but also being able to communicate with each other with their different musical styles. So when you hear something like Latin soul music, which are basically Puerto Rican musicians just trying to earn a living in the Bronx in New York by Latinizing soul music, that stuff gets flipped and what we eventually know is hip hop. And one can totally imagine the stoops manifesting down. When you think about an earlier genre like doo-wop, where literally you have Black, Latino, Italian kids, some Spanish-speaking kids sitting on the stoop, trying to sound like some of the best doo-wop groups and just trying to sound like Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers. What would you say are sounds that are either unique or highly relevant for black culture like non-musical sounds? And do they have a relationship to musical production? When you think of the fact that very often folks were denied access to instruments, they clearly didn't have access to instruments they would have played in the native land. Things like handclaps become really significant to stomping of the feet. Handclaps and the stomping of the feet is a way to maintain rhythm. The feel hollers and the moans, stuff that we don't normally think about is musical, but they get utilized in a very musical ways in sound. Mos Def and Talib Kweli as Black Star, they have this song called Respiration. And when you listen to Respiration really closely, you'll hear a rhythm track, and the rhythm track is the clickety-clack that you would hear on a New York City subway. So, we get these kind of incidental noises that also become part. When we talked about doo-wop a few minutes ago, the echo in the spaces in between tenement buildings, the echoes in the hallways of tenement building, where they could hear those rich melodies and those harmonies, and they would echo up into the rafters. Those were all great examples of folks using sounds that weren't necessarily musical sounds both to articulate who they were in the world but also in terms of making the music. In my experience, it's even has to have to do with a projection of the human voice. When I go to any subway around the world, Mexico City, Berlin, Korea in Seoul, I miss the Caribbean nature of New York, where people speak louder. And I do completely associate with black culture. And you are hearing all these mixes of accents that's so uniquely New York. Yeah.
