This week, we talk about the music of Motown,
Stax and James Brown in the context of the 1960s.
Essentially, a kind of a history of black pop in the middle of the decade.
There a few things though before we actually get into the consideration of
Motown, Stax & James Brown that I want to talk to you about just so that we
can identify some of the important issues that go into talking about this music.
One of the first things, and maybe important things for us to discuss for
a minute, is to talk about the issue of race.
And how it plays into a lot of what we're talking about here.
There's probably no issue, in American culture at least,
that is more sensitive in a lot of kind of ways, than discussions of race.
And so we have to be careful the kinds of things that we say that we don't give
the wrong impression or send the wrong kinds of signals,
especially a guy like me, obviously, a white guy talking about black music.
There might be some who would say somebody like me could not really
totally understand the black experience, and
then maybe not really totally understand the music for what it's trying to say.
Well that may or may not be true, and people can have their own views on it.
But fortunately for us, we don't really have to worry so
much about that because what we are really talking about is the history of
black pop as it's seen through the lens of rock and roll.
And it's probably fair to say that rock and roll is a style of music primarily
directed at, at least initially at, white teens and primarily at a white audience.
I mean if one of the failures of rock n' roll may be that
by the time we get into the 70s, and we'll talk about this in part two of the class,
rock n' roll has become very segregated from black pop and
it's like black pop and rock n' roll exist in two very different worlds.
So anyway, one of the things that we'll do this week,
is talk about black pop in the 60s.
But I make the admission or say right
up from that we're talking about black pop as it's viewed from the history of rock.
Now I have maintained for a long time, and I hope one of my scholarly friends or
professors will take me up on this that what we really need
is a textbook that deals with the history of black pop in its own context.
Not the way that people like Motown and Stax and
James Brown fit into the story we're telling about the history of rock, but
one in which, so they're sort of on the side of the stories or of coming in
where they seem to be interesting to us from a perspective centered on rock.
But rather, a perspective that deals with black pop as being the central thing and
maybe thinks of rock as peripheral, or jazz as peripheral,
or country western as peripheral.
But it really sort of takes black pop as the central thing.
That would be a fantastic thing and
probably, dealing with the 60s, a book like that might deal with this differently
than I'm going to do in this week's set of lectures.
When we talk about racial issues, being involved in this music and
our discussions of it, we've already seen
how this plays out in our discussion of music in the 1950s and before.
The idea that there was a kind of a chart segregation, a kind of