New this month is a paperback edition of Paul Gilroy’s W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures. Entitled Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, the lectures and book present Gilroy’s call for a revitalization of Black Atlantic studies. He uses a discussion of the fading political voice of African American music, once represented by such outspoken talents as Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Curtis Mayfield, as an entrée to a wider examination of the state of black intellectualism in America. Gilroy suggests that black thinkers should open a new dialogue to address the problems arising from an unsustainable consumer culture in which African American cultural output now circulates as generic Americana.
Gilroy, a DJ and music journalist on top of being an academic, uses music to trace a shift in Black Atlantic culture from group consciousness to individualism. From that analysis, he provides a roadmap to the shifting terrain of identity politics in the “Age of Obama,” critiquing the urban chic championed by Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and the commodification of black politicians and statespersons such as Condi Rice as “diplomatic assets.”
The musicians Gilroy highlights from the 1960s and ’70s appealed to him as a young man in the UK by offering “the traveling truths of a people who were now even darker than an Ellisonian shade of blue.” For Gilroy, the music of that era endures:
Extraordinary things can still be heard in the enduring music of that uniquely soulful era. The live recordings made by Aretha, Curtis Mayfield, and Donny Hathaway have proved particularly durable. As they established new aesthetic criteria for African American popular music, they seemed to invite even their most distant listeners into a collective that felt intimate in spite of its attenuated, outernational character. Eager crowds had been dynamic collaborators in those epoch-making performances. Perhaps that surprising possibility should be recalled, now that the art of live recording has shrunk to fit the hyper-real, pseudo-classical niche in which we are told authentic jazz performances still dwell.
Curtis Mayfield’s concert recordings captured the kernel of this magic. After his shamanic January 1972 shows at the Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, an imaginary line linking him to James Brown (then becoming known as the Godfather) constituted one axis of my own nascent, “uk blak” mindset. The contemporary contrast between Kanye West’s ironic appetite for branded finery and 50 Cent’s scarred, muscular, Republican frame prompts us to ask: Where can Mayfield’s dignity and bespectacled seriousness have gone? Not, surely, into the global business enterprise that has been built up so skillfully by brand Jay-Z?
Curtis’ example worked its wonders in other places too. In Jamaica, Bunny Wailer was one of many singers who copied his falsetto phrasing; and, as we have seen, Bob Marley was inspired by his political courage and imagination. Curtis had bravely raised and reworked the issue of black America’s roots long before Alex Haley took that limelight. If the Wailing Wailers built their early work on the templates provided by old Impressions tunes like “People Get Ready” and “Minstrel and Queen,” they also appropriated Curtis’ timeliness and his clear-sighted orientation towards peace and war, as well as the disabling features of contemporary capitalism that he would struggle to name on his later, solo records like “Future Shock,” “Back to the World,” and “There’s No Place Like America Today.”
The title for Darker than Blue actually comes from a Curtis Mayfield song called “We the People Who Are Darker than Blue,” a phrasing that of course echoes the opening of the U.S. Constitution. As Gilroy argues was the case with much music of the era, the song calls for a collective spirit among people of color. It opens with a question:
We people who are darker than blue / Are we gonna stand around this town / And let what others say come true?
The song was later covered by the Jamaican singer Lloyd Charmers, in a haunting performance that demonstrates Mayfield’s appeal across the Black Atlantic, as noted above by Gilroy. Have a listen:
