What a fantastic book this is:
Don’t get hung up on the title, it’s a bit of a bomb-throw. The tone of the book is largely genial and reflects the subtitle: An alternative history of American popular music. The breadth of research puts every musical era from 1900-1970 in a fresh light. It’s dense and demands to be read with an open music app at hand. Every page is full of weird rabbit holes like this:
This is told in the context of exploring the 1920s and how the residue that remains in music writing is such a small trace of the actual musical lives people lived in the decade.
In particular one of his many theses is that there exists a somewhat forgotten dichotomy between “hot” and “sweet” jazz (continuing into all types of music.) “Hot” music displays virtuoso performances, tricky composition and oddball rhythms. It rewards repeat listening and obsession and is not particularly friendly to dance to. “Sweet” is rhythmic, hummable, danceable often simpler and smoothed over: Everything that the future music writers sneer at and try to pretend doesn’t exist. Thus the most popular and palatable musical artists are often left out of the histories.
History must be taken back from the writers.
When we think of 1920s music our minds probably conjure up “hot” solo-heavy jazz that has been preserved in what’s now called “trad”. (Think Woody Allen clarinet soundtracks.) Wald spends many pages rediscovering the “sweet” titans Paul Whiteman and Guy Lombardo, big band leaders who created palatable tunes that “swung,” sold and brought couples of all races to the dance floor. But all the music critics and historians can’t bear to even acknowledge them.
“Jazz historians remain angry that [Whiteman] was dubbed the ‘king of jazz’ and tend to mention him only in passing, as a barrier that the true jazz artists had to surmount.”
_How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll_ by Elijah Wald
We don’t really call music “hot or sweet” any more but if you’ve spent time in a record store or college dorm in the last 50 years you know what “hot,” critic-friendly music is. Look at this list of “Best Albums of 1990” from “Paste Magazine” that I found with a random search. The Breeders, Sonic Youth, A Tribe Called Quest, The Replacements. We all get it. These are all very fine musicians and albums and defensible choices. (Except for putting The Breeders’ Pod above The Pixies’ Bossanova, come on.) They are a very specific kind of dense, bold, raw, critic-friendly music. Maybe that is what has truly stood the test of time from 1990.
But let me give you a memory of my own from the fall of 1990. I arrived early to cover a high school football game for the school paper. In addition to team warmups the dance squad was practicing their routine on an unused corner of the field. The method of amplification was a boombox dragged up to the PA announcers booth where someone had to hold down the mic key while the tape played. The slightly distorted song echoing back across the empty bleachers was “Everybody, Everybody” by Black Box. (US Billboard Hot 100 chart debut: August 8, 1990.)
I had already heard the song on the syndicated radio show John Garabedian’s Open House Party. In my memory the show ran without commercials when I could find it on my walkman late at night when I was supposedly sleeping. Its playlist was always bigger and a few weeks ahead of regular FM radio.
Looking back that period around 1989-91 saw an explosion of “sweet” sanded-off danceclub house unlike other pop on the radio at the time. It was unapologetic in its use of cheesy synth, pop samples, catchy rap, high bpm, earworm boop-boop-beep melodies, whatever it took to make a great song.
Let me throw a few more out here. Pump Up the Jam by Techonotronic. (US Billboard Hot 100 chart debut: October 14, 1989)
3 AM Eternal by The KLF, (US Billboard Hot 100 chart debut June 22, 1991):
(Incidentally all three videos use ‘fake’ lip-synching singers. The actual vocalist on the Black Box songs was Martha Wash, who sang “It’s Raining Men.” She had to sue for her credits on this and, amazingly, also for her uncredited vocals on “Everybody Dance Now.”)
Part of what made them so appealing for kids and slippery for big picture writers is their “one hit wonder” status. (Actually many of these DJ groups had a few hits clustered together in a short span of time out of nowhere.) There was none of the feeling of inevitable studio promotion greeting a release from a major “name.” Those endless promo hours echo back years later as writers “reappraise” major stars that were already covered to death in their primes and don’t need another word written about them.
This KLF book by John Higgs is an exception. It’s a deeply rewarding but insane book:
I’m not sure even the author believes it all. For our purposes the upshot is that the duo behind the KLF spent years in the trenches of “hot” music (Liverpool punk, Negativland-esque sonic theft rerecordings, 9 hour experimental theater collaborations) before a deal with the devil (or perhaps the goddess Eris) produced the ultimate “sweet” single: radio-friendly sample-laden dance-house-rap that topped charts worldwide and made them a fortune. Shocked and dumbfounded, they stopped making music and burned one million pounds cash in an abandoned boathouse on the Isle of Jura. (And later pulled digital rights so that the song was literally lost for years.)
The K Foundation, as Drummond and Cauty called themselves when they stopped being the KLF, burnt the money in August 1994. The period of the early to mid-90s is frequently overlooked in our cultural histories, yet it was far more potent and strange than it is usually given credit for.
The KLF by John Higgs
As one who graduated high school in 1994 (and who owned the cassette single of “3 AM Eternal” in 1991) I salute Mr. Higgs for correctly ascertaining the era of maximum strangeness and potency.
How Disco saved interracial music
Back to How the Beatles… This is another fascinating tidbit:
The pop music world had been becoming less segregated with every passing year, and by 1964 Billboard stopped publishing separate pop and R&B charts, apparently deeming the division both politically and musically untenable. […] In January 1965, recognizing that the British Invasion and folk-rock trends had reopened the gap between white and black styles, Billboard had reinstituted its R&B chart…
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll by Elijah Wald
For one brief second in 1964 the black and white divide in popular music dissolved. But of course it came back stronger than ever and most of rock and pop became coded as either black-created or white-created. The exception as the 1970s wore on was disco, which as the author notes pretty much everyone in his generation was reluctantly if not dancing, at least nodding along to:
Wald’s narrative history ends in the 70s but picking up my 1990s memories it’s clear that the music we are talking about here is a reborn Disco. The 80s underground “house” and “techno” genres purified and reinvigorated the sound when Disco was cast into the pop wilderness in the early 80s. And Disco as noted was always an interracial creation. The most famous Disco partnership not mentioned above is the white Italian super-producer Giorgio Moroder with Black American Donna Summer.
Let’s take a look at the artists behind the songs on my idealized late-80s safe-house list:
Black Box – white Italian DJ supergroup with soulful vocals from Black American singer (and Disco veteran) Martha Wash.
Technotronic – white Belgian DJ pair with Black African rapper Ya Kid K.
The KLF – white Englishmen DJ pair with vocals from a variety of Black Americans including P. P. Arnold and Ricardo “Da Force”.
C&C Music Factory – interracial New York DJ pair with vocals from Martha Wash again and Black American rapper Freedom Williams.
Snap – white German DJ pair with vocals from multiple Black American women including samples from Disco artist Jocelyn Brown and rap from American Turbo B.
It goes on! “What is Love” by Haddaway is a German DJ pair and a Black Trinidadian soul singer… “The Rhythm of the Night” by Corona is white DJs/Black singer. “You don’t know me” by Armand van Helden with Duane Harden was a classic of the genre at the end of the decade. The Euro-DJ boop-boop-beep studio genius with the Black American soul riff on top is a template that is making bigger hits than ever. All that star DJ singer collab stuff started here.
(It seems it did get more truly collaborative as time wore on. As much as I enjoy the weirdness of The KLF’s wholesale buy-in to the imagery and mythos of the Illuminatus! trilogy, the “African motifs” of the videos haven’t aged that well. The first hits were stealing samples and barely compensating singers, but by the mid 90s the singers were in the studio as true artistic partners. )
Another memory: Winter of 1990 or 1991. The basketball team (mostly Black) playing at home for the (mostly white) town. I arrive early to cover the game for the school paper. Another giant boombox is dragged out and placed under the basket to play the team’s designated shootaround song. Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C&C Music Factory (US Billboard Hot 100 chart debut November 17, 1990) :
I don’t know that any auteur-driven pop act of the time could have bridged the gap between what kids of all races and genders and watching adults would tolerate quite like these mixed-race high energy songs. Certainly nothing that would appear on any “best of the year” on a critics’ list.
In the end all I’ve got is “Let’s remember some songs.” But if we don’t I’m afraid the respectable critics won’t remember what was really being played. Whoever is going to write the equivalent of Wald’s book in 50 years time please take note. Find those Open House Party playlists. Check the yearbooks for shootaround songs, high school dance reports and pep rally setlists. If you can get a VHS player working, figure out what songs are playing in the background of grainy dance routines taped on those long-gone fields.
Footnote 1: Thank you Youtube for preserving the a capella version of Joceyln Brown’s “Love’s Gonna Get You” (1985). Press play here at 2:18 for the sample Snap used (and apparently didn’t have to pay for in those days.)
Footnote 2: Black Box’s thievery was truly amazing. In addition to disputes with Martha Wash over the uncredited vocals, they apparently stole the entire rap on “Strike It Up” from the song NELSHOUSE by Nelson “FFWD” Cruz:
If you listen to the versions of “Strike It Up” now out on streaming they sound weird because they had to change the lyrics on the rap. Don’t throw away your old CDs!
Footnote 3: Two fantastic songs I tried to shoehorn into this but couldn’t so I will put it here at the end. I Beg Your Pardon by Kon Kan (US Billboard Hot 100 chart debut: December 24, 1988).
Canadian clubkid DJ pair building a song over a country music 70s soulful sample. It’s a little early and a little too derivative of the Pet Shop Boys to fully qualify but it’s a great Open House Party deep cut. Too weird for regular FM radio to be truly a part of everyone’s shared musical life. That stutter edit on the sample may sound dated now but it was novel at the time and quickly everywhere in all kinds of ads and other pop.
Buffalo Stance by Neneh Cherry (US Billboard Hot 100 chart debut: April 1, 1989).
Neneh Cherry had African and Swedish parents, an American childhood and step-father and lived in London after age 15. (That’s where this album was recorded.) Not quite (not at all?) as “house” the rest of this list; it’s hard to imagine this as a shootaround song. But it was incredibly fresh sounding at the time and still sounds current. Definitely not overlooked: it went to #3 and gets all kinds of love on best-of lists.