Music the righteous people enjoy

I see them resenting me. In class. In the Diag. Everywhere. The White Girls are ticked off.

I have seen the hurt in the eyes of a few earnest sophomores who were wounded that I so coldly dissected and illuminated their idiosyncratic and brilliantly eclectic camp mix tape pathology (thank you, Lawrence.) They accuse me.

"Okay, Mr. Too-Cool-For-Everything. If you're better than all us people who listen to the Violent Femmes, what do you think is good? Huh, smartypants?"

I'm glad you asked.

1) Sam Cooke. Everyone knows a few of his songs. "Chain Gang" is very popular, as is "Cupid" and "Twistin' the Night Away." If these songs were the whole of his recorded output, he would have a comfortable place in the pop pantheon. As it happens, Sam is one of the greatest singers ever to draw a breath. Keith Richards once said that for a period of two years, he listened to nothing but Sam Cooke. Jerry Wexler, the legendary Atlantic producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, said that Cooke was the "the best singer ever. Unequivocally."

He may be right. In the history of pop and R&B singing, there has not been a single person who has been able to copy him. People of surpassing talent love him; but they cannot imitate him. Sam Cooke is one those singers who doesn't just make you think about Her, he makes you want Her back.

2) B.B. King. It's more than a little unfortunate that his most famous song, "The Thrill Is Gone," is his most overproduced and most hokey. Not that there's anything wrong with it. But typing Riley B. King by the sound of that one song is ridiculous.

Every year since 1954, King has played at least 300 dates a year. He began his career filling in for Sonny Boy Williamson on Memphis radio and at last count has seven Grammys, not including the lifetime achievement award. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame. He also holds honorary doctorates from Yale and the Berkeley College of Music.

More colloquially, everybody who has started playing guitar since the mid-sixties would play differently if King had never lived. Everybody. In the realm of singing, only one or two other bluesmen can be mentioned in the same sentence with him. On the landscape of American music, B.B. King is, in the words of his biographer David Ritz, "a grandfather, calling to his children."

3) Stevie Wonder. The 20th-Century American answer to Mozart. From Saginaw. You get the idea.

Stevie Wonder is one of those artists whose scope of talent and influence is almost too huge to discuss. From Little Stevie Wonder and "Fingertips, part 2" through the inspired "Songs in the Key of Life" and beyond, few musicians have been able to be so creative and original with each album and still maintain such a large base of popularity. Wonder's music can make it impossible not to dance, impossible not to sing along, impossible not to remember and impossible not to cry.

He, along with Marvin Gaye and the Temptations, was responsible for creating a sense of social conscience and activism in music that rivaled that of the hippie movement occurring concurrently. He can generate pure, caustic funk; a seamless ballad, an R&B tone poem or a protest song, put it all on a record and make it sound like it would be foolish to have it sound any other way.

And why is all this necessary? All this hipster, doofus idol worship in which I am indulging. Because, in the words of a great philosopher, "People put anything in their earhole." In the modern rush not to make anyone not feel bad about themselves, not to make any value judgments, we are losing something. This is not to say that music made after 1975 is automatically meritless; witness my shameless crush on Lauryn Hill. New music is not, by definition, bad music. But, just for a minute, think about the music press and television that called the 17-year-old Fiona Apple "the next Queen of Soul" on the basis of one album and a Calvin Klein underwear model physique.

It's not passion anymore. It's not love and it's not soul. It's focus groups and marketing. It's Ani DeFranco's hackish, adolescent whining passing for ... I'm not sure what the hell it's supposed to be.

It's that in our time, music is a cultural weapon. Something to put on your chest or your backpack to impress someone in coffee shop. Live up to your demographic description. In their time, and in their music, it was the girl who left you, the girl who might not leave you and all the things that are best and wretched about us. And I hate that I have to sound like a greeting card just to be on the side of the angels.

In a rush to sell posters and merchandising contracts, we are forgetting that music used to be, and sometimes still is, more than acoustically pleasant product packaging.

- James Miller can be reached over e-mail at jamespm@umich.edu

James Miller Miller on Tap

10-07-98