Rocking Racism

Nobody gets out of these blues alive. Last October, Guns n' Roses was one of the opening acts for the Rolling Stones' show at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The other act on the bill was Living Colour. Despite suggestions that the world's best all-black rock band would do something more provocative, Living Colour played its set straight through without comment. But what could be more provocative than such songs as Open Letter to a Landlord, Which Way to America and Funny Vibe? Especially the last, sung by young black men who've had it with getting the fisheye from white folks for no good reason: "No, I'm not gonna rob you / No, I'm not gonna rape you / No, I'm not gonna beat you / So why you want to give me that funny vibe?"

Fifteen minutes after Living Colour's set, Guns n' Roses, whose essence is provocation, headed for the stage and ran into Living Colour bassist Muzz Skillings standing in the wings. Axl Rose, Guns n' Roses' lead singer and chief songwriter, confronted him in an angry mood about criticisms of G&R's song One in a Million. Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid and drummer Will Calhoun had ripped it on a local radio show. The song depicts Rose's first day in Los Angeles, where he'd just arrived by bus from southern Indiana. The rant goes, "Police and niggers, that's right, get out of my way....Immigrants and faggots, they make no sense to me / They come to our country and think they'll do as they please."

Rose harangued Skillings for several minutes with specious justifications for his apparent bigotry; Skillings mildly suggested that Axl Rose take the subject up with Reid and Calhoun. G&R then took the stage and Rose dived into a tirade about using the word nigger, concluding eloquently, "All you people calling me a racist, shove your head up your fuckin' ass."

Vernon Reid was reported to be upset the next day, not because of anything Living Colour or Guns n' Roses had said or played but because many in the audience of 70,000 had cheered whenever Rose said nigger. In America, apparently, music is not the only universal language.

In the past year, rock's Ebony and Ivory dream has exploded as overt racism rushed far past the exhortations of neofascist skinheads at the postpunk fringe into the scene's central currents. Rather than being dominated by the moist brotherhood fantasia of We Are the World, rock has revealed naked bigotry as a pair of its most adventuresome artists, Guns n' Roses and Public Enemy, became enmeshed in chilling incidents of racial friction. This isn't just another bad-boy pose. It's for real, an unfolding of the endemic segregation at the heart of the day-to-day business of the music world. What's new is that, in the aftermath of the affirmative-action era, hardly anyone is even pausing to apologize for making big bucks off bigotry.

In November 1988, Geffen Records released G n' R Lies, a quickie project designed to cash in on the megaplatinum success of Guns n' Roses' debut LP, Appetite for Destruction. Lies featured One in a Million but with not a hint of the group's usual thrashing heavy metal. (Appetite also had generated controversy with an original cover portraying a half-naked woman bashed, battered and presumably raped by cartoon monsters.)

In late May 1989, The Washington Times published an interview with Professor Griff, "minister of defense" for Public Enemy, a hip-hop group whose platinum It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back won The Village Voice's 1988 national critics poll for best album. Griff made a variety of blatantly anti-Semitic comments to writer David Mills, including assertions that Jews were responsible for "the majority of wickedness that goes on around the globe" and that they control the jewelry business ("Is it a coincidence ... that it's named Jew-elry?").

Rose also tried to explain his racist posturing to a journalist. Speaking with Del James, his "best friend" and associate editor of the heavy-metal magazine Rip, in a Rolling Stone interview, Rose proceeded to dig himself an even deeper hole. "I used words like police and nigger because you're not allowed to use the word nigger," he said. "I don't like boundaries of any kind. I don't like being told what I can and what I can't say. I used the word nigger because it's a word to describe somebody that is basically a pain in your life, a problem." He went on to say that his use of the word immigrants referred to Middle Easterners and Asians who work in "convenience stores and gas stations [and] treat you like you don't belong here." He justified his use of the word faggot because of "some very bad experiences with homosexuals.... I'm not into gay or bisexual experiences. But that's hypocritical of me, because I'd rather see two women together than just about anything else. That happens to be my personal favorite thing." While denying gay bashing, Rose went on to admit verbal harassment of gays on the Hollywood cruising strip.

What's going on here? The end of the cultural dream in which the universal language of music brings the world together? Or the consequence of the cultural reality in which the music world is divided, separate but equal, and, therefore, inevitably produces stars in its own bitterly but unconsciously racist image?

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I asked Charles Hamm, a Dartmouth musicologist who has traveled to South Africa in order to study its music, to describe the similarities between the U.S. and South African music industries.

"I don't think it's very complicated," he said. "In most ways, the two are very much alike. I think it would be much more difficult to find differences." The only one he could think of: In America, there are black-owned record companies and radio stations.

Everybody in the music world knows that separate but equal is its essence. In talking with a few dozen people--performers, industry executives, broadcasters, managers, journalists--for this article, I discovered that that was the point almost everyone agreed on. I found only one person who disagreed. That was James Brown. He was calling collect from the South Carolina prison that's to be his residence for the next six years.

"I'm not here because of racism. America's not racist," Brown insisted, in his half-hysterical, self-promoting style. But the facts make it almost impossible to believe his claim.

Since Brown's 1988-arrest, he has been charged, legally and journalistically, with carrying a gun, fleeing police and their gunfire during a high-speed chase across state lines in South Carolina and Georgia, PCP addiction and wife beating. He is currently doing six years in the State Park Correctional Center in South Carolina, for the first two charges; a similar sentence is on the books in Georgia. He complains that he was unfairly convicted of those crimes and that the tabloid innuendo is inaccurate and unfair.

Brown isn't Nelson Mandela, but he is the most influential American pop musician of the post--World War Two era. Presuming that everything said against him is true--and a black man who flees police gunfire on a dark road in South Carolina is committing no simple crime--the question remains whether he should be serving time in a prison rather than in a detox center. Compare Brown to Ezra Pound and you'll have something to think about. Compare him to Oliver North and you may get pissed off.

Compare Brown's case to the separate, unequal treatment accorded Jerry Lee Lewis and maybe you'll just be stunned. Lewis' legend includes shooting up quiet streets in the Memphis night, wounding a band member, abusive behavior with his wives and a long-standing addiction to alcohol. Yet last summer, while Brown languished in prison, the same media that had avidly researched his crimes ran all sorts of stories celebrating Lewis on the occasion of the release of Great Balls of Fire, a film about his life.

That's not just how the media see it. It's how the record industry shapes images. From the beginning, the wild unconventionality of white rockers has been seen as a means of marketing them. Equally rowdy or eccentric black performers--from Little Richard and Jackie Wilson to Prince--are perceived as shameful. So Lewis, the music's ultimate redneck, is a cinema hero, while Brown, whose music helped redefine the meaning of blackness in pop culture, languishes in jail.

Racism is central to rock's role in our public mythology. For instance, the Jerry Lee Lewis legend includes an apocryphal story about a late-Fifties Alan Freed show at the Brooklyn Paramount. In the fable, Chuck Berry was headlining, and Lewis responded with a ferocious show, ending by setting his piano on fire. "Follow that, nigger," the mythic Lewis said to Berry as he sauntered into the wings. While there's probably no more truth to it than to the claim that Elvis once said "Niggers aren't fit to do anything but shine my shoes," it's interesting how often the (continued on page 84)Rocking Racism(continued from page 76) Lewis/Berry confrontation is presented in a way that makes Lewis seem heroic.

Such lore beats its path straight to Axl Rose's door. And only slightly more circuitously to Professor Griff's. Both Rose and Griff, after all, are trying to make sense of their own feelings of oppression--one as a working-class long-hair, the other as a middle-class black kid. Nothing justifies either's verbal thuggery, but it shouldn't mystify anybody, either. The fact that both have identified false enemies--Griff, Jews; Rose, blacks, gays and foreigners--is the oldest, most predictable element of this story. Racism always makes its appeal to the oppressed themselves, as Bob Dylan made clear when he wrote Only a Pawn in Their Game, not about Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers but about the deluded poor white who shot him.

No matter what Brown would like to believe, American music has been based on racial exploitation for 100 years. Charles Hamm's Music in the New World is virtually an encyclopedia of musical racism, from the mid--19th Century minstrel shows whose darky plantation caricatures gave the nation its first great songwriter, Stephen Foster, to the expropriation by Irving Berlin, Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller, among many others, of ragtime and jazz at the expense of their black originators. In fact, one reason Tin-Pan Alley so adamantly opposed the postwar emergence of rock and roll and rhythm-and-blues into the Top 40 was that it actively integrated mainstream popular music for the first time. The problem wasn't that white musicians were stealing from blacks; Benny Goodman and Johnny Ray caused none of the problems that Elvis did. It was that white music, black music and their audiences were intermingling and, hence, screwing up the music industry's well-entrenched color-coded marketing plan.

The growing preference for Southern R&B (in both its urban-black and rural-white strains) led directly to the 1960 payola scandal, which amounted to lily-white Tin-Pan Alley's defending its turf against a barbarian invasion.

Many aspects of this battle remain unresolved 30 years later. "There are dozens of ways in which the black music community has been affected by racism," says Public Enemy's executive producer Bill Stephney, a black Long Island native with a near-perfect Top 40 radio voice without a trace of regional or ethnic accent, naming a few: segregated radio formats; the low priority record companies give black acts when it comes to tour support, image management and other kinds of career development; and the impoverished promotion and video budgets of "special markets" (black-music) departments. And he's right: Why does everybody know Robert Palmer, the Pat Boone of his generation, and relatively nobody Luther Vandross, the Sam Cooke of his? Why are terms such as new music and progressive assigned exclusively to white acts? Why does a $30 Michael Jackson ticket elicit massive criticism, while an equally overpriced Rolling Stones ticket is evidence of business savvy?

"The intense racism of the music business--a business where segregation is encouraged--has made many of us defeatists," Stephney says.

But the consequences of the music business' pervasive institutional racism are felt not by blacks alone but by everybody. In 1987, John Cougar Mellencamp made a video of his song Cherry Bomb that featured a blonde woman and a black man in a bun-hugging dance scene. Shortly thereafter, Mellencamp received a letter from a North Carolina chapter of the Ku Klux Klan chastising him for race mixing. But then, Mellencamp says that, early in his career, he had a radio programer tell him that one of his records couldn't be aired because it was "too black." As if good rock and roll could possibly be anything else.

Musicians who try to circumvent the record industry's unmarked race barriers meet massive resistance. Take Was (Not Was). The arty funky group was the brain child of white Motor City hipsters David and Don Was, but it's fronted by the black Detroit soul singers Sir Harry Bowens and Sweet Pea Atkinson. The Wases had been fairly successful as a near-underground act when they signed with Geffen Records, which refused to release their third album. David Was describes the material Geffen rejected as "a very traditional-sounding R&B album," but Don Was was reported to have stated, the record label "so much as said, 'Get rid of the black guys and go audition a Paul Young type.'" (Young is a white British singer.) Geffen A&R executives even scheduled an open-call audition in New York for such a vocalist. After Geffen refused to free Was (Not Was), an adventurous A&R man at Phonogram Records in England, David Bates, agreed to buy out the band's contract. The same material, technically spruced up but still featuring Bowens and Atkinson, became a hit in England and, later, in the U.S. as the album What Up, Dog? featuring Walk the Dinosaur.

"In a way, we became Eliza Doolittle to Bates's Professor Higgins," says David Was. "His very own soul band that he was gonna devise and make respectable and have hits with. He was romantically linked with Motown and Memphis in a way that no American A&R guy could be. And England not only doesn't have a fear of American black music but actually reveres it."

The Was (Not Was) experience suggests how deeply embedded the separate-but-never-quite-equal concept of institutional racism remains in the record and broadcasting industries. "When we were signed to Island [the group's first record label], it was at a time when the jamming up of cultural strains was just beginning," said David Was. "We wanted to make funk records with dub overtones. And we started to, but by the time we got to those big wide halls at Warner Bros. [Geffen's distributor], we hit the wall. Who's gonna promote Was (Not Was)? The head of black promotion? He couldn't believe a white guy was walking into his office. The first thing he said was, 'No pictures on the cover.' "

"I thought the musical climate was right for a black artist who was kinda on the edge. But when I took it to the record company, people were baffled," said Marc Anthony Thompson, a black artist who delivered a Talking Heads--like album to Warner's. "They didn't listen to it or try to understand it, the way they would with someone like Sting or Paul Simon, who to me just rape other cultures." Living Colour had it slightly easier, at least in part because the band was brought to Epic by Mick Jagger. Stephney pointed out that Public Enemy, for all its militant separatism, got to CBS only under the auspices of "mainly white background people," including the rap and heavy-metal producer Rick Rubin.

So separate but equal remains the guiding thesis of all major record companies. Black records are assigned to the euphemistically designated special-markets departments for marketing and promotion. Except for a few crossover stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince, budgets in special markets are smaller, opportunities narrower than on the pop side. Not surprisingly, the inequities begin with separate and distinctly unequal royalty scales for black artists below the megastar level. Numbers are hard to come by, but with rare exceptions--most of them named above--black artists begin with more disadvantageous contracts and never quite catch up in subsequent (continued on page 163)Rocking Racism(continued from page 84) renegotiations.

Force your way past the color line and immense fame and riches await. Russell Simmons' Def Jam label had much pop success with hip-hoppers such as LL Cool J and Public Enemy, at least partly because its distribution agreement with CBS Records ran through the pop department, not special markets. Living Colour took more than a year to break Vivid, its Epic debut album, because the hard-rock quartet has four black members. According to record-industry stereotypes, hard rock is white music, even though everyone acknowledges that it stems directly from Chicago blues and that Jimi Hendrix is one of its icons. Had Jagger not agreed to invest in producing two tracks, Living Colour might never have had a shot at a major-label release. Its multiplatinum success, and the reception it earned as an opening act on the Stones' tour, may trickle down to the other black hard rockers who have coalesced around the Living Colour--inspired Black Rock Coalition in Hollywood and New York. But don't count on it.

Once past the record-label color line, an act such as Living Colour next has to find a way of breaking through another Jim Crow system, this one in radio. The play lists at album-oriented radio (AOR) stations appear to be so racially restrictive that the format has been referred to as apartheid-oriented radio. On the other hand, black-oriented stations often don't play records by black artists such as Living Colour, Ziggy Marley and Tracy Chapman, because of their lack of a dance beat or conventional love ballads that are the staples of those stations. According to Stephney, Vivid was deliberately not promoted to black stations. On the other hand, for all Public Enemy's lyrical black nationalism, its sales were achieved with a majority of white interest. Stephney says that even at the height of its success, not more than 40 of the 100 stations reportedly playing It Takes a Nation of Millions were black-oriented. Most of them weren't pop or AOR, though, but college stations that wouldn't touch a Vandross ballad or a Janet Jackson dance track with a 2000-meter antenna. In this context, Public Enemy's militance plays to the same sensationalized tabloid mentality as Guns n' Roses'.

Radio programing supposedly follows market tastes, but race lines tend to hold against all aural logic. Terence Trent D'Arby's first CBS single, If You Let Me Stay, flopped because the label tried to promote the record at AOR stations--which made sense because AOR is highly Anglophile and Darby's album was the best-selling debut album in the U.K. in 1987. But D'Arby's black skin--and perhaps an attitude that seemed a mite uppity--settled the issue for the majority of America's FM rockers. D'Arby's second single, Wishing Well, gave him his U.S. breakthrough. And with that single, the label's strategy shifted from AOR to urban contemporary--the euphemism for black-aimed broadcasting.

Since radio and TV programers generate profits by narrow-casting--that is, reaching only those segments of the audience that make for coherent advertising buys--they attempt to eliminate factors that will cause their core constituency to tune out. By this standard, there was no way to promote the D'Arby single--or any other--to both AOR and urban contemporary at the same time. AOR programers, for one thing, would never have risked challenging their (largely white male) audience's prejudices by playing the same stuff as the local dance station.

"How extreme can you get about these guys?" asks Bill Stephney. "The amazing thing is that new music has come along, the true inheritors of rock and roll"--he's talking about hip-hoppers such as Run-DMC and the L.A.-based quasi gangsters N.W.A.--"and these guys won't touch it because of the color of their skin." He recalls, in disgust, working at WLIR on Long Island that played Robert Palmer's You Are in My System, while ignoring System's original version, putting Blondie's Rapture on the air but not being permitted to touch any black rap. WLIR was widely regarded as one of the most adventurous rock stations in the United States.

The most notorious example of such built-in research prejudice occurred at MTV. The music-video channel's first programing chief was Bob Pittman, a white Mississippi native with liberal politics, who earlier gained fame as a research-oriented radio programer. Pittman responded to research that indicated that the white teenage audience he envisioned for MTV wouldn't tolerate the on-screen presence of black artists. He believed in his research to the point of refusing to air Michael Jackson's video for Billie Jean until threatened with a CBS Records boycott. The impact of its eventual screening helped substantially increase MTV's Nielsen rating.

Yet it seems clear that Pittman kept the color line in place for black artists of lesser stature than Jackson and Prince. By the time he left in 1986, ratings had fallen back below 1.0. Responding to the overtures of some of his younger, hipper producers, MTV's new programing chief, Lee Masters, also a veteran radio programer, agreed to try a half-hour rap program on Saturday mornings. "I wasn't convinced it was gonna be big," Masters said. "In fact, I told the guys not to be worried if the ratings were lower than usual." Instead, the ratings soared right back up--and held as MTV Raps, featuring all black artists, went from a half hour to an hour, from weekly to daily. Today, MTV Raps is widely regarded as the best music show on the air.

To Masters, this is not a story about a racist programer versus an enlightened one. It's about accentuating the positive. "The prejudice isn't the result of racist thinking; it's the product of the programers' aversion to negatives. The prejudice against hard rock is the same, because a lot of people don't like that either. So it's a noise issue."

Radio programers have all too readily succumbed and one result is Axl Rose, who seems unaware that the music he loves--and the music he makes--has totally black roots. A quarter of a century ago, in a Top 40 climate where Otis Redding, Barry McGuire, the Rolling Stones, the Temptations and Simon and Garfunkel all had access to the same audience, connections likely and unlikely impressed themselves on listeners hourly. In today's world of narrow-casting, the links among musical styles are deliberately hidden. The AOR stations that played the Beastie Boys are too terrified of tune-out to consider playing the black rappers who inspired (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party).

Popular music reflects the real state of America more clearly than any other cultural idiom because, despite everything, it offers diversity. Nowhere else could a white-trash punk such as Rose find such a broad forum. Nowhere else could an angry black nationalist such as Professor Griff find a mass listenership. That is pop music's glory; it is also what makes it dangerous. And you can't trust what seems to be. It would be dishonest to question the sincerity of Lee Atwater's love for the blues. It would be insane to forget that his empathy with the music never deterred him from using Willie Horton in a fashion that makes both Rose and Griff look like the race-baiting amateurs they are.

Amateur or not, there is a lesson in what becomes of a race baiter. For Atwater, the effect was sweet--his man was swept into office. In the music industry, the consequences to those who tear the veil off American apartheid differ starkly by race.

One in a Million caused Guns n' Roses some minor inconveniences--mainly a spate of press criticism and the public ignominy of being dumped from a benefit for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, an AIDS support group in New York. But G n' R Lies, a quickie cash-in project, still sat on the Top Pop Albums Billboard chart week after week, even after Rose's Rolling Stone interview appeared in early August.

After The Village Voice picked it up, Griff's interview generated far more problems for Public Enemy. Press criticism led to threats of a boycott of all P.E. products. A month later, P.E. leader Chuck D called a press conference and announced that Griff had been expelled from the group. Later the same week, he announced that Public Enemy had disbanded, though before the summer was out, the band had reassembled, with Griff relegated to a role in the shadow cabinet. One reason the members got back together was that elements within the black community disapproved of Chuck D's bowing to white pressure.

In California last October, all of this fell most heavily upon the shoulders of Living Colour. It can be no simple thing for the world's foremost black hard-rock group to be sponsored by Mick Jagger (who once sang, "Black girls just want to get fucked all night") or to serve as cannon fodder for audiences that come to see Englishmen interpret music that's almost exclusively black in its origins. Rose taxed Reid and his bandmates beyond endurance, and probably would have done so even if they weren't the standard-bearers of the Black Rock Coalition. On the other hand, Living Colour is among the most prominent opponents of rock-music censorship. What response could it make to Axl Rose?

The night after Rose delivered his Klan-like tirade, Living Colour again took the L.A. Memorial Coliseum stage and played its show. Corey Glover wore a Stop Racism T-shirt, but the band said nothing until it played its first and biggest hit, Cult of Personality. That song is prefaced by a tape of Malcolm X intoning, "And during the few moments that we have left, we want to talk right down to earth, in a language that everybody here can easily understand."

This time, Reid stopped the music and stepped up to the microphone. "Some things were said on this stage last night that I have a problem with," he said calmly. "If you don't have a problem with gay people, don't call them faggots. If you don't have a problem with black people, don't call them niggers.

"I never met a nigger in my life." The crowd cheered wildly, and the band charged into the song so hard it seemed to hope to exorcise racism from rock through the sheer potency of its attack.

Of course, it doesn't quite work that way. The Stones' show had two more nights to run. The opening-act dressing rooms shared the same hallway. Somehow, nobody from Guns n' Roses ever managed to visit Living Colour. Keith Richards did stop by, however, to let the band know he thought it had done a great thing.

Sadly, that's as close to a conclusion as this article can come.

"John Mellencamp had a radio programer tell him his record couldn't be aired--it was 'too black.' "