Soul contestataire

To save a world that is destined to die

Among the most fervid expressions of the Seventies Soul Dharma was a set of records that protest the state of the world, protest registered at levels that range from the intimate to the cosmic. We might be tempted to label this “Protest Soul,” but “protest” is too narrow and restricted a moniker; protest music, in its early to mid-twentieth century folk-music guise, is earnest and totally unmysterious. Woody Guthrie, its great exemplar, sang the “Dust Bowl Blues” and asked “Which Side Are You On?” He even inveighed against “Old Man Trump.” (Yes, the beloved Woody Guthrie wrote a song protesting the racial discrimination practiced by New York City landlord Fred Trump, a practice for which he and his son Donald were sued by the Justice Department in 1973. Yes, the likely Republican nominee for president in this year’s elections was sued for refusing to rent apartments to Black people. It seems the scope for protest music of all kinds remains as present as ever.).

Bob Dylan, who visited Guthrie early in his New York years and dedicated a song to the older man on his début album, infused the protest song with a more self-consciously poetic and social-analytical cast than the previous generation. But it was still, arguably, narrowly political, and explicitly the voice of the protester, the critic, the reformer, the revolutionary.

That’s all fine. The protest soul I want to write about today includes that Guthrie-Dylan current, but it is more varied than “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And although there can be something insufferably pretentious and precious in using French terms in English-language criticism, I’m going to do it anyway. I’ll call it soul contestataire, which is just French for “protest soul,” or “protest-oriented soul,” but evokes a broader set of attitudes and responses than protest, all of them contained in the French verb contester: to challenge, to contest, to dispute, to question, to deny, to defend, to oppose, to dissent. Soul contestataire: contesting the social and economic ills afflicting Black and brown Americans in the Seventies, deploring the social and personal consequences of those ills, mourning the dissipation of the idealism and optimism of the Civil Rights Movement, and indeed of the “Sixties” more generally.

Let’s look at four variants of soul contestataire.

1. Inside the fraying social fabric

We’ve already encountered examples of soul contestataire. It was hiding inside another current of Seventies soul that sought to soothe the hurt that listeners felt by harking back to the bliss of adolescent love: “Neo Doo Wop”, profiled last week. We found that very few of the lush, keening Neo Doo Wop records successfully captured the naïveté of teenage love; most bore the marks of dissolving relationships (“Kiss and Say Goodbye,” “I’ll Be Around”). Widening the aperture a bit, these groups — particuarly the great Philly Soul records produced by Thom Bell —

Thom Bell (January 26, 1943 – December 22, 2022) – Moses Theme (1979)

— sang wistfully or bitterly or stoically not only about breakups but of the fraying social fabric engendered by a hardening and ever more unequal United States.

Thus, the great O’Jays could on the one hand deliver a neo doo wop gem like “Sunshine”:

on a record whose title track meanwhile decries the breakdown of trust in the singer’s social circle. Like Teddy Pendergrass crying out “I need a loan!” in the middle of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Where Are All My Friends?”, Eddie Lavert’s desperate “What can I do to get on the right track? I wish they'd take some of these knives out my back!” is the plea of a man who doesn’t entirely understand why the world is so hard. This is unlike the solemn, knowing perspective of Dylan’s “Masters of War,” which knows who’s responsible for what’s wrong with the world (the military/industrial complex, as it happens) and is telling the responsible parties just how evil they are. A demographer can look at a vast amount of population data and observe the statistical relationship between long-term unemployment, say, and divorce; the singers in “Backstabbers” and “Where Are All My Friends?” can’t see the larger pattern, but they are caught up in the distress it causes.

2. Nihilism

In “(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go,” Curtis Mayfield, in contrast, could see the larger pattern: “Brothers and the whiteys / Blacks and the crackers / Police and their backers / They're all political actors.” But, unlike Dylan' in “Masters of War,” he believes it’s too late for political action: “If there’s hell below, we’re ALL gonna go.” Here is the dark flip side of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everybody is a Star.”

Mayfield could, in other settings, be inescapably upbeat (e.g. “Move On Up,” also on his 1970 début album). But in this song he paints a dystopian hellscape of political misfeasance, a dysfunctional justice system, drug abuse. It bears a strong resemblance to sociologist Johan Galtung’s increasingly relevant concept of structural violence, which coexists with direct, physical violence.

But Mayfield’s critique, while more comprehensive than the O’Jays’, is not sociological — it is theological. We are going to hell, all of us, and not only as punishment for our sins, but, as Buddhist teachers might tell us, because we have rendered our Earth a living hell even while we live, a direct consequence of accumulated karma.

There’s a dark and excellent Colombian novel by Mario Mendoza called Satanás (2002) which fictionalizes a true episode of terrible violence in Bogotá in the 1980s; Mendoza’s masterstroke is to suppose that Satan is actually present in the city and orchestrating the bloodshed. The powerful religious symbology in Mendoza’s novel and Mayfield’s record makes the point that structural violence — the dimensions of which are many in Bogotá in the Eighties and in Mayfield’s Chicago in the Seventies — not only hurts people, but that it represents the presence of potent kind of evil in the world.

One striking aspect of the eruption of hell into the world we live in is that it echoes the eruption of the devil in a lot of songs before and since. The recorded prototype is Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues” (1937). The singer is awakened by a knock at the door. He answers it: “Hello Satan, I believe it’s time to go.”

The devil is taking the singer’s soul into the underworld, it seems. As they walk down the street, the singer announces “I’m gonna beat my woman till I get satisfied.” She asks him to explain his violence and he speculates, “It must-a be that old evil spirit, so deep down in the ground.” The song ends with the singer asking that he be buried by the roadside, “so my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.”

Jump forward to Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop” (1973). Vocalist Garry Shider sings a song about a mother to five children who prostituted herself to support the family; as a child, the singer heard her pray at night:

Hear my mother call

I can hear my mother call

Late at night I hear her call

Oh lord, lord I hear her call

She says, "Father, father it's for the kids

Any and every thing I did

Please, please don't judge me too strong

Lord knows I meant no wrong

Lord!”

So far, this is a poignant and painful story. But as the woman prays, something strange happens. The devil appears, as he did in the Robert Johnson blues: “Then the devil sang, ‘Would you like to dance with me? We're doin' the COSMIC SLOP!’”

A final example of the ruptured membrane between hell and our world: the Houston rappers the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” (1991).

The three rappers — Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill — take turns narrating the point of view of a Fourth Ward drug dealer whose paranoia, and perhaps guilt, is eating away at his sanity (“I often drift when I drive / Havin’ fatal thoughts of suicide”). He has dreams of a menacing figure:

I can see him when I'm deep in the covers
When I awake I don't see the motherf*cker
He owns a black hat like I own
A black suit and a cane like my own
Some might say, "Take a chill, B."
But f*ck that sh*t! There's a n***a tryin' to kill me
I'm poppin' in the clip when the wind blows

In the final portion of the song, by Bushwick Bill, a policeman attacks the narrator:

He'd be in for a squabble, no doubt
So I swung and hit the n***a in his mouth
He was goin' down, we figured
But this wasn't no ordinary n***a
He stood about six or seven feet
Now that's the n***a I be seein' in my sleep

The policeman has turned into the figure from his dreams — only to disappear. The narrator is all alone: “It was dark as f*ck on the streets/My hands were all bloody from punchin' on the concrete.” There is more than one possible interpretation of the mysterious figure in “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” but one is that he is the devil, first entering the protagonist’s dreams, then — briefly — fighting with him on the same kind of street Robert Johnson walked down, past the kind of yards where Garry Shider’s mother danced the Cosmic Slop.

The protagonists in all of these songs are more like the O’Jays or the Blue Notes in that they don’t entirely comprehend what’s happening to them, unlike the wise and nihilistic Mayfield in “Hell Below”. But like Mayfield, Johnson’s bluesman, Funkadelic’s poor mother, the Geto Boys’ drug dealer, can see hell or the devil in their travails. It’s natural to assume that the devil appears in each instance because the characters feel guilt for their sinful behavior, or that the devil appears directly to punish them for their transgressions.

But Mayfield’s “Hell Below” raises questions about whether some of these individuals are sinners, or whether instead they are condemned to live and act and seek their flourishing as best they can in a structurally violent world. Taken together, Johnson, Funkadelic and the Geto Boys sound like scattered stories from Mayfield’s hellscape as much as individual tales of falling from grace.

That’s not to say that the characters are entirely innocent. What Mayfield’s nihilistic variant of soul contestataire decries is a world in which, to greater or lesser degree, people suffer not only the pain of structural violence but the pain of being party to it, the pain of inflicting it, too. If there’s a hell down below, we’re ALL going to go.

3. (Beleaguered) Hope

Like Mayfield, Donny Hathaway brought a religious perspective to soul contestataire. Not surprising for someone who sang in public for the first time at the age of four, billed as "Little Donnie Pitts, the Nation's Youngest Gospel Singer." Hathaway is capable of staring into the darkness of “Hell Below,” but he does not lose his faith. Consider this inexhaustibly joyful and personal gospel number from his début album, “Thank You Master (For My Soul)”:

The darkness is there, it’s audible in the dramatic writing for the horns, but always relieved by the singer’s gratitude to the Lord:

I just got to say "Much obliged" to you, master
'Cause the walls of my room was not the walls of my grave
My bed was not my cooling board
Y'all don't know what I'm talkin' 'bout
My sheet (My sheet) was not my wind— (Was not my winding sheet)
And I wanna say thank you

Given the force of Hathaway’s gratitude and faith, it is not surprising that his variant of soul contestataire is the most optimistic. Its best illustration is his reassuring composition “Someday We’ll All Be Free,” and I’m partial to the 1971 live version from These Songs For You, Live! Hathaway introduces the number to the audience as embodying “an idea that I hope we all can share in.”

“Hang on to the world / as it spins around / Just don’t let / The spinning get you down,” he sings. “Keep your self-respect, your manly pride.”

A further connection. Hathaway’s “Voices Inside,” also from his début album, provides a lyrical version of Indra’s Net, the Buddhist illustration of how, when we look in a jewel, we can see all the other jewels reflected. That’s a visual metaphor; Hathaway’s lyric is an auditory metaphor: “I hear voices, I hear people, I hear voices of many people.” Get close to Indra’s Net, and that’s what you’ll hear, voices, people, voices of many people.

You’ll certainly hear Earth, Wind & Fire in this Hathaway tune, as they covered it on their second album, The Need of Love:

4. World weary; a world transformed

The best known and maybe just the best, period, example of soul contestataire is Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album What’s Going On. Its impact was immediate. Donny Hathaway sang its title song on the live album sampled above. In fact, a lot of artists covered it in the aftermath of the album’s release (Johnny Hammond, Quincy Jones, Les McCann, Herbie Mann, Richie Havens). It seemed that there was something so effective in the compostion, in Gaye’s recording, that other artists found the best thing they could do to respond to Gaye’s creation was sing it themselves, like a ritual chant, a hymn; but also, perhaps, like a protest slogan. That urgency to embrace, to intone, to sing “What’s Going On” wasn’t exhausted by the mid Seventies, either; far from it.

Donny Hathaway’s début anticipates Gaye’s album in a very particular gesture. “The Ghetto,” a groovy bit of atmospheric social realism, includes a lot of people talking (and a baby crying) throughout:

…not unlike the overlapping conversations in the introduction and the interstices of “What’s Going On”:

It’s probably impossible to hear this song as one would have heard it the first, or the second or third, time, on the radio, in 1971. It takes some effort to mindfully pay attention to the details of the lyrics, to the arrangements, to Gaye’s achingly beautiful singing as though it were brand new. Gaye rests his attention on some of the elements of the records above — war, poverty, drugs, despair; on the effects of structural violence.

But let’s back up:

“Flyin’ High” is he album’s comment on drug abuse. More than that, its sound is that of beauty that surpasses all understanding; listen to Gaye’s voice over the airy minor chords at the one-minute mark as he sings, disappointed in himself, “so stupid-minded, so stupid-minded.” “Flyin’ High,” because of its extended use of the drug-taking “high” metaphor, brings to the aural surface the way that the characteristic sound of this album is one of soaring above the surface of the planet, surveying the suffering below. This effect relies centrally on the ethereal beauty of David Van De Pitte’s sometimes disparaged string arrangements and the vocal choruses, which sound to me like all the people conversing and greeting each other at the start of the record have lifted their voices in song, in support of the protagonist.

Gaye’s perspective is at least as all-seeing as Curtis Mayfield’s on “Hell Below”. “When I look at the world, it fills me with sorrow.” “What about this overcrowded land? How much more abuse from man can she stand?” Whereas Mayfield was moved to weary revulsion, though, Gaye is just moved to weariness: “This ain’t livin’, this ain’t livin’, no, this ain’t livin’.”

For protest music, Gaye’s record is quiescent; it’s world weary, it flirts with distanced defeatism from its up-in-the-sky perspective. On its own terms — working with the elements we hear in the record, the songs, the words, the harmonies — it can be difficult to know how to transform listening into action, into contestation. But we don’t experience the record on its own terms, not anymore. Gaye has achieved something rare and wonderful: he has remade our world in the record’s image, and carried along all these other records — by Donny Hathaway, by the Geto Boys, by the O’Jays, all of them — with him into that world refashioned according to Gaye’s creativity.

This is not just a fancy way of saying the album was a big hit, that we’ve all heard it hundreds of times, the singles, the album, that the music is familiar, that it’s popular, that it has been influential. I mean that, for millions of people, What’s Going On is the sound of contestation itself, of despair, of anger, of dejection with the world. Mercy, mercy me. It has been fifty years, more, but these world-weary songs rouse themselves again and again and embolden and reawaken our courage, our compassion, our loving-kindness. Let’s save all the children…save the babies.