If you were one of the hundreds of millions around the globe watching Tuesday's memorial tribute to Michael Jackson, you heard Stevie Wonder deliver arguably the musical highlight of the day, first with a quick instrumental line of "I Can't Help It,' a song he wrote that Jackson covered on "Off The Wall." Then you heard Wonder sing "Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer," a haunting song that ranks among his very best, if not well known.
Finally, you heard another song, the title of which appears at the top of this blog entry. It's a track from his 1974 Grammy winning album, "Fulfillingness' First Finale," and it is a withering indictment of false prophets and misplaced spirituality. The album is my favorite of Wonder's, and "They Won't Go When I Go" is a brilliant piece among a masterwork.
Yet, I'm willing to bet that unless you are a Wonder devotee (which I certainly am), you didn't know that song (which is understandable). But the fact that none of the networks and the nation's leading newspaper bothered to note it, much less comment on its inclusion in the program, speaks to a particular pet peeve of mine, namely the utter disregard mainstream African-American popular culture receives in the broader media.
For all the sizable contributions that Black artists make to the broader culture, they are routinely ignored in mainstream publications and telecasts. Music and television and movies that are of great import to African-Americans are blithely dismissed by E!, and Entertainment Tonight and People and the like.
Need proof? Think of the number of times Tyler Perry movies have opened to sizable box office figures, if not the very top spot in weekend figures, yet reviews of his works often require magnifying glasses to find in major papers and magazines. If you live in a major American city, chances are a gospel-flavored musical will come to your town at some point. But don't hold your breath looking for profiles of the actors/singers in your town's mainstream press.
Heck, Entertainment Weekly, the bible of American popular culture, effectively dismissed Michael Jackson's entire body of work with The Jacksons after the group left Motown in their recent retrospective of his career. That means, for instance, "Triumph," a platinum selling album, the group's first album to chart No.1 on the R&B charts in nine years, went without comment. It was as if the magazine wasn't interested in anything Jackson did from his days as a little boy until "Thriller."
During Tuesday's telecast on ABC, Martin Bashir, whose fame is due largely to his 2003 interview with Jackson, dropped in the bombshell that Jackson alone sang the vocals on the Jackson Five's "I'll Be There," a fact that will no doubt come as a surprise to Jermaine Jackson, who shared the lead with Michael, not to mention the millions of people who have heard that song over the past 28 years. Yet, to my knowledge, Bashir hasn't been corrected. Ask yourself if a correspondent at a major television network could have made a similar gaffe about a Beatles or Bruce Springsteen song without drawing heavy fire.
Look, I don't expect the nation's Big Media to suddenly start quoting Stevie Wonder album tracks as a matter of course. But it would be nice to know that someone in Big Media knew where to find those cuts and what they mean when they are important.
3 comments:
Was a memorial service to Michael Jackson an appropriate forum for a compendium on Af-Am contributions to American pop culture?
I don't think so. Yesterday was not the time and the Staples Center not the place to blow people's minds with minutiae on Stevie Wonder, et al.. Still, several speakers (and pundits) acknowledged Jackson's role in advancing the stature of Black music in pop culture.
I guess you missed that.
With all due respect, MIB, I think you missed the point of the piece. Tuesday surely was not the day to, as you put it, "blow people's minds with minutiae on Stevie Wonder." But I've seen and read enough errors about factual matters to realize those in charge of the nation's pop culture don't care enough about African-American pop culture to get those matters right or to even care when they make mistakes.
That, to me, is a part of a larger lack of respect for Black popular culture, which I attempted to address in the posting.
I guess you missed that.
I understood your point.
A memorial -- even one to arguably the greatest entertainer of all time and who happens to be an Af-Am -- isn't the proper venue to demagogue the Black influence on pop culture. Still, I think the comments by many of those who eulogized Michael Jackson, and the presence of so many fans plus the media coverage all subtly made the point where even a casual viewer could understand without honest, harmless flubs by Martin Bashir, Jeffrey Toobin, etc., getting in the way.
I agree with your central point that Af-Am culture, and Af-Am contributions to human civilization are frequenly ignored and largely underappreciated. Those are indirect by-products of a media institution where Af-Ams are few in number, and without much in the way of ownership. So, it's kind of naive to expect a commercial news media targeting a largely non-White demographic to function as sincere anthropologists or historians for Black culture, isn't it?
And there's the issue of pop culture itself, upon which no one should judge by the same standards of modern or traditional art. That strikes me as the ultimate irony in talking about Jackson or his memorial service. Here we are discussing whether enough props were dished out at the funeral ceremony of a person whose primary (and reluctant) contribution to society was an unbridled celebration of material excess.
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