Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” produced by Giorgio Moroder, was a giant hit in 1976–and has had a lot of influence on artists since then (including Daft Punk, who worked with Moroder on their album Random Access Memories, reviewed by both Ann Powers and Anthony Fontana).
Let’s pretend we are a well-known contemporary musical artist. We’ll decide who in class together. We’ve been tasked with reviewing “I Feel Love” for a special issue of Rolling Stone with the title “50 Songs in 50 Years.” Our focus will be the song’s relation to disco and ways that current artists may still be influenced by it. So, let’s ask ourselves some questions:
In what ways does the song pay homage to gospel music?
What elements or conventions of gospel are featured in the song?
What might Ann Powers say about the song’s relation to gospel?
In what ways does the song diverge from conventions of gospel?
Following the lead of Fontana, Powers, and Reed, what might be an evaluation we can make that both critiques and praises the song?
Can you think of artists of today who seem to be influenced by Summers and Mororoder and/or gospel traditions?
In groups of two or three, review the elements of reviews listed below. Then:
1. Analyze one of the reviews we’ve read for class. How many paragraphs is it? What is the length of the paragraphs? What is the focus of the review? Identify at least three of the elements below in the review and be prepared to talk about how the writer handles them.
2. Choose some interesting language or description–something that seems inspired or gets your attention.
3. Make a sketch of your own reviews, talking them through with your partners:
What are you reviewing?
What will your focus be? What do you really want readers to know.
What expert advice do you want to be sure to follow?
Make a list of paragraphs that will feature some of the elements listed below.
Choose a quote from Ann Powers’s Good Booty or Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan’s Switched on Pop that might enhance your review.
Try to come up with at least one great description.
Watch these videos of gospel artists, keeping a couple of Ann Powers’s arguments in mind:
1. “‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ stands at a crossroads more crucial than any that hosted a devil out to take a bluesman’s soul. This song, seemingly simple, created a space where the beauty and poeticism of desire was revealed, and where the physicality of spiritual longing could be manifest.” (85)
2. “[Female gospel singers’] voices, ripe with that improvisatory ripple that would come to be called melisma and the rich tone of what Williams called “the moan that keeps homes together,” gave popular music a new kind of mobility. Their singing overrode the mind-body split that kept the sacred from the profane. Basically, these women invented rock ‘n roll performance.” (86)
3. “Gospel music’s songwriters and performers wanted their music to touch people where they live–in their hearts and guts, and, though they might not admit it, their genitals–but also reveal ‘that something within’. In the 1930s, holy people and their highly interactive congregants ushered in the Golden Age of Gospel, which extended into the 1950, when its central elements were secularized within the prime erotic musical movements of our time: rock, funk, and soul.” (76)
Powers is making a few related points:
A song like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” imagines a connection to god that involves both body and soul–the idea that God might touch you, actually take your hand.
Gospel performers were all about stirring up feelings in audiences, to inspire them to feel the feeling the performer seemed to be feeling, audible in her voice and visible in her movement.
Gospel led directly to soul, funk, and rock music–genres that made its undercurrent of eroticism central and explicit.
See what you think about these ideas as you watch and listen to these performances.
The first thing we need to know is that makossa means “dance” in Douala, one of the languages of Cameroon–where Manu Dibango is from. “Soul Makossa,” in other words translates to “soul dance.” Makossa is also the name for a genre of music in Cameroon.
Manu Dibango released the original version of “Soul Makossa” in 1972. It was a worldwide hit–and went to number one on the charts in the U.S. He released Soul Makossa 2.0 in 2011, collaborating with Wayne Beckford. The song is famously sampled in Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”
Dibango is from Cameroon, and his music tends to blend traditional Cameroonian styles with jazz and funk. In fact, the music of Cameroon tends to blend a lot of styles anyway. I admire the fact that with “Soul Makossa 2.0,” Dibango adds a hip hop element, forty years after the song was originally released. That’s a vibrant artist. All this mixing–the mixing of genres, the Michael Jackson sample, the two versions–seems to make Ann Powers’s point that the evolution of music is all about mixing. She’s talking specifically about American music, so let’s take “Wanna Be Startin Somethin.” That iconic song could not exist if Jackson didn’t borrow from Dibango and the music of Cameroon.
The song is famous for being really danceable. The infectiousness of its groove has a lot to do with the syncopation of the beats. (By the way, an infectious groove is a good example of entrainment.) It gives the rhythm a lot of texture. The harmony iconic chorus–“mamasay mamasa mamamakusa”–adds to the danceabilty. Harmony creates the effect that this is a collective experience, with multiple voices. Because the harmonies are so rhythmic, it sounds like party. (By the way, the harmony involves the main melody and then that same melody sung an octave higher, so it’s technically an “octave harmony.”
But most listeners would never need to know this. As Ann Powers writes in her essay “Why We Fight About Pop Music,” “Music can make you feel like a room without a roof. When that’s happening, all the categories we build as thinkers recede, and whatever sound made it happen is glorious.” That sounds a lot like soul dancing to me.
Now, here’s the original and the remake, for your enjoyment.
Definitions
Sample: sampling is the reuse of a portion (or sample) of a sound recording in another recording. Samples may comprise elements such as rhythm, melody, speech, sounds or entire bars of music, and may be layered, equalized, sped up or slowed down, repitched, looped, or otherwise manipulated. They are usually integrated using hardware (samplers) or software such as digital audio workstations. . . .Sampling is a foundation of hip hop music, which emerged when producers in the 1980s began sampling funk and soul records, particularly drum breaks. It has influenced many genres of music, particularly electronic music and pop. Samples such as the Amen break, the “Funky Drummer” drum break and the orchestra hit have been used in thousands of recordings; James Brown, Loleatta Holloway, Fab Five Freddy and Led Zeppelin are among the most sampled artists. The first album created entirely from samples, Endtroducing by DJ Shadow, was released in 1996. –Wikipedia
Syncopation: In music , syncopation is the deliberate upsetting of the meter or pulse of a composition by means of a temporary shifting of the accent to a weak beat or an off-beat. In other words, it is when a musician plays on rhythmic and metrical expectations such as giving a silence where a stressed note is expected or stressing a normally weak beat. Used extensively in the fourteenth century, syncopation is a rhythm in which normally unaccented beats are stressed either through agogic or dynamic rhythm. Syncopation has been used in the music of all periods, and is one of the foremost features of jazz. —Free Music Dictionary
Entrainment:‘Entrainment’ is the coordination or synchronisation of different rhythms. ‘Interpersonal entrainment’ is timing coordination between two or more individuals. ‘Interpersonal musical entrainment’ is what happens when people get together for activities involving music (concerts, dances, religious rituals, even sporting events…), and synchronise what they are doing. For more background, watch our short film… –Music & Science Lab, Durham University, “What Is Musical Entrainment”
Harmony: In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions.[1] Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches (tones, notes), or chords.[2] However, harmony is generally understood to involve both vertical harmony (chords) and horizontal harmony (melody). [3]Harmony is a perceptual property of music, and, along with melody, one of the building blocks of Western music. Its perception is based on consonance, a concept whose definition has changed various times throughout Western music. In a physiological approach, consonance is a continuous variable. Consonant pitch relationships are described as sounding more pleasant, euphonious, and beautiful than dissonant relationships which sound unpleasant, discordant, or rough.[4] –Wikipedia
Octave: An interval spanning seven diatonic degrees, eleven semitones. The frequency of a note one octave above another will have exactly twice as many Hertz as the frequency of the note an octave below it. to modern ears, the “same” pitch separated by register. The octave is the eighth note counting by step up a diatonic scale and in modern notation would be called by the same letter name as the starting pitch. Medieval listeners, however, did not consider octaves to be equivalent, so, for instance, a cadence on the upper octave could not be substituted for a lower note. See interval. an interval eight diatonic scale degrees above it. two notes an octave apart have the same letter name, and form the most consonant interval possible<br><br>A succession of eight notes comprising a scale, the eighth one having twice as many vibrations per second as the first. A difference of pitch where one tone has a frequency that is double or one-half of the frequency of another tone. —Free Music Dictionary
This song by Clipping creates a mythology about a group of people being transported across the middle passage on a slave ship. They are thrown overborn, have children in the sea, and evolve into a race of underwater people, never knowing life as slaves in “the new world.” When they confront above-water humans, they find them destructive, as they drill for oil and the ocean starts to warm.
How does this mythology reflect some of Ann Powers’s ideas?
THE BAMBOULA, 1886. Drawing, 1885, by Edward Windsor Kemble.
This is the drawing Ann Powers describes in Chapter One, of the dancing couple in Congo Square. It was one of nine Kemble illustrations accompanying George Cable’s article “The Dance of the Congo.”
Powers suggests that the drawing “has dignity” lacking in many portrayals of Black life by white artists of the time–but also that it, like Cable’s article, is a “fantasia communicating both desire and anxiety” (29). Many cite Place Congo, or the Congo Square, as a primary birthplace of jazz, whose early twentieth-century recordings are thought to be based on the music you’d have heard if you’d been in New Orleans during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Powers is careful to note that “no first-person accounts from antebellum Congo Square dancers survive”–and thus “this central birthing place of American musical performance only comes to us through layers of glamorous misrepresentation.” You might think of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” as a glamorous re-imagining of the era.
If you’re interested in learning more, take a look at Hugh Smith’s “George Cable and Two Sources of Jazz” (African Music vol. 2, no. 3). In any case, Powers argues that describing Congo Square as the birthplace of jazz is overly simplistic: “If it was the birthplace of anything, however, as the nineteenth century slid toward the twentieth, it was of mixed messages and misheard phrases, of cultural preservation achieved only after a rape and a fight” (35).
Powers’s language here is consistent with one of her book’s main arguments, that American music is “a mixed race child” (30). In her words, “this music was a mix, and was about mixing. It arose from those streets and semi-private places as a product of Afro-Caribbean, European, Latin American, and native cultures colliding and mingling” (xxii). She argues that the history of American music is a history of mixing that involves a lot of contradiction–love, theft, virtuosity, violence, innovation, appropriation–all of it connected to the history of race and sexuality.
Beyoncé–and Miley Cyrus, for that matter, certainly L’il Nas X–may be proof that, as Powers suggests, “The real reason American popular music is all about sex is that we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality’s power through music” (xxi).
Preparing for Tuesday’s class
1. Choose two details or moments from Powers’s book that made you think about music in a new way.
2. Listen to the Clipping song “The Deep” that I posted. Make a connection between an idea or passage from Powers’s book and the Clipping’s music you’ll hear in the podcast, hear about in the video review, and the song I posted.
3. Come to class with your take, or your questions, about the “dancing about architecture” controversy. You’ll see what I mean when you read the Markus essay. Is Powers, for example, “dancing about architecture.” (By the way, she worked under Robert Christgau, quoted in the article, for a long time at the Village Voice in its heyday.
4. Be on time (or early). We’ll do record club right at 5. Record club rules state that nobody can enter or exit while we listen.
5. Bring headphones and a device you can listen to music on. Choose a song in advance to use for our writing experiment.
Note: I added those of you who signed up for Record Club the calendar—FYI.
As always, let me know if you have questions. I look forward to our discussion Tuesday.
Welcome to Writing About Popular Music–English 303W. We’ll use this site as the online hub for the course. I’ll post announcements here; you’ll post assignments; you’ll engage in discussion about each other’s posts. We can also share any reading, viewing, or listening materials we think the rest of the class will find interesting.
Note: Everything on the syllabus is here–and more.
Need help with the Commons?
Email us at [email protected] so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
