Cross overs coming home

The life cycle of a Black pop star

We (amongst Black people) joke about Black (Jackson 5) Michael Jackson and White (skin bleaching, vitiligo) Michael Jackson. The pop superstar was different when his skin was darker than lighter. His songs, mannerisms, and demographics at concerts changed. Black Michael Jackson sang “I’ll Be There,” “Rock with You,” “PYT,” and even “Remember the Time” — canonically, this music video comes after the bleaching but the song feels like Black Michael. I know this because these four songs find themselves on playlists at Black functions (cookouts, weddings, basement parties). Meanwhile, I only hear “Thriller,” “Bad,” and “Love Never Felt So Good" at my PWI catholic school’s father-daughter dinner dance, Brown’s campus dance, and the adult contemporary (white) radio station.

But I didn’t notice this phenomenon with Michael Jackson. Prince was the first time I realized that Black artists have different personas and vibes depending on who the song should target. “Kiss, “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” and “When Doves Cry” I hear on WBLS. Meanwhile, the only Prince songs some white high school classmates knew in high school were “Purple Rain,” “Little Red Corvet” and “1999.” Going back and forth between white and black parties in high school I heard the difference and saw the songs my dad, a life-long Prince fan, leaned towards when he wanted to jam in the car on the way to work.

All artists who have decades-long careers have some songs that relate to different generations better than others—the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ late 80s and early 90s punk fans versus those of us who heard them for the first time while playing Guitar Hero. Artists who can remain relevant in pop culture have to shift their sounds to stay interesting.

However, I am unpacking a phenomenon that is only recognizable with Black artists of a certain level— Beyoncé, Rihanna Whitney, Aretha, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, and Nicki Minaj. The short version of this is codeswitching also called crossover appeal, also called the Motown Effect. You can hear, regardless of the decade, when a Black artist wants to be Black or not. (Again, “Remember the Time” is a Black a$$ song written at a time when Jackson bleached his skin.)

The direction isn’t always about wanting to sound “whiter” or “palatable to the mainstream.” Sam Cooke, the first Black artist to reach number 1 on the pop charts, held two concerts within a year that had two very different fates. RCA rejected Cooke’s first live album recorded in 1963, originally One Night Stand then changed to Live at the Harlem Square Club. The album wasn’t released until 1985, two decades after Cooke dies. RCA didn’t like how “raw” and “gritty” (Black) the album, now recognized for its greatness, sounded.

He does not sound on this album as he sounded to the white audiences at the Copacabana in either 1960 or 1964. In a Miami all-Black crowd, horns slur and slide the syncopated rhythm as he exclaims, “Put it anywhere,” before singing a raspier version of “Twistin’ the Night Away.” At the famously racist and segregated New York City club, he’s buttoned up. The rhythm bounces cleanly in perfect time and he articulates each note clear as a whistle.

For Cooke, the shifts sound like a return and set the stage for his Civil Rights classic “Change is Gonna Come.” Similarly, Becyoncé released Homecoming and set the stage for her album Renaissance. The shifts happen when Black artists need different things at different stages of their careers.

Except for one artist, Drake is an outlier despite the fact he performs the same shifts and should be included in this post. But, the child actor, turned rapper, turned loser/pedophile staged the same moves as his peers and predecessors. Only now, it’s come to light that they weren’t authentic. I keep coming back to the fact that he introduced himself to the mainstream through Canadian child stardom versus through a Black institution—chitlin circuit, church, HBCU arts school, Atlanta strip clubs, Carnival competitions, etc. Drake has never presented to the public a grounding culture to which he returns for spiritual and communal connection. Visually, this looks like Kendrick returning to Compton after being snubbed from the Grammy’s and living his life and building up artists around him, like Doechii. Meanwhile, Drake’s Toronto high-rise floods as he loses credibility and reputation with seemingly no one around him.

Why do I bring all this up? I am trying to think through an essay about Black mainstream artists Greg Tate wrote about Prince, Eddy Murphy, and Wynton Marsalis unpacking what Black artists must give up or relinquish in search of crossover success. There’s the other end of this trajectory that’s useful to imagine and think through. An artist who must return home once the mainstream (white) has extracted all they could. I feel we’re seeing that now across cultures. Black artists are returning home given the fascist, authoritarian, alt-right regime. But some artists made the wrong gamble and don’t have anywhere to return. Or, they sold their people out in search of a quick cash grab (looking at Snoop Dogg).

Personally, it’s also worth thinking about our own communities, traditions, and cultures we must return to and fortify in this moment.