“HEAVEN HELP US ALL”: STEVIE WONDER, MICHAEL JACKSON, AND THE MEANING(S) OF MOTOWN IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

Blues, gospel, jazz

We’ll come back to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and the brick through the window. First, however, I want to connect Motown with the larger history of African American music. Rather than yield to its remarkable craft and buy the “Sound of Young America” ad copy, I want to look behind the wall of sound and root even Motown’s most exuberant moments in the struggles at the center of African American history.

White critics writing about soul music (most notably Peter Guralnick in his otherwise brilliant Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom) often see Motown as a sanitized confection which sweetens and dilutes “real” black music in its attempt to attract white dollars. It wants money, that’s what it wants, they sing along with Motown’s first big hit, cowritten by Gordy himself. While Gordy was unapologetically aware of the economic implications of hurling a brick through the confines of the “race record” market, Motown never forgot its black listeners or gave up its grounding in the traditions of gospel, blues, and jazz.

Following Ralph Ellison’s lead, I approach gospel, blues, and jazz not as genres—the relevant bins at your local record store or the musical categories on your iPod—but instead as “impulses,” to use Ellison’s term, that help us process what Leroi Jones called the “changing same” of African American life. Writing on Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Ellison defined the blues as

Though no one can deny or evade the existential isolation of the blues dilemma, the raw candor and hard comedy of the blues artist—whether a songwriter, storyteller, or shaman—offers personal catharsis and communal connection. Positing the blues as black America’s answer to Hamlet’s question—“To be or not to be?”—Ellison’s friend Albert Murray argued that we should not press the blues for transcendence but instead see it as an assertion of the self in a brutal history that denies one’s right to exist, that sees you not as a person but a thing.

Motown got the blues, politics and all. Its genius had grown up in black America. Even as the movement picked up momentum, Motown knew full well how foolhardy it would be to believe that things had fundamentally changed. Anyone tempted to forget that point would have been reminded when someone shot at the bus carrying the Motown Revue through Alabama in 1962; only a year earlier, a mob of Klansmen had firebombed a Greyhound full of Freedom Riders at Anniston.

The blues dimension, in both its personal and its communal forms, comes through with unmistakable force in the music of the Four Tops. The confrontation with brutal experience is clear in laments like “Bernadette,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and “7 Rooms of Gloom.” But if you listen to Levi Stubbs’s voice rather than surrendering to the singalong melody and catchy arrangement, “I Can’t Help Myself” finds its emotional baseline in the struggle with an anguished, addictive love. Stubbs’s ongoing battle with heroin isn’t beside the point. The tension between the joyful sound and lyrics focusing on loss recurs in dozens of Motown classics. You didn’t need a decoder ring to recognize the theme of anguished love in songs like “Where Did Our Love Go?” and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears.” What wasn’t immediately clear to listeners like me, who came at those songs without a prior knowledge of the blues, was the way they, and songs like Marvin Gaye’s “The End of Our Road” and Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run” took on deeper meanings when heard as masked commentaries on the frustrations of the political structures. The toughness of spirit, at once intimate and communal, inspired black people to reaffirm themselves in circumstances which could have crushed the soul. It’s what makes having the blues different from just being sad.

The gospel impulse parallels the blues impulse in its structure but places a different emphasis on the nature of the problem and arrives at a different conclusion. Beginning like the blues in the “brutal experience,” rephrased as “the burden” or our “cross to bear,” the gospel narrators testify or bear witness—the sacred equivalents of blues lyricism—to the powers that saw them through their trials. Nearly every gospel singer, at some point in his or her career, records a version of “How I Got Over” or “Amazing Grace.” The difference between the two impulses is in the point of arrival. Where the blues endures, gospel transcends. If we reach up and reach out, if we hold together in the light of the spirit and do the right thing even when it’s hard, we can find redemption. That redemption entails both personal salvation—even when they stray in their personal lives, the vast majority of gospel impulse singers are dead serious about their belief in God—and a political transformation of the broken world.

“Moving on up a little higher,” as Mahalia Jackson sang, isn’t just an individual or ethereal thing. That’s why gospel rose at the core of the African American freedom struggle long before the Montgomery bus boycott notified the nation. Like the Old Testament prophets, the songs envisioned a world transfigured by love in all its forms. “Music is healing,” observed Mavis Staples, one of numerous singers who followed Sam Cooke on the path from gospel success to pop stardom. “It’s all there to uplift someone. If somebody’s burdened down and having a hard time, if they’re depressed, gospel music will help them. We were singing about freedom. We were singing about when will we be paid for the work we’ve done. We were talking about doing right by us. We were down with Martin Luther King. Pops said ‘this is a righteous man. If he can preach this, we can sing it.’”

Though Berry Gordy did not sign up the Staple Singers, Motown sang the gospel vision in ways that took it from the black churches of Detroit to the record players and transistor radios of white America. The joy of redemptive transcendence radiated from the Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston’s “It Takes Two,” Smokey’s “I Second That Emotion,” and the Temptations’ “My Girl” and “Get Ready.” When I met Reverend James Webb, one of the crucial young leaders in the 1965 Selma campaign, the first thing he did was to sing a verse of the Tempts’ “It’s Growing,” as if I would instantly understand—which I did. The Holland-Dozier-Holland production team with its tambourines, churchy organ lines, and, above all, ability to tap into a spirit with the power to transform a car radio into a temple of love infused a distinctly Pentecostal spirit into the Supremes’ and the Four Tops’ crossover hits.

The deepest connection between Motown and gospel, however, sounded in the voices of the singers, all of whom grew up in and around church. You can hear it in the way Smokey and Marvin and David Ruffin and Gladys Knight stretch the notes on the bridges and during the fadeouts of their songs. The technical term is melisma, but for black listeners (and the small number of whites attuned to the style) it echoed the testifying that signified the presence of the Holy Spirit. Listen carefully to the vocals on “My Girl” and it’s clear that David Ruffin understood that the pretty melody wasn’t the point.

The gospel foundation was especially clear when Motown artists performed for black audiences. The African American fans who filled the Uptown in Philly, the Regal in Chicago, and Harlem’s famed Apollo knew that the singers understood where they came from. This was vividly evident during the annual holiday season love feast (a ten-day marathon with four or five shows daily) when black Detroiters packed the Fox Theater to share their love of Smokey, Stevie, Mary Wells, the Temptations and whomever else was hot at the time. The cross-generational congregation that gathered for the Christmas and New Year’s services at the Fox recognized the stars’ success as their own. Especially in the years before the devastating street battles that laid waste to vast areas of the Motor City in 1967, most of the crowd—familiar with gospel standards like “How I Got Over” and “Mary Don’t You Weep”—believed that crossing over wasn’t just for the affluent. It wasn’t a matter of becoming white, and certainly not of celebrating white cultural standards. You certainly didn’t want to trade Marvin Gaye for Sing along with Mitch, the sonic oatmeal my family consumed every Friday night.

As part of the crossover strategy that made them regulars on the Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, Motown had developed a tightly choreographed, melody-centered approach to live performance. The style corresponded to the early movement’s unspoken “best-foot-forward” strategy to reassure whites that blacks aspiring to full citizenship were “just like everyone else.” Motown and the movement framed this simplification for the public sphere, of course; black Americans needed a fuller acceptance than mere “civil rights” suggested and sought to create a new African American sense of self, too. Beyond that, the whole point of freedom is that no one is “just like everybody else.” But, in the sense that both Motown and the movement intended these messages, they were not misleading. These crossover strategies had to be understood as part of a dialectic with the stereotypes of blacks, men especially, as savage sexual predators, unable to control their animal nature.

Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Sam Cooke carried themselves with a dignity designed precisely to reveal those vicious images for the lies they were. Ellington, Cooke, and Motown’s Smokey Robinson incarnated a type of class grounded in African notions of cool, the ability to maintain a sense of yourself and keep control whatever the circumstances. The mask wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The surface details, like the lessons in decorum Motown gave its artists, were beside the point, and neither Ellington, Cooke, nor Robinson betrayed their deep connection to the black community.

You can see and hear that deep connection on a film clip of Smokey Robinson performing a medley of “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” and Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me” at the Apollo in 1963. Robinson embodied the crossover strategy’s notion of class; he wasn’t faking anything when he sang and moved with precision and grace. When he wanted to, however, he could back off the mainstream caution and take it straight back to church. At the Apollo, Robinson ditched the choreographed dance steps and embraced the physicality Robert Farris Thompson describes as one of the defining characteristics of African diasporic art. Squeezing the microphone, twisting like a man in the grip of the Holy Spirit, closing his eyes and falling to his knees, Robinson testifies to the power of love and pleads for connection. The words fade into near insignificance next to the sound of his voice. On record, Smokey was almost always smooth, controlled; at the Apollo, his voice cracks, he shouts and chokes back (no doubt carefully orchestrated) sobs. Freed from the constraints of the moves they allowed themselves on TV, the Miracles bend low, let their hips gyrate, a choir fully aware of what’s happening outside on the streets providing Smokey with good-humoredly sexy amens.

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, circa 1970.

Michael Ochs archives, Getty Images

That ability to adapt and change, to adjust your voice and your performance of your multifaceted self to different contexts, points toward Motown’s connection with the “jazz impulse.” Ralph Ellison’s definition echoes the restless, searching sensibility which has manifested itself in the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane, as well as Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and Parliament-Funkadelic. “True jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group,” Ellison writes. “Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvasses of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition.” The most aesthetically radical of the three impulses, jazz is rarely at the center of popular music; outside of self-consciously artistic and intellectual circles, audiences tend towards the familiar. If you’re interested in sales, give the audience more of what worked last time out. That’s why so much popular music sounds stale and formulaic—and why most of it hasn’t lasted.

Motown, obviously, has lasted, and some of that has to do with jazz. Everyone who has studied Motown is aware of the Funk Brothers, the group of talented studio musicians who play on pretty much every classic Motown record. Most of the core musicians had been nurtured in Detroit’s vibrant modernist jazz scene. The lineup varied from track to track, but the heart of the Funk Brothers included pianist-bandleader Earl Van Dyke, drummer Benny Benjamin, reed player Beans Bowles, and the incomparable bassist James Jamerson. Consummate professional musicians, the Funk Brothers had an extremely high percentage of “inspired commercial performances,” which challenged the singers, songwriters, and producers to craft performances which would redefine American popular music. The range of Jamerson’s bass lines is astonishing: the lyricism of the solo that opens “My Girl,” the arpeggios of “Nowhere to Run,” the intricate funk of “I Was Made to Love Her,” and the dramatic syncopation of “Stop! In the Name of Love” are only a few of Jamerson’s voices. Legend has it that producers were reluctant to let Jamerson play on a track until they were sure everything else was in place; on a second take, and on a third, he was likely to come up with something entirely new.

The most interesting lessons to be learned from considering Motown in relation to the African American tradition concern the relationship between gospel and jazz impulses. Both are about change—gospel more about getting over, jazz more about breaking out—but the vision of change in jazz is more radical, disorienting. The gospel impulse has a firm foundation in God and community and a clear moral center. Jazz questions everything, risks everything, and our culture and especially our politics are profoundly resistant to real risk. As long as you don’t think too hard about the deep costs and real risks of lived faith, gospel’s vision of change seems sweetly reassuring—a counterfeit gospel vibrates at the root of the ninety million films that have their emotional core in white redemption (the recent crop of Oscar nominees includes The Blind Side and Invictus). Whether jazz has a political audience remains an open question, though the sixties were filled with test cases.

Motown founder and president Berry Gordy playing the piano as group, including Smokey Robinson (rear) and Stevie Wonder (second right), join in singing together at Motown Studios.

Photo by Steve Kagan, TIME and LIFE images, Getty Images

What is clear is that Motown chose the gospel path. Gordy’s approach did not discourage listeners from seeing Motown as a path which led into the system, rather than toward what James Baldwin called the “deep water” of the unknown. Gordy sometimes admitted he had personal problems with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence but he knew it was the approach most likely to appeal to the white folks whose soothed sensibilities were making Motown a commercial success.

And that brings us back to Stevie Wonder, Barack Obama, and the brick.

“Higher ground”: Motown and the election of 2008

Like the records that made Stevie a star, the campaign that carried Obama to victory was powered by a secular form of the joy at the heart of the gospel impulse. The coalition that came together around a politician whose background nicely negotiated “African” and “American”—the fact that his father was from Kenya meant among other things that he wasn’t from Harlem, or Birmingham—allowed Obama to play his changes on the immigrant American dream. Assiduously avoiding the polarized rhetoric that has dominated American politics for decades, Obama articulated a vision of community that seemed to lift us above the brutal divisions of the second Bush era. Like Motown’s early hits, Obama crafted an image that distanced him from white stereotypes of black men as sexual threat; Michelle and his daughters served as archetypes of the American family. Equally importantly, he distanced himself from the angry, honest politics of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Compelled to repudiate Wright’s Old Testament call for radical transformation, Obama delivered in Philadelphia the most deft and delicate speech about race in the history of American politics, bursting the boil of racial tension, and then returned to lining out his liturgy of change. Redemption. Even those with a realistic sense of what it took to succeed in the realpolitik world of Chicago politics set aside their cynicism (realism?) and got on board what they hoped would be a new model of the freedom train. At times, Obama seemed to model himself explicitly on Sam Cooke, who’d pioneered the Motown crossover strategy Berry Gordy honed to perfection. During the town hall debate with John McCain, Obama perched on a stool in almost exactly the pose Cooke struck for one of his iconic photos. In his election speech, he riffed on Cooke’s signature line, assuring us that “change has come.” For a brief moment, it felt like we might actually reach higher ground.

As the years pass, it becomes increasingly clear that the love has faded. This phrase from “I’m Losing You” came back to me accompanied by the haunting intro to the Temptations hit that rose to the top of top of the R&B charts as 1966 ended; the next year, 1967, dragged us into the Detroit riots, the Summer of Love, and more than eleven thousand American deaths in Vietnam. Black rage, free love, endless war. The year of “I Heard It through the Grapevine,” “Purple Haze,” “It Takes Two,” and “All You Need Is Love.”

Bricks crashing through windows.

If I’d listened more closely to Stevie Wonder during the summer of 1966, the violence might not have been such a surprise. Like most white teens, I didn’t know how to listen like that. Other than an occasional Mahalia Jackson TV appearance, I’d had no contact with gospel music; it would be five years before I ventured out from the Stones to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, a quarter century before I recognized the echoes of Dorothy Love Coates’s “You Can’t Hurry God” in “You Can’t Hurry Love.” The events of the next few years would make it clear how many young people of my generation, the people growing up on Dylan as well as Motown, wanted something more. The right wing accused us of picking up orders on short wave from Moscow. They should have been worrying about Detroit.

The Detroit of Little Stevie Wonder’s 1963 “Fingertips (Part 2)” had seemed no threat to anyone. But three years later “Little Stevie” had run off with Bob Dylan: How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man? Transforming the folk revival anthem into deep gospel blues, Stevie made the lyrics his own and black listeners made “Blowin’ in the Wind” a number one R&B hit. For a month or two, it was my favorite song, succeeded by the Rolling Stone’s “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows,” I am mildly embarrassed to say, which is yet another version of the white kids’ tract home blues. Locating the emotional center of “Blowin’ In The Wind” in the gospel burden, the song voiced the growing blues feeling—expressed in the streets of Newark, Watts, and, the next year, Detroit—that even after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, redemption remained a long way away.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” contrasted sharply with the celebratory energies of the songs that had catapulted Stevie to stardom. Recorded live at the Regal in Chicago, “Fingertips (Part 2)” combines the joyous call and response between Stevie and his adoring fans (“Let me hear you say ‘yeah’!”) with a Ray Charles piano riff and one of the most amusing examples of creative chaos on record. Having reached the scheduled end of the song, Stevie sneaked back on stage, a standard move on the gospel circuit that had been incorporated into the shows of soul men like James Brown. As the thirteen-year-old musical preacher sends his syncopated sermon into overdrive, you can hear the bass player, who was taking the stage to back up the next performer, Mary Wells, calling out “what key? what key?” Gospel let loose jazz.

The gospel energy, in slightly more contained form, continued in “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and “I Was Made to Love Her,” with its sly shout-out to the movement. “I was born in Little Rock,” Wonder begins. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, at that point in his life, he’d never even been in Arkansas. As for every other movement warrior, the very words “Little Rock” lifted a battle cry. I don’t want to overstate the case; without question, gospel energy and pop savvy made Stevie a star. But he was determined to use his celebrity in ways that would lead his audience, including a lot of white kids like me, uneasy with the silences around them, to look, listen, and think.

In a pop culture resistant to religious references, Wonder unveiled a singular ability to leave the gospel message explicit without losing his secular audience. By the time he wrested his creative independence from Gordy, he was flat out preaching. In “Higher Ground,” the keynote sermon of Innervisions, Wonder begins by sketching the burdens of a world at war. People die while the leaders lie. Swinging with the ferocity of an Old Testament prophet, he reaches out to God and, more in the driving, determined music than the words, leads the way toward a vision of the promised land that was fading by the 1970s. A big part of Obama’s success came from his ability to preach Stevie Wonder’s vision back to life. Small wonder his stump speech became a pop song.

At the same time Wonder embarked on his quest for spiritual truth, he confronted the brutal experiences of black life with uncompromising clarity. “Living for the City,” the blues response to the gospel call of “Higher Ground,” wasn’t an abstraction to him; there’d been a time when his mother had had to walk the streets to get food for her children. Making it clear that Stevie understood the gospel vision as a call to action rather than a reassuring rhetoric, “You Haven’t Done Nothing”—background vocals from the Jackson Five—dropped the mask of accommodation: If you really want to hear our views, you haven’t done nothing.

The complexity of his gospel-blues-jazz came together in Songs in the Key of Life. Effortlessly montaging blues realism (“Village Ghetto Land”) with gospel aspiration (“Have a Talk with God”), Wonder invokes the jazz ancestors in “Sir Duke” and conducts his own explorations in “Saturn” and, especially, “As.” A microcosm of the album as a whole, “As” begins as a jazzy love song, a vision of a transformed world where nature sings in harmony and love endures without fear or doubt or shame. To that point, the beautiful ballad presents a deeper, more believable version of “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” And then Wonder ups the ante. Midway through the instrumental bridge, the tempo accelerates, the emotional texture shifts to something harder, more complex. When Wonder begins to sing again, his voice, too, has changed. Sounding like he’s aged a century, he comes out of the break to a world filled with doubt and near despair. We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles can make you wish you were born in another time and space. The emotional center of the song has shifted from redemption to the burden. But it’s still gospel. But you can bet your lifetime—that and twice its double—God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed. Insisting that we deal directly with the burdens, Wonder calls on us—everyone who followed his journey from “Fingertips” to Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life—to come correct. So make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it, you’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called hell. There’s no hiding place down here. The brick came through the window and we deal with it or we don’t.

Songs in the Key of Life is the defining moment of Wonder’s career, one that makes it clear he understands the depth of the gospel challenge. A modern Dante, he reports on and from the hell created when humans withdraw from the world because it hurts too much down here. Looking around, he sees the windows, many of them long since shattered, on every block. White folks creeping through the shadows, fleeing into suburban night. Black folks watching their neighborhoods burn, bricks in hand or not. The broken glass owes its existence to the sin of withdrawal that Stevie’s thousand-year-old voice decries. You can throw the brick and run, but you can’t get away from the world or yourself. When the Hendricks family left my street in Colorado Springs, whoever threw the brick probably reverted to hitting himself, or his daughter, his wife, or his hippie son. I hope he just bought a new TV and railed at the six o’clock news.

Having guided us through a corner of hell, Stevie reemerges in the long fade-out of “As,” offering a jazz world where dolphins fly and parrots swim at sea. It’s not a promised land, a place waiting for us to arrive and live happily ever after, but a higher ground that we need to imagine and try to create in a world where the burden’s not going away.

In retrospect, Songs in the Key of Life marks an end both to the great period of Stevie Wonder’s career and to a major phase of the African American freedom movement. That movement, of course, was not born in Montgomery or Little Rock and still plays on, albeit in a muted key. Wonder’s career may have weakened—how could a hurricane never blow any slower—but his music has stayed vital. Hotter Than July kept the movement’s energy alive even as the Reagan backlash bloomed. I love Conversation Peace, but he hasn’t been attuned to the heartbeat of his community in the same ways. If you want to be cynical, you could say he became a cultural monument to be invoked as needed, for the King holiday or after 9/11 or at the Obama inauguration. More charitably, and I think accurately, he’s become an elder that we turn to in need of wisdom and guidance. But he’s no longer a driving force.

Stevie’s transition to the role of national treasure has fundamentally altered his relationship with his audience. When Stevie was young, he reveled in direct contact; there are stories about him asking to be driven into the middle of ghettos, where he’d get out and play impromptu sets for kids growing up in places that reminded him of his pre-Motown life. Although he’s still a mesmerizing performer and was an effective presence at several Obama campaign rallies, he’s no longer in the same kind of direct call and response relationship with his America, black or white; a political rally isn’t a congregation.

Both sides of Stevie’s recent story—the real love he inspires and the problems with the way that love can be expressed in the political culture of the new millennium—came through clearly at the White House on February 25, 2009, when the newly inaugurated President, fresh from addressing a joint session of Congress, awarded Wonder the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Award for Popular Song. Wonder played a set of standards, including “Isn’t She Lovely” and “Superstition,” which injected a reminder of the bigger picture into the celebratory event. Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall. Looking back from the summer of 2010, it’s hard not to see the ominous lyrics rather than the infectious funk which makes “Superstition” a staple of oldies radio—a nod toward the nostalgic past rather than the portentous future—as an emblem of what was to come. Very superstitious, nothin’ more to say. Very superstitious, devil’s on his way.

Obama’s description of Stevie as the spirit of American music was accurate as far as it went. Describing Wonder’s ability to drawn on an “incredible range of traditions in his music,” the President credited him with creating “a style that’s at once uniquely American, uniquely his own, and yet somehow universal.” Indeed, this could be called the American tradition—artists demonstrating the courage, the talent to find new harmonies in the rich and dissonant sounds of the American experience.” American, not African American and certainly not black. Keeping the story personal and focusing on Stevie’s universal appeal, Obama made the Motown move again, framing the story the same way Berry Gordy had in the early 1960s, and Stevie seemed happy enough with the choice. “What is truly exciting for me today,” he said, placing Obama in the tradition of Martin Luther King, “ is that we truly have lived to see a time and a space where America has a chance to again live up to the greatness that it deserves to be seen and known as.”

Like many of Stevie’s speeches, the words, however sincere, sound flat. Trading the spiritual and political intensity of “As” for boosterism, Stevie spoke and talked for a carefully selected guest list in gowns and tuxedos. They wanted oldies, and it might have been a mistake if he’d played anything new or even told his old and still applicable truths. But the tableau at the White House reflected an altered relationship between politicians, soul stars, and their world since the Civil Rights/Black Power era. Until the Obama campaign, there hadn’t been an effective political movement that shared the inclusive vision of the gospel impulse, though Jesse Jackson hit some high notes and Bill Clinton figured out how to look comfortable at the photo-ops. Somehow the new culture of celebrity, which encourages us to attach our identities to what we buy, rather than what we do, how we live, and love, overmatched the moment. We project our needs and desires, even our ideals, into the figures presented to us by the marketing department. We count on them to lead us to the promised land. That wasn’t what the freedom movement or the gospel impulse had been about. Martin Luther King sang it even better than Stevie, but what made the movement move were the actions of ordinary black people and their white allies—nowhere near as numerous as mythic history would have it—who knew that they’d be responsible for changing their own conditions after the TV cameras followed King to the next symbolic battleground.

This constellation of historical and cultural forces makes it hard for pop artists, especially those with deeply private sensibilities like Stevie’s, to maintain an active flow of energy with their audiences.

And that brings us to Michael.

“Blood on the Dance Floor”: Barack Obama’s Michael Jackson blues

Like Stevie, Michael Jackson arrived on the scene in a burst of pure gospel energy. The calls and responses between the voices and instruments on “I Want You Back” feel like something out of a futuristic Church of God in Christ revival. Ralph Gleason in his Rolling Stone review anointed it “the best rock and roll record of all time.” (He subsequently dubbed “ABC” the second best rock and roll record of all time.) Sonically, Michael Jackson made 1969 feel like 1962 or 1963, before Vietnam and the riots, when it made sense to hope that things might really change. For all the joy radiating out from Michael and his brothers, however, it’s worth noting that the record’s already looking back, recapturing something old, not creating something new. I don’t want to make too much of that; after all, Michael didn’t write the lyrics. But, at the very least, it’s suggestive of the changes that were going on in and around Motown.

One of the biggest of those was Motown’s move from Detroit to LA, completed in 1972, which had been in the works for several years, as the people who’d come together at Hitsville began to drift apart. What emerged from the broken Motown family was a very different relationship with the larger call and response—the aesthetic core of the blues, gospel, and jazz impulses. It was complicated by the tensions within the Jackson family. Let’s simply say there were some blues elements at work. Most importantly, Michael, unlike Stevie, didn’t have a political movement to call and respond with. Music can’t create a movement on its own—Lord knows hip hop has tried—but it can certainly feed and be fed by one that exists.

Michael was a matchless musician, a timeless performer, a consummate artist—that can’t be repeated too often. But he was a master working under unbearable and ultimately unsupportable pressure. His greatest work (after “I Want You Back” anyway) charts a struggle to make sense out of a world that mostly didn’t. You can read Jackson as a frontline report on the struggle of the African American tradition—the impulses—to adjust to an unprecedented array of troubles. Jim Crow had died but so had Dr. King, Malcolm X, and the grounded sense of memory that would have made them more than cultural icons. No album captured the contradictions of the disco era—the mix of communal celebration, gospel vocal style, and out and out hedonism—better than Off the Wall. Propelled by a frenetic, irresistible groove, the album’s signature cut, which was written by Michael, revoices gospel determination as personal desire. Keep on pushing ‘til I reach the higher ground morphing into Don’t stop ‘til you get enough. The audience response, measured by sales or dance floor energy, indicates that plenty of people got it. On one level, that’s to say that “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” is pure blues, an affirmation of the self. But dancers aware of the lower and sometimes deeper frequencies were capable of translating the singular you into a communal we. The lines between self-indulgence and self-knowledge, pleasure and pain, gospel and blues weren’t always clear. Especially in the chocolate cities whose economies died more deeply every day, Off the Wall brought the beat for a dance along the razor’s edge.

There would be much more dancing. Thriller’s status as the best-selling record of all time—as of July 2010, its figure of 110 million copies sold worldwide more than doubles the second album on the list, AC/DC’s Back in Black—can obscure the fact that the record is an incisive political statement discernibly grounded in the three impulses. Looking into the heart of Reagan-era darkness, Michael didn’t give in. Where large parts of white America saw a new morning or a return to traditional American values, much of black America saw a horror show that included the revival of de facto Jim Crow, a drug epidemic in the ‘hood, the death of the industrial jobs and public schools that brought them to what E. Franklin Frazier called “the cities of destruction,” and the rise to power of politicians who had defined themselves by their opposition to black aspiration. Jackson sang and danced the blues in “Beat It,” issued an ambiguously political call to action in “Want to Be Starting Something,” and summoned the trickster spirit of Br’er Rabbit in “Billie Jean.”

The video for “Billie Jean” is particularly instructive about both Michael’s strengths and his limitations. Dancing through an urban dreamscape filled with emblems of Reagan era ­paranoia—the most visible sign reads “Ron’s Drugs and Watches”—Michael eludes the pursuing paparazzi and transforms into a new incarnation of Ellison’s Invisible Man. On one level, the video is a jazz-tinged expression of the “changing same,” redefining African American tradition for a new place and time. But where that tradition, especially the gospel impulse, was committed to spreading love, “Billie Jean” is an anti-love song. Billie Jean is not my lover; the kid is not my son. What’s at stake is ultimately personal, an echo of the conservative emphasis on private property and a more distant echo of the prophetic warning of “As.” It’s a blues situation; Michael could escape, but he couldn’t change the world.

The tensions came to a head in the video of Black and White, one of the strangest and most powerful pieces of MTV-era art. Originally broadcast on November 14, 1991, the video opens with a skit featuring Macaulay Culkin as a rock-and-roll loving kid who blasts his father into a multicultural never-never land. A happy-face universalist fantasy—Day-glo gospel—unfolds around a sequence of apparitions: Masai tribesmen, faux South Asian classical dancers, Hollywood Indians, Thais, Russians. Two babies, one black, one white, examine a glass snow ball containing the scene. A brief interlude, juxtaposed with scenes of burning crosses, focuses on Culkin rapping “I’m not gonna spend my life being a color.” We see the Statue of Liberty in the foreground, world landmarks in the background, and the video ends with a universalist fantasy of faces morphing from male to female, black to white to yellow to brown. Who you are, the specifics of your life and history, doesn’t matter. We’re all just people. Leave it there, and it’s a flat-out denial of the blues.

That was the video which, after November 14, most viewers saw. It wasn’t, however, the one Michael made. The full-length version, pulled from the air after its debut, continued for more than four minutes. As the rainbow cast of the first section congratulate each other on a job well done, Michael transforms into a black panther, descends to an underground urban waste land, and proceeds to tear hell out of everything he can reach. His dance moves are pure rage, fueled by the sexual violence which lurks beneath the surface of the American psyche. You won’t find it on YouTube, but the full version remains on HIStory: Greatest Video Hits. The extended version ranks with the most incredible artistic statements of the last quarter century. It tells a profound blues truth about the cost of reducing gospel to a happy-face façade.

The last acts of what played out as a tragedy were sobering. As a prime target—and I use the word advisedly—of the celebrity culture which had drawn Stevie away from his audience, Michael arrived at a place where community must have seemed an utter abstraction. His halting forays into the world gave way to life in the medicated bubble. From time to time, he continued to make good music, and on at least one occasion, great art. Highlighted by the harrowing “Morphine,” Blood on the Dance Floor issued a searing rebuttal to anyone who thought things in Bill Clinton’s America were going just fine. This was the blues impulse at its deepest, but the step was into the abyss.

The Meanings of Motown in the Age of Obama

So what does all this have to do with Barack Obama? The short answer is that in a very real way the early Motown, Stevie Wonder’s Motown, provided the model for Obama’s successful campaign. Once candidate Obama had become President Obama, however, he found himself right back in Michael Jackson’s nightmare.

Obama was obviously aware of the crossover strategy. He posed like Sam Cooke, embraced the core values of America’s professed civic religion, and avoided anything that might have kept his message off the air. Although I doubt either Berry Gordy or Barack Obama were amused by Harry Reid’s description of Obama as someone “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one,” both men certainly understood the point. Motown’s Artist Development unit included elocution and manners in its curriculum precisely to avoid alienating potential buyers with a product that sounded “too black.” Transferring the commercial strategy to the political marketplace, the Obama campaign offered an inclusive vision which didn’t require too much awareness of the blues undertones of the gospel message. At the same time, like Motown, Obama clearly understands the blues realities behind his pop hit, as his campaign speech in Philadelphia made clear. There was a certain risk to saying it once, but once he had, he could go back to the crossover message and not have to say it again.

Selling the image is one thing; sustaining the vision is something else. At some point, keeping the gospel vision real requires dealing honestly and deeply with the blues—which in political terms would require making a whole lot of white people, not to mention some affluent black people, extremely uncomfortable. I don’t see a lot of evidence that Obama’s willing to demand that clarity. Which is to say, he’s a politician. Despite all of the statements following the election to the effect of “he’s going to need help,” “don’t stop now,” mostly we’ve treated Obama like the celebrity—for white liberals, the magic Negro—who’s going to lead us to the promised land. As Moses discovered—see Zora Neale Hurston’s landmark novel Moses, Man of the Mountain for details—that path leads nowhere but into the wilderness. It’s worth remembering that Moses never reached the promised land.

In its early years, Motown—and above all Stevie Wonder—provided an inspirational image of how that journey would feel, what it would sound like to move forward together. But the later history of Motown—above all, Michael Jackson’s telling saga—serves as an equally powerful warning of what can happen if we forget the need for all three of the impulses: blues realism, gospel aspiration, and jazz’s willingness to take real risks. We’re stuck inside of Motown with the Detroit blues again.

One of the songs played at Barack Obama’s campaign rallies, as well as on the final night of the Democratic Convention in Denver, an hour’s drive from where I first bought “You Can’t Hurry Love,” was Stevie’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” It was a perfect choice for the moment, a promise of fidelity to the community that had rallied around him and the vision that had brought them victory. Today, a year after the death of Michael Jackson, with the sound of breaking glass echoing in the corridors of my memory, reflecting on the fact that you can’t hurry love, or change, what I hear is the song that followed the title cut on the Signed, Sealed, Delivered album. Now, as then, Stevie’s words ring all too true: