29 July 2008
Motown
Black artists plus “white” pop equal musical success
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
The music of the 1960s includes a remarkable spectrum of styles and influences. In Detroit, Berry Gordy Jr. was creating his own songwriting/ producing/marketing organization. Motown was named after the “Motor town,” Detroit, the automobile production capital of America. It came to be one of the most stunning African-American business success stories. The intensity and duration of Motown’s commercial success reflected the distinctive dual thrust of Gordy’s vision.
First, he was determined to keep all of the creative and financial aspects of the business under African-American control. This worked because Gordy had an uncanny ability to surround himself with first-rate musical talent in all aspects of the record-making process, and to maintain the loyalty of his musicians for substantial periods of time. It also worked because Gordy had a shrewd head for business as well as for music, and this leads us to the second element of his visionary plan. Motown’s music was not directed primarily at black audiences. Gordy sought to make an African-American pop music addressed to the widest possible listening public.
It is almost as if Gordy launched his enterprise as a kind of counteroffensive against the expropriation of African-American music and the exploitation of African-American musicians that had been as much a part of the early history of rock ’n’ roll as it had been of other periods in the development of American popular music. And the unique genius of Gordy was the ability to create a black music aimed right at the commercial mainstream that never evoked the feeling, or provoked the charge, of having sold out. With few exceptions, Motown recordings avoided direct evocations of earlier rhythm & blues forms and styles; 12-bar blues patterns are strikingly rare, as are the typical devices of doo-wop or anything suggestive of the 1950s sounds of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, or Little Richard. Yet a generalized blues or gospel manner remained a defining characteristic of Motown’s performers; sometimes it could be very subtle, as is often the case with William “Smokey” Robinson, and sometimes much more overt, as is the case with Martha Reeves. This proved sufficient to give a definite African-American slant to the pop-structured, pop-flavored songs that were characteristic of Motown.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
