Compared to What? The Black Rock Coalition’s fight to break the mold text Andrew Scott photography Drew Carolan
MTV, this new medium that was supposed to be replacing radio, wasn’t playing Black artists, however. Vernon [Reid] was aware that attitudes about Black people not playing rock were starting to re- surface and solidify.” Accordingly, in August 1985, together with Konda Mason, Tate and Reid began laying the groundwork for the Black Rock Coali- tion (BRC), a nonprofit organization promoting musical choice for Black musicians. Gathering on Saturday afternoons at Linda Goode Bryant’s Tribeca gallery, JAM (Just Above Midtown)—which was where Craig Street, who would go on to produce for Norah Jones, k.d. lang, and Cassandra Wilson, was working—the newly created BRC began “freaking people out about their ideas of what Black music is,” suggests Tate. “We started to move quickly from Black cultural nationalism rhetoric to ‘What are we going to do to create an alternative?’ ” he elaborates. By year’s end, the BRC was host- ing parties and presenting bands at JAM (the poster for this initial “Drop the Bomb” event features Little Richard standing in front of the Japanese flag) and at the Kitchen. More than twenty years later, the BRC is going strong. With many of the gatekeepers gone (or perhaps just skilfully hidden) in the digital meritocracy that is today’s online music industry, I ask LaRonda Davis, current BRC president, what she sees as the con- tinued need for the BRC. “It’s harder to pinpoint what the obstacles are in terms of race in music,” she admits. “But those obstacles are still there, and the iconography of music is still against Black people. The BRC’s role now and going into the future is one of listening to people and offering resources. People want to know that people are listening to them.” They are. .
Whether White involvement in musics of the African diaspora is genuflection or appropriation (so-called “White theft of Black cap- ital”), from Benny Goodman to Elvis to Eminem, a dance between Black musical advancements and their mainstream acceptance by way of White popularizes has long been on display. White domin- ance of corporate rock music was so complete by the mid-1980s, argues Maureen Mahon in Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race , that Black musicians (ghettoized to such genre classifications as soul, R&B, jazz, and disco) were thought to be incapable of (or at least uninterested in) rocking out—a particularly myopic view of music history in that Louis Jor- dan, Jackie Brenston, Ike Turner, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry were the originators of rock and roll. Such was the cultural climate, however, that guitarist Vernon Reid and his band Living Colour found themselves in as a popu- lar, yet unsigned, New York club act during the mid-1980s. Reid, who had been a member of Defunkt and Ronald Shannon Jack- son’s Decoding Society, and who had recorded a two-guitar album with Bill Frisell (1984’s Smash & Scatteration ), was tired of how stylistically compartmentalized the industry viewed his band. Ac- cording to Aubrey Dayle, who would later play drums in Marque Gilmore’s Blueprint, “By the late 1980s, things had become really segregated. Rock and roll was for L.A. hair bands to the point that Living Colour looked novel.” Village Voice writer Greg Tate suggests change was in the air, however: “It was a real transitional moment in New York in 1985. Black artists like Prince and Michael Jackson had made important statements, Fishbone had gotten a deal, and they, along with Bad Brains, were part of the background radiation.
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