Preacher and Cochise, the central characters in Cooley High, experience Chicago in all its gospel and ghetto complexity; they share the promise and they hear the moan. And Motown provides the sound track. Set in 1964—although the sound track includes songs released as late as 1966—Cooley High opens with the Supremes’ “Baby Love” playing over a sequence that begins with the Chicago skyline across Lake Michigan and ends up in a ghetto apartment. Picking up on Holland-Dozier-Holland’s carefree lyrics and production style, which mirror the “girl group” formula of the Shirelles or the Crystals, these early scenes vibrate with the joy of young black men experiencing a world open to them in ways their parents would never have imagined possible. Energized by Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips,” Cochise, Preacher, and their friends hop a ride on the back of a city bus to the Lincoln Park Zoo, a public space of the sort that the movement was fighting to open in the South. In one crucial scene, Cochise organizes a minor theft by staging an argument with a white woman working at a hot-dog stand. In the South, a similar act might well have been fatal, as the citizens of Mississippi had taught Chicago native Emmett Till less than a decade earlier.
Throughout the first half of Cooley High, the teenagers live out their own version of the Young American Dream. They dance, joke, and make out to the sounds of the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself,” the Marvelettes’ “Beachwood 4-5789,” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Ooo Baby Baby,” and the Temptations’ “My Girl,” which might as well be designated the official anthem of sixties teen lovers, black and white. But where The Big Chill uses Motown to endorse an eighties version of escapist personalism, Cooley High knows there’s something serious behind the pop mask.
One moment in Cooley High captures the depth of the gospel impulse about as well as anything in American popular culture. Cochise and his friends are getting ready to share a bottle of wine before heading to a party. When he opens the bottle, Cochise pours a few drops on the ground, saying, “This is for the brothers who ain’t here.” Defending himself against charges of wasting the wine, Cochise underlines the sense of community that connects Chicago, the black South, and the West African religious traditions he almost certainly doesn’t know much about: “There’s a lotta brothers who dead or in jail and we got to give them a little respect.” The gospel sense of community isn’t limited to the present; it reaches back into the deep past, remembers the moan, and helps the characters deal with the blues realities lurking within every Motown classic.
Even as they celebrate the communal energies of black Chicago, the hopes of the Great Migration, the Cooley High kids and their real-world counterparts hear the moan much more clearly than the characters in The Big Chill, who would have been almost exactly the same age. Where The Big Chill refers to political demonstrations and confrontations as part of a romanticized past, Cooley High portrays the violence just beneath the surface of everyday black life, even in its most hopeful moments. A party erupts into a free-for-all; Preacher’s mother collapses under the burden of her domestic work and her son’s unwillingness to do the right thing; a fight at a movie theater culminates in a stunning image of shadows bursting through the screen into reality; Preacher kneels in the twisted shadows beneath the El, calling out in despair over the body of Cochise, whose college scholarship is reduced to meaninglessness by black-on-black murder. As Preacher reenacts Cochise’s ritual by spilling whiskey into his open grave, Levi Stubbs’s anguished vocal on “Standing in the Shadows of Love” summons up a nightmare of abandonment from the middle of Motown’s optimistic pop mix. Whatever happy-talk the official company policy might have touted, Motown spoke to the full reality of black life in the sixties.
Today Coolidge High School, the real-life site of Cooley High, presents an emblem of urban hopelessness. The streets where the children hoped and played stand deserted. Mothers do their best to keep their kids off the block, to protect them from a violence unimaginable to the older generations. For a sense of how the Cooley High neighborhood appears today, look at the book Our America, a sobering and brilliant montage of photographs, interviews, and meditations assembled by two young black Chicagoans, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. Like Our America, Cochise’s fate testifies all too clearly that The Big Chill’s lament for youthful idealism addresses the least of our losses.
Motown provided a sound track that was a whole lot more politically charged, more complexly moving, for young black Americans than it was for most of the white kids whose money helped realize Berry Gordy’s dream. Like gospel, Motown captured both the joy of connection and the pain that gave the joy its edge. But where gospel spoke to the black audience’s sense that the joy and pain couldn’t be separated, Motown played to the taste of a white audience conditioned to believe that, in James Baldwin’s timeless dismissal, “happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad.”
Although Motown accentuated the positive, Berry Gordy definitely understood the company’s success as part of the movement’s struggle against injustice. As part of the masking strategy, Motown avoided saying anything that might turn off record buyers or radio programmers. Where Sam Cooke and James Brown used their popularity to desegregate Southern theaters, however, the Motown Revue accepted racially separate seating areas in Memphis. Singers sang each song twice, once to the white audience on one side of the auditorium and once to the black audience on the other. Motown resisted its artists’ desires to create more socially explicit music until it became clear that politics, too, could pay.
And anyway, on street level, the songs had always communicated something fresher, more aggressive than Gordy had in mind. Gordy made generous donations to established civil rights groups and expressed respect for “all people who were fighting against bigotry and oppression.” His heart was clearly with King; in 1963, the Gordy label released two albums of King’s speeches, Great March to Freedom and Great March to Washington. “I saw Motown much like the world Dr. King was fighting for—with people of different races and religions, working together harmoniously for a common goal,” Gordy wrote. “While I was never too thrilled about that turn-the-other-cheek business, Dr. King showed me the wisdom of nonviolence.” Frequently, however, Motown provided part of a sound track for the new black generation that often rejected nonviolence with contempt When the Detroit ghetto exploded into violence in 1967, Martha and the Vandellas’ good-times classic “Dancing in the Street” rose up over the carnage. The thousands of Detroit residents who made the song into a call to arms were responding to Motown in ways that clashed strongly with Gordy’s interracial dream. Motown may have presented itself as a Negro enterprise, but it had a black soul.
One of the many things Cooley High gets right is that even those insiders—most but not all of them black—who heard the messages in the lower frequencies of James Jamerson’s bass and Levi Stubbs’s moan didn’t have to concentrate on them all the time. Even if you understood Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston’s “It Takes Two” as an endorsement of desegregation, you could still groove to it on a date. Responding to “The Tracks of My Tears” as a profound expression of the psychological cost of black masking didn’t keep you from singing it when you saw your lover with somebody else. The important point was that there was no dissonance between the personal and the political energies. The power of love you wanted to come down in your own life was the same power that energized Martin and Mahalia and Ella Baker’s beloved community. It was all about love and betrayal and the power of connection, which you felt as much when it was gone as when it was there. That was what the gospel impulse was all about
The Gospel Impulse
A Gospel Impulse Top 40
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