Introduction: “What’s Going On”
“When would the war stop? That’s what I wanted to know. . . the war inside my soul.” That was the question that inspired Marvin Gaye to create the great 1971 album that provides the title of this section. He could have been speaking for the country. On the cover of What’s Going On, Gaye gazed out over a nation torn by conflicts: the war in Vietnam and a racial war raging sometimes in the streets, but always in our hearts. Nearly three decades later, we’re still looking for answers to Gaye’s question. Voices of despair sometimes seem to have carried the day. Difference is real, they say; there’s no point in trying to change human nature. War, like the poor, will be with us always. That’s just the way it is.
They’re wrong.
A Change Is Gonna Come is my attempt to help renew a process of racial healing that at times seems to have stopped dead. Like Marvin Gaye, I believe that black music provides a clear vision of how we might begin to come to terms with the burdens of our shared history. During nearly two decades of conversations with students desperately seeking ways to make sense of their lives, I have found that black music and the not-quite-white music that responds to its calls can provide many with insight that allows healing to begin. It’s a wisdom grounded in process; it can’t be reduced to “Aretha’s Little Book of Life,” “The Wit and Wisdom of Miles Davis,” or “Ten Ways to Beat the Blues.” The best way to get a sense of what black music offers is to follow its story through the decades that have shaped the world we live in today.
History never happens in straight lines. The lines connecting events extend across space and time in tangled, irreducible patterns. All forms of storytelling oversimplify the patterns, but music simplifies less than most. Structurally, music mirrors the complications of history. Moving forward through time, music immerses us in a narrative flow, gives us a sense of how what happened yesterday shapes what’s happening now. But the simultaneous quality of music—its ability to make us aware of the many voices sounding at a single moment—adds another dimension to our sense of the world. When a jazz trumpeter incorporates a Louis Armstrong riff into her solo or a hip-hop DJ samples James Brown, music transcends time. When a London remix of a Jamaican version of a Curtis Mayfield classic plays in a Tokyo dance club, music conquers space. When “glory hallelujah” is the line that follows “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” and no one finds that confusing, music captures the paradoxes of the human heart.
A Change Is Gonna Come makes no attempt to tell a definitive story. Rather, I look at what’s happened in America since the fifties from as many angles as possible. At times, I stick close to the chronological sequence of events; at others, I deliberately create dialogues between songs released years apart. In all cases, my underlying intention is to suggest useful ways of thinking about the problems that keep America from realizing its own democratic ideals. There are no more compelling statements of human potential than the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But, perhaps because the ideals are so visionary, there’s probably never been a nation that more consistently failed to live in accord with what it imagined itself to be.
Nowhere has that been clearer than in America’s experience with race. From the moment the first slave ship landed at Jamestown in 1619, America has struggled—sometimes heroically, sometimes evasively—with the reality of a multicultural society. The attempt to express the inner meaning of that struggle gives American art its unique power. You can feel it in the novels of Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville and William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Leslie Silko, in the collages of Romare Beardon and the photographs of Dorothea Lange. But its strongest expression comes in music. Since the barriers imposed by legal segregation began to come down after World War II, music has provided a unique forum for dialogue—sometimes harmonious, sometimes angry—between black and white voices.
The primary goal of A Change Is Gonna Come is to tell the story of that beautiful and complicated dialogue. It’s a story of how music radiates healing energies, how gospel and soul and reggae help us imagine a world where we can get along without turning off our minds. But it’s also a story about how history erodes hope, how the lures of money and power tempt us to betray our best selves. And how often we give in.
The music of the last four decades refuses to forget either part of the story. If we forget where we’ve come from, we have no chance of knowing who we really are, what we can become. Frequently the music tells a truer story than the ones recorded in the newspapers or broadcast on TV. Rapper Chuck D’s claim that “rap music is black America’s CNN” applies equally well to the gospel music that powered the freedom movement, the soul music that carried the message of love through the sixties, the funk, reggae, and disco that testify to the confused crosscurrents of the seventies.
It’s not just a black thing. A Change Is Gonna Come places black music at the center of the story for reasons that have a lot to do with history and nothing to do with the melanin content of an individual’s skin. Most of the people taken into slavery came from West African cultures that understood how developing individual character contributed to the health of the community. When West Africans confronted the nightmare realities of slavery, they improvised ways of surviving that have come down to us through the voices of Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke, the instruments of Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, and the communal explorations of Sly and the Family Stone and the Wu-Tang Clan. While those strategies are grounded in the specific history of blacks in what Bob Marley called “Babylon,” they’re available to anyone who doesn’t call Babylon home. Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Steve Cropper have their place in the story that, today, is being passed on by blacks and whites, Asians and Latins. The spirit doesn’t check IDs.
In telling this story, A Change Is Gonna Come uses a conceptual framework derived from gospel, jazz, and the blues. Together, the musical “impulses”—the term originates with Ralph Ellison—provide a way of thinking through the most fundamental human problems. Readers who prefer to begin with the concepts can consult the definition sections (see pages 28, 68, and 132) before plunging into the story. The blues, jazz, and gospel impulses highlight black music’s refusal to simplify reality or devalue emotion. Even when they force you to accept uncomfortable truths, the blues never explain away how things feel. They make you deal with the evil in the world and the evil in your head, help you find the strength to get up and face another blues-haunted day. Testifying to the power of love, gospel gives us the courage to keep on pushing for a redemption that is at once spiritual and political. Gospel reminds us we’re all in it together, though the definition of “we” varies. Jazz is innovation; it refuses to accept the way things are, envisions ways of reaching a higher ground we’re only beginning to be able to imagine.
Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On gives voice to all of these currents. Introducing Gaye’s main concerns, the title cut opens the album with the sounds of a party, the celebration of black family and community. But the three-song sequence that continues with “What’s Happening Brother?” and “Flying High” collapses the distance between the gospel feeling of unity and the isolation experienced by a Vietnam veteran returning to a world of unemployment, political confusion, and drugs. As the story unfolds, Gaye moves back and forth between