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CHAPTER 1
Black Nostaljack
This chapter is dedicated to all of the Brothers and Sisters out there who never had enough of '70s black culture.
Sonny Cheeba (b. Salahadeen Wilds, 1975) grew up on 183rd St and Tiebout Ave in the Bronx, not far from Geechi Suede (b. Saladine Wallace, 1977), who grew up on 197th and Valentine. Monotone apartment buildings, row houses, elevated subway platforms, and a dense demographic of blacks and Latinos were markers of their connected neighborhoods. Both had Muslim upbringings; their given first names are variations of the name Saladin, the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, reflecting their parents' Muslim faith as well as the naming practices that resulted from a pronounced wave of black consciousness in the 1970s. As Cheeba recalls about their meeting: "when you meet someone who has the same name as you, and know both what it means, you just run with it." Then, a chance meeting with producer Ski (b. David Willis, 1969) — at that point a member of the hip hop duo Original Flavor — on a Bronx block became the serendipitous encounter that led to the creation of Uptown Saturday Night.
There are several demographic groups in the U.S. that have seen their culture absorbed and transformed by the processes of mainstreaming. Yet, more consistently than any other group, black people in America — from enslaved Africans to American Negroes to Blacks to African-Americans — have been appropriated and incorporated into the mélange that makes up American popular culture. While the cultural practices and signifiers of black Americans will always be a foundation of a larger, American culture, there is a continuous cat-and-mouse game that proceeds as such: 1) racially and economically suppressed black culture creators breed practices and products for the marginalized community around them that is too "raw," "real," and different for the center; 2) the newfound culture is superficially disparaged while its innovative and "authentic" qualities begin to attract many at the fringes of the cultural center; 3) the fresh culture is eventually absorbed or appropriated, introducing financial gains to some; 4) the next generation — still racially and/or economically suppressed — soak in what the previous generation accomplished while forging new practices within and for their community, only for the cycle to begin anew.
Due to the variety of black locales and experiences in the U.S., particularly in the late twentieth century, this progression is usually staggered. There was a time, however, when all four of these stages were simultaneously occurring, providing a rush of community-based, mainstream, underground, and subversive black culture shooting through the media conduits of America. It was a time of cultural awareness and black resistance movements — broadcast on national television, radio, and movie circuits — sowed by the neglected youth in major cities. The increased social, visual, political, and aural presence of potent blackness in the 1970s is essential to understanding much of the culture that has been produced in the past forty years. It is important here to note that Cheeba, Suede, Ski, and all of the principals involved in crafting Uptown Saturday Night were children during the 1970s. In this chapter, we'll show how this early absorption and adolescent processing of that politically vibrant decade as they went through their young adult years in the 1980s (to then become culture creators themselves in the 1990s) was paramount to the nostalgic inspiration that directly stimulated the conception and ethos of Camp Lo.
I feel that the '70s sonically was just wider.
— Sonny Cheeba
There is a diversity to black culture that is not always recognized. Often, black culture is reduced to a couple of practices that are made to represent the totality of black creativity, experience, and values. While the dynamic range of analog tape did, quite literally, produce a wider sound on recordings from the 1970s in comparison to the digital recordings of today, Cheeba's statement refers more figuratively to the wide range of personalities, voices, instrumentation, and lyrics sonically presented on recordings from that decade. Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Bob James, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and others were exploring and experimenting with a range of improvised music and jazz. Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, and the Temptations were all breaking away from the soul templates established at Motown. And, as the home of soul was evolving, various styles of rhythm and blues were being shepherded in by LaBelle, Kool & The Gang, Jimmy Castor, James Brown, Esther Phillips, Leon Ware, The Chi-Lites, Marlena Shaw, and a multitude of bands, singers, and producers that, to mainstream entertainment consumers, seemed unhinged in regard to their particular expressions of blackness. For many black people that were coming of age during this time, the aesthetic shift was apparent:
... there was a freshness to the culture that came forward, a sense of liberation, a statement of self-determination on the part of all those people who felt that they were no longer going to try to appease mainstream taste. Instead, they were emboldened in their commitment to being as Black as they wanted to be: in style, taste, and overall action. The Blacker, the better.
— Boyd 2007, 6
Cinema and Media Studies Professor Todd Boyd's comment speaks to a major reconfiguration of blackness in the American public that extended beyond music. The wideness of black culture was seen and felt through the bodies of Muhammad Ali and Lynn Swann, digested and contemplated through the poetic arts of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and engaged with every week on television through George and Weezy Jefferson and the variegated blackness of Don Cornelius's hippest ride in America. For black children and teenagers who had not already been accustomed to the extremely narrow representation of public, media-constructed blackness, these characters, voices, bodies, sounds, and perspectives provided a rich constellation of cultural and entertainment options with which they could identify. Arguably the most significant — if not the most discussed and referred to — platform for the cultural representation of 1970s blackness was feature films. In the 1970s, before BET, YouTube, and Twitch, if you were a black kid or teenager, seeing a beloved actor or character on the living room console television, or on the movie screen, was momentous.
Black actors, directors, screenwriters, and producers proliferated during the decade and created an assortment of cinematic content intended for black audiences, now known as the "Blaxploitation Films" of the 1970s. Blaxploitation has become a catchall term for popular films of that era which featured a largely black cast and depicted various facets of black life and culture. Regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people directing, producing, writing, or developing a film, the cinematic genre was distinguished by a "you know it when you see it" type of calculation: if you saw a lot of black people, it had to be blaxploitation. And yet, such a two-dimensional view — ironic, considering the greater racial self-awareness of America at the turn of the twenty-first century — actually breeds a flawed understanding of 1970s black film culture which disavows the artistic and perhaps political intent of many black filmmakers and actors. As director John Singleton puts it, "To call every black-themed film made between 1971 and 1977 blaxploitation is very unfair; I think it's very racist. It denigrates a lot of good work that came out of some of those films" (Martinez et al. 1998, 78). Thankfully, over time, as critical awareness of the variety of black themes explored in films made during the decade has grown, there has been a broader discussion of what those films meant at the time and a recognition of the profound impact that they had and continue to have on black and American culture.
The term blaxploitation was coined in 1972. Junius Griffin, the former head of the Hollywood/Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP, initiated the debate over the proliferation of then contemporary black images in mainstream media. In 1971, independent filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles completed and released Sweet Sweetback's BaadAsssss Song and MGM produced and released Shaft by photographer and director Gordon Parks, films that at their most superficial level were ostensibly narratives of empowered black masculinity outside and within the justice system. Following the box office success of those films, Griffin was quoted in an August 16th, 1972 Variety story referring to Sweetback and Shaft as "black exploitation films"; he had read each film as a depiction of and indulgence in black social pathologies that were far from empowering. By the end of that month, Griffin and Roy Innis of CORE (Congress of Racial Equity) formed the Coalition Against Blaxploitation (CAB). The activist group's stated purpose was to create a ratings system for black movies and serve as a gatekeeper and filter for black subject matter in films.
The first film CAB officially identified by the moniker of "blaxploitation" was Superfly (1973), a work that would set the standard for depicting drug culture in urban areas. The movie also established a third archetype for black male lead characters in the contemporaneous wave of high profile black films: the gangster/hustler persona represented in Superfly by Youngblood Priest (Ron O'Neal). Previously, Sweetback and Shaft had codified the tropes of the "stick it to whitey" badass — Sweet Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) — and the badass enforcer of community order — private detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), respectively. In 1973, The Mack unveiled Goldie (Max Julien) as the new pimp/player archetype. From there, versions of these two-dimensional characters proliferated in filmmaking. Responding to these on-film representations of black men, Griffin would state that "the transformation from the stereotyped Stepin Fetchit to Super Nigger on the screen is just another form of cultural genocide" (quoted in McGee 1972). Griffin never completely qualified what "cultural genocide" meant or how it would manifest, but he established a discourse that deemed all cinematic depictions of working class blackness as unrefined or boorish, and unnecessary.
There were, of course, blaxploitation films that were undeniably exploitative in their over-exaggerated and denigrating depictions of black people — particularly in the late 1970s when the plots, themes, and characters became pure derivations of early blaxploitation films. It is, however, more appropriate to take Boyd's and Singleton's more nuanced perspectives and see this era of film as an emergence of black representation on the screen and behind the scenes — one that had both positive and negative effect. Unacknowledged by Griffin, the content and style of those films were transforming and sustaining the film medium for black culture creators and American cinema as a whole (Martinez et al. 1998). After all, those films created a generation of black actors, actresses, producers, screen writers, music directors, film composers, and directors who received their first exposure to the industry through what CAB was disparagingly referring to as blaxploitation.
For Griffin, however, representation in and of itself was not enough. The Coalition Against Blaxploitation's perspective did not allow for an understanding that black people wanted to see their living conditions and situations displayed in a film, or that some black people that had lived through police brutality, black and Italian race contestations in New York City, or urban drug trafficking could in fact recognize the exaggerated essence of the characters in these films. Sweetback, Shaft, Priest, and Goldie are considered the templates for blaxploitation masculinity, a masculinity steeped in gendered chauvinism whose potency was sustained as it trickled down and was adopted by hip hop. While there is a persistent and legitimate debate about the impact of sensationalizing violence and over-sexualizing black characters in film, that debate can sometimes become paternalistic and often fails to document the wants and desires of black creators and consumers, their rationale for engaging with certain content, or their critical understanding of who they are and what they are creating or consuming. In expressing this perspective, Cooley High (1975) actor Glynn Turman explained, "Another thing we were so proud of, as Black people, was to share with the rest of the world what our life was like. It was like a greeting card. This is how we are" (ibid., 188).
Then smoke the shooby dooby with the black nostaljack
Blaxploitation had a feel, a groove, an art, an urban blackness that impacted the hip hop generation of black culture creators — Camp Lo included. Group producer Ski discusses his exposure to blaxploitation films: "being in North Carolina we had a dollar movie theater, we used to go and see them there. But you could always catch a blaxploitation film in the hood." Being a toddler as the production of the early 1970s films ramped up, Ski was immersed in blaxploitation films as the seventies concluded in large part because they were cheap entertainment. Then, once a new technology became ubiquitous in the home, the nascent hip hop generation was even more exposed to 1970s ideas of blackness. Ski articulates this point: "In the hood, you got the theater. Then boom, VHS." The videocassette made engagement with blaxploitation cinema even more accessible, and VHS was a seminal part of Cheeba's early interaction with the films:
Well at that point, I had older cousins. So, if my parents weren't showing me what's crackin', they was. They'd bring in those type of flicks, and we'll sit there with a bowl of cereal and watch it in the morning.
Turntables, drum machines, synthesizers, and samplers are the technologies most often credited for establishing and transforming the sound of hip hop music, but in regard to the personas of the rappers themselves, the VHS tape machine deserves the credit Boyd allots: "When many of today's artists were coming of age in the '80s, the first decade when VCRs were becoming staples in the home, films from the blaxploitation era formed the largest body of work for them to draw on in creating their own sense of identity" (2007, 12).
We got the Emporio and vino just for the caper And yes he be the Cheeba And yes I be the Suede
Different rappers of course identified with different personas from these films, but the most popular links between blaxploitation and hip hop can be found in famous characters that were "gangsters." The term blaxploitation had lumped all black-oriented films from the era together as accentuating and encouraging the social pathologies of black urban areas, and for some, this stream of thought was confirmed when gangsta rap became a dominant mode of expressing youthful subversion. Gangsta rap, these critics might argue, was a tendency toward a glorification of violence that was born directly out of 1970s black film. Blaxploitation was prominently referenced in gangsta rap through characters and plot devices associated with the gangster/ drug dealer and pimp personas of the genre. Priest, Goldie, and Dolomite are three characters that were often referred to, quoted, and sampled in 1990s gangsta rap. Blaxploitation films, then, were a cultural heritage that manifested as a reservoir of influence for hip hop creatives, Camp Lo included. Yet, as Camp Lo were not gangsta rappers, they chose instead to identify with certain other black characters that came to life in films from the era. Suede and Cheeba used their blaxploitation references to present a contrast to the gangsta personas and imagery that dominated hip hop in the mid-1990s; their nostalgia was common enough, but it was an alternative take, all the same.
Cheeba was essential to bringing blaxploitation film culture to the Camp Lo group concept. He was a critical consumer of the content of the era, and very aware of the over-exaggerated and denigrating depictions of black people that often characterized the genre:
I like the style, I like the way cats were talking, and the scene — for every dude they had theme music, you know what I'm saying. So, I was digging all that. I was never really big on the slap happy joints. So I was really more into the Cooley [High] and Youngblood, you know what I'm saying. The Uptown [Saturday Night] — Uptown was more classic, you know what I mean, because you got Sidney Poitier and Bill Cos[by].
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Uptown Saturday Night 33 1/3"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton.
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