Wax Poetics Magazine Redesign

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Digging deeper–into music

Curtis Mayfield: The inside story of his 1972 masterpiece.

June 1


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ISSUE NUMBER SIXTEEN

CONTENTS

T a ble of

06 RE:DISCOVERY 12 CURTIS MAYFIELD 24 SHOCK G 30 GZA 36 THE EAST 43 PAUL McCARTNEY 48 KELELA June 3


ISSUE 16 Publishers

Contributing Writers

Alex Bruh David Holt

A. D. Amorosi Heather Augustyn Greg Cassesus Maeve Hannigan Mijke “Margie” Hurkx David Kane John Kruth Anton Spice Alice Price-Styles Allen Thayer Andy Thomas Andre Torres Dean Van Nguyen Tamara Warren Chris Williams

Editor-in-Chief Brian DiGenti

Editor Andrew Mason

Associate Editor Tom McClure

Designer Eric Banta

Published by WP Media B.V.

Founders Andre Torres Brian DiGenti Dennis Coxen

Contributing Photographers Barbara Alper Heather Augustyn Leo Aversa B+ Anthony Barboza Patricia Beck Janette Beckman Bob Berg Lizzy Bravo Carmen Jesus John Byrne Cooke Tom Copi

2022 Wax Poetics ISSN 2666-3104 WP Media B.V. Amsterdam All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication without prior consent prohibited

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David Corlo George DuBose Martyn Goodacre Bobby Holland Adama Jalloh Justin Kearney Irene Kubota Harry Monty Don Paulsen Al Pereira Gilles Petard Aaron Rapoport David Redfern Ebet Roberts Raymond Ross Steve Schapiro Harvey L. Silver Leni Sinclair Joe Sohm Mathew Vosburgh Peter J. Walsh Neva Wireko Francis Wolff Evan Zott

Contributing illustrators Eric Banta Rich Terrana Smurfo


Editor’s Letter Les sitiorrum atur, occae core cus, sumqui cuptaecearum rerfere perrum re neste ellat rae modi ad quam quam rerovitae ad ernat pa voluptaernam dolore nuscium quiditibusam essinct emporpores autate expero ex et volest molo vollab ipis aligend eseque nisinveliqui dolum explanducia si voluptatur? Ihici is evenimp oreperatum eum corporati con rem fuga. Ur, expedig nisciatibus, occusam, nimuscias ius magnis inihil errum es audandesciis ut venda ipsam ea quis quae preicte eum, sim nisquat laborrovit evenes eum simintum et fuga. Tem fugit ipiciae. Dunt magnatur aribusciis qui cuptatu ribusciet fugitaque laut lab ipitatentus eatae nestiatest, ad molorumqui doloribus nostia cullest, alit, iliqui blaboritatem adis eostia doluptium cone nimilla temodig entiam quamus, tem entis atur am acidessimped que el id eum reptaectint ipit omnis por audictorum, aut pre pa dolorrore natibus que sit officabo. Ventiam fuga. Ut vel erum verrorest, con pori omnias essequo ssitas alia nonsendandi ium rerit, option eum que nullibu santibus et, et, nobit excea dunt magnianim et pa pliquatent, sumque voluptur recepel maxim que sequidis dolo veratur sus es maximus dolorepuda plitiae. Ab is sanihicia pratiis dis autatiatemo maio dolum sam, solorem in est ipsa

Brian DiGenti, Editor-in-chief

June 5


RELEASED 1975 • ISLAND RECORDS • WRITTEN BY A. D. AMOROSI

BETTY DAVIS / NASTY GAL L

ast night, I stumbled upon the impressionistic snip of a documentary on balls-to-the-wall, rock-out, R&B singer-songwriter Betty Davis. The 2017 film Betty: They Say I’m Different looked into the too-brief career, and too-long-insilence retirement of Davis, whose violent marriage to jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and disappointing interactions with

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male-driven record labels in the 1970s, left her spent. She wasn’t the first (or last) woman to be harassed by Miles, or the first (or last) female act to be underserved by the music industry. And if the documentary world is any form of justice, we’ll see those tales told now in living color so that they never occur again. Betty Davis, who passed away at the top of February 2022


at the age of seventy-seven, was hailed for a past that touched upon her auteur spirit (after her eponymous debut, she produced almost everything she recorded), her flamboyance (Betty’s adventurously funky fashion manner inspired Miles to ditch jazz’s suit-and-tie decorum), and a brazen sexuality and rock-funk vibe that made her unplayable on the staid radio programming formats of the day. That hard-driving sex and smoldering raw funk-punk tone certainly held sway over her first two albums, 1973’s Betty Davis (produced by Sly and the Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, with contributions from the Pointer Sisters, Sylvester, guitarist Neal Schon, organist Merl Saunders, and Sly bassist Larry Graham) and 1974’s They Say I’m Different. The one thing, though, that is most noticeable about those two records, beyond the fact that Davis was in possession of the greasiest growl-and-scream this side of Janis Joplin, is that her Just Sunshine label albums actually don’t sound very good. Listening to them in the present day, their production is thin, the material often sounds dated, and the sexuality that Davis portrays can be heard in more hard-core settings by elders such as blues-jazz goddess Ma Rainey or even a ’70s contemporary such as Millie Jackson. Davis’s true and most deliberate masterwork, then, is her third—and last—official album, and her first and only excursion into major-label release: 1975’s Nasty Gal, which was pushed by Robert Palmer (supposedly her boyfriend at the time), Britain’s blue-eyed-soul avatar, to friend and label head Chris Blackwell, for the latter’s Island Records. From its scantily attired photo on the album sleeve to its mellow-harshing R&B, Nasty Gal is pure Betty, at her boldest. Happily, too, as Nasty Gal is the auteur at her most diverse, showing off her full-flower’s potential to a world that, sadly, didn’t care or wasn’t ready, as she never sold much, even as Island Records, at the time, pumped tons of cash into press and radio promotion. If you missed out on Ms. Betty by not jumping on Davis’s hard-chugging soul train, this one’s on you. Eschewing the thin production of its predecessor, They Say I’m Different, Davis ramped up the rhythm stick of Funk House—her longtime live band—and propelled bassist Larry Johnson and drummer Semmie “Nicky” Neal Jr. into more of a foreground setting. Or at least a side-by-side relationship with Davis on a rough song such as “Feelins,” where her rhythm section, along with guitarist Carlos Morales, mimic the singer and double each other’s melodies. This couldn’t be the first time musicians “twinned” each other, but it certainly sounds like a revelation, something Thin Lizzy and noted Davis fan, Rick James, would eventually make their signature. This thick and raunchy early punk-funk work goes one step further in its approximation of Sly Stone’s spacey rainbow psychedelia on the elongated album closer, “The Lone Ranger” (all six-plus minutes!), and the record’s churning title track. On the latter cut, the fiery, background churn parts just enough to allow Davis to open up and howl-growl lines such as “You said I love you every way but your way / And my way was too

dirty for ya now” in a fashion so frightening, you’re not sure if she’s ready to fuck you or punch you. And while self-penned gutbucket funk and salacious soul songs such as “Gettin Kicked Off, Havin Fun,” “Talkin Trash,” and “Shut Off the Light” top the torrid album, the ensemble-written “The Lone Ranger” could be mistaken for jam rocker with an incendiary sting, and “F.U.N.K.” has a dense tribal element that is thrilling in the way Davis—the producer, arranger, and the vocalist— jazzily interacts with her rhythm section and conga player Errol “Crusher” Bennett. Written with bassist Larry Williams, a player also renowned for his country chops, “Dedicated to the Press” finds Davis humorously (I think? I guess?) toying with rock scribes who simply didn’t know how to take a woman, and a Black woman, who did the bump-and-grind with such honest force: “Extra, extra, have you read about me? They say I stick out my tongue quite lecherously /Well, I really don’t know what they’re talkin’ about / I just can’t seem to keep my tongue in my mouth” What’s weird, and inaccurate, about Davis’s complaint is that the press loved her records, Nasty Gal in particular. More than likely, Davis is ranting and railing against radio programmers for whom her schtick was too rock for Black radio (still is) and too funked up for white radio (still is). Unlike Davis’s other albums, which both feature stressed-out rock-and-funk excursions, Nasty Gal holds a rare, gorgeous gem: the slow-burning, churning ballad, “You and I.” Unfortunately (for me) cowritten by Miles Davis, and amazingly fortunate enough to feature the multi-tonic arrangement of Miles’s conductor and orchestrator Gil Evans, “You and I” is unlike anything else on this record, or unlike anything Betty Davis had publicly attempted to that point. (There is an album of Columbia label rarities from before and during her time with Miles on Light in the Attic to look out for.) Just as bold and wild as her more risqué lyrics and music, “You and I” is tender and touching, romantic and never needy, with Davis’s usual provocation and force high in the mix. Yes, she’ll open her heart, and tell her partner how much she loves and needs. But she isn’t about to let down her guard or her gall: “But it’s so hard for me to be me / I wish I could give to you / I’d be free, I’d be free, I’d be free / Ahh, then I could be me” As far as the R&B&rock, the punk-funk, or genre-less album history goes, Nasty Gal was a future-forward, marvelous mess-in-a-dress in 1975, and right on time when it comes to the world of Janelle Monáe, Willow, Erykah Badu, and H.E.R.

That hard-driving sex and smoldering raw funk-punk tone certainly held sway over her first two albums.

June 7


RELEASED 1974 • CTI RECORDS • WRITTEN BY ANDREW MASON

BOB JAMES / ONE I

n the aftermath of World War II, U.S. Army Air Corpsman and music teacher Harold Rhodes developed a simple, portable piano designed for recovering GIs to play in hospital beds. He couldn’t have known then that a descendant of his humble invention would be a central component of a massively influential musical movement, but by the early 1970s, his design had been refined and commodified, and the distinctive sound of

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the Fender Rhodes electric piano was heard everywhere. It was ubiquitous—from nightclubs to pop radio, and nowhere more so than in the sophisticated new style of jazz being popularized by the artists on the CTI record label. Records from Grover Washington Jr., Hubert Laws, and Quincy Jones were a few of the first to utilize this fresh new tone, all courtesy of a young keyboardist and arranger from the Midwest named Bob James.


James first came to the attention of the jazz world at large when he won a competition at the Notre Dame Jazz Festival in 1963. One of the judges was up-and-coming producer and arranger Quincy Jones. Taken with James’s style and technique, Jones actively promoted him, getting the youngster signed to Mercury Records where the very first Bob James LP, Bold Conceptions, was released that same year. By the mid-’60s, James was touring and recording with Sarah Vaughan, a prestigious position to be sure, but one which gave little hint of what would soon follow. Meanwhile, Creed Taylor, a musical visionary famed as a producer with Verve and the founder of Impulse! Records, was embarking on a new venture. Taylor wanted to bring jazz to a wider audience and had a well-conceived plan to do it. He would add lush production values more in line with pop music, including brass and string sections. He would focus on hip interpretations of popular music and familiar classical melodies. The packaging of his albums would be glossy, with artistic photos and gatefold jackets. And the core musicians would be specialists in the new electric sound who could hold down the heaviest grooves. One of Taylor’s first releases on his new label, christened Creed Taylor Incorporated, or CTI, was an LP by his good friend Quincy Jones. Jones brought Bob James on board as a keyboard player and gave him arranging credit on one of the tunes, a significant statement considering Jones’s sizable reputation as an arranger himself. Walking in Space, released in 1969, was a landmark for James in two regards: it brought him to the clear attention of Creed Taylor as an arranger and marked the first time James used an electric piano on record. The electric piano in question did not belong to James, however, and he had barely used one before arriving at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, where Walking in Space was recorded. “I was a sideman and was asked to do it,” he recalled when we talked in 2013. “I never set out to say that I was going to be identified with the Fender Rhodes piano.” In fact, he wasn’t initially fond of the sound. “Some of my favorite piano players occasionally would use the Rhodes—Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans—and I was quite critical of the way they played it, because I could tell that they weren’t really embracing it as a musical instrument. It was a novelty and they sounded clumsy on it, to my ears.” James tried to develop a touch that would take advantage of the sounds that could be coaxed from the Rhodes by playing more subtly. “If I used the same technique that I would use on the acoustic piano, it was too heavy and sounded clunky and awkward,” he explained. When James arrived at Van Gelder’s studio in 1969 and was asked to use this new device, he was determined to not

repeat the mistakes of his predecessors and forge his own style on the instrument. “Maybe that approach contributed to the fact that people liked hearing me play the Rhodes.” The Bob James style, refined over an enormous number of sessions through the next decade—most recorded at Van Gelder’s studio—would influence a generation of musicians and mark a definite sea change in popular instrumental music. “There was a shift in jazz,” James explained, “moving away from the swing-based feel that had been standard up to that time and towards a more modal way of playing.” This groove-based approach was certainly intentional on the part of Creed Taylor, who with CTI was making a deliberate play for the fans of funk and R&B who wanted a bit more of the sophistication associated with the jazz and classical idioms. “Rock rhythms were also starting to find their way into jazz songs,” James said. “We were playing even sixteenth-note grooves as opposed to swing.” This funkier feel was de rigueur on CTI releases, as was a liberal sprinkling of covers of popular R&B and rearranged versions of classical standards—both of which would make appearances when in 1974 Bob James finally got the opportunity to record his first record as a leader since 1965’s Explosions. Recorded at Van Gelder Studios, Bob James’s One finally brought into focus a group of stellar musicians who, under the direction of their leader, by then renowned for his unique touch on the electric piano, would record an undisputed jazzfunk classic. “Valley of the Shadows” leads off the album, a complicated song that challenges the listener right off the bat with multiple contrasting movements. The improvisation within the framework of James’s composition sets up numerous absorbing moments between the rhythm section of bassist Gary King, drummer Steve Gadd, and James’s keyboard. “These guys were amazing,” James said. “Gary King was like the Rock of Gibraltar, I had supreme confidence that he was right at the bottom of every groove.” Hip-hop production luminaries DJ Premier and, appropriately, DJ Shadow have found much to admire in this piece of baroque funk. Perfect illustrations of Creed Taylor’s policy of cover versions, “Feel Like Making Love,” “Night On Bald Mountain,” and “Soulero”—a funked up arrangement of, you guessed it, Ravel’s “Bolero”—were pushed to radio, with mild success. But lurking in the final slot on the B-side of One, a space traditionally reserved for cuts with little commercial potential, was a track built around a relentless, off-kilter, menacing seven-note riff. “Nobody paid any attention to it,” James recalled. “I didn’t

The Bob James style, refined over an enormous number of sessions through the next decade—most recorded at Van Gelder’s studio—would influence a generation of musicians and mark a definite sea change in popular instrumental music

June 9


think it had any kind of hook at all that was special.” Despite James’s initial appraisal, at some point in the ’70s amateur DJs in the parks of New York City—the DJs who were unknowingly soundtracking the birth of hip-hop—began playing it, focusing on Idris Muhammad’s massive drum break. “Idris’s groove was awesome,” James admitted. “It was so simple and so catchy, it was irresistible.” As sampling became prevalent in the exploding hip-hop scene of the mid-’80s, the song,

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which Creed Taylor named “Nautilus” for its submarine-dive intro and deep, undersea mood, was repeatedly plundered, with virtually every loopable bit of its five-minute duration being used in one song or another. The mesmerizing, slowly unwinding keyboard solo that takes up the middle portion is a perfect example of James’s special touch on the Rhodes, and an apt reminder of how far we’d come from Harold Rhodes’s simple invention.


RELEASED 1979 • BRUNSWICK RECORDS • WRITTEN BY MARK McCORD

VAUGHN MASON / BOUNCE, ROCK, SKATE, ROLL V

aughan Mason may have been a genius. He readily admitted that he couldn’t sing or play an instrument to save his life. But he was incredibly smart and business savvy. In the summer of 1979, he was a recording engineer, and he worked in a record store as well. He had this idea that kept tugging at him. The problem was that he knew that what he wanted to do would be walking a very fine line legally as far as copyright laws went. “There is nothing in copyright law that says that you can’t copy the feel of a record,” he told me in a phone interview. “It is against the law to copy a composition’s sound note for note without permission,” he told me, “but there is nothing that says you can’t copy a record’s feel. Musicians have been doing that for years.” Let’s note that the recent ruling against Pharrell and Robin Thicke for their Marvin Gaye soundalike “Blurred Lines” calls this previously held belief into question. His idea was to copy the feel of the most popular song on the radio—in this case, it was Chic’s “Good Times.” “Now, I can’t play music or write music,” he told me. So he took a piece of paper, a pencil, and a ruler and made grids up and down and across the sheet. On the left side of the sheet on the first line, he wrote “kick.” On the next line under it, he wrote “snare.” Under that one, he wrote “hi-hat,” and under that, he wrote “bass.” Then he played the song “Good Times”

over and over and over and over again. He mapped the whole song out by putting dots on the grids, ending up with five pages of data. Then he assembled the musicians. He had a drummer play just the kick to a metronome for about ten minutes. Then he recorded the snare. After that, the hi-hat. Although he never could remember which specific one it was, he knows they used a keyboard for the bass line. However, what he never forgot was the inspiration for the lyrics. The Wall Street Journal published an article about the popularity of roller skating: “Three hundred thousand roller skates have been sold,” the article read. It just so happened that the hottest craze at the time was roller disco. “That’s it!” Mason said. “A song about roller disco.” Nice idea so far, but it was kind of strange coming from a guy who couldn’t skate. But that didn’t matter, because there was only one more element he needed. It came to him at a party. “The most popular dance back then was called the Rock,” he told me. “It was the laziest dance ever. You didn’t need to have any rhythm to do the Rock. I used to see white people out in the middle of the floor doing the Rock—it was that damn easy.” With all elements in place, he recruited the musicians, among them a singer named Jerome Bell. While Mason was producing the tracks, he enlisted Bell to write the song’s lyrics. Forty years later, “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” is still a skater’s anthem.

June 11


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Excerpted from Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield, by Todd Mayfield with Travis Atria, courtesy of Chicago Review Press

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ew York, late 1971—For Curtis Mayfield, the beginning of the new decade was a time of great change. He had entered uncharted territory in every aspect of his life. He had quit his group, the Impressions, and moved far from his relationships with bandmates Fred Cash and Sam Gooden. He had founded his own label, Curtom, with longtime manager Eddie Thomas (the “Tom” in Curtom), but now even his relationship with Eddie hung on a string. He split from my mother, moved into the basement apartment of a building he owned nearby, and grew close to people who didn’t have his best interests at

heart. But at the same time, he had never been more successful. And he now lived and worked on his own terms. He had quit the Impressions in large part to spend more time at home working at Curtom, but with the wild success of his first three solo efforts—Curtis, Roots, and Curtis/Live!—he found himself touring as much as ever. After one of his last shows of the year, a gig at Lincoln Center in New York City, writer Phil Fenty and producer Sig Shore slipped backstage with a script in hand and a proposition. “We hope that you might be interested in scoring this movie,” they said as they handed him the script. My father almost fell out of his chair. He’d wanted to get into films for years—desperately so after Isaac Hayes’s smash hit Shaft—and it had finally come.

SUPERFLY The inside story of Curtis Mayfield’s masterpiece.

AT

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The result would define him for the rest of his life. Flying home, the Super Fly script in his lap, Dad couldn’t stop the music from coming. “Wow, was I so excited,” he said. “I’d written a song just flying back home from New York. It took me hardly no time to prepare the songs and that’s how it began . . . I began writing immediately upon reading the script. I was making notes and coming up with the songs already. That was just a fantastic adventure for me.” Reading the script, he felt drawn to the main character, Youngblood Priest. By name alone, Priest was an obvious archetype, a broadly drawn amalgamation of every drug dealer and pimp who stalked the ghettos. The main difference was, Priest wanted out. Curtis said, “I didn’t put Priest down. He was just trying to get out. His deeds weren’t noble ones, but he was making money and he had intelligence. And he did survive. I mean all this was reality.”Director Gordon Parks Jr. and Curtis Mayfield on the set of Super Fly. Even closer to reality, my father felt, was Priest’s fall guy, Freddie. “Reading the script, I started feeling very deeply bad for Freddie,” he said. “Between his friends, his partners, and his woman, he was catching a hard time. ‘Freddie’s Dead’ came to me immediately. While you might not know a lot of pimps and drug dealers, we do meet quite a few Freddies.” Dad crafted “Freddie’s Dead” on the Fender Rhodes piano he kept in his basement bedroom of the three-flat house— he said it only took him five minutes to write. He liked to work late into the night, long after we’d fallen asleep. In the morning, sometimes we’d see the aftermath of a songwriting session. As my brother Tracy recalls, “I remember all this legal paper balled up everywhere on the floor. And I remember picking one up to read it and it just said ‘Freddie’s

Dead’ on it. I was like, ‘Who’s Freddie? Who’s dead?’” Dad had another song already written—“Ghetto Child”—which he tried to cut during the Roots sessions. As he explained, “I started writing it three years ago. It never seemed to come out right, though. And then, all at once, while I was scoring the movie, everything fell into place.” Renamed “Little Child, Runnin’ Wild,” it became the leadoff track on the album. To score the rest of the film, Dad received rushes of the scenes and watched them on a Sony VO-1600, a huge, heavy, professional piece of equipment that was a precursor to the VCR. The rushes came on three-quarter-inch videocassettes, each one the size of a book, featuring a timeline running across the bottom of the screen so he could sync the music exactly where he wanted in each scene. He had the machine set up in a room he used as a home studio, and sometimes he’d let us watch the tape while he worked. Other times, my brothers and I would sneak in and watch the famous bathtub love scene while he was napping. On top of giving him a chance to score his first movie, the Super Fly script called for a cameo performance featuring “The Curtis Mayfield Experience,” which would mark his first time on the silver screen. Because of scheduling conflicts, the band had to shoot the scene for the movie before recording the album, so late in December 1971, Dad called his band and said in typical last-minute fashion, “Hey, we’re going to go do this movie. We got to go to New York.” Curtis Mayfield performs “Pusherman” in the film Super Fly, 1972. Photo via Cache Agency. Dad had written a song called “Pusherman” for the scene, but he hadn’t had a chance to work it out in the studio. Filmmaker Gordon Parks Jr. needed a finished song for the shot,

As usual, Curtis brought in cassettes with snippets of guitar licks and vocal ideas

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though, so the band booked a session at Bell Sound Studios in New York to cut it. Guitarist Craig McMullen recalls, “I think we went in at night, because we had to go do the movie thing the next day.” The band hadn’t heard any of the other songs my father had written, but if “Pusherman” was any indication, they were in for something special. When they arrived on set, as Craig recalls, “That’s when we found out what movie making is all about. We’re just standing there, and they’re adjusting the lights. They’re trying to get all the entrances right and things.” The band mimed the song while the actors attempted to nail the scene, take after take. The next day, they did it again. As my father learned on the first Impressions’ tour, what once seems glamorous often becomes mundane when viewed up close. Movies were no different. After the taping, my father wanted to go home and finish the soundtrack, but a month of touring in Europe and writing a new album for the Impressions (with new lead singer Leroy Hutson) got in the way. By spring, he was finally back at work on the soundtrack and began to receive more rushes of the film. He didn’t like what he saw. He said, “Reading the script didn‘t tell you ‘and then he took another hit of cocaine’ and then about a minute later ‘he took another hit.’ So when I saw it visually, I thought, ‘This is a cocaine infomercial.’” He was no prude, nor from what I heard was he a stranger to cocaine—I was told he’d begun experimenting with it by the time of Super Fly, and soon he would enter a period of heavier use. He had also lived the truth of the movie’s seedy scenes during his childhood in the White Eagle. “I didn’t have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things that Superfly is about,” he said. “It was easier than most scripts because it was about an environment that I knew. It’s not that the ghetto is thriving with pimps and pushermen, it’s just they are a very visible part of the ghetto. If you stand on the corner, you’re gonna notice the pimp, because he’s so bright. If he goes by twice, you’re


gonna remember him and get to know him, while you might not remember somebody else who goes by five times. And you have to understand that half of every big city is the ghetto.” Still, he wanted no part of a movie that glorified these things. Instead of backing down, he doubled down. He crafted his songs into character studies, each one becoming its own movie in miniature. In a way, he became the film’s conscience. “I did the music and lyrics to be a commentary, as though someone was speaking as the movie was going,” he said. “It was important for me to counter the visuals—to go in and explain it in a way that the kids would not read it as an infomercial for drugs.” With the message in place, he needed the music to match, so he returned to the man who had done more for his music than anyone—Johnny Pate. Johnny still lived in New York, working as an A&R man, producer, and arranger for MGM Records. He got a call, and the soft, high voice on the other end said, “I can’t do it without you.” Johnny dropped his work and flew to Chicago. As usual, Curtis brought in cassettes with snippets of guitar licks and vocal ideas. For the first time though, when Johnny heard the songs, he felt little inspiration to write arrangements. “Most of [the songs had] very few chord changes, very few melodic lines,” he said. “‘Pusherman,’ ‘Superfly,’ ‘Freddie’s Dead,’ if you listen to these closely enough, Curtis was almost rapping through these things.” Johnny did get excited about “Eddie You Should Know Better”—“You’ve got chord structure, you’ve got beautiful chord changes, plus a great melody,” he said—but for the rest of the material, scoring two-chord songs didn’t leave a lot of room for a jazz cat with a full orchestra at his fingertips. That simplification—the emphasis on rhythmic rather than chordal movement—had already pushed my father’s music into new realms. It did the same for Johnny’s arrangements. Despite the difficulties, or perhaps because of them, Johnny created unforgettable backdrops

to the songs, jaw-dropping in brilliance and complexity. Harps, oboes, strings, horns, bells, and flutes do as much to paint a picture as the lyrics themselves. The arrangements helped create an intricate tapestry of sound unlike anything Dad and Johnny had yet made together. Part of that intricacy came from the method of recording. “We had the

chance to cut with a live orchestra,” Craig says. “The advantage of it is, if you have a full orchestra, when you place your licks, you don’t have to worry about your licks bumping. You can hear everything that’s going to go down.” Another part was how close my father, Craig, Henry, and Lucky had become from touring together. “As a guitar

June 15


player, I wanted to make sure I had my stuff right,” Craig says. “I played on every song. Curtis would drop out sometimes and just sing. He knew I could do that. I was the only guitar player on ‘Freddie’s Dead.’ Curtis was in the control booth and Phil Upchurch couldn’t be there, so I was the only one out there. So, I knew exactly where to put all the nuances, the little licks. The way we worked was that Curtis would play something and he relied on me and Lucky and Master Henry to put our parts onto his thing. He might have an idea, but in the end we was like a team, man. You don’t even have to say nothin’. We just do it. I already knew what he was getting ready to do, and I can counter with something else.” Engineer Roger Anfinsen recalled working in a crammed studio with as many as forty musicians on some songs. Dad and the band were crowded in by harps, horns, strings, flutes, and other

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players, and background singers had to sing from the control booth. “This was the only time I worked in this fashion with Curtis,” Anfinsen said. “It seemed about capturing a certain electricity, a live energy.” They cut the songs in a mere three days, after which my father perfected his vocals. Perhaps counterintuitively, writing to a script and telling other characters’ stories allowed Dad to craft his most autobiographical lyrics ever. He wasn’t just writing about Priest and Freddie; he wasn’t just writing about junkies and pushers; he was writing about himself and his childhood. He was writing about the things he’d seen growing up in the White Eagle, the things he’d experienced living in one of the most segregated cities in the North and traveling through the South during the darkest hours of Jim Crow. His autobiography shines through in lines like, “Hard to understand / What

a hell of a man / This cat of the slum had a mind / Wasn’t dumb,” and “His mind was his own / But the man lived alone,” and “Can’t be like the rest is the most he’ll confess.” He also recognized his adult life in the film rushes. In one scene, a street gang approaches Priest and tries to extort money in exchange for protection. My father had just lived through that exact trouble. One day, he walked into Curtom and found the Blackstone Rangers, one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs, lurking in his office. They demanded money. Just like when the promoter in Atlantic City waved a gun in his face, my father remained cool. He had steel of his own in his desk drawer—a silver revolver with a white handle. He often kept it close in case a situation got out of hand. At home, he tucked it under his mattress or stashed it in the drawer next to his bed. Sometimes he’d even bring it on family


outings for safety. One day, he showed it to me—“You see that?” he said. “Don’t touch it.” Still, he wanted no part of the Blackstone Rangers. He cut a deal. “I’m not giving you any money,” I recall him saying, “but I’ll play a concert in Chicago and you can take the money and help the neighborhood.” They never bothered him again. That didn’t mean he was safe, though. A black man making the money he made remained a conspicuous target, especially in a city with such strong Mafia ties. After fending off the Blackstone Rangers, Dad found himself in the shady clutches of Queen Booking again—the same company he bought into with Jerry a decade before and ultimately left because of the way the Mob took advantage of black artists. Now, Queen offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse—a six-month contract to book a tour of white-college dates. The deal was short-lived, though, since Queen never followed through. Dad soon switched to William Morris, one of the biggest bookers around, and they scheduled more than eighty white-college shows. He hadn’t given up on getting over to white crowds in America the way he did in Europe. Though he navigated that treacherous world of gangsters and mobsters without losing control of himself or his money, he couldn’t always navigate personal relationships with such finesse. While preparing Super Fly for release, Dad and Johnny got into an argument over the album’s two instrumental tracks, causing an irreparable rift in their relationship. The first of those tracks, “Junkie Chase,” is a classic piece of blaxploitation music—all orchestral hits, rumbling bass, and wah-wah guitar. The second, “Think,” features a guitar part that would surely have made Hendrix take notice. Both songs owe quite a bit to their orchestral arrangements, and Johnny wanted cowriting credit on them. My father refused to give it to him. Curtis the friend might

have appreciated Johnny’s contributions; Curtis the businessman didn’t share credit—not with Carl Davis, not with Fred and Sam, and not with Johnny. When the final product hit stores, the album sleeve read, “Successfully arranged and orchestrated from the original dictations of Curtis Mayfield by Johnny Pate.” Johnny refused to back down. “I orchestrated and arranged the score to Superfly, but Curtis Mayfield got all the credit,” he told a reporter a month after the album’s release. “Everybody is ego tripping and taking credit for things they didn’t do.” By December, Dad filed a lawsuit in New York’s US District Court to declare himself the sole author and publisher of “Junkie Chase” and “Think.” He also went after one million dollars’ worth of damages for alleged defamation of character. His lawyer, Lew Harris, told Jet magazine, “We aren’t denying that Johnny Pate performed a very useful service in the arranging of the songs, but he was an author for hire; he was paid for his service.” In the same article, Johnny said, “I am entitled to half of the composing rights for those two tunes, because I wrote the melodic line for both.” Publicity poster for a Curtis Mayfield concert, 1973. Image via John Kisch Archive/Getty Images.

just a poor way of doing something, as far as I’m concerned.” That was how my father had always done business, though, and that was how he’d keep doing it. Even near the end of his life, in an interview for the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary, he framed the debate on his terms. “Most arrangers that I have used in the past will come in with their own contributions, but I was always careful to make changes and be assured that the music was still mine and there was no conflict in the music that was arranged against the basic rhythm pattern in the song itself,” he said. “There’s a Curtis Mayfield song that really has no singing or lyrics, which is called ‘Think’ from the Superfly album that I especially appreciate when I listen to it. My art and my creativities were totally something that was of my own heart and mind. I could never let anybody dictate to me what I should write and how I would write it.” Sharing writing credit would have meant sharing revenues, and Curtis had toiled his whole career to avoid that. As a result, he and Johnny would never work together again. The Super Fly soundtrack dropped a month before the movie and shot to the top of the R&B chart. It was an odd way to orchestrate a release, but a canny move in this case. Making a blaxploitation film came with tremendous obstacles, and the massive pre-publicity from the soundtrack helped overcome them. Fenty and Shore had that in mind when they handed my father the script in New York. They knew working with one of the hottest artists in the world would help them secure backing, and as Dad wrote and cut the soundtrack, Fenty got that backing. He went to Nate Adams, who owned an employment business in Harlem. Adams said, “I had a good picture of what was happening on the streets, as well as what was happening in the business world.” He signed on. Fenty also had producer Sig Shore on his side. He said, “Sig was ideal for this. He knew the market. He knew how to get

A black man making the money he made remained a conspicuous target, especially in a city with such strong Mafia ties In Craig’s eyes, Johnny had a point. “Curtis couldn’t write music down,” he says. “So, he wasn’t going to orally translate those harmonies or those hits. You can listen to it and tell this is some big-band arranger putting this down. So, really, after all the things those two had done like brothers in the past, it shouldn’t have been a problem. That was

June 17


You saw this mass of people with police trying to stop them breaking into the theatre trying to see this movie.”

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things done. He knew how to hustle, how to put together an independent project with no money.” Shore received money from two black dentists that lived in his neighborhood. Gordon Parks Sr. also pitched in roughly $5,000. “It was really a struggle from the very beginning,” Shore said. One struggle was overcome easily— casting the lead role. Fenty went to his friend Ron O’Neal, who was trained as a Shakespearian stage actor. It went without saying that Super Fly was not Shakespeare, but O’Neal felt a connection to Priest. He had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment on the West Side of New York and recognized himself in the script the same way my father did. “He really understood what that part was all about,” Shore said. They overcame another struggle with help from an unexpected place. In need of a superfly hog—the sweet street-hustler car they felt a character like Priest would drive— Adams serendipitously ran into a real-life pimp with just such a ride. “I can remember sitting in the shoeshine parlor in the Theresa Towers, and a gentleman pulled up with this black Cadillac El Dorado with these big headlights,” Adams recalled. “This gentleman walked in, and he was slick as he wanted to be. A guy by the name of KC. He sat down next to me on the rack, I’m getting my shoes shined, you know, so I go, ‘Hey, man, that’s a bad ride. We thinkin’ about doing a movie, and I’d like to maybe let them look at your car to use in the movie.’ So, he gave me his number. It took me three weeks to get in touch with him. Consequently, when we finally talked, he said, ‘Man, ain’t no niggas makin’ no movies. You jeffin’ me?’” After Adams convinced him, KC let them use his car, which features heavily in the film. Fenty decided he wanted more than just the car, though. “We said, ‘Let’s put KC in the picture,’ because KC was wonderful,” Fenty said. “When we ran out of money, KC would just, [snaps fingers], ‘Buy ’em some food.’ He would buy food, he had his own wardrobe, and he knew what to say.”

Even so, production difficulties haunted the actors and crew. “When you shoot a picture like this, you’re very flexible,” Fenty said. “If you can’t get in someplace, or if you get thrown off of a corner, you can’t just fold it and wait for tomorrow. You got to find something else you can get.” Adams recalled, “We didn’t have anything but raw bones and guts. We didn’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We can shoot this scene over.’” They didn’t have the luxury of a professional wardrobe, either, so most of what the actors wore onscreen came from their own closets, or from Adams’s bevy of fly vines. After Warner Brothers agreed to back the film, they held a sneak preview in Westwood, a predominately white California neighborhood. Reviews came back tepid at best, and Warner Brothers threatened to back out. They were, after all, taking a chance on backing such a movie. Shore wheedled, saying, “What the hell did you expect in that theatre? This is a white-bread town.” As he recalled, “The next picture they screened it with was with Shaft at the Fox Theatre in Philadelphia. Of everybody that came out, they were all raves.” Spurred on by my father’s music, the movie caused a fracas when it opened in New York in August 1972. “We decided we would go down and watch the lines for the movie,” Fenty recalled. “They ran out of tickets, and there was still a lot of line left. Somebody went around the side of the building, and they broke the door open. You saw this mass of people with police trying to stop them breaking into the theatre trying to see this movie. That was a very, very high moment for Gordon and myself. That was our little picture, and people were actually breaking into the movies to see it.” Super Fly briefly knocked off The Godfather as the highest grossing movie in the country, and it was the third-highest grossing film of 1972. Dad took Tracy, Sharon, and I to the movie’s premiere in Chicago. Even though I was only six years old, I still remember the excitement and electricity in the air. I had seen many of the scenes on video while he was

in the process of making the soundtrack, but seeing it on the big screen with the score made it seem bigger than life. Obviously, Super Fly wasn’t meant for a young audience, but I believe Dad was so proud of his accomplishment that he wanted to share it with us. While the movie follows a pusher trying to escape street life, beneath the surface, it is about the same things my father had been singing about since songs like “The Other Side of Town” and “Underground”: the dynamics of power—who has it, who needs it, who is denied it. The movie has a strong moral center. At the end, Priest wins through intelligence and cunning, not violence— although he did give the cops a good beat down before driving off with his life, woman, and money intact. As my father noted, “In all the films at that time black people were portrayed as pimps and whores, who usually got ripped off at the end. Superfly had enough mind to get out of all that, and let the authorities know that he saw through their games.” In other words, unlike every other movie, this time the black man won. Crowds loved it. Critics did not. They’d fallen hard for Super Fly the album, but a furor erupted over Super Fly the movie. The Times of London said, “You could find more black power in a coffee bean.” Vernon Jarrett, a black reporter for the Chicago Tribune, called it a “sickening and dangerous screen venture.” Tony Brown, dean of Howard University’s School of Communication, said in a Newsweek cover story, “The blaxploitation films are a phenomenon of self-hate. Look at the image of Superfly. Going to see yourself as a drug dealer when you’re oppressed is sick. Not only are blacks identifying with him, they’re paying for the identification. It’s sort of like a Jew paying to get into Auschwitz.” Critics couldn’t stop the movie from influencing the culture, though. Soon, black men everywhere wore Priest’s hairstyle, “the Lord Jesus,” with long, flowing locks curled and pressed. Cadillacs, decked out à la Priest’s superfly

June 19


hog, crept down ghetto streets across America, moving just slowly enough to give the whole neighborhood an eyeful. The clothing of the street hustler became mainstream fare, too—suits with wide lapels and intricate stitching, mink coats, and platform shoes with three-inch heels. That last sartorial trend couldn’t have come soon enough for my father, who at five-foot-seven loved to wear platform leather and suede boots. In those boots, he stood two or three inches taller. Of course, he wasn’t the first or last artist to surreptitiously enhance his height. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Prince took advantage of heels in the same way. Critics also couldn’t stop a generation of kids who lived through the realities on the screen from absorbing every nuance. A decade later, they’d dig through their parents’ records and chop up beats they found from Curtis, James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and others, to create a new art form—hip-hop. While James Brown was arguably the most influential of the group, an especially strong link exists between Super Fly and hip-hop. The movie’s gritty depiction of street life, the way Ron O’Neal swaggers through every scene as if he owns the entire world, the gratuitous martial arts scenes, and Curtis’s slick, streetwise songs—these elements are imprinted on KRS-One’s Criminal Minded, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Nas’s Illmatic, the Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle, among dozens of others. As Public Enemy’s Chuck D said, “When hip-hop became the thing, of course you’re going to reach back to what influenced you, what touched you in the past. The words from Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions just meant everything. The rhythms and the pacing we might not have incorporated as much as maybe something more percussive and aggressive like a James Brown, but

there was something in Curtis Mayfield’s stance that we used.” The film inspired more than just a young generation of musicians. Armond White, film critic for the NY Press, said, “I remember in the theatre in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972—the climax was when [Priest] told the cop off. He says, ‘If I so much as choke on a chicken bone’ what would happen, and the entire theatre, including myself, we leaped to our feet, and we stood, and screamed, and applauded, and clapped our hands, and stomped our feet. It connected psychically with people at a perfect place and time to provide that kind of catharsis.” Michael Gonzales, noted R&B and hip-hop journalist, had similar memories. “The first time I saw Superfly was at the Lowe’s Victoria on 125th Street,” he wrote. “Next door to the Apollo, the theater was a hundred feet away from the pigeon-eyed view of the movie’s opening shot. Filled with young folks who couldn’t wait to enter into that playa playa netherworld of hustlers, scramblers, dames, and gamblers, folks were psyched. As the reel started rolling, music spilled from the speakers and the audience hummed along, mouthed the words, or sang aloud to the soundtrack.” Gonzales also credited the “neo-psychedelic red logo” on the “Freddie’s Dead” single with inspiring “a million graffiti artists.” Despite the success of both soundtrack and movie, though, the critical excoriation stung. My father, who never wasted time arguing with critics, fought back, saying: “The way you clean up the film is

commercial can be looked at as a dope commercial. You can’t do nothing about drugs by pretending they don’t exist. You just have to be able to give people credit for knowing what’s good and what’s bad. That’s why I wanted ‘Freddie’s Dead’ put out as the single. Because the average dude realizes that he’s more like a Freddie than a Priest. And Freddie’s just the average guy who might have been able to be saved except that he fell in with the wrong crowd. More people are gonna realize that they’re like Freddie and if they don’t watch what they’re messing with they’ll end up dead. There’s one other thing that the critics of Superfly seem to miss. For the budget of less than $300,000, there isn’t that much you can do. The film had to be about things that go on in the street because this is the only place they could afford to shoot it.” With Sweetback, Shaft, and Super Fly, the blaxploitation genre exploded. A pattern formed in which a world-class artist created an album that helped sell the movie and often overshadowed it. It happened with Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, Roy Ayers’s Coffy (written for the movie that introduced Pam Grier to the world), Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, and James Brown’s Black Caesar—all excellent albums that resulted in some of the best work by each artist. Even Johnny Pate got in the mix, scoring Brother On the Run and Shaft in Africa. Dozens of

With Sweetback, Shaft, and Super Fly, the blaxploitation genre exploded.

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by cleaning up the streets. I can see where those guys are coming from, and how they look upon Superfly as a dope movie. But it’s just as easy to see it as an anti-drug movie, which is what I think the critics don’t give the people enough credit for seeing. I mean even an anti-dope


other examples exist, but of all these soundtracks, Super Fly remains in a class by itself. It transcends the genre and time period in a way no other blaxploitation soundtrack does. Perhaps that’s due to its unprecedented and unrepeated success on the charts. Perhaps it’s because my father spoke about real life issues that remain relevant some forty years later, and will likely be relevant in another forty years. Whatever the reason, critical opinion and cultural impact have set Super Fly apart from the competition—and it was damn stiff competition, too. After the movie became a smash, it propelled the soundtrack to even further heights. Dad was no stranger to the top of the R&B chart, but Super Fly did something else—something Dad had never done before and would never do again. When the Billboard pop chart came out for the week of October 21,

1972, at number one with a bullet, it read: “Curtis Mayfield, Superfly.” After fourteen years in professional music, including countless albums and singles for dozens of other artists, he reigned supreme on the pop chart for the first and only time. No other black artist had hit the top of the pop chart with an album like Super Fly. It was the grittiest, hardest album Curtis ever made. He painted his most unflinching picture of ghetto reality as black people experienced it—drugs, pimps, pushers, depression, despair, destruction. More than ever before, he spoke directly to the concerns of his people. He wrote no songs of conciliation, no messages of peace and understanding between races. In return for that, the public—both black and white—gave him the highest status in popular music. It seemed contrary to everything black

performers had experienced throughout history. For half a century or more, conventional wisdom held that white people wouldn’t buy “race records,” although white people had always discreetly listened to black radio stations. Such reasoning formed the underpinning of segregated radio. The only way black artists could break through those chains was to walk that tightrope between worlds, between voices. With Super Fly, Dad not only cut that rope, he replaced it with a new model of artistry. One can debate forever the reasons why that happened. Certainly, the movement and the music of the 1960s helped make it possible. Perhaps the recent years of hard drugs, brutal assassinations, and bloody war also readied the record-buying public for Super Fly’s unflinching honesty. Regardless of why, however, it happened—and it would

June 21


happen for black artists with increasing frequency in coming decades. It’s hard to imagine the fearless honesty of hip-hop catching on with white suburbia—and influencing the music, culture, fashion, and language of the entire world in the ’80s and ’90s—if not for the success of an album like Super Fly. Curtis had everything he’d always wanted: money, fame, family, a movie score, the most popular album in the country, his own label, complete control over his career, all the material comforts and conveniences possible, and as always, a generous share of women. He was only thirty years old. Yet, Eddie’s warning that he was going to burn himself out was coming true. “I’m working 24 hours a day,” he said. “This business involves mind and imagination. You can’t sit back and enjoy ‘normal’ activity—it always involves work.” He had an unbelievable amount of creativity left within him, a deep well of songs that replenished at the same astonishing rate it always had. That well was in no danger of running dry, but he didn’t know how long fans would keep coming back to it. In two years, he’d recorded six albums between himself and the Impressions. The four he made for himself—Curtis, Curtis/Live, Roots, and Super Fly—surpassed anything he’d done with the Impressions in terms of commercial success. If this wasn’t the peak, how much higher could he climb? As he sang in “Superfly,” “How long can a good thing last?” These thoughts crept into his mind. “You never want to reach the peak,” he said, “because after all, when you’ve gone all the way up, the only way to go is down.”

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June 23


Digital Underground frontman Shock G talks about the deep impact that Parliament Funkadelic and its eccentric leader George Clinton had on his career and life. by Alice Price-Styles 24

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Very Much

June 25


George Clinton has had a considerable influence on your work. When did you first hear his music?

First song I noticed was “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker).” When it came on the radio in ’76, I thought it was some weird and twisted gospel group, because the vocals were layered so densely. It was actually kind of haunting; it scared me and seduced me at the same time. [laughs] The music had an exaggeratedly dark, urgent, and aggressive quality to it, while

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also comical, and while also somehow warm and kind-hearted, like I had never heard before. It gave me a vision of a choir performing in a church somewhere way out in space. Kool and the Gang made funk music. Slave made funk music. But “Tear the Roof” sounded like funk on steroids. Then a year or two later, “Flash Light” came out, and my soul recognized that same feeling that “Tear the Roof Off” gave me. That’s when I bought my first Parliament album: Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome.


Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Brides of Funkenstein, and so on. I soon discovered that in order to get that particular great feeling, it had to be P-Funk.

What’s your favorite Clinton record?

Probably “(Not Just) Knee Deep” or “Aqua Boogie.”

What’s your favorite P-Funk song? You like George and them?

My favorite Parliament song? It would be “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign.” I love that song. [Sings] “Can we go down…” I like the lyrics where he says, “Let’s go mating, the water’s fine.” That was the B-side to the single “Aqua Boogie” on 45. That’s your favorite? See, I like the dance music. [plays and sings to “(Not Just) Knee Deep” melody] “Feeling so serious, she was on her period, when she tried to freak with meeeeeee.” That’s my Humpty version. I love it.

Can you play “Sons of the P” on piano?

Hmm. I can’t remember it! [sings] “The things we bring, will scatter sunshine in those times of rain. When we’re near, have no fear…we’ll set free…the pain.” My favorite line in that song is “…pulling down the pants to your mind.” Working with George and doing that song was so fun. That was a great time, because it was our first time really being around him for more than just a few backstage handshakes. We did about two songs for him, and he did that one for us. Then we played each other’s albums. I think he was working on [1993’s] Hey, Man, Smell My Finger. We played him “Kiss You Back” and “Heartbeat Props,” and he liked them. Then we rhymed over [“Rhythm and Rhyme”] with him. That was an amazing time.

How was it working in the studio with him?

Later that same year, I was enjoying another song on the radio, “One Nation Under a Groove,” when my best friend Cush said, “You know, that’s your boy George from ‘Flash Light.’” I said “Nah, the DJ said this is a different group called Funkadelic.” He said “Yeah, that’s them, Parliament; it’s the same group.” I was blown away. From that moment on, they became my favorite band and still are to this day. I began clicking up with other Funkateers, back-learning their catalog and discovering

George is one of those people when you meet him, and he’s exactly who you knew he was. Because of his music, and he feels a certain way. You meet him, and, “Yup.” Wooo! He puts the threshold so low as far as what’s acceptable. He takes the bar down to level everybody, and just loosens everybody up. He’s real comfortable in his skin; not embarrassed or ashamed about one thing about his life. It transforms the room. When you spend time with George, it’s not like you’re in the United States; you’re in P-Funk land. It just has that air to it. None of the usual laws and social norms apply. It’s just total freedom. He was a little bit rough around the edges back then, but he was the anchor, and you forgot about that. The conversation takes over, and it’s always so enlightening, brilliant, fun, and rich. You don’t see yourself or anyone else. You see the fantasy of the vision of the things you talk about. That’s all you see. When people are like, “What color was his shirt?” or “Where did he get all the coke from?” I don’t remember. It just seemed

June 27


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like every time he ran out, he’d pull another sack magically out. There wasn’t even a pocket; he would just pull at his leg. I remember he listened to “Sons of the P” once. We sent him a tape with some of it on there, but most of the vocals we laid while waiting for him to show up. We sent him a tape with the music, with no extra keyboards on it, and a basic chorus. The “yes we are the…” and all of that other stuff wasn’t on there. So we put that on there, and then he shows up and listens to all of that once, and was like, “Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.” He went in the booth and he did what he did in one take. All his adlib stuff he did from just listening to it once. He was amazing. He nailed what we were doing with the third, fourth, fifth harmony. He was going up and down, shorts, stops, breaks, breath, speak again, breath, speak again—and he captured all that “and the doctor said you don’t need a thing…” He was amazing to work with. It was funny too. He walked in with a big crumpled piece of, like, postal wrapping paper; it was just something from around the house you could tell. And on top of that he had the lyrics he wanted to sing scribbled on sideways, in colored ink. He’s just organic. From the moment I spent those hours with George, life got better for me in all fashions. I was just like, “What is everybody tripping about? Why does the notebook have to be neat? Why does my hair have to be fixed to record? Why does…blah blah blah?”

Did that stay with you?

Oh yeah, because I was already that kind of person. People teach you “First impressions are everlasting” and “If you don’t look like you want to get paid, you won’t get paid.” So I still had some of that. And hip-hop was different to funk. Part of the funk code was the lovechild hippy thing. But hip-hop had a code, and being funky and un-groomed wasn’t part of the code. “Want It All” is one of the Digital Underground songs I relate to most.

What inspired the song for you? Do you still relate to it?

I absolutely do still relate. I struggle with those types of choices even more now that I’m older and have more self-discipline and awareness. Only slightly more though. [laughs] But “Want It All” was always about the feeling of course, not the action. Everyone knows that nobody has it all, it’s not possible. If you’re rich or famous, you’re also locked in a cage and drenched in responsibility.

June 29


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WORD PLA

WU-TANG CLAN’S GZA RUNS DOWN EVERY TRACK OFF LIQUID SWORDS By David Ma

“It was clear. It was fresh,” replies GZA, when asked how his head was while making Liquid Swords. “We were on a roll, and it was the perfect time to get in the studio and just do it.” The year was 1995 and the first generation of Wu-Tang solo projects was gripping fans globally. And for his part, GZA never did waste ink and has shown a penchant for writing since Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and his debut, Words from the Genius. Even in a year of memorable releases, Liquid Swords’ rhymes coupled with RZA’s cinematic beats stood tall, furthering WuTang’s dominance to this day. Over two decades later, Liquid Swords continues to age well and is a stellar case of quality ’90s hip-hop. For the first time ever, GZA talks about the making of the heralded classic, deconstructing it track by track and allowing insight into a vital era in which it was made. David Ma: What was your writing process like at the time? GZA: Real slow. I don’t say slow in the sense that it necessarily took me a long time to finish what I’m writing. I mean, Raekwon and Ghostface can step in and record a song in about forty-five minutes. I, on the other hand, would often go back and finish rhymes that I started. I would say I pieced things together [more] slowly then. Songs generally take me two to three days to write. Sometimes I take different sentences and put them together. For a few tracks on the album, I remember, the beat would be running, and it’d be four o’clock in the

June 31


afternoon. We’d be smoking, and you know how weed takes its toll on you. I’d just get tired and sit in the same spot all day. I’d take a nap, hang out, nap later, wake up, and finish a track. RZA would leave and go to the city to handle business. He’d come home hours later, and I’d still be writing same shit I started when he left. [laughs] What did you think of RZA’s beats for Liquid Swords when he first played them for you? I loved them. A lot of them had a grimy, rock-like feel to

Normally, when I hear a beat, I already know where to go with it. I can picture the track and just vibe off it them. The majority of the album was done at RZA’s house, in the basement. It was a small, two-bedroom apartment where he showed me all the beats he had made. We did a lot of stuff there, including Tical, I think, so it’s hard to remember the exact moment, or time, he showed me which beat. I just remember absolutely loving them. The album heavily samples the film Shogun Assassin and keeps a dark atmosphere throughout its course. Were you trying to stick to a theme for the album? It’s the story of a shogun told through different narratives and scenarios. It’s not a theme, but more like a thread throughout the album. Had you seen Shogun Assassin by then? No, I hadn’t actually. While we were mastering the album, RZA asked the engineer to go out and get it and bring it back to us. That’s when I watched it. I loved it immediately and thought it fit with the album well. Did you feel like you made a classic after it was done? It’s hard to say something is gonna be classic or not. But I can say that I felt the magic with that one. I actually saw it grow and come together, and felt that it was special as we were doing it. You’ve never talked real in-depth about Liquid Swords before. Are you down to talk about each track on the album? Sure, let’s do it.

Liquid Swords

g This track is just braggadocios. It isn’t meant to stand for anything. I’m talking about my skills and how I’m better than the rest. Usually, I take a beat home and write to it for a few days, but it wasn’t like that with this track. I think RZA played the beat for me and I just spit to it right there. The hook was actually a routine from around ’84 that me RZA and Ol’ Dirty [Bastard] would do: [sings] “When the MCs came,

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to live out the name.” Just like that. Duel of the Iron Mic g This might be my favorite track on the album. I like how I delivered on this one, and I love RZA’s beat. I remember writing to it and that it took me a while because I was trying different things. I remember being so happy after Ol’ Dirty blessed the track like he did. I love how the recording sounds too. When we perform this song live, the music gets real low for Deck’s part, and then it comes in real loud and it still always gets me hype. I also love the skit at the beginning. I just love that shit.

Living in the World Today

 I just remember sitting in the basement for hours and writing it over and over. I don’t know what actually transpired during the making of this. But as far as the song itself, it was another old-school hook taken from a crew we knew from the Bronx. They used to say something like: “And if you listen to me rap today, you be hearing the sounds that my crew will say. And we know you wish you can write them, well, don’t bite them, well okay…” So I flipped it and said: “Well, if you’re living in the world today, you’ll be listening to the slang that the Wu-Tang say…” and so on. It’s just another old-school hook we took and had some fun with.

Gold

g This is a great track. I really love the beat a lot. It has sorta has a rock vibe to it, and Meth helped with the hook. The whole song is on a street-hustling-vibe tip. The whole song is talking about hustling and stuff like that, but I don’t say it plainly. It’s a street tale, not a let’s-get-your-grind-on song. And the hook is actually kind of taken from the Diana Ross and the Supremes song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” In the ’80s, we used to harmonize a lot and we sang a similar hook: [sings] “No neighborhood is rough enough, there is no clip that’s full enough…” See? Like that. We used to sing the chorus and harmonize with each other. That’s how that one came bout.

Cold World

g Just another dark, gritty street tale. Normally, when I hear a beat, I already know where to go with it. I can picture the track and just vibe off it. As soon as I heard the beat to “Cold World,” I knew it would be another inner-city story. And the beginning is obviously taken from “The Night Before Christmas.” I have this cousin who we call Life. He sang a little bit of background on the album, and he was in the studio when we were making this track. He’s got a great voice, not as great as it used to be, [laughs] but he’s been singing his whole life. He was singing Stevie Wonder’s “Rocket Love,” where the hook goes, [sings] “Took me riding in your rocket, gave me a star, but at a half a mile from heaven, you dropped me back down to this cold, cold world.” RZA was the one who told Life to change the words and use it as a hook. So we added the hook and we got [Inspectah] Deck on it and boom! That’s how that one went.


Labels g My whole negative experience with Cold Chillin’ was part of why I made this song—but it wasn’t the main reason. I wasn’t deliberately trying to write a song dedicated to problems with labels and so on—I just threw Cold Chillin’ in there because they were an established label at one time. It actually started when I heard my friend say: “Tommy ain’t my boy!” Then it just kind of clicked in my head to use “Tommy” and “Boy.” I mean, I like doing songs based around wordplay with one theme. I actually love doing those kinds of songs. It comes naturally to me for my rhymes to have double meanings. 4th Chamber

g Crazy, crazy song. If I ever do a rock album, not saying I would, but if I did, it would have to be on that kind of vibe. It would musically have to sound like “Rock Box” from Run-DMC. Making “4th Chamber” was crazy because I didn’t have a rhyme ready for that one. That’s why I went last on it. [laughs] Plus, Ghost killed it with his verse, so I knew I had to come correct. This is one of three songs that crowds always go crazy for when we do a Wu show. As soon as they hear the [imitates opening guitar sound] they just explode. It’s not even a GZA song to me—it’s a Wu-Tang song. And Ghost’s verse is [just]

incredible to me. He delivered so well. I don’t know if you saw the video; I directed that too. This song, the guest verses, the video, the crowd response, all turned out perfect for this one.

Shadowboxin

g Meth delivered well on this one too. I even do his verse when I do it live! I mean, “I breaks it down to the bone gristle” is so dope. It’s hard not to rap along to this one. Just like when I hear “Triumph,” it’s hard not to do Deck’s verse. I think, I was actually [just] the filler for that song anyways. [laughs] It always seemed more like Meth’s track. I remember RZA telling me I needed to get on it, so he put me in between. It’s an incredible song though, and I love performing it. It’s just another MC lyrical joint with crazy smooth cadences.

Hell’s Wind Staff / Killah Hills 10304

g This is another one of my favorites. It’s a very special song as far as the album’s concerned, because it’s long as hell and has no hook. It’s up-Wtempo and is straight-through. My cousin, Life, who did the hook on “Cold World,” also did some singing on this too. This song has a lot of depth in terms of sound ’cause we used to layer weird shit over it. For example, myself and Killah Priest were in the city one day with a portable ADAT recorder I just bought. We were just walking around, going to stores, buying water, juice, whatever, and just recording the random stuff, you know, just picking up sounds and shit. I think we recorded the Hells Angels riding by too. RZA was in a restaurant talking to some guy, and we were banging forks on the tables, and we just recorded all those sounds too. [laughs] So we incorporated all that into the production. As a song, it’s a street story, but not told in a regular street way. I’m talking about slanging on the block, but not just your average street dealer. These were more sophisticated cats. Some of it came from a documentary I saw on the infamous Pablo Escobar. He was sending judges

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intimate photos of their wives and things like that. I think this is my first real Mafioso track. It’s like a dense, short film.

Investigative Reports I don’t remember this one that much. RZA g

kicked us the beat and Rae just set it off. RZA decided to put all that news footage in there, and U-God did the hook, and I just followed it up. This one was just all of us doing our parts. I think it was just a simple track we put together.

Swordsman

g This is another one of those hard ones that I love. The beat just knocks. The hook also came from a routine we used to sing a long time ago. But like I said, we used to harmonize often back then: [sings] “Every MC has his place, to begin in the MC race.” The melody is from an Earth, Wind and Fire track. It’s just a dope, recycled hook. I love this song a lot too. I think I delivered well on it.

I Gotcha Back

g This was a short rhyme I wrote for one of my nephews. When I said, “My lifestyle was so far from well / Could’ve wrote a book called Age Twelve and Going Through Hell.” It’s for my nephew who was twelve at the time, and whose father, my brother, had been locked up since ’88. So he wasn’t around for my nephew when times were rough, so I wanted to up my nephew a bit with this track. It was actually part of the soundtrack for the movie Fresh. I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but I directed the

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video for that song. The interesting thing about that [one] is how the video blends in with the movie itself. I had two nephews in the video, they were both real young at the time. And in video, they both had met up and shots rang out from some young gangsters. It’s a shame because both those kids in the video, both nephews of mine, ended up getting in trouble for ringing out shots and are both doing time right now. It’s kind of ironic. One of my nephews ended up getting eight years for that shit. So the whole song is a sad irony to me now.

B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth)

g I really wanted to get [Killah] Priest on the album. And when I did, he said he could cover the whole track, so we let him do it. It’s incredible to me, man. Some people still tell me that it’s their favorite song off the album. I mean, it’s a really deep song. He broke down lots of things: preachers, ministries, churches, details, and a lot of insight on a lot of stuff. “The earth is already in space / The Bible I embrace / A difficult task I had to take…” The song’s just perfect and ends the record out brilliantly.


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Fighting a tide of cultural dilution, the East amplified and strengthened the roots of Brooklyn’s Black communities through a wide-ranging array of initiatives. The Sun Rises in the East is a new film that documents the movement and points the way to the future. BY TARA DUVIVIER

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I

n a Brooklyn that is changing quickly, the importance of documenting its rich history becomes even more urgent as new residents move in, attracted by rich architecture, easy access to Manhattan at lower rents, and what some call an indescribable “cool” that lives on each street. This “cool” can be attributed to the cultural trappings of Black and Latino people, many long displaced, who lived in parts of Brooklyn in a time where New York City in general had a notorious reputation for being unsafe and blighted. White flight and a fiscal crisis had the city in turmoil and strong movements by Black and Latino New Yorkers to have more control over their own communities, particularly education, grew in strength during this time. In what was perceived to be tumultuous times, Black and Latino New Yorkers created and cultivated culture not as a flight of fancy or entertainment, but as a means of survival and attempt to destroy the white supremacy which permeated their lives. In Central Brooklyn (Crown Heights and BedfordStuyvesant primarily), one form of this cultural movement was known as the East, a broad-reaching community organization that is the subject of a new feature-length documentary, The Sun Rises in the East. The documentary was produced and directed by Cynthia and Tayo Giwa of Black-Owned Brooklyn, a publication that documents and highlights various Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn. According to a recent interview with the New York Times, the filmmakers were preparing a feature on the International African Arts Festival, a longstanding weekend-long Pan-African festival featuring performances and a robust marketplace featuring clothing, food, and art. In researching the Brooklyn summertime event, they learned its origin is rooted in the East and wanted to celebrate its history and legacy through a feature-length documentary. While various publications have written about the East (including Wax Poetics in Vol.1 Issue 14), particularly its musical legacy, there has never been a comprehensive feature of this kind before, despite many of the East members still living, and many still in Brooklyn. The documentary includes interviews with many of the founding members of the East, as well as former students of Uhuru Sasa Shule (Freedom Now School), one of the primary institutions created by the collective to provide education rooted in pan-African and Black socialist principles. The documentary also includes interviews with Dr. Kwasi Konadu, who wrote the definitive text on the East, as well as Mark Winston Griffith, a community organizer whose School Colors podcast chronicles the fight for community-controlled education in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, also in Central Brooklyn, which began to sow the seeds of what then became the East. As the documentary unfolds, it is easy to understand what drew the filmmakers to their subject; the East’s reach was enormous, and occurred in a very short amount of time. The East did not stop with Uhuru Sasa Shule: as they began to

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build, they realized the importance of having other institutions and businesses that would employ members and serve the larger community. Some of the over twenty-five institutions resulting from the East include a food cooperative, restaurants, a bookstore, and a record label, where recordings of live jazz performances that took place as part of their cultural programming were pressed on vinyl and sold. Artists such as James Mtume, Milford Graves, June Tyson, Gary Bartz, and Pharoah Sanders performed at the East. The East sought ways to expand their principles and become more self-sufficient. They continued to grow and offer more programs and while various factors (burnout of founding


members, lack of sustainability, government infiltration and surveillance) contributed to its destabilization and eventual end, the documentary reinforces that the legacy and principles of the East are still alive, despite gentrification significantly reducing the Black population in Central Brooklyn, particularly over the last twenty years. The legacy of the East exists in the Black-owned businesses found throughout Brooklyn, which Black-Owned Brooklyn carefully documents. That legacy exists through annual events such as the aforementioned International African Arts Festival (originally a local carnival fundraiser for the East), and through institutions that trace their origins directly to the East, as well

as others that carry forth their principles, unaware that the East even existed. A public plaza near 10 Claver Place, the original location of Uhuru Sasa Shule and where the East’s live musical performances took place, was renamed in honor of Jitu Weusi, principal founder. On a recent summer day, live jazz performed by students from a local music school could be heard in the plaza. Documenting and creating landmark spaces to honor the East in a changing Brooklyn is important as there is a disconnect between newer residents and long-standing residents who endured the “bad old days” of New York City. There is often a perception that there was not enough effort, not

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enough wanting for change by these long-standing residents but this documentary affirms what many Black New Yorkers have known most their lives: that the neglect and poverty which existed and still exists is not due to lack of effort to organize to resist these conditions and determine the future of their own communities, but rooted in structural racism which has limited

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political and economic power for Black people worldwide. The East was created was a response to that, utilizing resources available to them: the will of the people to work and cultural expression as a means to get free. The Giwas’ documentary also shows that while many founding members are elderly or have passed away, there is still a movement,


especially among younger generations, to permanently dismantle white supremacy. In Dr. Konadu’s definitive book on the East, he noted that in speaking with some of the members about the demise of the East, a few never expected it to become a permanent institution but rather understood it would have a natural life cycle that would create a framework whose

effects would be felt for generations, like a mother birthing children. This documentary not only serves as a record of what was Black Brooklyn, but presents a model for what Black Brooklyn could be.

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PAUL IS LIVE

Raised on original rock-and-rollers Chuck Berry and Little Richard, the Beatles and Wings legend Paul McCartney gave everything he had back to the genre that made him. by Travis Atria

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am sitting at the Hard Rock Live in Hollywood, Florida, waiting for Paul McCartney to take the stage, staring at the jumbo screen flashing pictures from his long career and wondering how anyone could withstand the weight of such massive history without crumbling. Consider this: exactly sixty years ago to the day, Paul McCartney was performing in Hamburg, Germany. He was about to turn twenty. His band was pretty good and pretty popular. In a few months time they’d earn a slot opening for their hero Little Richard (whose band featured a young Billy Preston). A recording survives of the Beatles at Hamburg’s Star Club from this same year, captured by a single mic placed in the center of the room, and it reveals a raucous, wild, forceful band, closer to what we’d call garage rock than the cleaned-up, suit-clad version of the Beatles the world would soon meet. Their set contained a haunting, screaming version of Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking About You,” followed by turbo-charged versions of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” and in those three songs it is clear who the Beatles were and what they came to do. No white boys had ever sung or played like that before, not even Elvis. In every bash of Ringo’s crash cymbal one can hear the influence of Black American music detonating

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halfway around the world. In the interim between that night and this one lies the story of popular music. It is the story of a boy from Liverpool who grew up with the sounds and rhythms of jazz and Vaudeville and English folksong in his bones, who loved weepy ’30s crooner Al Bowlly and the sound of family singalongs, who might have been a teacher or an amateur trumpet player had his teenage mind not been blown by the ecstatic sounds of Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Elvis. It is a story that connects literally billions of people over more than half a century, myself included. Like countless others I would not be a musician if not for him and the Beatles. Like countless others, I have spent hundreds of hours listening to his work, studying it, learning it, performing it. And so it was a pilgrimage to see McCartney. I had no real expectations of the concert. That night Paul was three weeks shy of his eightieth birthday, and even legends must bow to the brutal power of time. I came ready to forgive. I left blown away by how good he still is. Sure, the voice that was perhaps the most versatile instrument in popular music—the one that could sing both the dulcet “Yesterday” and the wailing “Oh! Darling,” that could fit as seamlessly with John Lennon as it could with Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson—is now worn ragged from decades of use


and abuse. But he still demands more of it, playing the songs as written, refusing to lower them even a half step. And there are still moments when he hits those old impossible notes with such force it brings you to your feet. And then there are the times you anticipate the impossible notes because you know he sang them on record fifty-odd years ago, and you think surely tonight he’s going to back off and give himself a little rest so he can make it through the rest of the tour, but those are the moments he goes even harder. Sometimes it sounds like his vocal chords are about to snap, and those are the times he goes hardest of all, sailing along on the power of his band (he’s been with them longer than any other group of musicians in his career) and a live horn section that evokes as needed the ghosts of Stax and Motown on “Got to Get You into My Life” or the classical bombast of “Golden Slumbers.” It was inspiring, especially because you knew he wanted to be there. He has more money than the pope and his fame is as ubiquitous as the Holy Roman Empire. He has no reason to ever be in Hollywood, Florida, except that somewhere deep inside, he’s still the teenager who heard Little Richard sing and thought, “I could do that.” He’s still the twenty-something longhair who studied James Jamerson’s playing on Motown and used it as fuel to become arguably the greatest bass player in rock history (despite what Quincy Jones said). He’s still the masterful polymath who had space

in his head for both “Honey Pie” and “Helter Skelter.” He is among the last living links to the explosion in music and culture that was rock and roll. And that’s why his Got Back tour was so important. He was there at ground zero. The blast still propels him. That said, McCartney, like all great artists, is more than just a rehashing of his influences. He gave as much as he took, and a great deal more. By the time he caught up again with Billy Preston seven years after their Hamburg stint, the Beatles had already changed the course of popular music twice and were working on what would become their final release, Let It Be. And although much of McCartney’s early solo work was misunderstood at the time, it has been burnished in the hindsight of history, from the lofi bedroom rock of McCartney’s “Every Night,” to the batshit insanity of Wild Life’s “Mumbo”; from Ram’s “Monkberry Moon Delight,” which contains perhaps his most intense vocal performance, to McCartney II’s “Temporary Secretary,” which has only recently received its due recognition. The examples are nearly endless, and just when you think you’ve heard them all, you’ll be surprised by some long forgotten B-side or oneoff project like “Check My Machine,” or Thrillington, or the Fireman, or “Goodnight Tonight,” or “Loup,” or “Cuff Link,” or “Wino Junko” and its vocoder breakdown, or the electro funk of “What’s That You’re Doing?” with Stevie Wonder.

He is among the last living links to the explosion in music and culture that was rock and roll.

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Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, who together recorded “The Girl Is Mine” for MJ’s Thriller (1982) and “Say Say Say” for Pipes of Peace (1983).Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney recording in Montserrat. “Ebony and Ivory” and “What’s That Your Doing” were released on 1982’s Tug of War. Of course, it will surprise no one to read that Paul McCartney is an influential and successful musician. And it might seem strange for Wax Poetics, an outlet famous for telling stories that have slipped through the cracks, to highlight what is perhaps the most widely told story in the last century of popular music. But there is an untold—or at least undertold—part of McCartney’s story, and it lies not in his songwriting or singing, not even in his influence on popular culture, but rather in his rhythmic force as a bass player and a drummer. Use the word “pop” as much as you want, the Beatles were deep in the pocket. They were funky. They spoke the language of R&B. This is the reason they sound as natural on a YouTube mixtape behind the greatest rappers of all time, as they did on a hi-fi in 1969. This is the reason McCartney has been sampled or interpolated by the Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre, Common, the Roots, Guru, De La Soul, and Erykah Badu, among others. It is the reason Kanye West sought him out for a collaboration with Rihanna (which produced McCartney’s most streamed

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post-Beatles song). And it is a big reason his music continues to be relevant as he enters his ninth decade. It is worth mentioning that Got Back was not just an oldies tour. McCartney doggedly performed his newer music too, including cuts from 2018’s Egypt Station and 2020’s McCartney III—which debuted at number one in America and England, respectively, his first time reaching those marks since the 1980s. And although they are not his best works by far, they are proof he is still truly engaged in the process of creation and his voice can still command the conversation in popular music. But of course none of this would be possible without those four boys playing a dive in Hamburg in 1962. McCartney knows this. The height of the concert and perhaps the entire Got Back tour came during the encore, when he performed “I’ve Got a Feeling” along with a jumbo-screen projected John Lennon, edited from the iconic rooftop performance recently seen in Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary. The moment Lennon came on the screen, McCartney turned and watched his old friend, stars in his eyes. Then he turned to the microphone, and the weight of fifty years and an assassination were erased for a magic moment while Lennon and McCartney sang together in concert once again. Time collapsed. It was yesterday.


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