MUSI 005F. Black Popular Music: From "Race Music" to the Mainstream (SC)

2001. An African-American popular music style. It features syncopated interlocking rhythm patterns based on straight quaver and semiquaver subdivisions, a vocal style drawn from soul music, extended vamps based on a single and often complex harmony, strong emphasis on the bass line, and lyrics with frequent spiritual themes and social commentary. The use of the term for a musical style inverts the negative colloquial meaning of strong aromas, particularly of a bodily and sexual nature.

2001. A 20th-century pop music style. It fuses jazz and jazz-influenced melody and improvisation with the more simple, driving rhythms and bass lines of funk as characterized by James Brown and Parliament. Early jazz-funk albums included Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (1969), which also incorporated many rock elements. In the 1970s many American jazz artists such as Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock and Lonnie Liston Smith added funk elements to their sound; in the late 70s and early 80s, British groups began to explore jazz-funk, with bands such as Light of the World and Hi Tension softening the hard-edged rhythms of funk and incorporating more jazz elements. By the late (1980s and (90s the definition had narrowed: jazz-funk lost many of the jazz inflections that had characterized its beginnings. It became a more spartan, simpler music, more heavily reliant on a standard 4/4 rhythm track, repetitive bass guitar groove and, frequently, a rhythm guitar line more heavily influenced by disco than in the 1970s. Protagonists of this development included the Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai and the Hammond organ-based James Taylor Quartet. Additionally, from jazz funk came Acid Jazz, at first a record label but soon an umbrella term used to describe the more adventurous jazz-funk artists, such as Galliano.

2013. The story of Stax Records unfolds like a Greek tragedy. A white brother and sister build a record company that becomes a monument to racial harmony in 1960's segregated south Memphis. Their success is startling, and Stax soon defines an international sound. Then, after losses both business and personal, the siblings part, and the brother allies with a visionary African-American partner. Under integrated leadership, Stax explodes as a national player until, Icarus-like, they fall from great heights to a tragic demise. Everything is lost, and the sanctuary that flourished is ripped from the ground. A generation later, Stax is rebuilt brick by brick to once again bring music and opportunity to the people of Memphis. Set in the world of 1960s and '70s soul music,Respect Yourself is a story of epic heroes in a shady industry. It's about music and musicians -- Isaac Hayes, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Wilson Pickett, the Staple Singers, and Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Stax's interracial house band. It's about a small independent company's struggle to survive in a business world of burgeoning conglomerates. And always at the center of the story is Memphis, Tennessee, an explosive city struggling through heated, divisive years. Told by one of our leading music chroniclers,Respect Yourself brings to life this treasured cultural institution and the city that created it.

2010. "Exceptionally illuminating and philosophically sophisticated." ---Ted Cohen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago "In this audacious and long-awaited book, Joel Rudinow takes seriously a range of interrelated issues that most music theorizing is embarrassed to tackle. People often ask me about music and spirituality. With Soul Music, I can finally recommend a book that offers genuine philosophical insight into the topic." ---Theodore Gracyk, Professor of Philosophy, Minnesota State University Moorhead The idea is as strange as it is commonplace---that the "soul" in soul music is more than just a name, that somehow the music truly taps into something essential rooted in the spiritual notion of the soul itself. Or is it strange? From the civil rights movement and beyond, soul music has played a key, indisputable role in moments of national healing. Of course, American popular music has long been embroiled in controversies over its spiritual purity (or lack thereof). But why? However easy it might seem to dismiss these ideas and debates as quaint and merely symbolic, they persist. In Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown, Joel Rudinow, a philosopher of music, takes these peculiar notions and exposes them to serious scrutiny. How, Rudinow asks, does music truly work upon the soul, individually and collectively? And what does it mean to say that music can be spiritually therapeutic or toxic? This illuminating, meditative exploration leads from the metaphysical idea of the soul to the legend of Robert Johnson to the philosophies of Plato and Leo Strauss to the history of race and racism in American popular culture to current clinical practices of music therapy. Joel Rudinow teaches in the Philosophy and Humanities Departments at Santa Rosa Junior College and is the coauthor of Invitation to Critical Thinking and the coeditor of Ethics and Values in the Information Age.

1994. A film documenting the history and output of the Stax record company, responsible for promoting the careers of musicians such as Isaac Hayes (b.1942) and Otis Redding (1941-1967), and the contribution of these performers to the Civil Rights movement.