Norman Kelley: Michael Jackson Allegations Hit a Wrong Note

• From Newsday on July 19, 2002
• By Norman Kelley. Norman Kelley is the editor of "R&B (Rhythm and Business): The Political Economy of Black Music."
  

Michael Jackson's charge of racism in the recording industry is a double-edged sword. Foremost, it has spectacularly backfired on him. He has done something truly remarkable: made a recording company appear sympathetic, aided and abetted by a stumbling coalition that refused to act like a Dutch uncle.

By letting him make ad hominem attacks against Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network's ill-conceived music summit July 9 has allowed the recording industry to duck real issues and enjoy the spectacle.

When your enemy is destroying himself, Napoleon once said, do nothing. Jackson made it difficult for himself to get back his master recordings and dredged up old and new stories that undermine his issues and music issues in general.

While others will remember his accusation of racism and the triple whammy of Mottola being "very, very, very devilish," few will probably ever know of the one truly profound statement uttered by him at a news conference on July 6.

"We don't have the institutions we really should have," he told an enthusiastic black audience at the National Action Network.

Jackson talked about how black artists are always taken advantage of, which is generally true but not in his case. He has had a very, very, very lucrative contract, receiving 50 percent on what Sony earns on his music. That was an unprecedented deal at the peak of his fame 20 years ago - and also included a partnership with Sony.

The double-edged sword of Jackson's charges cuts both ways because, to a certain degree, blacks themselves have never seriously considered the economic consequences of their own music. Because most black popular music has had lower-class origins, which have fueled black music forms, the black bourgeoisie has traditionally disdained such music, eschewing its black folk roots.

Thus, the black elite and the middle class have never sought to protect black music and educate its lower-class geniuses to the virtues of the business of music - owning one's publishing rights and controlling master recordings - in a racist society that loves black music but has contempt for black people.

Except for an NAACP 1987 report on the music industry, "The Discordant Sound of Music," no major black institution has thoroughly examined the economic power of black music. Thus, "racism" in the recording industry is expressed more through black economic subordination to the industry's overriding interest. That interest is vast profits - which, on the whole, benefit whites more than blacks, who are the driving creative force behind most of American popular music.

In the hierarchy of American racial politics, black music talent is neo-colonized, channeled into subordinate roles as entertainers, not as executors of corporate policies. Black music talent, by and large, is a pool of cheap labor with disparities in how black artists are contracted, promoted and confined to certain genres in ways that don't happen to whites due to the legacy of race in American society.

Of the five major record labels, not one is majority black-owned, even though the majors have distribution deals with black-owned labels that are placed within their distribution network. Why Motown has ceased to exist as an independent force is a question that isn't even examined by most black public intellectuals, and that history can be partially understood by reading the Harvard Report on Soul Music commissioned by CBS Records (now Sony) in 1972. The report examined whether soul music was profitable and concluded that it was.

The lack of institutions that Jackson alluded to can be traced to the rise and fall of the Black Music Association, founded by Kenny Gamble in the late 1970s. Formed as a means to promote and protect black music as it was being corporately gobbled up, BMA floundered mostly because black industry insiders expected the white recording industry to fund it. Its legacy has virtually disappeared.

Herein lies the supreme irony of the past weeks: The man in the mirror with the deepest pockets could have founded the Michael Jackson Center for Music, a think tank dedicated to studying music issues and formulating policies that would help black artists in regard to the future of music.

Instead Jackson, a master of racial self-evisceration, has decided to show his true blackness by not thinking strategically and by not funding a forward-thinking black institution. Without missing a beat, he has truly come back to blackness.