Detroit, 1992: I’m over at my friend Keith’s house, and we’re hanging out in his basement bedroom when he puts on a new CD: “Freedom What Freedom,” the latest album by a British punk band called Skrewdriver. This comes as a surprise for at least two reasons: 1) Skrewdriver is a white-supremacist neo-Nazi skinhead group; 2) Keith is black. I have no idea why Keith likes Skrewdriver, but presumably it has something do with pissing off his family; what could be more punk rock than that? I assume as much because within minutes his older brother, a bona-fide bow-tie-wearing member of the black-nationalist Nation of Islam, is shouting from upstairs for Keith to turn that shit off, and Keith seems pleased.
Only two things are clear to me. One is that, at least in this basement in Detroit, Skrewdriver has lost control of what its music means. The other is that it means something entirely different for Keith to listen to Skrewdriver and for me, a white boy, to listen to Skrewdriver.
Which I don’t, I hasten to add. I was seriously into the punk scene at that time—that’s how I met Keith—but unlike Keith, I almost never listened to punk records at home, and certainly not skinhead stuff. What I actually listened to was soul music. It was the music I was weaned on, starting with Motown, and I thought it was the best kind of music there was, simple as that.
I rarely went out of my way to listen to Motown; living in Detroit, you never had to. It was everywhere, even decades after its heyday. Motown was music for which I felt both great pride—all Detroiters did, earned or not—and slight embarrassment. Lots of Motown songs were irresistible; I thought it inconceivable that any singer could be greater than Stevie Wonder, and I still do. But lots of it sounded pretty square, too. I was appalled at the way Motown was milked for maudlin nostalgia in the movie “The Big Chill,” including Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street,” and David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s obnoxious 1985 cover version of that song seemed to epitomize that decade’s phony enthusiasm. Every time I heard “Dancing in the Street” after the mid-eighties, I cringed. It seemed to me like a simple song too often pressed into service for an easy jolt of uplift, its optimistic fanfare clashing uncomfortably with the hard facts of a city in such bad decline that last week it filed for bankruptcy.
The last thing it sounded to me was dangerous. After 9/11, the radio conglomerate Clear Channel put together a list of some hundred and fifty songs it advised its stations to avoid playing, and the inclusion of “Dancing in the Street” made it seem like a joke. I was immediately curious, then, when I learned that Mark Kurlansky had written a whole book about “Dancing in the Street,” and its supposed status as a radical anthem. Called “Ready for a Brand New Beat,” Kurlansky’s book is comprehensive; no known fact about the song “Dancing in the Street” seems to have escaped its pages. If I’d been wrong all along about “Dancing in the Street,” this was the place to find out.
Kurlansky sets up his study with a series of effective capsule histories—of the “rock-and-roll riots” of the fifties, of the Great Migration, of portable record-player technology—bringing us at last to the origins of the Motown record company. In a city of industry, Motown was a factory for turning inner-city Detroit teen-agers into R. & B. divas in evening gowns and glittery tuxedos, trained in everything from posture to etiquette to stage patter. Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy, wrote in his memoir that his methods “had been shaped by the principles I learned on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line.” He was in the business of market-tested and quality-controlled crossover music. Gordy “operated in the belief that black art flourished only when it reached out to include white audiences,” Kurlansky writes. Between 1960 and 1970, sixty-seven per cent of Motown records made the Top 100, in an industry where a ten-per-cent hit rate was considered a success.
At the end of 1963, Billboard magazine discontinued its R. & B. chart in favor of a single pop-music Top 100, having determined that white and black record-buying trends could no longer be meaningfully distinguished. At the beginning of 1965, Billboard reinstated the R. & B. chart, white and black tastes having diverged again. Not coincidentally, that desegregated interlude was the high point of Motown’s crossover triumph, and “Dancing in the Street” was released smack in the middle.
Three men collaborated in writing “Dancing in the Street”: William (Mickey) Stevenson, who was the A. & R. director for Motown, the staff songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter, and Marvin Gaye. Stevenson told Kurlansky that the title came from a hot summer day when he and Gaye were driving through Detroit and saw kids playing in the spray of open fire hydrants. Gaye said, “Dancing in the street.” Hunter said that Gaye’s other major contribution was the naming of cities with major black populations: “Philadelphia, P.A. / Baltimore and D.C. now / Can’t forget the Motor City.” (A decade later, Parliament would make the political implications of such a list explicit in the song “Chocolate City.”) The only message of the song, Stevenson told Kurlansky, was integration and coexistence. “Kids have no color,” he said. “They would play out there as if they were brothers and sisters of every creed. So the song comes from that idea.”
But that’s not the idea Kurlansky’s talking about. The subtitle for “Ready for a Brand New Beat”—“How ‘Dancing in the Street’ Became the Anthem for a Changing America”—is a bit coy; a more accurate tagline would be something like “How ‘Dancing in the Street’ Became the Anthem for Black Insurrection.” “There is that telling phrase: ‘Summer’s here and the time is right,’ ” he writes. “And did not ‘calling out around the world’ mean a call for revolution, and didn’t the song include a list of cities, each with important black communities that were likely to have ‘disorders’? What did it mean to be calling out to these cities for people to go dancing in the street now that summer’s here and the time is right?”
Out of context, these sound like the kind of questions Charles Manson might ask after listening to the Beatles’ “White Album.” But Kurlansky develops a strong case for why “Dancing in the Street” would be widely interpreted as a call to action. Here’s what else was going on in the summer of 1964. On June 17th, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed the first of over three dozen black churches that would burn that summer. On June 19th, the Civil Rights Bill passed the Senate. On June 21st, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee launched its Summer Project, a campaign to register rural black voters in Mississippi; that same day, three of its volunteers, one black and two white, went missing. In July, riots broke out in Harlem and Bed Stuy and Rochester, New York; Malcolm X said, “We want freedom by any means necessary.” “Dancing in the Street” was released on July 31st. In August, there were riots in New Jersey and Chicago and Jacksonville, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and the bodies of the S.N.C.C. volunteers were found buried on a Mississippi farm, one bullet in each of the hearts of the white men, three bullets in the black man. Halfway through Kurlansky’s book, “Dancing in the Street” suddenly struck me as terribly moving song.
In August, 1965, riots broke out in Watts. Marvin Gaye wrote in his autobiography that he was listening to one of his own songs on the radio when an announcer interrupted with the news:
But to some listeners, it did. A rumor went around that “Dancing in the Street” had been banned from the radio because it had inspired the violence. Kurlansky writes, “This was the first time it was suggested that the song had a second meaning.” The black-power movement was first to embrace this meaning. In October, 1965, the S.N.C.C. member Roland Snellings wrote an article called “Keep on Pushin’: Rhythm & Blues as a Weapon” for a black-power journal called Liberator: “WE ARE COMING UP! WE ARE COMING UP! And it’s reflected in the Riot-song that symbolized Harlem, Philly, Brooklyn, Rochester, Paterson, Elizabeth; this song, of course, ‘Dancing in the Streets’—making Martha and the Vandellas legendary.”
The early years of the civil-rights movement were fuelled by freedom songs—traditional hymns and folk tunes such as “We Shall Overcome,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Which Side Are You On?” But the black-power movement had had enough with singing freedom songs. At S.N.C.C. parties in 1966, they played R. & B., but not much Motown. Kurlansky quotes the d.j. Magnificent Montague: “The only place you don’t feel the tension in the music of 1966 is in Detroit, where Berry Gordy is managing to go the other way and make Motown less black, less tense, and more controlled.” Protected by what the Motown star Mary Wells called “the Motown bubble,” the company didn’t start releasing overtly political songs until 1970: Edwin Starr’s “War,” The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All.” Even Marvin Gaye’s own “What’s Going On” didn’t come out until 1971; Gaye had recorded it the year before, but Gordy refused to release it, calling it “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.” S.N.C.C. preferred artists like Curtis Mayfield, who sang openly about civil rights and black pride.
“Dancing in the Street” was an exception. It wasn’t just the lyrics, it was the sound of Martha Reeves’s voice. Kurlansky describes it as having “an almost mystical urgency”: “It was neither sweet nor beautiful but it had an undefeatable power that some would call sexy, others edgy, some even said political.” (Interesting word, “political”: when used to describe what a politician does, it smacks of craven expedience, but apply it to a pop song and it sounds hip and forceful.) There were lots of covers of “Dancing in the Street”—seven in 1965—but only the original was ever associated with rioting.
Marvin Gaye is the one author of “Dancing in the Street” who couldn’t be asked about any double meanings; his father shot and killed him in 1984. But in his autobiography, Gaye wrote, “Funny but of all the acts back then, I thought Martha and the Vandellas came closest to really saying something. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but when they sang numbers like ‘Quicksand’ or ‘Wild One’ or ‘Nowhere to Run’ or ‘Dancing in the Street,’ they captured a spirit that felt political to me. I liked that.” As Kurlansky points out, it was Gaye himself who picked Martha Reeves to sing “Dancing in the Street.”
In the spring and summer of 1966, there were forty-three riots in U.S. cities. Kurlansky enumerates some of the explanations offered by the white press and politicians for why black people were rising up: heat waves, weak character, overcrowding, the writings of James Baldwin, and the radio patter of Magnificent Montague, whose slogan was “Burn, baby, burn.” There was even an article in the 1967 Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Does Brain Disease Play a Role in Riots and Urban Violence?” The actual incidents that instigated the riots seemed to point in a different direction: in the great majority of cases, they began over police treatment of a black person.
In 1967, there were more than a hundred and twenty riots. H. Rap Brown was now chairman of S.N.C.C., and that summer he often played “Dancing in the Street” during his rallies in black neighborhoods. “Strangely, the uprisings, too, often took on a party spirit,” Kurlansky writes. “It can be seen in press photos of the incidents—people standing around, laughing, taunting the police. And this was the atmosphere this song helped create. The record would be played. People would sing it. They would refer to what they were doing as ‘dancing in the street.’ ”
The worst riots that summer were in Detroit itself. On the day the riots began, Martha Reeves was in the midst of what was supposed to be a ten-day engagement in downtown Detroit’s Fox Theatre. By strange coincidence, she was actually in the middle of performing “Dancing in the Street” when the stage manager interrupted to tell her that the city was on fire. The Kerner Report, which President Johnson had commissioned to study the increasing incidence of summertime “civil disorders,” said that in Detroit “a spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold.” One witness was quoted as saying that young people were “dancing amidst the flames.” Reeves was horrified by it all. In London that year, she burst into tears when British reporters asked her if “Dancing in the Street” was a call to arms. “It is a party song,” she said.
Kurlansky calls Martha Reeves “a genuinely apolitical person.” “I just want to be responsible for being a good singer,” she said, and told him she’d never heard of S.N.C.C. But she also said, “We were always political. We sold love in front of segregated audiences. That’s political.” Gordy, too, has often been labelled apolitical, and it’s true that he didn’t want politics in his songs until it became an inevitability of the marketplace—although in 1963 he started a Motown label called Black Forum, which released speeches and talks by black thinkers from Langston Hughes to Stokely Carmichael. But outright activism isn’t what made them political. Norman Mailer once remarked to James Baldwin, “I want to know how power works, how it really works, in detail,” and in his essay “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Baldwin replied: “Well, I know how power works, it has worked on me, and if I didn’t know how power worked, I would be dead. And it goes without saying, perhaps, that I have simply never been able to afford myself any illusions concerning the manipulation of that power.” Reeves’s parents were Alabama sharecroppers; Gordy’s grandparents were born into slavery. No illusions there. By 1970, Gordy had built the largest black-owned company in America. In this sense, Kurlansky writes, Gordy “was in fact a black power ideal.” He quotes the poet Amiri Baraka: “Merely by being a Negro in America, one was a nonconformist.”
The way people heard “Dancing in the Street” can’t be broken into neat “white” and “black” categories. Some white radicals heard it as a revolutionary anthem—Mark Rudd told Kurlansky that the Weathermen thought it was a “code for rioting”—and plenty of black people, like Reeves, heard it as a straightforward party song. Anyway, both are true: it’s an innocent song about children dancing to records outside in the summertime; it’s a provocative song about taking action in an urgent hour. But black and white audiences, generally speaking, are differently equipped when it comes to reading the meaning of a song like “Dancing in the Street.” Kurlansky quotes from Baraka’s book “Blues People”: “In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than an exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative.” An intelligent message is conveyed by “ever-changing paraphrases.” This tradition of “masking” goes back to the very roots of black American culture, when messages of escape and rebellion were hidden in slave spirituals, and developed through the elaborate innuendo of blues lyrics. For black audiences, Kurlansky writes, listening for that subtext was “the normal response to hearing a new song.” A literal reading misses the mystery of a song like “Dancing in the Street,” whose power and durability as an anthem derives from its very indirection.
Elsewhere in his essay on Norman Mailer, James Baldwin writes, “The thing that most white people imagine they can salvage from the storm of life is their innocence.” More than anything, Kurlansky’s agenda in “Ready for a Brand New Beat” is to decry white Americans’ vast capacity for obliviousness. While I was reading his book, I kept thinking about another Detroit moment, this one from 1989. I was about to start my freshman year of high school, and my dad and I went to see “Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee’s study of an urban black uprising in the hot summertime, in one of the last first-run theatres in the city. We were the only white people in the packed house, which wasn’t unusual, and as the film made its way toward its climax there was more and more shouting around us, which also was not at all unusual in a movie theatre in Detroit. The movie’s white characters made me feel a touch defensive—Pino, whose love of Prince doesn’t cancel out his racism; the neighbor who says, “I own this brownstone” after Buggin’ Out challenges his presence—but it was easy enough to see the ways in which they weren’t much like me and go on enjoying the movie. When Mookie threw the garbage can through the pizza parlor window, the audience stood up as one, or seemed to, and people were shouting, “Burn the motherfucker down!,” and my father and I stood, too, so that we could see the screen. It didn’t occur to me that the film and the reaction had anything much to do with me until the lights came on, even as the film was still playing, and a (black) security guard came up to me and my father and said, “You better get out of here,” and escorted us through the emergency exit to the safety of the parking lot and the bright white afternoon.
Rollo Romig is a former member of the editorial staff of The New Yorker. He is currently based in India.
Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty.