Revolution number ja danke
Parts One and Two – with thanks to Liz for comments
I. Notes on Summer of Soul and ‘the Black Woodstock’
This summer I saw the film Summer of Soul, a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It’s a beautiful record of an extraordinary time in music, featuring stunning live footage of an array of artists, many of whom were at their creative and musical peak at this time. The footage has remained without an official release for over fifty years, and one of the participants in Summer of Soul observes that the Harlem Cultural Festival was overshadowed by the media hype around Woodstock and its attendant film. Attempts to attract distributor interest by labelling the event ‘the Black Woodstock’ were unsuccessful.
As an effort to drum up corporate interest in a forbidding climate, it would be banal to criticise the ‘Black Woodstock’ label for its inaccuracy. Below I emphasise what is suggestive and promising about the concept, but first it may be worth noting the significant differences between the Harlem Cultural Festival and Woodstock. First, the former was a series of well-organised free concerts held at a park in Harlem over the course of the summer, whereas the second was a chaotic weekend concert, for which tens of thousands of advance tickets were sold, although it eventually became free by default. This led to a divergence in audience for each event. Whereas Woodstock was attended by young, mostly white, rock fans, the Harlem Cultural Festival had a multi-generational, mostly black audience, and whereas the former represented an opportunity for escape and hedonism, the latter, with its location in a local community and temporal spread, was not just a youthful free-for-all. Then there is the question of politics and music. The Harlem Cultural Festival exhibited a range of political viewpoints of the late 1960s: from local politicians standing for election to civil rights activists and the Black Panther Party; while Woodstock was oriented to the inchoate politics of the youthful counterculture, recorded compellingly in Joni Mitchell’s song of the same name.
Turning to the question of music, the ‘Black Woodstock’ handle raises obvious objections in the sense of making the Harlem Cultural Festival, which was a remarkable demonstration of artistry, musicianship, and soul, into an ‘answer’ to a much more musically uneven event. Beyond this evident disservice to the Harlem Cultural Festival, the idea of a ‘Black Woodstock’ presupposes, incorrectly, that Woodstock itself was ‘white’. Given the obvious blues and soul influences among the white groups who played the event, this would be preposterous even if Woodstock hadn’t famously opened and closed with black artists (Richie Havens and Jimi Hendrix) as well as featuring Ravi Shankar and Sly and the Family Stone (who also performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival) in the line-up.
Despite, or perhaps because of these multiple objections, the essentialist reading of Anglophone popular music in the 1960s as containing distinct ‘black’ and ‘white’ elements remains hardwired into the way music has been thought and written about. Nor can it be denied that the realities of racialisation and racism reinforced differences in musical production and consumption at this time. Thinking about the Harlem Cultural Festival and Woodstock through this lens highlights a black world of cross-generational tradition tied to the struggle for freedom (symbolised in Summer of Soul by Mahalia Jackson handing her microphone to Mavis Staples), in which commercial success was hard won in the face of institutional racism through professionalism, virtuosity and artistry, and a white world that was, musically and politically, sloppier and more self-indulgent, but which was nevertheless backed by major labels. Doubtless there is some truth to this, and yet the ‘Black Woodstock’ label, for all that it is highly problematic, hints at another underexplored truth to this period, which is that these ‘black’ and ‘white’ categories were porous, and insofar as distinct musical worlds existed, they were involved in a dialogue and cross-pollination that reached a crescendo in the mid to late ’60s. And this raises the question of what political consequences this dialogue might have, given that the performance and production of Anglophone popular music was probably more widely and intensely politicised at the turn of that decade than it ever would be again.
The neglect suffered by the recording of the Harlem Cultural Festival is not hard to understand, even when the commercial appeal of its electrifying footage is so apparent, because the music is situated in a highly political context. It is not only that ‘white’ corporations were reluctant to finance the release of a film that documents and celebrates ‘black’ artistry – although this is surely part of the story. It is the way this artistry is unmistakeably linked to oppositional politics, both formal and informal, that made it intolerable in that febrile period. I think this would be true even if that politics was expressed only in its reformist variant in the recordings, but this is not the case.
Take Nina Simone’s set, for example. Summer of Soul includes her rendition of the poem ‘Are you ready, black people?’ by David Nelson of The Last Poets. Simone has the words written down and she dances in between delivering the lines, while her band provide a percussion-only backing and the repeated chant: ‘Are you ready?’ The performance has a spontaneous, almost ramshackle feel. Paradoxically, as a groovy, under-rehearsed ‘happening’ it is the closest thing that the film shows to the ‘white’ countercultural vibes of Woodstock, while everything about the performance and the lyrics provide a stark declaration of black autonomy. ‘Are you ready to kill?’ Simone asks the crowd. ‘Are you ready to smash white things? To burn buildings?... Are you ready to create out of nothing?’ It is jolting and powerful, even decades later.
II. Nina Simone’s critique of Lennonism
Simone’s avowal of black self-determination has led some critics to take an overly simplistic view of another song in her Harlem set, ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’, co-written with Weldon Irvine. This extraordinary record is one of the 1960s’ key musical interventions in politics, made all the more compelling and radical for its dialogic character. It was written as an answer song to The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’, which had been released in two different versions in 1968. In a very deliberate way, Simone and Irvine’s song goes down to the crossroads: the crossroads in Simone’s career between popular music standards and black autonomy; and the crossroads between ‘black’ cultural flourishing and ‘white’ counterculture – ‘the Black Woodstock’ conundrum.
John Lennon had written ‘Revolution’ to comment on the unfolding politics of street protest in 1968. From the standpoint of an outsider, the song’s lyrics consider the merits and shortcomings of revolutionary politics, assuring the revolutionaries that ‘it’s gonna be alright’ regardless of what they choose to do. It is saved from pure condescension by Lennon’s attempt to grapple with his own position. Famously, his instinct to count himself ‘out’ of destruction caused him a great deal of anxiety and self-doubt. He attempted to resolve this in the studio during the recording of the version released on The White Album by singing the song while lying down. On this version, he sings ‘don’t you know that you can count me out – in’, although the languid vocal paradoxically adds to the sense of complacency rather than conveying the inner turmoil he felt. Much more effective in this sense is the single version, released on the B-side of ‘Hey Jude’, which is faster and noisier and features a classic rock ‘n roll scream at the beginning, but whose impact is lessened by the ‘count me out’ lyric, which leaves no room for ambiguity. This is why the definitive version of the song is that put out on the promo, which keeps the single delivery and the ‘out – in’ vocal.
As is well-known, the song was panned by the radical left and led to an exchange of letters published in Black Dwarf. Simone and Irvine’s ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’ is often seen as being part of this general, hostile reaction. Certainly, it was an effective critique of ‘Revolution’, and the principal difference is made clear in the opening line ‘Now we got a revolution’, indicating Simone’s intention not to make an objective judgement about revolutionary aims but rather to respond to an ongoing situation in which she is involved. Contrary to Lennon’s dismissal of radical posturing, Simone and Irvine get to the heart of the matter by situating the problem as one of survival rather than hipness: ‘It’s not as simple as talking jive, the daily struggle just to stay alive.’ Nor do they duck the issue of violence, but contextualise it: ‘I’m here to tell you about destruction of all the evil that will have to end… The only way that we can stand in fact, is when you get your foot off our back’. While the chorus of ‘it’s gonna be alright’ is retained, the rest of the lyrics make it clear that this is not blissed out reassurance, but optimism of the will.
Undoubtedly, we can make a case that ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’ represents a realistic black revolutionary response to the shortcomings of ‘Revolution’. But what makes the Simone / Irvine song so effective is that it is not a mere polemic against The Beatles, a common misconception. For example, in this informative article, the author expresses surprise that Lennon went on record as liking ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’ given that it ‘attacked’ him, and in Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald makes the surprisingly flippant and misleading statement that ‘The jazz singer Nina Simone recorded a “reply” record in which she attacked Lennon for his apoliticism and advised him to “clean” his brain’. This is a mischaracterisation. Instead, we can think of Simone and Irvine as choosing to call in rather than call out The Beatles.
It would certainly have been within Simone’s power to record a hard-edged, funky response to ‘Revolution’ that would provide both a lyrical and sonic counterpoint to the latter’s soft edges. But ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’ also goes out of its way to demonstrate that Simone and Irvine were attentive listeners of the band. The song not only rejigs The Beatles’ shuffling blues – ‘sort of like “Revolution”, but not quite’, as Lennon later admiringly put it – but also references the ‘Day Tripper’ riff and the lead guitar motif from ‘Old Brown Shoe’ (the latter is impressive because it can only have been available for a matter of days before the recording of ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’), while the song’s climax is a clear take-off of the avant-garde cacophony that brought ‘A Day in the Life’ to a crescendo. It also seems likely that the lyrical echoes of ‘Get Back’ and possibly even ‘All Together Now’ are deliberate. It is playful, but also a gesture of musical respect that demonstrates the song’s desire for dialogue rather than dismissal. If there was any doubt, the lyrical affirmation of this trans(Black)Atlantic conversation underlines Simone / Irvine’s intent: ‘Some folks are gonna get the notion, they’ll say I’m preaching hate. But if I had to swim the ocean, well, I would, just to communicate’. As for the ‘clean your brain’ line, Simone’s performance at the Harlem Cultural Festival changed the lyric to: ‘well you know we all got to clean our brains,’ suggesting this was not the personalised advice it has been interpreted as.
Musically and lyrically, the song explores the political possibilities of ‘white’ and ‘black’ countercultures converging, while asserting a standpoint that could not afford to dismiss the need for destruction. Rather than the belligerent statement of ‘black’ opposition to ‘white’ apoliticism it has been read as, it was a provocation and an invitation to reconsider the stakes of social transformation that acknowledged The Beatles’ contribution to Black Atlantic culture. As such, ‘Revolution Parts One and Two’ is a record that realises the potential of the ‘Black Woodstock’ moment of 1969, a time whose promise is obscured by essentialist readings of musical production.
- Danny
PS: Writing this piece I became aware that there is an article about The Beatles’ and Simone’s ‘Revolutions’ on Jacobin behind a paywall. I’ve not read it, so any reproduction of themes or arguments is unintentional.