Milestones

Rick James

Name: Rick James – Street Songs
Item: Street Songs
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Street Songs

1981 (Gordy)

contemporary R&B, synth funk

by Federico Romagnoli

The history of funk has always been populated by characters who, in their own way, were bizarre and provocative. Just think of the genre's biggest names and recall for a moment their exploits: from the mogul James Brown to the innovator George Clinton, via the sheer recklessness of Prince. Flamboyance, after all, has always been a core ingredient of one of the fizziest genres in popular music. And yet there was one musician truly unique in his kind, capable of standing out as eccentric even within the funk melting pot. A man who literally swept audiences off their feet with his intoxicating fusion of disco elements, consistently seasoned with an unconditional love for soul music and a rock sensibility pushed to exaggerated, even glam, extremes. A musician with rhythm running through his veins and the sly grin of someone determined to live life at full throttle, not caring what anyone else thought. Yet it was a life that began badly, with his father abandoning him when he was just ten years old, leaving him with only one great source of support: his mother, a dancer with the celebrated Katherine Dunham company. It was she who introduced the young James Ambrose Johnson Jr. to the world of music, albeit unintentionally. Thanks to her performances in New York's most exclusive venues, James had the chance to see Etta James, John Coltrane and Miles Davis live. However, his encounter with the ruthless world of drugs was just as precocious. An addiction that lasted his entire life, and one that would lead to his death in 2004 at just 56 years old.

After being arrested for breaking and entering, James joined the US Navy before he was even sixteen, lying about his age to enlist. During those months, he also became a drummer for New York jazz-leaning groups, before being called up to serve in Vietnam. A call he naturally dodged by fleeing to Toronto in 1965, where he met Neil Young e Joni Mitchell. To avoid getting caught, he started going by the name Ricky James Matthews, and that same year he found time to put together the short-lived Mynah Birds, an r&b-oriented band. Passing through their ranks were Bruce Palmer , as well as Young himself, who would soon go on to front the Buffalo Springfield.
It was in Detroit, where the band had settled to record material for Motown, that the still very young James met his musical mentors: Marvin Gaye e Stevie Wonder. And it was the latter who suggested he shorten his name to Rick James, in order to steer clear of his troubles with the Navy. Indeed, after various legal entanglements with the Navy, which only ended in 1968, James finally began devoting himself full-time to music, writing songs for the Miracles, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers and the Spinners.

Having finally returned to his beloved New York in 1973, he signed with A&M and released his debut single, "My Mama". With the Stone City Band, built in his own image, he went on to record "Get Up And Dance!", a track that once again caught the attention of Berry Gordy's Motown, who finally understood he had to give a chance to that brazen, irreverent, yet utterly contagious musical phenomenon.

The single "You And I" was a considerable success, as was the album "Come And Get It!" (1978), packed with groove booming p-funk arrangements. It also spawned a classic of the calibre of "Mary Jane", a thinly veiled ode to marijuana. The following "Bustin' Out Of L Seven" (1978), "Fire It Up" (1979) and "Garden Of Love" (1980) cemented his reputation, particularly within black music circles, proof of a talent that was truly out of the ordinary. It was a golden period for James, who also found time to produce the splendid Teena Marie's album "Wild And Peaceful", complete with a duet on the track "I'm A Sucker (For Your Love)".

If there's one record with which James broke down genre barriers, winning over appeal white audiences as well, it's "Street Songs", released in April 1981. It's a rather curious paradox, given that it's the album with the most extreme lyrics he'd written up to that point.

James struck a chord without making any compromises — if anything, he pushed even harder on his expressive urgency, singing about life in the New York slums, a subject he could easily have written a treatise on.

In this respect, while carrying the torch, James did not follow the blueprint set by the previous gurus of the rawest funk. Brown had built his career on the redemption of African Americans, crafting for himself an image as a sex symbol, yet never coming across as outrageous. Clinton, for his part, sang of Black pride through metaphor, filtered more or less explicitly through his sci-fi subject matter, when not entirely abstract ("One Nation Under A Groove").

James broke away from all this, on one hand bringing sex into it in the crudest way possible, much like Prince was doing at the same time, and on the other singing about the dark side of the poorest strata of the population, not necessarily Black. Problems with police abuse of power ("Mr. Policeman"), bullying and underage sex in the most rundown neighbourhoods ("In The Ghetto", "Below The Funk"): these weren't subjects exclusive to Black people, nor did James frame them along racial lines in these songs. It's not hard to see how even a white listener could identify with the words of that alien, whose black skin — even in the troubled America of the time — was no more of an issue than his impossibly long hair, his skintight black leather outfit, or his towering red high-heeled boots. A strongly feminine and sexualised look, which James also adopted as a symbol of social payback: in "Below The Funk" itself, he sings about having endured homophobic slurs in the past. Here too, the parallel with Prince of "Dirty Mind" — another famously hyperactive heterosexual who liked to flaunt his own femininity — rings true.

To launch the album, videos were shot for "Give It To Me" and "Super Freak", in which James was joined by attractive models, courting them or simply dancing alongside them, all spiced up with provocative looks or lewd smirks aimed at the camera.

Those videos, like Prince's from the same period, were only aired on the newly launched MTV during the late-night slot, as network executives feared backlash over music so far removed from their mostly white target audience. One of the channel's presenters, Mark Goodman, was pressed on the matter by David Bowie during an interview, and admitted that broadcasting those “black faces” might scare a white kid in the Midwest. This was the social climate James stepped into with the utmost boldness: the problem had to be tackled by shattering the code of silence, a battering ram was needed, there was no longer time to wait for the slow change that had been promised for far too long.

Even without MTV's enthusiasm, the message was so powerful that the record managed to climb to number three on the Billboard chart and stayed on the charts for a year and a half.

In hindsight, the record seems calculated in every detail to reach a crossover audience. The arrangements and songwriting broke away almost traumatically from the artist's previous work, which he oversaw personally at every stage, drawing on his skills as a multi-instrumentalist. The jam that had defined his style up to that point were essentially wiped out: no more tracks with codas or interludes built on exhausting repetition, no more arrangements piling up chaotic layers of instruments, no more orchestrations with the overtones of disco (a genre James never explicitly embraced, but whose presence in the air he had inevitably absorbed).

In place of p-funk sorcery, James delivered eight songs strongly centred on songwriting, with far more defined structures than in the past, ready to grab attention on first radio play. He pushed the guitars back a step and brought the more modern synthesizers forward, softened the drums' presence by layering hand claps (suitably processed with effects) over every snare hit, occasionally doubled his masterful bass lines with a keyboard, and added a horn section, probably to keep things from sounding too sterile. The new arrangements, especially by contrast with the recent past, seemed to work by subtraction, and he couldn't risk that, in modernizing the soundits dynamism would be drained away.

No fewer than five are dancefloor-filling funk cuts (“Give It To Me”, “In The Ghetto”, “Super Freak”, “Call Me Up”, “Below The Funk”), broken up by two ballads (the superb “Make Love To Me”, with the most prominent bass line on the record, and the lengthy “Fire And Desire”, another duet with Teena Marie) and a reggae number (“Mr. Policeman”, probably influenced by Stevie Wonder's “Master Blaster”, which would explain the latter's presence on harmonica).

Aside from its enormous influence on hip-hop (we won't even try to count the artists who would go on to sample it), the record would go on to set several standards, becoming a classic of what's known as synth-funk – defined precisely by the dominance of keyboards – and more broadly of the era that immediately followed the collapse of disco musicwhich saw the rise of a new face for Black music. The passage of time and its place in history have since allowed us to point to “Street Songs” as one of the founding moments of contemporary R&B.

From roughly that point on, “R&B” was no longer automatically synonymous with the rhythm & blues born in the Sixties, but took on a postmodern meaning, stylistically all-encompassing and closely tied to technological development. To give a practical example, if today the term can also be used to describe Kali Uchis o Janelle Monaeand no longer just Otis Redding and Aretha Franklinit's because in between there was a school of musicians who shifted the centre of gravity of its meaning. Among them, James has only been surpassed by Prince and Michael Jackson in impact, and only by the former in visionary scope. Yet had drugs and a string of legal troubles not badly undermined James's career in the second half of the Eighties, eventually wrecking it entirely as the Nineties began, today we would in all likelihood be talking about one of the most important artists of the era, rather than a figure dismissively filed under the shadow of the Minneapolis imp, as he is so often simplistically written off.
On the other hand, it's also true that if he hadn't been so extreme, he probably wouldn't have been Rick James, the alien and freak par excellence of the season that revolutionized American culture.

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24/02/2019

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition