Come Get To This

Another excellent Marvin song. Everyone knows that the man was an absolute monster. The past few days at work, I've pretty much only played him, hopefully the people around me like his music just as much as I do.

Yes I know all the Soul Train appearances are lipsynched, but I just love looking at the people more than anything (and I generally prefer album cuts to actual live singing). And I just love the title of this song. I'm a sucker for good titles, and I love people who have the ability to sum up exactly what I'm getting into, in just four or five words. Intellectually speaking, I suppose it's a little bit shallow. It's like judging a book by its cover, and I'm afraid I do that much more often than one would care to admit. (After giving it some consideration though, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not as deep as I want to appear. I love snappy titles, I love certain types of style even if they lack any semblance of substance 50's Rat Pack style slang, Spike from Cowboy Bebop, pseudo-indie pop culture references, and in many moods I'll take a good single over an album.)
Anyway, "Come Get To This" is like a perfectly aggressive come on- plenty of confidence to spare, but smooth enough, if said correctly, to not make it seem like a command. Now, obviously Marvin could sing the white pages and have it sound sensual, so in the hands of a lesser singer it might have fallen flat. Thankfully, in this video we don't have to find out.

I use to have this box set of funk & soul rarities from the 60's and 70's. The music was great, it had everything from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to Little Sister (Sly Stone's girl group) and Eddie Palmieri's Harlem River Drive. But what I really loved about it was the booklet that came with it. Just the pictures of the artists, the unmistakable 70's style and hair. It was all sepia-toned, so I couldn't see the outrageous colors, but it certainly did make me want to be young during those years. I have a friend who I use to share music with sometimes. She had the same reaction that I did when looking at the photos, a sense of joy upon gazing at the people of our parents generation. We were both history majors and anything that puts modern history into a better context is something we'd enjoy. But it was a bit more than that too, and I think it can be summed up in something she said while we were looking through the booklet- "Man, I love Black people from the 70's."
I certainly know the feeling, which is why I pick the Soul Train videos as much as I can.
When I look at those old episodes the first thing I notice.. well, the first thing I notice is that everyone is so damn skinny. And from the looks of things, it's mostly because of all the dancing they did. People really did dance back then, males included. I can't dance, but one of the bad things about the machismo of hip-hop infiltrating pretty much all of popular Black music, I think, is that it's pretty much unacceptable for Black men to dance like that anymore, it takes a little bit of bravier because something you try might not be "cool." It's fine for men to do, say performance dance, Americans in general love to watch dance crews, but no man could ever get away with dancing at the club the way some of these guys danced on Soul Train. Kat Williams talked about how Black people, particularly Black men, always have to be cool and can't enjoy themselves fully. It's generalizing of course, but I kind of agree.
But after the collective anorexia and dancing (and clothes), what I notice the most is a sense of the collective attitude, you can kind of feel it bursting through as Marvin's singing. It's feels like a cloud of joy has kind of just been released By almost any legitimate measure, the life of the average Black person is far better today than it was in the 1970's. Crime is down, drug addiction is down, educational achievements levels are up, as are economic ones. But what I think we don't have, or at least did not have until very recently, was that pure sense of joy about the prospects for the future. I wasn't alive back them (of course) and my impressions may be wrong, but from what I've seen, there was so much pent up hope about the progress of Black people. I mean, some of the culminating events of the Civil Rights movement were less than a decade old, and the progress that had been made was pretty stark, it must have been a wonderful experience to witness firsthand. I don't think you can fault anyone for thinking that the progress would go unimpeded, that the only direction there was to go was up. In hindsight we now know that the progress, under the economic and cultural conditions of the 70's was unsustainable. The sagging economy of the 70's, devastated by high inflation, low growth, and government largesse, begat the Reagan 80's, and with it came cuts in social spending and a more general laissez-faire attitude when it came to the underclass. To strain an analogy a bit, it may be comparable in a sense to how people felt about the space program. In elementary school, some of the social studies books we use to use were pretty old, and one in particular talked about all of the future plans that NASA had in store, the most prominent being a manned mission to Mars, sometime around 2000. Again, the progress the United States made in the 60's was enough to be optimistic about what was in store for the future of our space program. But of course it wasn't to be- it was unsustainable and in many ways a waste of spending. I guess that's what many people felt about government spending on inner cities too (although we never really got control of the budget during the Reagan years either- the money just went to a different constituency). Of course the educational and economic stagnation of Black people during the 1980's is a lot more consequential for our current situation than an unfulfilled mission to Mars. People talk about Japan's lost decade of the 1990's the 2010's becoming a lost decade for our country, well, with a few caveats, the 1980's was a lost decade for Black people and were now only starting to make up for it.

But the point is that, what I see, when I watch those Soul Train videos is the exuberant feeling that comes along with visions of an extraordinarily bright future. I'm pretty sure it's just my wishes reading too much into something, but that's how I'd like to see it, so that's how I will.