Arthur Kempton salutes Motown
On Christmas Day of 1968, the breaking dawn disclosed Motown in its fullest flower. Five of America's ten most popular records had been made and sold by a company seeded a decade earlier in a backwater of culture commerce by a scuffling thirty-year old black songwriter with money borrowed from family who already considered him chronically unsuccessful.
And still, on late Friday afternoons, the proprietor of black America's biggest enterprise prowled the offices of what was, by then, the most effective organization in the history of the music business, admonishing any within whose pace had slackened to keep working. "Haven't you heard?," Berry Gordy Jr. would growl. "Money's not on strike."
That was "the Chairman": relentless in the pursuit of the next dollar among the thirty million or so in record sales amassed by his company that year; as tenacious in the minding of his store as any hard-bitten Seven-Eleven franchisee in a bad neighborhood. But Gordy was much more than that.
Once the physical labor of black Americans began its inexorable slide into economic obsolescence in the middle years of the last century, black America's popular culture became its principal natural resource. It was Gordy who first figured out how to package and sell black music to the white masses. In so doing, he turned it into a commodity.
Within ten years of Motown's mass market breakthrough in 1964, black music was accounting for about two-thirds of the industry's $3.5 billion annual take. Since these days the popular culture of black Americans is among this country's leading global exports, Berry Gordy Jr. deserves to be recognized as a twentieth century American industrialist as consequential as Carnegie or Rockefeller.
While more than three quarters of his competitors' products were failing to recoup what they cost to make, Gordy was building a brand that became nearly as recognizable around the world as Coca Cola and McDonald's. Of the 537 single records Motown released between 1960 and 1970, two thirds of them--357--were hits. Never before, or again, in the annals of culture commerce was quality produced in such quantity.
Gordy's specific genius for the record business was enlisted in the service of making and selling art. His was a song-driven enterprise, and he taught his songwriters to tell coherent "three minute stories." As dominant contributors to the soundtrack of everyday black adolescent life in the Sixties, the output of Motown's songwriters comprised a literature of the streets.
To those of us who were young when Motown was, they taught a danceable curriculum of lessons in life. I, for one, can't count the times in the last forty-three years when I've heard the echo of Wanda Rogers's voice reminding me that "it's vanity,insanity, to play when you can't win." I've never gotten any advice I consider more enduringly useful.
The Motown Berry Gordy made lasted less than twenty years and has been dead for more than thirty. Its afterglow is fadeless.
Arthur Kemton is author of Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music
