800 Words: Dreamgirls - An Opera Lover's Perspective

(another rerun from 2009)

For nearly two years, I've had this vague curiosity about Dreamgirls.  I've heard from some sources that I don't always trust that it's incredible, and others I do trust have told me I have to avoid Dreamgirls like the plague.  For two years the latter is exactly what I did.  

But something gnawed at me about this movie.  A movie that is supposed to look unflinchingly at the business of entertainment would have to put each of these stars in the proper lights they never seem to fill.  I love Eddie Murphy, how can anyone not?  As a young man he would simply explode off the screen.  But year after year, he coasts through bad projects, getting second chance after second chance from an audience that would do anything to see him make great movies again.  I have a vague respect of Jamie Foxx but I rarely see him in something good enough for his talent - he seems too smart for even his better movies, as though he's a sort of robot who does an impeccable Ray Charles.  And I'm just plain irritated by Beyonce, she really is as processed and packaged a commodity as today's world has.  I can't be alone in thinking she's not even a good guilty pleasure.   This movie would have to have an Eddie Murphy in all his explosive charisma, a Jamie Foxx with all his cold intelligence intact, and a Beyonce completely honest about her vacuousness.  In an era of crappy movie musicals, can anybody be blamed for being dismissive about this movie's prospects?

And so, with nobody home I did a thing I'd never do otherwise: I found the beginning of Dreamgirls on HBO, and I didn't keep channel surfing, and what I found dug deeper into the dirt than anything I could imagine.  No doubt there is plenty of room to carp: if you take them out of context the songs are often RENT-level in their insipidness.  But then again, so often is opera.  What matters is the primal emotion that underlays.  This is no RENT-like imagining of bohemian life by people too white bread to understand it.  Dreamgirls may have been marketed as a glitz and glamor nostalgia tour, but the movie is in fact anything but.  It is shockingly, savagely honest about the entertainment world, only flinching into some maudlin sentimentality in the final scenes.  The movie is about The American Story, retold as ever it has been in everything from The Great Gatsby to Big Love - built upon the idea that in America all goals are possible so long as people have the will to succeed.

And so it is with the reptilian engine of will in this plot: a used car salesman named Curtis Taylor Jr.  It is a tribute to the movie that there is no attempt to make him a cartoon villain whose machinations inspire pure hatred.  Like Charles Foster Kane or Michael Corleone, he has his own dreams and his own reasons, and the fact that he has his reasons for acting as he does makes him much more frightening.  Regardless of the human cost, Curtis Taylor is the will to succeed, and succeed he does at a cost that is slightly devastating.  People like Curtis Taylor took the music of the projects, tamed it into something acceptable for incurious white audiences and watered down the art of it into something too bland to be remembered.  

And so he does with Jimmy Early.  Eddie Murphy plays a soul singer named James "Thunder" Early.  Everything about this character, down to the name, is supposed to be redolent of James Brown.  But Early can just as easily be a stand in for every great R&B singer from Sam Cooke to Marvin Gaye to Otis Redding (and at many points, for Murphy himself).  Jimmy is a performer of such self-destructive animal charisma that he devours everything in his path from food to women to drugs.  He is a walking machine of id that cannot think past his own immediate desires.  He cannot be restrained, directed, or appeased.  He can only be humiliated.  If Jimmy cannot be made to sing like Johnny Mathis, all Curtis has to do is let Early be himself, and that is what destroys his career.

At the same time, Curtis takes a talented but small-time R&B trio of female friends from the Detroit projects and streamlines them into the biggest sensation in pop.  The trio, called the Dreamettes, are obviously supposed to remind us of The Supremes.  Taylor does this by taking Deena Jones, the least talented but most beautiful of the three, and making her the star.  Deena Jones is an obvious standin for Diana Ross, but she could just as easily be Beyonce.  Marketed and produced to a point of no independence, her fame is a kind of slavery.  She is a commodity who exists to be sold by others to others.  Any attempt by her to have some independence or creativity in her act is snuffed out before it can even begin.  By the end of the movie, she is just a shell for other people's desires.

To make Dreamettes into a sensation, Curtis needs to get rid of the trio's true artist.  Effie James begins as the lead singer, but as the movie progresses she is thrust further and further aside to the margins until the movie nearly eliminates her.  Like James Early, she is an uncontainable force of nature too unique to be packaged.  If she had been born ten years earlier she might have sung at the Obama inauguration with Aretha Franklin, but originals are too precious for too many to survive.  As the Dreamettes move to success, Effie moves ever downward, back to the projects, and in so many ways becomes a standin for all the forgotten people of America's bad neighborhoods, denied the opportunities that a great country should have given them.   

Where the movie went wrong was in giving Effie a second chance.  Just as Curtis, Jimmy and Deena have their real-life counterparts, so does Effie White.  Before Diana Ross was The Supremes lead, she was the backup to Florence Ballard .  A full-figured singer whose image was entirely bound within her voice.  Effie White's story may have ended on a major chord, but Florence Ballard died nearly destitute at the age of 32. 

The movie itself moves along seamlessly with a minimum of dialogue, the cliches in the lyrics made palatable by the electricity of the singing.  But this is not the world of Shakespeare, this is the world of Grand Opera with all the grand camp that implies.  The words are nothing more than a medium to carry the primal emotions within the music.  The music, at the same time affecting and absurd, gives us a stylized rendering of a world of outsize emotions for which mere words can't express.  These figures are larger than life, and deserve the larger than life treatment.

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Soul: The American Music - Part 1: Ray Charles

Soul music was the unique moment of history in American music - its confluence of facets forms a body of music more complete than any other genre produced by our country. In its marriage of musical sophistication to the complete gamut of human experience, it is almost unique among American musical genres. To this day, it has done a better job than any other American music in marrying the best in recording technology to the most individual and emotionally committed performers, and both to the best songwriters and lyricists and the most sophisticated musical arrangers. It marked the first true era of reconciliation and redress between white and black cultures, and marks the first time when the extraordinary musical culture of American Blacks were backed by the full might, support, expense, and hired talent of a recording industry controlled almost entirely by Whites. The result was a music which married the old world sophistication of European composition to the brave new world of American immediacy and improvisation, and both to furthering the emerging influence of the African musical roots that would come to dominate world music as the twentieth century progressed to the same extent which Europe dominated the nineteenth. All of Soul Music’s various facets synthesize in a fusion which mirrors the best of the democracy which produced the genre. It is the climax, the apex, and the ambassador for everything which American musicians are capable of achieving. It is the most American music there has ever been, and perhaps will ever be.

Not all soul music is created equal, and lots of it has all the same problems as the rest of the 1950’s and early 60’s musical genres - solid musical values, sometimes extraordinary ones, married to total vapidity; bad lyrics, sappy romantic sentiments, the desire for a commercial hit trumping the desire to create something meaningful. There is plenty by Ray Charles and James Brown which does not deserve to be heard again. Much of their second rate music can be amazingly fun and beautiful, and occasionally brilliantly inventive, but if mere fun and beauty and novelty is what people want from music, there’s plenty of music from their own eras which speak better to their experience. If you want to find what’s eternal in this music, you have to separate what might be forgettable from what’s truly unforgettable. If you want to understand why Soul Music is everything to America, here is a mere pebble in the pool of why that is.

Ray Charles:

You Are My Sunshine - If you want to understand the importance of Soul Music to America, start right here. You Are My Sunshine, that innocent children’s song, was written by Jimmie Davis - a country music singer and a virulently segregationist governor of Louisiana. Ray Charles takes that white bread melody and with fistfuls of dominant and diminished chords, he makes the song into something completely black - existing in a waystation between big band, gospel, Motown and the blues. Using a purely musical language, it is perhaps the most subversive cover in American musical history.

What’d I Say: If I have one complaint about any form of ‘popular music’, it is the obsession with sex. I know, I know, I’m a total stick in the mud. But sex is the primary signifier of vapidity in popular culture. If a musician feels the need in his songs to resort to incessant talk about love or sex, or selling a watered down version of romance that has nothing to do with the real thing, it’s an almost guaranteed indicator that a musician has nothing more profound to offer the world. It is no different than how classical musicians can create the most boring music in the world and can then slap a religious title on it and be lauded for their 'profundity' and 'depth.' But if you’re going to talk about sex in music, really talk about it. Don’t prettify it with romantic emotions which are completely divorced from anyone’s actual experience of love, lust, and loss. For various reasons, other Ray Charles songs get close to erotic realities too ((Night Time is) the Right Time, Hallelujah I Love Her So, Hit the Road Jack being prominent examples). But What’d I Say is unique among Ray Charles songs, in many ways unique among anything written until the day it was released. It was the first American song which actually traffics in the genuine sounds of sex. For perhaps the first time ever and the only time during the 1950’s, Americans could hear the sounds of fucking on the radio.

Unchain My Heart: So many American lyrics, particularly in the mid-20th century, traffic in euphemism. It’s probable that 90% of the euphemisms are very simple: they’re employed to disguise extremely sexual images in the terms of innocent love. But Soul Music brings an entirely different dynamic to that equation - what seems flippant and shallow at first glance contains far more depths to fathom. Unchain My Heart, in addition to having two of the most gripping hooks in the American popular tradition, has the metaphor of a heart in chains. Hailing as he did from Georgia, Ray Charles would have to view the image of chains as a very, very loaded symbol. Is this about an unfeeling woman in a bad affair, or is this about a region where the shackles of oppression still control people’s lives if not their legal states-of-being; a region that may have freed slaves in name, but not in deed? It’s entirely possible that the song is precisely as shallow as it seems on the surface, but I would stake a claim that this music alludes to something much deeper, and much more troubling.

Drown in My Own Tears: Moreso than perhaps any other nationality, one of the great qualities of American music is the seemingly effortless ability so many of its greatest exemplars have to skirt the line between comedy and tragedy. Other nationalities have their few, Austria has Mozart, Russia has Stravinsky, France has Jacques Brel, Britain has The Beatles, and America has dozens for every one of theirs. This ability is a simple question of taste and time. If there is such a thing as a national character, then it’s clearly not in American temperament to commit too much to any emotional extreme - and our music reflects that. Other countries view the ability to unquestioningly follow their primal instincts as a virtue, but we are (or at least we were) a nation which views apathy as something approaching our most cherished value. Music, at least in its written form, was the playground of obsessives who pursued their craft to the limits of infinity, and went through many corresponding periods of over-the-top expression that reflected the unbalanced obsessions of its creators. But with the development of recorded technology, music requires far less technical accomplishment to be powerful, and perhaps it is far more reflective of the way life is lived as a result. Life is not quite tragic, not quite comic or perhaps it is both all of the time. But so much of the Great American Music exists in precisely that state. And what you feel from this music is a Rorschach test of wherever on the emotional spectrum you’re feeling at the moment you’re listening to it. Drown in My Own Tears contains some of the most extravagantly emotional depictions of loss ever put on pen. The lyrics themselves are not particularly memorable, though perhaps the line “I sit and cry/just like a child/my pouring tears/are running wild/if you don’t think/you’ll be home soon/I guess I’ll drown, oh yes, in my own tears.” can’t help but make us wonder if this song is not in fact about the younger brother who's drowning Ray witnessed as a child. But what makes this song extraordinary is its major-key understatement. Yes, it’s clearly a sad song, but it sounds more nostalgic than tragic, and is not nearly as sad-sounding as such a sentiment would warrant, but it’s all the more moving for it.

Busted: I can’t lie, this is easily my all-time favorite Ray Charles song - another song which effortlessly glides the tragicomic line, and yet does so much more. Anyone would instantly relate to this song who’s ever been broke, or couldn’t live up to their responsibilities to those they love. It is an ultimate example of music endowing dignity to the lives of people who most desperately need it. There is something defiant about it, as though for all the indignities life has in store, we should, we must, we will nonetheless, keep marching forward, and celebrate in pure E-flat major brass glory. All it takes is two minutes, and within that tiny framework this song shows us a vision of life as it perhaps truly is; something full of heartache and humiliation, loss and misery, squalor and torpor, and yet still something exquisitely beautiful.

Seven Spanish Angels: There is a huge metaphorical resonance to this duet between Ray and Willie Nelson - perhaps the ultimate ambassador of White Southern Music. Is this song a romantic ballad about a violent Bonnie-and-Clydesque death of two lovers at the hands of evil men, or is the conjuration intentional which this song brings of a decision which hundreds if not thousands of widows who’d recently watched their husbands murdered by Klansmen had to make in the century before this duet was recorded? On the one hand, it is a glamorized view of death, romanticizing the idea of a glorious death in a way that’s slightly quease-inducing. On the other hand, the song is all too redolent of a decision which many women probably had to make after they watched their loved ones murdered in cold blood.

Georgia On My Mind: And finally we come to Georgia On My Mind, probably THE Ray Charles song in the mind of most people, and certainly the emotional heart of his output. There are two different sentiments that can be interpolated from this overexposed yet never too exposed simple song. The first is more obvious, the longing we all have for home and inner peace. Most people find that the further they grow from their origins, the more they long to go back. But there’s another sentiment made in this song that is far more challenging.  Like You Are My Sunshine, there is a definite and important statement being made in this song. Georgia, the heart of slavery, is a place not only just as valued by its black population as its white one as a homeland, but also a place cherished for its beauties and consolations by a people whose history in the state is a litany of misery. It is a message of both liberty and of equality. It is the message of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come (which was probably modeled on Georgia On My Mind much more than Blowin’ in the Wind as Sam Cooke claimed), of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, of dozens of American hymns and spirituals both black and white, and even the message of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. And that message is the ultimate message of music: that all humans have a right to cherish the same things, that dignity is universal, that he who oppresses his fellow man is oppressing his brother (and sister), and that no law which separates can prevent them from feeling love.

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