THE EAGLES / “I Can’t Tell You Why”

I listened to a lot of music when I was a kid (meaning a whole heaping hell of a lot – we had no TV, but the record player was going pretty much from sun up to sun down) and about 99.9% of it was black music. From time to time though, I’d hear some “other” kind of music. I don’t know where I would’ve gotten a chance to hear this “other” music – I don’t remember any of it actually being in the house and my family didn’t exactly hang out with “other” kinds of people – but some of it I really liked. I never learned the names of either the songs or the musicians. The hooks stayed with me though. The songs I liked the most usually had a catchy melody line or memorable harmony part that you’d only have to hear once or twice and then it’d be stuck in your head for a week. Years later when I started working at a Tower Records I learned the names of some of these songs and bands. As it turns out, they were some of the biggest names in the history of American pop: growing up, I’d been inadvertently singing along to people like Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Elton John, James Taylor and the like. After I got over the embarrassment I did my best to forget that I’d ever actually liked any of that music. By then I was a hip twenty-something and along with the names of those acts, I’d learned that the cool white kids considered them dinosaurs. I remember one record-store friend of mine calling Fleetwood Mac ‘boring’ and that was at a time when calling something boring was probably a worst insult than coming right out and saying it sucked. The late eighties was moving into the early nineties. There was so much cutting edge music coming in and going out of the store every day that neither I nor any of my friends had time for nostalgia. My record-store friends were listening to the inspired noise of bands like Jane’s Addiction, the Pixies and Sonic Youth. Meanwhile, hip-hop was in the second half of its decade-long golden age. When Chuck D, KRS-One and Rakim were all dropping new 12” singles every other month, it’s understandable that I wasn’t sussing out my favorite Carly Simon record from back in the day. All of that said though, I have to admit that rock records from the seventies with great hooks remain a guilty pleasure of mine. So check the jukebox and the below list for some of my favorites and meanwhile, click over to this week’s Cover post where I’ll both continue the story I started and attempt to explain why we’re posting Eagles records on a black music website. Get your classic pop/rock records from the seventies (and one from 1982) with great hooks here:

• The Eagles – “I Can’t Tell You Why” from The Long Run (Asylum, 1979)

• Toto feat. Cheryl Lynn – “Georgy Porgy” from Toto (Columbia, 1978)

• Carly Simon – “You Belong To Me” from Boys In The Trees (Elektra, 1978)

• Seals & Crofts – “Summer Breeze” from Summer Breeze (Warner Bros, 1972)

• Michael McDonald – “I Keep Forgettin’” from If That’s What It Takes (Warner Bros, 1982)

—Mtume ya Salaam             It’s Called Home Schooling              Mtume, I know this week’s Classics and Covers are about blue-eyed soul, the crossing back and forth of the porous racial borders in America borders. It’s easy sometimes to forget which side the border one is supposed to be escaping to. But I’m going to let all of that go and quickly respond to a note you dropped in passing. You were reared in a household within which you could listen to any kind of music you wanted to. No exceptions. However, the house had over three thousand albums (including maybe five or six albums of classical music) and, well, let’s just say you had to search hard to find something on the shelves that weren’t in the black tradition. But guess what? You were home schooled in black music and thus had a much broader appreciation than your peers. Of course you didn’t like everything in the house and didn’t listen to every record up in there but still, you and your siblings heard a wider range of black music in one week then your black schoolmates probably heard all year. The deal is, black music is not something one acquires as a racial birthright. Indeed there are black kids reared in places like Iowa who were not exposed at an early age to blues, R&B, gospel, and jazz, not to mention less well known genres such as ragtime and prison songs, or our international cousins such as calypso, ska, samba, township jive… no, just because one is born black doesn’t mean that one has been exposed to the range of the music. I believe that it’s impossible to grow up in America and not hear some black music, however the majority of what you hear on the fly (on television, on the radio, etc.) is only the most popular tips of the black music iceberg. Whereas 40 years ago black professionals dug jazz, most of their grandchildren think Bird is something you eat or watch fly in the sky. Today we have a big problem in the black community. Most black youth grow up without any in-depth appreciation of black culture in general and, incredible as it may sound on the surface, nothing more than a cursory appreciation for black music specifically. Mtume, you know a lot of music you don’t know you know. I mean I can play you some music from different eras, different national origins and you probably can’t name it specifically but it will strike a response. It will be familiar, even if only faintly so. And there is an even larger body of music that you don’t consciously recall but which you are predisposed to tolerate if not relate to. It’s all because you grew up in a house full of a broad and deep collection of black music. I believe black music should be taught in school. Every sixth grader ought to be familiar with the range of our music… I don’t have to go any further. The point is made. One other thing I do want to mention: The first ten tracks in this week’s jukebox sound like bad radio, i.e. some of it’s hip and some of it’s WTF, why are they playing that? Think of it as some boring homework. It will help you in the long run; it’ll increase your understanding of the tradition even if a number of the songs are not great fun to listen to. —Kalamu ya Salaam

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 1:04 am and is filed under Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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