Where Did Our Love Go?
George, Nelson
[The Negro] is a racial and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless...
...Oh, yes, let freedom ring...
...At a wed-ding in Milwaukee, "The Way You Do the Things You Do" gets even the drunks barking at each other at the bar to hit the dance floor like Marines hitting the beach at Iwo, making life unsafe for saucy 17-year-olds and blushing maiden aunts who ask, "How old do you think I am...
...He might have taken more heed of his own warning against hatred...
...He describes the an-tics of a pair of euphoniously named free spirits, incid^ntally studio musicians, Benny Benjamin and James Jamerson...
...Bandow points out, as an example of possible pressure for costly benefit liberalization, the action taken in late 1984 (not 1983, as he states) to waive the 3-percent COLA threshold...
...by definition, can never be racist...
...12.6...
...Gordy turned his attention to other areas, notably movie-making, and relaxed his intense management style...
...The Motown classics must be played, at every party, barbecue, day at the beach,and wedding...
...What key...
...And despite the gaudy entre-nousnoires rhetoric of The Fire Next Time, so is James Baldwin...
...Bandow seems to imply that political forces have been at work to make them show a rosy picture for the future...
...The myth of Motown is that it is the eternal family, where singers and executives, clerks and bass players, shared ideas and energy all for the common good...
...He does not realize that the assumed level of the inflation rate is not important, but rather that the excess of the assumed rate of in-crease in wages over the rate of inflation is controlling...
...It is a testament to the power of black music and an example of how soul-stifling success can be when its fruits are not shared...
...someone nails me...
...MODERN REFORMED theology in America has shown astonishing variety in its expression...
...The author tends to write in an idiomatic style, referring to "cats" and "chicks," but he avoids most of thesilly drivel so characteristic of popular music writers, who when they do not write in cliches like to describe rock and roll in terms usually used for Bach's fugues...
...What Mr...
...program will have sufficient income to meet outgo completely until mid-1998 according to the intermediate estimate and until early 1992 according to the pessimistic estimate (with the cumulative deficit REFORMED THEOLOGY IN AMERICA provides penetrating analysis of these five traditions and the two leading theologians of each...
...He succumbs to the awful commercialism of Los Angeles and, if you can read between the lines, to the Powerful White Record Companies...
...The bloated Motown of today does not consistently put out hits, but it is axiomatic that small, independent operations turn out the best, most creative work...
...The criticism of the accuracy and integrity of the actuarial estimates is unfair...
...61.7...
...The National Commission did, however, recognize the problem for H.I...
...His raving about genocide might have been tempered by the realization that American black influence is not just a matter of white guilt over slavery, black suffering, and so on...
...RANI) RAPIDS, MICH...
...the in-crease in life expectancy at age 65 from 1935 to 1984 was only 4 years (16.8 vs...
...The author then goes on to assert that Medicare (by which term he really only means the Hospital Insurance portion of that program) will "face an estimated $250 billion cumulative deficit by 1995...
...Dennis Voskuil • Gabriel Fackre • Malcolm Reid • James Montgomery Boice At your bookstore, or write: WM...
...2," you can hear a musician shout "What key...
...Carefully he sketches out a theory that the "Christian world" is an anti-black conspiracy, and takes it to a spectacular peak of self-contradictory arrogance, equating anti-black prejudice with the "sin against the Holy Ghost...
...No souls were sold, and no love was lost...
...These real individuals are slowly being submerged in a grand mass of abstract blacks over whom Baldwin, like the white liberals (one is tempted to say, other white liberals), expresses virtuous outrage and helplessness...
...The answer must be more than nostalgia...
...But consider a few episodes...
...And he does include some first-class photographs, of Smokey Robin-son crooning, Martha and the Vandellas singing in the back of a Cadillac, and one in particular that shows exactly why the Temptations were superfine...
...Although this was legislated, it did not become effective, because the measured increase turned out to be 3.5 percent—well above the trigger point...
...More important, however, was the fact that such a waiver would not have increased the cost of the program over the long run...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) only OASDI (which I believe could have no financing problems for at least the next twenty-five years...
...There is nothing mysterious in any of this, of course...
...NB: Among us...
...As to the mortality assumptions not containing sufficient allowance for future- improvements, Mr...
...He tells what Junior Walker said at the end of "Shotgun," and tells why, during Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips-pt...
...and Why doesn't Motown turn out hits like "Baby Love" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine...
...That moment when The Awful Truth comes out, revealing the apparently in-excusable lacuna in my record collection...
...Almost without exception, the SSA actuarial estimates have been accepted by members of Congress of all political and philosophical views as the appropriate basis for considering the financial status of the Social Security program and any proposed changes therein...
...George writes, "There are no heroes in this book...
...Grouped under the name "Reformed" are, in fact, five diverse traditions — The Princeton theology, Westminster Calvinism, the Dutch schools, Southern Reformed thought, and Neoorthodoxy...
...The Final Solution...
...e it IEEPERSON AVE...
...First, the increase in the expectation of life at birth from 1935 to 1984 was only 13 years (74.7 vs...
...As for democracy, in America, the ballot "cannot create autonomy," which means that a white electoral majority and racist white supremacy are identical and that being white automatically entails guilt for "destroying hundreds of thousands of black lives...
...He criticizes the fertility assumptions without recognizing that, if natural fertility remains below the replacement level (or even falls from the present level), this will very likely be counterbalanced by increased immigration, legal or otherwise...
...In Where Did Our Love Go...
...Come on.,, Such is the importance of vintage sixties Motown to my generation...
...Such is the explanation for Motown's golden age, but it does not make for a moving yarn...
...With these words, writ-ten early in 1951, Baldwin is ironically speaking through the mask of a (collective) white man...
...And he gives the vitally important details of how the Temptations and the Four Tops learned all those funky dance steps...
...As for blacks and American politics, well...
...He tips his hand in the preface: Motown Records is a triumph and a contradiction...
...However, in other places it is used to mean OASDI plus H.I.—as, for example, in referring to A. Haeworth Robertson's criticisms...
...They have never succumbed to any political pressure—and only rarely has there ever been any—either to make the costs look low so as to present a favorable picture or to make the costs look high so as to discourage benefit liberalizations...
...His oppressed blacks are less and less the genuine people he knew and loved in Harlem...
...The most ambitious of them all, Berry Gordy, Jr., becomes a "big dog," as he put it, but loses his soul...
...At a Columbia reunion, "Just My Imagination" sparks a debate of almost Talmudic attention to detail and nuance...
...George has written in great part is a morality play about the evils of ambition...
...Beneficiaries on the roll at the end of 1984 would have received less in 1985 if the waiver had not been in effect, andthe threshold had not been reached (but the same in 1986 and after, because the measurement of the COLA under the previous basis was cumulative...
...Motown was a "family" in the best sense of the word, with founder Berry Gordy, Jr., the undisputed father figure...
...ONTRIBUTORS to this volume are • George M. Marsden • Mark A. Noll • David F.• Wells • W. Andrew Hoffecker • W. Robert Godfrey • W. Stanford Reid • Wesley A. Roberts • James D. Bratt • Henry Zwaanstra • C. T. McIntire • Morton Smith • Douglas Floyd Kelly • Luder G. Whitlock, Jr...
...In the Name of Love" no less than 27 times, and every girl in the place follows in imitation his boozy yet inspired choreography with misty, half-closed eyes...
...George does manage to include a number of details and little-known anecdotes about his subject in Where Did Our Love Go...
...To a remarkable degree, from the late fifties to the mid-sixties, that myth rang true...
...I hope he can bring himself to take his American chance to escape it at last...
...There are just ambitious people...
...No Motown...
...However, offsetting the in-crease in cost due to the waiver, those who came on the roll in 1985 would—due to the previous law being incorrectly drafted—have received too large benefits in the absence of the waiver (by getting the 1984 COLA at the end of 1985 in addition to the 1985 one—and this excessive amount would carry on to all future years...
...Lest anyone grow uneasy about these extremes, it is made clear that suffering has conferred a special nobility of soul upon blacks, and that "the powerless, 'What Brecht said, when told these people were innocent, was: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserved to die...
...Moreover, the actuarial estimates assume that significant increases in life expectancy will occur in the future...
...He has subtitled his book, "The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound," and he answers questions that nobody asked, to wit: Where did the Temptations go...
...Well, you can see what's going on here...
...This is music with power...
...ii is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing presence among us were somehow analogous to disease...
...which cannot be forgiven...
...Holocaust...
...It's 11 p.m., and we get down to the Rachmaninoff, the boxed "Jerry Lee Lewis: The Sun Years," and the Bang the Drum Slowly soundtrack, and Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...
...THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MOTOWN SOUND Nelson George/St...
...B. EERDMANS I PUBLISHING CO...
...Like Brecht condemning the victims of Stalin's show trials' Baldwin thunders, "It is the innocence which constitutes the crime...
...Bandow states that life expectancy has increased 14 years since 1935 and that this proves that the projected improvements are too low...
...blacks may be using the vote to outwit the final solution...
...The result is an important advance in our understanding of what being Reformed has meant and what it should now mean in the late twentieth century...
...The greatest tragedy of Bald-win's racist ferocity is that it turns out to be unnecessary...
...This is a collective guilt, overriding any mere personal innocence...
...What happened to processed hair...
...But in the next decade this is the actual view of real white folks: Marlon Brando, Leonard Bernstein, Vanessa Redgrave, and others are seeing blacks exactly in the manner of that quote...
...Or something like that...
...49fot THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 47...
...The National Commission on Social Security Reform (whose recommendations led to the 1983 Amendments) had the assignment of only looking at OASDI, which was the immediate problem...
...It is most important to note that the actuaries of the Social Security Ad-ministration have, over the 50 years of operation of the program, always at-tempted to do the highest level of professional work in making these estimates...
...He created a sort of black music hothouse, and was catapulted to the top...
...it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes...
...There are no villains...
...And he might still take note of these lines from William Blake's great prophetic poem Jerusalem: It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend...
...This was the case according to the estimates made in 1983...
...He drove his workers: "The whole thing at the company was about competition, and competition breeds giants," one of his writers said...
...Not only that, but it is a rare rites-of-passage movie nowadays that does not feature Motown...
...Martin's Press/$17.95 Joe Mysak 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 great songwriting teams, destroying the Supremes, and inflating Diana Ross's ego to the size of the Grand Canyon...
...the title taken from a Supremes hit of 1964), Nelson George, whose previous credits include a biography of Michael Jackson, tells the story of Motown, and why it is just not the same anymore...
...There aren't enough Negroes...
...Bandow superficially criticizes the assumptions underlying the actuarial estimates...
...He turned Motown into a finishing school that turned out some slick and sophisticated products...
...After over a decade of speedy success, creative enterprise flagged, top talent left for money, new talent went unsigned...
...He was a shrewd and creative businessman who "preached success—not black success," and who hired white men when he thought they could do something better than he could, the author notes with just an air of disapproval...
...Despite his self-imposed exile and his white racist mask, Baldwin is still an American, citizen of a country where the racist obsession is no more fixed than other ideas about society, and where the possibility of dispersing it still exists, even for those who, like Baldwin, have committed themselves for the present to this nightmare...
...Only a fabulist would have predicted that it would have such staying power...
...Gordy did, in fact, was to bring together singers, songwriters, and musicians in Detroit under one roof, and under stringent contracts giving him almost total control over their development...
...Racism became a highly charged factor in Western democratic politics only after the Second World War, and primarily through the sacrifice of white men: the millions upon millions of Jews, gypsies, and others who were slaughtered in the It happens at every party I throw...
...At a Boston party that is dragging, the Great Gustayson plays "Stop...
...However, the benefit experience since then has turned around, and it is now estimated that the H.I...
...What Mr...
...By 1971, when Motown leaves Detroit for its current quarters on the West Coast, entrepreneur Gordy becomes an impossible monster, discarding studio musicians, breaking up WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO...
...He does not, and perhaps cannot, answer the question of what was the Motown Sound, and why is it magic to this very day...
...As for the abstract white oppressive masses, Americans "are the most violent and dishonorable people in the world...
...The man who permits you to injure him deserves your vengeance: He also will receive it .. . Over sixty now, Baldwin has indeed received that vengeance, and in a bitter, cruel form: his own conversion to racism...
...No black person can afford to forget that the history of this country is genocidal from where the buffalo once roamed to where our ancestors were slaughtered (from New Orleans to New York, from Birmingham to Boston) and to the Caribbean to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Saigon...
...The Tough Al, an otherwise demure Delawarean prep, once topped them all when she observed, "You know what's wrong with your record collection...
...yet one cannot define Motown in the same way one can define surf music or the Phil Spector Wall of Sound...
...Blacks and other ethnic groups have had the benefit of this sacrifice...
...Second, most of this increase was due to reduction in infant mortality and in mortality at the younger ages...
...What happened then was inevitable...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
