BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2010 (PART I)

We are proud to begin this series for February, Black History Month 2010. It is a month in which we bear witness to the progress, richness and diversity of African-American achievement. Quite naturally we are going focus and reflect on African-American history - a history constantly being made and written about. We just witnessed the terrible tragedy that took place in Haiti, following an earthquake and a series of aftershocks that devastated this already fragile, impoverished country.

Unfortunately, Black America no longer has the luxury of oneness. For me and countless others, it has been hard to let these moments slip away. But we must let them go otherwise we will be forced to cling to a comfortable illusion rather than face a much more complicated reality.

Now let's look at an historic reality. It was August 1619, when a Dutch ship sailed into the harbor of Jamestown, Virginia, with a cargo of "black gold" - 20 Africans. The colonies had officially entered the slave trade. And from even these tragic beginnings black people had an immediate impact on the birth, growth and development of the colonies into the world power the United States has become.

One early achiever was Crispus Attucks, a black man who was the first to fall in young America's struggle for independence. There were others, like Benjamin Bannecker who aided in the designing of the nation's Capitol building and the city of Washington D.C. From these humble beginnings the contributions of African-Americans continued. They were many and varied. But one of the most meaningful contributions we made were in music.

Now lets quickly flash forward. And though millions listened and were infected by the sounds, danced to the swirling, demanding rhythms pumping from the soul of Black America like blood from a severed artery, no one paid heed to the words, or heard the cries for justice, freedom, equality. They ignored the underlying threat that demanded immediate change. We are the inheritors of what was forced upon the entrenched white social, political and legal establishment when my parents generation won the struggle for civil rights.

For those of us who have been around long enough to remember the last four decades, each decade, each year was a journey we associate with some event, some song. This was true whether you were a small child or newly coupled in young adulthood or experiencing perhaps for the first time, the endearing rites of passage. For those of us who experienced love for the first time in one of these decades, the world had paired off and brazenly flaunted its couplehood. Life was a celebration of the least important aspect of love - the infatuation, the giddily addled effervescence of discovering that someone else on this planet listened to and liked the same artists, the same songs on the radio that you did. Real love, of course is much deeper, and needs no day of its own, no decade of its own - just perhaps a song of its own.

One of the decades that we will all remember was the one just past - the 90's. That was the decade in which many of those songs, along with black music and black artists, found new homes in the hearts of those who were in love and/or who needed something to reflect that love, that spirit. If rock reflected the energy of the 80's, rap and R&B penetrated the 90's with its energy and originality. This new wave of hip-hop and R&B had been building for years and this was the decade when it could no longer be denied. Blessed with a remarkable talent, collaborative spirit and a stack of infectious beats, the artists of the 90's became pivotal figures in the evolution of mainstream music in the studio, the amphitheaters and on the radio.

Hip-hip and R&B dominated the charts and radio airplay during the 90's. One of the reasons was the splintering of formats. Black radio split into mainstream, which played all the hits and appealed to teens and young adults, while their parents finally had their own station, usually called "magic-something." Although there were some songs and some artists that overlapped, the separation usually started with adult urban stations refusing to play any rap songs or artists. The 90's also saw the emergence of the so-called "smooth jazz" stations whose playlists contained up to 70% black artists. Some called these stations were called "Kenny G" jazz stations because he was often the artist most played and identified with that type of station. It was during the decade of the 90's the even white AC and Hot AC stations, joined with Top-40 in playing black artists that their audience research showed, grew up with and preferred this music.

Quite naturally, from a radio standpoint, in the competitive world of pop music, the 90's really was also the decade of research. The nineties was also a decade of collaborations. One in which artists took genuine pride in one another's work and often made appearances on one another's record, from a creative community, which was in some ways, reminiscent of the old Motown. This interchange was virtually unheard of in earlier decades because labels resisted having their artists going into the studio with those from other labels because they didn't want to split royalties or help boost other artists' careers. These careers had been colliding and overlapping since the decade of the sixties when Bob Dylan sang about the times-a-changing in 1964. Beginning back then, rock and roll and rhythm and blues were still very much the rallying cry of the counterculture. Over the past four decades the times have gone right on changing. As for this new generation and their children, second generation hip-hop and R&B fans - they rule the roost economically. And the rebellious attitude that once made this generation a threat to the status quo now belongs to the new Generation X, or Generation Y or Generation Jones.

A New Day