Just Books Only: Street

Saturday, August 17, 2013

READY FOR A BRAND NEW BEAT: How "Dancing in the Street" Became the Anthem for a Changing America

Aug 16, 2013

Mark Kurlansky
Riverhead
ISBN 978-1594487224
263 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Aaron Leitko

At this point, it's no longer a brand-new beat. It's a familiar beat, one that has woven itself into the fabric of American culture, staking out a permanent position on oldies FM, on your friend's bar mitzvah playlist and at your cousin's wedding reception.

Written by William "Mickey" Stevenson, Marvin Gaye and Ivy Jo Hunter and sung by Martha Reeves, "Dancing in the Street" is among the best-known tunes produced by the Detroit R&B label Motown. It was a hit, too: Released in 1964, it climbed all the way to No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Pop Singles Chart. It never managed to snatch the No. 1 slot, which was held by Manfred Mann's cover of "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," but it has certainly eclipsed that song in terms of cross-generational appeal. If you missed Martha and the Vandellas' version, then you heard it a decade later, performed by Van Halen or the Grateful Dead, or as a duet between David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

In "Ready for a Brand New Beat,"Mark Kurlansky argues that "Dancing in the Street" is more than just a catchy tune: It was the anthem of a nation in the grips of political and cultural upheaval.

If you've ever found yourself at an airport bookstore, looking for a way to demolish six hours of idle time, then you're likely familiar with Kurlansky's work. The author has carved out a niche in the nonfiction world by finding drama amid banal subject matter. His formula is most visible in the titles of his best-sellers, which pit kitchen-friendly objects against civilization as we know it: "Salt: A World History" or "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World." They provided entertainment under the auspices of self-enrichment - Wikipedia before Wikipedia existed.

Unfortunately, there's not much drama to "Dancing in the Street." The story behind the song is not particularly eventful. Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. viewed his label as a hit factory, and in many ways the song was just one more tune that rolled off the conveyor belt. In July of 1964, Reeves showed up at Motown's Hittsville studio and was coaxed by Gaye, Hunter and Stevenson to sing a demo version of their new song. The producers liked her version and decided to release it. The process did not involve much in the way of blood, sweat or tears.

In fact, the parties involved in creating the song prove formidable foes to Kurlansky's thesis that "Dancing" captures the early '60s zeitgeist. In their opinion, it was just another song. Though Gordy supported the civil rights struggle, he sought to keep politics out of his label's music. "He wanted to show white people that in the age of dangerous, angry black people, of black power, and ghetto rebellions, Motown blacks were neither angry nor dangerous," Kurlansky writes.

Asked about the political events of the '60s, Reeves insisted that she wasn't involved. "I just want to be responsible for being a good singer."

Stevenson was political, but according to Kurlansky, he believed that the song's only message was that "all kinds of people could get along together." Gaye, who died in 1984, came closest to backing Kurlansky's view. He is quoted in a passage taken from his autobiography, saying that the song "felt political."

Kurlansky's strongest argument comes from analyzing what separated the song from other Motown singles. "The new R&B of the mid-1960s was making the old Motown songs of requited or unrequited love, such as those by the Supremes or Smokey Robinson, seem slightly old-fashioned," he writes. But "Dancing in the Street" was different because it was upbeat, positive and had lyrics that told a more general story. When it was played at a rally, it made sense.

A compelling case for "Dancing in the Street" as a generation-defining riff never quite emerges, though, and most of Kurlansky's arguments could be applied to other songs, like Gaye's "What's Going On," which addressed the times in a more direct manner.

Kurlansky spends much of "Ready for a Brand New Beat" explaining the cultural context of the mid-'60s music business, moving from the origins of rock 'n' roll and the racial tensions that it exposed, to the civil rights struggle and the rise and decline of Motown. In this environment, the purchase of a record could hold additional meaning, and, in a small but significant way, it promoted change in society. Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" was one of those records, but one of many.

Aaron Leitko is a freelance writer in the District of Columbia.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

THE DEAL FROM HELL: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS

James O'Shea
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586487911
395 pages
$28.99

Reviewed by Jack Shafer

Eyewitnesses can't be expected to produce the best dispatches from a calamity. They're usually too bound in bandages and cross-stitched with sutures to understand anybody's pain but their own. That's what sort of witness James O'Shea was to the disastrous purchase of the Los Angeles Times media empire in 2000 by the larger media empire that owned the Chicago Tribune.

From vantage points first in the Tribune newsroom, where he supervised coverage of the deal, then later in the Times newsroom, where Tribune Co. executives installed him as the paper's top editor, O'Shea files a comprehensive report about the genesis of the deal, its rapid unwinding into a novel buyout by real estate wizard Sam Zell, and the final descent into bankruptcy where the combined company languishes today. But his book "The Deal From Hell" appears to make the reportorial mistake of coming to conclusions first and not letting the evidence, no matter how strong, shake him loose from them.

In O'Shea's view, the cause of the undoing of the newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. and Times Mirror, as well as other newspapers in the country, has not been the Internet, or declining circulation, or long stories and "skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists." It's been the reaction of newspaper executives to those forces. He writes: "The lack of investment, the greed, the incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public's are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today."

The problem with O'Shea's analysis is that important newspapers whose executives and owners weren't stingy, greedy, incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical or arrogant have also been forced to reduce news pages, cut whole sections, close bureaus and decimate newsrooms. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times, long controlled by families that have taken immense pride in providing the public service of great journalism, have bent before recent market forces and made the cuts that O'Shea deplores. (Candor demands that I disclose that I work for Slate.com, which is owned by The Washington Post Company.)

When the Hearst Corp. paid $660 million for the San Francisco Chronicle and paid another publisher $66 million to take its San Francisco Examiner off its hands in 2000, it had no idea that its losses would be so great by the end of the decade that it would threaten to close the newspaper if employees didn't make big concessions. Likewise, when McClatchy Newspapers, one of the best-run quality chains in the country, bought the larger Knight Ridder chain in 2006 for $4.5 billion (spinning off four newspapers it didn't want for $1 billion), the owners were guided not by greed and corruption when they later dramatically cut staff and features at all of its titles. They were guided by an instinct to survive.

You don't have to like the Tribune Co. number crunchers who put the deal together with Times Mirror -- or their demand that profits come before Pulitzer prizes -- to see that they thought their deal was going to make the combined company a lot of money. One of the lead Tribune dealmakers, John Madigan, predicted an additional $225 million in cash flow for the new enterprise.

O'Shea is not so blind that he doesn't correctly identify a few greedheads undermining quality journalism. There would have been no deal if the estimated 170 descendants of the Chandler family, which controlled Times Mirror, hadn't been so eager to sluice profits and capital out of the company. O'Shea reports that Times Mirror paid out $2.1 billion in dividends and distributions to investors and the Chandler heirs between 1995 and 1997, compared to $417 million the three previous years. The cash cravings of the Chandler heirs, practically none of them Times Mirror employees, made the deal happen. Readers of the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the other newspapers that suffered after the deal can hate the Chandlers all they want, but it was their cow to milk, bleed or slaughter.

As late as 2007, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. moved in with a $5.6-billion offer for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, when heirs to that company showed a similar desire to cash out. Despite Murdoch's substantial investment in all aspects of the Journal, changes in newspaper economics forced News Corp. to take a $3 billion write-off in his newspaper division 14 months after the purchase.

Not to get overly counterfactual about this "deal from hell," but let's say the Chandlers had stood up for journalism -- as have the Grahams, who control The Post, the Sulzbergers, who control the New York Times (and the very much diminished Boston Globe), and even Murdoch, who has spent deeply to improve the Journal. Let's say the deal never happened just before the 40-year financial heyday of newspapers came to a close. Wouldn't the Tribune and Times Mirror newspapers still have had to cut employee perks, staff, bureaus, circulation and quality to prevail? The answer is obvious.

O'Shea's pocket histories of both Times Mirror and Tribune are succinct, and his reporting on the circulation scandals at Newsday and other newspapers in the last decade is superb. But, alas, he is not much of a writer. When he pokes former Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes for expressing himself with cliches like "think outside the box," O'Shea invites readers to catalog his own literary laziness. He writes of "gritty neighborhoods," "finishing touches," a "seasoned veteran," "a bear of a man," a "sympathetic ear," "a taste of their own medicine," a "crown jewel" and more. When he writes that somebody's eyes "twinkle," I found myself wanting to poke mine out.

O'Shea, an experienced reporter and editor, misses the story and writes poorly. If only we could send his terrific assignment back to the rewrite desk for fixing.

Jack Shafer writes about the media for Slate.

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