9

Wild Cherry,"PlayThat Funky Music"(1976)

Robert Fink

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.
- W.E.B.Du Bois, 1903

Admit it-you've panced to it, maybe at a wedding, or a bat-mitzvah, or even a

quinceaflera;and I'll bet you've actually, at least once, made that obligatory half-turn on
the dance floor and shouted out its irresistible hook; and even if you've never lowered
yourself that far, you'd certainly recognize those eight lightly syncopated syllables
anywhere, as one of the most stinging memes in American pop music, journalistic
shorthand for anyone, from white rappers and reggae musicians to Republican
presidential candidates, who try to act more Black than they have a right to.
Play thatfunky music, white boy.
Ouch. PTFM/WB, as we'll henceforth abbreviate it, is ubiquitous as a catchphrase
because the phenomenon it indexes is so problematic, and yet so ubiquitous as to be
completely unremarkable. It denotes the societal privilege inherent in reversecrossover:
the tendency of non- Black members of the dominant culture to assume that they
can just go ahead and do things like play the distinctive music of Black people and
take on the Black cultural style they admire without somehow paying for it. Reverse
crossover has been the morally dubious engine of popular music since the first white
boy strummed a banjo and started dancing in a style picked up from the Black men
who labored alongside him; it shadowed the birth of ragtime, jazz, swing, and (oh my
god yes) rock 'n' roll; it will undoubtedly still be a pop music reality on the day you
read this chapter. 1

1
On the roots of minstrel "crossover;' see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface
Minstrels and their World (Cambridge, 1997). PTFM/WB is often used to index instances of white
performance that remind those reporting on them of minstrelsy, up to and including the revival
of the original black.face practice itself; see, as an example, Darren Keast, "Play That Funky Music?
Across the Country; Historical Minstrelsy is Re-emerging to the Shock of ManY:' Ihe [St. Louis]
Riverfront Times, November 19, 2003. https:/ /www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/play-that-funky-
music/Content?oid=2464344 (accessed September 07, 2021).
80 One-Hit Wonders l'\TildCherry, "Play That Funky Music" (1976) 81

But what separates PTFM/WB from run-of-the-mill appropriation, what makes it explosive crossover of rock 'n' roll in 1950s Cleveland, and Wild Cherry was following
interesting, is its autological character. Autology happens when a text itselfis an instance in the footsteps of white blues-and-boogie bands with multiracial audiences like The
of the thing it describes or narrates. Autologies in pop music can be trivial (new dance Jaggerz, out of Pittsburgh, or the James Gang, with whom they later shared a Cleveland-
records tell you about the new dance craze) or unsettling (Leonard Cohen can let you based manager and promoter, Mike Belkin. There are no recordings of Wild Cherry
in on the harmonic sleight-of-hand behind "Hallelujah" even as he breaks your heart from the early 1970s, but I imagine their original material sounded something like the
with it). "Play That Funky Music" is autological on a mass-cultural scale: thanks to its James Gang's 1971 chart hit "Funk #49;' which .fully lives up to its name, with barely
huge success-it was one of the first singles to sell 2 million copies and be certified decipherable lyrics riding over Joe Walsh's churning guitar-based funk, all punctuated
"platinum;' the Wild Cherry album it was on did the same, the song, performance, and by a descending unison riff obviously copped from Sly and the Family Stone's "Sing A
the record were all recognized with major awards, and the band were declared the most Simple Song:'
promising new artists of 1976 in Billboard-it became the paradigmatic example of the White boys in the Ohio Valley kept on playing that partially funk")'music for years,
reverse crossover move its autobiographical narrative celebrates, and thus uniquely influenced, no doubt, by the waves of Black musical innovation that were changing
implicates anyone caught dancing, singing, or moving to the grooving in its shady, rock 'n' roll and minds in the upper Midwest, one record at a time. Draw a loose
self-reflexive logic. Wild Cherry thus almost had to be a one-hit wonder. You only get triangle connecting Pittsburgh and Detroit to Cincinnati and you capture most of
away with this particular autology once, white boy. Wild Cherry's natural touring habitat; you will also circumscribe an extraordinary
I am, accordingly, going to follow Du Bois by making the color line the dividing line flowering of Midwestern funk. The Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Detroit axis passes north
of my two-part story. TI1iswas the line in the American musical sand across which the of Steubenville to run through Canton, home to the O'Jays before they decamped
four white boys of Wild Cherry sauntered so optimistically in the Bicentennial summer to Philadelphia; the Detroit-Dayton-Cincinnati axis transects the Ohio Players and
of 1976, the dividing line of my story. No false integration here: let's accept that the story their mercurial keyboardist Junie Morrison (Dayton), who left in 1974 to record solo
of PTFM/WB adds to dubious cultural appropriation the even more dubious claim that for Westbound Records and later joined George Clinton's Parliament/Funkadelic
those stolen from were "asking for if' To repurpose two terms that critics often link in collective in Detroit, along with William "Bootsy" Collins (Cincinnati) and Michael
this context, the song wants to be loved for its theft, and, of course, that kind of demand "Kid Funkadelic" Hampton (Cleveland). All these musicians were influenced by some
will resonate differently either side of the color line. The white perspective on PTFM/ combination of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly Stone, and together they created
WB we already know from the record itself and its industry reception, although some a market for riff-heavy, guitar-driven instrumental funk rock with strong psychedelic
details of time and place can add shading and local (yes) color. But understanding what overtones that appealed to both Black and white audiences.
PTFM/WB could mean to Black folk requires actually listening to their voices, not just Thus the narrative laid out in the verses of PTFM/WB rings true, if you take it as the
ventriloquizing them. It will be necessary to look at complex traces left in both the Black lightly fictionalized story of a local rock band facing a stylistic choice while touring the
press and the white racial imagination by the song's runaway success. Some of the darker Pittsburgh-Detroit-Cincinnati triangle in the funk-crazy middle years of the 1970s. By
content we find will turn out to have been there all along, a dark autology that, when it then, Joe Walsh, who'd left the James Gang in 1972, was out in California country with
hits you, may demand that you lay down more than just the boogie. the Eagles, and things had gotten so low for guys like Parissi that he gave up the band to
manage a steakhouse in western Pennsylvania. But when he went to sell his last guitar,
he hit it off with the dude who showed up to buy it and decided to rebuild Wild Cherry
Changing Rock 'n' Roll and Minds with him. In late 1975 Parissi and his new lead guitarist Bryan Bassett were playing a
mix of hard rock and Led Zeppelin covers at a new futuristic dance club called 2001 on
Self-identified "boogie singer" Robert Parissi was born on December 29, 1950, in the north side of Pittsburgh, when somebody cornered their tall blonde drummer, Ron
Mingo Junction, Ohio, a small steel town on the western side of the metropolitan Beitle, between sets, asking, ''Are you going to play some funky music, white boys?"2
region that begins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and sprawls across the northern West Everybody involved now remembers the 2001 Club as a "disco:' because its owner,
Virginia panhandle to end at Stuebenville, Ohio, home of Franciscan University and Tom Jayson, later franchised the concept across western Pennsylvania and upstate New
the birthplace of another successful Italian American entertainer, Dino Paul Coletti York at the height of the white disco boom, turning it into what cultural historian and
(aka Dean Martin). Parissi put together a group called Wild Cherry in Steubenville rock critic Alice Echols analogized to a minor-league "McDonald's of the glitter-ball
sometime around 1970. They had little trouble burning up the one-night stands over
the next four years, building a following up and down the Ohio Valley. Gigging around
the southern and eastern reaches of the state, Wild Cherry was navigating a racial
landscape shaped by the Great Migration, barnstorming in and out of gritty factory Scott Mervis, "Obituary: Ron Beitle; Played that Funky Music for Wild Cherry;' Pittsburgh Post-
Gazette, December 13, 2017. Available online: https://-wvr,v.post-gazette.com/ae/music/2017/12/13/
cities like Pittsburgh, Canton, Akron, and Dayton, where working-class Blacks had Ron-Beitle-Played-that-funky-music-for- Wild-Cherry /stories/201712130135. (accessed September
sought jobs during the postwar boom. This was the demographic responsible for the 07, 2021).
82 One-Hit v\Tonders Wild Cherry, "PlayTh.atFunky Music" (1976) 83

world:' 3 But at the time, nobody would have gone to suburban Pittsburgh for what we moment, when it hits you, the sudden, disorienting harmonic shift up-and then up
would now recognize as New York-style disco music, with its glossy surfaces and four again-is quite dizzying.
on the floor beat; the mostly Black clientele that night would have expected hometown The experience of musical vertigo on the dance floor is exhilarating, the drop in
funk, some Ohio Players or Isley Brothers, or even just above-average imitators like the the pit of the stomach as the chorus winds its way back down to the tonic a visceral
Jaggerz or the James Gang, local white boys who could still rock a dance floor every example of musical autology. Putting us in the audience with him, rather than on stage,
once in a while, if you asked them nicely. the song's narrator abandons us up to the power of the Black music he is copying; when
that power hits you, you may feel that you've been given permission by the song (and
the imaginary Black voices in it) to do as he did, and let its embrace carry you across
Just When It Hit Me the color line in a self-abandoning act of racial impersonation. 5 (You do not have that
permission; keep reading.) Apprehended this way, the song is a testimony, with the cry
I'll wager the workaday transaction just discussed is not how you pictured the pivotal of PTFM/WB as its narrative pivot: the descent of the spirit, the breaking open of the
moments of PTFM/WB going down. To be fair, that's because the song, whose verses heart, the moment of conversion. I was blind, but now, in a crowd of dancing witnesses,
tell the story of a gigging band just trying to satisfy their customers, suddenly switches I see. Once I was a boogie singer, but now I'm funkin' out in every way!
genre and perspective for the chorus. When Parissi, who's been telling us about his life The historian and cultural critic Raymond Williams coined the term structures of
as a rock 'n' roll performer, decides to "disco down and check out the shmv" at some feeling to analyze the inchoate political patterns traced out by countless individu~l
fictionalized version of Club 2001, he does so as an enthralled spectator. Evidently moments of affective reaction to everyday life (food, landscape, clothing, sound) which
another band is playing there, and the patrons, singing, dancing, moving to the leave a trace in the collective cultural record through representation in literature, film,
grooving, are just diggingtheir music. Swept up in the mostly Black crowd, so does he; and music. 6 Let's counterpoise to PTFM/WB another highly charged moment close
the funk hits him, hard. to the musical color line, to get an inkling of the complex structures that tend to lurk
Thanks to the musical craftmanship of Parissi and his bandmates, it hits the behind that groovy feeling.
listener hard as well. PTFM/WB, like most funk-soul chart hits, overlays its nonstop John Fahey, the pioneering ''.American Primitive" guitarist and blues revivalist,
cyclic repetition with a basic teleological structure familiar to generations of popular described his first encounter with country blues, on a record by Blind Willie Johnson,
songwriters. During the verses, the dancing groove stays dose to home, with little or as "a hysterical conversion experience where in fact I had liked that kind of music
no harmonic motion; in the words of a pioneering formal taxonomist of funk, listeners all the time, but didn't want to:' The funky sounds coming off the old shellac hit the
are suspended in one long moment of "presence and pleasure:' 4 But as the chorus suburban white boy hard: "We played it and I had this visceral reaction. I almost threw
approaches, a paradoxical constriction of the groove-dropping the bass out, additional up. I said, 'Please put on some Bill Monroe records so I can get back to normal: But
layers of beat, more unison riffs, increased circling around the tonic pitch-signals that here's the trick: by the end of the Bill Monroe record the Blind Willie Johnson thing
a change is going to come. Songwriters sometimes call this type of pre-chorus section was still going through my head, and I had to hear it again:' George Henderson, in the
the "channel:' because it channels all the song's energy into the hook, which in this case critical study of Fahey from which these interview snippets are taken, notes that this
arrives with platinum-record-selling force: at the words "somebody turned around:' the kind of emotional conversion narrative is a well-worn trope with white aficionados of
bass re-enters and the track turns itself around and surges upward, so that the entire the blues, signifying that a complex game of authenticity is underway. Claiming that
pentatonic groove can reconstitute itself a disorienting (because non-diatonic) minor I am the sort of person stopped in their tracks,felled by music, as Henderson sums up
third higher. In retrospect, this will turn out to have been a completely logical thing to this structure of feeling, gives one license to appropriate, even to cross back over the
do: the bassline of the chorus moves through the flat third, then the flatted fifth degree color line in blackface. (Fahey's first solo LP devoted one side to what he pretended
of the prevailing blues scale, composing out as chord roots (Em7 -Gm 7 - Bbm7,for the were lost 78 rpm recordings of an old bluesman named "Blind Joe Death:' going so far
musos) the altered scale degrees used in the verses for melodic inflection. But in the as to concoct a fake discography and liner notes to back up his racial impersonation.) 7

5
1be reference gives proper respect to a key text in the Black interpretation of Black music, Samuel
A. Floyd's The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (Oxford,
3
Alice Echols, Hot Stuff Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (Norton, 2010), 198. The 1996).
6
plans for Jayson's fast-food disco empire were laid out in Jesse Kornbluth's bemused report on Raymond Williams, "Structures of Feeling" (Chapter 6) in Marxism in Literature (Oxford: Oxford
"Merchandising Disco for the Masses:· New York Times Magazine, February 18, 1979, 5-9. Available University Press, 1977), 128-35.
online: https:/ /www.nytimes.com/ 1979/02/ l 8/ archives/merchandizing-disco-for-the-masses-the- Geo:ge J::Ienderson, Blind l?e Death's America: John Fahey, the Blues and Writing White Discontent
franchiser.html (accessed September 07, 2021). (Umvers1ty of North Carolma Press, 2021), 166-68. Henderson references the discussion of blues
4
Anne Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (\,Vesleyan authenticity in Kimberly Mack, Fic.tional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack
University Press, 2006). White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).
84 One-Hit Wonders Wild Cherry, "Play That Funky Music" (1976) 85

This Jelled by (black) music trope provides the basic through-line for Wild Cherry's the post-civil rights struggle days. These singing stars and a spattering of more
eponymous 1976 album. None of the other tracks lives up to the promise of their hit like the Average White Band and Wild Cherry have managed to make mega hits
single, but the band burns through Wilson Pickett's gospel-inflected "99 ½ (Won't Do):' by draining purses from white and Black communities equally dry. Like updated
and lays down an almost note-for-note copy of the Commodores' "I Feel Sanctified:' Al Jolsons, these performers have Black-voiced-and-tracked their cuts masterfully
In both cases the religious roots of the material harmonize with the title track's feeling to win Black listeners for the most part without ever having to play before any
structure, as does the rather lamer cover of the Motown classic "Nowhere to Run:' substantial Black audiences. They can, like the latter-day Northern carpetbaggers
The album's closing track, "What in the Funk Do You See:' is an emotional bookend who ravished the South, take the money and run. 9
for the opener, returning to the same alternating-note riff and minor pentatonic feel.
After a series of leading rhetorical questions about the funk ("Is it the beat that makes Kisner's reporting shows that a lack of reciprocity, not lack of authenticity, was the
you wanna dance?/ Is it the message that makes you take a chance?"), the title phrase major complaint from Black industry professionals. Unlike Top 40 stations, which
acknowledges that while these white guys might not look like they should know what retained the power to draw the color line around their majority white audiences, Black-
funk is, sonic blackness has "really got a hold on" them, haunting their dreams, driving identified stations felt pressured to enable whites crossing over. (TI1eprogram director
them if not to distraction, then at least to the other side of the color line, leaving the of Atlanta's WAOK concedes that, in the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever, "It's hard
whole countercultural project of "rock" in the dustbin of music history: sometimes not to play white artists:') Kisner went back to his Midwestern roots and
interviewed Eddie Levert, a veteran of the Ohio funk scene, who, as lead singer for the
Woke up one night and feeling so strange O'Jays, had toured with Wild Cherry as a supporting act the previous year. Levert's
This reggae music was playing in my brain experience was that "if a white act is good enough Blacks will accept them:' but that the
The mass confusion is driving me insane color line didn't flex the other way: "Why not put the Bee Gees and the O'Jays together
The hell with Woodstock, I'm going on Soul Train! in concert? What I get from both white and Black promoters is that whites and Black
will not mingle well together in concerts. My position is that you've got to try it:'
After you stop laughing, you have to admit it's a breathtaking change of allegiance for Still, there had always been an undertone of skepticism in the Black press about the
a white rock band to pledge. And, as with Dr. Hook's plaintive ode to being on "The popularity of crossover acts like Wild Cherry with the Black audience that made up
Cover of Rolling Stone:' it actually worked: after the huge success of their first album their readership. Kisner claims that mainstream record labels deliberately tried to efface
and despite the dispiriting flop of their second, Wild Cherry went on Soul Train on the whiteness of popular crossover artists like Tom Jones and the Bee Gees, to the point
April 15, 1978, to promote yet another crossover funk-rock album and play their one that many Black radio listeners only became aware that a group like the Average White
big hit. They were only the second all-white American act to do so.8 - Band or Wild Cherry was made up of white musicians when they finally appeared on
Soul Train. He had a point: not a single image of the all-white band appears anywhere on
Wild Cherry's first two album covers, which take their cue instead from the soft-focus
Losing Every Step of the Way sepia eroticism of the Ohio Players. (The objectified females draped across Electrified
Funk, Wild Cherry's sophomore LP, are racially ambiguous to an exquisite degree, their
For Black journalists covering the racial politics of the music industry, the appearance snow-white outfits setting off cafe-au-lait skin tones that could pass for either light-
of a white act like Wild Cherry on the premier Black-controlled television music skinned "black" or aggressivelybronzed "white:' depending on who's looking.)
program was not a cause for celebration. That same week, an acerbic report appeared But even if you didn't trust the official charts put out by Billboard, Cashbox, and
in Jet magazine under the no-nonsense headline "White Stars Cross Over and Get Rich Record World-and many Black deejays did not-it was hard to argue with the evidence
on Black Music:' Jet's new West-Coast bureau chief, twenty-eight-year-old Ronald in the Black press itself: a correspondent from the New York Amsterdam News saw Wild
Cherry rocking the capacity Madison Square Garden crowd assembled to hear the Isley
Kisner, did not mince words:
Brothers; later in that tour, the Oakland Post's gossip columnist relayed a report from
No the Bee Gees, Elton John, Billy Joel, Samantha Sang and Steely Dan aren't the Coliseum in which they played better than the Isleys' other supporting act, Black
Black, but you might think so, if you've been tuning in Black radio stations since Smoke, to the degree that their cover of "I Feel Sanctified" brought "wild cheers and
'bravo' from the Coliseum audience:' Most tellingly, the in-house R&B record charts
curated by most African American newspapers and magazines consistently highlighted
8 Dennis Coffey, the Motovm session player and fuzz-tone guitarist who played on the Temptations'
"Cloud Nine" and "Ball of Confusion;' was the first, playing his own hit, "Scorpio;' on January 8,
1972. All the other white acts that played Soul Train between his appearance and WUd Cherry's were 9 Ronald E. Kisner, "White Stars Cross Over and Get Rich on Black Music;' Jet, April 13, 1978, 16ff.
foreign nationals: Gino Vanelli (Canada), Elton John (UK), David Bowie (UK), and the Average Available online: https:/ /books.google.com/books?id=c0IDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14 (accessed
White Band (UK/Scotland). September 07, 2021).
86 One-Hit Wonders Wild Cherry, "Play That Funky Music'' (1976) 87

both "Play That Funky Music" and the Wild Cherry LP. Kisner's own employer, Jet, (In the final chorus, "I really didn't know" becomes "It really doesn't matter" -but, of
tracked both records for months in its "Soul Brother Top 20;' a chart determined course, that was a delusion. As we'll see, it matters a lot.)
directly by polling the readership with no industry input. Wild Cherry must have had Some Black teens appear to have used Wild Cherry as a transitional object to move
a following among Black concertgoers: How else did they end up headlining the first away from the "bubble gum soul" purveyed by Motown groups like the Jackson 5.
night of the 1977 Atlanta Kool Jazz Festival, next to the Mighty Clouds of Joy, jazz Reminiscing for Ebony in 2016, African American pop critic Michael A. Gonzales
legend Roy Ayers, Natalie Cole, the Temptations, and Lou Rawls?10 recaptures the feeling of this cultural shift with writerly precision. The scene is set in
the rec room of his older cousin's house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, some forty years
earlier:
The Honkey's Got Soul?
In the bicentennial summer of 1976, my cousin Denise suddenly announced to
So we have to assume that a lot of Black folks listened to PTFM/WB and genuinely me, "Michael Jackson is played out" -and she wasn't the only one who believed
enjoyed it. But where did that enjoyment come from, socially, and what did it mean, that to be true. We were sitting in the gaudy basement of her parent's Pittsburgh
politically? Searching for an underlying structure of feeling that, given the discursive home, the same Tiki-lit/wood paneled wall cellar where, a few years before, we
policing of the color line on both sides, will be even more fugitive than normal, we'll played the Jackson S's debut Motown single "I Want You Back" over and over and
need to cast our net wide, sweeping up suggestive bits of memoir, criticism, and fiction, over. Throwing those memories aside, she spread out her new 45s on top of the
both Black and white, looking for fleeting traces of how it felt to "listen while Black'' to bar: the mid-tempo balladry of the Brothers Johnson's "Good to You" (she loved
white boys crowing about playing your funky music. her some bass playin' Louis); the grown-folks' soul of the O'Jays jam "Livin' for the
Bob Parissi took the huge success of "Play That Funky Music" on the R&B charts Weekend"; and the White-boy funk of Wild Cherry's bugged out "Play That Funky
as validation from Black fans who he was proud to claim didn't know, and didn't Music:' 11
care, if he and his bandmates were white. The designated follow-up to PTFM/WB on
Electrified Funk was originally titled "The Honkey's Got Soul" (cooler heads prevailed) For Gonzales, the path through Wild Cherry led first to Zeppelin, then back across
and depicts Wild Cherry successfully taking it to the stage in Detroit in the midst of a the color line to Jimi Hendrix, hip-hop, and an omnivorous career as a music critic.
full-blown race riot: But white rock critics of the time were uniformly harsh about Wild Cherry; they had
a sneaking suspicion that Blacks viewed the band's provincial white funk like they did,
I heard the brothers and the sisters as an embarrassment: "Maybe the notion of a white man's imploring a black audience
Shout something in a rage to 'get funky and crazy' strikes a black audience as amusing:' 12 Black conservative
They were screaming to me cultural commentator (and linguist) James McWhorter also assumed, in 2004, that a
self-deprecating, shuck-and-jive White Negritude was the not-so-subtle message of the
Black now, white right, oh what a sight song, since no self-respecting white person could ever hear its title phrase as anything
I really didn't know the suckers was white other than a taunt:
Baby don't you know (x3)
That the honkey's got soul! White-the nut is that we are game to watch him venture to produce and touch us
with this music even though he's not of the race we associate the music with, and
that we're all aware of the looming assumption that whites are at a disadvantage in
channeling the spirit that makes the music live. Then boy-a kind of diminishment,
getting on the record that we see the fellow as operating at a disadvantage because
he wasn't born with it, getting him back for the eons during which black men were
w Marie Moore, "Fiery Concerts: Black & White Smoke;' New York Amsterdam News (1962-1993),
October 9, 1976. Available from: https:/ /www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/fiery-concerts- called "boy" by white bigots; now it's okay to tap you on the back of the head, White
black-white-smoke/ docview/226546490/se-2?accountid= 14512 (accessed September 07, 2021);
Berry Weekes, "I Didrit Say That [Weekly Column];' Oakland Post (1968-1981), October 17, 1976.
Available from: https:/ /wv,rw.proquest.com/newspapers/i-didnt-say-that/docview/371715990/
se-2?accountid=l4512 (accessed September 07, 2021). For the lineup of the 1977 Atlanta Kool Jazz 1
t Michael A. Gonzales, "How Off the Wall Launched Michael Jackson into Orbit:' Ebony, January
Festival, see the Atlanta Constitution, June 11, 1977. Available from: https://www.proquest.com/ 27, 2016. Available online: https:/ /w,vw. ebony.com/ entertainment/ off-the-wall-put- michael-jack
historical-newspapers/lineup/docview/1617561401/se-2?accountid=l4512 (accessed September son-into-the-stratosphere/ (accessed September 07, 2021).
2
07, 2021). In addition to the Jet Soul Brother Top 20, singles and album charts appeared weekly t John Rockwell, "Pop: Jacksons Run into Interference at Coliseum;' New York Times, April 12,
in most Black newspapers of the period, including some digitized and indexed online, like the 1977. Available online: https:/ /www.nytimes.com/ 1977/04/ 12/archives/pop-jacksons-run-into-
Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Afro-American. interference-at-coliseum-crowd.-and-sound.html (accessed September 07, 2021).
88 One-Hit Wonders Wild Cherry, "Play Tiwt Funky Music" (1976) 89

Boy,because the times have changed and ncrwwe're where it's at, so prove yourself, on down, Parissi'sraunchy (read:Black) vocal picks up the last three words and repeats
White Boy-but you know that we're only calling you "boy" in the same vein of them twice, first as what Lethem heard as a sneer, and I thought was an incredulous
affectionate diminishment that we call each other "nigger:'13 question ('til you die?),then as what both Lethem and I agree was probably a groan of
self-abasing pleasure (aww, 'til you di-ie).
Jonathan Lethem's finely wrought novel of the same year, The Fortressof Solitude-a In this reading, the white subject of the song vocally enacts his own destruction-a
personal fable of late 1970s Brooklyn, doomed interracial solidarity, and the minor-league, disco version of the Wagnerian love-death-every time the chorus
bifurcation of American musical culture-deploys PTFM/WB like a weapon against rumbles down to the tonic. Oh, come on, I hear you mutter-but consider this: the
its white teenage protagonist, whose Black tormentors were not "affectionate" in their album version of the track, and early live versions, too, eventually leave this moment
diminishment; they were relentless and without remorse: behind. The last time around, the tonic return at the end of the chorus is followed by
another repeat that does not resolve. As Parissi ad-libs, autologically, "got to keep on
Every time your sneakers met the street, the end of that summer, somebody was playing funky music;' the song freezes into place a third higher-and then, with a nod
hurling it at your head, that song. [It] was the soundtrack to your destruction, to Sly Stone, takes us another step higher, fading out into disco immortality a perfect
the theme. Your days reduced to a montage cut to its cowbell beat, inexorable fourth above its original pitch.
doubled bass line and raunch vocal, a sort of chanted sneer, surrounded by groans Autology becomes privilege here: if you're white, you can just keep on playing that
of pleasure. The stutter and blurt of what-a tuba? French horn? Rhythm guitar funky music, and you might think that you can take what you want from Black culture
and trumpet, pitched to mockery.14 and just walk away, scot-free. For obvious reasons, cover versions of "Play That Funky
Music" by Black musicians are vanishingly scarce, but the one or two I've been able to
Given the autobiographical precision of the narrative-almost everything in the find don't end this way. They play through the chorus twice, and, the second time, slow
book that doesn't involve comic book superheroes actually happened to Lethem-we down the final riff until it comes to rest at the tonic with three stony downbeats for
can treat this passage like a primary source from the summer of 1976, preserving a those three last words. It's a logical way to end the song in concert. (Or an episode of
particularly abrasive structure of feeling circulating just on the other side of the color Tiie Voicewhere the white contestant sings it as an interracial duet with his coach Cee
line. Of course middle schoolers can be cruel; but Lethem, the narrator, wants us to Lo Green, accompanied by a miniature Cee Lo clone popping and locking.) 15
feel the existential hatred behind the raillery, a structure of feeling stamped by slavery But maybe it also means exactly what it says. Maybe that's what Parissi heard in
on America from the very beginning that, when looked at squarely, turns out to be a the tone that night in Pittsburgh, maybe he just sensed it, maybe he laughed it off, but
matter of life and death. maybe, just maybe, Black folk are deadly serious about this. Go ahead and mess with
"Sing it through gritted teeth: WHITE BOY! Lay down the boogie and play that our music, white boy, but there will be a price to pay. Maybe this time, it is you who will
fun1..-y
music 'til you die:' be forced to work until you die.

'Til. You. Die.

'Til You Die? ('tilyou DIE, motherfucker!)

No surprises: I'm working my way around to the proposition that Robert Parissi had
no idea what he was messing with when he scribbled down the words "play that funky How I Learned My Lesson
music, white boy" on an empty server's pad during a set break at Club 2001 in 1976.
Or maybe he did. What I remember puzzling over in 1976, as a fifteen-year-old Does this seem melodramatic? Not if you actually listen to the stories circulating in
white boy, was the cadence at the end of the chorus, the precise moment Lethem evokes Black culture. Interviewed in Jet, Los Angeles DJ Don Mack perceived guys like Parissi
in the description above: after everybody piles onto the inexorable bass riff and rides it as an existential threat: "Whites are singing and talking like us. Pretty soon there
won't be any need for us:' It had long been taken for granted within the small cadre of
Black media professionals that segregation of the airwaves and appropriation of Black
u James McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We
Should, Like, Care (New York: Penguin, 2004), 188. I have retained McWhorter's explicit, racially
charged use of the N-word, partially for the implied symmetry with "white boY:'and partially because,
as a Black conservative intellectual who is also a professional scholar oflanguage, McWhorter has
the right to deploy language as he chooses without "politically correct" editing or expurgation from
15
a white academic. Yes, that happened, on December 12, 2012. See https://www·.youtube.com/watch?v=lHitcRQwg:x1\11
14
Jonathan Lethem, 171eFortressof Solitude (Vintage, 2004), 109. (accessed July 3, 2021).
90 One-Hit Wonders "WildCherry, "Play That Funky Music" (1976) 91

musical creativity caused race hatred: "Blacks go around mad at whites, and say, ,-White Kunzru's novel is, in fact, an elaborate narrative labyrinth of white guilt, and it ends,
people are no good: Many whites are being hated and they don't know whY:'16 as promised, in a torrent of white tears (and blood). But the real sin in the novel, as in
Music historian Matthew Morrison has coined the term blacksound (the sonic the story of PTFM/WB, is pride. It's one thing to know and love Black music. It's quite
equivalent of blackface) to name the profound cultural violations-stereotyping, another thing to believe you can impersonate it, and by virtue of that impersonation,
appropriation, exploitation, erasure-that planted and nurtured an American music efface responsibility for your own cultural privilege:
industry built on Black creativity but economically dominated by whites. 17 Reverse
crossover, blacksound by another name, is thus a primal wound for African Americans, -What do you mean? It's the best idea! These fuckers think this music was made
engendering persistent fantasies in which attempts to possess Black music by outsiders, in 1928, but actually we made it. We made it, fools! We made that shit last week! So
even well-meaning ones, are punishable by death. Those familiar with the Black Arts who's the expert now? Who knows the tradition? We do! We own that shit!
Movement will remember Henry Dumas's speculative fiction, "Will the Circle Be
Play thatfunky music, white boy.
Unbroken;' in which the unearthly sonic power of a vibrating "afro-horn" instantly
kills three white sensation-seekers who have forced their way inside Harlem's Sound Play thatfunky music 'tilyou die.
Barrier Club during an experimental collective improvisation. It's worth noting that
two of the three were also skilled and passionate mimics of Black music-until they
died.
One of the most gothic versions of this fantasy was channeled by a racial outsider.
The writer Hari Kunzru, of Kashmiri descent on his father's side, grew up in a Britain
where he would have been classified as "Black;' and his 2017 novel, White Tears,puts
the death back into the legend of Blind Joe Death. Like John Fahey, its callow white
protagonists trifle with the identity of a long-lost bluesman, in this case using the skills
they developed wrangling drum breaks from old Black records for the benefit of white
hipsters and hip-hoppers; unlike Fahey, they pay for their appropriation with their lives
and the lives of everyone they love. (I told you it was gothic.) Kunzru did his research:
his characters repeatedly echo the conversion narratives that blues record collectors
like Fahey used to describe how they felt while listening to Black music on rare old 78s.
But in this retelling, haunted by the wrongness of blacksound, the messages they hear
coming off the grooves are vengeful, overtly menacing, distorted by historical guilt:

I had listened to that record many times, but it was as if it had never broken my
skin. The air was rent open by the sound; darkness poured in. BabeI'll never die, he
sang. I'd always heard the line as frightened, the alcoholic singer afraid of the death
he is swallowing: Sterno brand camping fuel strained through a cloth. But now I
heard something else. A veiled threat. If what I've already swallowed doesn't kill
me, nothing can. You will never be able to stop me, babe. I'll just keep on coming. 18

16
Media activist Donald Warden as quoted in Chester Higgins, "Fight Bias in Radio against Famous
Blacks;' Jet, June 24, 1971. Available online: https://books.google.com/books?id=rzcDAAAAMBAJ
&pg=PA57 &dq=Chester+ Higgins,+ "Fight+ Bias+in+ Radio+against+ Famous+ Blacks;' &hl=en&sa
=X&ved=2ah UKEwi3sLS09 uvy Ah USN n0KHXB 7AfoQ6AF6BAgCEAI #v=onepage&q &f=fals
e (accessed September 07, 2021).
17
Matthew Morrison, "Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse;' The
Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (2019): 781-823.
18
Hari Kunzru, White Tears: A novel (Knopf, 2017), 87. The 78 rpm record being played is identified
by the author as Victor 38535-A, Tommy Johnson's "Canned Heat Blues;' from 1928.