Abstract
ABOVE: Felice Rosser of the band Faith broke boundaries in rock music in the 1980s
CREDIT: Caroline Conejero
IT’S EASY TO take popular music as a fait accompli. Rock is seen as the preserve of mainly white men, whilst reggae, rap, soul and jazz are Black music. Once algorithms take over music - or, rather, direct its consumption -music becomes another echo chamber. How many Black rockers show up on Apple Music’s Rock Classics playlist, for instance? Where is the proto punk band Death, from Detroit, who had an epiphany after seeing Alice Cooper? Or Pure Hell from Philadelphia, a glam rock band in the mould of the New York Dolls?
Playlists determined by chart positions and record sales mean the tastes of the people who rely on them become calcified. In the case of classic rock playlists, the bands are almost entirely white and male. Do Black women’s voices and songs have a shot at creating popular music? Or is it a self-fulfilling loop that reflects the inherent racism and misogyny of record executives and/or musical gatekeepers, which stifle diversity and inclusion in popular songs?
History proves illuminating. Despite the massive success of Billie Jean and Beat It from Michael Jackson’s Thriller LP, MTV still had to be convinced to play Black music in the early 1980s. It may have been white rocker Eddie Van Halen’s whining guitar on Beat It that won it airtime.
By then, African-American inventors of rock‘n’roll such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard had been written out of the history of the music they’d created. There was no better proof of rock’s whitening than the interview Rolling Stone’s editor and founder Jann Wenner gave to The New York Times for his 2023 memoir of musical greats, The Masters. Wenner’s dismissive bigoted and chauvinistic comments against Black and women musicians prompted the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to drop him from its board.
Racial dimensions in the selling and promotion of music goes as far back as the 19th century, according to Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. He writes that “the terms highbrow and lowbrow … were borrowed from the racist pseudoscience of phrenology which posited that racial types and intelligence could be determined through cranial measurements”. In the early 20th century, records directly marketed at and sold to Black audiences and hillbilly/ folk recordings released on wholly white labels laid the groundwork for industry attitudes today.
The 1960s folk revival reinforced notions of authenticity and primitivism in its championing of the blues. Soul was considered Black, whilst rock, the inheritor of rock‘n’roll, was white -except for the anomaly of Jimi Hendrix.
In the case of classic rock playlists, the bands are almost entirely white and male. Do Black women’s voices and songs have a shot at creating popular music?
The 1970s emerged as a fertile period for an explosion of independent music, from Philly soul to disco, punk and new wave, which brought with it a new diversity of people to the dancefloors. However, by that decade’s end, the ugly face of white rock’s fandom revealed itself. Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh slammed the riot and the burning of disco records at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979 as a wider “racist and sexist” attack on gay, Black and Latino people. I was an intern at the magazine at the time, and spent my nights in New York’s downtown clubs, listening to punk, reggae, disco and hip hop, much like my Black girlfriend, Felice Rosser. She was then working at CBS Records and playing bass, with an eye on forming her first band.
More than a decade later, she and her band Faith belonged to the Black Rock Coalition, a movement of musicians, critics and activists combating racist stereotypes in rock. Faith’s live shows were causing quite a stir and the major record companies were circling. In his history of the BRC, The Wire’s music critic Michael A Gonzales quotes BRC’s conceptual thinker, writer Greg Tate: “People were going crazy over Faith in the clubs … but the record executives just couldn’t see past a 6ft woman playing bass and singing . All these years later . when it comes to rock and roll, it’s still a white male discussion.” People were going crazy over Faith in the clubs… but the record executives just couldn’t see past a 6ft woman playing bass and singing
This attitude barred Rosser from contemporary music’s most popular, macho genre. She recalls how record companies came up to “the two male members of early Faith” during shows and tried “to talk business, and they’d say, ‘No, she’s the leader, you have to talk to her’. I feel that sexism had a big part of what happened to Faith then”.
There have also been pressures on Black musicians to be better than their white counterparts. “They have to be virtuosos,” she said. She cites bassist and poet Meshell Ndegeocello, then signed to Madonna’s Maverick label,
and guitarist Vernon Reid of another BRC band, Living Colour. They were “introduced” to the music industry by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.
For some, the Rolling Stones, among many others, were at the forefront of the white wave that co-opted Black music and effectively erased rock’s Black originators. In her seminal 1973 essay Ripping Off Black Music, Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Margo Jefferson perceived the mimicking of Black styles and attitudes by white musicians through the prism of 19th century minstrelsy. She wrote: “Black music, and with it the private Black self, were suddenly grossly public - tossed onstage, dressed in clown white and bandied about with a gleeful arrogance that just yesterday had chosen to ignore and condescend.”
However, for Rosser, growing up in Detroit, the English invasion into blues was where she learned about the original bluesmen in the musically segregated landscape of the 1960s. She recalled: “Motown was trying to get away from the blues. They wanted to make pop music that could be played on AM radio that would be acceptable to broad American culture. It took the English guys to [bring back that history].”
Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green had come out of England as a blues band, but “by the time Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined - not to take away from the great songs they wrote - and the Eagles had their commercial success, the Black roots of rock had faded away”, Rosser added.
LEFT: Rosser recalls how record companies came up to “the two male members of early Faith” during shows, rather than her, and tried to “talk business”
When Rosser and I were in Detroit together, she talked us past the security guard and got us into the now-defunct Michigan Palace. Torn bits of curtain hung from an enormous stage where concerts by Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the New York Dolls made deep and lasting impressions on her. Unlike today’s internet playlists, which turn listeners into isolated consumers, bands coming to Detroit unified a generation, like the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Of our group of friends from Barnard and Columbia colleges, Rosser was the first one to move to downtown New York. The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the novelist Jennifer Jazz - whose debut novel, Spill Ink on It, was about their punk days together - shared a couch in Rosser’s apartment on First Avenue. Basquiat then was out on the streets as the graffiti artist “Samo”, and heroin-shooting galleries dotted the Lower East Side. Despite its bohemianism, there was old-fashioned racism in the iconic punk club CBGB and within the music business, which the music critic Lester Bangs recounted in his essay The White Noise Supremacists. A female industry figure once told him: “I liked them so much better when they were just Negroes.”
Although novelist and editor Kaitlyn Greenidge has described Rosser as “a Black punk pioneer”, at a recent photographic exhibition of the old days the musician saw no Black punks in the pictures.
“I feel like a lot of people never even saw us,” she said. “They don’t even know that Black people were there … I never thought it was odd to be [in the clubs] because everybody else who was there liked this odd, weird stuff, too, so that united us.” Reggae, she added, was another unifying force: “At the reggae shows, you’d see white, Black, all kinds of people.”
Over the years there have been many iterations of Rosser’s original band. The current one, FaithNYC, plays a signature fusion of the musical styles - from rock and reggae to punk and soul - that have shaped her life in music. I introduced her to Justin Adams, Robert Plant’s guitarist who’d played with Sinead O’Connor. Rosser and Adams, together with percussionist Finley Hunt, went into the studio for three tracks and came out with nine. FaithNYC’s new LP, Love Is a Wish Away, was released in November on Good Deeds Music.
ABOVE: Rosser believes her music gives her the “freedom to express herself” amid preconceptions around how Black women should act in American society
CREDIT: (left) Barry King / Alamy; (right) Alice Teeple
In his review of the LP for The Wire, Gonzales describes Rosser’s voice as having “the texture of whiskey and honey and a chameleon-like versatility”. He likens some of Adams’s guitar licks to those of Chic’s Nile Rodgers. The LP’s title single has earned praise from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and critics Vivian Goldman and Lucy Sante. Drummer Chris Frantz, of Talking
Heads and Tom Tom Club, calls the record “a powerful groove and force for good in these troubled times”.
This year, Rosser watched another Black woman (this time on the political stage) attempt to smash through the cultural and social barriers that hold back African Americans, and she is adamant about her message. Her music is “the freedom of a Black woman to express herself amidst all the subtle -and not so subtle - rules about who and what a Black woman should be, do, say and feel in American society”. ✘
Footnotes