RHYTHM & GANGSTER
The First of Several Brief Looks at the Long History of American Music and Crime
During the Prohibition era, from 1920 to 1933 when alcohol sales were banned in the United States, the “speakeasy” was a code word for locations where illegal booze was available for purchase, often accompanied by music, dancing, other recreation drugs and sex - both consensual and mercenary. Often the purveyors of the booze, known as bootleggers, were from recent immigrant groups who were locked out of mainstream American businesses. While that thirteen-year experiment in government behavior control failed as policy, it had the unintended consequence of cementing a marriage of the criminal underworld and the music industry.
After the sale of alcohol was again lega, nightclubs became ways to launder dirty money, base various illegal operations, and legitimate business fronts for its owners. In essence, the roots of the modern entertainment business, and its intimate relationship with the underworld, go back to America’s first failed war on drugs. Despite the wishes of that era’s Christian Right the appetite for alcohol grew more feverish with Prohibition as bottles of whiskey, rum etc were brought down from Canada, up from Mexico, and concocted at home made stills nationwide.
Prohibition criminalized thousands of Americans who drank illegally, became part of this underground bootlegging economy or law enforcement officers who took bribes to look the other way (and secure some bottles for themselves.) There’s a huge percentage of Americans who always have, and always will, like to get high. How they get high evolves with the times, but that essential desire for elevation is an unchanging staple of our national character. You can make certain substances illegal. You can arrest sellers of large and small amounts. You can close borders, and pass draconian laws to criminalize selling and buying. But, unless Americans stop getting high in large numbers, any war on drugs is just an excuse to sound sanctimonious and live in hypocrisy. We are a nation of addicts and have been so at least since the 1900s.
The original soundtrack for our booze crazed country was hot jazz and swing provided by Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie and other giants. Though people affiliated with the white underworld often managed booking agencies for black talent, organized crime’s main focus was on prestigious, segregated, white only venues. The majority of black performers, especially those who played the blues and rawer forms of black music, worked the network of segregated venues originally known as TOBA (aka tough on black asses) and later labeled the chitlin’ circuit. Entry into the American showbiz mainstream post-Prohibition meant dealing with the larger forces in organized crime.
Chicago is crucial part of this story. The criminal empire of Al Capone ruled the Windy City in the 1920s through profits generated by bootlegging. During this same decade that Chicago was a northern promised land for hundreds of thousands of African-Americans in the Great Migration, swelling the city’s South Side, which became known as Bronzeville. These new Northerners traded in share cropping for work in Chicago’s stockyards, bringing with them a strong work ethic, a lot of hope, and a vibrant musical culture.
Somewhere in this mix we should situate black gangsters, men and women who were both the exploiter and the exploited, the enforcer of the status quo and economic engines for the community. In the segregated America of the 20th century, black gangsters operated in they served several roles: gate keepers for white power both criminal and political; independent businessmen using hustles to fullfill their dreams; undercover financiers of legal black businesses (or straight up loan sharks) and the civil rights movement.
They were essential figures in the history of African-American music as managers, label owners, and club owners. Sometimes they were heroic in that they provided opportunity where none otherwise existed. Sometimes they were villains who exploited black artists as profoundly as any white mobster. Many of them spoke the language of black nationalism, urging black ownership (be it of our music or our rackets), wedded to capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses. I think it’s important to see black gangsters in the social context of racist America. In a segregated world where employment opportunities — especially opportunities to build wealth — were limited to the black bourgeois, life outside the lines attracted men and women unwilling to settle for crumbs.
The post-civil rights era opened up many once closed doors for advancement for black folks. Parallel to this progress was an unprecedented flood of drugs into the country’s poorest areas. In the ‘60s it was heroin. In the early ‘80s angel dust. It was crack in the ‘90s. It the current epoch opioids are all the rage. These multiple waves of drugs addicted hundreds of thousands and became businesses opportunities for people hungry for money, power. and respect.
What’s intriguing to me, in light of the cultural transition that occurred in the ‘80s and ‘90s, are the aesthetic changes in how gangsterism manifested in music and around it. In short, the difference between gangsters versus gangstas. Gangsterism was the subtext of the pop music world for decades. People often arrested during the soul/funk era - think Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly’ album or Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street.” But hip hop has made gangsta life it’s uber text, from the days of Boogie Down Production’s ‘Criminal Minded’ through Dr. Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ through today’s drill music - all with the MC as narrator. The gangsta ethos has had a As we look at #hiphop50 there’s a lot of romance about the beauty of the culture. At its most humanistic it spreads love and joy. Yet hip hop also ushered in a celebration of gangsta life, a nornalization of its often nihilistic codes of behavior through beats and rhymes, that makes the days of Al Capone seem quite benign.
More thoughts on the music world/underworld matrix in the weeks to come.