Black Nostaljack

This chapter is dedicated to all of the Brothers and Sisters out there who never had enough of '70s black culture.

Sonny Cheeba (b. Salahadeen Wilds, 1975) grew up on 183rd St and Tiebout Ave in the Bronx, not far from Geechi Suede (b. Saladine Wallace, 1977), who grew up on 197th and Valentine. Monotone apartment buildings, row houses, elevated subway platforms, and a dense demographic of blacks and Latinos were markers of their connected neighborhoods. Both had Muslim upbringings; their given first names are variations of the name Saladin, the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, reflecting their parents' Muslim faith as well as the naming practices that resulted from a pronounced wave of black consciousness in the 1970s. As Cheeba recalls about their meeting: "when you meet someone who has the same name as you, and know both what it means, you just run with it." Then, a chance meeting with producer Ski (b. David Willis, 1969) — at that point a member of the hip hop duo Original Flavor — on a Bronx block became the serendipitous encounter that led to the creation of Uptown Saturday Night.

There are several demographic groups in the U.S. that have seen their culture absorbed and transformed by the processes of mainstreaming. Yet, more consistently than any other group, black people in America — from enslaved Africans to American Negroes to Blacks to African-Americans — have been appropriated and incorporated into the mélange that makes up American popular culture. While the cultural practices and signifiers of black Americans will always be a foundation of a larger, American culture, there is a continuous cat-and-mouse game that proceeds as such: 1) racially and economically suppressed black culture creators breed practices and products for the marginalized community around them that is too "raw," "real," and different for the center; 2) the newfound culture is superficially disparaged while its innovative and "authentic" qualities begin to attract many at the fringes of the cultural center; 3) the fresh culture is eventually absorbed or appropriated, introducing financial gains to some; 4) the next generation — still racially and/or economically suppressed — soak in what the previous generation accomplished while forging new practices within and for their community, only for the cycle to begin anew.

Due to the variety of black locales and experiences in the U.S., particularly in the late twentieth century, this progression is usually staggered. There was a time, however, when all four of these stages were simultaneously occurring, providing a rush of community-based, mainstream, underground, and subversive black culture shooting through the media conduits of America. It was a time of cultural awareness and black resistance movements — broadcast on national television, radio, and movie circuits — sowed by the neglected youth in major cities. The increased social, visual, political, and aural presence of potent blackness in the 1970s is essential to understanding much of the culture that has been produced in the past forty years. It is important here to note that Cheeba, Suede, Ski, and all of the principals involved in crafting Uptown Saturday Night were children during the 1970s. In this chapter, we'll show how this early absorption and adolescent processing of that politically vibrant decade as they went through their young adult years in the 1980s (to then become culture creators themselves in the 1990s) was paramount to the nostalgic inspiration that directly stimulated the conception and ethos of Camp Lo.

I feel that the '70s sonically was just wider.

— Sonny Cheeba

There is a diversity to black culture that is not always recognized. Often, black culture is reduced to a couple of practices that are made to represent the totality of black creativity, experience, and values. While the dynamic range of analog tape did, quite literally, produce a wider sound on recordings from the 1970s in comparison to the digital recordings of today, Cheeba's statement refers more figuratively to the wide range of personalities, voices, instrumentation, and lyrics sonically presented on recordings from that decade. Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Sun Ra, Bob James, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and others were exploring and experimenting with a range of improvised music and jazz. Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, and the Temptations were all breaking away from the soul templates established at Motown. And, as the home of soul was evolving, various styles of rhythm and blues were being shepherded in by LaBelle, Kool & The Gang, Jimmy Castor, James Brown, Esther Phillips, Leon Ware, The Chi-Lites, Marlena Shaw, and a multitude of bands, singers, and producers that, to mainstream entertainment consumers, seemed unhinged in regard to their particular expressions of blackness. For many black people that were coming of age during this time, the aesthetic shift was apparent:

... there was a freshness to the culture that came forward, a sense of liberation, a statement of self-determination on the part of all those people who felt that they were no longer going to try to appease mainstream taste. Instead, they were emboldened in their commitment to being as Black as they wanted to be: in style, taste, and overall action. The Blacker, the better.

— Boyd 2007, 6

Cinema and Media Studies Professor Todd Boyd's comment speaks to a major reconfiguration of blackness in the American public that extended beyond music. The wideness of black culture was seen and felt through the bodies of Muhammad Ali and Lynn Swann, digested and contemplated through the poetic arts of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, and engaged with every week on television through George and Weezy Jefferson and the variegated blackness of Don Cornelius's hippest ride in America. For black children and teenagers who had not already been accustomed to the extremely narrow representation of public, media-constructed blackness, these characters, voices, bodies, sounds, and perspectives provided a rich constellation of cultural and entertainment options with which they could identify. Arguably the most significant — if not the most discussed and referred to — platform for the cultural representation of 1970s blackness was feature films. In the 1970s, before BET, YouTube, and Twitch, if you were a black kid or teenager, seeing a beloved actor or character on the living room console television, or on the movie screen, was momentous.

Black actors, directors, screenwriters, and producers proliferated during the decade and created an assortment of cinematic content intended for black audiences, now known as the "Blaxploitation Films" of the 1970s. Blaxploitation has become a catchall term for popular films of that era which featured a largely black cast and depicted various facets of black life and culture. Regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people directing, producing, writing, or developing a film, the cinematic...