Fear of a Black Planet

In 1989 Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing came out in cinemas, a film about one hot summer day in a Black neighbourhood of Brooklyn that ends in violence. The same track sounds throughout the film: Fight the Power by Public Enemy. The group's production team, The Bomb Squad, stacked dozens of samples on top of each other, from James Brown grooves to fragments of civil rights speeches. A year later the track appeared on the album from which this chapter takes its title: Fear of a Black Planet (1990).

In one record Public Enemy showed how closely music and society are connected in Black American music. That starts with the names. The American record industry first sold music by Black artists as race records, then as rhythm & blues and later as urban. A label like that says little about the sound and a lot about the audience the industry had in mind. Is 'Black music' then a musical category or a social one? The answer is: both. The music was made by the descendants of enslaved Africans, and you can hear it.

In Mixtape 1 (The birth of pop music) we saw how blues, jazz and gospel arose in the African diaspora: the communities of people of African descent outside Africa. Certain features travelled with them through all the styles: call & response between a lead singer and the group, polyrhythm, improvisation, the emphasis on groove and the central role of the voice. After 1945 we meet those features again in soul, funk, reggae, disco, hip hop and R&B. That music was always tied to the struggle for equal rights. And it always grew bigger than the group that made it. That is what this chapter's question is about: how did the music of an oppressed group become the music the world listens to most?

Soul arose in the mid-1950s and grew in the 1960s into the most important Black pop music in the United States. Its roots lie in three styles: the gospel of the Black church, jazz and rhythm and blues. The church matters most of all. In the American South the church was the centre of the Black community, and the place where many singers learned to sing.

The step from church to the charts was taken by Ray Charles. In 1954 he recorded I Got a Woman for the Atlantic label. The melody and the way of singing come from a gospel song, It Must Be Jesus. Charles replaced Jesus with a woman. To part of his audience that was blasphemy: music meant to honour God was now about love and desire. At the same time the song became a hit. That pattern, scandal and success at once, would return more than once in the history of Black music.

In soul the voice and the lyrics are central. Singers use melisma: many notes on one syllable, as a preacher in church can stretch a word. They sing raw, sometimes shout, and let you hear that it costs them something. Almost always there is call & response: the singer calls, a choir or a horn section answers. That is the form of the church service, in which preacher and congregation answer each other.

In 1965, with I Got You (I Feel Good), James Brown showed how far that voice could be stretched. The hook of the song is a scream. The horns do not play long melodies but short stabs, which work like percussion. Brown put more and more emphasis on rhythm, and a few years later would invent funk with it (side B).

Soul was the soundtrack of the civil rights movement. In the South, Black and white Americans were separated by law until the 1960s: in schools, buses, restaurants and waiting rooms. Black citizens were also prevented from voting in all kinds of ways. In 1955 a boycott of the city buses began in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Marches, sit-ins and, in 1963, the March on Washington followed, where Martin Luther King gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech. In 1964 and 1965 segregation and discrimination at elections were banned by law. Singers like Sam Cooke, who came from gospel, gave that struggle a voice: his A Change Is Gonna Come (1964) became a song of the movement.

The clearest example is Aretha Franklin's Respect. The song was written by Otis Redding, who recorded it himself in 1965. In Redding's version a man comes home and asks his wife for respect. Aretha Franklin, the daughter of a minister from Detroit, turned it around in 1967: now a woman demands respect. She added the spelled-out word that everyone can sing along to. That made Respect an anthem for two movements at once: the one for civil rights and the one for women's rights. We come back to her in Mixtape 10 (Women in pop music).

After the murder of Martin Luther King in April 1968 the tone became fiercer. In the same year James Brown recorded Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud. Soul was about Black pride, and about the question of who profited from Black music. That question also played out in the two cities where soul gained a sound of its own: Detroit and Memphis.

Detroit was the city of the American car industry. From the First World War hundreds of thousands of Black Americans moved from the South to cities in the North, looking for work in the factories and away from segregation. Berry Gordy, a songwriter from Detroit, had himself stood on the assembly line of a car factory. In 1959, with 800 dollars borrowed from his family, he started a record label: Tamla Records. Shortly afterwards came the label Motown, a contraction of Motor Town, the nickname of Detroit.

The headquarters was an ordinary family house on West Grand Boulevard. Gordy hung a sign on it reading Hitsville U.S.A. The house held the offices, and there was a small recording studio. From the early 1960s until the early 1970s almost every Motown hit was recorded there. The house is now the Motown Museum.

Gordy organised his label like a car factory: an assembly line where each department had one task. Songwriters wrote the songs. The best-known team was Holland-Dozier-Holland (Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland), who wrote hits for The Supremes and The Four Tops. Smokey Robinson wrote and produced for others and sang himself with The Miracles. The house band, The Funk Brothers, played on almost all the recordings, usually without their names on the sleeve. Their bassist James Jamerson, with his nimble bass lines, largely defined the Motown sound. Artists were taught clothing, posture and manners by Maxine Powell, and choreographer Cholly Atkins rehearsed the dance steps. Every week a meeting decided which recordings were good enough to release.

The aim was Black music that the white audience also bought. Motown called itself The Sound of Young America, not The Sound of Black America. The production was clear and cheerful, with a tambourine on the beat and songs about love, rarely about politics. It worked. The Supremes, three young women from a public housing project in Detroit, became the label's most successful group, with twelve number 1 hits in the United States. In 1967 the name of singer Diana Ross was put in front of the group name for the first time. On Reflections from that year an oscillator sounds in the intro: Motown followed the psychedelic fashion of the moment.

Smokey Robinson showed that the format left room for poetry. In The Tracks of My Tears (1965) he sings about someone who laughs at a party, while anyone who looks closely can see the traces of his tears. It is a triple image in a three-minute song. The Jackson 5 came from Gary, Indiana, an industrial city near Chicago. On I Want You Back (1969) singer Michael Jackson was only ten or eleven years old. Mixtape 7 (The 1980s) is about his later career.

The assembly line also had a downside. Artists had little say over their own music. Around 1970 singers like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder wanted to decide for themselves what they recorded. Gaye made What's Going On (1971), an album about the war in Vietnam, poverty, drugs and pollution. Gordy thought it too political and did not want to release it. Gaye persisted, and the album was a great success. A year later, in 1972, Motown moved to Los Angeles. The story of pop music as a product of a factory continues in Mixtape 12 (The hit factory).

A thousand kilometres to the south-west, in Memphis, Tennessee, a different soul sound arose. The label there was called Stax. It was founded by a white brother and sister: Jim Stewart, a bank employee who played country fiddle in his spare time, and Estelle Axton, who took out a mortgage on her house to finance the company. Stewart started in 1957 with the label Satellite Records, and Axton joined in 1958. In 1961 they changed the name to Stax, from the first letters of their surnames: Stewart and Axton.

Stax was housed in an old cinema, the Capitol Theatre, in a Black neighbourhood of Memphis. In the former foyer was a record shop, where the staff could hear what the neighbourhood wanted to buy. On the facade went the words Soulsville U.S.A., an answer to Hitsville in Detroit. The studio was in the auditorium. Recording was live, with all the musicians together in one room and little added afterwards. The sloping floor of the cinema gave the recordings a sound of their own.

The result sounded rawer and more southern than Motown. Where Detroit was smooth and cheerful, the Stax recordings were rougher, with a heavy bass, a dry drum and the horns of the Memphis Horns. The house band was Booker T. & the MG's: organist Booker T. Jones and drummer Al Jackson Jr. were Black, guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald 'Duck' Dunn were white. A mixed band was an exception in the segregated South of the early 1960s. In the studio they played together. Outside the studio the rules of the city applied.

In 1962 they had a hit of their own with Green Onions, an instrumental track. It is a 12-bar blues in F: Jones repeats a short figure on the Hammond organ, and Cropper plays sharp guitar chords against it. Booker T. Jones was still a teenager then. As the house band the MG's played on the records of almost all the Stax artists, from Sam & Dave to Otis Redding.

Otis Redding, from Macon in Georgia, was the biggest star of Stax. In June 1967 he performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, for an audience of mostly white hippies, and won a new audience there. At the end of that year he wrote (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay with Steve Cropper, a calmer and more personal song than his earlier work. On 10 December 1967, a few days after the recording, Redding died in a plane crash. He was 26. The whistling at the end of the song was meant as a temporary place for a lyric he still wanted to write. In 1968 it became his first number 1 hit in the United States.

A difficult period followed for Stax. In April 1968 Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, and relations in the city and in the company changed. In the same year the cooperation with Atlantic Records, which had distributed the Stax records, ended, and it turned out that the rights to the old recordings lay with Atlantic. Stax carried on with new artists, such as Isaac Hayes, who won an Oscar in 1972 for the music of the film Shaft (1971). In 1972 the label organised Wattstax, a large concert in Los Angeles. In 1975 Stax went bankrupt. On the site of the old cinema now stands the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

Motown and Stax show two answers to the same question. Motown made Black music that reached the white audience by sounding as polished as possible. Stax stayed closer to the church and the blues, and found its white audience later, among other routes through rock musicians who knew the records of Redding and the MG's.

Funk grew in the second half of the 1960s out of jazz, rhythm and blues and soul. Here too James Brown played the leading role. On Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (1965) and Cold Sweat (1967) he put melody and harmony in the background. Every instrument became a kind of percussion: the guitar, the bass, the horns and even the voice.

The most important feature of funk is called on the one: the emphasis falls on the first beat of the bar. In rhythm and blues and rock the emphasis falls instead on the second and fourth beats, the backbeat. In funk all the instruments come together on the one, and in between they play short, shifted figures. Rhythm comes before harmony. A funk track often stays on a single chord for minutes. The guitar plays a short, muted stroke, staccato. The bass plays syncopated, just off the beat. The horns play tight, short stabs. Together they form the groove, and that groove is the actual song.

In Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine (1970) you hear that principle in its purest form. Almost the whole track stays on one chord. The bass guitar is played by the then eighteen-year-old Bootsy Collins, the guitar endlessly repeats the same short stroke, and Brown shouts while his singer Bobby Byrd answers: call & response from the church, now on the dance floor. At the end of 1969 Brown had already recorded Funky Drummer, which came out in 1970. Clyde Stubblefield's drum break on that track later became one of the most sampled fragments in hip hop (side C).

Funk was also an attitude. After Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud the music stood for self-awareness: afros, bright colours, big bands on stage. With the make-up of the band itself, Sly and the Family Stone from San Francisco showed something: Black and white musicians, men and women, in one group.

George Clinton went even further. His two groups, Parliament and Funkadelic, together formed a collective of dozens of musicians known as P-Funk. Clinton wrapped the music in science fiction: on the album Mothership Connection (1975) Black Americans land in a spaceship, and on stage a real spaceship came down. In Give Up the Funk (1975) choirs sing over each other, and keyboard player Bernie Worrell plays synthesizer parts on a Minimoog. On Flash Light (1977) he even played the bass line with it. Mixtape 8 (Electronic music) is about that synthesizer.

Stevie Wonder had been under contract to Motown since childhood. When he turned 21 in 1971, he negotiated a new contract in which he became the boss of his own music. One of the first results was the album Talking Book (1972). On Superstition Wonder plays the riff himself on a Hohner clavinet, an electric keyboard instrument with a short, plucked sound. He played the drums himself too. Earth, Wind & Fire, the group of Maurice White, made funk with a large horn section and a sunny major-key groove. In September (1978) the 'ba-dee-ya' in the chorus was a placeholder lyric, which stayed because nobody found anything better.

Funk did not disappear when the style dropped out of the charts. The grooves became the material of hip hop. And rock bands took over the style: Living Colour made funk metal in the 1980s, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers combined funk with punk and rock.

Jamaica was a British colony for centuries, with plantations on which enslaved Africans worked. In 1962 the island became independent. In the poor neighbourhoods of the capital Kingston, music centred on sound systems: mobile discotheques with enormous speakers, on which DJs played American rhythm and blues. When those records became scarce, Jamaican producers began recording themselves.

That is how three styles arose in succession. First ska, in the late 1950s and early 1960s: fast and cheerful, with the emphasis on the offbeat. In the mid-1960s rocksteady, slower and with more room for the bass. And around 1968 reggae. One of the first tracks with that word in the title was Do the Reggay (1968) by Toots and the Maytals.

In reggae the drums and bass guitar together determine the riddim, the rhythmic basis of a track. The bass is heavy and melodic, and often plays the main line. The guitar plays the skank: a short, muted chord stroke on the second and fourth beats. The drummer usually plays the one drop: the bass drum falls on the third beat, and the first beat stays empty. That makes reggae feel slow and tense at the same time. It is the opposite of funk, where everything comes together on the one.

Many reggae musicians were Rastafari. Rastafari is a Jamaican reading of the Bible, in which Africa is the promised land and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is seen as the messiah. The movement built on the ideas of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, who in the 1920s called for Black pride and a return to Africa. In reggae lyrics the system that oppresses is called 'Babylon'. The lyrics are about slavery, poverty, Africa and resistance.

Bob Marley grew up in Trenchtown, a poor neighbourhood in Kingston. With Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer he formed The Wailers. In 1973 Catch a Fire came out on the British label Island Records of Chris Blackwell. Blackwell had guitar and keyboard parts added to make the record better suited to the rock audience. On Stir It Up from that album you can hear the division of roles in reggae clearly. Marley became one of the first world stars from what was then called the Third World. He died in 1981, aged 36.

After The Wailers, Peter Tosh went solo and was fiercer in his lyrics than Marley. In 1983 he recorded Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry's rock 'n' roll classic from 1958. The chords are the same, the rhythm is different. It is a good exercise for hearing what a riddim does: the same song takes on a completely different character. And it shows how the music of the diaspora travels back and forth. Rock 'n' roll, which itself arose from Black rhythm and blues (Mixtape 1), comes back via Jamaica as reggae.

Jamaican producers like King Tubby and Lee 'Scratch' Perry built new versions from existing recordings: they removed the vocals, dropped instruments in and out and added echo and reverb. That style is called dub, and made the studio an instrument. Later came dancehall, in which DJs talk and sing over riddims. That practice travelled with emigrants. Clive Campbell moved from Kingston to The Bronx in New York in 1967. There he became known as DJ Kool Herc, and laid the foundation for hip hop.

Disco arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s in clubs in New York frequented by Black, Latino and gay people. After the riots around the Stonewall Inn in 1969, in which patrons of a gay bar resisted a police raid, such clubs became places where people could feel free. At David Mancuso's The Loft (from 1970) and later the Paradise Garage, where Larry Levan played, the DJ became the most important person in the room. He let records flow seamlessly into each other, so that the dance floor never fell silent.

The rhythm of disco is called four-on-the-floor: a bass drum on every beat, with an open hi-hat on the offbeat, at around 120 beats per minute. Above it come strings and horns. For DJs there were longer versions on 12-inch singles: large records with an extended mix, in which the instrumental part was lengthened. Disco was at its peak between 1974 and 1980.

The band Chic revolved around two musicians: guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards. Rodgers plays short, rhythmic chords, called 'chucking', and Edwards a bass that is always on the move. According to Rodgers, Le Freak (1978) came about after the two were refused entry to Studio 54, New York's best-known discotheque, on New Year's Eve. The groove of their track Good Times (1979) would become the basis of the first rap hit a few months later.

Disco also reached the general public outside the clubs. Donna Summer and producer Giorgio Moroder made I Feel Love (1977) in Munich, in which almost everything comes from a Moog synthesizer. It is the beginning of electronic dance music, and the beginning of Mixtape 8. Village People was thought up by the French producers Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo. The group played with imagery from gay culture, and Y.M.C.A. (1978) was a wink at that culture. The general public embraced it as a party song. The film Saturday Night Fever (1977) brought disco to the white middle class, with music by the Bee Gees. For Stayin' Alive they used a two-bar drum loop from their own track Night Fever: an early form of sampling.

That very success provoked resistance. On 12 July 1979 the Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl organised Disco Demolition Night at the baseball stadium Comiskey Park. Visitors could get in cheaply if they brought a disco record. Between two games of the Chicago White Sox, a container with thousands of records was blown up on the field. Then thousands of spectators stormed the field. The second game was never played: the White Sox were awarded a forfeit loss.

The slogan 'Disco sucks' seemed a matter of taste: rock fans found disco superficial and commercial. But anyone who looked at what was in the container saw something else. Many records that visitors brought were not disco, but soul and funk by Black artists. Disco came from Black, Latino and queer clubs, and the campaign was carried mainly by white rock fans. Nile Rodgers later compared the evening to a Nazi book burning.

After 1979 the record industry preferred to call the music dance. But disco did not disappear. In New York it lived on as garage, named after the Paradise Garage. And in Chicago, the city where the records were blown up, Black DJs made house of it a few years later.

The Bronx, a borough in the north of New York, was in the 1970s one of the poorest areas of the United States. A highway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, cut straight through the neighbourhoods. Those who could afford it left. There was a lot of unemployment, and whole blocks of houses burned down. The residents were largely Black and Latino. Hip hop arose here as a reaction to racism, unemployment and poverty: young people without money for clubs organised their own parties.

One of the first was Clive Campbell, the DJ who called himself Kool Herc. He knew the sound systems of Kingston. On 11 August 1973 he played at a party for his sister in the recreation room of an apartment building on Sedgwick Avenue. Herc noticed that the dancers were mostly waiting for the break: the short section of a funk record in which only the drums and bass play. He bought two copies of the same record and switched between the two on two turntables. That way he could extend the break endlessly. He called it the merry-go-round. The dancers who danced to those breaks were called b-boys and b-girls.

Other DJs built on that. Afrika Bambaataa played everything danceable, from funk to Kraftwerk. Grandmaster Flash developed techniques for switching between records faster and more precisely. Grand Wizzard Theodore discovered scratching: moving a record back and forth by hand under the needle. Beside the DJ stood the MC, the master of ceremonies, who at first mostly hyped up the crowd and later began rapping longer and longer lyrics to the rhythm. That is how the elements of hip hop culture arose: deejaying (playing and scratching), MC-ing (rapping), breakdancing and graffiti. Beatboxing was added later: making drum sounds with your mouth. None of those elements needed much money.

Rap only reached record in 1979, and not from The Bronx. Sylvia Robinson, owner of the label Sugar Hill Records in New Jersey, put together a group of three rappers: The Sugarhill Gang. Rapper's Delight lasts almost a quarter of an hour in the long version. The music is the bass line of Chic's Good Times, replayed by a studio band. After legal proceedings, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were eventually credited as composers. The track became the first rap hit, in the Netherlands too.

Rapper's Delight is a party song. The Message (1982) by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five is not. The tempo is lower, the mood menacing, and a synthesizer line keeps returning. Rapper Melle Mel describes life in the ghetto: broken glass, stench, noise, no money to move away, children who get no chance. For the first time a rap hit described the social reality of the neighbourhoods the music came from. Rap became a form of reportage.

Hip hop spread quickly beyond New York. The breakdancers of the Rock Steady Crew had a hit of their own in 1983, (Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew, and films like Wild Style (1983) and Beat Street (1984) showed the culture to the rest of the world. Forty years later, at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, breaking was an Olympic sport. The breakthrough to the large white audience came in 1986. Run-DMC, a group from Queens, recorded with producer Rick Rubin a new version of Walk This Way by the rock band Aerosmith, together with singer Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry. In the video Tyler literally breaks through a wall between two rehearsal rooms. Rap and rock together thus reached MTV, which in its first years had hardly broadcast any Black artists (Mixtape 7).

In the late 1980s what is called the golden age of hip hop began. Samplers became affordable, and producers built their beats from pieces of existing recordings: a drum break by James Brown, a horn stab from a soul record, a voice from a film. Sampling became an art form. Mixtape 9 (The instrument) is about the sampler as an instrument.

Public Enemy, with rappers Chuck D and Flavor Flav, took that sampling to the extreme. On the album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) The Bomb Squad, the production team around Hank Shocklee, stacks layer upon layer: samples, sirens, scratches and fragments of speeches. Night of the Living Baseheads is about crack, the drug that wrecked Black neighbourhoods in American cities in the 1980s. Chuck D once called rap the CNN of Black America: the news that the ordinary media did not bring. With Fight the Power and the album Fear of a Black Planet the group made that political line its trademark.

De La Soul chose a different tone. 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), produced by Prince Paul, has playful samples, among others from Funkadelic, and lyrics with humour. Me Myself and I was the counter-image of the tough rapper. Sampling did get a legal sequel. After a lawsuit against rapper Biz Markie in 1991 it became standard to ask permission for every sample and to pay for it. Because the rights to De La Soul's old samples had not been properly settled, their early work was missing from streaming services until 2023.

On the West Coast gangsta rap took shape. N.W.A. came from Compton, a suburb of Los Angeles, and released the album Straight Outta Compton in 1988. The track Fuck tha Police is an indictment of police violence in Los Angeles, with an explicit lyric. The FBI sent the record company a warning letter about it. Three years later, in 1991, a bystander filmed police officers in Los Angeles beating the Black motorist Rodney King. When the officers were acquitted in 1992, riots broke out in the city. What N.W.A. had described had become visible to everyone.

In these years hip hop also became controversial. Violent and misogynistic lyrics caused an uproar, and between rappers of the East Coast and the West Coast a rivalry arose that got out of hand. 2Pac was shot dead in Las Vegas in September 1996, The Notorious B.I.G. in Los Angeles in March 1997. Musically the period was rich. Dr. Dre, a former member of N.W.A., developed G-funk with The Chronic (1992): slow funk grooves with synthesizers and a lot of space. On California Love (1995) Roger Troutman sings through a talk box, a small tube with which you shape the sound of an instrument with your mouth. On Still D.R.E. (1999) the beat is minimal: a piano riff by Scott Storch, drums and otherwise mostly silence. In New York the Wu-Tang Clan from Staten Island released Protect Ya Neck in 1992: eight MCs, lo-fi beats by RZA and samples from kung fu films.

There is an uncomfortable fact in this story. Licensed to Ill (1986) by the Beastie Boys was the first rap album to reach number 1 in the American album chart. On Sabotage (1994) the group plays guitar, bass and drums themselves: rap, punk and funk mixed together. Eminem from Detroit was discovered by Dr. Dre. His Lose Yourself (2002), from the film 8 Mile, was the first rap track to win an Oscar. By now the music is impossible to imagine away. Since 2017, hip hop together with R&B, partly thanks to streaming, has been the most listened-to genre in the United States according to the measurement company Nielsen. In 2018 Kendrick Lamar became the first musician outside classical music and jazz to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

The term rhythm and blues came back, now abbreviated to R&B. Modern R&B grows out of rhythm and blues, soul, funk, hip hop and electronic music. Production, vocals and drum machines are central, and the producer becomes a star, sometimes as well known as the singer.

The beginning lies with Michael Jackson. After the Jackson 5 he made the album Off the Wall (1979) with producer Quincy Jones. Rock with You was written by the English songwriter Rod Temperton: supple disco with a soft, precise voice. Three years later came Thriller (1982), the best-selling album of all time. His sister Janet Jackson worked on the album Control (1986) with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, two producers from Minneapolis who came from the circle around Prince. When I Think of You shows their tight Minneapolis sound: drum machines, synthesizers and short, sharp chords. Whitney Houston, daughter of gospel singer Cissy Houston, sang with a voice from the church in a synth-pop production. In I Wanna Dance with Somebody (1987) what Ray Charles did in 1954 repeats itself: the gospel voice goes onto the dance floor.

In the late 1980s producer Teddy Riley combined hip hop beats with R&B vocals. That style was called new jack swing. In the 1990s that combination became the norm. Mary J. Blige became the 'queen of hip-hop soul'. On Family Affair (2001) she sings soul over a hip hop beat by Dr. Dre. TLC, a group of three women from Atlanta, scored a worldwide hit with Waterfalls (1994) about HIV and drug violence. Erykah Badu recorded Tyrone (1997) live, with harmonies from jazz. She belonged, with D'Angelo among others, to neo-soul: R&B that went back to the soul of the 1970s. Producer Timbaland, with singer Aaliyah and rapper Missy Elliott, made music with stuttering, unusual rhythms.

After 2000 R&B and hip hop became the core of the mainstream. OutKast, the duo of André 3000 and Big Boi from Atlanta, scored in 2003 with Hey Ya!, a cheerful track with, in every phrase of six bars, one bar of two beats, which most listeners do not notice. Beyoncé began in the group Destiny's Child and then became one of the biggest solo stars in the world. Halo (2008), written with Ryan Tedder, is a piano ballad that builds to a climax with choir, like a gospel song. Usher and Rihanna scored hit after hit. On Girl on Fire (2012) Alicia Keys used the drum pattern of The Big Beat (1980) by the white rock singer Billy Squier, a drum break that hip hop producers had been sampling for years.

With that the circle of this chapter is complete. Music that was long sold separately, first as race records and then as rhythm and blues, that was kept apart from 'white' music on radio stations and in record shops, and that was blown up in a stadium in 1979, is now the music that is streamed most. Along the way a lot went wrong: musicians who were not on the sleeve, recordings whose rights lay with others, samples for which nobody was paid. And the question of who profits from Black music has not been answered even now. What remained are the features it began with: the voice, the groove, the call and the answer.