20 Years in 27 Days: A Marriage in Music
Day #6: The Dazz Band—“Let it Whip”
by Mark Anthony Neal
From July 14, 1973, until June 26, 1982, Billboard Magazine published the “Hot Soul Singles” chart every week. The first song to top that chart was Johnnie Taylor’s “I Believe in You (You Believe in Me”; the last song to top that chart was The Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip.” The “Black Singles” chart debuted in June of 1982 with w the Gap Band’s “Early in the Morning” sitting atop. The shift was a reflection of the increasing tensions about how “Blackness” was going to be represented in the marketplace.
As such “Soul” meant a connection to a past of struggle and down-hominess, while “Black” was the catch-phrase for a Black Middle Class flexing its muscle in the marketplace and at the polls. Artists like Taylor and Fred Wesley, who preceded him at the top of the “Soul Singles” chart, couldn’t even get played on Black radio stations in 1982. That ambivalent space between holding on to the traditions that Soul represented and Black aspiration found its resonance in early 1980s (electro) Funk; music that was unapologetically Black—even as it was coming from places Ohio and Oklahoma as was the case with The Dazz Band and The Gap Band—yet such a far-cry from the music that Black folk marched and protested to.
In the months after the Billboard chart shift, Wilson Goode and Harold Washington would be elected the first Black mayors of Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley would make a serious run for the California Governorship and Rev. Jesse Jackson would begin his quest for the Presidency of the United States. I didn’t care much about any of this in June of 1982, as I was in love with that lil Brown-eyed gal. Though it wasn’t apparent at the time, what would make this thing with Peaches and I work (eventually), was that we were products of a Black working class world, with parents who shared the same “down South up North” values, but we were also enticed by the aspirational desires of our middle class peers.
