Performing on the show, Cannon finally came in personal contact with Don Cornelius, the goal of every Soul Train dancer. Though by then Cornelius had retired as host of the weekly show, he was still very much a presence in the studio.
Cannon: When I was a dancer on Soul Train, you gotta have your A-game on. So by the time I was an artist and this dude that we always saw walking the halls, hands in his pocket, who you might not want to make eye contact and get kicked off the set—then you actually got the opportunity to talk to him, and you’re like, Damn, this is such a nice, loving dude.
It was one of those things where it was like an opportunity where I really was like, Wow, to get that, to actually have that moment where, man, Don Cornelius knows my name. To be able to share that experience and then to create a relationship with him. I mean, like, he’s definitely someone I call on when I need a favor or some advice. It’s one of those things where I would never dream of that one day, him calling, asking me to host one of the award shows. I felt like my career just jumped leaps and bounds, to go from revering this man to actually having a personal relationship with him.
Cannon hosted the Soul Train Awards in 2005 along with singer-songwriter Brian McKnight, American Idol star Fantasia, and tabloid star Nicole (daughter of Lionel) Richie. But instead of holding it in Pasadena or Santa Monica, the show was held, perhaps in a cost-cutting move, on the Soul Train soundstage. But the Cali native did more than just host. In 2005 he’d formed his own label, Can I Ball Records, and released a single called “Can I Live?”
Cannon: The record was dealing with the fact that my mom was a teenage mom, and that she’d been advised to have an abortion, and the record kind of came from a perspective of me speaking to my mom from her womb, saying, you know, “Can I Live?” It actually made a huge impact, you know, in politics, and it was a great record. I won a lot of awards for it, but to me, my memory from that record was actually getting to perform that record onstage at the Soul Train Awards. We had like forty kids wearing “Can I Live?” T-shirts. I remember looking at the audience and seeing my mom like bawling, and tears, and I said, “Aw, ain’t gonna cry. Gonna keep my performance together.” But that would be one of the moments that I will always remember; I thank Soul Train so much for giving me that opportunity, because that was the only show that I was able to perform that record live on.
If Soul Train returns to television in any form, Cannon expects to be its future host.
Cannon: I always see Soul Train as that destination for our culture. Whatever was going on in African American culture you saw on Soul Train for many years, you know what I mean? That’s something archived. When aliens come in about two thousand years and they want to see what was going down in black life, they could watch all episodes of Soul Train, and they’ll see that’s how we got down. Our fashion, the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we move, what type of music we listen to, what was going on in politics—all of that was in an episode of Soul Train from before I was born all the way to the present day. That was a destination that you could kind of turn to to see us. You could see who we are—you know, it wasn’t the watered-down version that you might see on a sitcom. Or it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t the negative depiction of us that you might see on the news. It was us having a good time and enjoying each other.
Chapter 16
Soul Train Awards
FOR MANY decades, civil rights leaders and entertainers sought a nationally televised prime-time show that would celebrate black achievement in general, and black music in particular. The Black Music Association, the organization I had first traveled to LA to cover in 1981, had made the production of such a show one of its stated goals. But none of the big three networks—CBS, ABC, NBC—would touch it, despite the huge crossover success of Michael Jackson, Prince, Lionel Richie, and Whitney Houston in music and Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby on television. Black stars occasionally had their own TV specials or summer replacement shows on networks while also being featured on the Grammy Awards and telethons like Lou Rawls’s annual benefit for the United Negro College Fund. But nothing existed just to celebrate the rich spectrum of black music.
Don Cornelius had tried in various ways to extend the Soul Train brand through his short-lived Soul Train Records and by managing O’Bryan. Perhaps, with this history in mind, he first pitched a fifteenth-anniversary Soul Train show and not something annual. He approached his partners at Burrell Advertising, and they were open to it because of how valuable Cornelius had become to their clients.
Michelle Garner, who’d watched Soul Train growing up in Chicago, joined Burrell Advertising in 1985 and was immediately impressed with Cornelius. “He was a great marketing partner for the business,” she said. “He really served as a visionary to us because he was in the music business, and at the time I worked on the Coca-Cola account, and Coke had a music marketing strategy. So we were using lots of talent for our classic commercials and would talk all the time . . . Don was very involved in things we were doing with Coke. “He would make suggestions talent-wise, or this song was getting ready to hit, or this artist was getting ready to blow up. Just things we needed to be on the lookout for. I love him dearly, even though he did kick me off Soul Train when I tried to get on there and dance one time. He wouldn’t let me dance, so I was little bit disappointed. But I’ve gotten over it.”
Though they weren’t able to pull off a fifteenth- or even a sixteenth-anniversary special, when Cornelius came to Burrell about starting an annual show, Garner supported it immediately. “I just knew it was gonna be huge, and I signed on the spot. I said, ‘Yes, we’re in.’ I didn’t even talk to the client . . . From an agency standpoint, at Burrell we got all our clients aligned with that property, and that helped launch it. With Coke we actually negotiated soft-drink exclusivity and, I think, we maintained that until it went off the air.”
Cornelius: The Soul Train Awards came about because we had noticed that constant grumbling from people of color who didn’t feel that they got the respect they deserved from the established awards shows. So we saw an opportunity through the Tribune Entertainment Company to create a show that focused on black talent and the best performances for a given year. It would be a party that focuses on us, part of a party that we barely got invited to. That was the whole point of it. It gave us a tremendous amount of joy from 1987 through the next twenty or so years. The first Soul Train Awards in 1987 offer a somewhat amusing window into the state of black music that year. The great Stevie Wonder was given the first Heritage Award, and Janet Jackson won best video for her dancing in the iconic “What Have You Done for Me Lately.” Run-D.M.C. won two rap awards. Cameo, an old-school funk band reconstituted as a new-wave-influenced, video-savvy trio, won for the single and album titled Word Up!
The humor was provided by the two awards captured by one-hit wonder Gregory Abbott, a pretty-boy vocally challenged singer who, aided by technology, won (hilariously) both best new artist and best male singer. Over the years the Soul Train Awards would exist as an erratic barometer of quality, with truly worthy winning plaudits next to minor, transitory talents. Though the program began in 1987, after the peak of Michaelmania, Michael Jackson has won far and away the most awards, with twenty. Sister Janet has thirteen, but as the show continues on, expect current hit makers Beyoncé, Usher, and Alicia Keys to challenge the Jacksons.
USUALLY HELD in an auditorium in Pasadena, the Soul Train Awards became noted for the enthusiastic, sometimes rowdy crowds that sat in the balcony. While the seats in the orchestra were primarily reserved for entertainers, business insiders, random celebrities, and others connected to the entertainment industry, the balcony became a West Coast equivalent of the Apollo Theater. When performers hit the stage, especially those with youth appeal or up-tempo songs, they had to play to the rafters if they wanted any real energy.
Aretha Franklin’s legendary career was the inspiration for the Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards, a TV special first held in 1995.
Sometimes the judgment handed down by the balcony gods could be cruel. At a 1989 Soul Train Awards appearance, Whitney Houston was actually booed by many in the balcony, an apparent commentary on her song choices. Many fans of R&B resented her reliance on big pop ballads, feeling she was turning her back on black listeners to cater to white audiences. Still, it was quite stunning to hear Houston so publically chastised. Don himself took the stage to defend the singer and reprimand the crowd. Though Don had been critical of the crossover mentality of the era, he was too gracious a host (and understandably concerned about booking stars in the future) to let the disrespect pass.
The Soul Train Music Awards show was successful enough that in 1995 Cornelius launched another annual special, the Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards, which focused on female vocalists and achievers and enjoyed a ten-year run. These award shows would be Don’s most successful spin-offs from the weekly show and, in fact, would have serious cultural currency even as the weekly show was running out of steam.
It is noteworthy that in 1993 it was Don Cornelius’s idea that Burrell reach out to BET about hosting a promotional event tied in with the broadcast. “After the first Soul Train Awards, we decided to make Sprite the lead brand in that property and did a consumer promotion,” Michelle Garner said. “So we actually initiated the promotion in 1988, and the winners went to the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards, and we sent close to a hundred people from all over the country, and we had a big party the night before with all the winners. After a few years, we had invited celebrities, and they would come, but then it started to wane off, and Don suggested that we bring in BET to televise the party.”
As a result, a pre–Soul Train Awards event called Sprite Night was created. It was a live two-hour music concert that went on for six years and was quite successful for all involved. However, this collaboration between the two most important brands in promoting the visuals of black music wouldn’t be enduring.
In 2001 the network launched its own show, the BET Awards, with a broadcast out of Las Vegas. But afterward the BET show, like the Soul Train Awards, would be shot in LA and would celebrate the best in black music while adding categories covering TV, film, and sports to the mix, allowing the program to cast a wide net in terms of booking talent and attract a wider audience. With BET nationally available in every major market and firmly established as the chief vehicle aimed at black viewers, the BET Awards quickly dwarfed the Soul Train Awards as the most significant celebration of black culture.
While on a daily basis the BET Awards catered to young viewers, BET embraced adults as well. Unlike the Soul Train Awards, which had to rely on syndication and were thus subject to the whims of local television stations, BET controlled what time its award show aired and how often it was repeated, giving it a major competitive advantage.
Chapter 17
New Jack Swing
ON EPISODE #436 of the 1983–84 season, New Edition would make its first Soul Train appearance to perform “Candy Girl,” the hit single off their debut album on the independent Streetwise Records. The five Boston adolescents (Bobby Brown, Ralph Tresvant, Michael Bivins, Ronnie DeVoe, Ricky Bell) were adequate, singers—at best—but they had a scintillating stage show that married aspects of old-school Temptations-style choreography with hip-hop-generation dance steps. It was a unique blend that mirrored the pseudo-soul tracks produced by their mentor, Maurice Starr, which contained rap breaks and some beat-boxing. Only the most visionary Soul Train viewers could have imagined that they were watching not only a highly entertaining performance but a band that embodied the immediate future of black music. Over the course of the next ten years, R&B music would be sonically and thematically absorbed by hip-hop. First it would just be rap breaks on otherwise typical R&B tracks. But soon a generation of producers, born into older black music traditions but who came of age in the 1980s, would fuse the beats and samples of hip-hop onto sing-along melodies.
The men of New Edition—among them Bobby Brown, who was at the start of a hit- and headline-making career—would be messengers of the new movement. “Soul Train was probably the one show that I, for some reason, foresaw myself being on,” Brown said. “Being a dancer with New Edition, I told them, I was like, ‘One day, we’re gonna be on Soul Train,’ and all of them talked about me, they called me all kinds of names.”
The five came together through Boston talent shows where, under the guidance of choreographer Brooke Payne, they developed a dynamic stage show. “We were part of the dance-crew scene,” Brown said. “When hip-hop first got started and break-dancing and pop locking, we were there. I was the best dancer in all of Boston. When it came to battles, I won probably all of them. I only lost one battle ever in my life, and it wasn’t against somebody from Boston, it was against somebody from New York. So I still hold the title in Boston.”
Famously, New Edition invited Big Lou onstage with them, much to Don’s displeasure. Brown even made mistakes on that first performance because he was spending more time watching Big Lou than focusing on Payne’s routine. “Yes, I messed up a few times,” he acknowledged. “I was probably the one in New Edition that at least had four mess-ups per show. I think that’s probably why I went solo. Because I wanted to do my own thing anyway. I would sometimes do my own move on purpose, throw my own move in there, and the guys would laugh. That’s what it was about, us having fun onstage.”
New Edition’s members were so young that Cornelius asked the five what they planned to do with their money.
Brown: All of us guys were talking about, “I’m gonna save my money. I’m gonna put mine away for college.” I was just like I wanted to do with everything. I actually said, “I’m gonna spend mine.” Being on the Soul Train set, the vibe is cool. All the dancers are getting themselves together. It’s a real laid-back type of set, and then once the music starts, all hell breaks loose and everybody is just trying to do the best dance so that they can get camera time.
Brown, though barely out of puberty, made the women of Soul Train a focus of his dancing with the pelvic thrust that would become a trademark. He recalled gleefully, “Oh, the girls! They always reacted nicely. We liked that. You gotta throw a pump in there every once in a while doing a step. You throw in a pump to get the girls excited.”
Following that debut, New Edition would become the subject of a bidding war when they were able to escape their contract with small Streetwise Records. The quintet ended up on West Coast–based MCA Records, which was then becoming a major player in black music. While their original producer, Maurice Starr, went on to control the lucrative careers of New Kids on the Block, a white Boston teen group that utilized the same musical formula as New Edition, New Edition went on to have major hits with “Cool It Now” and “Mr. Telephone Man.”
Despite the new record deal and becoming the first vocal group with hip-hop appeal, there was great turmoil within the group. Three of the members remained a tight unit (Bivins, DeVoe, Bell) while Tresvant and—to a much greater degree—Brown were outliers. Brown didn’t just mess up steps on purpose; he was often late for appearances, group meetings, and shows. It all came to a head at the end of 1985 when Brown was voted out of New Edition. Signed as a solo act by MCA, Brown would release King of Stage, his debut album, in 1986. In retrospect it was a transitional album, as he worked to find his own voice as a singer. During this period he’d work on choreography with Rosie Perez and continue to refine his R&B/hip-hop hybrid.
By 1988, an inevitable fusion of R&B melody and hip-hop beats was labeled “new jack swing” by Village Voice writer Barry Michael Cooper. Acts like Keith Sweat and Al B. Sure! would beat Brown to the marketplace in 1988, but his Don’t Be Cruel album would sell some nine million copies and establish him as the hottest male entertainer of that era.
Brown: New jack swing is basically soulful hip-hop. It’s singing hip-hop. It is rap music with vocals. You put rap and singing together, and that’s what new jack swing is. Than it’s a real hard beat. It’s a banger for you. It’s something to
dance to, and it’s got slick bass lines. I think we just basically took what Zapp, Gap Band, Parliament, Funkadelic did and we put it into a rap format and made it work.
Backed by new jack swing–pioneering producer-writer Teddy Riley and the West Coast–based team of Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds and Antonio “L.A.” Reid, Don’t Be Cruel was one of the definitive albums of the time, and its success made it clear that new jack swing was the new direction for dance music. Soul Train was a happy home for new jack–influenced artists. The 1987–88 season featured Riley-produced MCs like Heavy D & the Boyz, Keith Sweat, Al B. Sure!, and Guy (which Riley was a member of). The last show of that taping season put the final stamp of new jack’s arrival with New Edition, Bobby Brown, and future Brown replacement Johnny Kemp on the same show. Throughout the next few seasons Boys, LeVert, Troop, Today, Tony! Toni! Toné!, Johnny Kemp, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Full Force, After 7, Jeff Redd, and many other acts with new jack swing records made regular appearances.
Some of the most innovative uses of the new style came from three of Brown’s old band mates. Bell Biv DeVoe released their debut album, Poison, in 1990, combining elements of new jack swing with a distinctive, idiosyncratic sound that spawned two massive hits, “Poison” and “Do Me Baby.” They had a rougher, more streetwise look than New Edition, one that would influence up-and-coming acts like Jodeci and R. Kelly and lead directly to the absence of the suit-and-tie look among that era’s vocalists. Bell Biv DeVoe appeared on Soul Train episode #628 during the 1989–90 season with a Bobby Brown video and, incongruously, soulful jazz singer Randy Crawford.
Bivins would, as he matured, become one of the more successful talent scouts of the 1990s, finding M.C. Brains, ABC (Another Bad Creation), and, most important, Boyz II Men, a Philadelphia quartet that would become the biggest pop vocal group of the decade. Brown’s recording career would sputter following Don’t Be Cruel, but he’d become tabloid fodder following his 1992 marriage to superstar singer Whitney Houston. In keeping with the Soul Train theme, the Brown-Houston romance got its start when they met at the 1989 Soul Train Awards.
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