At Least Stephen Glass Fabricated His Bullshit

Cornel West calls Michael Eric Dyson "the most talented rhetorical acrobat in the academy" and "one of the most courageous and engaged intellectuals in America." Of course, he said that before he read Dyson's latest, Mercy Mercy Me: The Arts, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye, so maybe a public recantation will be forthcoming. Because this "biocriticism" of the R&B legend is, frankly, so inept I would have been embarrassed to turn in when I was an undergraduate...and it would boggle the mind that an accredited professor could get away with such nonsense except that he's not actually with an academic press. (Though, in all fairness to Basic Books, they usually manage to do much better.)

That the book has been published to cash in on the twentieth anniversary of Gaye's death is obvious enough, but venality doesn't necessarily have to result in intellectual paucity--and it's the latter that's on far more damaging display here. Never mind the lack of original insight into Gaye's musical genius; it's hard, in some respects, to see what Dyson could add to the subject, which hasn't exactly been a matter of dispute. Oh, he tries, by interviewing Motown studio personnel responsible for assembling various outtakes and alternate recordings of Gaye's songs, but the result reads more like an infomercial for the deluxe CDs than any sort of engaged analysis. (Matters certainly aren't helped any by his seeming inability to edit a transcript.)

When Dyson attempts to be more than a cultural critic and try his hand at biography, the results, rendered in prose that would shame a tabloid journalist, are wildly irresponsible:

Like everyone else who has written on Marvin Gaye, I have been told by countless people that his relationship with Tammi [Terrell], while undeniably full of good feeling and deep emotion, was purely platonic. That is until now. During the course of my conversations with Brenda Holloway and Martha Reeves, the truth came out.

And what, you might ask, degree of incisive research does Dyson apply in order to disprove not just every other biographer of Gaye, but most of the people who knew him and Terrell during their lifetimes?

In our conversation, I ask [Brenda Holloway] about Marvin's relationship with Anna (his first wife).

"I don't know if he really loved her," Holloway replies. "I think he really loved Tammi Terrell."

"Really?" I confirm.

"Of course he did."

"Did they ever have a relationship?"

"Of course they did."

"Okay. Right."

I was trying to take all of this in. I was amazed that after all of this time--33 years after Terrell's death, and nearly 20 years after Marvin's--no one had ever spoken publicly about their love affair.

Of course, Dyson, who never met a celebrity he didn't like, does go to the trouble of finding a second, confirming source: Martha Reeves says she can hear in it the way they sang together. His credulity reaches even more stunning heights in the final chapter where, operating on the flimsy premise that R. Kelly is today's Marvin Gaye, he is granted an interview during the midst of Kelly's legal woes:

[Kelly:] "Well, we got prophet in us. We are not just someobody who is at a studio trying to write a song and sell some music and make some money. We don't care if we eat or not with this. We don't care if we die or not with this, because that's how much we love it. That's how much we respect the gift. And when you respect something as much as I respect what I do, and Marvin obviously respected what he did, you're willing to die for it. You're no different than the firemen who went into the building on September 11th. We knew the consequences; we knew the possibilities of not coming out."

Dyson's response to this grotesque self-aggrandizement? "Kelly's identification with Marvin makes it plain to me that he also understands that, like Gaye, he will make mistakes..." No correction, no questioning, just headbobbing admiration for Kelly's alleged "preaching" skills. Soon, the singer's ranting once more about "the great men like the Marvin Gayes, and the Donny Hathaways, the R. Kellys, the Michael Jacksons, and Martin Luther Kings, and Malcolm Xs." Here, Dyson at least recognizes that Kelly comes off like a conceited, arrogant fool, but then amazingly proceeds to apologize on his behalf, saying, "[L]ike it or not, if we get young people to latch onto the narratives of struggle that informed us, we can't be mad at them for creatively applying them to their lives and using the older stories as a lens through which to perceive their own strugggles."

The hell we can't, I say.

Not that the "academic" parts of the book are any better. For example, there's the chapter on the "Afroedipal" Gaye family dynamic. Gaye's father was a crossdressing childbeater:

Father's behavior kept the children from seeing Mother as a refuge from terrorizing forms of masculine identity. Father's violent masculinity metstasized through his weakened household. He sought to absorb Mother's sex and gender. Thus their children were left with diminished psychic resources to explain their evolving sexual identities in reference to a healthy masculine model. (If Father had not been abusive, his cross-dressing may have opened up marvelous possibilities for rethinking sexual identity. But his sheer brutality only compounded his children's confusion.)

That at least has a convincing aura when it's strung together like that (and, I have to admit, that parenthetical remark, with its "marvelous possibilities," cracks me up every time). On the very next page, we learn "Marvin's suffering was deepened even more at age 15 by a tragic event: his alleged sexual molestation by his uncle Howard (sic)." Well, no: if his suffering was deepened, then the event wasn't just alleged, it happened; and if it's alleged and unconfirmed, you can't claim it as a definite influence on Gaye's life. You can speculate, and to be sure Dyson does. But that just brings up the ethical questions involved in psychoanalyzing somebody publicly, especially when you've never met them... and when you're not an actual psychologist, but a humanities professor.

Cornel West isn't the only member of the black studies academic community to praise Dyson, which puzzles me, because I'm reasonably sure that said community isn't so hard up for great thinkers that it even needs him as a leading light. And there's plenty of academics who write much more intelligently and insightfully about pop culture. So what's the deal?