A Vision of Love: An Etiquette of Vocal Ornamentation in African-American Popular Ballads of the Early 1990s

Abstract

Around 1990, buoyed by the success of Bill Cosby's situation comedy and Oprah Winfrey's daytime talk show, there was a renewed visibility of African-American pop culture in the mainstream. Movies such as Do the Right Thing (1989; directed by Spike Lee) and Boyz 'N the Hood (1991; directed by John Singleton) represented a point of arrival for black directors. The new Fox network (and, to a lesser extent, NBC) featured the situation comedies Living Single, Martin, and A Different World, which starred and were, to varying degrees, written, directed, and produced by African-Americans. These shows treated their subject matter in a more unapologetically black way and were less dependent on the stereotypes of past shows like The Jeffersons or Good Times, both from the 1970s.1 Another Fox show, In Living Color, represented a similar increase in the presence of mainstream black comedians (a way paved in the 1980s by Eddie Murphy). Murphy's protege, Arsenio Hall, was able to sustain a mainstream talk-show format from 1989 to 1994 that nevertheless maintained a black point of view.2 And of course in music, which had never lacked a strong African-American presence, hip-hop had made a significant mark on the charts; as a wide range of musicians became familiar with this music, some began to appropriate aspects of it for their own music, though not always with great success. What is significant about all these cultural products is that they demonstrated an unapologetic blackness while still enjoying mainstream popularity. That is, even if the material seemed to be about and to ad-