Fever by Tim Riley Page A

protest; but the prominence of its racial politics overshadowed its equally daring gender themes. Founder Berry Gordy called his shop “the sound of young America,” and he meant it to be as embracing a slogan as it implied, and not just in the racial and class-conscious sense. In a way, Gordy presided over a family of performers, sorting out its own customs and traditions with its own rules and hierarchies, and with gender conflicts between brothers and sisters, lovers and strangers, discoveries and influences.
    With acts as diverse as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Four Tops, the Temptations, and Marvin Gaye, and signal female singers like Mary Wells, Diana Ross, and Martha Reeves, all making music under the same roof, the distinctions between soul (the black market) and pop (everybody) became less and less important. Gordy’s shop understood how white ears responded to black indefatigability as much as black talent clamored for white crossover success.
    The gender geometry of Motown’s accomplishment is keener than commonly assumed: white men responded to flirtatious black women just as much as black women responded to flirtatious white men. And in keeping with how Europeans taught Americans how to love black music, the Beatles admired Smokey Robinson at least as much as Dusty Springfield admired Marvin Gaye.
    More than any other label in the sixties, Motown aimed itself at gender meritocracy (at least aesthetically), even if Gordy, its patriarch, ran a tight ship. Gordy’s crossover ambitions were manifest: Motown’s men may have been nattily dressed and groomed for success, but their ecstatic singles told of outright sexual delight and pleasure with women—both as another metaphor for freedom in the white man’s world and as another leg up on traditional male stereotypes. It was hard to imagine any young man more handsome in song, or more of a gentleman, than Marvin Gaye. And although Motown women wore sky-high beehives, sequins, dinner gloves, heels, and deliciously long eyelashes, they sang for a larger biracial sisterhood, and their songs were often cool put-downs of the male ego (“Back in My Arms Again,” “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right”).
    To be sure, Diana Ross wanted to be a star far more than she wanted to be a feminist. But the pleasure men took in Supremes songs told of the more complex feelings that passed between couples. “Come See About Me” meant something more than “drop by when you get lonely,” and “You Keep Me Hanging On” treated love as an addiction that bespoke as much pleasure as dread—and the insistent beat landed somewhere in between. The Supremes’ hits in particular, while overshadowed by titans like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder, are generally underrated in the critical canon. The way these Motown men and women regarded each other epitomized the new male-female dialogue in pop, from Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here,” to the hits that Smokey Robinson wrote for Mary Wells (“My Guy”), to the duets Marvin Gaye sang with Kim Weston (“It Takes Two”) and Tammi Terrell (“Your Precious Love,” “If I Could Build My World Around You,” “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” and “You’re All I Need to Get By”).
    Motown’s gender politics was in keeping with the rhythm-and-blues tradition it siphoned into pop. On the sidelines, the R&B scene was where you heard more about long-term adult relationships, more frank female voices, and more embattled struggle for equality than in mainstream pop. Think of songs like “Let’s Straighten It Out” by Clarence Carter, which posed an alternative to breaking up, “Good to Me” by Irma Thomas, “We’re Gonna Make It” by Little Milton, “Stay By My Side” by Jo Ann Garrett, or “Hold On to What You’ve Got” by Joe Tex. The