Brothers Gonna Work It Out. Willie Hutch. 1973. Motown.

 As improbable as a musical utopia scored for a blaxploitation film about street life in Oakland sounds, the conceit is in keeping with the fantasies disseminated by the movie genre. Like the mafioso or serial killer, a collective image of the pimp looms in our imagination: surrealist avatar of fantasies of control and submission, entrepreneurial ruthlessness and sociopathy. Either lampooned or absurdly romanticized, the pimp was culturally denied a complexly honest, large screen characterization until Morgan Freeman’s pitilessly unsentimental portrayal of Leo Smalls in Jerry Schaztberg’s Street Smart, from 1987. What Freeman’s performance does is to lay bare the fallacy at the heart of blaxploitation mythology, namely, that poverty is the tragic motor that drives the characters’ most basic choices, leaving only a residual masculine pathos which the creators of fiction have attempted to dramatize in freakishly garish baroque styles (it’s similar to the shallow emotional terrain that Tyler Perry now forces his male characters to endure, albeit with more evident discomfort; what Perry is suggesting is that the further removed you are from your roots, the grosser the decay to your soul). The pleasures of Brothers Gonna Work It Out are indicative of the pleasures of the genre. Taken from the Motown original soundtrack, The Mack, by Willie Hutch, the song is a part of that musical company that includes Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street and the O’Jays’ Backstabbers, exemplary soul hits that declaimed the urban experience with richly expressed, studio pop-funk melodrama to which we, sitting beside our radios and hi-fis, desperately surrendered our imaginations, awaiting our turn to join the dreamworld of reality. We wanted the excitement of its criminal underworld without any of its cruel banalities, and, having chosen the inner workings of bourgeois hum-drum over danger, we let our experience of death lose meaning, properly positioning us for choice views of the world’s end. The surface beauty of pop culture gives us the gallows humor of that spectacle.

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