The Conceptual House Album That Tells the Bittersweet Story of Newark’s Post-Civil Rights Era

For decades, Black musicians have reached for the canon of Black dance music in moments of political crisis. In the early 1980s, amid an economic downturn, the brutal repression of Black radical struggles, and the arrival of a major right-wing turn in American politics, soul and funk artists like Fatback and the Valentine Brothers wrapped pointed rejections of Reaganomics into punchy synth-funk and boogie tracks that reworked the hallucinatory 1970s work of Funkadelic and Sly Stone. D’Angelo mined those same ’70s grooves on his 2014 album Black Messiah, released in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri protests that took place after the police killing of Michael Brown. More recently, Beyoncé leaned toward escapism and archiving during the COVID-19 pandemic and the global recession that accompanied it with Renaissance—experimenting with a variety of dance music styles to, as she put it, “feel free and adventurous in a time when little else was moving.” Around the same time, the heartracing pulse of Jersey club became the de facto tempo of so much rap and pop, soundtracking a stir-crazy post-pandemic era.

As we enter another moment of growing alienation, unprocessed grief, and fears of backsliding civil rights, I’ve been drawn back to a forgotten gem of political Black dance music that deserves a place in this canon: 25 Years Later, the 1990 debut album by Newark, New Jersey house trio Blaze. Released on Motown Records, 25 Years Later holds an unusual place in the genre’s history: It captures the nuances of Newark’s distinct take on house within a strikingly ambitious concept album—using the sound and style of Newark’s nightclubs to ask complex questions about the end of the Civil Rights Movement.

When Blaze began releasing music in the mid-’80s, their soulful, spiritual take on house music fit into a style dubbed the “Jersey Sound,” drawing from the tracks pumping out of clubs in the 100-mile corridor that connects New York City, Newark, and Philadelphia. One could argue that the story of the Jersey Sound started on July 12, 1967, when Newark police pulled over a Black taxi driver (and former trumpet player) named John Smith. Officers beat and arrested Smith, dragging his body into a precinct as hundreds watched. Protests erupted into a week of violent rebellion, leaving 26 people dead and more than 700 injured. The rebellion reshaped Newark’s trajectory: White flight accelerated, major industries moved out, and the city became a national symbol of urban decay.

Newark’s dilapidated inner core turned into a center of Black nightlife. Clubs like Le Joc and Docks offered refuge for queer and working-class Black people when de facto segregation was built into the city’s culture. According to local writer and critic Gary Jardim, unlike New York’s private gay clubs like Paradise Garage and The Loft, Newark’s Black clubs were public spaces where queer aesthetics could be “adopted as popular style.”

In 1976, developer Miles Berger bought an abandoned Holiday Inn in downtown Newark that reporters had once used to cover the rebellion. Berger rechristened it the Lincoln Motel, converting the ballroom into a discotheque called Abe’s Disco. In 1979, taking inspiration from Paradise Garage, he renovated that same space into a proper nightclub called Club Zanzibar, named for an archipelago off the coast of East Africa.

Soon after, a young Newark native named Kevin Hedge snuck into the club with a group of friends who lent him clothes to appear older. As a high schooler, he regularly left home at night to frequent Zanzibar and Paradise Garage; in the early ’80s, he started DJ’ing and gained a local following. He then partnered with childhood friend and vocalist Chris Herbert to record original music. Herbert introduced Hedge to an organ player from his church, 16-year-old Josh Milan. The trio decided to call their group Blaze; “it was probably an unconscious effort to get close to the idea of Earth, Wind & Fire,” Hedge once recalled.

25 Years Later draws heavily from prophetic strains of 1970s soul—you can consistently hear the influence of Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder—but its infectious grooves and winding instrumental corridors retain house’s core sensibilities. The album’s narrative follows a character named Shaheed Muhammad, who leads a community organization called the Black People’s Movement (BPM). Cinematic interludes depict Shaheed in fierce debates with his partner Felicia and fellow organizer Elijah Shabazz, meeting neighbors on the streets of Newark, and reckoning with the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X a generation before.

The liner notes cite a grab bag of Black religious leaders, nationalists, anti-colonial monarchs, and humanitarians as “spiritual mentors,” including Harriet Tubman, the 17th century Angolan queen Nzinga, and Clara “Mother” Hale, who founded social service programs in Harlem. In line with this pastiche of influences, the BPM that Blaze envisioned was more about finding empowerment than contesting political power. “We’re tryna educate our people,” says Muhammad on the album. “We’re not tryna take away from nobody else. We want every minority to share in the wealth of America.”

The record’s political contradictions reflect the real contradictions of the post-King years, when New Jersey became a hotspot for competing traditions of Black resistance: elections, cultural uplift, and armed revolution. In 1970, Newark elected Kenneth Gibson, one of the first Black mayors of a major American city, and during his 16-year tenure, Black separatist and communist groups in New Jersey like the New World of Islam and the Black Liberation Army were pursued by the government for organized crime and domestic terrorism. 

25 Years Later frequently emphasizes nonviolent action and education, telling potential recruits that the BPM “is not the ‘kill the white man’ movement.” When Afrocentrism was growing in hip-hop, we hear Muhammad struggling with his relationship to Black history: “Am I the descendant of kings? Or am I a product of oppression? Am I a great and mighty warrior, a provider for the masses? Or am I a mere statistic for public assistance?” 

These concerns also reflected the local conditions of Black Newark. At Club Zanzibar, there was little buffer between the sacrosanct bubble of the dancefloor and the urban decay that surrounded it. Throughout the ’80s, the motel that housed the club became a sanctuary for Newark’s poor: families on welfare and unhoused people displaced from New York City. Among them, DJs and singers would stay for repeated stints. “The club, then, had a definite blue-black feeling,” Jardim wrote. “The joyful noise of soulful divas raising Cain was always just a few feet away from hell.” 

Across 25 Years Later, BPM’s office is bombed, police harass its organizers, and Muhammad is drugged and robbed by community members whom he tries to help. A central tension is that many Black people have given up on the Civil Rights Movement’s vision. Felicia argues that Muhammad’s time risking his life on the street leaves him absent from his family—an equally dangerous form of political abandonment. But there’s a tragic optimism that shines through, framing community-building and organizing as ever-present tasks for survival. 

Take the album’s centerpiece, “Gonna Make It Work.” Atop soft waves of horns and background vocals recalling a gospel choir, Blaze dedicate their lyrics to “those of you who have failed,” addressing a shared sense of grief and disillusionment over the slow pace of social progress. In a country fundamentally opposed to Black life, they passionately plead with Black Americans to stay oriented toward the future: “Now we’re on our way/No more living day to day/We’ve got a plan, we’re gonna make it this time.” In the album’s final arc, Muhammad takes a taxi to downtown Newark, stopping at the corner of Broad and Market Streets—just a stone’s throw from its pioneering Black clubs. But before he can get home, he’s assassinated on the street.  

When 25 Years Later dropped, it didn’t fit neatly into the larger musical landscape. House was entering the mainstream through hip-hop crossovers and European rave culture, while the rise of new jack swing was capturing mainstream R&B. The ecstatic single “So Special” was a minor club hit, but the album’s intricate narrative complicated marketing—the original cassette release left out its interludes, and the vinyl edition also removed the last three songs. Motown dropped Blaze shortly afterward, and vocalist Chris Herbert left the group to pursue solo work. 

Meanwhile, Newark and its dance scene underwent permanent shifts. In 1989, city officials attempted the biggest planned demolition of public housing in America. At the same time, the city was hit especially hard by the AIDS crisis, as a generation of queer clubbers began to disappear. Club Zanzibar came under new management that was more interested in hip-hop, pushing out its most popular DJs. The surrounding motel fell into disrepair and closed permanently. In 2007, the home of the Jersey Sound was demolished.

Can the immediacy of club music connect the working-class Black experience to a broader sense of history? As house hit the mainstream in the ’90s, soulful practitioners in Chicago and New York offered indirect answers through instrumental-forward releases like New York producer Lee Rodriguez’s 1994 classic The African Dream, while Detroit’s house and techno scene turned to somber reflection and militant Afrofuturism. 

More recently, some Black artists have used house’s descendants in more critical and conceptual work that untangles the political complexities of the Black experience. After the George Floyd uprisings, Kelela explored the contours of misogynoir through dance music, hoping to give Black femmes, as she put it, “permission to feel more emboldened and more unruly and vehement.” DJ and writer Gum.mp3 argues that Southern rap’s intimate connection to local dance scenes is deeply political, highlighting the region’s central role as a laboratory for contemporary pop. “Their use in the club scene turns nightlife into a communal preservation effort,” he has written. “Black social dance is gleeful catharsis as resistance.”

Throughout Newark’s disco and post-disco years, Mayor Gibson was frequently quoted saying that “wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first”—a hopeful affirmation or foreboding prophecy, depending on how you take it. On 25 Years Later, we’re asked to look from the dancefloor into the city outside, find ourselves in the rubble, and start rebuilding.