The Political Force of Musical Beauty (Refiguring American Music) - Softcover

Shank, Barry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356589 ISBN 13: 9780822356585

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres—including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk—Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Shank is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas, and A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture, and a coeditor of American Studies: An Anthology and The Popular Music Studies Reader.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Political Force of Musical Beauty

By BARRY SHANK

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5658-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, vii, 
INTRODUCTION. A Prelude, 1, 
CHAPTER ONE. Listening to the Political, 10, 
CHAPTER TWO. The Anthem and the Condensation of Context, 38, 
CHAPTER THREE. Turning Inward, Inside Out: Two Japanese Musicians Confront the Limits of Tradition, 72, 
CHAPTER FOUR. "Heroin"; or, The Droning of the Commodity, 108, 
CHAPTER FIVE. The Conundrum of Authenticity and the Limits of Rock, 147, 
CHAPTER SIX. 1969; or, The Performance of Political Melancholy, 201, 
CODA. Listening through the Aural Imaginary, 244, 
NOTES, 263, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 301, 
DISCOGRAPHY, 317, 
INDEX, 319, 

CHAPTER 1

Listening to the Political

In 1999 Moby released his multiplatinum-selling album Play. Most of this album consists of a blend of sampled gospel and blues with electronica-dance instrumentation and beats, exemplifying through its mixture of racially coded genres one of the most common strains of crossover success in American popular music, the recasting of black musical traditions for the profit of white musicians. Initial critical response was mixed, with quite a bit of commentary focusing on Moby's use of the older material. At Pitchfork, Brent DiCrescenzo wrote, "The sampling and processing of passionate folk and blues roots music drains whatever emotional ballast kept the music so spiritually afloat.... A performance loses raw magnetism after being chopped up in ProTools, cut from its atmosphere, cleaned, and gutted from its accompanying guitar." In the Village Voice, Frank Owen was slightly more positive, misdescribing Alan Lomax's source recordings as "field recordings from the '20s, '30s and '40s," but also noting that the "weary but hopeful '40s gospel singer Vera Hall in 'Natural Blues' ... wouldn't sound out of place at the old Paradise Garage, a dancehall where space-age Baptists regularly congregated in the '80s." Writing for Salon, Scott Marc Becker noted, "She's [Hall] as potent in Moby's hands as she was a cappella, the ghost of her voice resonating as if she were still alive." But "luxnigra," writing as recently as 2007 for a blog titled The Last Angel of History, declares that Moby is just another in a long line of white appropriators of black music: "Moby is the Elvis or Benny Goodman or Beastie Boys of his genre and generation. He directly appropriates African-American music, such that he is the white mediator through which the blues records he samples are 'brought to life,' as one critic, in 'The Big Takeover,' commented. In fashioning a career while seemingly unaware of how his whiteness functioned and functions at every point in his career, he is fully complicit with white supremacy in the US." Well, yes. And no. Not fully. To racially code technology as white and heartfelt emotion as black is complicit with the history of white supremacy. Although Moby cannot be held uniquely responsible for that—the critical response to the album indicates that the racial coding of its musical signs preceded the album itself and structured its reception for many listeners—it is clear that Play does not resist that reading. What is also clear is that Play—one song in particular, "Natural Blues"—is a way of working through that history.

Throughout the twentieth century, white musicians drew heavily from black musical traditions in an effort to achieve major commercial success. A continual strain of critical debate accompanied this phenomenon, arguing the merits and the crimes of such cultural borrowing. The market success of such acts as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, Elvis Presley, Eminem, and so many others has been challenged by critics asserting the superior musical and social value of musicians like Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Chuck Berry, and Tupac. Karl Hagstrom Miller has recently shown, however, that the very idea of racially separated music traditions was an invention of the music industry who sought to streamline the distribution of particular musical commodities to specific audiences. Scholars from Ronald Radano to Marybeth Hamilton have uncovered the deep white investment in the very category of black music even as the aural consistency and political significance of genres identified as black has been demonstrated by generations of scholars and critics, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Portia Maultsby, Samuel Floyd, and Mark Anthony Neal. The racial coding of particular sounds and specific genres has varied historically. Before the twentieth century, the sounds of a banjo evoked blackness; after the invention of "old-timey music," the same sounds indexed an image of white communities. In the past ten years, scholars such as Maureen Mahon, Greg Tate, and Kandia Crazy Horse have insisted that black rock musicians be returned to the discussion of this presumably white form. Further complicating the racialization of musical genres, George Lipsitz, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Frances Aparicio, and Josh Kun have reminded us of the interweaving of black and Latino styles, while Deborah Wong and E. Taylor Atkins have explored the convergence of East Asian and African American musics. The ever-more intricate and self-reflexive nature of this struggle over musical traditions and cultural borrowing was captured by Roshanak Kheshti in her discussion of Sasha Frere-Jones's use of miscegenation to describe the white use of black-identified sounds in rock. Kheshti neatly uncovers the homosocial nature of the white-male use of the musical signs of black passion for cultural reproduction.

Throughout this critical history, musical traditions and their political significance have been linked to racialized populations whose boundaries have been momentarily stabilized in part through the very processes of musical performance and reception that form the heart of the debate. This is the truth that ethnomusicology explores. Ethnomusicology establishes the expressive connection between the social real of an ethnos and the songs that both move and solidify the identity of that group. Within the operating assumptions of ethnomusicology, it is not too difficult to comprehend the musical resonance of social belonging, or the longing to belong. It is not a stretch to imagine the pleasure of identification or the warmth of a social connection that ensures fellow feeling—even where the feeling is in response to a threat. In traditional country blues, a constantly humming minor third is played by a guitarist alternating a down-tuned D with an F natural, bumping that bass line twice a second with the right thumb while the fingers of the left hand map a descending array of sevenths, fifths, and thirds across the fretboard, and a male voice sketches the outlines of a cypress grove within which he sings the insecurity of love; this pattern of harmony and rhythm not only enacts a solidarity of masculine vulnerability, a vulnerability made more palpable by the history of slavery and Jim Crow, but also evokes the work of the hands that counter that vulnerability through the sheer fluid ability to sound and resound again the irrepressible presence of desire. That unending movement back and forth from the D to the F structures the ineluctable. A voice maps a melodic arc that immediately falls upon its rise, that breaks itself in two and then four, and then recombines its wholeness through a downward slope that returns to a home that simply cannot feel safe. Listening to this, it is not difficult to feel the bonds of the community that chases itself into and through that musical metaphorical space. The social formation that produced these sounds might no longer exist, but its musical pleasures, the beauty of the political struggles that defined that social formation, remain. Skip James's "Cypress Grove Blues" exemplifies the quiet power of ethnomusical politics—the construction of an ethnicized community through song. Country blues no longer actively shapes the boundary of a people. Nevertheless, the continued experience of its beauty reaches beyond the historical moment of the song's conception, responding to changing historical circumstances with appeals rooted in its ethno-musical heritage but branching outward to grasp the attention of differently attuned listeners. The music's meaning grows organically and politically.

In a turn of events that would probably have surprised Theodor Adorno, the most-productive efforts to link the musical and the political have taken shape not in European aesthetic theory or traditional musicology but inside the discipline of ethnomusicology—traditionally understood as the study of the folk and popular musics of the non-Western world. As early as 1973, John Blacking could assert that "because music is humanly organized sound, there ought to be a relationship between patterns of human organization and the patterns of sound produced as a result of human interaction." This relationship between patterns of sound and human organization was not merely homological and covarying, according to Blacking. Speaking of the Venda, the particular people whose music Blacking studied, he claimed that their music was political "in the sense that it may involve people in a powerful shared experience within the framework of their cultural experience and thereby make them more aware of themselves and of their responsibilities toward each other." The politics of Venda music consisted of the reaffirmation and reinforcement of the human organization named the Venda people. Through expressing an already existing social real, music could reproduce the boundaries of that community. But that was all it could do. Here is Blacking again: "Music cannot change societies.... If it can do anything to people, the best that it can do is to confirm situations that already exist. It cannot in itself generate thoughts that may benefit or harm mankind[,] ... but it can make people more aware of feelings that they have experienced, or partly experienced, by reinforcing, narrowing or expanding their consciousness in a variety of ways." Insofar as the music of the Venda could heighten awareness of their feelings, it could act in the world; the music could provide an arena for the contestation over cultural values. But these values were the values of the Venda that could only be expressed by Venda music when performed by the Venda people.

Throughout most of the history of ethnomusicology, even the most thoughtful and careful scholars have found themselves working within this frame. When Steven Feld wrote about the music of the Kaluli, the linkage he found between musical style and extramusical meaning was based in a concept of group identity that had to remain stable for the linkage to function. While Kaluli music might be characterized by "lift-up-over sounding" and that quality might also characterize the cooperative nature of Kaluli social organization, the music was an expression of the basic value hierarchy that marked one as Kaluli. If one is Kaluli, one cannot sound otherwise. Social organization and musical style that is not "lift-up-over sounding" cannot be Kaluli.

Despite its success at demonstrating linkages between music and politics, the fundamental assumption of traditional ethnomusicology is hampered by an inherent circularity. The idea that groups make music that identifies the group and thereby expresses the values of that group relies on a static concept of identity and a relatively firmly bounded notion of the group that frustrates any effort to think about the political force of music. If all music can do politically is to reinforce the already existent values of an already defined group, then music acts more as a conveyor of values constructed elsewhere than as an agent itself. In its traditional formulation, ethnomusicology can conceptualize only the political uses of music, wherein a particular group promulgates its interests through the musical performance of identity.

This problem—the tendency to reduce music's political force to an expression of a group's already existing and stable identity—is exacerbated by an accompanying tendency toward essentialism (since essentialism extends an enclosed ethnos indefinitely into the future). In his classic study of racial formation, The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy asks, "What special analytical problems arise if a style, genre, or particular performance of music is identified as being expressive of the absolute essence of the group that produced it?" The special analytical problems are many. But for my immediate purposes, the chief problem is this: linking the relationship between the political and the musical through identity often solidifies that identity. When that occurs, that identity becomes a reified object rather than a subjective set of processes. Identity becomes susceptible to essentialist concepts, and the linkage between music and identity loses its dynamism. Music's political role is reduced to the advance, or the defense, of this identity, and music loses its capacity for productive action in the world.

In the introduction to their superb collection Music and the Racial Imagination, Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman acknowledge the traps of traditional ethnomusicology, rooting the field's reliance on a fixed identity in its area-studies origins. Radano and Bohlman go on to argue for replacing the centrality of ethnic identity with a focus on the racializing practices that are entwined with the production of musical meaning. Rather than following traditional ethnomusicology's tendency to accept "differences as if they were givens," they argue that "'race' defines not a fixity, but a signification saturated with profound cultural meaning and whose discursive instability heightens its affective power." Race should be understood as a subjectifying practice, not an object, they rightly insist. The difficulty of following through on this editorial intention can be traced through many of the articles in the collection. Even Christopher Waterman's otherwise sterling analysis of the crossover hit "Corrine Corrina" by Bo Chatmon depends on a posited hybrid "mulatto" identity for Chatmon as the experiential ground out of which the song's political significance could grow. It is as though the laudable effort to identify racializing tendencies in musical performance can only be understood as the expression of a preexisting and stable identity.

The tendency to think the political through the limits of a fixed identity haunts not only ethnomusicology but also popular-music studies. In her compelling ethnography of the production and consumption of banda music in Los Angeles, Helena Simonett identifies moments when young Mexican Americans, inspired by hearing banda on the radio, begin a more visible and audible relationship to Mexican culture. In her analysis, this moment of musical identification becomes a reconnection to already existing roots, a reaffirmation of a belonging that was always already there rather than a productive connection that generates new experiences of subjectivity. Aaron Fox's sensitive ethnography of white working-class culture introduces a degree of collective agency to the performance of "real" country music, seeing this performance practice as a means of maintaining a social identity that is threatened by increasing complexities in the world of work and by the sentimental evacuation of that identity through Nashville-style production and commodification practices. But even here, the musical qualities that distinguish "real country" from its blander competitors can only be identified through these qualities' capacity to enable members of this social group to recognize each other as real-country people. These are important examples of music's political action. The musical confirmation of already existing political groups helps to consolidate them as self-aware communities. But I am mainly interested in a different direction that music's political power can take.

For example, Louise Meintjes's stunning Sound of Africa! reports an informal discussion among a group of musicians about a complex of musical sounds—a musical form. Her analysis of this conversation uses the concept of "the figure" as a doubled formal structure that combines the social notion of a "socially constituted type, or icon, presented and recognized through style" with the musical concept of a figure as a "repeating motive or pattern." Meintjes fuses these two ideas into a sociomusical concept that becomes "a process of arguing musically, by means of repeated and varied motives, over ideas about social relations." She describes a moment in a recording studio when a particular timbre associated with East Africa is imbricated with an approach to guitar playing that is already identified as South African (using an existent socio-musical link). This timbral resonance, echoing East Africa, shifts the sociocultural reference of the guitar style. The new sound is intended to reference "Africa," an impossible semiotic object in itself, but a meaningful auditory symbol in the market for world music, particularly when contrasted with "white pop." Each of these terms, each of these figures, each of these references are relatively fluid concepts that are at play in the conversation among the musicians who are working to create this sound. Their conversation is made up of a set of strategies for marketplace success. But the musicians' goal is to create a sound that can solidify a musico-cultural reference to Africa that will carry an affective charge beyond the reference's value as a commodity marker in the world music marketplace. The musicians want to create what could be really felt to be the "sound of Africa." This analysis reintroduces an element of dynamism into the linkage between music and identity, demonstrating the imbrication of extramusical thinking with formal musical creativity. The analysis is deeply contextualized in terms of the meanings carried by the musical form and the historical moment out of which this element of musical beauty can be heard. My argument will build on Meintjes's discussion to suggest that this affective charge, if successful, could consolidate an emergent identity with real political force. The affective power of musico-cultural figures can change the relationship of the ethnos to the demos, shifting the relations of those who are legitimately included inside the political community. The fundamental assertion of this book is that music is one of the central cultural processes through which the abstract concept of the polis comes into bodily experience. Music's ability to effect this experience must have already taken place before any of the debates about genres and peoples, of sounds and identities, can begin. Simply put, the political force of music derives from its capacity to combine relations of difference into experiences of beauty.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822356589
• ISBN 13: 9780822356585
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344