Popular Music and the Politics of Hope

Queer and Feminist Interventions

Susan Fast, Craig Jennex

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138055865
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351677813
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In today's culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyoncé's Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red's We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn's 100th Birthday.

At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today's queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.

PART I

Displacing Whiteness

INTRODUCTION

Displacing Whiteness

Daphne A. Brooks

For a moment, it seemed like the party was over, like the jig was up. Back in 2017 during those closing moments of that year’s hotly anticipated Grammy ceremony, it seemed like a superstar pop artist at the height of her fame and an utter darling in the music entertainment industry, was about to break the codes of silence and putative civility in awards show culture in a way that rivaled that classic moment when old-school Kanye bumrushed the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards stage to protest Taylor Swift’s victory. In those first few seconds when she made her way to the microphone to accept the “Album of the Year” honor, it seemed like Adele, the latest British pop sensation with mad black music love in heart might do the deed, speak the unspeakable on a global telecast, and lay bare not only the way white institutional power works in pop but also expose the ways that that same power remains inextricably linked to her own fame and a string of accolades and achievements. Her initial faltering and her tearful opening address to fellow nominee, Beyoncé Knowles suggested that something might be afoot. “I’m very humbled and very grateful …,” she began, “but my life is Beyoncé.”

Adele’s words marked the first time in pop music history that a white female artist, from the awards show podium, directly addressed a contemporary black woman musician in the prime of her career and publicly expressed humility, heartfelt debt, and a deep and abiding recognition of longstanding influence on her own work. “The artist of my life is Beyoncé and … the Lemonade album,” Adele continued, “was … so monumental, and so well thought out, and so beautiful and soul-bearing … all us artists adore you. You are our light.” Never before had any white pop artist—woman or man—so closely flirted with momentarily bringing the wheels of institutional racism to a dramatic halt. “I can’t possibly accept this,” sobbed Adele while the Staples Center audience held its breath. She ultimately (and disappointingly to many) did—but in even uttering such seemingly unvarnished remarks she came closer than any artist before her to shining a light on the absurd racial inequities in awards show culture and popular music culture more broadly. Leave it to Adele, the Brixton lass, to push back against the American Recording Academy whose repeat offense in overlooking black women artists in its major categories came to a head that night when it chose the safety of white, female, big-voiced pop convention over the edgy, experimental, overtly black feminist protest music soundtrack for the woke generation. Adele’s salvo was a big one—even if it sounded intimate and personal—the testimony of a fan genuflecting before her “queen” while filled with remorse and a bit of shame. Her claims bespeak larger histories of both white and black women musicians’ complicated entanglements with one another, and perhaps even more importantly, black women artists’ surprisingly precarious and paradoxical position as highly influential yet critically undervalued figures in popular music culture.

Adele is just the latest iteration of the kind of artist who sits at the center of this web. One might think of how, with her earthy timbre, her curvy, zaftig figure, her open affinities toward black women musicians like Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, she recalls the early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant songstress Sophie Tucker (“the Last of the Red Hot Mamas”) whose dominance in those outback frontier years of the blues during the Gilded Age era especially reflected the recording industry’s appropriative, anti-black attitudes. Tucker and other white blues vocalists soared while African American musicians were sidelined from the studio until Mamie Smith broke through with her “Crazy Blues” in 1920. Yet, in spite of segregatory divisions and racial stratification in the record business, this was also an era that produced meaningful networks of collaboration as well as charged competition between white and black women musicians, as scholars such Elijah Wald, Jayna Brown, Lori Harrison-Kahan, and others have noted.¹ Tucker was emblematic of the kind of musician who walked these faultlines carefully. Called a “coon shouter,” that repugnant title given largely to white vocalists who trafficked in musical aesthetics (lots of vibrato and a deep, lower register range) perceived to be culturally “black” and capable of performing bawdy tunes about sexual agency and independence, Tucker aspired to sing the blues like the African American women performers whom she greatly admired, going so far as to ask blues legends like Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters for vocal lessons to sharpen her game (Hunter declined but Waters took the pay). With roots in blackface performance and a penchant for ethnographically “observing” and incorporating black style into her repertoire, she was hardly an innocent ally. But largely behind the scenes in Jim Crow culture, she championed the likes of black women entertainers like dancer Ida Forsyne and quietly bonded with other women of color (African American actress Mollie Elkins, pioneering Asian American female physician Dr. Mom Chung) later in life (Brown, 2008; Harrison-Kahan, 2011). Adele’s globally heard embrace of Beyoncé’s regality and her pathbreaking iconicity marks that 100-year leap from Tucker’s tacit adoration of black female genius to proudly—if awkwardly—aspiring toward kinship (“I want you to be my mommy,” said Adele. Country artist Faith Hill would second the sentiment that evening).

Delivered with Adele’s trademark brand of sincerity and emotional authenticity, as well as a heaping dose of reverence, such a line is, nonetheless, cringe-worthy to the extent that it, of course, calls up the fraught history of black women imagined as nurturing, service-oriented maternal figures—mothers, maids, and caricatured “mammies”—who were subjugated in captivity to breed against will and—both before and after slavery—to care for children not their own. They are, as scholar Farah Griffin has famously argued, often thought of as the “nurturing, healing, life and love giving for the majority culture” (2004, 104). While African American women’s aesthetic contributions have literally supplied some of the fundamental DNA of our modern popular music culture, rarely have they been recognized for their mainstream impact and the superior quality of their craft and artistry. Aretha Franklin, of course, comes to mind as the consistent exception, and even in her passing she still towers over other vocalists with that gospel melisma heard round the world. Her long-running domination at the Grammys in its “female R&B vocal” category was a streak so notorious that, for a time in the 1970s, she became synonymous with the award itself.² Yet still, mind you, the Grammys’ “Album of the Year” category, the category that acknowledges a long-playing masterwork collection of songs, even eluded the Queen of Soul.

How is it possible for black women popular musicians (an Aretha, a Whitney, a Beyoncé)—some of the most deeply impactful and widely imitated artists in the world—to exist simultaneously at the fringe and yet also at the critically under-acknowledged center of the culture industry? It is a problem that political science scholar Richard Iton once characterized as, for African Americans, an “outside/inside dynamic … experienced asymmetrically: as political disfranchisement on the one hand and overemployment in the arenas of popular culture on the other” (2010, 4). These are old battles that continue to be fought across new eras and on many fronts. Think, for instance, of Nicki Minaj who put it ever so plainly in her summer 2015 “Twitter beef” with (yet again) Swift about that year’s MTV Video Awards nominations when she declared that there is “a system that doesn’t credit black women for their contributions to pop culture as freely/quickly as they reward others…. We are huge trendsetters, not second class citizens that get thrown crumbs. This isn’t anger. This is #information” (qtd. in Webber 2015).

The press covered Minaj’s infamous tussle with Swift as a micro-spat between two pop egos, but the conflict was indicative of truths that exceeded standard tabloid chatter. Beyond the headlines in entertainment journalism, Beyoncé’s 2015 and 2017 losses in the Recording Academy’s major categories (while continuing, as many noted, to garner recognition in the racially coded R&B competition) were events that spawned think pieces and media debates calling for greater scrutiny of taste-making machines like the Grammys and the hegemony it generates and sustains. These were incidents sparking vociferous cultural backlash, stoked by the power of social media and its ability to raise the audibility of marginalized voices as pop critics, themselves, and fueled as well by the striking recognition that Beyoncé was in the midst of a radical artistic and political transformation unprecedented in twenty-first-century pop. Out of the chrysalis of a high-profile Harry Belafonte hailing to merge art with social justice and on the wings of new motherhood, she emerged in 2013 as a black feminist Black Lives Matter (BLM) visionary with love and sex and gender equality and black revolution on her mind and coursing through her sound and visual repertoire. The quality and distinctiveness of her maturity and innovation as an artist came through on 2013’s Beyoncé album and reordered the pop world’s expectations of what epic black feminist storytelling looks and sounds like in popular music culture with the arrival of Lemonade two-and-a-half years later. This was work that set her apart from her peers. Fans and critics took note, and when the veteran alternative trickster musician Beck beat her for the top prize in 2015, it triggered the kind of handwringing that would replay in the wake of Adele’s triumph. Her loss the first time prompted one colleague to text me with the bitter observation that “even Beyoncé’s black life doesn’t matter to the Grammy’s.”

Of course, we know that not to be true—especially given the fact that, heading into 2017’s show, Beyoncé had received more nominations (60) than any other female artist, and only one female solo artist, Alison Krauss had, at that time, won more Grammy’s than her. Bey is doin’ alright, for sure. But it’s worth pausing for a moment to recognize the fact that, not since 1998 (when Lauryn Hill captured the imagination of pop music culture with her neo-soul masterpiece, the bildungsroman narrative The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) has a woman-of-color artist won the prize for the best long-playing record (and only three others have won since the first year that the award was presented in 1959: Natalie Cole, Whitney Houston, and Norah Jones). Swift, as she reminded the audience at 2016’s ceremony, has now won twice. Adele has done the same. To say that the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences suffers historically from institutional racism and sexism would seem shocking given the fact that the Academy has deservedly showered awards on icons like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, and others over the last half century. And some divas—the aforementioned Swift, Celine Dion, Adele—have certainly had their turn at dominating the night. But in recent years, the Grammys have featured a bevy of white musicians drawing on historically black musical forms while passing over awarding black artists the biggest prizes to be had. Back in 2015, the stage was populated with performances by blue-eyed soul singers from across the pond: Sam Smith, Annie Lennox, Hozier.

The night of Adele’s upset, the lineup was decidedly bolder and more inclusive in content, from A Tribe Called Quest’s searing rendition of their anti-Trump manifesto, “We the People” to even J. Lo who dropped a Toni Morrison reference. But in both instances in which she had been snubbed in that elusive album category, it was Beyoncé whose performances offered the most stirring and indelible enactments of “whiteness displaced” at a ceremony that has historically been at odds with such a concept. Think of her in her Lemonade glory, resplendent in gold, bedecked with a shimmering crown and flanked by women dancers in radiant yellow garments, walking forth carrying her pregnant-with-twins belly draped in beads and baubles and jewels. As many have noted, it was a performance of her redemption song “Love Drought” that gave “nods to African, Hindu, and Roman goddesses” (Mettler 2017). It was female ritual and regeneration that focused on collective healing and the incandescent energies emanating from feminine, sensual sensibilities. It was a spectacle of a staged “private” communal moment that looked past the demands of crowd scrutiny and audience pandering to execute a different kind of care. It was an act of laying claim to a stage that’s been as welcoming to women of color as a two-faced Jordan Peele horror movie villain, and it reaffirmed the tactics by which Beyoncé has been steadily interpolating black feminist imaginaries into the center of dominant pop life—even as the doors fly open and shut for her to make a bid at shattering its glass ceiling.³

Like her fertility deity tableaux, she would strike a similar pose in spiritual solidarity with her brethren at 2015’s ceremony when she delivered a stirring reading of Thomas Dorsey’s gospel classic “Precious Lord.” Joined onstage by an ensemble of “real men,” as Beyoncé described them, men who “have lived … have struggled, cried … have a light and spirit …,” she set out in this staging to seize control of the narrative of blackness, to fill the stage through choreography that highlighted bowed heads and outstretched arms raised toward the heavens.⁴ This was Beyoncé’s bid to channel the grassroots energies of black radical testifying and witnessing. With hands in the air, her accompanists carried the signal street protest gesture of the nascent BLM moment into the Hollywood awards hall and quietly demanded a hearing while Knowles burrowed her way through gospel’s song-of-songs, a classic articulation of worldly crisis and adamant spiritual recourse and aspirational resolution. Yoncé and company offered an enactment of musical prayer, a conversation between black subjects and their Maker that segued into Common and John Legend’s triumphant disturbance of the peace. Ubiquitous that year with their performances of Selma’s theme song “Glory,” the duo’s stentorian proclamation that “one day when the glory comes/it’ll be ours …” felt like an indictment of both the increasingly visible, newly palpable Civil Rights crisis in this country as well as a meditation on other struggles still with us: really valuing black women’s art and seeing them not simply as “mommies” to love but as formidable artists to reckon with, is still a battle underway. Full glory remains elusive.

The authors in this part entitled “Displacing Whiteness” suggest to us, however, that key artists—including Beyoncé—are resourcefully improvising ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Displacing Whiteness
• PART II: Rethinking Difference
• PART III: Decolonizing Sound
• PART IV: Refusing Conventions
• PART V: Voicing Resilience
• Notes on Contributors
• Index