Popular Musicology and Identity

Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins

Kai Arne Hansen, Eirik Askerøi, Freya Jarman, Kai Arne Hansen, Eirik Askerøi, Freya Jarman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429837647
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Popular Musicology and Identity paves new paths for studying popular music's entwinement with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, locality, and a range of other factors. The book consists of original essays in honour of Stan Hawkins, whose work has been a major influence on the musicological study of gender and identity since the early 1990s. In the new millennium, musicological approaches have proliferated and evolved alongside major shifts in the music industry and popular culture. Reflecting this plurality, the book reaches into a range of musical contexts, eras, and idioms to critically investigate the discursive structures that govern the processes through which music is mobilised as a focal point for negotiating and assessing identity. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Popular Musicology and Identity accounts for the state of popular musicology at the onset of the 2020s while also offering a platform for the further advancement of the critical study of popular music and identity. This collection of essays thus provides an up-to-date resource for scholars across fields such as popular music studies, musicology, gender studies, and media studies.

1 The British dandy on the popular musical stage (1866–1915)

Derek B. Scott

In his monograph The British Pop Dandy, Stan Hawkins recognised that every age ‘has possessed its own brand of dandies, and general characteristics distinguish one period from the other’ (2009, 15). Hawkins placed his study in historical context (20–26, 183–84), but his focus was on the dandy of British post-industrial society. That allows me to supplement his work with an account of the British dandy in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. My first brief case study is of the music-hall swell, and it is succeeded by a comparison of Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic dandy Reginald Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience (1881). Then come the ‘masher’ characters of musical comedy, followed by some thoughts on the cross-dressing dandy performances of artists such as Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields. Finally, I take a brief look at the blackface dandy, who had been a feature of the early American minstrel shows. This character-type became a popular figure on the British music-hall stage in the 1890s and created white audience expectations that needed to be carefully negotiated by the black British dandy.

In the period I am surveying, the British dandy was changing from a person whom Thomas Carlyle described in the 1830s as being dedicated to ‘the wearing of Clothes wisely and well’ (2010, 217), to someone whom, in 1863, Charles Baudelaire claimed was possessed by ‘the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions’ (1981, 420). However, Baudelaire then went on to add that a dandy ‘can never be a vulgar man’ (421), which is an assertion that is contradicted frequently once our focus shifts to the music-hall stage. By detailing the transformation of the British dandy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this chapter offers new insights into the ever-changing modalities of masculine expression and works towards a deeper understanding of the historical trajectories that have shaped dandyism in popular music.

The music-hall swell

The dandy as the mock upper-class ‘swell’ rose to prominence in music-hall entertainment of the later 1860s (see Scott 2008, 69–70). The subject position of music halls, especially in the West End, was that of the upper-working-class or lower-middle-class male, and the parodic aspect of the music-hall dandy therefore had a considerable appeal to socially aspirational young men in the audience who worked as clerks, or in other positions in which they might nurture hopes of a professional career (see Bailey 1986, 55). Many of them had a desire to be fashionable in dress and would put on their ‘slap-up toggery’ for a Saturday night out, or a Sunday jaunt. There were several performers associated with the swell, but pre-eminent among them were George Leybourne (1842–84) and Alfred Vance (1839–88). It was Leybourne’s song ‘Champagne Charlie’ (music by Alfred Lee), first performed at Princess’s Concert Hall in Leeds in early August 1866, that first generated huge enthusiasm for the swell. Yet, Charlie was a double-coded dandy: he might have displayed admiration for fine clothes, wealth, and status, but he subverted bourgeois values by celebrating excess and idleness, boasting that he was ‘a noise all night, in bed all day, and swimming in champagne’. A key moment came when Leybourne signed an exclusive year-long contract at the Canterbury Music Hall agreeing to maintain a swell persona on and off stage (Bailey 1986, 51–52; Beeching 2011, 194). It was not an inflexible imposition, since Leybourne had several swell characters in his repertoire, of which Charlie was the most exaggerated representation of upper-class dissipation.

Peter Bailey (1986, 54–55) distinguishes three types of swell: (1) the meticulous dresser, languid or affected in manner; (2) the noisy, alcohol-imbibing, boisterous man about town; and (3) the sham or simulated swell. Leybourne wore striking blue and white striped trousers for his role as Charlie, forming part of an outfit that Bertie Wooster might later have described as ‘rather sudden till you got used to it’.¹ His long side-burns (Dundreary whiskers), short top hat, striped trousers, Malacca cane, cigar, and champagne bottle all suggest that he is parodying type two of Bailey’s swells (see Figure 1.1). His champagne bottle was fitted up to ensure it would pop its cork when struck by the cane, as shown in Alfred Concanen’s lithograph for the sheet music cover. Bailey’s third type of swell, the sham variety, is represented in the song ‘Immenseikoff’ (1873), written and performed by Arthur Lloyd (1839–1904). Immenseikoff describes himself as a Shoreditch toff, but Shoreditch at that time was far from the fashionable district it is today. Charlie sang about himself to a vigorous march rhythm, but Lloyd’s song was in polka rhythm, suggesting an affected elegance (see Figure 1.2). Immenseikoff boasts that he used to obtain his clothes cheaply from Poole, because of the way he ‘showed them off’. The high-quality tailoring firm of Henry Poole still exists today at 15, Savile Row. Immenseikoff might be thought prone to exaggeration in bragging of a deal he has done with a tailor, but it seems that Alfred Vance, whose swell character praised Cliquot in contrast to Leybourne’s promotion of Moët, was rewarded with suits by Edward Groves, on the understanding that he would recommend his tailor’s shop situated nearby the Canterbury and Metropolitan halls (Bailey 1986, 60).

Figure 1.1 Sheet music title-page depicting George Leybourne as ‘Champagne Charlie’.

Figure 1.2 ‘Immenseikoff; or the Shoreditch Toff’, words and music by Arthur Lloyd, 1873.

Charlie’s sexuality is somewhat ambiguous. He desires – and assures us he obtains – female adoration, but he prefers a night out with the boys. Like Reginald Bunthorne in Patience, he seems happily resigned to his inability to settle down with a woman (‘with all my grand accomplishments, I ne’er could get a wife’). In fact, the closest he approaches sexual fulfilment is probably the moment when, at the end of his song, he taps his bottle and the cork flies in the air followed by the fizz. He claims that the thing he most excels in ‘is the PRFG game’, but we never quite know what takes place in those Private Rooms for Gentlemen. Christopher Beeching, who was first to identify this meaning of the letters PRFG, suggests that another meaning might be the Prize Ring Fighting Game, but it would seem odd to repeat the word ‘game’ if that were so (2011, 142–43).

The reaction of the respectable middle classes to the disruptive, sham gentility of music-hall swells, and to those on the streets who imitated them, fluctuated between scorn and revulsion (see Bailey 1986, 49, 59, and 68; Kift 1996, 49). The swell was not a morally improving role model. Nevertheless, the self-indulgent dandy represented by Champagne Charlie continued into the Edwardian period. George Lashwood, the ‘Beau Brummel of the halls’ performed a song, ‘I Forgot the Number of My House’ (words by Fred W. Leigh, music by George Arthurs, 1911), in which he arrives home somewhat the worse for drink, confessing that he has been out with the boys and is feeling ‘extremely queer’.

The aesthetic dandy

I am devoting a large amount of space, here, to Reginald Bunthorne, one of the two dandies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience. In Bunthorne, Gilbert presents a caricature of the artistic devotee of the Aesthetic Movement, which brought together artists who called for life to be lived intensely and who stressed that the ideal of beauty in art overrode any moral or political dimension – an influential text was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Bunthorne arrives at a moment when dandyism may be seen moving in the direction of camp and an appeal to gay sensibilities (although the terms ‘gay’ and ‘camp’ were, of course, not yet coined). Raymond Knapp has remarked that Gilbert and Sullivan sometimes placed idiosyncratic characters and their stylised song performances in a context that often seems pre-labelled as artificial and, thus, ‘readymade for camp’ (2018, 172).

Richard D’Oyly Carte realised that the reception of Patience, when it toured the USA in 1882, would benefit from better acquaintance with the aesthetic movement, and, for that reason, was keen to finance a lecture tour there by Oscar Wilde. When Patience premiered in London the year previously, Wilde was not widely recognised as having the status of a premier aesthete. Indeed, Carolyn Williams has argued that, rather than Bunthorne’s character being a parody of Wilde, Bunthorne was, in reality, ‘the model that Wilde attempted both to imitate and to prefigure on his American tour’ (2012, 165; for a detailed account of his tour, see Mendelssohn 2018). The very clothes Wilde wore – the velvet jacket and knee breeches – were indebted to the costume Gilbert had designed for Bunthorne. Wilde’s period of wearing aesthetic attire was actually of short duration, coming to an end abruptly in March 1883, when he decided to change his image to that of a French bohemian artist (see Kaplan and Stowell 1994, 12).

Bunthorne is a figure who is difficult to pin down in terms of sexuality. On the one hand, his effete, or effeminate manner has to be related to a historical context in which such behaviour was thought to be a means of attracting women – which is precisely why the dragoons in Patience are motivated to adopt such behaviour.² On the other hand, as Williams observes, ‘it is not necessary to argue that Bunthorne is meant to represent or “be” a homosexual in order to see the queer implications of the representation’ (2012, 168). She does not regard the question of whether there was any intentionality on Gilbert’s part as important to this perspective, because he may have been elaborating a particular stereotype without being critically conscious of his actions.

Dennis Denisoff remarks of Bunthorne’s exclusion from the happy ending of multiple marriages (often interpreted as punitive) that throughout the operetta Bunthorne has been playing the game of deferring marriage, his unrequited attachment to the milkmaid Patience being part and parcel of ‘an indefinite deferral of sexual fulfillment’ (Denisoff 2001, 61). As a dandy-aesthete, he wishes to be popular with women, but without commitment. He informs the audience, confidentially, that his aestheticism is ‘sham’ and has been adopted in order to gain female adoration, but, oddly, he is not prepared to abandon it when it no longer serves that purpose. His confessional song ‘If you’re anxious for to shine’ makes scornful reference to aesthetes who are content with a ‘vegetable love’, which, he declares emphatically, would certainly not suit him; yet, he announces calmly before the curtain falls that, in the future, he will have to be content ‘with a tulip or lily’.

Jay Newman draws attention to the fact that Gilbert’s relations with leading figures of the aesthetic movement were cordial, and that nothing in Patience could be described as malicious satire (Newman 1985, 266 cited in Denisoff 2001, 58). Gilbert’s views on same-sex relationships should not be assumed to be condemnatory, although this was a topic that could not be addressed openly in contemporary drama. His play The Wicked World (1873) may be interpreted as approaching the subject delicately, by depicting a land in which fairies reject mortal love between the sexes for ‘sister-love’ and ‘brotherhood’ love, but even that was found indecent by the Pall Mall Gazette (Pearson 1957, 42–43 cited in Denisoff 2001, 60).

For Williams, the character of Bunthorne marks a key moment in ‘the emergence of a queer historiography’ (2012, 170). Knapp would agree, and stresses it is not only Gilbert’s libretto but also Sullivan’s music that shapes Bunthorne’s character. In his longest solo scene, he enters wondering aloud if he is alone and unobserved. The melodramatic music tells us he is performing theatrically, but when he moves from declamatory recitative to a song in which he reveals what he really feels about aestheticism, the music ‘unfolds as a kind of mincing march, adopting the sensibility of a slightly effeminate burgher on promenade’ (Knapp 2018, 178). Although Knapp concedes that effeminacy was often thought a means of attracting women in the 1880s, and was not generally equated with homosexuality, he discerns an incipient camp taste in Bunthorne’s manner, which may have had a covert appeal to those attracted to same-sex relations (2018, 182). It should be noted, too, that although Oscar Wilde’s demeanour may have owed much to Bunthorne, it was only retrospectively – after Wilde’s trial in 1895 – that many people comprehended Wilde’s manner as signifying his homosexuality. Yet, that trial took place six years after the Cleveland Street Scandal had shone a light on homosexuality among the aristocracy.³

Bunthorne’s ‘signature moment’, in Knapp’s opinion, comes after Patience rejects his marriage proposal. He exits with a poetic outburst:

Oh, to be wafted away

From this black Aceldama of sorrow,

Where the dust of an earthy today

Is the earth of a dusty tomorrow.

Knapp comments that an exaggerated performance style is encouraged by the audience laughter that greets this recit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface: essays in honour of Stan Hawkins
• Acknowledgements
• List of publications by Stan Hawkins
• Introduction: a musicology of popular music and identity
• 1. The British dandy on the popular musical stage (1866–1915)
• 2. ‘She Said She Said’: the influence of feminine ‘voices’ on John Lennon’s music
• 3. The classical closet
• 4. Perfect duet? Paradoxes of gender representation and mixed-gender collaborations on the Billboard charts from 1955 to 2017
• 5. The pleasure(s) of the pop text: subversion and theatricality in Cloroform and Tove Lo
• 6. ‘Everyone is a little bit gay’: LGBTIQ activism in Finnish pop music of the 21st century
• 7. ‘Keeping it real’, ‘Keeping it dandy’? Male blackness and the popular music mainstream
• 8. Global success, identitarian performance, and Canadian popular music
• 9. ‘Very’ British: a pop musicological approach to the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Always on My Mind’
• 10. Pulp: a paradigm for perversion in pornosonic pop
• 11. Regina Spektor’s Small Bill$: the cute and the manic-zany as body-political strategies
• 12. Masculinity and the illness narrative in Pain of Salvation’s In the Passing Light of Day
• Index