Popular Music and the Politics of Novelty

Pete Dale

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501307058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

Popular music, today, has supposedly collapsed into a 'retromania' which, according to leading critic Simon Reynolds, has brought a 'slow and steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original.' Meanwhile, in the estimation of philosopher Alain Badiou, a significant political event will always require 'the dictatorial power of a creation ex nihilo'. Everywhere, it seems, at least amongst commentators of a certain age and type, pessimism prevails with regards to the predominant aesthetic preferences of the twenty first century: popular music, supposedly, is in a rut. Yet when, if ever, did the political engagement kindled by popular music amount to more than it does today? The sixties? The punk explosion of the late 1970s? Despite an on-going fixation upon these periods in much rock journalism and academic writing, this book demonstrates that the utilisation of popular music to promote political causes, on the one hand, and the expression of dissent through the medium of 'popular song', on the other hand, remain widely in practice today. This is not to argue, however, for complacency with regards to the need for expressions of political dissent through popular culture. Rather, the book looks carefully at actual usages of popular music in political processes, as well as expressions of political feeling through song, and argues that there is much to encourage us to think that the demand for radical change remains in circulation. The question is, though, how necessary is it for politically-motivated popular music to offer aesthetic novelty?

1

1899 and All That

Pop music didn’t just drop out of nowhere, fully formed and perfectly new; the idea that such an arrival could be possible is surely risible: what comes out of a void? In fact, popular music is a subcategory of music; almost anyone (with the possible exception of Alain Badiou) will admit this much.¹ It utilizes instruments, a sense of harmony and melody and a whole lot more that were passed along from the European musical tradition. As everyone knows, however, popular music doesn’t only come out of that tradition: rather, above all else, it seems to bring largely African-derived musical traditions to bear upon a European inheritance. Or should that be put the other way around? This may even be our first political question about popular music. It would take a much bolder musicologist than the present author to insist upon prioritizing one side over the other, however. Let us just say, then, that popular music blends African and European musical traditions. So far, hopefully, we are on safe ground.

Our next question may be more inflammatory – I hope it will be, indeed. When does popular music arrive? It is doubtful that anyone would want to deny that popular music has some elements that derive from pre-existing musical traditions. The question as to the first statement of whatever-it-is-that-was-new-about-it occurred, by contrast, is ripe for argument.

The title of the present chapter has been chosen for one primary reason: received wisdom seems to agree that popular music is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon (see, for example, the fifty-point history of popular music, published by The Guardian on 11 June 2011, which begins in 1944). We need to challenge this because it is clear that something like Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ of 1899 is a fair contender for inclusion within the bracket ‘popular music’. Is this where it begins, then? At the tip of Joplin’s pen (for, lest we forget, his compositions were notated)? An argument to this effect would surely be hard to maintain, as we shall see. How about England’s ‘music hall’ tradition, then? Again, a closer observation of this area of music will show us that the elements which mark the music out as ‘popular’ rather than, say, ‘folk’ or ‘art’ music do not in fact come from nowhere. In a third example, I will draw the reader’s attention to the copious inheritances that 1950s ‘rock’n’roll’ took from pre-existing sources. In each case, I am interested not only in questions as to how novel the music was but also how extrinsically important the elements of apparent novelty may have been; and the question as to what political significance we can link to the element of novelty.

Before discussing these three particular subcategories of popular music, I want to touch upon some ideas put forward by Richard Middleton in From Liszt to Music Hall, an Open University study text published in the late 1970s.² Middleton having been a dominant voice within popular music studies and this text having been prepared for self-study in a ‘distance learning’ context, From Liszt to Music Hall should be fairly reliable as a source for initial consideration of salient facts regarding the development of popular music in the nineteenth century. In his ‘Preamble’, Middleton poses a question of particular interest for our own purposes: given that ‘classical’ concerts are typically ‘made up of music by dead composers’ and given our simultaneous demand that living composers ‘produce something original and new’ – all this given, ‘Why do we demand the new and at the same time prefer the old?’³ It’s a great question, probably going a long way towards explaining the limited audience for contemporary composition. Middleton counterpoises ‘new-world’-creating composers (with good reason he brings the folk-inspired work of Stravinsky as an ironic example) against ‘a music rooted in the “real” world – our popular music’.⁴

This is classic (early) Middleton, and doubtless the argument made particular sense in a 1970s context when popular music still seemed to be burgeoning with novelty and limited in its retrogressive tendencies. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, things look a little different. Indeed, we can pose much the same question at the contemporary pop scene. Why do so many current writers, commentators, musicians and fans complain of a perceived lack of new directions in popular music (Hot Chip: ‘Pop music has become conservative’, Uncut, 28 May 2012) when, in truth, they seem much to prefer the ‘classic’ stuff from the past (Hot Chip: ‘The late Beatles, obviously, but Prince, too’, Skiddle.com, 5 February 2012)? If, say, progressive rock was musically interesting in the early 1970s, why shouldn’t bright young things such as Kiran Leonard find the musical characteristics associated with this form of popular music remain interesting still?⁵ Granted, Leonard’s music draws on music from the past and could, therefore, be tarred as exhibiting some form of ‘retromania’; but the political implication of such chauvinism for pop/rock’s past glories (‘it’s all been done before’, as they say) is surely worth considering.

Such a consideration will be developed in later chapters. The Middletonian challenge to assumptions of a hard distinction between the popular and ‘art’ music fields is worth keeping in mind for the present chapter, however. We also should consider the implications of the following question: ‘could one see rock music as part of a counter-culture within popular music, one which might be perhaps compared with that offered by nineteenth century “bohemian” artists, like Liszt, who were revolted by the social developments of their day?’⁶ Perhaps so; but how significant, actually, is this perceived link? Liszt may have been inspired by Saint-Simon and the revolutions of 1830, just as Scott Joplin clearly invested importance in the post-slavery dignity of ‘the negro race’.⁷ If art holds up a mirror to society, however, the jump to political agency is far from a necessary consequence. In any case, what is going on politically when popular music coughs up ‘the new thing’? On this question, let us first turn to ragtime music and the immensely popular work of Scott Joplin – a composer whose significance is, according to Susan Curtis, ‘certainly comparable to Schoenberg’.⁸

The King of ragtime

According to Katherine Preston, ‘prior to the advent of ragtime, there was very little popular music in the United States that incorporated such complex rhythms . . . at the turn of the century, ragtime’s rhythms were entirely new, somewhat mysterious and devilishly hard to master.’⁹ Her celebratory account of the musical work of Scott Joplin – consistently promoted by his publisher John Stark as ‘the king of ragtime’ – is largely justified in its enthusiasm: it is hard not to admire the marked seriousness of Joplin as a man and the clear salience of his compositions within a ragtime context. However, if Joplin really was a king, why did he die penniless, destitute and in despair in 1917? Perhaps he should have been a king; but it would be close to a century after his death before the United States would have even have a ‘black’ president, let alone a king. From a serious political point of view, then, to what extent can Joplin’s story suggest the way we should really want things to be, with regards to popular music and ‘the new’?

We should begin with a sketch of the life of this remarkable African American composer. Born in 1868 in Texas, the son of a slave who had been freed the previous decade, Scott Joplin initially excelled on the banjo before taking up the piano as a boy. Although his father, Jiles Joplin, is reported to have learnt some violin in his youth and to have played in his master’s house as part of the plantation orchestra, his son’s abilities appear to have gone well beyond expectations from a young age. For example, Preston quotes an ‘old family neighbour’ describing the way that the boy ‘just got his music out of the air’ in a manner that would defy any assumptions of a simple inheritance of skill from an enthusiastic parent.¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, given this gift and Joplin’s upbringing in what today we would call a context of ‘socio-economic disadvantage’, he took up the life of a travelling musician in the mid-1880s. Time spent in St. Louis will doubtless have exposed him to an exceptional melting pot of musical styles that ‘poured through his ears and filtered through his brain at almost every waking hour of the day’.¹¹ A still more formative influence upon the young Joplin, at least in terms of his ambition, would seem to have been the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Scholars have been unable to provide conclusive evidence that Joplin took part in this event, but there is a general agreement that he probably did.¹² In any case, the event seems to have enabled the ‘penetration of white consciousness’ in respect of hitherto little regarded traditions of African American music.¹³ By the mid-1890s, Joplin is said to have believed he had refined the ‘new music the public wanted to hear’.¹⁴

Subsequent sales of the sheet music for his compositions in the early years of the twentieth century would suggest such self-belief was well founded. That said, we can note that he was initially not especially well received by publishers, several of whom rejected works including the era-defining Maple Leaf Rag.¹⁵ Furthermore, sales of the Maple Leaf Rag, when it was initially published by John Stark and Son in 1899, were far from overwhelming – under 400 copies in its first twelve months, seemingly.¹⁶ By the following autumn, the situation changed significantly: Stark and Son could not keep up with the demand and had to cancel publication of all orders besides the sheet in question.¹⁷ By all accounts, the demand for and enthusiasm about this rag was extraordinary. A claim that it ‘blew the lid off the musical world and set it into the greatest musical craze that the world has ever known’ is certainly overstated – many a twentieth-century musical ‘craze’ has fair claim to being ‘greater’ in a range of senses.¹⁸ Widely repeated claims of initial sales in excess of a million are also unfounded – half a million in its first ten years would appear to be a more accurate figure.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the piece was without doubt a runaway success, which remains popular with amateur pianists and enthusiasts of popular music to this day.

Other Joplin rags of note are numerous, including of course The Entertainer (1901) – the cornerstone of the 1970s ragtime revival, thanks to the 1973 film The Sting. Less well known (particularly during his lifetime) but very much of note are his operatic works. His first effort in this regard, Guest of Honour, soured his hitherto mutually respectful relationship with publisher John Stark because ‘people wanted rags they could sing or play on their parlour pianos. They did not want to buy a ragtime ballet or opera.’²⁰ The story is archetypal of popular music: Joplin ‘was interested in elevating ragtime from the realm of popular music to the realm of serious art music. Stark was not interested in elevating music – he was interested in selling it. After all, he was a businessman.’²¹ In short, their publishing relationship collapsed as a result of Joplin’s aspirations. His final efforts towards creating what he called ‘folk opera’ were unsuccessful during his lifetime: the (initially) ill-fated Treemonisha was performed only once, in 1915 with Joplin forced to attempt an approximation of his orchestral arrangements on a single piano for a tiny and seemingly indifferent audience primarily made up of friends and family. ‘The listeners were sophisticated enough to reject their folk past’, Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis have argued, ‘but not sufficiently to relish a return to it in art. Nor have they, it may be remarked, reached that stage even today’.²² Joplin’s mental and emotional state went into an immediate and severe decline thereafter, resulting in placement in a mental institution where he would spend the remaining months of his life. Although Treemonisha would be performed again in the 1970s, at last granted the kind of critical praise (including a posthumous Pulitzer prize in 1976), which his numerous piano rags also received during the same decade, the composer seems to have died believing his life to have been a failure.

As noted, Preston wants to claim Joplin’s rags as ‘entirely new’. We will encounter these two words many times in ensuing chapters of the present book. They are problematic because, strictly speaking, for the entirety of a thing to be new there can be no frame of reference. How, then, could any music be entirely new? Framed as music, its status as absolute novelty disperses. This is not to say that there was nothing new about, to use the subject at hand, ragtime music. The point, rather, is that the novelty of new things presents itself within a context that can never be entirely free of pre-existing frameworks (‘the old’, presumably – a rather unsatisfactory catch-all term for the history of everything up to but not including this supposed arrival of the entirely new, but let us pass over this issue for the time being).

Peter Gammond has summed up the basic problem nicely: ‘As for ragtime – nothing ever comes completely out of the blue and it must have been created from existing materials.’²³ For Gammond, ‘there is no great mystery as to where ragtime’s melodic and rhythmic characteristics came from’: the obvious source, he asserts, was ‘the traditional folk music of the slave plantation . . . which had been printed as the popular and minstrel songs of Negro composers . . . in the decades of the nineteenth century before the rise of ragtime’.²⁴ Thus, ‘Probabl...