ABSTRACT
A similar situation prevails in academic analyses and histories of pop music in the U.S. and the UK. According to the most influential studies, written chiefly by leftist white males, the great moments in the history of modern Anglo-American pop music are variously said to be: (1) the emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1950s; (2) the Beatlesled “English invasion” of 1963-1964 and the subsequent growth of youth protest rock in the 1960s; (3) punk and post-punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s; (4) the “new authenticity” of the 1980s; (5) techno-dance music. The various figures who epitomize oppositional pop culture are: the Sex Pistols for Greil Marcus; the Talking Heads or the punks for Dick Hebdige; Bruce Springsteen for Lawrence Grossberg; the “deconstructivists” Public Image Ltd and the Gang of Four for Iain Chambers; high-tech dance-pop artists New Order and S’Express for Terry Bloomfield-all white, U.S. or UK, artists.1 While the major academic rock critics usually acknowledge black musicians’ essential contributions to pop and occasionally write sympathetic and informative accounts of black artists,2 their tendency is still to treat black music as an influence, a source for white musicians to mine. Thus Elvis’ greatness is said to stem from his creative and combustive fusion of black rhythm ’n’ blues with hillbilly music; the Rolling Stones were fueled by the driving beats of Chuck Berry and Chicago blues; the genius of the English punk aesthetic is that it constituted a white “translation” of the black “ethnicity” manifested in reggae;3 the Talking Heads’ signal contribution is their imaginative amalgamation of funk and Afropop with the quirky sensibilities of new wave; and so on. What defines the great and progressive breaks in these narratives of postwar pop music are the moments when white artists tapped into the energy and innovation of black musical forms, harnessed them for commercial success, and “integrated” them into the white pop music arena.4 In such accounts, it is almost as if white pop artists make “culture” out of black musicians’ “nature.”5 The “home” turf from which these critics theorize oppositional culture, therefore, is a white cultural milieu. As Simon Frith observes, “what we’re dealing with in cultural studies of popular music…are
academic not working-class fantasies…[and] what’s at stake in such writings are what it means to be male, to be white, to be middle-class.”6
