Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 21, Issue 4, Pages 427–439

REVIEWS

Marcyliena Morgan. The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 227 pp. $74.95 (cloth)/$21.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Adam Bradley University of Colorado

Very little about hip hop seems underground anymore. As the lingua franca of global youth culture, it is nearly inescapable. During the last thirty years, hip hop has not only remixed popular music; it has restyled language, fashion, even politics. Its best-known artists, from Jay-Z to Kanye West to Common, are not just performers but public figures and de facto ambassadors of popular culture. Despite this exposure, hip hop is often misunderstood. Criticized and caricatured, commercialized and commodified, the “real” hip hop is sometimes hard to find. In her new book, fittingly titled The Real Hiphop, Marcyliena Morgan argues that the true spirit of the culture still resides underground. Morgan, a professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the executive director of the Hiphop Archive, is by inclination and avocation a conservator of the culture. The Real Hiphop is born of her two-decade connection with a hip-hop institution that began as an after-hours gathering in an inner city Los Angeles health food store called the Good Life and went on to become a fixture on the underground scene known simply as Project Blowed. Project Blowed emerged in the early 1990s as a counterpoint to the more public face of West Coast hip hop, the so-called gangsta rap of artists like N.W.A. A loose collective of MCs that at various times included such underground icons as Aceyalone, Medusa, and Jurassic Five, Project Blowed constituted a kind of “counterpublic,” an effort born from within hip hop to resist the banalization and commodification of the culture. As different as Project Blowed’sMCs were from N.W.A.,they shared a common geography (Compton) and a common language of expression (the beats and rhymes of hip hop). “The underground began in earnest,” Morgan writes, “when hiphop was on the verge of losing its place as a socially relevant arts movement. It did not resurrect itself outside of other styles of hiphop but rather in discourse with them” (189).

C 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 428 Reviews

Morgan resists the inclination among some hip hop scholars to draw clear lines of demarcation between hip hop’s “good” and “bad,” between the conscious and the commercial. Instead, she makes a case for how the constellation of underground MCs that would come to orbit around Project Blowed partook of the same spirit of resistance embodied in Ice Cube’s memorable line from NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police”: “police think/they have the authority to kill a minority.” Regardless of the progressive tendencies on display at Project Blowed, Morgan shows that these did not inoculate it from the arbitrary exercise of power. In one of the book’scentral moments, Morgan describes a large-scale police raid on the Project Blowed performance space. Gangsta or not, she suggests, hip hop has always been Public Enemy #1. The Real Hiphop channels the generative spirit of Project Blowed in the language of academic discourse. As a self-described “message from the underground” (15), the book weaves together three strains of analysis: ethnographic study of the symbolic and tangible import of language, close consideration of social and cultural implications of hip hop, and strong claims for hip hop’s capacity to stimulate social and political movements. Morgan’s audacious aim for her book is that it might help foment a revolution in academia by inspiring it to adopt the principles and values of hip hop culture. Specifically, she calls for the “issues, ideologies, and love of knowledge and sense of fairness that is fundamental to hiphop culture to become part of academic culture” (Acknowledgments). Although this will seem sensible to some, it may sound absurd to those familiar with the sustained academic critiques of hip hop’sfailings, specifically when it comes to matters of gender and sexuality. Far from letting hip hop off the hook for its wrongs, however, Morgan acknowledges that such destructive forces are an inseparable part of the culture. The difference, however, is that she insists upon hip hop’s own strident critiques of these very ills. This strain of resistance is most apparent in hip hop’s homegrown responses to misogyny and sexism. “Most successful female MCs,” she points out, “recognize that for them the only place where they can negotiate race, class, gender, and sexuality with relative freedom is the hiphop world. It is not an ideal space but rather one populated by those searching for discourse that confronts power” (159). Thus, while Morgan is no apologist for hip hop, she is certainly an ardent and enthusiastic advocate for what she believes hip hop culture gets right. In particular, she celebrates hip hop in all its forms—as lyrics, as music, as dance, as visual art, and beyond—as a “space of hard work, skill, approval, and dreams” (5). As the creation of young black and brown men Reviews 429 and women, many of whom come from lower socioeconomic conditions, it has crafted a counternarrative to the public demonization directed toward them from without. Hip hop is very much about aesthetics and expression, but Morgan sees it as something more; it is a force that “redraws the urban grid and transforms ideal spaces into problematic ones and decaying spaces into fertile, creative landscapes” (5). Although this may sound grand and idealistic, perhaps just an empty rhetorical flourish, her case study of Project Blowed reveals the truth behind the claim. Perhaps most revealing for those unfamiliar with hip hop culture may be the book’s third chapter, “Thursday Night at Project Blowed,” in which Morgan takes us into the actual performance space, chronicling every nuance of sight and sound (and even smell). She reveals the collaborative and competitive relationship among artists as well as between the MC and the crowd. Anyone who has ever been to an open mic night or an underground artist showcase can vouch for the care with which Morgan has rendered the details of the experience. We witness her here as both ethnographer and hip hop head, a chronicler and a creator of the culture. Even by itself, this chapter makes The Real Hiphop an important contribution to the growing body of literature seeking to move the public discourse on hip hop beyond the trite assumptions of such spectacles as CNN’s 2007 “Hip Hop: Art or Poison?” Morgan rejects this binary, insisting upon a clear-eyed view of the contingent relationships and circumstances out of which hip hop is born. The book’s occasional missteps and excesses are almost always a consequence of Morgan’slove and respect for hip hop culture and its creators. This leads her at times to make claims that neither her book nor, likely, the underground movement she describes can support. For instance, she begins Chapter One with the claim that the hip hop workshop at Project Blowed was “one of the most profound commentaries of the last quarter of the twenty-first [sic] century” (21). This grand claim seems antithetical to the very spirit of the enterprise. Yet her point holds that something significant and revelatory was going on in Leimert Park in the last decade of the twentieth century that, when studied, offers deep insight into the function of the broader culture and, perhaps, promises direction for the future. To Morgan, the art form is hiphop—not hip hop. She connects the words to signal that “the words hip and hop are not related to the meaning of hiphop culture” (197). This gesture may strike some as a bit contrived and showy, but it nonetheless underscores the book’s broader commitment to remaking the image of the art. The Real Hiphop comes in at a modest 193 pages; one can only imagine what Morgan held back from 430 Reviews her many years of notes, observations, and interviews. Although we are treated to lengthy lyrical transcriptions from such legendary LA underground artists as Aceyalone and Medusa, one wishes at times for a more sustained engagement with these artists in their own words. Whether we call it hip hop or hiphop, the culture Morgan describes is one of standards and values, not of swagger and bling as the popular projections of it would lead one to believe. As Morgan notes near the book’s conclusion, “One of hiphop’s lasting contributions may be that it has made linguistics and the power of discourse visible and exciting” (191). More than that, hip hop enforces rigorous standards of craft, a constantly evolving set of aesthetic principles and values that demand much of the performer and something of the audience as well. Although the public image of hip hop culture is often one of conspicuous consumption, disregard for public norms, and brusque indifference, the reality is vastly more complex. Hip hop demands “attention to the art and role of practice, critical evaluation, and performance in order to develop artistic and technical skills. Evaluation in the underground is a thing of great value” (190). The Real Hiphop is a book written with the eyes of an ethnographer, the ears of a true hip hop head, and the love of a scholar whose commitment to her subject runs broad and deep. By chronicling the history of an unfairly neglected underground music scene and by championing the potentially transformative influence of a popular music genre more broadly upon the academy, it offers a significant contribution to popular music studies.

Rustin, Nichole T., and Sherrie Tucker, eds. Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. $94.95 (cloth)/$26.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Rob Wallace University of California

Performance and gender have been closely intertwined in academic discourse since at least the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). Yet, as co-editors Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker point out in their introduction to Big Ears, gender is still “a register that is particularly untheorized in jazz studies” (1). Not surprisingly, most readers will probably assume that this volume is devoted to a feminist perspective on jazz, or a focus on “women-in-jazz”—a category that Sherrie Tucker has deftly critiqued in her 2004 essay “Bordering on Community: Improvising Women Reviews 431

Improvising Women-in-Jazz” (see Fischlin and Heble). Big Ears,however, makes an impact not only because it highlights numerous issues connected to women, feminism, and sexism in jazz culture, but also because it attempts to fully address gender, per se. This is significant in scholarship about a music that is highly gendered in all sorts of ways, and in which the performance of gender has ongoing implications for culture at large. From early French accounts of Josephine Baker, to Norman Mailer’s “White [Male] Negro,” to Wynton Marsalis’s recent album He and She, gender in jazz has been manipulated, transformed, and otherwise performed in ways that we are only now beginning to fully understand. As the editors note in their introduction, “it seem[s] no longer true to say that jazz studies lack[s] scholarship that incorporate[s] gender as a category of analysis or a feminist perspective” (3). Big Ears nevertheless fills a gap in jazz studies: it is a scholarly book offering myriad perspectives on jazz via the category of gender. Again, this is markedly different from the important work done by jazz critics and scholars focusing on women jazz musicians, mainly in the form of biographical and historical projects. Big Ears builds on that work, but like a good improvising ensemble, it takes the tradition and makes it new. Perhaps most importantly, Big Ears provides a pedagogical tool for jazz educators, who, as Rustin and Tucker state, might find “such a volume ...useful in jazz studies seminars that always seemed to be struggling with gender as ‘lack’ in jazz studies, when gender was included at all” (3). And as Tucker and Rustin emphasize, “In this volume, incorporating a gendered analysis means a number of things. But one thing it most certainly does not mean is to listen exclusively to jazz records by women on week 10 of the class” (9). The wide-ranging essays included in the book—both in terms of historical scope and subject matter—confirm that the study of gender in jazz is crucial for any scholarly account of the music, in that gender is always imbricated with the other facets of jazz which have become so important to jazz studies: race, class, sexuality, nationality, and the sonic aspects of the music itself (among other topics). While Rustin and Tucker point out that their book “is not, however, to be mistaken as the ‘birth’ of gender and jazz studies,” one of the volume’s most significant features is their brief summary of earlier work on jazz and gender (10). Their introduction serves as a reminder of the work that the subsequent essays draw on, and how—like women jazz musicians themselves—the study of gender and jazz has been present for a long time. Several of those foundational texts mentioned in the introduction are by authors featured in Big Ears, including Ingrid Monson and Tucker herself. 432 Reviews

Equally compelling, however, are the lesser-known scholars included in the book, and I would like to focus on three of those authors for the remainder of this review. Lara Pellegrinelli’s essay opens the book, and while “lesser-known scholar” might be a slightly inaccurate description of Pellegrinelli—who can be heard regularly on National Public Radio, reporting on various musical and artistic issues—her essay provides a prime but infrequently acknowledged example of how our gendered mythology of jazz has led to the neglect and erasure of important artists and practices that created what we now call “jazz.” In “Separated at ‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz,” Pellegrinelli expertly details how singing and instrumental music have been implicitly and explicitly split apart in jazz historiography—and subsequently in the masculine-coded ways in which musicians themselves conceive of their own aesthetic and social prestige:

The parentage of jazz ...can be read as symbolically gendered: the blues is feminine, a natural product of the untrained voice associated with the body and the sexuality of its performers, whereas ragtime is masculine, associated with instruments as tools and technical skill .... Singing either gives birth to the music or perhaps midwifes it, but it does not continue to move forward as part of typical progress- oriented narratives. (34)

Pellegrinelli’s brief and incisive essay is an excellent first entry in a book filled with historical and theoretical analysis deserving wider circulation in general cultural studies. Another particularly illuminating piece in this regard is Tracy McMullen’s essay, “Identity for Sale: Glenn Miller, Wynton Marsalis, and Cultural Replay in Music.” Of all the articles in Big Ears, McMullen’s is perhaps the most theoretically oriented, developing a complex analysis of a trend that the author dubs “replay.” Replay, as McMullen humorously defines, is “a recreation of a past moment that then becomes bounded—a frozen ‘hunk o’ time’” (137). The essay analyzes specific instances of replay in big-band tribute concerts and in the jazz-canon-formation activities of Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In both instances, the role (and role-playing) of gender guides McMullen’sreflections on how jazz history and cultural memory are often in conflict beneath the surface of feel- good nostalgia, as evidenced by the presence of women in the Miller tribute band (but not in the original) and the lack of women in Lincoln Center’s Reviews 433

Armstrong tribute (despite the contributions of Lil Hardin Armstrong in the original ensembles and recordings). McMullen’s piece blends sophisticated thinking with witty prose, an approach that itself exemplifies the kinds of potentially liberatory agency that improvised music—as opposed to replay, which merely repeats itself—can offer. Anthropologist Joao˜ H. Costa Vargas’s essay, “Exclusion, Openness, and Utopia in Black Male Performance at the World Stage Jazz Jam Sessions,” offers one the book’s multiple perspectives on masculinity in jazz. The World Stage is a central Los Angeles performance space known for its legendary jam sessions, which often featured drummer (and cofounder of the venue) Billy Higgins, who passed away in 2001. Vargas details how Higgins and other musicians and community members associated with the World Stage strove to maintain an “ethics of openness” amidst an often sexist, classist, and racist social environment (339). As a male jazz musician myself, I was particularly impressed with how Vargas, a participant-observer in the Los Angeles jazz scene during the late 1990s, navigates the troubling aspects of masculine jazz culture while at the same time illustrating the potentially utopian power inherent in the best jazz throughout the music’s history. I do not have room here to discuss the intricacies of every essay, each of which deserves careful attention. Such a ground-breaking volume risks being criticized for not including enough or not living up to the expectations and anticipations of scholars already aware of previous work in the field. Because more and more archival material is being made available via the Internet, one advantage of the multiple perspectives found in Big Ears is that readers can use these essays as springboards for further investigation; this seems particularly relevant given the wealth of historical material uncovered and recovered in Big Ears. For scholars of popular music not directly associated with jazz, Big Ears will prove relevant due to the way in which the disparate essay topics demonstrate the widespread cultural impact of jazz from its earliest origins to the present day: jazz is represented as popular music and as a source of pop cultural aesthetics. The flappers, gangsters, vamps, cats, chicks, and other gendered bodies in jazz have become so embedded in our cultural psyche that it is easy to forget their connections to jazz culture. Clearly, gender plays a central role in how jazz was and is disseminated as both musical genre and multifaceted cultural symbol. Some readers will surely find that their particular interest or favorite musician is underrepresented, but suffice it to say that Big Ears lives up to its title, which alludes to an ubiquitous idiomatic expression in jazz. As Rustin and Tucker 434 Reviews explain: “Players and listeners ...with ‘big ears’ are equipped to hear and engage complexity as it happens” (1). The authors in Big Ears represent a group of scholars willing to listen to jazz culture in ways which some of us might have missed or need to hear again.

Works Cited Fischlin, Daniel, and Ajay Heble, eds. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Annie J. Randall. Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. xv + 219. $24.95 (hardcover).

Reviewed by Patricia Juliana Smith Hofstra University

In December 1998, shortly after Dusty Springfield had been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and three months before her death, Robert Hilburn considered whether certain new inductees were “worthy or not” of this honor. He judged Dusty a “question mark” inadequate to inhabit the rock pantheon. Although she “showed the potential to rank as one of the all-time great soul singers,” aside from the legendary Dusty in Memphis “Springfield seemed to be searching for most of her career for the right material or producer, sometimes both. It left her one step short of pop’s top plateau.”1 Such an assessment, condescending as it is, is hardly surprising, given what Annie J. Randall identifies as the male-centered “rockist narrative,” a “shared perspective ...that “privileges ‘rock’ over ‘pop’ and ascribes artistic, historic worthiness to the former while deeming the latter merely superficial” (70, 180n1). In Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods, the author offers a cogent re-evaluation of perhaps the most significant pop vocalist that Britain has produced. Problematizing the assessments of Hilburn and his ilk, Randall questions the primacy of Dusty in Memphis as the high point of her career and the validity of the “blue-eyed soul” label attached to her as a result of the album. Instead, she argues that the music Dusty created should be seen as a unique transatlantic cultural phenomenon amalgamating diverse elements of Britpop, European popular and classical musical traditions, and American soul and pop to create what she calls the “pop aria.” By going against the grain of previous criticism, Randall provides a fresh and probably Reviews 435 more accurate view of who Dusty Springfield was, what she accomplished, and why it matters. Since her death, Springfield has been the subject of a considerable number of widely diverse volumes devoted to her life and career, ranging from biography (Penny Valentine and Vicki Wickham’s Dancing with Demons) to reference sources (Paul Howes’s The Complete Dusty Springfield), to highly personal and subjective musings (Warren Zanes’s Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis). Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods is undoubtedly the most astute and most unique of the lot. Randall’s lively and elegant study is neither biography, nor catalogue, nor fan piece; it is a serious academic study of Springfield’s recordings and performances from 1963 to 1970, the peak years of her career. Rather than approaching her subject from a purely musicological standpoint, Randall considers the various historical and cultural contexts that shaped Springfield’s artistry by dividing her work into four seemingly disparate but nevertheless congruent sections: “Dusty’s Hair,” an examination of the visual and cultural aspects of Springfield as a popular icon; “Migrations of Soul,” an exploration of Springfield’s collaborations with African-American singer Madeline Bell and their respective ventures into an intercultural pop idiom; “Soul + Melodrama = The 1960s Pop Aria,” a detailed reading of specific recordings that call upon European operatic and theatrical traditions; and, finally, “Dusty as Discourse,” a discussion of such vital yet frequently dismissed aspects of Springfield’s art, persona, and legacy as gender and sexual identity, fan discourses, and the generally unspoken queer rhetoric of camp. The first chapter, “Dusty’sHair,” examines far more than the singer’s iconic beehive. Randall’s intent is to focus on “her sound in tandem with her look,” suggesting that the visual aspect of pop music culture is hardly an inconsequential one, “given pop music’s strong visual component and constant traffic in culturally coded signs” (14). The plain but talented teenager Mary O’Brien created the pop icon Dusty Springfield, a truly postmodern narrative of self-invention as simulacrum and pastiche, “pasted together” from such “blond glamour queens [as] ...Brigitte Bardot, Kim Novak, Monica Vitti, [and] Catherine Deneuve.” The result was far from the “wholesome femininity of American girl groups”—itself nothing more than an artifice—but instead “a camp version of feminine display that drew attention to its artificiality and ...its own obvious fakeness” (16). While female fans were generally “notoriously apathetic” to female pop stars, Dusty inspired a vast female following who imitated her look as an early mode of “girl power” (16). Dusty’s visual persona, an element 436 Reviews in the “spectacular collision ...at the intersection of gender, race, nation and sexuality” contributed to making her “one of the most fascinating pop phenomena of her era” (18). But while the ingenious and liberating aspects involved in this self-reinvention are empowering from a female perspective, such an extravagant display of unambiguous female artificiality flies in the face of critics who privilege a certain masculinist authenticity, which undoubtedly contributed to Springfield’s relative marginalization in popular music discourse over the greater part of the past five decades. The bundle of contradictions comprising Dusty Springfield was nevertheless a palpable part of her appeal, making her the “Queen of the Mods,” as she was dubbed in the mid-1960s. Much of the first two chapters concerns Springfield’s interchanges with African-American performers, particularly the Motown acts (whom she single-handedly introduced to British audiences) and the gospel-trained Bell. Using Henry Louis Gates’s concept of “signifyin(g)” as a point of departure, Randall coins the term “Dustifying” to explain the manner in which Springfield derived material and stylistic mannerisms from a broad spectrum of sources and “crafted a singular musical identity” (28). She assesses the artistic collaboration between Springfield and Bell to illustrate the larger phenomenon of transatlantic cultural exchange between America and Britain (and, by extension, Europe), thus correcting the notion that Dusty was merely an appropriator of African American music who used it solely for her own career purposes. The exchange was, in fact, mutual: “While Madeline absorbed Britpop, Dusty absorbed gospel; both landed in the uncharted waters of an emerging transatlantic pop that was neither one nor the other” (36). Bell, for her own part, established herself in Britpop as not only one of the most sought-after backing vocalists in Britain, but also a solo performer, and the lead singer of Blue Mink. The latter portion of the chapter is potentially controversial, as it goes against the established narrative of Dusty as soul singer with Dusty in Memphis as her masterpiece. Springfield came to Memphis with hopes of recording a true “soul” album. She was used to exerting a certain amount of artistic control (as the uncredited producer of many of her own discs) within a highly ordered environment, far from the improvisatory ambience of the Atlantic Records studio in which Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Arif Mardin called all the shots. The results were mutually antagonistic. Randall delineates underlying gender issues that have rarely been addressed forthrightly; namely, that Springfield, a courageous gender bender vocally, was compromised and feminized in the recording process. She queries the Reviews 437

“mysteries” surrounding the seeming sexual subjugation barely beneath the surface of the album’s affect: “Why is Dusty singing here predominantly in her upper register, when ...[she] preferred her voice in a lower range? Why did she choose songs that took her voice out of its customary soul placement when the project was supposed to be a definitive soul album?” Nor is voice placement the only issue: “The collection’s general air of supplication and abjection, coupled with ...her soft voice, seems strangely out of character with Dusty’s carefully crafted persona .... In the near-total absence of her chest voice, the underlying strength of Dusty’s persona is missing; the album’s abjection thus seems more a permanent character trait than a temporary slump from which the protagonist shall recover” (66). The result is an album that “seem[s] to be an inexplicable act of self-erasure” (66), and is it hard to dispute that Dusty in Memphis, for all the accolades heaped upon it since, was a commercial failure that marked the beginning of the end of Springfield’s brilliant career. Considering the well-documented tension in the studio, it is perhaps remarkable that the album turned out to be the extraordinary work it is. Randall’s critique of the issues informing this now-canonical recording will undoubtedly meet with resistance from some, yet she presents a necessary counter-narrative to the mystique that has attached to Dusty in Memphis. If Dusty in Memphis and the concept of “white soul” are arguably the most discussed elements of Springfield’s career, the third chapter addresses a salient aspect of her art that has received little serious critical attention. Randall defines the “pop aria” as “a short-lived, rarefied genre laden with musical and emotional bombast that can only be described as histrionic and shamelessly manipulative.” With “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” as its paradigm, the genre “expose[s] emotions that we have been taught to hide—jealousy, rage, lust, self-pity—and ...express[es] them openly with a high degree of theatricality and morning-after guilt” (71). What Springfield brought to this genre—which obviously falls well outside the rock idiom—is a fusion of pop, soul, and European melodrama, the latter derived from both the highest of “high” art (opera) and the lowest of “low” art (soap operas), all compressed into a three-minute package as an artistic commodity. Selecting nine songs from Dusty’s repertory, Randall subjects each of these “arias” to exacting musicological study. Taking the reader through each song (helpfully including minute and second markings), she demonstrates precisely how Dusty created emotional affects—by means of vocal inflections, orchestral arrangement, engagement with lyrics—with a clarity that makes these analyses accessible to those without extensive 438 Reviews musical training. She deftly explains, for example, how in “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten,” a richly textured piece full of dramatic shifts in mode and tempo, Springfield uncannily conveys a lover’s rapid mood fluctuations between optimism and pessimism. The author also takes on the challenge of unpacking the enigmatic “Summer Is Over,” a song unique among Springfield’s recordings in its complete lack of personal pronouns or references to a relationship. She notes that “not until the song’s bitter end does she finally and very reluctantly concede that summer (and whatever it represents) really is over” (87), which is probably as far as one can delve into the meaning of a song too apocalyptically melodramatic to be about nothing more than a change in the weather. Her discussions of the unusual structure of “All I See Is You”and the “tortured, tormented, and cheated” vocal of “I Wish I’d Never Loved You” also go far in explaining how Dusty skillfully moved her audiences. If one were to quibble with any element of this particular portion of the book, it would be the choice of some examples. Certain Springfield arias omitted here (e.g., “All Cried Out,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” “If You Go Away”) beg for the same close reading. The chapter comes to grand finale with a breakdown of all the parts of “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” that goes far beyond the previous analyses, aligning the lyrics with stills from a video performance of the song alongside nineteenth-century illustrations of stock dramatic poses. As incongruent as this juxtaposition might seem, it effectively demonstrates how carefully and deliberately Springfield arranged all aspects of her performance. The final chapter addresses a variety of discourses that have become part of Springfield’s legacy since the 1960s. The most significant of these is undoubtedly camp, a dangerously slippery rhetoric that for some is inseparable from gay identity, a matter that many of Dusty’s admirers remain reluctant to discuss. While undeniably present throughout Dusty’s self-presentation, camp is curiously absent in most critical assessments of her career. Philip Core’s famous definition of camp as “the lie that tells the truth” (16) is nonetheless an apt summation of Dusty Springfield; in her public persona, she “chose ‘none of the above’ from the usual gay/straight, black/white, masculine/feminine binaries that structured the 1960s bourgeois milieu” (143). Randall concludes by positioning Springfield as a sign of contradiction between her “consistent undermining of conventional authenticity markers, and her fans’ equally consistent perception of emotional authenticity” (153). To embrace this contradiction is to comprehend the importance of being Dusty Springfield. In delineating the twisted strands of diverse discourses that have attached themselves to Reviews 439 her heritage, Annie Randall has provided the most definitive study thus far of one of the most unique and influential singers of the past fifty years and has given her the serious critical attention she richly deserves.

Note 1. Robert Hilburn, “Commentary: Listening to the Rock Hall Honorees— Worthy or Not.” Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec 1998, F17. Copyright of Journal of Popular Music Studies is the property of Blackwell Publishing Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.