RT75905_half title page 3/27/06 1:17 PM Page 1 Voicing the Popular MMiddleton_RT75905_C000.inddiddleton_RT75905_C000.indd iiii 33/22/2006/22/2006 99:53:42:53:42 AAMM RT75905_title page 3/27/06 1:15 PM Page 1 Voicing the Popular On the Subjects of Popular Music Richard Middleton New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business RT75905_Discl.fm Page 1 Thursday, March 30, 2006 3:37 PM “In Excelsis Deo (Gloria).” Written by Patti Smith. © 1975 Linda Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” Words by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Jerome Kern. © 1927 Universal Polygram. “Ol’ Man River.” Words by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Jerome Kern. © 1927 Universal Polygram. “There’ll Be Some Changes Made.” Words by Billy Higgins, music by Benton Overstreet. © 1921 E. B. Marks Music Corp, Herman Derewski Music Pub Co Ltd, London WC2H OQY (for Europe). Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue 2 Park Square New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Richard Middleton Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97589-1 (Hardcover) 0-415-97590-5 (Softcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97589-6 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-97590-2 (Softcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2005031321 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Middleton, Richard. Voicing the popular : on the subjects of popular music / by Richard Middleton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97589-1 (hb) -- ISBN 0-415-97590-5 (pb) 1. Popular music--History and criticism. 2. Music--Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. ML3470.M53 2006 781.6409--dc22 2005031321 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group and the Routledge Web site at is the Academic Division of Informa plc. http://www.routledge-ny.com Contents Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 “We’re Low, We’re Low, We’re Very, Very Low” Chapter 2 Th rough a Mask Darkly 37 Voices of Black Folk Chapter 3 Appropriating the Phallus? 91 Female Voices and the Law-of-the-Father Chapter 4 Memories Are Made of Th is 137 On the Subjects of Repetition Chapter 5 Th e Real Th ing? 199 Th e Specter of Authenticity Notes 247 Bibliography 299 Song Index 311 General Index 315 v MMiddleton_RT75905_C000.inddiddleton_RT75905_C000.indd v 33/22/2006/22/2006 99:53:43:53:43 AAMM MMiddleton_RT75905_C000.inddiddleton_RT75905_C000.indd vvii 33/22/2006/22/2006 99:53:43:53:43 AAMM Acknowledgments Much of the work for this book was done during a year’s research leave in 2003–04. Th is was funded partly by the University of Newcastle, partly by the Arts and Humanities Research Board of Great Britain, and I am grateful to both. Th e research benefi ted greatly from the effi ciency and helpfulness of staff in the Robinson Library at the University of Newcastle, and in the British Library in London (including the National Sound Archive). I owe specifi c debts, for assistance in chasing up material or references, to Paul Attinello, Helen Barlow, Jan Fairley, Jim Garretts, and Trevor Herbert. David de la Haye kindly put the music examples through the mysterious processes of Sibelius notation soft ware. Parts of the book were presented, in earlier versions, to seminars in New- castle, Liverpool and Berlin, to a British Forum for Ethnomusicology confer- ence at Goldsmiths, London in 2003, to the International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference at Montreal in 2003, and to the Nordic Musicology Conference at Helsinki in 2004. My thanks to all participants for comments and discussion. A diff erent version of part of Chapter 1 will be published in the journal Popular Music in 2006, and I am grateful to the editors and their readers for comments on this material. A diff erent version of part of Chapter 5 is included in Frispel: Festskrift till Olle Edström, edited by Alf Björnberg, Mona Hallin, Lars Lilliestam and Ola Stockfelt (Göteborgs Universitet, 2005). If my last book, Studying Popular Music, was in large part a product of my time at the Open University, this one is my “Newcastle University book.” It is diffi cult to fi nd words to express what I owe to colleagues at the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle since I moved there in 1998. (“International Centre,” by the way, although an accurate enough label in many ways, is neo-Blairite waffl e for what was previously a “Music vii MMiddleton_RT75905_C000.inddiddleton_RT75905_C000.indd vviiii 33/22/2006/22/2006 99:53:43:53:43 AAMM viii • Acknowledgments Department”; but “departments” are so last year.) Certainly the book would be very diff erent without the impact of their eye- and ear-opening intellectual companionship and the benefi ts of working with them in such a creative and collegial setting. If I single out Ian Biddle, David Clarke, Bennett Hogg, and Goff redo Plastino, it is because they work in areas close to mine and I owe them quite specifi c debts; but I would want to acknowledge the profound eff ects that all ICMuS staff —and students too—have had upon my think- ing, oft en to an extent and in ways, I suspect, beyond anything they realize. Particular thanks are due, too, to our two Visiting Professors, Phil Bohlman and Larry Kramer, who have read or heard several parts of the book, and whose own work and presence in Newcastle have been an inspiration. I hope the book will be seen as a component in a broader scholarly, pedagogical and creative enterprise which is taking shape at Newcastle in what I believe is a quite remarkable way (I can say this in a semi-detached spirit since, as I write, I have just retired). Th is debt sits at the tip of a pyramid whose foundations go deep and wide. My most obvious intellectual obligations are documented in the endnotes; but who could draw, in all their detail, the full dimensions of his biographi- cal intertext? I have been thinking a lot recently about the signifi cance of such interconnections and dependencies. It is a signifi cance germane to the politics of this book. At a time when the word “socialism” has been consigned to museums or reduced to distorting mythologies, many people—and not exclusively the young—need reminding that our lives actually contain im- portant pockets and models of socialistic practice. To adapt Marx: we may not know it but we are doing it. While academic and intellectual life is of course oft en sullied by petty competition, egotism, and assertion of property rights, there is here as well, at best, a collective network—a commons of the mind—within which we not only stand on the shoulders of giants but work with them daily. Given the reifying eff ects of “isms” and “ologies,” and the totalizing “solutions” to which they have oft en led, perhaps we would indeed do better to put the word “socialism” to one side, look to and engage with the multifarious desires teeming around the political unconscious, and concentrate on the laborious critical work of transforming practice in specifi c spheres. As important an arena for this as any is the home. My largest debt of all is to my dear wife and partner, Jane, who has responded with good humor (and sometimes with humor) to an assortment of oft en bizarre ideas, sprung on her at the least predictable moments (including the middle of the night); at the same time, getting on with her own work, which has probably achieved more good than I could ever claim. MMiddleton_RT75905_C000.inddiddleton_RT75905_C000.indd vviiiiii 33/22/2006/22/2006 99:53:43:53:43 AAMM CHAPTER 1 Introduction “We’re Low, We’re Low, We’re Very, Very Low” “Th e voice of the people is the voice of God:” so proclaimed the British Chartists in the revolutionary year of 1848.1 Th e singularity of the gram- mar — one god, one people — obscures the political reality of contestation: where was this voice to be located, who owned it? While for many Chartists the slogan no doubt simply implied that “God is on our side” — a position memorably satirized a century later by Bob Dylan — or perhaps that democ- racy can claim divine inspiration, readers today can hardly fail to note the motif of usurpation: the authority vested in what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the “Name-of-the-Father” is claimed by a new god, the People, a transposition concretely pursued by many post-Chartist socialists and communists.2 But not always with one voice; nor, oft en, without drowning out alternative sounds. Who, then, is entitled to this voice of the people? And what do they have to tell us? Ernest Jones, the “Chartist poet laureate,” was one who certainly laid claim to it, for instance, in the political soirées (or “evenings for the people”) he organized in London in 1856, at which such pieces of his as “Th e Song of the Lower Classes” were sung by his composer friend John Lowry.3 We plough and sow — we’re so very, very low Th at we delve in the dirty clay, Till we bless the plain — with the golden grain, And the vale with the fragrant hay.