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Popular Music, Race and Identity

Jon Stratton

Introduction and popular music is nothing if not modern. In this chapter I will discuss the history of the Race has been central to the discourse of idea of race, its connections with the state popular music: to its performance, reception and with popular music as a part of national and, indeed, to the ways that popular music cultures. For reasons of space I will mainly and its genres have been thought about. This focus on the Anglophone world. I will dis- is most obvious in the US where the distinc- cuss race and popular music in the US and in tion between ‘black’ and ‘white’ music is Britain, and I will also have something to say generally acknowledged. As we shall see, about the ways that American black music this distinction closely relates to the prob- has been utilised in countries with British lematic position of African Americans within colonial histories, such as South Africa and the American nation-state. The nation-state, Australia. as will be discussed, legitimated itself in In 2001, Ronald Radano and Philip terms of an homogeneous population. Bohlman published an edited collection titled Nation-states that had large populations of Music and the Racial Imagination. Radano people identified as different who it was and Bohlman began their Introduction by accepted were exceptions. This means that echoing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s African Americans have always posed a very Communist Manifesto but also pointing out particular problem for the American nation- that it is no longer the spectre of commu- state. However, race has been a key element nism that haunts Europe. Rather, breaking in the formation of popular music every- new ground in musicology, they asserted where. This is because, as we shall see, race that: ‘A specter lurks in the house of music, has been a fundamental element in identity and it goes by the name of race’ (Radano construction throughout the modern world & Bohlman, 2000, p. 1). Writing from an

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American perspective, Radano and Bohlman argument holds much truth for popular music emphasise that this spectre is not simply too, as their calling to mind of music identi- ‘black music’, not a specific racialised musi- fied as African-American signals – though it cal form. They explain: is the case, as we shall see, that there has been an increasing awareness in popular music The specter of race is not the edifice of ‘black studies of the racialised aspects of diverse music’ to which the musical disciplines, when acknowledging the racial, reflexively turn. It is, popular musics. However, it is only since the rather, the ideological supposition that informs this 1990s that academics focusing on popular reflex. (p. 1) music have begun to engage critically with race as a formative category in the discursive As we shall see, because of the racialised articulation of popular music. As the quota- way in which African-American people have tion above from Goldberg indicates, race has been positioned in the US nation-state and become accepted and taken for granted as a therefore society, since its establishment in way of distinguishing groups of people across the American War of Independence, music the world of modernity: Europe and the (post) racially defined as African-American has colonial outposts of its nation-states, the always been identified exceptionally in racial US and, increasingly, all the parts of the terms. Radano and Bohlman are making a world impacted by Euro-American culture. more profound, and more general, point; that Indeed, race is a key element in the establish- music is always deeply imbricated with race. ment of the discourse of the nation-state. At As they go on to write: ‘Race lives on in the the same time, race, as a cultural construct house of music because music is saturated which can be traced back to the sixteenth with racial stuff’ (p. 3). Whether in its pro- century, has a deeply imbricated relationship duction or in its reception, and regardless of with popular music. the racial identification of the composers or performers of the music, music is always already permeated with the ideological assumptions that are associated with the What Introductory Texts Say lived experience of race. This is not just true of the US. It is a characteristic of music in the About Race and Popular Music modern world – that is, the world of modernity. David Theo Goldberg has argued that: In light of the ongoing importance of race in ‘If premodernity lacked any conceiving of everyday society, it is surprising that a criti- the differences between human beings as cal understanding of race has only relatively racial differences modernity comes increas- recently become more central in discussions ingly to be defined by and through race’ of popular music. Simon Frith’s foundational (1993, p. 24). Race, Goldberg is suggesting The Sociology of Rock, published in 1978, here, is such a pervasive topos in the modern revised for the US edition as Sound Effects: world that it may be taken as one of moder- Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ nity’s defining qualities. At the same time, as Roll, which was published in 1981, has no Radano and Bohlman suggest, continuing section on race and race is only mentioned in their critique of musicology, music identified a few places. Certainly it is true that this was as European – and they are thinking particu- a British book and that there have been larly of classical music – goes unmarked, American books that address music by while non-European music is racially African Americans, but it is still the case that marked. It becomes the provenance of ethno- there is a history of music by people in musicology (2000, p. 2). Britain identified as black, which Frith did While Radano and Bohlman were con- not acknowledge. In the American situation, cerned with musicology, nevertheless, their while it is always invidious to attempt to find

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first examples, LeRoi Jones, a poet and importance for the study of popular music. author of plays and non-fiction books later In his later book, Voicing the Popular: On known as Amiri Baraka, published in 1963 the Subjects of Popular Music, published Blues People: Negro Music in White America, in 2006, race has a much greater salience. a key text in the discussion of African Indeed, here Middleton describes race, along Americans and music. While this book, and with gender, as ‘specific social registers of Jones/Baraka’s equally important 1968 book, analysis’ (p. 35) and devotes a chapter to it, Black Music, do not question the idea of race ‘Through a Mask Darkly: Voices of Black itself, they are written from the point of view Folk’. This chapter is an acute deconstruc- of an African-American and assert the qual- tion of the blues as an historical genre. At one ity and worth of black American music while point, following a discussion of the white, providing contexts for its development. There Jimmie Rodgers whose recordings cross are earlier books that provide accounts of over between country and blues, Middleton musical forms identified as African- remarks that: ‘What is in any case clear is American, and make aesthetic judgements on that this network of blues voices constitutes that music, such as Nat Hentoff and Nat an intricately tied cultural knot in which Shapiro’s Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Story racialised identity is continually at stake, of Jazz by the People Who Made It, published both for blacks and whites, the knot is always in 1955. However, Jones/Baraka’s books are at risk of unravelling’ (p. 62). For Middleton, the first to tie in the history of African race is confined to a distinction between Americans in the US, including the impact of African Americans and white Americans. slavery, with the music produced by African While, as I have noted, Middleton’s analy- Americans. At the same time, none of these sis is insightful there is, again, no critical books, nor many later discussions of African discussion of race itself. Nevertheless, the Americans and music engaged critically with inclusion of race signals a significant shift race as a discourse. from its absence in Studying Popular Music. As popular music studies started to In this acceptance of race as a given cat- become established as a discipline studied in egory, Middleton is aligned with many of the universities and other centres of higher edu- American discussions of black music. cation since the 1990s, so introductory books Between these two books, in 2003 of various kinds began to be published. In Middleton co-edited with Martin Clayton 1990, Richard Middleton published Studying and Trevor Herbert another introductory text, Popular Music. Divided into two main sec- this one more broadly addressed to music tions, this book provided an account of the- in general, The Cultural Study of Music: A ories of what popular music is and how it Critical Introduction. Here, Philip Bohlman, might be analysed. Race appears in passing whom we have met before as one of the edi- in Middleton’s discussion of Paul Oliver’s tors of the seminal Music and the Racial Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Imagination, has a chapter titled ‘Music and Race Records in relation to a debate over the Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture’. distinction between folk and popular music Within this chapter Bohlman has a section and again in a discussion of Dick Hebdige’s on the Historical Moment of Racism in Nazi- (1976) account of skinheads, Reggae, Rastas influenced Musicological Writings. Here, and Rudies, where, for Middleton, race is Bohlman explains that: present as an afterthought: ‘Once again, then, the axes of class and generation define So unremarkable was the presence of racism in the conjuncture within which the new style German-language musicology from the 1920s through World War II and the Holocaust that it was developed – while that of race also makes only in the 1990s that scholars began to an appearance’ (1990, p. 158). Clearly at unravel the full extent to which modern musicol- this time Middleton does not think race is of ogy failed to extricate itself from an earlier

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musicology that was itself a racist response to music in the United States, but also in modernism. (2003, p. 48) the musics of ethnic minorities and world musics’ (p. 111). Importantly, Shuker broad- Bolhman’s edited collection with Radano ens the use of ethnicity/race beyond the was of profound importance for the acknowl- identification of blackness. It is unfortunate edgement of race in musicology, and for though that rather than expanding on the dis- popular music studies. In his chapter in The cursive formation of race Shuker discards the Critical Study of Music, Bohlman concludes term leading to confusion for his readers. that the racial cannot be distinguished from Keith Negus has a background in sociol- the racist with fatal consequences for the ogy, which may have helped his sensitivity pursuit of ethnomusicology, a discipline his- to the importance of race. In his 1996 book, torically dependent on race to distinguish it Popular Music in Theory, Chapter 4, entitled from musicology. ‘Identities’, is split between discussions of From the point of view of popular music race and gender with the greater emphasis studies, Bohlman’s and Radano’s work being on race. However, again, rather than has been an element in a wake-up call for providing a critical examination of race the study of race as integral to the practice and popular music Negus focuses on what of popular music. However, they are by no he calls ‘black music’. While Negus prob- means the only people pointing out the lematises what this term means, its refer- importance of race to popular music stud- ent is related to African Americans. Negus ies. A number of academics in popular music begins with a critique of the way Frith dis- studies have come out of sociology, media cusses black music in Sound Effects. For studies, cultural studies and other humanities Negus, Frith’s untheorised comments on backgrounds, bringing with them a recog- what he calls black music may be construed nition of the importance of race. In his Key as enacting two essentialisms: sociobiologi- Concepts in Popular Music, first published cal and musicological. Negus claims that, in 1998, Roy Shuker takes a well-intentioned in the first instance, Frith’s understanding stand against the use of the word ‘race’. of black music ‘was based on the idea that He writes that: ‘While the term race is still black people are more ‘natural’, physical widely used in popular discourse and in some and spontaneous than white people, who in academic work, it has been superseded by turn are more constrained by social conven- the more correct term, ethnicity’ (p. 111). tions’ (p. 102). In the second instance, Negus Shuker explains that his choice is driven by claims that for Frith ‘black music was char- race referring to a biological concept, the acterized as having certain intrinsic musical logic being that this makes the term essential- features – improvised and spontaneously ist and reductionist, while ethnicity ‘is based created rather than composed’ (p. 102). It on the shared characteristics for a group of seems unlikely that Frith actually held such a people’ (p. 111). Many would argue that race view. However, his lack of a critical approach and ethnicity do not describe the same entity to race left Sound Effects open to the kind of and that, indeed, race and ethnicity can coex- analysis performed by Negus. ist, the former describing a totalised type of Setting aside the question of Frith’s views people and the latter a grouping within that about race as deduced from Sound Effects, race, usually based on culture. However, hav- what Negus successfully achieved was a rap- ing recognised the inadequacy of Shuker’s idly drawn outline of the traditional, essen- shift in terminology, we can note that he cor- tialist understanding of African-American rectly states that: ‘Ethnicity [for which we music and its relation to African Americans – in might read race] has been an important con- other words, that black music is music produced sideration in virtually all aspects of popular by African Americans and it is the way it is music studies, particularly in regard to black because of certain racial features that are

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inherent in people of black African descent. In this way, Gilroy undermined the American Negus counterposed this with what he views binary of black and white, reminding readers as the later understanding of black music as that black music does not just mean African- constructed within overdetermining cultural American music but can also describe music pressures. In doing so, Negus sets aside the throughout the Caribbean islands and the question of the racialisation of people iden- UK as well, of course, as the musics of sub- tified as black, while critiquing the kind of Saharan Africa. It remains, it must be remem- racially essentialist assumptions he attributes bered, music by people of African origin. to Frith. That is, like Middleton, Negus fails In an essay titled ‘Cultural Studies and Ethnic to engage critically with the discourse of race Absolutism’, published the year before itself by establishing from the start that he is The Black Atlantic, Gilroy quotes Peter concerned with ‘black music’. Negus then Linbaugh’s statement, made in a 1982 article, discusses two key works that criticise the that: ‘The ship remained perhaps the most idea of an essentialist black music. The first important conduit of pan-African commu- of these is an open letter that Philip Tagg pub- nication before the appearance of the long- lished in the journal Popular Music in 1989. playing record’ (1992, p. 191). Negus ends In this Tagg set out to show that the musical his discussion of Gilroy by opening ‘race’ up features conventionally considered as typical to further referents: of black American music can also be found in white European music, and vice versa. If the original call [as in call and response] is becoming harder to locate and the subsequent Tagg’s polemic remains a useful antidote to forms of ‘black music’ are not the property of the easy association of musical forms with black people but at the same time are not simply one or other racial group, black or white, set being commercially exploited – but created by rap- up as a binary of oppositions. Indeed, as we pers seeking a political vision in China, Poland, shall see, there are various problems associ- Mexico or Singapore – then how do we start thinking about black music that has left the black ated with the binary itself. For example, it Atlantic? (Negus, 1996, p. 113) buys into a very particular national problem for the US: the relationship between African This very good question, which pertains to Americans and the nation-state. In addition, the complexities of musical ownership, must by setting up such a binary, tempting as it also take account of the limits of African- is, other racialised groups, such as Hispanic originated blackness and the recognition that Americans, Jews, or indeed Native Americans there are other musics made by non-African get left out. More globally, other groups who related peoples who are also identified as are conventionally defined as black, such as black. What seems like a crucial question is the Indigenous people of Australia, tradi- only such if we accept the limiting of our tionally known as Aborigines, or the Maori understanding of race to, ultimately, the of Aotearoa/New Zealand are left out of the binary that is generally thought of as having untheorised term ‘black’. shaped American society. To some extent, such a binary problem is opened up by the work of Paul Gilroy who is the author of the other key work that Negus discusses, The Black Atlantic (1993b). While Paul Gilroy, Race and I will discuss this shortly, here we need to Popular Music understand that Gilroy’s most protean intellectual move was to start thinking about black Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and music in the context of circuits of physical Double-Consciousness was published in and cultural movement across and around the 1993, the same year that a collection of his Atlantic. The sea then becomes a facilitator essays, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of communication rather than a barrier to it. of Black Cultures, appeared. The Black

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Atlantic made a profound impact on debates relationship to Jewish lore and law was remote or about the experience of black people in the ambivalent, have been a rich resource for me in US, not least because it provided ways for thinking about the problems of identity and difference in the black Atlantic diaspora. (1993b, p. 205) those experiences to be connected with the experiences of other African originated peo- The preservation of Jewish identity and the ples situated around the Atlantic. It is, though, simultaneous evolution of divergent cultural in the first instance, a book written by a black forms was a model for Gilroy’s understand- man born and raised in England and it views ing of the black experience unified and the complexities of the Atlantic experience, the divided by the Atlantic. It is this idea of dif- commonalities and differences, from the posi- ference founded in an ongoing continuity to tion of Britain – indeed, from the ambiguities, which Gilroy refers when he remarks: the double-consciousness, of being a black ‘I suggest that this concept should be cher- Briton. As Gilroy writes: ished for its ability to pose the relationship between ethnic sameness and differentiation: What might be called the peculiarity of the black English requires attention to the intermixture of a a changing same’ (p. xi, original emphasis). variety of distinct cultural forms. Previously sepa- The ‘changing same’ is the other idea of rated political and intellectual traditions converged Gilroy’s discussed Negus. Its origin lies in and, in their coming together, overdetermined the the work of LeRoi Jones in an essay titled process of black Britain’s social and historical for- ‘The Changing Same (R&B and New Black mation. (1993b, p. 7) Music)’, where he writes:

There is a strong sense of English belonging And Rhythm and Blues music was new as well. It is evoked in this quotation through the allusive contemporary and has changed, as jazz has conjuring up of a well-known essay by remained the changing same. Fresh Life. R&B has E.P. Thompson, published in 1965, The gone through evolution, as its singers have, gotten Peculiarities of the English. Thompson, the ‘modern,’ taken things from jazz as jazz has taken things from R&B. (2010, p. 232) author of The Making of the English Working Class, was engaged in a Marxist grounded Jones is explaining how jazz can be trans- debate over the specificities of England with formed yet remain fundamentally the same. respect to its transformation into a modern, capi- It is this term that Gilroy reapplies to the talist society. Thompson’s essay is very English black diaspora – and, indeed, to the music of in its straight-talking style and very English in its that diaspora. concern. Gilroy’s reference to it in a context These ideas form the background to what about the specificities of the black British expe- might be taken as Gilroy’s understanding of rience both establishes Gilroy’s work in a the political experience of black people in the distinctively British tradition and unsettles present day: that tradition by redeploying Thompson’s titular phrase for a very different purpose. The specificity of the modern political and cultural formation I want to call the black Atlantic can be Gilroy places the black British experience in defined, on one level, through this desire to tran- the broader context of the forced diaspora of scend both the structures of the nation-state and black Africans historically dispersed by slav- the constraints of ethnicity and national particular- ery around the Atlantic. ity. These desires are relevant to understanding Diaspora, then, is one of Gilroy’s key political organizing and cultural criticism. They have always sat uneasily alongside the strategic terms; indeed, in his discussion of Gilroy it choices forced on black movements and individu- is one of the terms on which Negus focuses. als embedded in national and political cultures Gilroy’s understanding of diaspora owes and nation-states in America, the Caribbean, and much to Jewish thought. As he writes: Europe. (1993b, p. 19)

Some of these discussions [by Jewish thinkers], For Gilroy the black experience, like that of particularly the contributions from writers whose the Jews, is both embedded in the modern

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nation-states in which blacks live and improvisatory drive and brilliance’ (p. xiii). informed by the recognition of common his- Thompson goes on: tories and traditions. Music occupies a similar position. Chapter 6 Since the Atlantic slave trade, ancient African organizing principles of song and dance have of The Black Atlantic is devoted to a discus- crossed the seas from the Old World to the New. sion of black music. Gilroy writes that black They took on a new momentum, intermingling expressive cultural forms ‘are … western and with each other and with New World or European modern, but this is not all they are … their styles of singing and dance. (p. xiii) special power derives from a doubleness, their Much of the American debate over Gilroy’s unsteady location simultaneously inside and book revolves around the African-American outside the conventions, assumptions, and aes- politics related to essentialism. Isidore thetic rules which distinguish and periodise Okpewho defines essentialism ‘as an ugly modernity’ (1993b, p. 73). In the Introduction label for any tendency to see the imprint of to Small Acts, Gilroy offers an example of how the homeland or ancestral culture – in this this thinking can be directly applied to popular case, Africa – in any aspect of the lifestyles music: or outlook of African-descended peoples in Hip hop was not an ethnically pure or particular the Western Atlantic world’ (1999, p. xv). African-American product but rather the mutant Okpewho, who points out Thompson’s ear- result of fusion and intermixture with Caribbean lier use of ‘black Atlantic’, suggests that cultures from Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Its outerna- tional and intercultural origins are effectively con- Gilroy would find Thompson’s idea of a cealed by powerful ethnocentric accounts of its direct emphasis difficult to accept (p. xxi). history that see it merely as a direct descendent of However, Gilroy is clear that: ‘There is a jazz, soul and blues. Instead, the circulation and great body of work which justifies the propo- mutation of black musics provide a powerful illus- sition that some cultural, religious and lin- tration of how the untidy patterns of differentiation and sameness to which a diaspora gives rise guistic affiliations [from Africa] can be might yield a novel notion of tradition as the identified even if their contemporary politi- medium for exchange and creative development cal significance remains disputed’ (1993, rather than invariant repetition. (1993a, pp. 6–7) p. 81). It is wrong to try to tie Gilroy down to a simplistic view of African inheritance in Here, Gilroy brings together his ideas of music or any cultural form. All culture is diaspora, tradition and the production of constantly being remade and a part of its local culture in the service of understanding remaking is the tradition which forms the hip hop as a black music rather than just an basis for that remaking. African-American music. As we have seen, African-originated black It should be acknowledged that the term peoples stand both inside and outside of the ‘black Atlantic’ has a prior history. In 1984, modernity which was in part built on their Robert Farris Thompson published a book enslavement. They also live in specific loca- on the continuities of black African art forms tions, the US, Jamaica, the UK and so forth – with black art in the US. The subtitle of his which inflect their lives variously while all Introduction to this book, Flash of the Spirit: these peoples share common heritages. For African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, Gilroy music has held a central place in the was ‘The Rise of the Black Atlantic Visual black experience: Tradition’. In this Introduction, Thompson writes about music: ‘Listening to rock, jazz, [This musical heritage] was instrumental in pro- blues, reggae, salsa, samba, bossa nova, juju, ducing a constellation of subject positions that highlife, and mambo, one might conclude was openly indebted for its conditions of possibility to the Caribbean, the United States, and that much of the popular music of the world even Africa. It was also indelibly marked by the is informed by the flash of the spirit British conditions in which it grew and matured. of a certain people specially armed with (1993, p. 82)

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Music is not just one way, but a key way, in Race is at the very foundation of the US as which black cultures have developed. It a nation-state. expresses, among other things, a politics of Race has been a core legitimating dis- oppression. Josh Kun writes that: ‘What is so course in the processes of exclusion and crucial about Gilroy’s writings on black homogenisation that have underpinned the music here is that he stresses the extent to very existence of the modern nation-state. which a liberatory, transformative politics is As Goldberg explains, ‘central to the sorts of not simply reflected in music or represented racial constitution that have centrally defined by music, but actually “made audible” in the modernity is the power to exclude and by music itself’ (2005, p. 24). What we need to extension include in racially ordered terms, remember here, again, is that these are cul- to dominate through the power to catego- tures related to black people of African rize differentially and hierarchically, to set origin. Gilroy’s discussions are restricted to aside by setting apart’ (2002, p. 9). Within the Anglophone Atlantic diaspora. This is not the emerging form of the US, the racialisa- a criticism. It is something to be remembered tion of people as black helped to homoge- when considering the relevance of his work. nise diverse groupings of people as ‘white’. Such an approach, which emphasises dias- As Radano argues, in the process music was pora and the ways diasporic groups develop very important: ‘The … construction of an similarly and divergently, can be applied in antebellum “Negro music” would become other contexts. At the same time, in relation the consummate symbol of racial difference to Gilroy’s work, Kun asks: ‘What happens arising from the unspoken interracialization to “blackness” when it drifts outside of the of the music’s constitution’ (2003, p. 109). maps drawn for the black Atlantic?’ (2005, Quoting Etienne Balibar, Radano goes on: p. 147). We shall return to this question. ‘Black music emerges as “a symptom of the contradiction between particularism and uni- versalism which primordially affects nationalism”’ (2003, p. 109). Balibar understands Race and Popular Music in the race as the means by which nationalism United States distinguishes the particular nation from the generality of humanity: ‘Inasmuch as nation- For the moment we must examine the histori- alism and racism are related notions and have cal construction of racialised music in the US a long history of practical interaction, what because, as a consequence of the spread of seems to be the case is that racism deprives American cultural colonialism, the divisions nationalism of its universalistic character’ in US popular music, especially the forma- (1994, p. 195). In other words, race, and rac- tion of African-American music, have ism, enable a particular nation-state to spec- impacted far beyond the world connected by ify itself. Race both excludes certain people the Atlantic. As I have already indicated, race from membership of the nation and gives is thoroughly invested in state formation. other people the possibility of membership. David Theo Goldberg argues that: The utility of race in this context has been aided by essentialising the discourse. Race is integral to the emergence, development, and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, Historically, as we saw in the development materially) of the modern nation-state. Race marks of scientific racism, race was understood as and orders the modern nation-state, and so state a given quality, at first based in blood and projects, more or less from its point of conceptual heredity, this became a hierarchical order and institutional emergence. The apparatuses and founded in evolution. Indeed, race was the technologies employed by modern states have served variously to fashion, modify and reify the point where biological evolutionism met terms of racial expression, as well as racist exclu- the social Darwinism of supporters, such as sions and subjugations. (Goldberg, 2002, p. 4) the nineteenth-century British humanist

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Herbert Spencer. However, as Radano writes Minstrelsy, in which mostly whites blacked about African Americans: ‘The legacies of up and performed music claimed to be black, oppression and segregation that undoubtedly was the most popular form of entertainment contributed to black music’s distinctiveness among whites through much of the nine- are not enough to sustain arguments of an teenth century and into the early twentieth unyielding black essence’ (2003, p. 5). The century. There remains debate over the extent point here is to recognise that while in many to which minstrelsy was based on some discussions of African-American music, such aspects of actual African-American music. as those of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, race is What is without doubt is that minstrelsy taken as a given, we need to understand that, helped formulate key elements in what from the broader perspective of the forma- became accepted as black music.1 tion of the American nation-state, the essen- Miller provides a chronology for the segre- tialising of race has served a very particular gation of sound during the 50 years between purpose, that of legitimating the nation-state the 1880s and the 1920s. During this period, through the racialising of its members. a variety of people – scholars and artists, industrial- In this process, Radano argues, the construc- ists and customers – came to compartmentalize tion ‘black music’ was centrally important: southern music according to race. A fluid complex ‘For various reasons … the perception of of sounds and styles in practice, southern music musical difference had grown so thoroughly was reduced to a series of distinct genres associ- racialized that music came to epitomize ated with particular racial and ethnic identities. Music developed a color line. (2010, p. 2) racial difference generally, informing opinion across the racial divide’ (2003, p. 9). Indeed, Miller considers the importance of the segre- during the twentieth century and still now, in gation legislation from the 1880s onwards as the twenty-first century, music remains one the start of this racial ossification of musical way in which the claim of essential differ- forms. The doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ ence between ‘black’ and ‘white’ races is was enshrined in American law with the demonstrated even at a time when intellectu- Supreme Court resolution of Plessey v. als think of race in terms of a discourse that is Ferguson in 1889. It remained in place until central to the construction of identity. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The In Segregating Sound, Karl Hagstrom American Folklore Society was established Miller provides a history of how music that in 1888. This started distinguishing black had flowed across the two groupings, identi- and white musical genres and gave its author- fied racially, became increasingly differenti- ity to their racialised authenticity. Finally, for ated. He notes that: Miller, the mass production of sheet music for popular songs aimed at one or other racial Southern musicians performed a staggering variety market was reinforced by the spread of the of music in the early twentieth century. Black and gramophone and recorded music which, white artists played blues, ballads, ragtime, and again, divided up the raced market in order to string band music, as well as a plethora of styles popular throughout the nation: sentimental bal- focus advertising and maximise sales. By the lads, minstrel songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and 1920s, Miller argues, the musical divide was Broadway hits. (2010, p. 1) not just established, it was taken for granted. As he puts it: ‘At the beginning of my story While certain musical genres might have black and white performers regularly been associated with a particular race, the employed racialised sounds. By the end, most music was available for anybody to play and, listeners expected artists to embody them’ before the currency of recorded music, if you (2010, p. 7, original emphasis). By this time wanted to hear a certain song you had to essentialised race had become coupled with accept it played by whoever was around, musical forms, which were thought to be regardless of their racial identification. essentially linked to race.

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Either side of the colour line, as Miller an institutional and social disenfranchise- writes: ‘The blues were African-American. ment that challenges not just the racial order, Rural white southerners played what came to but a social structure that “whites” created’ be called country music’ (2010, p. 2). It is (2008, p. 89). Country music provides whites now time to turn to white music, in particular with a meaning to whiteness that legitimates to country music. In the Introduction to her their hegemony in a claim that it has always edited collection on country music, Hidden already been lost. in the Mix: The African American Presence By World War II, popular music in the in Country Music, Diane Pecknold, follow- US was divided between two racial groups, ing Miller’s work, discusses how ‘country constructed as black and white. Each music music became white, and did so in relation was constructed as fundamentally distinct and to a shifting landscape of social and symbolic as coming from different historical traditions.2 practices that supported white hegemony’ However, at the same time, a record company (2013, p. 3, original emphasis). As Miller, such as King Records, started by the Jewish and others, acknowledge, country music Syd Nathan in 1943, and with the African- has arisen out of a complex musical tradi- American Henry Glover as producer until tion made up of both white and black artists he left in 1958, could often record the same and music that was common to both. Indeed, song in both a rhythm & blues version for Pecknold tells us: ‘Country music’s debt to the African-American market and a country African-American influences has long been version for the white market. To take just one recognised’ (2013, p. 1). Nevertheless, the example, ‘Bloodshot Eyes’, became a R&B ideology of country music is that it was hit for Wynonie Harris in 1951. It was origi- born out of a white tradition. Geoff Mann, nally a country hit for its co-composer, Hank in Why Does Country Music Sound White? Penny, in 1950.3 Similarly, though with argues that: much more problematic intent, through the 1950s white artists, such as Pat Boone, made … the idea that country music ‘sounds white’ because its ‘origins’ are white – even if such a story a career out of recording watered down ver- were true – misses the essential process through sions of rhythm & blues songs for white, pop which the music’s ideology of whiteness must be audiences. For example, Boone recorded a reproduced over time, day in day out. Nostalgia for much sweetened version of Little Richard’s a white ‘used to’ has done a great deal of this ‘Tutti Frutti’ (itself a sweetened version of ideological work, and helps give country a raced materiality. (2008, p. 92) Richard’s original paean to homosexual sex influenced by Barrel House Annie’s blues In the same way that the blues and other about anal sex ‘If It Don’t Fit (Don’t Force ‘black’ genres, such as rhythm & blues are It)’), which climbed to number twelve on the claimed to be essentially black, country Billboard pop chart, and Ivory Joe Turner’s music has been provided with a mythic white ‘I Almost Lost My Mind’, which he took heritage which affirms the music as the prop- to the top of the Billboard pop chart in erty of the hegemonic white majority – not as 1956. Bill Haley and the Comets recorded Mann explains, in any simple way. Country a bowdlerised version of Big Joe Turner’s music creates a mythic past for white ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’, which had reached Americans in which things were better for number one on the rhythm & blues chart them than they are now. Mann’s argument is in 1954. Haley’s version reached number not just that country music’s nostalgia is ulti- seven on the pop chart and was one track in mately a nostalgia for a mythical time of Haley’s popularisation of rhythm & blues as white racial superiority but also, more pro- rock ‘n’ roll. foundly: ‘Like American conservatism, I have pointed out that Nathan, who American whiteness is premised on the notion started King Records, was Jewish because, that “average” (white) people are victims of in thinking about the place of racial groups

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in the music of the US, we need to consider black artists, including ‘Hound Dog’ which the Jews. In The Price of Whiteness, Eric was sung by Big Mama Thornton before Goldstein argues that: Elvis Presley made the song a number one hit in 1956/7. Phil Spector created the ‘wall of Despite the diverse nature of the American population and the presence of many groups that were sound’ for hits by mostly black girl groups, considered distinct in a racial sense – Native such as the Crystals and the Ronettes, and Americans, Asians, Latinos and various European also the Righteous Brothers’ whose ‘You’ve groups as well as African Americans – whites Lost That Loving Feeling’ (written by consistently tried to understand the racial land- Spector, Mann and Weill) holds the record scape through the categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’. (2006, p. 1) as the most played track on US radio in the twentieth century.7 In the 1960s and 1970s, We have seen the reasons for this and its as Jews became disillusioned with the white effect on popular music. Jews were racialised American society they had finally been in the US up to World War II. Around that allowed to enter, Jewish singer songwriters, time they began to be ambivalently incorpo- such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Phil Ochs rated into whiteness. One important reason and Randy Newman, and not forgetting Janis for this was the expansion of the American Ian’s ‘Society’s Child’, offered critiques of economy, which required a larger, manage- American society.8 Many Jews ran record rial, and therefore white-identified, middle companies and, given their complicated posi- class.4 One of the key differences between tioning between the black and white races of Jews and African Americans and whites is American society, formed a bridge between that Jews have been identified with no spe- the two racial musics. Syd Nathan was cific popular music form. Klezmer, the most typical in this. To the extent that Jews were well-known Jewish musical genre, brought to accepted as white, some Jews, such as Gene the US by migrant Ashkenazi Jews in the Simmons of Kiss and David Lee Roth of Van late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Halen, played in rock groups, a musical form has never become more than a minority, identified as white, without their presence ethnic music. In the first quarter of the twen- being an issue.9 tieth century, Jews utilised blackface as a The special case of black American music way of becoming Americanised and also as is born out not only by the lack of a distinc- a way of becoming white. The most well- tively Jewish music but by the lack of any known example was Al Jolson in The Jazz other racially identified music with more Singer (1927). However, many other Jewish than minority popularity. Tejano music, also performers used blackface, including Eddie known as Tex-Mex, the music from Texas Cantor, Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker.5 that combines European peasant dances, In the early-twentieth century, Jews were such as the waltz, which had been appropri- often linked to blackness, which is one rea- ated by the upper classes by the nineteenth son why Jews, alongside African Americans, century, and the polka with Mexican forms were sometimes associated with jazz.6 In the like the corrida and mariarchi, is perhaps the 1950s and 1960s, as Jews were granted some best known. When the so-called Latin break- degree of whiteness, they wrote songs for through took place around 1999, the tracks white pop singers. Many of the writing pairs by Ricky Martin, most importantly ‘Livin’ in the Brill Building, who offered white teens La Vida Loca’, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and a vision of romantic love were Jewish: Carole Thalia, sounded mostly like pop-oriented King and Gerry Goffin, Doc Pomus (Jerome rhythm & blues. Indeed, it is worth compar- Felder) and Mort Shuman, Cynthia Weill ing these tracks with another Latin develop- and Barry Mann, Neil Sedaka and Howard ment, rock en espagñol. This evolved outside Greenfield, to name a few. Jerry Leiber and the US, in the Spanish-speaking countries Mike Stoller wrote many hits recorded by from Mexico through South America from

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around the late 1950s. The categorisation is light-skinned African-American, or Blasian. itself a form of cultural colonialism as, for the On her Cantonese and Mandarin albums, Spanish language rock groups of Peru, Chile, however, Lee’s Chinese facial features are Mexico and elsewhere, their music is simply emphasised and her skin-tone appears to be a synthesis of rock styles with local musics lightened. Generalising, it would seem that mostly sung in Spanish, their native tongue. in the US non-white racialised artists are Kun comments that: ‘Rock en espagñol – most likely to be channelled into African- which we must remember, is just one large American styled music – perhaps because part of an even larger and more general they then remain a minority grouping in Latino rock movement across the Americas relation to the ongoing homogeneous white … destabilizes rock’s whiteness and rock’s hegemony.11 To put this more clearly, genres blackness’ (2005, p. 187). The Latin break- of music associated with African Americans through in the US was, in the first instance, have a legitimacy linked with the struggle on the terms of African-American and white of African Americans for a place as part of, musics. rather than in, the American nation-state. There has still been no equivalent break- At the same time, genres of music associated through of artists identified as Asian. In with Americans identified as white are most Speaking It Louder: Asian Americans obviously, rock, is considered the definitive Making Music, Deborah Wong asks: ‘Is there American popular music. something out there that ought to be called Asian American music?’ She answers that ‘it has never struck me as the most useful question to pursue’ (2004, p. 13). As Wong points Race and Popular Music out, one reason it is not a useful question is in the UK because ‘Asian American’ is itself such a dubious and false racial category. Indeed, I have already noted Gilroy’s argument that the term was first used in the 1960s by Yuji the black experience within the black Atlantic Ichioka as a way of unifying disparate east varies according to the nation-states in which Asian national communities in the US. The African-originated people live. The black artist most touted to lead the so-called Asian experience in Britain is very different from breakthrough was Coco Lee. Lee was born that in the US. For one thing, the largest in Hong Kong and brought up in California. black British diaspora began after World War She then returned to Hong Kong where she II, and it came from the Anglophone islands became successful singing dance-oriented of the Caribbean rather than directly from material in Cantonese and Mandarin. Her Africa. For another, in the same period there first Anglophone album, Just No Other Way, has been an increasingly significant diaspora was released in 2000. In spite of ‘Do You from Anglophone Africa. More broadly, the Want My Love’ reaching number 49 on the British have always thought of Britain as a US dance chart, the hoped-for breakthrough white country and the racial divide was exter- did not materialise. Her second Anglophone nal, related to colonialism. From this per- album, Exposed, released in the US in 2005, spective, it was deeply shocking to many was less successful than her first. Meanwhile, Britons when people from the Caribbean and Lee continued her success in East Asia.10 South Asian colonies started moving Lee’s album covers signal Sony’s market- to Britain. ing strategy. Like Jennifer Lopez and many There had been African-originated black of the Latin breakthrough artists, Lee sings people in Britain for many hundreds of years. in an African-American-related style. On Liverpool had a small black population from the covers of her Anglophone albums Lee’s around the mid-1700s as result of it being the skin is darkish and she could be taken for a main port for the slave trade. In the 1960s

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there was a small but thriving black music and without the musical establishment on the scene, which included a doo-wop group grounds that these were black or black- called the Chants. In 1962, the Beatles backed derived forms and that black music was dan- them when they played the Cavern. After the gerous; that it would infect the white race group broke up, Eddie Amoo, whose father with its open eroticism and its association came from Ghana, went on to join his brother with illegal narcotic drugs’ (1997, p. 85). On Chris’s group, the soul-influenced the Real 5 September 1956, the Daily Mail newspaper Thing, in the early 1970s and had a number published a now notorious editorial titled one hit in July 1976 with ‘You to Me are ‘Rock and Roll Babies’ which opined about Everything’. One of the Beatles’ mentors in rock ‘n’ roll: Liverpool was a Trinidadian calypsonian who went by the name of Lord Woodbine. He had It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows ragtime, blues, dixie, jazz, hot been in Britain during the war and returned cha cha, and the boogie woogie, which surely on the Empire Windrush in 1948, the ship originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder which brought the first large complement whether this is the Negro’s revenge. (quoted in of Caribbean job-seekers and which also Sandbrook 2005, p. 461) brought another Trinidadian calypsonian, Lord Kitchener, who popularised the calypso The previous day, the same newspaper had form in England. As the Caribbean migra- told its readers that rock and roll ‘has some- tion was taking place, there were a number of thing of the African tom tom and voodoo British-born black artists who had hits, such dance’. While the negative allusion to the US as Ray Ellington, Cleo Laine, Shirley Bassey was of a piece with a general British despisal and Kenny Lynch. Lynch became the first of American society and its consumerism, black British pop star, having seven top 40 the references to tom toms, voodoo and the hits between 1960 and 1965.12 jungle signal the British anxiety about the British culture had a deeply racialised impact of the cultures of ‘uncivilised’ and understanding of blackness. Peter Fryer pré- ‘primitive’ colonised peoples on what was cises a 1955 survey of British attitudes to thought of as respectable, modern Britain. black people: The fascination of some white British people with the blues in the 1950s was often More than two-thirds of Britain’s white population closely related to fantasies of the exotic and … held a low opinion of black people or disap- formed an obverse to the racialist anxieties proved of them. They saw them as heathens who outlined by Blake. Writing about nineteenth- practised head-hunting, cannibalism, infanticide, polygamy, and ‘black magic’. They saw them as century English attitudes to minstrelsy, uncivilized, backward people, inherently inferior to Simon Frith explains that: Europeans, living in primitive mud huts ‘in the bush,’ wearing few clothes, eating strange foods, Black Americans became coded as the ‘other’ of and suffering from unpleasant diseases. They saw lower-middle-class relaxation, a source of musical them as ignorant and illiterate, speaking strange access to one’s heart and soul less daunting than languages, and lacking proper education. They bourgeois concert forms. This was to be highly believed that black men had stronger sexual urges significant for later attitudes to jazz and blues. than white men, were less inhibited, and could (2007, p. 123) give greater satisfaction to their sexual partners. (1984, p. 374) At the same time as African-American blues artists, such as Josh White and Big Bill Andrew Blake writes about the cultural Broonzy, were being brought over to Britain resistance to African-American music in to perform for white audiences, there was Britain: ‘Resistance often took the form of increasing concern among large sections of specifically racialized discourses: hot jazz in the public about the migration of West the 1920s, swing in the 1930s, and rock ‘n’ Indians. By 1964, G.C.K. Peach estimated in roll in the 1950s were all resisted from within a 1967 article that there were around 300,000

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West Indians resident in Britain. In 1956, pop and rock, and sometimes hints of African attacks on blacks in Nottingham culminated rhythms. Lloyd Bradley argues that: in a riot that August against the black presence in the city. In London, August and A mere two-and-a-bit generations on from [Lord] Kitchener singing ‘London Is The Place For Me’ on September 1958 saw escalating violence the quayside [when he arrived in London in 1948 against West Indians leading to what has on the Empire Windrush]. London’s black music – become known as the Notting Hill riots and grime – has achieved the same sort of cultural in May of 1959 Kelso Cochrane, who had status as hip hop in the US. (2013, p. 402) migrated from Antigua, was stabbed to death in North Kensington. Kitchener returned to Trinidad in 1962. Generally speaking, through the 1960s Black British music has become mainstream 15 there was a greater acceptance among the in spite of ongoing racism. Artists like British population of African-American Dizzee Rascal, Tinie Tempah and Tinchy music than of the various West Indian Stryder make regular appearances in the musics. This was caused, in part, by the pop charts. actual presence of West Indians in Britain. In 1976, on stage at a concert in Birmingham the white, British blues guitarist Eric Clapton Black Popular Music Beyond the gave a drunken, anti-migrant diatribe where Atlantic Diaspora he told the audience: ‘I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Black music from the Atlantic diaspora is Britain from becoming a black colony’.13 still understood to be the music of the Enoch Powell had been the Conservative oppressed. It is music with which people shadow Secretary of Defence. In 1968, in considered as black in other parts of the Birmingham he gave what became known as world identify. Writing about a school in the ‘rivers of blood’ speech. In it he advocated Durban, South Africa, where she conducted stopping immigration and encouraging what research in 1996, two years after the formal he called re-emigration. He also criticised ending of apartheid with the election of the impending Race Relations Act. Ulrich Nelson Mandela and the African National Adelt suggests that: ‘Clapton’s admiration Congress, Nadine Dolby explains that: ‘At for ‘America’ was closely linked with an Fernwood … [r]ace is defined and deter- imagined Otherness ... These fantasies were mined through attachments to particular not compatible with the post-colonial reality aspects of popular culture, and identities both of the Caribbean migrants who quite possi- in connection and in conflict are played out bly even frequented the same clubs [as white on this terrain’ (2001, p. 13). She tells us that Britons]’ (2010, p. 61). Clapton’s apparently in this profoundly racialised world: incompatible attitudes were typical of many Britons. Where African-American music was Like clothing, musical taste is linked to collective sometimes held in high esteem, quite the racialized identities. In general terms most opposite was true of West Indian music when Fernwood students would agree that Africans it was linked with the migrants. At the same listen to rhythm and blues, ‘slow’ music like Whitney Huston, some rap, and what is known as time, certain English youth subcultures of the ‘local’ music, which is sometimes sung in Zulu, 1960s, specifically Mods and Skinheads, had sometimes in English, or a combination of the two. a strong appreciation of Jamaican music, ska Coloured students’ (and in this case, coloureds’ and subsequently reggae.14 and Indians’ taste differs) musical tastes are similar It took until the twenty-first century for to Africans, except for the absence of local music. White music takes several trajectories, and includes black Britons to be thought of as British. rave, heavy metal, ‘mellow’ music like the Musical genres such as grime combine ele- Cranberries, and for a small minority of white stu- ments of Caribbean music with white, British dents, gangsta rap. (p. 72)

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What we see here is the racialised musical Roller’. By the late 1960s, the Australian ver- divide that gets played out in the US and sion of rhythm & blues was morphing into a Britain being reproduced in South Africa.16 A hard edged guitar-based blues-rock sound similar racialized divide between black led by guitarists like Lobby Loyde in groups African students who listen to r&b and white like the Wild Cherries and the Coloured students who listen to rock was found by Balls.18 Sarah Ralfe in her study of five Durban By the 1990s and 2000s there was devel- schools conducted almost ten years after oping a non-white Australian population Dolby’s in 2004. which did not identify with white, Anglo- In Australia, where the White Australia American rock. Increasingly, these young policy, started immediately after federa- people were buying African-American tion in 1901 and only phased out by 1974, artists, mainly those performing r&b. meant that the dominant colonial popula- Australians also began working in this genre. tion was almost completely homogeneously Guy Sebastian, born in Malaysia of Tamil, ‘white’ (a definition that changed over time English and Portugese descent, who won to include southern Italians, Greeks and the first Australian Idol contest in 2003, is Christian Lebanese) until the later 1970s. one example. Another is Jessica Mauboy, of Popular music in Australia had relatively mixed Indonesian and Aboriginal descent, little direct African-American input until whose run of hits began in 2008. As hip hop the 1990s. This statement vastly simplifies became popular in the US so it was adopted as an inevitably complex scene. For exam- the music of those lower working-class ple, the presence of African-American whites and non-white Australians who felt troops during World War II meant that disenfranchised by a social order which many mostly working-class young people allowed non-white migrants into the country became familiar with the genres and art- but then continued to discriminate against ists enjoyed by those troops. Later, in the them. Tony Mitchell writes that: 1950s, there was an important subcultural influence of rhythm & blues. Indeed, Little On the one hand, culturally diverse hip-hop crews in Australia such as Downsyde, South West Richard toured with great success in 1957. Syndicate, TZU and Curse ov Dialect – with their However, when Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs wildly surreal ‘rainbow hip-hop’ – embody muti- recorded ‘Poison Ivy’ in 1964, which Leiber ple ethnicised speaking positions which express and Stoller had written for the African- Australian multiculturalism, pluralism and diver- American group the Coasters, they clearly sity. On the other, individual MCs from non- Anglo-Australian backgrounds such as MC Trey, whitened the Rolling Stones whitened ver- Hau of the 2004 Aria Award-winning group sion of the original. At this time, even the Koolism, Maya Jupiter, Sleek the Elite and Rolling Stones with their whitened versions Comrade Kos of Third Estate, who all speak from of African-American rhythm & blues were varied positions of ‘in-betweenness’, ... bring a not popular in Australia. Their sound was unique sense of hybridity and musical syncretism 17 to Australian hip-hop which contributes to a too black. Similarly, in the 1960s, Tamla highly original and distinctive view of the world Motown tracks were less successful in chart and participate in an expressive form of ‘transbor- terms in Australia than Britain. There was der citizenry’. (2007) little penetration of African-American music into mainstream Australian popular music. African-American music with its subaltern However, a minority was enthusiastic about history here raps to those with analogous rhythm & blues. In 1966, Ray Hoff and the backgrounds of social exclusion. Off Beats released the rhythm & blues influ- Australia’s Aboriginal people historically enced Let’s Go!, which included covers of related closely to country music. Clinton Little Richard’s ‘Bama Lama Bama Loo’ Walker, who has written Buried Country and Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Rock ‘n’ about Aboriginal people’s liking for country

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music, has summed up what he thinks the Japan, and Aotearoa-New Zealand, Marley connections are: revealed in a radio interview that he knew little about Australia beyond ‘the Aborigines’, convicts Before anything else, country music gave and cricket. The profound resonance of his music Aboriginal people a voice in modern white that united people around ‘the shared ritual of Australia. Telling black stories in a way white as dance’ and its themes of protest against injustices well as black could understand, Aboriginal country and redemption was shortly afterwards to inspire music was not only a salve for its own downtrod- a range of Aboriginal reggae artists in the follow- den people, it became common ground between ing decade, combining ‘an internationalist black black and white Australia’. consciousness [and] distinctive signs of Aboriginality’ such as the appearance of the To many, country music and black people may Aboriginal flag or colours in performances. (Read, seem unlikely bedfellows. But Aboriginal people 2006, pp. 110–111) took to country music for quite a number of very good reasons. (2000) As a consequence of Bob Marley’s connecting of the genre with Rastafarianism, reggae Walker suggests that living outside of the became globalised as the music of the oppressed major urban centres, Aboriginal people who identified as black. More recently hip hop would have heard country music from the has become an important aspect of Indigenous white cattlemen. Then too, they shared much music culture (Mitchell, 2006). of the roots of country music, such as gospel In the late 1990s, David Goldsworthy music and bush ballads. Third, Walker notes wrote that: that country music is easy to play: one just needs a guitar. Fourth, ‘there was something A major external source of inspiration for Kanak musicians in their quest for cultural identity more intangible to country’s loping rhythms through music has been reggae. From the late and mournful tunes – a sadness, a sense of 1970s, reggae and its associated cultural baggage loss – that Aboriginal people identified with has been a formative influence on popular music absolutely’ (2000). There is a question as to in New Caledonia. (1998, p. 51) whether that sense of loss, which we have It may be, as in Australia and New Zealand, seen Mann arguing is a condition of white that reggae has now been replaced by hip hop American nostalgic investment in country as the music of choice for Kanak musicians music, can be so easily translated into indig- wishing to assert their Kanak identity. enous people’s sense of loss for their land In Aotearoa/New Zealand the Maori group and their culture, and indeed their stolen Upper Hut Posse started out playing reggae children.19 Yet, as Geoff Mann notes, demon- in 1985 and subsequently moved on to hip strating that there is not an intrinsic connec- hop. As Kerry Buchanan writes, Dean Hapata, tion between musical genre and race: the leader of the group, has ‘the ability to weave Outside of North America, country music’s popu- Maori culture, language and political demands – larity is less associated with those who self-identify from land and fishing rights to economic as ‘white’. Country music is very popular, for equality – within the style and context of black example, in parts of the Caribbean and in Brazil. American hip-hop’ (2000). Tony Mitchell has (2008, note 3) argued, following Buchanan, that ‘hip-hop’s However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s associations with African-American culture Aboriginal groups started playing music with became an important reference point and a reggae feel: example for musical expressions of a local Maori and Pacific Islander vernacular culture, The first Aboriginal rock groups to ‘penetrate with which it shared strong roots in church popular Australian consciousness’ were No Fixed and gospel singing’ (2001, p. 284). One of Address and Us Mob, both of which emerged Mitchell’s points here is that hip hop was a shortly after Bob Marley’s 1979 tour of Australia, which inspired their reggae-influenced style and meaningful musical form for Maoris because political edge. During the sold-out tour of Australia, of the similar foundations of African-American

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Christian culture and the colonial Christianity 2 A good example of a history based on this view of Pacific Island cultures. which sees much white music as the consequence Across the world peoples identified as of appropriation is Kevin Phinney (2005). 3 On King Records see Fox (2009). black, and experiencing their lives as played 4 On the American whitening of the Jews see Brod- out in the aftermath of colonialism, have kin (1998); Frye Jacobson (1998). adopted reggae and hip hop as musics that are 5 On Jewish blackface see Rogin (1996). able to express their own feelings of oppres- 6 See, for example, Yaffe (2009). On Jews in the sion. These musics, developed in African United States and blackness see Gilman (2013). diasporas of the black Atlantic, and adapted 7 On the Brill Building see Emerson (2006). 8 For a theorised discussion of the racialised posi- to local circumstances, are being used to tion of Jews and American popular music see articulate the political realities of everyday Stratton (2009). life of subaltern peoples in nation-states far 9 For a listing of Jewish rock performers see Bena- removed from the black Atlantic. rde (2003). 10 There is a discussion of Coco Lee in Wang (2001). 11 Another useful article on Asian American musi- Conclusion cians in the United States is Yang (2007). 12 On Kenny Lynch see Stratton (2014). In this chapter, for reasons of space, I have 13 Clapton’s outburst is credited as one of drivers for the formation of Rock Against Racism, the concentrated my exemplifying discussions on anti-racist organisation which put on many gigs African-originated peoples and the impact of featuring both black and white artists from its their musics on peoples in nation-states as formation in 1976 to its disbandment in 1981; diverse as the US and New Caledonia. My see Frith and Street (1992). foundational argument is that in discussions 14 See, for example, Hebdige (1991). 15 On this history see Stratton and Zuberi (2014). of popular music we must not take racialisa- There is only a small literature on black music in tion for granted while considering the impor- Britain. The foundational text Oliver (1990). In this tance of various races and the musics identified chapter I have neglected any discussion of South with them but must problematise the idea of Asians and popular music in Britain for want of race itself. Only when this is done can we space. On this topic see Hyder (2004); Roy (2010); Bakrania (2013). understand why race has been, and remains, 16 There is a long history of the influence of Afri- significant in the modern, and indeed post- can-American music in South Africa. This is well modern, world and appreciate the ways that explored in Coplan (1985). music has been caught up in the complex 17 For more detail on the racialised nature of Austra- relationship between race and the nation-state. lian popular music at this time see Stratton (2003). A longer version can be found in Stratton (2007). My main argument has a general applicability 18 On Lobby Loyde see Oldham (2012). and my examples can be substituted for others 19 Between the early years of the twentieth cen- in different modern circumstances. It should tury and around 1970 large numbers of Indig- also be acknowledged that my thumbnail enous children were taken from their families to sketches of the racialised discourse of popular be brought up in orphanages where they were socialised into white Australian culture. This espe- music in various nation-states are exactly that; cially applied to mixed-race children. thumbnail sketches. I have left out more of importance than I have been able to include. Nevertheless, I have tried to make some crucial points about the raced nature of popular music and provide examples to illustrate this. References

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