Parody As a Borrowing Practice in American Music, 1965–2015

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Parody as a Borrowing Practice in American Music, 1965–2015

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music

John P. Thomerson

BM, State University of New York at Fredonia, 2008 MM, University of Louisville, 2010

Committee Chair: bruce d. mcclung, PhD ABSTRACT

Parody is the most commonly used structural borrowing technique in contemporary

American vernacular music. This study investigates parody as a borrowing practice, as a type of humor, as an expression of ethnic identity, and as a response to intellectual trends during the final portion of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary study blends musicology with humor studies, ethnic studies, and intellectual history, touching on issues ranging from reception history to musical meaning and cultural memory.

As a structural borrowing technique, parody often creates incongruity—whether lyrical, stylistic, thematic, evocative, aesthetic, or functional—within a recognized musical style.

Parodists combine these musical incongruities with other comic techniques and social conventions to create humor. Parodists also rely on pre-existing music to create, reinforce, and police ethnic boundaries, which function within a racialized discourse through which parodists often negotiate ethnic identities along a white-black binary. Despite parody’s ubiquity in vernacular music and notwithstanding the genre’s resonance with several key themes from the age of fracture, cultivated musicians have generally parody. The genre’s structural borrowing technique limited the identities musicians could perform through parodic borrowings. This study suggests several areas of musicological inquiry that could be enriched through engagement with parody, a genre that offers a vast and largely unexplored repertoire indicating how musical, racial, and cultural ideas can circulate in popular discourse.

!iii This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Jeff and Mary Hausmann, who instilled in me a love of our nation’s music and history.

And to Shirley Payne. “God practiced on the rest of the world, And then he made Kentucky.” —P. D. Q. Bach, Blaues Gras Cantata

!iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated several debts of gratitude over the course of this project. None of my work would have been possible without the diligence, generosity, and resourcefulness of librarians at the Albino Gorno Memorial Music Library at the University of Cincinnati, Blake

Library at the University of Maine at Fort Kent (especially Deb Durkin and Sofia Birden), the

Blount County Public Library, the Erie County Public Library, Pellissippi State Community

College (especially Maud Mundava and Christy Coulter), the Knox County Public Library, Reed

Library at SUNY Fredonia (especially Kevin Michki), and the dozens of consortium libraries who shared the contents of their collections. Support your local library!

I have had the pleasure of working alongside incredible musicians, thinkers, and educators, including Jack Ashworth, Scott Brickman, Marie Kendall Brown, Jean Christensen,

Jim Davis, Michael Markham, Jim Piorkowski, Gordon Root, Doug Shadle, Lance Strasser,

Aniko Walker, and Ann Marie de Zeeuw at SUNY Fredonia, the University of Cincinnati, the

University of Louisville, and the University of Maine at Fort Kent. I strive to live up to their collective example.

Dr. bruce mcclung served as my dissertation advisor and spent countless hours reading drafts, suggesting comments, and generally improving everything he touched. His attention to detail, high standards, and hard work are matched only by his kindness, and he serves as a model for my work and teaching.

Dr. Stefan Fiol was originally a member of my committee, and while research commitments prevented him from being able to attend my defense, my project is better because I wrote it preparing for his incisive comments. Drs. Jeongwon Joe and Stephen Meyer served on

!v my dissertation committee, and my work has been vastly improved by their thoughtful comments and patient guidance.

Sarina Pearson shared a book chapter that was otherwise inaccessible to me. Colleagues at several institutions and scholarly societies including the Collaborative Initiative on Problem-

Based Learning in Music, the University of Cincinnati’s Preparing Future Faculty program, the

Society for American Music, and the Midwest chapter of the American Musicological Society have commiserated, offered advice and encouragement, and provided models of exceptional scholarship and service.

The members of my graduate cohort, including Will Ayers, Alex Bádue, Doug Easterling,

Ashley Greathouse, Michael Kennedy, Jesse Kinne, Michelle Lawton, Gui-Hwan Lee, Matteo

Magaratto, Alyssa Mehnert, Erik Paffett, and Adam Shoaff, provided comradeship, challenges to my ideas, and stimulating conversation. I am grateful to everyone on the Transitive Axis for their community and levity. Nick Johnston provided material and psychological assistance throughout the course of this project. Tyler Fritts has been a friend and inspiration for years. I am especially indebted to my reading group partners Steven D. Mathews and Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey for their unwavering encouragement and editorial assistance. Sarah and her husband, Ben, shared their home with me during my final semester in Cincinnati and I am indebted for their hospitality.

To my family, Jeff, Mary, Tim, Roseann, and Adam Hausmann; Barbara Burris; Shirley

Payne; Janet Thomerson; Tom Thomerson; Karen Ramsey; and Mark, Jennie, and Lauren

Daugherty, I am indebted for their continued love, encouragement, and home cooking.

!vi To my wife, Holly Rae Thomerson, and our dogs Maddy and Albus, who make make all of this worthwhile. I cannot begin to express my gratitude for Holly’s sacrifices of time and attention throughout the entirety of my graduate schooling, which she handled with unwavering support and unconditional love. She remains my biggest inspiration as a careful thinker and as a human being. “A lovely view of heaven, but I’d rather be with you.”

To quote Allen Ginsberg, “America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?” I would like to acknowledge that over half of American public school students live in poverty.

About two thirds of American community college students are food insecure, half are housing insecure, and 13 to 14 percent are homeless. We have a high infant mortality rate; epidemics of heroin, obesity, prescription drug abuse, meth, and stroke and heart disease; a shortage of mental health workers; rising rates of teen suicide; and an average of two dozen veterans who commit suicide every day. Millions of American seniors live in poverty. Studying American music has renewed my love for this nation while reminding me that too often in our history—and in our present—we have not lived up to the rhetoric that we teach or the promises that we have inherited.

!vii CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES...... x

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER

1. PARODIC BORROWING TECHNIQUES IN VERNACULAR MUSIC...... 40

2. PARODY, INCONGRUITY, AND HUMOR IN THE MUSIC OF “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC AND P. D. Q. BACH...... 64 Theories of Humor...... 67 Incongruity and Parodic Borrowings...... 81 Parody and Humor Techniques...... 74 Parody, Humor, and Context...... 107

3. PARODY, ETHNICITY, AND VERNACULAR MUSIC...... 133 Whiteness...... 139 Jewishness...... 159 Chicanoness...... 200

4. CULTIVATED PARODY IN THE AGE OF FRACTURE...... 226 Memory, History, and Time...... 229 Power and Institutions...... 248 Parody and Identity...... 270

CONCLUSION...... 274

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 278

APPENDIX 1. SELECTED LIST OF VERNACULAR PARODISTS AND WORKS...... 294

APPENDIX 2. SELECTED LIST OF PARODIC BORROWINGS...... 295

!viii LIST OF FIGURES

3.1 2 Live Crew, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, album cover ...... 190

3.2 2 Live Jews, As Kosher as They Wanna Be, album cover...... 190

!ix INTRODUCTION

This project was bookended by two experiences that underscored parody’s ubiquity in

American musical life. Shortly after I began writing, while visiting a farm one crisp fall day, I discovered a booth with animatronic singing chickens. Sandwiched between the corn maze and the apple cider, for a quarter these poultry performers sang barnyard-themed parodies of Stephen

Foster classics (replete with double entendres to entertain the adults). As I concluded my final chapter, fake news circulated of a disaster close to home, as Americans everywhere learned of the horrors that never happened in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Soon, a score of parodies flooded social media, fitting tributes for a fabricated catastrophe.

These examples, and hundreds of other times I found parodies in the strangest of places, reinforced one major finding from my research: parody is the most commonly used structural borrowing technique in vernacular music, and the compositional technique most familiar in the musical experiences of Americans. If Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes are right, and we can hear America singing, she will most likely be performing parodies. Whether Americans are aware of the borrowings or not, on the rare occasions when they gather to perform music publicly, they often sing contrafactum parodies, including “The Star Spangled Banner,” “My

Country, ’Tis of Thee,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” or “Greensleeves.” Those who unwind at a bar after work might hear a cover band performing reverential parodies of classic rock and country hits.

American schoolchildren whose music programs have not yet been abolished often learn to sing parodies like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “John Brown’s

!1 Body,” and also write their own parodies or perform those passed down through oral tradition.1 I remember singing vulgar verses to “Rudolph, the Red-Nose Reindeer” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while in elementary school. These examples suggest parody’s capacity for bridging the musician–non-musician divide. As evinced by the host of amateur and semi- professional parodists on YouTube or the thousands of lyrics posted on websites like amiright.com, anyone can become a parodist simply by rewriting a song’s lyrics.2

Parody also figures prominently in rarified musical circles. Jazz musicians—creators and performers of a style often framed as “America’s music”—rely on parody as a principle compositional strategy. One of only three artists to place singles on the Billboard Top 40 chart in each of the past four decades is parodist “Weird Al” Yankovic.3 Judges from the highest national court have considered and discussed parody, which has garnered special legal protections as a type of fair use.4

A subversive history of this nation’s music could be told through parody, and limiting ourselves to only the past fifty years provides a way to navigate an overwhelming amount of

1 For more, see Simon J. Bronner, ed., American Children’s Folklore (Atlanta, GA: August House, 2006), 95–111.

2 http://www.amiright.com/parody/, accessed February 21, 2107.

3 The other two are Madonna and Michael Jackson.

4 The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the 1994 case finding for 2 Live Crew against publishers Acuff-Rose Music can be read at “Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569 (1994),” https:// www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/92-1292.ZS.html, accessed February 21, 2107. For more on parody and the law, see Joanna Demers, Steal this Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Charles J. Sanders and Steven R. Gordon, “Stranger in Parodies: Weird Al and the Law of Musical Satire,” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal 1 (1990): 11–46; and Juli Wilson Marshall and Nicholas J. Siciliano, “The Satire/Parody Distinction in Copyright and Trademark Law—Can Satire Ever Be a Fair Use?,” apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/intellectual/roundtables/0506_outline.pdf, accessed May 5, 2015.

!2 parodic material, including artists who are primarily musical parodists (such as “Weird Al”

Yankovic [né Alfred Matthew Yankovic], P. D. Q. Bach [né Peter Schickele], Country Yossi [né

Yossi Toiv], El Vez [né Robert Lopez], and Richard Cheese [né Mark Jonathan Davis]); musical humorists who use parody (including Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer); political humorists who use musical parody (such as Mark Russell, Paul Shanklin, and the Capitol Steps); and musicals that are principally parodic (e.g., the Forbidden Broadway series, The Classical Style: An Opera

(Sort Of), and The Book of Mormon). Parody appears less often in cultivated music but is used most frequently in the performances of classical music humorists (such as Victor Borge [né

Børge Rosenbaum], Anna Russell [née Anna Claudia Russel-Brown], and Igudesman and Joo

[the duo of Aleksey Igudesman and Richard Hyung-ki Joo].5 I have found several “serious” parodies in the oeuvres of late-twentieth-century composers including John Corigliano, George

Crumb, Jacob Druckman, Lukas Foss, George Rochberg, and Michael Gordon. These artists, performers, and composers are the tip of an iceberg, and music provides only one metric for measuring parody’s perennial popularity; as literary critic Linda Hutcheon has argued, parody was “ubiquitous in all the arts of the [twentieth] century.”6

Parody’s use in musical practice, however, stands in inverse proportion to its presence in musical scholarship, which can be divided into four categories: authors who do not offer a

5 Charles Ives’s parodies present an exception to this trend, one explained by the importance of borrowing practices to his style. (J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995], 1).

6 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London: Methuen, 1985; Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1.

!3 definition of parody,7 those who link parody exclusively with humor,8 those who provide limiting or imprecise definitions of parody,9 and those who include nuanced considerations of parody.10

Scholarship from this fourth group includes Esti Sheinberg’s book Irony, Satire, Parody, and the

Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities.11 Sheinberg presents a detailed discussion of musical parody, particularly the role parody plays in creating the

7 Paul Attinello, “Rock, Television, Paper, Musicals, Scissors: Buffy, The Simpsons, and Parody,” in Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ed. Paul Attinello, Janet K. Halfyard, and Vanessa Knights (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010), 235–48; William E. Studwell, “Vulgar Song Parodies from the ‘Good Old Days,’” Music Reference Services Quarterly 6 (1998): 13–17; Grantley McDonald, “Josquin’s Musical Cricket: El grillo as Humanist Parody,” Acta Musicologica 81 (2009): 39–53; Cassandra I. Carr, “Charles Ives’s Humor as Reflected in His Songs,” American Music 7 (1989): 123–39; Sarina Pearson, “How Many FOBS You Know ‘Flow’ Like This?: Parody, Popular Music and Articulations of ‘Asian’ Belonging,” in Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa, New Zealand, ed. Glenda Keam and Tony Mitchell (Auckland: Pearson, 2011), 89–103; Judith Sebesta, “Purpose and Parody in ‘Religious’ Musical Theatre,” Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance 3 (2006): 7–10; Timothy Koozin, “Parody and Ironic Juxtaposition in Toru Takemitsu’s Music for the Film, [sic] Rising Sun (1993),” Journal of Film Music 3 (2010): 65–78; Robert Gauldin, “Wagner’s Parody Technique: ‘Träume’ and the Tristan Love Duet,” Music Theory Spectrum 1 (1979): 35–42; Michael Chanan, “Dialectics in Peter Maxwell Davies,” Tempo 90 (1969): 12–22; Judah M. Cohen, “Hip-Hop Judaica: The Politics of Representin’ Heebster Heritage,” Popular Music 28 (Winter 2009): 1–18; and Judith Tick, “The Origins and Style of Copland’s Mood for Piano no. 3, ‘Jazzy,’” American Music 20 (2002): 277–96.

8 McDonald, “Josquin’s Musical Cricket”; Carr, “Charles Ives’s Humor as Reflected in His Songs”; Kay, “Music and Humor”; and Mera, “Is Funny Music Funny?”

9 Kay, “Music and Humor”; Tamara Balter, “Canon-Fodders: Parody of Learned Style in Beethoven,” Journal of Musicological Research 32 (2013): 199–224; Eric Savoy, “The Signifying Rabbit,” Narrative 3 (1995): 188–209; Kenneth H. Marcus, “The Seriousness of Comedy: The Benefit Concerts of Jack Benny and Danny Kaye,” American Music 25 (2007): 137–68; Amy Marie Bauer, “Compositional Process and Parody in the Music of György Ligeti” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1997); Paul Jewell and Jennie Louise, “It’s Just a Joke: Defining and Defending (Musical) Parody,” Australian Review of Public Affairs 10 (2012): 1–12; and Robert Falck, “Parody and Contrafactum: A Terminological Clarification,” The Musical Quarterly 64 (1979): 1–21.

10 Ian Russell, “Parody and Performance,” in Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular Milieu, ed. Michael Pickering and Tony Green (New York: Open University Press, 1987), 70–104; David Krasner, “Parody and Double Consciousness in the Language of Early Black Musical Theatre,” African American Review 29 (1995): 317–23; David Krasner, Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Ingrid T. Monson, “Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation: Irony, Parody, and Ethnomusicology,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1999): 283–313; Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Chichester, 2010); and Antti-Ville Kärjä, “Ridiculing Rap, Funlandizing Finns?: Humour and Parody as Strategies of Securing the Ethnic Other in Popular Music,” in Migrating Music, ed. Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck (New York: Routledge, 2011), 78–91.

11 Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2000).

!4 semantic ambiguity that is a hallmark of Shostakovich’s music. Despite her decision to divide parody into “satirical” and “non-satirical” types and her omission of several parodic techniques,

Sheinberg’s monograph presents a useful model for studying musical parody. Yayoi Uno

Everett’s article “Parody with an Ironic Edge: Dramatic Works by Kurt Weill, Peter Maxwell

Davies, and Louis Andriessen” draws from Linda Hutcheon’s research on parodic ethos, which

Everett describes as an “interpretive framework for distinguishing the aesthetic motivations that underlie parody, irony, and satire, and their points of intersection.”12 Her broad conception of parody informs my own work, but I diverge from her definition because I contend that it has the potential to include other techniques (like remixes, mashups, and sampling) that I do not consider parody.13 Our subjects overlap minimally, and while her inclusion of non-humorous examples explores an under-studied area of parody, she does not consider the borrowing techniques that these composers use or discuss the comic works that constitute the majority of parodies.

No author has comprehensively investigated parody in twentieth- and twenty-first- century music in general or in American music in particular. Paul Attinello incompletely

12 Yayoi Uno Everett, “Parody with an Ironic Edge: Dramatic Works by Kurt Weill, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Louis Andriessen,” Music Theory Online 10 (2004), accessed May 27, 2014, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto. 04.10.4/mto04.10.4.y_everett.html.

13 Everett defines parody “as a composer’s appropriation of pre-existing music with intent to highlight it in a significant way.” (ibid.).

!5 catalogues instances where The Simpsons parody musicals.14 Cassandra Carr lists several examples of parodic humor in Ives’s songs without defining “parody” or considering how the term applies to works ranging “from rather vicious to quite gentle.”15 Judah Cohen lists several parodies as support for his analysis of presentations of Jewish identity.16 Judith Tick mentions parody in “The Origins and Style of Copland’s Mood for Piano no. 3, ‘Jazzy’” without articulating what Copland is parodying or how he does so.17 Kenneth Marcus considers how Jack

Benny and Danny Kaye used reverential parody in their benefit concerts and relies on Hutcheon as his only source on parody.18 David Krasner mentions music’s role in early African American theatrical parodies.19 Ingrid Monson discusses parody in jazz without distinguishing between parody and irony.20

14 Attinello, “Rock, Television, Paper, Musicals, Scissors.” Since the 1970s, sampling has supplanted parody as the dominant borrowing technique in vernacular music. Despite their broad use and use of borrowed music, sampling contrasts with parody in two significant ways. First, a small percentage of samples are structural, while the overwhelming majority of parodic borrowings are structural. Second, structural samples typically comprise short, looped passages of music, whereas parodies typically recreate larger passages of music (often entire songs or whole melodies). Consequently, despite the prevalence of sampling in contemporary music, I argue that parody remains the most common type of structural borrowing technique in American vernacular music. (Amanda Sewell, “Paul’s Boutique and Fear of a Black Planet: Digital Sampling and Musical Style in Hip Hop,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8 [2014]: 31 and Sewell, “A Typology of Sampling in Hip Hop” [PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013]).

15 Carr, “Charles Ives’s Humor as Reflected in His Songs,” 124.

16 Cohen, “Hip-Hop Judaica.”

17 Tick, “The Origins and Style of Copland’s Mood for Piano no. 3, ‘Jazzy.’”

18 Marcus, “The Seriousness of Comedy.”

19 Krasner, “Parody and Double Consciousness in the Language of Early Black Musical Theatre” and idem, Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910.

20 Monson, “Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation.”

!6 Parody is likewise largely absent from the literature on musical borrowing. J. Peter

Burkholder’s monumental study of Charles Ives’s borrowing does not include parody as one of the fourteen musical borrowing techniques Ives uses.21 While Burkholder’s decision reflects

Ives’s compositional techniques (Ives employs techniques like quotation or cumulative form more frequently than he does parody), Burkholder’s seminal article outlining the subject of musical borrowing similarly omits parody.22

The gulf between parody’s omnipresence in contemporary American musical life and its near absence in musical scholarship begs a key question: why do musicologists continue to ignore the most accessible and widely-heard genre in American music? One potential answer is that parodies challenge several musicological limitations at once: they are typically unapologetically popular and lowbrow; they raise issues surrounding originality, authorship, and attribution; and they are associated with irreverence, absurdity, incongruity, and pleasure, values that collectively undermine “aesthetic coherence, formal unity, and idealized transcendence,” the pillars of Western aesthetic experience.23 Critics have abstained from substantively addressing topics like parody, ignoring humor’s social roles as “a mask for social critique, a display of comic artistry, a mode of communication, a fount of pleasure, and sometimes all of these at

21 Burkholder, All Made of Tunes.

22 J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes 50 (1994): 851– 70.

23 Charles Hiroshi Garrett, “The Humor of Jazz,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Andrew Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 52.

!7 once.”24 Beyond this mode of social critique, however, scholars have missed the valuable insights that parody’s immediacy offers.25

My dissertation serves as a partial corrective. I situate parody within the artistic practices and scholarship on musical borrowing as a means of explicating how and why parodists rely on pre-existing music. This focus on parody as a borrowing technique connects my four chapters. I begin chapter 1 with a descriptive survey of parody in vernacular music that explores what material parodists borrow and what techniques they use to modify this music. I then explore the purposes of these borrowings. In chapter 2 I investigate parody’s long-standing association with humor and argue that parodists rely on pre-existing music and social conventions to create incongruities that can have a wide range of meanings depending on the background and stylistic competencies of individual listeners. Chapter 3 explores parody and ethnic identity and suggests that contemporary parodists use musical borrowings to establish and police a black-white racial binary. Chapter 4 situates cultivated parody within the intellectual history of the late twentieth century and explores the ways parody manifested itself in the “age of fracture,” suggesting that its nature as a structural borrowing technique provided composers with an inadequate vehicle for exploring newly fragmented conceptions of identity.26 I conclude with several other possible avenues for research, including further study of parody’s potential in the classroom.

24 Ibid., 53.

25 Framed another way, parody’s disposable, transient nature offers another metaphor for contemporary America, less prosaic than Whitman’s and Hughes’s poetry, but perhaps more accurate.

26 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011).

!8 Because musicological scholarship on parody is either lacking or uneven, I have turned to scholars from literary criticism and English for the necessary background to my subject. In these fields, musicologists are in good company, because parody has been denigrated in historical practice and thought for centuries. Linda Hutcheon’s book A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of

Twentieth-Century Art Forms (1985, revised edition 2000) situates parody in both historical and contemporary contexts. As the preeminent source on twentieth-century parody, her research provides a foundation for my dissertation because of its focus on twentieth-century art and her argument that parodies have a large expressive range extending beyond the humorous or satirical. Margaret Rose’s Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (1993) provides a thorough discussion of historical definitions of parody. Simon Dentith’s Parody (2000) summarizes arguments between those who define parody according to “a more neutral or neoclassical usage in which the element of mockery would be absent” and those who describe it as a “fully comic practice.”27 Robert Chambers’s Parody: The Art That Plays with Art (2010) argues that parody and parodists are “no more imitative, parasitic, or dependent upon external originals than other artists.”28

Chamber’s comments explain part of the reason parody has been largely ignored by musicologists, and tracing changes in the genre’s reception over time helps situate parody’s reception in twentieth- and twenty-first century American music. While the considerable extent of historical parodic practice and the changing meanings of the term itself makes providing even a concise history difficult, a brief historical overview of parody in Western European artistic

27 Simon Dentith, Parody (New York: Routledge-Taylor, 2000), 193.

28 Robert Chambers, Parody: The Art That Plays with Art (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 4 and 190.

!9 practice and critical thought illustrates that both the creation and criticism of parody rely on a wide scope of artistic practices that have held different meanings at different times. These ongoing debates about the nature, expressive potential, and characteristics of parody create problems for defining the term; while these debates have been less vigorous in musicology than in other fields, they have affected how music scholars understand the term.

The idea of parody originated in Ancient Greece. The word’s root is the Greek noun parodia, which can be translated as “counter-song.”29 Linda Hutcheon believes that this root suggests “an opposition or contrast between texts,” arguing that the “textual or discursive nature of parody (as opposed to satire) is clear from the odos part of the word, meaning song.” She adds that the “prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned—that of

‘counter’ or ‘against.’”30 She notes that “para in Greek can also mean ‘beside,’” suggesting “an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast.”31

Subsequent uses of the word illustrate its potential for multiple meanings. While the first recorded use of the word comes from Hegemon of Thasos, little information about him or this reference survives.32 As a result, Aristotle’s discussions of parody in Poetics are the first substantive considerations of parody. For Aristotle, parody referred to a “specific literary

29 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 32.

30 Ibid., 32.

31 Ibid., 32 and 53–54. For another discussion of the word’s etymology as well as ancient meanings and later translations and interpretations of the word, see Rose, Parody, 6–20 and Joāo Ferreira Duarte, “‘A Dangerous Stroke of Art’: Parody as Transgression,” European Journal of English Studies 3 (1999): 68.

32 Duarte writes that the Hegemon of Thasos reference “is disappointingly vague and unenlightening, not only on textual grounds, since it carries no theoretical or demonstrative force, being a mere passing illustration, but also on historical grounds, since no works written by him have survived.” (Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 73).

!10 form . . . a narrative poem, of moderate length, in the metre and vocabulary of epic poems, but treating a light, satirical, or mock-heroic subject.”33

Parody also had other meanings in the ancient world. According to Joāo Ferreira Duarte, the term could refer to a “complete work of moderate length,” a device of “textual transposition” within works, to a practice of allusion and quotation, and “to a figure of speech” (the meaning employed by Quintilian, who defines parody as “a name drawn from songs sung in imitation of others, but employed by an abuse of language to designate imitation in verse or prose.”).34 Simon

Dentith writes that parody was frequently used to refer “to a more widespread practice of quotation, not necessarily humorous, in which both writers and speakers introduce allusions to previous texts.”35 As these varied descriptions suggest, ancient parody included a range of artistic practices.36 These include mock-heroic poems (of which only the Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and Mice survives), satyr plays (“which typically travesty the high material handled

33 Dentith, Parody, 10–11. Duarte claims, “We should thus infer that Aristotle’s aesthetic system was remarkably coherent with the social and cultural system of ancient Greece, the system still prevailing in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, at least as far as the role of parodic transgression is concerned.” (Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 77; for more on Aristotle and parody, see ibid., 65–710).

34 Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 70.

35 Dentith, Parody, 10–11. Duarte affirms this claim, noting that the use of quotation or allusion was “not necessarily comic.” (Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 70).

36 Dentith observes, “Ancient Greek culture was shot through with parodic forms, even if their relationship to the heroic, tragic or sacred texts is difficult to determine.” (Dentith, Parody, 40).

!11 with such dignity in the tragedies that precede them”), and Old Comedy (works stemming from the late fifth century BCE, exemplified by Aristophanes).37

Several aspects of modern parody stem from these ancient texts, including parody’s reliance on pre-existing works and a broad conception of parody both in terms of relationships to existing texts as well as social or aesthetic functions. Despite these similarities, there are no direct correlations between the ancient and modern meanings of the word. As Simon Dentith observes, “Greek uses of the term do not simply correspond with modern English usage,” which frequently involve a mocking element absent in earlier meanings.38 While many ancient authors included some aspect of humor in their descriptions, this characteristic has proved contentious, as we will see in both seventeenth- and eighteenth-century definitions, which limit parody’s expressive range, and in modern attempts to remove or downplay the humorous aspects of parody.

37 Dentith, Parody, 40–45. For more on Aristophanes, see Joseph A. Dane, Parody: Critical Concepts Versus Literary Practices, Aristophanes to Sterne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 17–66. Dentith believes that parody might also be present in Plato’s fourth century writings. (Dentith, Parody, 45–47 and Chambers, Parody, 13–18).

38 Dentith, Parody, 10–11 and Chambers, Parody, 3–4 and 195–97.

!12 Parody in the Middle Ages was influenced by Aristotle39 and includes the genre of

Menippean satire.40 Artists during this era created a “remarkable range of parodic forms” including “direct liturgical parodies” and parodies of vernacular religious practices.41 While

Dentith acknowledges the difficulty in determining what these texts meant to historical worshippers (emphasizing the importance of understanding the specific contexts in which these parodies were situated), he notes that ancient and medieval parodic practices frequently targeted

“sacred and authoritative texts,” limited in scope (and potential damage) by “social and even political factors, which may or may not include popular institutions like the carnival.”42 This aspect of parody has figured prominently in subsequent interpretations, which likewise stress the necessity of understanding how a parody would have been interpreted in specific historical and social contexts such as carnival, a prominent aspect of twentieth-century interpretations of parody as found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.43

39 Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 77. After Aristotle, the most important critical text discussing parody from this time was Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, which Alfred the Great translated into Anglo- Saxon and Chaucer into English. (Dentith, Parody, 49). For more on parody in important works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Lucian’s Verae historiae and François Rabelai’s Book IV), see Dane, 67–120. For more on the classicization of medieval parody, see Dane, 175–204.

40 Menippean satire, the “tradition of serio-comic writing which is heavily dependent upon parody, and which continued through the Hellenistic and Roman worlds and into the Christian era,” is marked by “the presence of prose and poetry and of a serio-comic attitude,” and can also be characterized by “a learned parody of learning . . . by means of a comic self-parodying narrator.” (Dentith, Parody, 47).

41 Dentith, Parody, 49. These works were both censured and celebrated, and included “four principal forms: allegorical parody, mock saints’ lives, liturgical parodies, and humorous centos (in which lines from the Bible or other classic sources are taken and rearranged to make a new, comic, text).” (Ibid., 50–51).

42 Ibid., 54.

43 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1941) and Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995).

!13 Another link between early and modern interpretations of parody was established through parody’s connection with humor. Margaret Rose attributes much importance to matters of translation, using J. C. Scaliger’s Poetices libri septem of 1561 to “illustrate the dangers of translating the ancient Greek words and their connotations into other languages.” Scaliger’s use of the Latin “ridiculus” could be translated into English either as essentially “laughing at” or

“laughing with,” and since “his discussion of parody was in its turn taken up by several other critics in their accounts of ancient parody,” his interpretation unduly influenced later conceptions of parody.44 Rose argues that Scaliger’s decision to use “ridiculus” to describe parody’s comic features may “have led some English critics . . . to view the latter in a more negative light than was necessary,” because ridicule led parody to be connected with mockery, a relationship that

Rose believes made parody’s “eventual reduction to the burlesque more easy.”45 While Rose concedes that “the majority of works to which words for parody are attached by the ancients, and which are still known to us in whole or in part, suggest that parody was understood as being humorous,” and that “aspects of ridicule or mockery were present” in these works, she argues that these traits were supplemental “to its other functions and were co-existent with the parody’s ambivalent renewal of its target or targets.”46 Ancient parody had a humorous aspect, but its importance was exaggerated by early modern translators and critics. As a result, humor was then

44 Rose, Parody, 9. For more on lexicography of parody in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Dane, Parody, 121–74.

45 Rose, Parody, 9–10. Rose also criticizes Fred W. Householder, Jr.’s translations of ancient terms, calling him “misleading” and observing that “humour was not always or necessarily present in the word parody.” For comments on the problems “of translating the ancient terms into modern equivalents,” especially “given the modern understanding of ridicule and laughter as something more negative or destructive than humour as such,” see Rose, Parody, 20–29; Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 51–52; and Chambers, Parody, 197–99.

46 Rose, Parody, 25 (emphasis in original).

!14 reduced to the primary characteristic of parody, and its associations with the comic, satire, and ridicule caused it to acquire a reputation as a less-than-serious medium.

These connotations were emphasized in several early modern texts that are foundational to contemporary understandings of parody, including Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67).47 While positive valuations of satire and wit during the eighteenth century “brought parody to the forefront as a major literary mode,”48 parody also acquired several “negative connotations” during this period because of its “relegation . . . to a sub-category of the burlesque.”49 Despite this, parody flourished during the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries. Dwight Macdonald considers the nineteenth century a Golden Age of parody, a statement which Dentith qualifies as

“the Golden Age of a certain kind of parody,” arguing this period was not a time in which parody

“contributes to any of its major cultural achievements.”50 Despite the importance of parody to

47 Dentith, Parody, 55–59, 75–78, and 81–85. The genre similarly flourished in the theater and in poetry. For parody and the theater, see Ibid., 124–44.

48 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 36.

49 Rose, Parody, 9. Hutcheon disagrees with Rose’s claim (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 36). Rose believes that “the reduction of parody to a type of burlesque in modern [post-Renaissance] literary criticism has associated it with mockery or ridicule for many modern critics, authors, and readers in both a more exclusive and a more negative manner.” (Rose, Parody, 25; see also Chambers, Parody, 48–49, 199–201, and 203–4). Such interpretations delimited the scope and expressive range of parody and cast the genre in an unflattering light. Rose contends that the effects of relating “parody to the burlesque have included the development of a modern view of it as an inferior literary form, incapable of either complexity or seriousness.” Paradoxically, this same relationship also explains “modern and ‘late-modern’ attempts to separate parody from both the burlesque and the comic in order to treat it as a more serious meta-fictional or ‘intertextual’ form.” (Rose, Parody, 68; see also Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 141–42).

50 Dentith, Parody, 30 and 111–19. For more on Romantic and Victorian parody, see Chambers, Parody, 209–18. For more on parody and the theater, see Dentith, Parody, 145–53. For parody and poetry, see Dentith, Parody, 97–115.

!15 poetic practices, the genre conflicted fundamentally with nineteenth-century aesthetic ideals that opposed artworks understood as derivative, parasitic, and unoriginal.51

These attitudes began to change in the twentieth century as both artistic practice and critical thinking on parody became more nuanced. For Hutcheon, parody has been “ubiquitous” and constituted “one of the major modes of formal and thematic construction of texts.”52 Parody has been subjected to a broad range of interpretations and has been realized in artistic forms ranging from James Joyce’s Ulysses to Jasper Johns’s White Flag to Peter Maxwell Davies’s

Eight Songs for a Mad King to Monty Python’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life.”53

Parody’s pervasiveness have been mirrored by a surge of writing and critical theories that have contributed to a reappraisal of the genre. Russian Formalist scholars, in particular Bakhtin, rejuvenated critical discourse about parody.54 Dentith observes that while Bakhtin did not contribute a “specific theory of parody,” his writing on the topic “emerges as part of a more general characterisation of ‘carnival’ and the ‘carnivalesque’” extending back to the early

51 Chambers, Parody, 229; see also 192–94 and 230. For example, Nietzsche defined parody in 1886 as a “lack of originality and its laughter the laughter of despair.” A. S. Martin described parody as “parasitical” in 1896. (quoted in Rose, Parody, 281). Patricia Waugh displays the modern ramifications of this type of thinking when she writes that “because parody has been considered mainly as a form of criticism, it has been regarded as a sign of generic exhaustion.” (Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction [New York: Routledge, 2003], 65–68.

52 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 1 and 2.

53 For more on Ulysses, see Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 5–6 and 45. For more on White Flag, see ibid., 106. For more on Davies, see Everett, “Parody with an Ironic Edge.” “Always Look on The Bright Side of Life” is a parody of the positive songs that often conclude Disney movies.

54 For more on the Russian formalists, see Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 141, 154, and 157–76; Rose, Parody, 103–70; Dane, Parody, 7–10; Chambers, Parody, 218–23; and Waugh, Metafiction, 65–68. For Bakhtin and parody, see Dentith, Parody, ix and Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 168–76.

!16 modern era.55 These writings have contributed to a groundswell of parodic discourse, and several other schools of criticism have addressed parody.56 Parody also features prominently in discussions about post-modernism because of its intertextual or meta-fictional nature. Dentith observes that “controversy about the nature of postmodernism has turned on the place of parody in it.”57 Scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon have disagreed about parody’s political nature as well as the genre’s status as the most representative post-modern art form.58

Subsequent scholars have de-emphasized relationships between parody and postmodernism. Rose argues, “Hutcheon’s suggestion that parody is post-modern because of its ability to renew and look back to other historical works also obscures the fact that most parody does this.”59 Chatman argues that both Hutcheon and Rose “go a bit far in making parody the

55 Dentith, Parody, 22.

56 For more on parody and reception theorists (especially Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser), see Rose, Parody, 170–177. For structuralists and post-structuralists (including Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Renate Lachmann, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault), see ibid., 177–192. For deconstructionist and other late-modern theories of post-modernism and parody (including Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Dick Hebdige, and Richard Kearney), see ibid., 206–32. For a consideration of Charles Jencks, see ibid., 232–242. For discussion of post-modern parody in theory and practice (including writers such as Umberto Eco, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury), see ibid., 242–71; see also Chambers, Parody, 178–80, 203–6, and 223–31. Despite this growth in scholarship, Chambers argues that parody “and its relations have been consigned by many to an unnamed and undesirable colony reserved for parasitic art” and that contemporary parody remains rooted in Victorian thinking about parody. He remains pessimistic about any significant change. (Chambers, Parody, 229, 230, and 192–94).

57 Dentith, Parody, ix.

58 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92 and Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Cultural Critique 5 (1986–1987): 179–207. For analysis of their dialogue, see Dentith, Parody, 155–56; John N. Duvall, “Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson’s Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody,” in Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, ed. John N. Duvall (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 1–22; David Bennett, “Parody, Postmodernism, and the Politics of Reading,” Critical Quarterly 27 (1985): 27–43; and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, “Finger Exercises: Parody as a Practice for Postmodernity,” European Journal of English Studies 3 (1999): 226–40.

59 Rose, Parody, 211.

!17 prototypical postmodern genre, a generalization achieved only by the most generous stretch of the term.”60 Dentith similarly considers it “impossible . . . to assert that there is anything distinctive or central about parody, at the level of high art, which differentiates the postmodern world from its predecessors.” While he does not want “to deny the importance of parody in contemporary art and literature,” he denies “that this form leads towards any particular insight into the cultural dominant of the contemporary world.”61

Given that disagreements about the meaning and significance of “parody” have spanned centuries and been further complicated by shifting uses of the term, I side with Linda Hutcheon, who acknowledges the impossibility of finding “transhistorical definitions of parody.” She also argues that “the social or ‘worldly’ status of parody can also never be fixed or finally and permanently defined.”62 As a result, she concentrates on contemporary meanings and uses of parody, basing her theory as much as possible on actual artistic practices.63 I also agree with

Dentith’s description of parody “not as a single and tightly definable genre or practice,” but as a

“spectrum or continuum” or a “range of cultural practices which are all more or less parodic.”64

60 Chatman, “Parody and Style,” 28.

61 Dentith, Parody, 159–64 and 183–85.

62 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 10 and 115. She also claims that “nevertheless, I shall constantly be using examples from other periods to show that there are common denominators to all definitions of parody in all ages— although they are not the ones usually cited.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 10 [emphasis in original]).

63 As she writes, the “theoretical perspective here will be dual: both formal and pragmatic,” because I see parody as a formal or structural relation between two texts . . . even if a definition of modern parody should start with formal analysis, it cannot remain there.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 22).

64 Dentith, Parody, 19.

!18 Within the context of twentieth- and twenty-first century American music, parody can be defined as a structural borrowing technique typically employing contrafact, stylistic allusion, and/or quotation to create incongruities with an established sound, style, or social expectation.65

A range of disparate works fall under the category “parody,” which share several key traits that hold true for nearly all contemporary American musical parodies: parody can be both a genre and/or a mode of expression or technique within existing genres. Parodies are new works created by borrowing pre-existing material, and/or the modification and alteration of this material through a variety of techniques. Parodists rely on well-known forms of coded discourse to communicate with listeners, with a subsequent potential for multiple interpretations based on a particular listener’s stylistic competency.

Parody shares a use of coded discourse and polyvalence with several other genres, and distinguishing parody from irony, satire, and pastiche is necessary for a nuanced understanding of parody. Irony and parody both involve interpretive ambiguity.66 Lars Ellström writes that most scholars define irony as a “rhetorical formula of saying one thing and meaning the opposite.”67

This process is analogous to parody: Rose, for example, argues both irony and parody “confuse the normal processes of communication by offering more than one message to be decoded by the

65 While my formulation attempts to be as inclusive as possible, any attempt to create a single comprehensive definition of a musical style or practice from a descriptive position will inevitably run into difficulties. Quotation, for example, fits awkwardly into the “structural” portion of my definition, but omitting this borrowing technique from any definition of parody misrepresents contemporary parodic practice.

66 Parody and irony are also difficult to define. Concluding a historical survey of the concept of irony, Lars Ellström remarks that defining irony “is not . . . all that wise.” Like parody, the concept has undergone “considerable changes” over time, with “arguably . . . more extensions and modifications than that of most literary concepts.” Lars Ellström, Divine Madness: On Interpreting Literature, Music and the Visual Arts Ironically (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 25. For more on music and irony, see Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 33–65 and 69–137.

67 Ellström, Divine Madness, 25.

!19 reader,” a process that can “conceal the author’s intended meaning from immediate interpretation.”68 Hutcheon notes that the interpretive process for both techniques “rests on the recognition of the superimposition” of two levels, “a primary, surface, or foreground” level and a

“secondary, implied, or backgrounded one.”69

Notwithstanding this fundamental similarity, several key distinctions differentiate the two genres. Rose argues that irony “is usually more ‘cryptic’ than most parody” because irony combines “messages in the single code of the ironist,” while parody relies on dual codes with two messages from multiple authors.70 She also contends that the meanings of an ironic work are

“generally left concealed for the recipient of the irony to decipher” while those in a parodic work frequently result in comic effects.71 While parody is not limited to humor, Rose’s argument elucidates a key distinction between the two genres/modes: generally, parodists do less to conceal the overt meanings of their work that ironists do. While irony “work[s] with one code which conceals two messages,” parody “contains at least two codes,” which opens a space for parody to be “potentially both ironic and satiric in that the object of its attack is both made a part of the parody and of its potentially ironic multiple messages and may be more specifically

68 Rose, Parody, 87. The lines between the two techniques can become blurry as artists creating parodic works can employ ironizing techniques (and vice versa). Rose writes that “while the ironist may also use parody to confuse a meaning, the parodist may use irony in the treatment of the parodied work and its messages in a variety of different ways,” including using a parodied text ironically to obfuscate the text’s meaning. (Ibid.) Hutcheon argues we need to consider “the entire enunciative context” that is “involved in the production and reception of the kind of parody that uses irony as the major means of accentuating, even establishing, parodic contrast.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 34 and 54). Sheinberg builds on these ideas, defining parody as “an ironic utterance.” (Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 141).

69 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 34.

70 Rose, Parody, 88.

71 Ibid.

!20 defined as a separate target than the object of the irony.”72 This specificity and the combination of codes from multiples authors and texts do not necessarily delimit a parody’s potential meanings but serve to channel their meanings in a way that an ironic work’s frequently do not.

Satire and parody are likewise connected in the interpretive challenges they present to audiences.73 Distinguishing satire and parody in twentieth-century art can be particularly challenging since both often appear together and rely on “irony as a rhetorical strategy.”74

Hutcheon differentiates satire from parody based on ethos: while both genres “imply critical distancing and therefore value judgments,” she argues that satire “generally uses that distance to make a negative statement about that which is satirized.”75 She argues that “satire frequently uses parody as a vehicle” for both ridicule and amelioration, orienting satire “toward a negative evaluation and a corrective intent” frequently absent in parody.76 Parody may or may not be

72 Rose, Parody, 89. Elleström sees parody as “a species of irony,” and while he acknowledges “a terminological distinction” between the two, he does not see any “fundamental difference between the creation of ironic meaning based on contexts and intertexts.” (Ellström, Divine Madness, 99).

73 Hutcheon describes satire as a genre or mode that is “extramural (social, moral) in its ameliorative aim to hold up to ridicule the vices and follies of mankind, with an eye to their correction.” (Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 43; Rose, Parody, 80–81; and Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 69– 137).

74 Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 16, 43, 49, and 52. Rose and Sheinberg follow her argument that parody can be both ironic and satiric. (Rose, Parody, 88–89 and Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 142–147). Hutcheon complicates matters by distinguishing a type of parody that is satiric (which she terms satiric parody) from a type of satire that is parodic (which she calls parodic satire). She gives Woody Allen’s Zelig as an example of the former and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny as an example of the latter. (Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 62–63). While such terms are cumbersome, they allow us to parse distinctions between the ethos and intended function of works that rely on both genres/modes. I have omitted this distinction from my work because the distinction seems unimportant in nearly all contemporary American parody. For more on these distinctions in music see Everett, “Parody with an Ironic Edge.”

75 Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 44.

76 Ibid., 54.

!21 critical, and this criticism is not always aimed at producing social change or awareness, which are key components of satire.77

While some parodies inarguably “have ideological or even social implications” and can

“be used to satirize the reception or even the creation of certain kinds of art,” the overall genre differentiates itself from satire by its choice of target. As Hutcheon argues, “parody is not extramural in its aim; satire is.”78 Seen this way, parody appears to be the more versatile genre of the two: while satire almost invariably attacks a target, parody is capable of criticizing, defending, or paying tribute.79

Of the modes considered in this section, pastiche and parody are most similar. Both are

“formal textual imitations” that raise comparable “issue[s] of intent” as “acknowledged borrowings.”80 These similarities make it difficult to distinguish the two genres. Hutcheon attempts to differentiate pastiche and parody according to the material they target. She argues that pastiches rely on multiple works and often imitate not one text but “the indefinite

77 In Hutcheon’s words, “satire does not authorize but ridicules the transgression of social norms, though it may parodically legitimize literary ones.” (Ibid., 78).

78 Ibid., 43.

79 Rose, Parody, 82. Rose articulates another crucial distinction between satire and parody by arguing that satire separates itself “from the author’s sympathies” by “being made the object” of her/his criticism but “not an otherwise integral aesthetic part of the satirist’s message.” (Ibid., 81–83). This differs from parody, which incorporates some or all of the original into its own structure. This varied use of the original work also helps illuminate Hutcheon’s distinctions between parodic satire and satiric parody. Rose also comments that “parody may be used by the satirist to attack an author or reader through the evocation and mockery of a particular work with which they may be associated, and that the parody may sometimes have the satiric aim of using a target text or other preformed work to attack its author or audience.” (Ibid., 86).

80 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 38. Rose notes that pastiche is often used as a synonym for parody, especially in French literature. Similarly to satire, pastiche and parody can function as genres or as modes of treating others texts; in other words, pastiche can use parody or parodies can use pastiche (Rose, Parody, 72–73).

!22 possibilities of texts.”81 This definition, however, cannot account for American parodists’ use of stylistic borrowings. Parodic practice likewise complicates Ian Inglis’s claim that parody’s

“comic or satiric effect” distinguishes pastiche from parody, because the affective range of contemporary parody includes non-humorous effects.82

The difficulties of separating pastiche from parody are amplified by their centrality to contemporary artistic practices. Disagreements between Jameson and Hutcheon spurred each author to publish what Duvall calls “competing attempts to name the master trope of postmodernism.”83 Jameson believes both pastiche and parody involve “imitation or . . . mimicry” of pre-existing materials, especially “the mannerisms and stylistic twitches of other styles.”84 He characterizes parody as “seiz[ing]” on the “idiosyncrasies and eccentricities” of the

“uniqueness of these styles” in order to mock them. Responding to Hutcheon’s argument for an expanded parodic ethos, Jameson acknowledges that while parody is not characterized by a

“satiric impulse,” it tends to “cast ridicule” on “stylistic mannerisms and their excessiveness and eccentricity with respect to” normal communication.85 Parody, for Jameson, presupposes a

81 She continues: “it is similarity rather than difference that characterizes the relationship between the two styles. Parody is to pastiche, perhaps, as rhetorical trope is to cliché. In pastiche and cliché, difference can be said to reduce to similarity.” (Ibid., 38).

82 Ian Inglis offers a third definition, describing pastiche as “a literary, artistic, or musical work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.” (Ian Inglis, “Fabricating the Fab Four: Pastiche and Parody,” in Access All Eras: Tribute Bands And Global Pop Culture, ed. Shane Holman [New York: Open University Press, 2006], 121). For more on pastiche in music, see Christopher Joseph Tonelli, “Musical Pastiche, Embodiment, and Intersubjectivity: Listening in the Second Degree” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2011).

83 Duvall, “Troping History,” 20.

84 Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 15.

85 Ibid., 15–16.

!23 “linguistic norm” absent in pastiche, which he characterizes as neutral imitation, “mimicry without parody’s ulterior motive,” without laughter or satire, and without “that still latent feeling that there exists something normal” compared to the imitated target. Pastiche, then, is “blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor.”86 It results from “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible,” when artists are left with nothing else but the imitation of

“dead styles.”87 Hutcheon argues that a crucial distinction between parody and pastiche involves the relationship between the new work and its target. A parody will “seek differentiation in its relationship to its model” through its “transformational” modification of the target (what she elsewhere calls “ironic ‘transcontextualization’”), while a pastiche has an “imitative” relationship with its target, operating “more by similarity and correspondence.”88

Despite the particular difficultly of distinguishing between pastiches and parodies that rely on stylistic allusion, I argue there are several key differences. While parodies may use either one or several texts, pastiches always rely on multiple texts.89 Related to this is the fact that pastiche “usually has to remain within the same genre as its model, whereas parody allows for

86 Ibid., 16 (emphasis in original).

87 Ibid., 18. Jameson considers these implications dire, connecting pastiche to postmodernism and an emergent “late, consumer or multinational capitalism” through a “disappearance of a sense of history” (a theme that returns in a different context in chapter 4), arguing that pastiche, and postmodernism more generally, inadequately resistant to the “cultural logic” of this capitalism. (Ibid., 28–29). Hutcheon likewise considers pastiche a lesser imitative form, “monotextual” in comparison to the “bitextual synthesis” of parody. (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 33).

88 Ibid., 12 and 38.

89 As Hutcheon writes, “it is similarity rather than difference that characterizes the relationship between the two styles. Parody is to pastiche, perhaps, as rhetorical trope is to cliché. In pastiche and cliché, difference can be said to reduce to similarity.” (Ibid., 38).

!24 adaptation.”90 Moreover, pastiche is frequently neutral, while parody can have a wide-ranging ethos.91 Finally, pastiche is often linked with suggestions of immorality (as a form of plagiarism or theft); Jameson considers “the allusive and elusive plagiarism” of older materials a “feature of pastiche.”92 While parodies might be portrayed as derivative, they are less frequently accused of being immoral or unethical, and have a protected status as a type of borrowing in American copyright law.

As these examples show, the lines between these genres are not always clear. Given the ability of artists using each mode to adopt techniques or ethos from other works (satiric parody, for example, or elements of pastiche in Yankovic’s polka parodies), isolating, differentiating, and labeling these modes presents difficulties. These difficulties are compounded by the challenges posed by non-comic parody. Previously, the presence of humor alerted a listener that they were hearing parody, but given the use of a non-humorous ethos by twentieth-century artists, humor no longer provides a listener with a surefire interpretive clue. Taken together, these uncertainties have become a key characteristic of modern parody. I contend that focusing on the borrowing techniques parodists use offers a solution.

90 Ibid., 38. She also adds that “parody, then, is related to burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation, and allusion, but remains distinct from them. It shares with them a restriction of focus: its repetition is always of another discursive text. The ethos of that act of repetition can vary, but its ‘target’ is always intramural in this sense.” (Ibid., 43).

91 Rose, Parody, 72.

92 Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, 19 and Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 75–76.

!25 Understanding parody as both a genre and a mode of expression within existing genres situates parody within the larger network of borrowing practices in contemporary music.93 Here I follow Dentith, who positions parody both as a “mode” and “as a range in the spectrum of possible intertextual relations.”94 This conception of parody as both genre and mode reflects contemporary artistic practices and allows me to refer throughout this document to the genre of parody (for example, most of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s catalogue fits into a genre of American parodic music extending back through Frank Zappa, Spike Jones, and the Marx Brothers) as well as how those works create their impact (through the expressive mode or borrowing technique of parody, like George Crumb’s parody of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in Vox

Balaenae).95

Parodies are new works created through musical borrowings. One of the most significant differences between historical and contemporary understandings of the genre is a mounting rejection of the underlying assumptions that framed parody as a lesser art form because of its reliance on pre-existing material. Despite the lingering persistence of ideals privileging

93 This framing also accounts for linguistic uses of “parody” as both a noun and a verb.

94 Dentith, Parody, 37. I agree with Hutcheon’s argument that parody “can certainly operate on a wide range of text sizes,” and find her distinction that “parts of a work may be parodic without the entire text being so labeled,” but both Dentith and I depart from her formulation of parody as “an extended form, probably a genre, rather than a technique” because such works retain their “own structural identity” and “hermeneutic function.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 18–19). I also disagree with Robert Chambers’s reduction of parody to a technique, a viewpoint likely resulting from his book-length attempt to systematize parodic technique. While parody can be a technique, his conception fails to differentiate an artwork’s primary mode of expression with the technique used to create it. In other words, a non-parodic text can use parodic techniques and vice versa. (Chambers, Parody, 6, 11, and 32). I likewise disagree with Carolyn Williams’s formulation of parody as “a mode, not a genre” which “can operate in any genre.” While I am intrigued by her argument that “parody is a primary form of genre formation, for new genres are never entirely new, but emerge from the assimilation and critique of older genres,” the large number of vernacular parodies I found suggests parody is its own genre. (Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan, 12).

95 My work concentrates on the former instance in part because of the number of unstudied parodies and to distinguish lyrical contrafactum from jazz contrafactum, a compositional technique not explored in this study.

!26 “originality” and “aesthetic coherence”, reliance on another work does not mean that the end result is also not new. Chambers believes that “except when the work is shoddy,” parody “is not inherently derivative, parasitic, or unoriginal.”96 Hutcheon similarly contends that parody “is never a mode of parasitic symbiosis. On the formal level, it is always a paradoxical structure of contrasting synthesis, a kind of differential dependence of one text upon another.”97 She argues,

“For the decoder of parody, this creative function for an individual artist is less important than the realization that, for whatever reason, the artist’s parodic incorporation and ironic ‘transcontextualization’ or inversion has brought about something new in its bitextual synthesis.”98

Williams considers parody a “modern and relative form of originality that acknowledges the claims of adaptation and partial derivation as legitimate forms of authorship.”99 While parodic borrowing relies partially or wholly on pre-existing material, parody “whether of a personal, generic, or period style, typically turns on idiosyncratic choices among the entire panoply of literary and linguistic features—from the smallest particulars of form, like meter and rhyme, to the broadest choices of subject matter.”100 In other words, while parodists rely on pre-existing works, the processes of revision and recreation that occur through parodies are not less original than any creative act occurring within any set of conventions.

96 Chambers, Parody, xi.

97 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 3 and 61.

98 Ibid., 35.

99 Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan, 13.

100 Chatman, “Parody and Style,” 36.

!27 While parodies are new works, they are created by modifications to pre-existing music.

Parodists treat these borrowed materials through a range of musical techniques. I discuss the specific techniques vernacular musicians employ in chapter 1, but a brief summary of parodic practice is helpful here. Esti Sheinberg divides these techniques into two main categories: imitative techniques (including replication, quotation, allusion, and stylization) and incongruous techniques (such as variation, distortion, and parodic collage).101 Like those between any interpretive acts, the lines between these approaches are often blurry, because what one critic interprets as allusion another might interpret as stylization. Parodies can also rely on multiple techniques simultaneously, making the labeling of different devices difficult. Conceiving of these techniques as belonging to a spectrum of parodic devices provides the flexibility necessary to determine a composer’s methods and analyze his/her use of preexisting materials.

At one end of the imitative spectrum is replication, which Shenberg defines as “exact reproduction intended to create aesthetic or ironic distance.”102 Parodic replication occurs frequently in post-war American music. An example is Bob Rivers’s “O Come All Ye

Deadheads,” which replicates the music of “Adeste Fidelis” for a new Grateful Dead-themed text.103

101 Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 187. In order to provide greater clarity, I will be relying on several sources to flesh out her descriptions, several of which she does not define.

102 Ibid., 189.

103 “Weird Al” Yankovic relies on this technique for parodies that target specific songs; for example, “The Saga Begins” replicates the music, prosody, and arrangement of Don McLean’s “American Pie.” The first movement of P. D. Q. Bach’s Eine kleine Nichtmusik replicates Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and combines it in collage with fragments of nineteen other songs, themes, and melodies, including “Zip Coon/Turkey in the Straw,” “Là ci darem la mano,” and “Dixie.” Aside from the addition of an unresolved dominant chord at the final cadence, Schickele replicates Mozart’s music in full.

!28 David Metzer defines the second imitative device, quotation, as “the placement of parts of a pre-existent piece in a new composition or performance.” He distinguishes quotation from allusion and paraphrase in that the former uses “actual material” while the latter techniques broadly evoke works styles, or textures. Metzer also distinguishes these techniques by “the prominence of the borrowing, which is made to stick out from the surrounding music” and by

“the use of brief excerpts” in quotations.104 These criteria help critics discriminate between replication (which duplicates a large portion of preexisting music) and quotation (which uses smaller portions). Quotation is frequently found in the music of P. D. Q. Bach, including in

Minuet Militaire (which quotes “Reveille”), the G minor prelude from The Short-Tempered

Clavier (which quotes “The Hearse Song”), and Three Chorale-Based Piecelets (which features quotations from “Aura Lee,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Au Clair de La Lune” in the first, second, and third movements, respectively).105

104 David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4.

105 Such quotations primarily function to create humor through incongruity and to provide familiar musical materials (rewarding an experienced listener’s stylistic competency). Quotations are also used for programmatic reasons, as in P. D. Q. Bach’s Birthday Ode To Big Daddy Bach, which references the German birthday song “Hoch soll er leben,” or the 1712 Overture which relies on (among others) a quotation of “Pop Goes the Weasel” to depict antagonist Wilhelm Wiesel.

!29 Allusion and stylization can be difficult to separate and the literature on musical borrowing typically conflates the two.106 Based on how musicians use these techniques, I believe that it is necessary to distinguish between allusions to specific works and presentations of material in certain styles. Burkholder’s descriptive writing on Ives’s actual practices supports this interpretation, discriminating between three groups of works: those that use “one or more specific pieces as models and quoting them,” those “using one or more specific pieces as models without quoting them,” and those “alluding to a certain style or musical type without unmistakably alluding to any particular piece.”107 The use of “alluding” to refer to such a wide range of borrowing practices means that his definitions conflate borrowing practices that draw specifically from a specific source (like quotation), those that draw generally from a specific source (like allusion), and those that draw generally from a general source (like stylization).108

For my study, “allusion” involves borrowings from specific models or works (i.e., a general reference to a specific musical work), while “stylizations” involve borrowings from

106 For example, in All Made of Tunes, Burkholder defines “stylistic allusion” as “alluding not to a specific work but to a general style,” while his definition of “allusion” in the Grove Music Online describes “a reference in a musical work to another work or to a style or convention.” (Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 4 and idem, “Allusion,” in Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/ 52852 [accessed August 16, 2014]). Several other scholars have discussed allusion including Nicholas Marston, Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Raymond Knapp, “Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1998): 1–︎30; Christopher Smith, “‘Broadway the Hard Way’: Techniques of Allusion in Music by Frank Zappa,” College Music Symposium 35 (1995): 35–60; and Anne Chatoney Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera: The Ghosts of Versailles by John Corigliano and William Hoffman,” Contemporary Music Review 20 (2001): 117–35.

107 Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 268.

108 Differentiating between allusion and stylization allows for greater precision when describing how a musical borrower relies on pre-existing music as well as how a listener can hear and understand these references. For example, a stylistic competent listener familiar with Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” can hear P. D. Q. Bach’s allusion to that specific work, while other audiences members might simply here this as a general stylization referencing the genre of art song. For more on the issue of listener competency and meaning, see Michael Allis, “Bax’s Elgar: Musical Quotation, Allusion and Compositional Identity in the First String Quartet in G,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 136 (2011): 317–20.

!30 conventions or styles (i.e., a specific reference to a general style or convention).109 I find it important to distinguish between the two techniques because they can be combined in the same parody. For example, P. D. Q. Bach’s Prelude to Einstein on The Fritz combines an allusion to J.

S. Bach’s C-major prelude from the The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I with a stylization of that work in the style of Philip Glass.110 It is inarguable that memories of this piece and style at the individual or community level introduces additional interpretive ambiguities, and one listener’s allusion is another’s stylization, based on their respective stylistic competencies. Ultimately, I side with Burkholder, who maintains that all of these techniques have a “similarity of purpose and effect,” as composers from Ives to Yankovic use the “familiar style as a rhetorical device, knowing that the style will bring with it a wealth of emotional associations and remembered experiences.”111

Sheinberg’s final three techniques (variation, distortion, and parodic collage) rely on incongruity, a key element of parody and one that I explore in detail in my chapter 2. Variation and distortion are best defined in opposition to one another. My characterization of these

109 The specificity of allusions help differentiate them from stylization, a technique that uses tropes or gestures drawn from a genre or other large body of works. Examples of the former technique include P. D. Q. Bach’s “Es war ein dark und shtormy Night” (which stylizes early nineteenth-century lieder), Yankovic’s “Generic Blues” (which stylizes the blues), and This is Spinal Tap (which features stylizations of hard rock in songs like “Hell Hole” as well as the narrative and dramatic style of music documentaries). For more on this last example, see John Covach, “Stylistic Competencies, Musical Humor, and This Is Spinal Tap,” in Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 399–421. Examples of the latter technique include stylizations that draw from an individual artist’s corpus, like those found in many of Yankovic’s general parodies, including “I’m So Sick of You” (an original song in the style of Elvis Costello) and “Velvet Elvis” (a stylization of The Police).

110 Another example is Yankovic’s stylization of The Doors in “Craigslist,” which begins with an organ solo that alludes to similar introductions in such songs as “When The Music’s Over” and “Soul Kitchen.” Referring to these treatments as “stylistic allusions” conflates the different borrowing practices that Schickele and Yankovic use.

111 Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 268.

!31 techniques relies on how much they alter the original material. A variation is a type of borrowing wherein a parodist’s changes to the borrowed music leave it recognizable to someone familiar with that work. Several examples of variation occur in P. D. Q. Bach’s music, including in the

1712 Overture, where Schickele quotes “Yankee Doodle” and stylizes this borrowing through generically “classical” variation.112 In contrast, in distorted borrowings a parodist’s modifications to the pre-existing music are so significant that the original is barely recognizable to someone familiar with that work.113 Schickele relies on this technique also in the 1712 Overture, which creates a humorous effect by quoting several passages from J. S. Bach’s letters devoid of all context, leading one to believe that the composer was solely concerned with pecuniary minutiae.

While stylistically competent listeners might recognize the original circumstances behind these letters, this involves considerable knowledge of both Bach’s life and letters as well as an understanding of Copland’s narration in A Lincoln Portrait, the larger work that Schickele parodies. Other listeners would likely either consider these Bach letters to be Schickele’s own

112 Schickele treats the tune’s antecedent phrase as a fragment for development, having it played by different instruments in a variety of articulations. Despite several melodic and rhythmic changes, the original remains recognizable throughout, and someone unfamiliar with that melody would very likely be able to recognize it after hearing the original, unvaried version. Similarly, “Smokski the Russian Bear,” the third movement of the Sonata da Circo, varies “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from J. S. Bach’s cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147. The distinctive ascending unfolding of original melody ends before arriving on the (to some listeners) expected high note, and the melody’s underlying counterpoint is adjusted accordingly, still identifiable to a listener familiar with the borrowed material. A less literal example can be found in “I’m Spelling as Fast as I Can,” the twelfth episode of the fourteenth season of The Simpsons (2003), which plays with an audience’s idea of Deadheads. Those familiar with the group will understand the parody, while those initially unfamiliar will be able to understand the parody’s references only when they become familiar with this community.

113 Framed another way, a variation allows someone familiar with only the parody to recognize the original if they encounter it. A distortion would either not lead to recognition of the original by someone familiar with only the parody or would lead to cognitive dissonance as that listener’s memory of the parody came into conflict with the original source.

!32 invention or would have difficulty reconciling their cursory knowledge of Bach with the man’s actual words.114

Parodic collages feature a “swirl of quoted and paraphrased tunes” that juxtapose

“multiple quotations, styles or textures so that each element maintains its individuality and the elements are perceived as excerpted from many sources and arranged together, rather than sharing common origins.”115 The handful of examples of this technique that I have found in twentieth-century American music come from Yankovic and from P. D. Q. Bach, including the

UnBegun Symphony (which blends Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” Johann Strauss, Jr.’s

“The Blue Danube Waltz,” and other melodies), and the Quodlibet for Small Orchestra (which borrows Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar’s “Tea for Two,” the primary theme from the first moment of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, and more). This technique, which Sheinberg fails to distinguish from collage, medley, quodlibet, and other techniques, does not feature prominently in the borrowing practices of American parodists.

One final note: in twentieth-century American practice, parodists frequently rely on numerous devices within the same work. For example, P. D. Q. Bach’s Prelude to Einstein on the

114 Another example clarifies the distinctions between variation and distortion. Yankovic’s “Bohemian Polka” presents a polka-flavored rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Aside from completely re-stylizing the song, Yankovic is faithful to the original’s harmonic, melodic, and dramatic intricacies. Moreover, this song is an oddity in his repertory of polkas, since it only relies on one source instead of creating a medley of contemporary hits. For this reason, I argue that a listener unfamiliar with Yankovic’s music could hear and recognize the original even through the layer of parody. Conversely, his “Alternative Polka” takes numerous examples of mid-1990s alternative music and treats them in a polka-styled medley. While the snippets of the original songs are likely familiar to audiences who already knew them, their truncation and re-stylization obscure the original songs to audiences who are unfamiliar with this repertoire. The songs’ melodies and lyrics are largely preserved, as are some of the supporting harmonic progressions, but Yankovic’s treatments are worlds away from the original, both sonically and stylistically. I consider this (and many of his other polka medleys) an example of distortion.

115 I have drawn this from definition from Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 4 and idem., “Collage,” in Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/53083 (accessed August 16, 2014).

!33 Fritz relies on quotation (“Three Blind Mice”), allusion (to Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi and J. S.

Bach’s C-major prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I), stylization (presenting the

Bach prelude in the style of Philip Glass), and variation (Schickele re-phrases the eponymous

Koyaanisqatsi vocal chant to “Koy-hotsi-totsi” and presents “Three Blind Mice” in both major and minor modes).

Given the welter of sounds, styles, and techniques that occur in a parody, understanding these works poses a particular challenge to listeners and scholars. Parodists mitigate this, in part, by relying on well-known forms of coded discourse, another trait of twentieth-century American parody. Because parody is a structural borrowing technique, a parodist’s subject matter must be well known if s/he is to communicate with her/his audience. While Hutcheon’s claim that

“popular works of art are always parodied, whatever their quality” is obviously too broad, she correctly observes that parodies almost always target works, styles, or conventions that are widely circulated.116 Otherwise, a listener unaware of the original would likely arrive at a different and potentially non-parodic interpretation of the new work.

An act of coding and decoding is inherent in parody, which means that, as Duarte argues:

“a parodic text is essentially reflexive, in the sense that it represents another representation. In other words, its primary referent is not some extradiscursive object but another sign system.”117

For Hutcheon, these systems can include parodies of “individual works or parts of them,” of specific artists, of the “characteristic aesthetic modes of the entire oeuvre of that artist,” of a

116 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 18.

117 Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 71–72 (emphasis in original).

!34 genre’s conventions, or of the “style of a period or movement.”118 Parodies can be specific or general, targeting either content or style, as well as “the originals’ way of thinking.”119

Hutcheon’s expansive vision of parody suggests that “any codified form can, theoretically, be treated in terms of repetition with critical distance, and not necessarily even in the same medium or genre.”120 Duarte agrees, writing that parodies can target “genres or discourses, whether canonical or not” in addition to “any other semiotic object—painting, music, or even social systems and institutions.”121

This potential range illustrates another important facet of parody, its polyvalence. Each parody could potentially be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on a listener’s stylistic competency and her/his familiarity with the parodist’s borrowed music or targeted conventions.

118 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 13 and 18. Examples of parodies targeting specific works include Yankovic’s “Trash Day” (which parodies Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” [sic]) and P. D. Q. Bach’s “My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth” (a parody of Thomas Morley’s “My Bonnie Lass She Smileth”). While American parodies typically draw from one source, there are examples where a parody combines multiple sources, including Yankovic’s “The Plumbing Song,” which draws on two songs from Milli Vanilli (“Baby Don’t Forget My Number” and “Blame It on the Rain”). Stylistic parodies drawn from “general models of representation” include Yankovic’s parody of Ben Fold’s style in “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?” Parodies targeting “the conventions of an entire genre” include Yankovic’s parody of Christmas carols in “Christmas at Ground Zero,” while parodies “of the style of a period or movement” can be heard in Schickele’s parody of the late Baroque in his cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn. (Ibid.)

119 Chatman, “Parody and Style,” 36 and Dentith, Parody, 7. Rose writes, “Despite the fact that it was the use of specific and satirized parody which often led to a work being dubbed burlesque and banned from the canon of more serious literary forms, the concept or use of general parody need not exclude that of specific parody, and especially as it is the techniques of the latter which serve to create the ambivalent dependent of general parody on its target.” (Rose, Parody, 47–53).

120 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 18. Rose expands on this point, writing, “Parody in its broadest sense and application may be described as first imitating and then changing either, and sometimes both, the ‘form’ and ‘content,’ or style and subject-matter, or syntax and meaning of another work, or most simply, its vocabulary.” (Rose, Parody, 45).

121 Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 76. These two types of parodies are related, because “the imitation of a specific work or composer can carry generic implications; the representative case implies the genre.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 18). For example, Yankovic’s “Achy Breaky Song” can be interpreted as parodic of several codified forms: an individual song (“Achy Breaky Heart”) and artist (Billy Ray Cyrus), a style of music (country), and the popular music industry (satirizing one of its current stars using the same business models, distribution systems, and technological practices that first made Cyrus’s song a hit).

!35 As a result, scholars need to be cautious when explicating a parody’s ethos not merely because such labels can restrict a work’s meanings but also because underlying assumptions about parody tend to produce either/or interpretations.122 A listener who considers parody inherently humorous, for example, will be predisposed to hear a parody that way, regardless that parody remains “a device which is able, because of its peculiar dual structure, to have an ambivalent, or ambiguous relationship to its target . . . demonstrat[ing] several of the above characteristics at once if, or when, an author choses.”123 Despite the authorial focus of many scholars, I am interested in exploring how parodies can work potentially different impacts on multiple audiences (which I address in chapters 2 and 3), but I agree with most critics that audience competency is a key aspect of parody, perhaps even inherent in the idea of parody itself.124

Sheinberg claims, “The perception and understanding of parody require some degree of acquaintance with the parodied object.”125 Dentith remarks that parody “depends for its effect upon recognition of the parodied original, or at least, upon some knowledge of the style or discourse to which allusion is being made.”126 Hutcheon confirms, writing that parody “is a

122 As Rose observes, “Despite the fact that parodies may be both critical of and sympathetic to their ‘targets,’ many critics have continued to describe parody as being only critical, or only sympathetic, or playful, or agitatory, or engagé, or blasphemous, or ironic, or imitative, or counter-imitative.” (Rose, Parody, 47 [emphases in original]).

123 Ibid., 47.

124 Specifically, parody demands “that readers ‘can be legitimately expected to possess the necessary knowledge to interpret ‘correctly’ the author’s intentions,’ so that a condition of reading is inscribed in the definition of the genre—in its perceptibility—hence in its very existence.” (Joseph Dane, “Parody and Satire,” 154, quoted in Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 72).

125 Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 141.

126 Dentith, Parody, 39.

!36 sophisticated genre in the demands it makes on its practitioners and its interpreters. The encoder, then the decoder, must effect a structural superimposition of texts that incorporates the old into the new.”127 Chatman agrees, writing “as practically every theorist has argued” that

stylistic parody depends on an audience familiar with the style of the original author and cognizant of the new subject matter’s inappropriateness. Both kinds of knowledge are required: the audience must not only recognize the original but sense that the style is being used to express a content which the targeted author could or would not contemplate, except in a joking spirit (as in self-parody).128

Duarte terms this “communicative overdetermination” and affirms the importance of both producer and receiver as creators of meaning, writing that for a “connection between addresser and addressee to take place effectively parody demands ontologically . . . the competence of both participants in the communicative act.”129

As these authors all agree, parodies include an act of recognition and understanding on the part of both audience and parodist, a stylistic competency that John Covach defines as “the ability of listeners to identify a particular style.”130 We have seen how parodies can rely on artistic nuances, stylistic mannerisms, and/or general societal conventions, and I will use the term

“stylistic competency” to refer broadly to a constellation of cultural conditioning and listening practices that encompass a listener’s ability or inability to perceive and comprehend the parodist’s references to works and styles.

127 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 33, see also 93. She adds, “The structural identity of the text as a parody depends, then, on the coincidence, at the level of strategy, of decoding (recognition and interpretation) and encoding.” (Ibid., 34).

128 Chatman, “Parody and Style,” 36–37.

129 Duarte, “A Dangerous Stroke of Art,” 72.

130 Covach, “Stylistic Competencies, Musical Humor, and This is Spinal Tap,” 407.

!37 While listener competency is widely held as a key in determining a parody’s meanings, scholars disagree about how this works when a listeners is not familiar with the original, because the resulting interpretation might have only a tangential relationship to the original work, the artist’s intended meaning, or any other of a range of possibilities (an issue I address in chapter 2).

Antti-Ville Kärjä stresses replacing debate about “‘those who get it’ and ‘those who do not’” with consideration of “the gamut of production choices, reception competencies and strategies, and contextual factors” that impact interpretation of parodies.131 I agree with Kärjä that

“‘competence’ does not refer to any kind of adequateness here, let alone correctness,” referring instead “to the fact that different competences result in different interpretations.”132 While he realizes that an audience can only recognize a parody if they have “an idea of what is parodied,” he deemphasizes “authorial intentionality” with its manifold hermeneutic problems.133

This seems like a reasonable assumption—I imagine most listeners do not surmise that any work they are unfamiliar with is a parody—and I disagree with Hutcheon’s statement that in parody or irony, “acts of communication cannot be considered completed unless the precise encoding intention is realized in the recognition of the receiver.”134 Setting aside the problematic

131 Kärjä, “Ridiculing Rap, Funlandizing Finns,” 87.

132 Ibid.

133 Ibid., 87–88. He finds it “more interesting (and less arrogant)” to interrogate “why they thought that ‘this’ was a parody of ‘that.’ Or, if an intentional parody was not recognized as such, why was that?” (Ibid., 88). Chambers finds a similar process at work in written mimicry. He believes that “percipients, even those who are unfamiliar with the object of the mimicry, should, as a result, find sufficient clues in the work at hand to posit and to envision, if not the actual model, a variety of writing that the parodist has established as both a source of norms and an object of parodic play, as the parodist constantly violates or departs from those norms.” (Chambers, Parody, 107). This position is at odds with Hutcheon, who argues that those who are unaware of “the text or conventions being parodied” will likely interpret what they are hearing as “any non-parodic piece.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 93).

134 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 93.

!38 notion that encoders decide on specific meanings that need to be decoded by the audience, I am more convinced by Ingrid Monson’s claim that “intermusical relationships need not be exact or unambiguously shared in order for them to be communicative.”135 Gestures (such as those suggesting height, depth, space, or motion), instrumental and timbral associations, and other musical codes convey several types of meaning, and I believe that parsing out the degree to which the parodist’s intentions are precisely conveyed by their audience is less important than confronting the range of such meanings.136

Notwithstanding esoteric discussions of parodic meaning, most parodists use the technique to create humor. One of the defining traits of contemporary American parody is that, while parodies are frequently associated with humor, they can evoke a wide range of expressive ends. I interrogate parody’s link with comedy in chapter 2, but artists and critics have expanded beyond the genre’s historical associations with humor to extend parody’s expressive scope.137

Ignoring parody’s potential to convey non-humorous messages means that scholars miss the genre’s rich connections with ethnic identity and intellectual history (ideas I address in chapters 3 and 4).

135 Monson, “Doubleness and Jazz Improvisation,” 309. She defines intermusical as “aurally perceptible musical relationships that are heard in the context of particular musical traditions.” (Ibid., 307).

136 Such questions lead to nuanced understandings not only of a listener’s stylistic competency, but of the circular impact of parody and other cultural forms on the reception and understanding of styles and genres within popular memory.

137 Hutcheon broadens the genre’s ethos from its conventional range of “respectful admiration to biting ridicule” to include “serious criticism, not necessarily of the parodied text” as well as “playful, genial mockery of codifiable forms” and a “neutral or playful” affect with “close to a zero degree of aggressivity toward either backgrounded or foregrounded text.” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 15–16, 60, and 64). Hutcheon’s preference for retaining “the idea of a range of intended ethos” in parody is echoed by Dentith’s framing of parody’s “relevant range” as a “spectrum, according to the evaluations that differing forms make of the texts that they cite, with reverential citation at one end of the scale” and “hostile parody at the other end.” (Dentith, Parody, 6).

!39 CHAPTER 1

PARODIC BORROWING TECHNIQUES IN VERNACULAR MUSIC

In his seminal 1994 article, J. Peter Burkholder advocated for the creation of a new musicological field devoted to studying “the uses of existing music.”1 He argued that such study was necessary because “conclusions about the significance of borrowed material in a work are premature until we know how the composer has actually used it.”2 Burkholder’s claim remains relevant to the study of parody, because parody’s replication or imitation of pre-existing music remains one of scholars’ few points of agreement about the genre.3 Despite this, and notwithstanding parody’s status as the most common structural borrowing technique in American vernacular music, no authors consider parody through existing methodologies and concepts for addressing borrowed music.4 This oversight reinforces existing problematic definitions of parody focusing on the parodists’ intent, complicating scholars’ efforts to discuss precisely how parodists use pre-existing music or to unravel the significance of these borrowings.

1 J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes 50 (1994): 861.

2 Ibid., 856.

3 Tamara Balter, “Canon-Fodders: Parody of Learned Style in Beethoven,” Journal of Musicological Research 32 (2013): 200; Simon Dentith, Parody (New York: Routledge-Taylor, 2000), 9; Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London: Methuen, 1985; Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 10; Paul Jewell and Jennie Louise, “It’s Just a Joke: Defining and Defending (Musical) Parody,” Australian Review of Public Affairs 10 (2012): 1, 4, and 6; and Ian Russell, “Parody and Performance,” in Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular Milieu, ed. Michael Pickering and Tony Green (New York: Open University Press, 1987), 75.

4 Three outstanding examples of the scholarship on musical borrowing include J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music,” 851–70; and David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

!40 Consequently, it follows that any investigation of parody as a structural borrowing technique should begin with a thorough consideration of what pre-existing music parodists select and how they utilize this music.5

In this chapter I apply Burkholder’s methodological questions for musical borrowing to a survey of vernacular American parodies to identify what borrowing techniques vernacular parodists use and how these practices are distinct from one another. I concentrate on texted parodies created by American musicians over the past fifty years. This focus distinguishes a tradition of texted vernacular borrowings from the principally instrumental contrafacta techniques found in jazz. There are significant parallels between these two traditions: both use parody as a structural technique, parody constitutes the principal method for using pre-existing music in both styles, and musicians often rely on their borrowings’ associative meanings to create or to influence their listener’s interpretation of their new work. Despite these similarities, the quantity of borrowings makes comprehensively addressing both traditions unwieldy.

Furthermore, omitting the comparatively new tradition of jazz contrafacta allows me to situate texted parodies within the history of American musical parody, a history that spans diverse traditions including eighteenth-century religious contrafacta and broadside ballads, nineteenth- century popular and minstrel show songs, the music of twentieth-century folk revivalists and humorists, and works created by twenty-first-century parodists fueled by increased access to digital distribution platforms like YouTube and the Funny Music Project (FuMP).6

5 Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music,” 864.

6 The FuMP is a collective of musical humorists who release their music under a Creative Commons license. The group also hosts FuMPFest, a yearly comedy-music festival/convention. “What is the FuMP,” accessed September 6, 2016, http://www.thefump.com/whatis.php.

!41 I began my survey by compiling a list of vernacular musicians who were known primarily as parodists or who used parody as a compositional device. I drew from my own knowledge, referrals from friends and colleagues, references in books and articles,7 and websites such as the Demented Music Database.8 From these resources, I selected twenty-five musicians or works in a variety of musical styles from across my targeted time period (listed in Appendix

1). These artists range from iconic parodists like Allan Sherman, Stan Freberg, and “Weird Al”

Yankovic to lesser-known figures like El Vez, Tony Schueren and Christopher Guest

(songwriters for The National Lampoon Radio Hour), and 2 Live Jews to newer parodists such as

Bart Baker, Rucka Rucka Ali, and Garfunkel and Oates.9 My survey also includes specific parodic works like Forbidden Broadway and The Book of Mormon as well as groups of parodies clustered around certain themes (such as responses to the fictitious “Bowling Green Massacre”) or songs (including a host of parodies targeting Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”). While an exhaustive survey of this widely used borrowing technique would be impracticable, I believe my chapter represents both the depth and breadth of American vernacular texted parodies.

7 Judah M. Cohen, “Hip-Hop Judaica: The Politics of Representin’ Heebster Heritage,” Popular Music 28 (2009): 1–18; Lee B. Cooper, “Response Recordings as Creative Repetition: Answer Songs and Pop Parodies in Contemporary American Music,” OneTwoThreeFour 4 (1987): 79–87; and Kenneth H. Marcus, “The Seriousness of Comedy: The Benefit Concerts of Jack Benny and Danny Kaye,” American Music 25 (2007): 137–68.

8 “The Demented Music Database!,” accessed March 16, 2015, http://dmdb.org. This site is a “source for details about everything played on The Dr. Demento Show from 1970 to today.” Hosted by Barry Hansen, the program began airing on Los Angeles radio stations in 1970. The show featured a mixture of “legends like Spike Jones, Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, Monty Python, and Frank Zappa” and “new funny songs sent in by amateur and professional singers and comedians.” By 1972 the show was reportedly “the most listened-to Sunday evening radio program in Los Angeles,” and by 1974 the show was nationally syndicated. “About the Dr.,” accessed June 19, 2014, http://www.drdemento.com/dr-bio.html.

9 Artists and groups, including Mark Russell, the Capitol Steps, Country Yossi, El Vez, ApologetiX, and others, have sustained decades-long careers as parodists. While my survey does not include each of their parodies, I sampled enough of their music to ensure that the songs I selected for inclusion represented their typical practices.

!42 My survey identified five borrowing techniques, three of which dominate twentieth- and early twenty-first-century parodies: contrafacta, stylistic allusion, and quotation. Across these techniques, parodists’ borrowings are related by type and origin, and fulfill two extra-musical functions. Parodists’ practices vary, however, in terms of what elements they borrow, how they relate this material to their music, how they alter borrowed musics, and the musical function of their borrowings. Throughout this chapter I articulate how each parodic technique encompasses a distinct relationship to pre-existing music. Finally, I conclude by describing two ways that framing parody as a type of structural borrowing affects our understanding of the genre.

In my survey of 762 borrowings, I identified five different techniques used by American vernacular parodists: contrafactum, stylistic allusion, quotation, adding words to a previously un- texted melody, and medley. Before considering the three primary techniques in depth, I will first address the two secondary techniques to explain why I omitted them from this survey. I excluded seven songs (totaling less than 1 percent of my survey) by Allan Sherman that add a text to an originally textless melody from the cultivated tradition.10 Because there are few examples of this technique and because they are concentrated in the works of one parodist, I did not find them representative of any trend in vernacular parodic practices.

10 These songs are “Hungarian Goulash No. 5” (Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5), “Lotsa Luck” (Victor Herbert’s Badinage), “Holiday for States” (David Rose’s Holiday for Strings), “I Can’t Dance” (Edvard Grieg’s Norwegian Dance No. 2), and three songs based on Amilcare Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” from La Gioconda: “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp),” “Return to Camp Granada (Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! I Am Back at Camp Grenada),” and “Hello Muddah—Nevada Style.” One distant parallel to Sherman’s practice is the medieval practice of troping, particularly the prosula, or the addition of a new text to a pre-existing melody. For more about troping, see Grove Music Online, s.v. “Trope (i),” by Alejandro Enrique Planchart, accessed October 14, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/28456 and Thomas Forrest Kelly, “Poetry for Music: The Art of the Medieval Prosula,” Speculum 86 (2011): 361–86.

!43 I likewise omitted medleys, which accounted for twenty six (or 3.4 percent) of the borrowings from my survey.11 Parodists or groups such as Allan Sherman and the Capitol Steps typically create contrafacta from excerpts of popular songs, often unifying their medley around a theme or concept like Jewish humor or recent political events. A major exception to this practice, however, comes from “Weird Al” Yankovic’s twelve medleys, which account for almost half of this total. In contrast to other parodists, Yankovic retains the original lyrics but refashions these excerpts in a polka style, a marked divergence from the techniques of other parodists. Because there are relatively few medleys and because these exhibit no standard use of pre-existing music,

I do not consider medleys a foundational borrowing technique used by vernacular American parodists.

Omitting newly texted songs and medleys reduced my survey to 729 borrowings. In these parodies, the three most frequently used borrowing techniques were contrafactum, stylistic allusion, and quotation. Contrafacta parodists often substitute “one text for another without substantial change to the music.”12 Such parodies account for 477 of the 729 remaining borrowings I examined (65 percent). The specificity of this practice contrasts sharply with what I term “style parodies.” In these, parodists use stylistic allusions to reference “a style or

11 Grove Music Online defines “medley” simply as “a succession of well-known tunes strung together, generally without any formal construction.” Grove Music Online, s.v. “Medley,” accessed October 5, 2015, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/18254.

12 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Contrafactum,” by Robert Falck and Martin Picker, accessed October 5, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/06361.

!44 convention.”13 Such allusions account for 181 of my survey’s borrowings (25 percent). Finally, parodists used quotation, “the incorporation of a relatively brief segment of existing music,” in seventy one borrowings (approximately 10 percent).14 In parodic quotations, “borrowed material is presented exactly or nearly so . . . but is not part of the main substance of the work.”15 This distinction separates quotation from contrafacta and allusions because these latter techniques are used to create the bulk of a new song.

Differences between these borrowing techniques are amplified by the ways parodists select and integrate pre-existing music. To analyze these borrowings in greater detail, I employ

Burkholder’s typology of musical borrowing. He offers six questions musicologists can ask to analyze composers’ uses of borrowed music. I have paraphrased his questions here to apply them directly to parody: where do parodists draw their source material from? What elements of this material do they borrow? How do parodists relate this material to their new work’s structure?

How do they adapt this borrowed music for their new work? What musical and extra-musical

13 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Allusion,” by J. Peter Burkholder, accessed October 14, 2015, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52852. Elsewhere, Burkholder defines stylistic allusion as “alluding to a recognizable style or type without actual borrowing” (Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music,” 855). Nicholas Marston explores the allusive nature of this technique, explaining that such borrowings “are not always intended to be so clearly recognized: much of their allure lies in the fact that they refer obliquely, and partly obscure their sources.” Nicholas Marston, Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 34; Raymond Knapp, “Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1998): 1–30; and Michael Allis, “Bax’s Elgar: Musical Quotation, Allusion and Compositional Identity in the First String Quartet in G,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 136 (2011), 305–52.

14 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Quotation,” by J. Peter Burkholder, accessed October 14, 2015, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52854.

15 Ibid. Elsewhere, Burkholder has rightly questioned the usefulness of “quotation” if scholars use the term refer to any use of pre-existing music. With this caveat in mind, the word still offers the best description of this specific borrowing practice. (Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music,” 855).

!45 functions do their borrowings serve?16 By answering each of these questions for the parodies in my survey, Burkholder’s typology offered a methodology for describing similarities and differences between parodists’ structural use of pre-existing music.

The most significant similarity between these borrowing practices involves “the relationship of the existing piece to the new piece that borrows from it.”17 Regardless of which of the three primary borrowing techniques parodists use, the pre-existing music they target is related by type and origin.18 Regarding type, I found that parodists borrow music from “the same genre, medium, style and musical tradition” as their new work.19 For example, Shlock Rock’s contrafactum “We’ve Got a Strong Desire” musically recreates Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the

Fire,” while The Lonely Island’s style parody “When Will the Bass Drop” targets electronic dance music from the 2010s, and El Vez’s “Maria’s the Name” quotes “I Want Candy” by The

Strangeloves. Each borrowing can be related to the new work through musical tradition

16 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by J. Peter Burkholder, accessed October 14, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52918. A previous version of this typology appears in Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music,” 867–69. While the two sources are substantially the same, Burkholder changes the wording of several questions and answers in the latter source. As a result, I cite the newer online source throughout this chapter.

17 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

18 Because Burkholder’s categories include only monophonic and polyphonic textures, none of the music I have studied shares a textural relationship with the borrowed music. I did not believe that modifying the typology to include homophonic textures would illuminate anything about parodic borrowings because of the homophonic textures common in many vernacular American styles.

19 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder. I have found exceptions where vernacular parodists borrowed from the cultivated tradition. For example, four parodists, groups, or revues (Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer, the Capitol Steps, and Forbidden Broadway) borrow from Gilbert and Sullivan. While I would consider their works examples of the cultivated tradition, I recognize that this music circulated widely across traditions. Other examples demonstrate borrowings that fit clearly into the cultivated tradition, including Sherman’s borrowings from Brahms, Amilcare Ponchielli, and Grieg; Lehrer’s use of music by Liszt, Mozart, and Verdi; and Altar Boyz’s quotation of Francisco Tárrega. I found only one example where a parodist borrows from other national traditions, the National Lampoon Radio Hour’s stereotyped stylizations of French, Italian, and Indian/ Bangladeshi music.

!46 (vernacular music), genre (popular song), and style (pop-rock, EDM, and rock and roll, respectively).

In terms of origin, parodists typically borrow music “by a contemporary from another place or circle.” Because parodies rely on the audience’s recognition of the original and much vernacular music has a short period of circulation in popular culture, parodists typically select recent hits. Garfunkel and Oates’s “Save the Rich” (2012), a style parody of charity songs featuring a roster of global pop starts like “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984) and “We Are the World” (1985), is an example falling at the outer range of music that parodists target.20 Such long gaps between original and parody are uncommon. Because parodists rely on their audience’s familiarity with the targeted work, parodists conventionally use music composed close to the date of the parody. The Maccabeats released their contrafactum parody “Candlelight” in 2010, the same year Taio Cruz scored an international hit with “Dynamite.” Similarly,

Freberg’s 1955 parody of The Platters’ “The Great Pretender” quotes a recent popular song

“Lullaby of Birdland” from 1952.

Less commonly, vernacular parodists borrow music from “an earlier time” and a “distant place.”21 Examples of borrowings of earlier music include Gerard Alessandrini’s “Old

Revivals” (released 2000), a Forbidden Broadway parody of Richard Rodgers and Oscar

Hammerstein II’s “Oklahoma!” (1943); Country Yossi’s “’Cause I’m a Jew,” a 2005 parody of

Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” (1956); and a quotation of Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A.

20 Garfunkel and Oates is the performance name for the folk duo of Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci. The pair mimics the group choir singalong and synthesized timbres of these charity songs while inverting the musical topic in a sarcastic plea to save the super wealthy.

21 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!47 Ward’s “America the Beautiful” (1895) in “Columbus Discovers America,” the second part of

Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years (1961).

Examples of borrowings of distant music include Allan Sherman’s “The Bronx Bird Watcher” and the Capitol Steps’s “Three Little Kurds from School” (contrafacta of “On a Tree by a River” and “Three Little Maids from School Are We” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, respectively) and The National Lampoon Radio Hour’s “The Immigrants” (which includes style parodies of musics from Switzerland, France, and Italy). While originating in times or places removed from the contemporary parodist, these borrowings draw from popular and widely circulated songs or musical stereotypes. As a result, their function is similar to contemporary borrowings, because in both parodists rely on their audiences’ recognition of these borrowings to create a comic, didactic, or critical effect.22

Similarities between the type and origin of their borrowed material underscores differences between what aspects of this material parodists select. The second part of

Burkholder’s typology seeks to identify “what element or elements of the existing piece are incorporated into or referred to by the new piece, in whole or part?”23 This question permits a sharpened distinction between the three major borrowing practices of American parodists. While parodists borrow similar elements regardless of technique, there are significant differences in the specificity of their borrowings.

22 I commonly found parodies of earlier music, like popular Tin Pan Alley-era or “Golden Age” Broadway songs, in the music of political parodists like Mark Russell or the Capitol Steps. Since their songs address contemporary political events and consequently date rapidly, I interpret these artists’ use of musical standards as a counterbalance to the topicality of their lyrics.

23 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!48 Parodists treating a pre-existing song as a contrafactum normally use “the full texture,” including melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic elements. These parodists incorporate numerous elements from the original song in order to replicate this work as closely as possible, such as

Mark Russell’s “76 Complaints,” a contrafactum of Meredith Willson’s “76 Trombones.”24 Some parodists also borrow vocal or instrumental timbres and performance mannerisms; for example,

2 Live Jews’s “Oy! It’s So Humid” (a contrafactum of 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny”) recreates many of the original’s timbres (use of a drum machine and digital keyboards, sampled female voices, and alternation between rappers with contrasting styles) and vocal nuances (like the rhythmic flow and rhyme scheme of the original rap) in addition to harmonic, melodic, and formal elements.

Contrafacta parodists’ practice of whole-cloth and largely unchanged borrowing contrasts with the techniques of style parodists, whose works involve multiple simultaneous borrowings with varying degrees of specificity. The parodies range from re-stylizations of existing songs to new works composed to sound like another artist, song, or style. In “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” The

Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone rework The Lion King’s

“Hakuna Matata.” The composers rely on several generic borrowings, referencing the original song’s use of densely layered pitched and unpitched percussion meant to represent sonically

Africanness, a mixed ensemble alternating soloists and choir, alternations between sung and spoken text, and lyrics built around foreign-sounding words taught by natives to tourists as a

24 Ibid.

!49 panacea to all of life’s worries.25 While these borrowings are principally indebted to one source work, the original appears only through allusion.26

In contrast, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s style parodies blend specific quoted borrowings with stylistic allusions and new music composed in the manner of the targeted artist or style.

Yankovic’s borrowings incorporate a variety of musical elements including melody, rhythm, harmony, form, and timbre. For example, his style parody of Bo Diddley “Party at the Leper

Colony” draws four key elements from Diddley’s style: a characteristic clave-inspired rhythm, the twelve-bar blues form, instrumentation (prominently featuring electric guitar and saxophone), and a call-and-response pattern alternating short vocal phrases with a response from a lead instrument or another vocalist. Because some or all of these elements are present in a number of

Diddley songs (including “Not Fade Away,” “Bo Diddley,” “I’m a Man,” and “Mona” among others), I do not identify Yankovic’s borrowings as originating in any one song. Instead,

Yankovic drew elements typical of Diddley’s style as a whole, folding these into a new song evocative of Diddley. Yankovic’s practice is typical of these types of stylistic borrowings in which parodists incorporate multiple aspects of the original but without the specificity and singularity of contrafacta parodists.

The practices of both contrafacta and style parodists differ from those who use quotation.

Parodists who quote typically replicate specific elements, particularly melody, rhythm, and

25 Max Perry Mueller takes The Book of Mormon creators to task for their “linguistic imprecision”: “Say what you will about the accuracy of the ‘Africans’ depicted in The Lion King musical, at least ‘Hakuna Matata’ actually means something in Swahili. ‘Hasa Diga Eebowai’ is gibberish.” Max Perry Mueller, “A Cringe-worthy Depiction of Africa,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 40 (2012), http://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/ summerautumn2012/cringe-worthy-depiction-africa, accessed August 27, 2016 (emphasis in original).

26 Parker, Lopez, and Stone also reference the style of such musicals as The Lion King and Jesus Christ Superstar.

!50 harmony. While this practice is similar to that of contrafacta parodists in its precision, there is a significant difference in terms of the amount of borrowed material. Parodists using quotations typically incorporate short excerpts of melodies (and their accompanying rhythms) of one-to- four measures in length, often including the chord progression supporting this melodic fragment in the original. For example, three songs from my survey quoted “Hail to the Chief.” Both

Cledus T. Judd’s “Waitin’ on Obama” and the Capitol Steps’s “George Bush Speaks” borrow the melody’s first four measures, rearranging the music for solo fiddle and synthesized brass, respectively.27 Paul Shanklin’s “I Am Barack, I’m the Messiah” takes a longer eight-measure segment of “Hail to the Chief,” using a traditional instrumental arrangement featuring a wind band.

The third segment of Burkholder’s typology investigates how “the borrowed material relate[s] to the shape of the new piece.” Parodists composing contrafacta use pre-existing music to “provide the structure, virtually unaltered” for their new song while changing enough features

“to create a new entity.”28 If parodists alter the original’s structure, they typically omit repetitions of the refrain. Even within this category of parodic borrowing, where parodists’ major alteration of the borrowed music is a change of text, these artists exhibit a variety of approaches. All of

Yankovic’s contrafacta parodies replicate the recorded original’s nuances closely, creating a sound-alike of the targeted song. Other parodies, including Ju-Tang Clan’s “Whack and Mellow” and “Grab That Paddle One More Time” from Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades of Grey Musical

27 The Capitol Steps’ quotation cadences on a dominant seventh chord, an alteration from the tonic chord on which this phrase typically ends.

28 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!51 Parody create passable replicas of their originals (Wiz Khalifa’s “Black And Yellow” and

Brittany Spear’s “. . . Baby One More Time”) without the strict attention to detail characteristic of Yankovic’s parodies, which attempt to recreate each distinctive timbral element of the original.

In contrast to contrafacta parodists’ typical procedure, parodists targeting styles relate borrowed material to their new music in four primary ways. Artists like El Vez and Cheese who rework pre-existing music in a new style often change the original arrangement (including both the performing forces and figuration) and vary or alter the original structure (usually shortening the borrowed song by omitting repetitions of the refrain). Cheese’s parody of Nirvana’s “Rape

Me” rearranges the original’s power trio instrumentation (guitar, electric bass, and drums) for jazz combo including piano, xylophone, drums, and acoustic bass. He also replaces the original’s simple, idiomatic guitar accompaniment with a piano playing an uninspired Latin-styled pattern, part of a larger strategy to flatten ironically Nirvana’s anthemic grunge rock into a 1950s-era lounge jazz style.29 Cheese also alters his target song’s structure, concluding his parody by reducing the number of sung repetitions of the song’s title at the end.

Style parodists such as Yankovic, Tony Scheuren, and others who compose new songs in the style of another artist or genre relate this material to pre-existing music by freely reworking their borrowings through stylistic allusion. “The Calling” from Altar Boyz is a new song written in the style of a 1990s-era boy bands like New Kids on the Block, NSYNC, and the Backstreet

Boys. Composer-lyricists Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker use markers of this style

29 Cheese’s act shows the influence of Spike Jones and his City Slickers, who were famous for restyling popular songs in a jazz style. Jones’s version of the “By the Beautiful Sea,” for example, borrows the original song’s melody, chord progression, form, text, and many of its rhythms, reworking these in a raucous Dixieland style, interpolating general stylistic allusions to New Orleans style jazz through instrumentation, simultaneous improvisation, and syncopated rhythms. Jones combines both types of borrowings with his characteristic sound effects, adding a third layer to the song.

!52 including lengthy melismas, extensive vibrato in solo sections, R&B-inspired chord progressions, closely spaced vocal harmonies, and alternations between solo and group singing.30

While I have not identified any specific song Adler and Walker borrow from, these composers use stylistic allusions to “provide material . . . that is freely reworked” for their new composition.31

Parodists using quotations relate this material to their new work through different procedures. These musicians typically reference quotations “once, in passing.” Tom Lehrer’s

“The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” for example, begins with a quotation from “Home on the Range” which does not return elsewhere in the song but serves to establish the geographic location of the song’s narrative. Parodists also use quotations to “mark a significant event in the form,” like the use of the musical tag “Shave and a Haircut” to end songs by Cledus T. Judd

(“Cledus Went Down To Florida”) and Tom Lehrer (“The Elements”).32 Parodists have also used quotations as motifs (like the quotation of the Dragnet theme in Stan Freberg’s “Little Blue

Riding Hood,” “St. George and the Dragonet,” and “Christmas Dragnet”) or to “provide material . . . that is freely reworked” (like Freberg’s “Rock around Stephen Foster,” a style

30 They also include other characteristics of this style, including dress/costuming, the varied personas of group members, and extensive choreographed dance numbers.

31 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

32 Spike Jones also uses this tag in “Wild Bill Hiccup.”

!53 parody of early rock and roll that reworks “Beautiful Dreamer” and several of Foster’s parlor and minstrel songs).33

The fourth area of Burkholder’s typology addresses how borrowed material is altered in the new piece. Musicians creating contrafacta parodies typically minimally alter their source material in three ways. In addition to a change of text, these parodies can be shorter than the original, customarily omitting repetitions of the refrain at the song’s end. I also found that parodists take a range of musical approaches to replicate the original. Yankovic’s “Foil,” for example, duplicates each nuance of by Lorde’s “Royals” as closely as possible, replicating the original’s sparse production with its heavily echoed snaps and tightly spaced vocal harmonies

(even matching the original’s differentiation between passages where Lorde dubs her own voice in harmony with itself and those featuring back-up vocalists). Yankovic’s borrowing practices stand as an outlier amidst contrafacta parodists, however. Conventionally, parodists cover the original music with varying degrees of fidelity (like ApolgetiX’s “Trust Him,” a rhythmically unsteady recreation of the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” that lacks the original’s flexibility of tempo and cocksure swing), alter minor aspects of the original’s sound or production (like Bart

Baker’s “I Knew You Were Trouble,” which is heavily Auto-Tuned and omits Taylor Swift’s vocal nuances), or arrange the original for the performing forces at their disposal (like Forbidden

33 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder. Freberg parodies, quotes, or references “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Nelly Bly,” “Oh! Susanna,” “Ring, Ring de Banjo,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground.” Freberg opens his parody with a sedate a cappella mixed choir performing a formal-sounding arrangement of “Beautiful Dreamer” before the producer interrupts to rework the music in a rock and roll style (“how can the kids dance to that jazz? If they can’t bop to it, they won’t buy the record”). “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” appears over a swing rhythm section, which supports a call and response between the singers and supporting horns and an electric guitar solo that comically exaggerates cliche riffs. Freberg peppers quotations and lyrical allusions to Foster songs while clarifying his source borrowings through parodies of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock.”

!54 Broadway, the Capitol Steps, or Mark Russell, who adapt Tim Pan Alley-era popular songs and excerpts from musicals for piano and voices).

Style parodists alter pre-existing music in a variety of ways depending on the specificity of their borrowing. Parodists like Stan Freberg who target a specific recording “embellish or ornament” the original. For example, “Heartbreak Hotel” parodies Elvis’s recording of the same song; Freberg’s target is not the song itself, but rather Elvis’s recorded performance, which

Freberg augments with exaggerated reverb and echo. Parodists restyling a song like El Vez or

Cheese will “substantially rework” the original, altering the targeted music’s figuration, harmony, and instrumentation (as discussed above with Cheese’s Nirvana parody). Parodists creating a new work in the manner of an previous artist or style allude to the original with similar gestures.34 Christopher Guest’s National Lampoon Radio Hour parody “Middle Class Liberal

Well Intentioned Blues,” for example, is a new song in the style of Pete Seeger. While Guest does not incorporate any borrowed music, he references several traits of Seeger’s music, including folk-like melodies moving largely by step, use of banjo and acoustic instruments, simple forms (often omitting a bridge), minimal rhythmic syncopation, lyrics addressing contemporary political or social events, and a lead singer who encourages audience participation.

When coupled with Guest’s vocal imitation of Seeger, Guest’s parody stylistically alludes to the original artist’s distinguishing gestures without specifically quoting any of his music.

Parodists using quotation typically employ only fragments of the original (such as the quotations of “Hail to the Chief” mentioned above). These fragments can be “embellished or ornamented,” like the pianistic flourishes Lehrer adds to his quotation of “Home on the Range”

34 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!55 in “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be.”35 Most often, however, the borrowed quotation is

“placed in a new context, changing its effect.”36 Both the Capitol Steps and Paul Shanklin quote

“Hail to the Chief,” a melody that customarily serves to honor the arrival of the United States

Commander-in-Chief. Both parodists retain the melody’s associations with the President but invert the traditional function by using the music to introduce a parody mocking him.

The penultimate element of Burkholder’s methodology considers “the function of the borrowed material within the new piece, in musical terms.” Function is one of the few shared similarities between contrafacta and style parodies. Parodists composing both types of songs use borrowed music “as a starting initial point for composition.”37 An artist composing a contrafactum customarily bases her or his work largely on previous songs, while a style parodist similarly uses borrowed music as a template for conveying the distinctive sound of an artist or style. Both types of parodies typically use existing music to “provide a model for the structure of the new piece.”38 This use of borrowed music is most apparent in contrafactum parodies such as

MC Paul Barman and Eric Schwartz’s “Hanukkah Hey Ya!” The parodists replicate numerous elements of OutKast’s “Hey Ya!,” including its form, instrumentation, rhyme scheme, and participatory chorus. Similarly Nate Herman’s National Lampoon style parody “You Put Me through Hell” targets the intimate, confessional style of Joni Mitchell’s songwriting on such as

35 Fragments can also be “melodically paraphrased or restructured,” like the quotation of the A section of the “Sailor’s Hornpipe” in Spike Jones’s “The Sailor with the Navy Blue Eyes,” which is woven into the song’s main melody during solos from the pianist and violinist.

36 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

!56 albums Blue (1971) and For the Roses (1972).39 In additional to a verse-refrain form, Herman draws distinctive elements like a nasal vocal timbre, emotionally raw lyrical content discussing private aspects of relationships, sparse instrumentation built around acoustic guitar and piano, and unconventional modal harmonic progressions.40 While Herman’s reliance on multiple models contrasts with Barman and Schwartz’s use of one, both parodists rely on borrowed music for similar structural functions.

In contrast, parodists use quotations to “mark a major event, such as a culmination or highpoint” or as “a passing gesture.”41 Tom Lehrer uses both functions in “I Wanna Go Back to

Dixie.” Lehrer begins his song with a passing quotation of Emmett’s “Dixie” and ends by paraphrasing “Home! Sweet Home!” Both quotations play neither a thematic nor a structural role, but rather serve as musical signposts situating Lehrer’s lyrics in a geographic and nostalgic antebellum South.

Burkholder’s final component takes into account “the function or meaning of the borrowed material within the new piece in associative or extra-musical terms.” In my survey I found two functions applied to all parodic borrowings. Regardless of which technique parodists use, this music’s meaning “varies with the listener,” having “special significance for certain groups or individuals and different or no associations for others” and “associations [that] have

39 The parody aired on the February 2, 1974 episode of the National Lampoon Radio Hour. “Best of NLRH: February 9, 1974 / #13,” accessed October 8, 2015, http://www.marksverylarge.com/nlrh/ nlrh740209_13.html.

40 Lloyd Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 62 and 127–31.

41 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!57 changed over time.”42 While unpacking every meaning is impossible, I note that the potential exists for a range of varied meanings. For example, these can include different affective associations, like those created by audiences who might not associate the Forbidden Hollywood parody of “Over the Rainbow” with Judy Garland’s performance of this song in The Wizard of

Oz but instead Barbara Streisand’s televised performance, or with Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s medley of that song and “What a Wonderful World.” These meanings can also influence the work’s status as parody. Younger listeners might not be familiar with the doo-wop style that

Yankovic targets in “Since You’ve Been Gone.” Without recognizing Yankovic’s stylistic borrowings, such listeners might not even hear the song as a parody, resulting in a different set of meanings than those created by a baby-boomer audience familiar with doo-wop music.

One extreme example, Tom Lehrer’s quotation of “Dixie” in “I Wanna Go Back to

Dixie,” demonstrates the potential for borrowed music to convey a host of meanings. Originally composed for performance in minstrel shows, “Dixie” was adopted as an unofficial anthem for the Confederate States of America and remains connected with the American South, the Lost

Cause, and white nationalism. Because of these associations, audiences from different geographic regions and in different times will hear different meanings in “Dixie,” which Lehrer augments with references to poll taxes, lynchings, and the Ku Klux Klan. The parodist’s quotation sonically links American southerners with racism and opposition to Civil Rights legislation. Some listeners might take offense to this essentialist stereotypes, while others could hear the quote as an affirmation of their preconceptions of Southern racial relationships or might be unfamiliar with the song’s relationship with racial politics. While few parodists borrow music

42 Ibid.

!58 as laden with meaning as Lehrer’s example, his quotation of “Dixie” exemplifies the potential for mixed and even contradictory meanings that a parodic borrowing may evoke.

Aside from these two similarities, I found that parodists using different techniques employed pre-existing music to different functions. The borrowings of contrafacta parodists typically have three functions. These parodists are usually “motivated by a text,” because the borrowed music’s “appearance (without text)” often “evokes part or all of the text with which it is normally associated, conveying an extra-musical meaning.”43 In “Couch Potato,” for example,

Yankovic draws on Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” an aspirational tale of a fledgling rap musician, but inverts that meaning to recount the story of a man dedicated to the pursuit of watching as much television as possible. Contrafacta parodists also “allude to the source work” by

“comment[ing] on” the original song.44 For example, Judd’s “If Shania Was Mine” repurposes

Shania Twains’s list of expected male behaviors in “Any Man of Mine.” Judd uses her music to extoll the virtues he would develop if Twain became his partner, providing a commentary that affirms Twain’s power to dictate these behaviors. Finally, contrafacta parodists can also “critique or negate” their source artist, like in Bart Baker’s demonization of Taylor Swift in his “Blank

Space” parody.45 Baker portrays Swift as a greedy, violent, mentally unbalanced devil, parodying how Swift presents herself in the original song and video and critiquing her public persona and private life.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

!59 Style parodists use pre-existing music for three main purposes: as an allusion, for descriptive reasons, or for symbolic reasons. Many of these borrowings “allude to the source work or its composer” in a number of ways, including paying “homage to [their] source” (like

Yankovic’s tribute to Bo Diddley’s music), “suggest[ing] parallels to its source” (like Cheese’s

Nirvana parody, which creates resemblances between alternative rock and lounge jazz), or critiquing or negating their source (like Freberg’s “Rock around Stephen Foster,” which frames

Foster as out-of-date, rewriting his music to make him more commercial so he can appeal to an audience of rock fans). These parodists also use borrowings descriptively to “lend a certain character to a passage, through the associations it carries.”46 For example, Garfunkel and Oates place “Sports Go Sports” in a lineage of rock styled athletics anthems (like Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the

Champions”). By referencing these songs’ lyrical themes of competition, repeated use of short rhythmic or melodic riffs, and simple choruses intended to encourage participatory singing, the parodists situate their song within a tradition of similar songs while creating irony by treating the topic sarcastically.47 Finally, style parodists use pre-existing music to “symbolize something or someone associated with it or with pieces of its general type.”48 Scheuren’s “The Immigrants” draws on aural stereotypes of foreign cultures, representing Switzerland through yodeling,

France with the accordion, and the Appalachians with the banjo. His borrowings link these

46 Ibid.

47 Another example is Scheuren’s “Middle Class Liberal Well Intentioned Blues,” which stylistically alludes to Pete Seeger to subvert and satirize the political activism of the 1950s and ’60s folk revivalists. Tom Lehrer also treats this topic in “The Folk Song Army.”

48 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!60 musical representations with other elements of national identity including dialect, slang, religion, and geography.

Parodists primarily use quotations descriptively to “lend a certain character to a passage, through the associations it invokes.”49 Quotations help situate the parody in a specific context, whether geographical (Cledus T. Judd’s quotation of “The Star Spangled Banner” in “Don’t Mess with America” or El Vez’s use of the B section of “The Mexican Hat Dance” in “Chihuahua,” quotations that situate their respective parodies nationally), dramatic (Freberg’s quotations of the

Dragnet theme to establish a police procedural frame for his parodies), or extra-referential (the allusions to the main theme of Pirates of the Caribbean in The Lonely Island’s “Jack Sparrow,”

Freberg’s quotation of the Lawrence Welk Show theme song “Bubbles in the Wine” in

“Wun’erful, Wun’erful,” or Rucka Rucka Ali’s quotation of the main theme from Power Rangers in “Ebola (La La).”

In conclusion, my survey of vernacular parodies found that parodists use three dominant techniques: contrafactum, stylistic allusion, and quotation. Parodies composed using each technique are related through the type of music parodists typically select (music composed by a contemporary from another location in the same genre, medium, style and musical tradition) and two of the extra-musical functions parodists employ for these borrowings (drawing on associations that have changed over time, with special significance for certain groups or individuals, and different or no associations for others).

Despite these similarities, there are several key markers differentiating these practices.

Contrafacta parodists usually borrow an original song’s full texture with great specificity. These

49 Ibid.

!61 musicians replicate the original as closely as possible; consequently, they minimally alter the original’s structure, substituting a new text and occasionally omitting repetitions of the refrain.

Taking the original as a starting point, contrafacta parodists will evoke the previous song’s text to convey an extra-musical meaning and will also comment on or critique the original number or artist.50

Style parodists usually borrow melody, harmony, timbre, and other elements from multiple songs, and their borrowings are less specific than those of contrafacta parodists. These musicians alter the original’s performing forces, figuration, and structure or change the original through embellishment, substantial alterations, or freely reworking the borrowed music through allusions and similar gestures. While these borrowings serve as a starting point for composition

(like those of contrafacta parodists), style parodists use pre-existing music for different functions, including alluding to the source work or its composer, symbolizing something or someone associated with this music, or lending a certain character to a passage through associations with the music.51

Unlike other parodists, those using quotation do not use their borrowings structurally.

These parodists use short, specific excerpts of melodies and harmonies, referencing these once in passing or to mark a significant event in the form. These fragments can be embellished, melodically paraphrased, or placed in a new context to change their effect. Parodists typically

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

!62 use quotations descriptively to lend a certain character to a passage, through the associations it invokes.52

In the introduction to this chapter, I cited Burkholder’s argument that asking interpretive, critical, or historical questions about borrowed music before analytical questions puts the academic cart before the horse. Because borrowings are foundational to parodies and parodists depend upon pre-existing music, we can apply Burkholder’s argument to this genre. Scholars must engage with the “whats” and “hows” of parodic borrowings before considering the “whys” for two reasons. First, such analysis illuminates the ways that parodists borrow music, shifting the focus away from previous definitions and framing parody as a structural borrowing technique. Second, I have found that studying how parodists create humor, construct identity, or reference the past clarifies why composers or songwriters borrow music. Tony Scheuren’s satiric poke at Joni Mitchell’s music, Judd’s depiction of gender roles, and Lehrer’s use of “Dixie” all take on different meanings when one considers how these musicians relate their parodies to pre- existing music. I believe this idea is foundational to the study of parody, and I will return to it in chapters 2, 3, and 4.

52 Ibid.

!63 CHAPTER 2

PARODY, INCONGRUITY, AND HUMOR IN THE MUSIC OF “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC AND P. D. Q. BACH

Parody’s transgressive nature makes it well suited to serve as a means of comic expression; while humor is not the only response parodists evoke from listeners (an issue that I address in the chapters 3 and 4), it is unarguable that musicians often use parody to create comedy. As I demonstrated in my introduction, however, many scholars’ definitions uncritically link parody with humor, either assuming that all parodies are comic or positing purely musical reasons for humor.1 I believe these approaches take humor’s complexity for granted and minimize the array of non-musical devices comic parodists use to create laughter. I also maintain that these approaches focus nearly exclusively on the parodist without taking into account the listener’s role in parodic interpretation.

In this chapter, I focus on the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic and P. D. Q. Bach. These musicians are two of the most prolific American parodists. Each has a distinct style as a humorist and borrows from different repertoires; Yankovic works primarily with contemporary vernacular musics, while Schickele (and his alter ego the fictional composer P. D. Q. Bach) composes in a

1 Tamara Balter, “Canon-Fodders: Parody of Learned Style in Beethoven,” Journal of Musicological Research 32 (2013): 199–224; Amy Marie Bauer, “Compositional Process and Parody in the Music of György Ligeti” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1997); Cassandra I. Carr, “Charles Ives’s Humor as Reflected in His Songs,” American Music 7 (1989): 123–39; Everett, “Parody with an Ironic Edge”; Grove Music Online, s.v. “Parody (i),” by Michael Tilmouth and Richard Sherr, accessed June 6, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/ article/grove/music/20937; Grove Music Online, s.v. “Parody (ii),” by Michael Tilmouth, accessed June 6, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/20938; Peter Kay, “Music and Humor: What’s So Funny?,” Music Reference Services Quarterly 10 (2006): 37–53; David Krasner, Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Miguel Mera, “Is Funny Music Funny?: Contexts and Case Studies of Film Music Humor,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14 (2002): 91–113; and Ian Russell, “Parody and Performance,” in Everyday Culture: Popular Song and the Vernacular Milieu, ed. Michael Pickering and Tony Green (New York: Open University Press, 1987), 73.

!64 style largely indebted to eighteenth-century music. Despite these differences, their parodies use pre-existing music and comic techniques for similar purposes, and investigating their works in detail offers insight into how musical parodies create humor. I draw from humor studies to argue that the parodies of Yankovic and Schickele combine structural incongruities from musical borrowings with a range of techniques to create humor in specific contexts. While structural musical borrowing is fundamental to the effects parodists create, humorous parodies are best considered as a meta-discursive strategy in which musicians use numerous techniques to create new, open-ended texts with latent meanings.

I begin by surveying five major humor theories: superiority, relief, play, dispositional, and incongruity. After briefly describing the key scholars and principal tenets of each, I illustrate how problems with these theories render all but one of them unsuitable for understanding musical humor. I maintain that the incongruity theory offers the most useful paradigm for understanding comedy. I support this argument by defining six kinds of incongruities Yankovic and Schickele create through their musical borrowings: lyrical, stylistic, thematic, evocative, aesthetic, and functional. I argue that these parodists’ borrowing creates foundational incongruities between existing and new music and are thus a structural source of humor.

This seemingly tidy approach, however, is complicated by the way that borrowing illustrates the incongruity theory’s key weakness: audiences unaware of the existing music or convention (or, more broadly, lacking a mental model that defines congruity) cannot understand a parodic borrowing as funny. Noël Carroll’s writings on humor provide a framework for

!65 understanding how listeners must hear an incongruity before interpreting it as funny.2 Drawing on his work, I argue that musical parodists augment the incongruities they create through musical borrowing with a combination of comic techniques. While the incongruities parodic borrowing creates is a defining element of humor for certain listeners, it is combined with other incongruities to create the comic effect.

I draw on Asa Berger’s catalogue of humor techniques to describe these methods and argue that both Yankovic and Schickele employ a range of devices to generate non-musical humor. These techniques define their styles as humorists and explain how listeners unfamiliar with existing music can still interpret their works as humorous. While I believe Berger’s work provides the analyst with a valuable tool, his insistence that techniques are the sole sources of humor is flawed, as it links the presence or absence of these techniques with comedy and limits ways listeners in different historical and cultural contexts respond to parodies. By analyzing two works from Yankovic and Schickele in detail, I contend that understanding parodies in specific contexts underscores parody’s inherently polyvalent nature. This explains why parodists deploy a host of musical and comic techniques to generate humorous effects, because listeners hear and understand parodies through a host of stylistic competencies, prior experiences, and contextual frameworks that influence their understanding.

2 Noël Carroll, Humour: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16–36 and 48–53; see also the Journal of Literary Theory 3 (2009), a special issue devoted to humor theory.

!66 Theories of Humor

Over the centuries writers have created numerous frameworks to explain humor. In this section, I consider five of the most important humor theories, including the superiority, relief, play, dispositional, and incongruity theories. While each theory is distinct, they are not mutually exclusive; linguist Victor Raskin observes that each theory “characterize[s] the complex phenomenon of humor from very different angles” and that they “supplement each other quite nicely.”3

Superiority is one of the earliest theories, with roots in Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible.4

Since the Ancient Greeks, humor was associated “with malice and abuse towards people marked as deficient.”5 We laugh at those inferior to us, and we create this response by coupling our sense of superiority with derision for laughter’s target. Thomas Hobbes’s later refinements to these ideas were particularly influential to this theory; as philosopher John Morreall notes, ideas from

Plato and Hobbes that “laughter is an expression of feelings of superiority [were] the only widely circulated understanding of laughter” prior to the Enlightenment.6 In addition to the theory’s importance for understanding early instances of Western humor, philosopher and humor scholar

3 Victor Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (New York: Springer, 1984), 40. Philosopher John Morreall concurs, emphasizing that we should consider each a “term of art meant to capture one feature shared by accounts of laughter that differ in other respects.” (John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor [Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 6).

4 These ideas were later taken up by a host of writers including medieval Christian thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, Charles Baudelaire, and Roger Scruton. (Carroll, Humour, 8).

5 Ibid.

6 Morreall, Comic Relief, 6.

!67 Noël Carroll notes, “There is a lot to be said for the superiority theory.”7 He emphasizes that this theory “has the virtue of handling a great deal of data” and adequately explains why “much laughter is nasty [and] directed at foolishness.”8 He cites ethnic humor, jokes directed at people with disabilities, or practical jokes as clear examples of the superiority theorist’s belief that “the laughter of comic amusement is aggressive.”9 Despite these examples, the theory cannot explain puns and wordplay, self-deprecating humor, or children’s games.10 As these examples suggest, feeling superior is an unnecessary pre-requisite for humor.11

In response to the problems inherent in the superiority theory, Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony

Ashley-Cooper) articulated a competing model, the relief theory. This was later taken up by

Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Sigmund Freud, the theory’s most well-known champion. His book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious posited a complex version of the relief theory building on eighteenth-century understandings of the nervous system as a connected series of

7 Carroll, Humour, 9.

8 Ibid., 11.

9 Ibid., 10.

10 Ibid., 10–11. Several of these ideas originate in Enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson’s critique of the theory. (Morreall, Comic Relief, 9).

11 Carroll, Humour, 10. An additional criticism of this theory was leveled by Elizabethan defenders of humor who argued that laughter’s superiority holds vices or undesirable traits “up for ridicule, not for emulation,” an idea Henri Bergson develops in his argument that laughter can “serve as a social corrective.” (Quoted in Morreall, Comic Relief, 8). In another assault on this theory, Carroll critiques Hobbes for his focus on laughter, not humor. While Carroll correctly identifies numerous non-humorous instances that can create laughter, his criticism falls wide of the mark by evaluating Hobbes’s writing according to our contemporary understandings of humor. Morreall stresses that “Plato, Hobbes, and other philosophers before the twentieth century were mostly looking for the psychological causes of laughter and amusement.” He writes that we should be cautious “in talking about theories of laughter and humor to distinguish different kinds of theories” and notes that his account of these theories positions them mostly as “mostly as psychological accounts.” (Carroll, Humour, 10 and Morreall, Comic Relief, 7).

!68 tubes.12 These conduits accumulate emotional pressure vented safely through bodily mechanisms like humor.13 Unlike the superiority or incongruity theories, the relief theory holds that “laughter, and by implication humor, are not anti-social or irrational, but simply a way of discharging nervous energy found to be unnecessary.”14

While such explanations are one of the theory’s strengths, scholars articulate three problems that leave the relief theory lacking as an explanation of humor. Morreall dismisses the theory as “based on an outdated hydraulic theory of the mind.”15 He also maintains that all humor need not build up and release emotional energy, citing some cartoons or instances of wordplay as examples.16 Carroll cites a similar problem with humor that involves “no working- up of expectations” when he attempts to reframe the theory’s premise on the grounds of expectation and relief.17 Finally, Morreall critiques Freud’s later revisions to the theory as internally inconsistent and implausible because they neither account for the intentionality of

12 Carroll, Humour, 8.

13 Ibid., 38. Carroll offers an example: when we prepare to encounter something significant but end up experiencing something insignificant, “the nervous energy stored up to grapple with serious matters is displaced or vented into laughter, and thereby flushed out of the system.” (Ibid.).

14 Morreall, Comic Relief, 17. Morreall cautions us that this otherwise innocuous view of laughter as relief is overshadowed by Freud’s connection of humor with lust and aggression. (Ibid., 17–23).

15 Ibid., 23. Carroll echoes this criticism, writing that the theory “presuppos[es] hydraulic views of the mind which are highly dubious.” (Carroll, Humour, 38).

16 Morreall, Comic Relief, 19–20.

17 Carroll, Humour, 40.

!69 much contemporary humor nor provide for any measure of experimental verifiability.

Consequently, he considers Freud’s work of “no use in building a theory of humor.”18

Carroll relates relief theory to play theory, arguing that both advocate “comic amusement as a release from the burdens of everyday activity.”19 Play theory—a term coined by humor scholars—refers to writings from a disparate group of thinkers including Aristotle, Thomas

Aquinas, and Max Eastman.20 These writers diverge from the majority opinion in the Western humanistic tradition by arguing for humor’s virtuous quality and positive benefits. Aquinas claimed that “humans need to rest occasionally from serious activity” and held that “humor and other forms of play provide that rest.”21 For Aquinas, so long as laughter involved “nothing obscene, injurious, or insolent” and did not encourage participants to “neglect [their] moral responsibilities,” the activities of play in general and humor in particular were worthwhile.22

18 Morreall, Comic Relief, 20–21; see also 22–23. Despite these serious flaws in the relief theory, contemporary philosopher Robert Latta presents a related idea dubbed the relaxation theory. Latta believes that a person becomes tense, responds to a stimulus creating a “rapid cognitive shift,” finds her initial tension “without object, point, ground, or function,” and experiences laughter as she relaxes. (Latta, The Basic Humor Process: A Cognitive-Shift Theory and the Case against Incongruity [New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998], 44, quoted in Morreall, Comic Relief, 25). Morreall considers the notion of a cognitive shift foundational to our experience of humor (including it in his own theory), but otherwise does not believe that Latta makes “a convincing case that relaxation is a defining feature of humor.” He cites “contests of humorous insults” like the dozens as examples of humor where the tension increases rather than decreases throughout the performance. (Morreall, Comic Relief, 25– 26).

19 Carroll, Humour, 42.

20 Morreall, Comic Relief, 23 and Carroll, Humour, 42. For comedy’s historically poor reception, see John Morreall, “Humor’s Bad Reputation,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2013 ed., accessed November 18, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/humor/.

21 Morreall, Comic Relief, 23.

22 Ibid., 24. This focus on the moral qualities of humor was a principle concern for Aquinas, who considered laughter’s restorative effects to be physiological as well as ethical and deemed a person’s lack of humor as a vice.

!70 Morreall admires play theorists’ positive framing of humor as a step in the right direction, especially considering “the overwhelmingly negative assessments of humor from other philosophers.” Despite this, he admits that this work lacks the comprehensiveness necessary for constructing a philosophy of humor.23 Carroll levels specific criticisms focused on the idea that while “much humour . . . coincides with play,” it remains unproven that “humour and playing are identical.”24 He also argues that “even if play or playing were a necessary condition for humour, they would not be sufficient” because many types of play “do not involve humour.” Finally, he calls into question the usefulness of an undefined concept like “play,” arguing that some definitions hinging on play’s removal from normal life are belied by genres such as satire that seriously engage with the everyday.25

A recent theory—which Carroll terms the dispositional theory—that has come to prominence in humor studies originates from the contemporary philosopher Jerrold Levinson. He believes that humor is connected with a tendency to laugh. According to Carroll,

Something is humorous . . . [if] it has the disposition to elicit, through the mere cognition of it, and not for ulterior reasons, a certain kind of pleasurable reaction in appropriate subjects (that is, informationally, attitudinally, and emotionally prepared subjects), and where, furthermore, this pleasurable reaction . . . is identified by its own disposition to induce . . . a further phenomenon, namely laughter.26

While both dispositional and incongruity theories recognize the importance “of a cognitive- response element,” the two are differentiated through Levinson’s broad definition of that

23 Ibid.

24 Carroll, Humour, 42.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 43–44.

!71 response. While incongruity theorists believe the response involves the awareness of incongruity,

Levinson includes virtually any cognition that has an “intentional object” towards which responses are directed and that “elicit[s] pleasure for its own sake from suitable percipients.”27

Carroll cites this as a potential weakness with this theory, countering that “the pleasure elicited by the cognition of the humorous [must] be identified by its own disposition to induce laughter.”28 Otherwise, he believes that the theory cannot distinguish specifically humorous dispositions from puzzles, games, or the non-humorous laughter occurring throughout normal conversations.29 As a result, he considers Levinson’s theory overly general and dismisses it as an explanation of humor.

Despite numerous authors’ attempts to elucidate the social and psychological mechanisms of humor, only one explanation has been widely accepted as the dominant paradigm in humor studies. The incongruity theory originates in the writings of eighteenth-century philosopher

Francis Hutcheson30 and counts “James Beattie, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, [and]

Arthur Schopenhauer” among its proponents.31 Morreall maintains that the “core concept in

27 Ibid., 44.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., 45–48. Carroll also criticizes Levinson’s devotion to laughter as an integral component of humor because it necessitates a human body, but I find this counter-argument weak because of the flights of fancy Carroll must take to support it: “Thus communities of telepathically communicating brains in vats, disembodied gods, and aliens without the biological accoutrements to support laughter or even smiling could not be said by us to have humour as a feature of their societies.” (Ibid., 45).

30 Carroll, Humour, 16.

31 Morreall, Comic Relief, 10. Despite the centrality of these philosophers to this theory and and the field of humor studies more generally, Morreall reminds us that “except for Beattie, none of these thinkers wrote even an essay about laughter or humor: their comments arise in discussions of wider topics.” (Ibid., 12).

!72 incongruity theories” is that “human experience works with learned patterns.”32 He describes an incongruity as “some thing or event we perceive or think about [that] violates our normal mental patterns and normal expectations.”33 Carroll expands on the importance of experience, writing that the “key to comic amusement is a deviation from some presupposed norm—that is to say, an anomaly or an incongruity relative to some framework governing the ways in which we think the world is or should be.”34 This deviation need not be surprising but should involve some play with our expectations “about how the world is or should be” with regards to grammar, logic, the laws of nature, “norms of morality, prudence, and etiquette,” conversation and wordplay, stereotypes, caricatures, narrative schemes, or emotional states.35

The incongruity theory provides scholars with a powerful explanation for understanding humor, but critics have observed flaws or areas needing refinement. Morreall notes that late twentieth-century observers often cite “one serious flaw in several older versions of the theory,” namely the implication that “the mere perception of incongruity is sufficient for humor.”36 To better clarify what types of incongruities we find amusing, Carroll writes that incongruity can

32 Ibid., 10.

33 Ibid., 11.

34 Carroll, Humour, 17.

35 Ibid., 18–24.

36 Morreall, Comic Relief, 12; see also Carroll, Humour, 28. For example, I can find a circumstance incongruous, like someone entering my classroom brandishing a weapon, without finding anything funny about the situation.

!73 only be humorous when we are free from fear.37 Building on Bergson’s formulation of humor as a “momentary anaesthesia of the heart,” Carroll describes humorists’ use of conventional markers like joke structures, verbal prompts, and the creation of fictive spaces to alert listeners to process these misfortunes by suspending anxieties for themselves and others.38

A second objection to the incongruity theory addresses the overlap in mental processes at work in creating congruity from jokes or puzzles. Carroll maintains that differences in framing conventions between these objects help us distinguish what types of pleasure we should derive from each, claiming that “in problem solving . . . our enjoyment attaches first and foremost to finding an authentic solution” whereas “with comic amusement the pleasure focuses upon the incongruity itself.”39 Morreall articulates two additional counterarguments to this theory, including the Irrationality Objection, which addresses the seemingly contradictory idea that we enjoy having our instinctive desire to process rationally the world frustrated.40 He counters this objection by connecting “humor with play” and exploring “the social significance of humor and play, and their benefits to the species.”41 He also writes that incongruity theory has difficulty explaining why we often enjoy incongruity in art. For example, while much of our delight in

Haydn arises from his diversions from expected galant conventions, these are not uniformly

37 Carroll agrees that “cases of found humour, then, require that the situations that comically amuse us not be ones in which we feel personal threat.” (Carroll, Humour, 29).

38 Ibid., 31–33.

39 Ibid., 36.

40 Morreall, Comic Relief, 13–15.

41 Ibid., 15.

!74 funny.42 Carroll addresses a related point, admitting that “against very rudimentary incongruity theories of comic amusement—theories that simply define the state of comic amusement as a response to perceived incongruity,” these charges “have a great deal of force.”43 To counter these charges, he posits a nuanced version of the theory, which I detail below.

A third and final objection to incongruity theory’s application to parody hinges on issues of interpretation and audience recognition of borrowed music. As Carroll observes, “comic amusement, according to the incongruity theory, presupposes that the audience has a working knowledge of all the congruities—concepts, rules, expectations—that the humor in question disturbs or violates.”44 Without this knowledge, even the most well-crafted sonic joke, such as the last movement of Haydn’s Op. 33, No. 2, can strike a sour note with the audience; a listener without stylistic competency (of rondo form in the Haydn example) cannot have a mental model for the parody.

I frame these issues as strengths of the incongruity theory, because I believe they show the theory’s potential to explain why some listeners respond to certain works with laughter as well as why the same humor can fall flat for others. I believe Carroll’s writings on humor offer valuable insights that can be applied to parodic incongruities, particularly his explanation of how listeners must receive an incongruity before interpreting its humor. I consider this a critical point

42 There are many examples of non-humorous incongruities including Beethoven’s use of a funeral march in the second movement of the Third Symphony, Berlioz’s grotesque setting of the “Dies Irae” in Symphonie fantastique, Schoenberg’s use of Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire, or Stravinsky’s juxtapositions of diatonic and octatonic collections in the Symphony of Psalms.

43 Carroll, Humour, 51–52.

44 Ibid., 27.

!75 to address before moving further into parody, incongruity, and humor, because a listener who does not hear a parodic borrowing as incongruous cannot reach a “state of comic amusement,” which Carroll argues happens only if

(i) the object of one’s mental state is a perceived incongruity which (ii) one regards as non-threatening or otherwise anxiety producing, and (iii) not annoying and (iv) towards which one does not enlist genuine problem-solving attitudes (v) but which gives rise to enjoyment of precisely the pertinent incongruity and (vi) to an experience of levity.45

Extending Carroll’s framework to music in general and parody in particular, it follows that listeners must recognize incongruities before they can interpret these as comic. In the case of

Yankovic and Schickele, listeners lacking stylistic competency with contemporary vernacular music or with cultivated music, respectively, might not know they are hearing borrowed music.

For example, listeners unfamiliar with Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, or other bands in the alternative rock style might hear Yankovic’s “Germs” or “My Own Eyes” as popular songs, while those unaware of Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi, Riley’s In C, or minimalism in general might hear

P. D. Q. Bach’s Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz as a “serious” composition. Listeners unacquainted with these borrowed musics lack existing models to conflict with the parodies and as a result cannot interpret these examples as incongruities.46

Carroll’s second criteria suggests that listeners who hear a parody as threatening or anxiety-inducing cannot recognize an incongruity and thus miss the work’s humor. Yankovic’s difficulties obtaining a record label’s approval for one of his parodies offers an example. Despite

45 Ibid., 49–50.

46 While Carroll’s observation that humorous incongruity can only result from a listener’s awareness of incongruity might appear obvious, his point helps explain how parodists select material for borrowing. If a humorist composes a parody to be funny, s/he needs the audience to recognize a specific borrowing. To aid the audience’s recognition, parodists typically select well-known works.

!76 securing artist James Blunt’s blessing to parody his 2004 song “You’re Beautiful,” Blunt’s label,

Atlantic Records, denied Yankovic permission to release the song. According to Yankovic, these executives believed “it was ‘too early’ in James’ career for a parody,” because “focusing any more attention on ‘Beautiful’ at that point might lead to the perception of James as a ‘one-hit wonder.’”47 In this instance, Yankovic’s borrowing was interpreted not as a comic incongruity but as a threat to Blunt’s career (or, more properly, to the record label’s investment in Blunt’s career). As a result, Yankovic’s proposed borrowing created anxiety and concern instead of amusement. A similar example comes from Schickele’s recounting of an unspecified “composer/ educator who was a head of a musical institution” who opined that “Peter Schickele makes fun of things that some of us hold sacred.” This response suggests that said educator perceived

Schickele’s musical jokes as a challenge to an integral aspect of his/her identity and consequently did not interpret them as humorous.48

Carroll’s third point indicates that listeners who are annoyed by an incongruity will not experience humor. Internet users’ comments provide one way of demonstrating the truth of

Carroll’s claim by marking different listeners’ responses to similar parodic borrowings. On a fan forum devoted to Yankovic’s music, several users commented on songs they consider irritating.

User Muldernscully remarked that “My Own Eyes” (a style parody of the Foo Fighters) was

47 Austin Scaggs, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Dishes on James Blunt, Discusses His Role as the Whitest, Nerdiest Rock Star Ever,” September 19, 2006, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/weird-al- yankovic-dishes-on-james-blunt-discusses-his-role-as-the-whitest-nerdiest-rock-star- ever-20060919#ixzz3UHipvZ12.

48 Frank J. Oteri, “Make ’em Laugh: In the Kitchen with Peter Schickele (a.k.a. P. D. Q. Bach),” March 15, 2004, accessed October 3, 2015, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/peter-schickele-in-conversation-with-frank-j- oteri/. This anonymous comment dates back to at least 1973, because Schickele tells the same anecdote to reporter Joann Gibbs. Schickele made similar comments in an interview with Bruce Duffie in 1988. ( (Joann Gibbs, Spokane Daily Chronicle, October 15, 1973, pg. 16 and Bruce Duffie, “Composer/Humorist Peter Schickele: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie,” February 15, 1988, accessed October 3, 2015, http://www.bruceduffie.com/schickele.html).

!77 “probably my least favorite song on the album. The lyrics and music are both annoying and the song is ultimately skippable.”49 claykid12345 had a similar response to “Twister,” posting that

“the song is too repetitive and annoying, and it REEKS with the late 80’s.”50 Similar comments abound for Schickele’s New Horizons in Music Appreciation, a parody of Beethoven’s Fifth

Symphony.51 Despite several positive responses, other commentators were irritated by

Schickele’s introduction, his mid-piece commentary, or the piece’s concept.52 These listeners’ annoyance at the sounds, techniques, or concepts used by Yankovic and Schickele prevented them from experiencing the works as comic.

49 Muldernscully, April 17, 2015 (10:01 am), comment on “My Own Eyes,” www.weirdalforum.com, http:// www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=11216&p=822464&hilit=annoying#p822464.

50 claykid12345, March 28, 2015 (3:34 am), comment on “Worst Weird Al Song,” www.weirdalforum.com, http://www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=245&p=822108&hilit=annoying#p822108.

51 These videos are the two most viewed P. D. Q. Bach clips on YouTube. The first was posted four years ago and has 367,171 views. The video was captured from P. D. Q. Bach in Houston: We Have a Problem! and features Peter Jacoby conducting Orchestra X. “PDQ Bach - Beethoven Symphony No. 5,” YouTube video, posted by “nnhjake,” February 3, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg. The second video was posted seven years ago and has 211,095 views. This “video” consists of a still image with an audio-only clip from Report from Hoople: P. D. Q. Bach on the Air (1967). “P. D. Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) - “New Horizons in Music Appreciation” (Beethoven),” video, posted by “LindoroRossini,” September 18, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=f0vHpeUO5mw.

52 User Hope NotTelling commented, “I was not at all a fan of hearing the speaker eat food, open some sort of drink in a can, and a dog barking in the background at the beginning of the video.” amaster101 remarked, “I found it to be more annoying than informative or entertaining,” while Banunu Hawawa simply asked, “What the fuck is this??” Hope NotTelling, comment on “P. D. Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) - “New Horizons in Music Appreciation” (Beethoven),” YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0vHpeUO5mw; amaster101, comment on “P. D. Q. Bach (Peter Schickele) - “New Horizons in Music Appreciation” (Beethoven),” YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0vHpeUO5mw; and Banunu Hawawa, comment on “PDQ Bach - Beethoven Symphony No. 5,” YouTube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg. Even a professional orchestra, the Dublin Philharmonic, tartly dismissed the performance with a sole epithet: “Idiots.” DublinPhilharmonic, comment on “PDQ Bach - Beethoven Symphony No. 5,” YouTube.com, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg.

!78 Carroll’s final criteria for potential incongruities stipulates that listeners must refrain from

“problem-solving attitudes.”53 Since incongruities are by definition unexpected, a listener who engages with a parodist’s incongruity by rationalizing it cannot hear the incongruity as humorous. In my own experience, I found that when I sought to identify a parodist’s source music, I engaged with the piece as a problem to be solved. For example, during my cataloguing of Yankovic songs as parodies or originals, I initially identified “Albuquerque” as an original song. After additional research, I found a source suggesting that the song parodied “Dick’s

Automotive” by the Rugburns.54 Similarly, when listening to P. D. Q. Bach’s No-no Nonette, I recognized that Schickele had paraphrased a passage from Mozart, but originally misidentified which piece he borrowed. In both instances, my understanding changed from hearing this borrowed music as a comic statement to searching for the identity of the source material. My experience affirms Carroll’s claim; when I could not identify a parodist’s borrowings or became more concerned with identifying the borrowing than hearing how this material functioned as a parody, I engaged with these incongruities as problems needing solutions and not as sources of humor.

Despite its potential limitations, the incongruity theory provides the most useful and comprehensive explanation for humor. Carroll observes the theory has attracted “the largest allegiance among philosophers and psychologists” and “offers the most informative approach to

53 Carroll, Humour, 49–50.

54 “The Style Parody List,” accessed November 24, 2014, http://weirdal.0catch.com/txt/ style.parody.list.html.

!79 locating the structure of the intentional object of comic amusement.”55 He opines that the theory

“may function as a serviceable stratagem—indeed, the most useful one we have so far—for unearthing the mechanisms that drive the various comic genres such as jokes and comic plots.”56

In addition to its preeminence with humor scholars, musicologists have invoked the incongruity theory to explain musical humor.57 No other theory can account for solely musical humor by addressing the devices composers use to elicit laughter through composition (and sometimes performance). I consider the superiority theory ill-equipped to handle specifically musical humor. While some of the class-, ethnic-, or community-based humor of Anna Russell,

Paul Shanklin, or Shlock Rock can be interpreted with this theory, their humor is typically verbal and relies on social or behavioral conventions; accordingly, I do not consider these examples of

“musical humor” in the sense that modifications to musical syntax create laughter.58 As Morreall and Carroll argue, the relief theory is largely outdated, and the play theory is not well defined enough to generate meaningful explanations of musical humor. We can use the dispositional theory to explain which pieces of music listeners might react to with laughter, but these ideas

55 Carroll, Humour, 17 and 48.

56 Ibid., 53–54.

57 John Covach, “The Rutles and the Use of Specific Models in Musical Satire,” Indiana Theory Review 11 (1990): 119–44; Garrett, “The Humor of Jazz,” 49–69; idem, “‘Shooting the Keys’: Musical Horseplay and High Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 245–63; and Mera, “Is Funny Music Funny?”

58 One possible objection to my claim involves musicians or other knowledgable listeners who understand solely musical humor and consider themselves superior to those who do not get the joke. The problem with this, however, is that the source of the humor would no longer be musical but would be the elitist listeners’ response to another’s lack of knowledge.

!80 offer little insight into how composers manipulate musical elements to create humor and cannot explain what happens if a work is humorous but a listeners fails to laugh.

The incongruity theory, conversely, is particularly useful at explaining musical humor, which can be broadly defined an incongruity between a composer’s choice and a listener’s expectation. Because of its versatility, explanatory power with a wide range of comic types, and relevance to musical humor, the incongruity theory will form the basis for my argument that a parodist’s borrowings create incongruity for stylistic competent listeners.

Incongruity and Parodic Borrowings

Here, I investigate how two important American musical parodists, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Peter Schickele, create humorous incongruities through their principal borrowing techniques.

I contend that these parodists create six kinds of incongruities through their borrowings: lyrical, stylistic, thematic, evocative, aesthetic, and functional. In his contrafactum parodies, Yankovic creates straightforward lyrical incongruities by borrowing a song and substituting a new text. His song “Fat,” for example, is a contrafactum of Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” Yankovic replicates

Jackson’s recording, borrowing the original song’s melodies, harmonies, dance groove, structure, texture, and instrumental timbres. Yankovic’s replication is distinctive amongst American parodists, since he and his band create a “soundalike” parody by reproducing the original

!81 recording’s nuances.59 Musically, this creates a liminal space where listeners experience uncertainty regarding which version of the song they are hearing, the original or the parody. The parodist’s fidelity to Jackson’s recording heightens the lyrical incongruities, because a listener hears the original music faithfully duplicated.

Within this musical framework, the parodist imitates the rhythms and rhyme structure of

Jackson’s lyrics.60 Listeners hear incongruities between the original’s posturing bravado and

Yankovic’s boastful gluttony. Throughout his parody, Yankovic’s careful replication of Jackson’s music and lyrical framework creates incongruities between a listener’s memories of the original recording and its parody. With “Fat” it is possible for listeners to remember “Bad” and hear those lyrics while simultaneously experiencing the contrafactum. This type of lyrical incongruity is foundational to both Yankovic’s music and the borrowing practices of vernacular contrafactum parodists.

Quotation is less important to Yankovic’s music than contrafacta or stylistic allusion, but the parodist occasionally employs this borrowing technique to create stylistic and thematic incongruities. His “Polka Power!” medley, for example, paraphrases Spike Jones’s 1942 hit “Der

Fuehrer’s Face.” Yankovic lifts a four-measure phrase of the original, borrowing Jones’s melody,

59 Yankovic does make small changes to the original, such as adjusting the key for his vocal range (lowering the key from A to F-sharp), slightly increasing the tempo (from M.M.= 114 to 116), and omitting the final repetition of Jackson’s chorus. Such changes are unlikely to be noticed by any but the most careful listeners, and they demonstrate the parodist’s ability to adapt the original song to his purposes. “Bad” functions as a long-form dance song, with extra repetitions of the chorus that permit the groove to continue for dancing. “Fat” functions as a comic statement, so extra choruses would unnecessarily lengthen the song and undermine its humor. By omitting these replications, Yankovic demonstrates his ability to adapt music to best suit his purposes as a humorist.

60 Yankovic’s first line heightens the musical sense of congruity between these works by retaining the first three words (“Your butt is”) and using a similar sounding word for the fourth (compare Jackson’s “mine” with Yankovic’s “wide”).

!82 rhythms, supporting harmonies, and timbres (including a distinctive series of muted brass raspberries).61

Yankovic’s quotation creates incongruity on two levels. He creates stylistic incongruity by refashioning Jones’s music in a polka style for accordion, muted trumpets, and tuba. He also creates a thematic incongruity between the songs in his medley because the lyrics, style, and social function of each song are markedly different. Yankovic restyles the chorus of a rap song about life in the ghetto—itself a sample of “Islands in the Stream,” a song written by the

BeeGees and recorded by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton in 1983—and links this to an anthemic dance number through an instrumental passage drawn from a song mocking Adolf

Hitler.62 The result is a bizarre, almost surreal listening experience, one typical of parodists’ quotations, which remove a section of pre-existing music from its original context and place it in an incongruous one.

Yankovic’s stylistic allusions generate evocative and aesthetic incongruities. His 2009 song “Craigslist,” for example, parodies the American rock band the Doors. Typical for

Yankovic’s stylistic allusions, “Craigslist” borrows numerous elements from the parodied artist’s style and combines these with newly composed music in the style of the target. The introduction to “Craigslist,” while original, features allusions to numerous Doors’s songs, including a guitar

61 The parodist also changes the original’s meter from compound duple to simple duple and increases the tempo from M. M. 142 to 180. In Jones’s song this music functions principally as an instrumental introduction, with a truncated two-measure version functioning as an bridge between the first two verses. Yankovic’s quotation similarly functions as a passing gesture. The parodist’s alters the original music’s final three notes to serve as a melodic transition between two other restyled popular songs in a medley “Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)” by Pras, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and Mýa and “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys.

62 “Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are),” http://www.whosampled.com/Pras/Ghetto-Supastar-(That-Is- What-You-Are)/, accessed November 4, 2015. Another intertextual reference results from the sampled song’s title, which references an Ernest Hemingway novel.

!83 figure featuring repeated bends that references “When the Music’s Over,” an organ riff alluding to the introductions of “When the Music’s Over” and “Soul Kitchen,” and a bass line similar to those from “When the Music’s Over,” “Soul Kitchen,” and “Twentieth Century Fox.”63 I term these evocative incongruities. Much like the process I described above with Yankovic’s contrafactum parody, a listener might hear these Doors gestures and associate them with the original songs. At this point, a listener experiences an incongruity as her or his memory of the song conflicts with her or his current experience and the familiar gesture becomes unfamiliar; rather than hearing the organ riff continue in “Soul Kitchen,” for example, a listener hears this musical gesture lead to different (yet related) patterns. Yankovic creates evocative incongruity in this shift between remembered and experienced musical passages.

Yankovic’s style parodies also create aesthetic incongruities, a term I use to refer to experiences that conflict with our expectations about authorship and originality. In “Craigslist”

Yankovic draws on the Doors’s music to “provide material” including “motifs [and] structural ideas” that are “freely reworked” by the parodist and his band.64 The organ solo in “Craigslist” exemplifies this approach. The solo—performed by Doors’s original keyboardist, Ray Manzarek

—concludes with a brief passage in quarter-note triplets. Manzarek establishes this rhythm as the other band members imitate it successively, building rhythmic tension against the established pulse and swelling until the solo concludes and the band returns to the original groove at a lower dynamic level. This rhythmic idea and type of ensemble interplay are featured in numerous

63 The bends are first heard from 0:07–0:11. A similar passage appears in “When the Music’s Over” between 0:35 and 0:36. The organ riff is first heard in “When the Music’s Over” from 0:00–0:09 and in “Soul Kitchen” from 0:00–0:08. The parody’s organ part also shares a melodic relationship with the organ figuration in “Riders on the Storm” beginning in the second verse (1:09).

64 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Borrowing, §1: Types of borrowing,” by Burkholder.

!84 Doors songs to play against the song’s duple meter (as in “Love Me Two Times”) or as a device allowing the soloist to signal the conclusion of an improvised section (such as the end of

Manzarek’s organ solos in “When The Music’s Over” and “Light My Fire”). As a result, the distinctive combination of similar rhythmic ideas, organ riffs, ensemble interaction, and structural function can be considered a distinctive aspect of the Doors’s musical style. Manzarek,

Yankovic, and his band rework these ideas to make the style parody’s music imitate the Doors.

These stylistic allusions play with our notions of originality and authorship. They are congruous in the context of the band’s style, but listeners experience incongruity by hearing them performed by another band.

Schickele’s borrowings create similar incongruities. His quotations and paraphrases produce stylistic and functional incongruities. In his P. D. Q. Bach composition 1712 Overture, for example, Schickele paraphrases three songs: the Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” “Pop Goes the

Weasel,” and “Yankee Doodle.” The parodist creates stylistic incongruity by refashioning vernacular excerpts in cultivated styles. He alters the Beatles’ passage, for example, from a rock- style guitar riff to a Baroque organ fantasia, working the material out by creating an ascending sequence out of the riff’s final melodic gesture and using this to approach a major sectional cadence. Hearing a passage originally associated with rock and roll refashioned as a Baroque fantasia creates stylistic incongruity.

Schickele also creates functional incongruities with these paraphrases. He treats “Pop

Goes the Weasel” and “Yankee Doodle” as themes. During the development section, for example, Schickele repeats the final interval of “Pop Goes the Weasel” in different rhythms and treats the melody’s opening gesture through rhythmic diminution. It also appears with new

!85 countermelodies. Schickele’s introduction contains a newly composed counter-theme to “Yankee

Doodle,” and presents the borrowed material in several tempos and keys with varied orchestration. Because these simple melodies are frequently used for collective singing (often in elementary school), Schickele creates functional incongruities by repurposing this material for a concert work.

Schickele's quodlibets create stylistic, functional, and evocative incongruities.65 His Eine kleine Nichtmusik replicates Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 in G major, K. 525 with a variety of counter-themes borrowed from both cultivated and vernacular traditions: Stephen Foster songs such as “Old Black Joe” and “Oh! Susanna,” folk songs like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and

“Mary Had A Little Lamb,” and themes from orchestral or operatic works including Stravinsky’s

Petrushka, Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov.66 At the surface level, Schickele creates stylistic incongruity through the disparate range of borrowed musical themes, because the quodlibet brings together works we typically would not associate with one another or expect to hear in the same context. Schickele also creates stylistic incongruity by arranging these vernacular melodies in cultivated styles (like the first movement, where Schickele uses four measures of “Turkey in the Straw” as a counter-theme to Mozart’s first theme) or overlaying Romantic-period music with galant traits (like the two-measure quotation of the “March” from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, which Schickele juxtaposes with the cadential chords that conclude Mozart’s first movement).

65 While quodlibets are not a dominant borrowing practice used by American parodists, I include them here because of their importance in Schickele’s oeuvre.

66 Schickele uses the same Mozart piece as the basis for his one-act opera A Little Nightmare Music.

!86 Schickele’s quotations originally served as independent melodies or themes functioning as the basis for a section of a song (verse, chorus, etc.) or piece (principal theme of a movement or number). As a result, he generates functional incongruities when listeners hear these fragmented themes serving as a counter-theme or hear Mozart’s music overlaid with vernacular melodies. Schickele also creates evocative incongruity when listeners hear musical snippets progressing not to their expected melodic or harmonic resolutions but to other similarly out-of- place excerpts. The conflict between the remembered expectation of what is “supposed to happen next” and the reality of hearing this music develop elsewhere produces incongruity between memory and experience.

Schickele’s stylistic allusions are foundational to the humor of P. D. Q. Bach’s music, and he uses them to create stylistic and aesthetic incongruities. Many of Schickele’s borrowings incorporate multiple elements from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century styles, including melodies, rhythmic figures, harmonies, forms, textures, and timbres. For example, in the first movement of P. D. Q. Bach’s “Moose” String Quartet in F major, Schickele alludes to numerous galant traits: antecedent-consequent phrase structures, simple yet varied surface rhythms that strongly articulate the underlying meter, functional tonality with slow-moving harmonic rhythms, sonata form, homophonic textures, and homogeneous instrumental timbres. Schickele develops multiple stylistic incongruities through his diversions with the music’s style. The first movement’s opening theme, for example, begins with a pulsing tonic chord in the ’cello, viola, and second violin. Schickele refrains from adding the melody until the third measure, and further flouts conventions by extending this phrase through an exaggerated multi-measure appoggiatura.

Listeners familiar with the conventions of galant music hear these gestures as stylistic

!87 incongruities. Schickele’s quartet includes other incongruous elements including Bartók pizzicatos (movement two), allusions to Beethoven’s late quartets and Shostakovich’s quartets

(movement four), and references to accompanimental figuration common in blues and boogie- woogie (movement four). These styles are incongruous not only within the piece’s eighteenth- century ethos but also in comparison to Schickele’s other borrowings.

By blending different stylistic elements within one piece and writing in an archaic style,

Schickele’s borrowings also create aesthetic incongruity. The parodist’s use of multiple stylistic elements within a musical language that fell out of favor centuries ago conflicts with our expectation for how a contemporary composer’s music should sound. Listeners customarily expect to hear composers using one style within a piece; while this can refer to previous styles, our assumption is that these references are merely one element within a distinct, individual, and

“modern” style that reflects contemporary compositional trends and shifts in musical syntax over time. Even if a listener takes the fictive P. D. Q. Bach as a “legitimate” composer or understands these incongruities as endemically postmodern, a listener might still hear aesthetic incongruities through Schickele’s references to musical styles that did not exist during the eighteenth century.

Finally, the parodist’s unironic use of multiple styles conflicts with lingering Romantic and

Modern aesthetic ideals regarding an artwork’s unity, the coherence of the composer’s language, and the idea of progressive changes in styles and techniques, creating additional aesthetic incongruity.

As “Fat,” “Polka Power!,” “Craigslist,” 1712 Overture, Eine kleine Nichtmusik, and the

“Moose” Quartet show, Yankovic and Schickele typically use borrowed music to create multiple incongruities—lyrical, stylistic, thematic, evocative, aesthetic, or functional—between a

!88 listener’s expectations and her or his experience hearing the parody. Incongruity theory offers a paradigm for understanding how these effects work in performance, as these borrowings create foundational incongruity between old and new music. As a result, I consider them a structural source of humor.

Throughout this section, I have assumed that a listener fulfills Carroll’s criteria by recognizing these incongruities and responding without anxiety, annoyance, or an attempt to solve a problem. While a listener can interpret a parodic borrowing as incongruous, what about one who lacks stylistic competency or familiarity with the borrowed music? Because I contend that nearly all listeners can understand Yankovic or Schickele’s music as humorous, how can the incongruity theory explain why a listener may still find a parody targeting an unfamiliar work or style humorous?

Answering this question necessitates understanding parody as a broad and not exclusively musical concept. While structural musical borrowing is an integral component of this experience

—a structural component with regards to musical humor—a borrowing typically works in concert with a range of other techniques to create humor. In this, I draw on Charles Garrett’s writings about humor in jazz, which he believes “exists beyond any musical incongruities intrinsic to an individual work.” He argues that such humor extends “beyond the comic production of musical incongruity to encompass a variety of artistic strategies that include mental and physical forms of comedy.”67 I believe parody functions in a similar way. Both

Yankovic and Schickele blend a variety of structural and surface techniques to create multiple

67 Garrett argues that jazz humor “is not limited to a written score or to the sounds of an individual performance” but includes “song titles, comic lyrics, and visual imagery” as well as during live performances through musicians’ “facial expressions, performance gestures, and stage banter.” (Garrett, “The Humor of Jazz,” 54).

!89 layers of incongruities and humor. These techniques clarify to a listener that a work’s incongruities are meant to be interpreted humorously and create humor for a listener unfamiliar with the borrowed material.

My formulation explains how a listener unfamiliar with a parodist’s borrowing can still interpret a parody as humorous. Someone unfamiliar with Jackson’s “Bad,” for example, can laugh at Yankovic’s exaggerations and fat jokes without the layer of humor added by his musical incongruities. A listener might still experience Yankovic’s parody as comic not because of any perceived musical incongruity created by the parodist’s borrowing but because his use of extra- or non-musical humor techniques.68 With this observation I diverge from traditional concepts of parody in order to emphasize its holistic nature as a comic statement. I contend that humorous parody is a flexible comic technique typically employed in concert with other strategies, both musical and otherwise.

Parody and Humor Techniques

To describe parody and humor techniques and the incongruities they can create, I draw from Asa Berger’s catalogue of humor techniques.69 His work provides ways to distinguish between different humor strategies, to articulate the defining or representative traits of specific humorists, and to compare different humorists. After reviewing his catalogue, I determine the comic strategies typically employed by Yankovic and Schickele, illustrating how both composers

68 The presence or absence of these techniques helps to differentiate parodic incongruities intended to be humorous from those intended to create community, to express a political statement, to serve a didactic function, or to evoke nostalgia.

69 Arthur Asa Berger, An Anatomy of Humor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 15–55.

!90 use a range of devices atop the foundational technique of parody. These techniques characterize their styles as comedians and account for one way a listener unfamiliar with their borrowed music might still interpret their parodies humorously.

Berger’s “catalogue . . . of the basic techniques of humor” is divided into four categories: language, logic, identity, and action.70 Language or verbal humor includes “allusion [or references], bombast, definition, exaggeration, facetiousness, insults, infantilism, irony, misunderstanding, over-literalness, puns and word play, repartee, ridicule, sarcasm, and satire.”

Logic or ideational humor involves “absurdity, accident, analogy, catalogue, coincidence, disappointment, ignorance, mistakes, repetition, reversal, rigidity, and theme/variation.” Identity or existential humor consists of “before/after, burlesque, caricature, eccentricity, embarrassment, exposure, grotesque, imitation, impersonation, mimicry, parody, scale, stereotype, and unmasking.” Action or physical/nonverbal humor encompasses “chase, slapstick, speed, and time.”71

70 Ibid., 15 and 17.

71 Ibid., 18. He coyly adds: “These techniques were elicited by making a content analysis of all kinds of humor in various media and are, as classification schemes should be, comprehensive and mutually exclusive. I’ve not been able to find other techniques of humor to add to my list.” At the risk of being contrary, I have refined Berger’s category of “allusions” to include “allusions and references,” which better reflects the types of humor I have found in American musical parodies. Berger’s descriptions evince a lack of clarity in his thinking about parody. He writes that “almost all of the techniques described in this glossary are functional,” but that many, including burlesque or parody, “are really classificatory.” As a result of his “focus on techniques” he “treat[s] certain topics, such as parody, as a technique rather than a form or a genre” because he believes that “recognizing techniques is more important than using traditional categories.” While such a dual categorization of parody as both technique and genre underscores difficulties that critics have traditionally faced when describing parody (discussed in chapter 1), Berger further muddies the issue by treating parody as both a technique and a meta-technique. He identifies imitation and mimicry as foundational to parody, but also writes that parodists employ “other comic techniques . . . to heighten the humor.” Blurring the lines between genres and techniques and placing parody on a similar level with less-complex techniques like eccentricity or embarrassment prevents Berger from achieving his stated goal of providing “the reader with a sense of how certain techniques of humor relate to one another.” (Ibid., 17–18 and 44).

!91 While Berger’s catalogue raises issues for both analysts and listeners, overall I consider it a useful tool for identifying what humor techniques define an parodist’s style as a humorist.

Using these categories, I found that Yankovic commonly employs nine principle techniques.72

These include four identity techniques (parody, mimicry, imitation, and eccentricity), three language techniques (puns and word play, exaggeration, and allusions and direct references), and two logic techniques (absurdity and catalogue). Yankovic uses parody, mimicry, and imitation to create musical frameworks for his parodies, and these techniques serve a structural function in his music. He relies on the other techniques to generate concepts and humorous material for his lyrics.

Parody is a foundational comic device for Yankovic. A short survey of his output provides the evidence for this claim: of his 167 songs, thirty-two (19 percent) are original non-parodic works.73 Of the remaining 135 songs (totaling 81 percent), seventy are specific parodies (42 percent), fifty-three are general or style parodies (32 percent), and twelve are polka medleys (7 percent).

Berger maintains that parody is closely linked with mimicry and imitation, techniques that Yankovic frequently uses.74 The parodist’s defining trait is his ability to duplicate the

72 I found these techniques throughout his career and in each of his four major song types. While there are elements of action humor in several of Yankovic’s music videos (including “Fat,” “Amish Paradise,” and “Perform This Way”), I found no instances of action humor in his recorded songs.

73 The larger total represents all of Yankovic’s commercially released vernacular parodies, including tracks from all fourteen of his albums and his three commercially available singles (“Headline News” from Permanent Record: Al in the Box, “Spy Hard,” and “You’re Pitiful”). I have omitted rare recordings with limited circulation (such as tracks from Dr. Demento compilations) as well as his cultivated style parodies of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Saint-Saëns’s The Animals.

74 Berger even defines parody as “a form of verbal imitation or mimicry.” (Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 44).

!92 original recording as closely as possible, as he and his band assume the identity of familiar artists or styles, mimicking gestures, timbres, and distinctive mannerisms.75 As long-time Yankovic guitarist Jim West observes, the band strives to make their parodies “as authentic as possible and kind of trick people into thinking it’s the real thing.”76 Drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz agrees, describing Yankovic as “a bit of a perfectionist” while mimicking the target during the recording process.77

The band’s musical mimicry provides a foundation for listeners to hear Yankovic’s vocal imitations as incongruities. Yankovic follows the original melody’s profile and expressive nuances but he makes no attempt to sound like or impersonate Kurt Cobain, instead singing in his distinctive, nasally voice.78 The combination of familiar, mimicked supporting music and out- of-place, imitated vocal music creates an evocative incongruity, a playful space between a listener’s expectation and the listening experience. Because of the music’s precision, the sound of

Yankovic’s voice alerts a listener unfamiliar with the original that they are hearing a parody and

75 Ibid., 37–38, 42.

76 Christopher R. Weingarten, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Looks Back at 20 Years of ‘Smells Like Nirvana,’” October 11, 2012, accessed November 29, 2015, http://www.spin.com/2012/10/weird-al-yankovic-looks-back-at-20- years-of-smells-like-nirvana/.

77 A representative example is “Smells Like Nirvana.” In this parody Yankovic and his band mimic Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In a 2012 interview, Yankovic’s bandmates recalled their precision duplicating the recording’s subtlest nuances. Schwartz remembered that “the [original] part was pretty loose. I remember asking Al, ‘Do you want me to play it exactly like the record?’ Tempos were up and down. We adjusted the tempos on our song to meet the Nirvana version.” Bass player Steve Jay also described the subtleties of the session: “I remember when I was examining the bass part, noticing how [Nirvana bass player] Krist Novoselic kind of dragged his finger when he was sliding up from a B-flat in the pattern. . . . So I was sure to include that glissando. It was sort of a nuance that he had done that gave it its character.” (Ibid.).

78 This aligns with Berger’s definition of imitation, which involves an individual “pretend[ing] he or she is something else . . . but maintaining his or her own identity, which is fused with that which is imitated.” (Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 37).

!93 sharpens the incongruities between original and parody for another listener, while directing all listeners’ attention to his lyrics.

In these lyrics, Yankovic deploys language, logic, and identity techniques to create additional layers of incongruity that do not rely on borrowed music. After selecting target material and employing the structural devices of parody, mimicry, and imitation, he expands on the song’s concept, which is frequently derived from punning the sound of words in the original song’s title.79 Other parodies are based on absurd concepts including juvenile premises (“Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters from a Planet Near Mars”), ridiculous scenarios (a family vacation to “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota”), pop culture references (riffs on Chuck Norris jokes with “CNR” or internet memes with “First World Problems”), and clever or witty stories (a love song to the under-appreciated “Pancreas”).80

After generating concepts, Yankovic expands his scenario through absurdity, exaggeration, or eccentricity. His lyrics use conventional narratives with absurd elements, like the protagonist’s grotesque self-absorption in “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?” or the hyperbolic banality of “Trapped in the Drive-Thru.” Other times, Yankovic establishes a premise and then exaggerates an aspect of it.81 For example, the protagonist in “Don’t Wear Those Shoes”

79 Through this process, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is transformed into “Like a Surgeon” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” into “Eat It.” For more on Yankovic’s typical songwriting process, see Joe Berkowitz, “Master Class: ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic on How to Make a Great Parody,” October 29, 2012, accessed February 4, 2015, http:// www.fastcocreate.com/1681833/master-class-weird-al-yankovic-on-how-to-make-a-great-parody and Nathan Rabin, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic,” June 29, 2011, accessed March 11, 2015, http://www.avclub.com/article/weird-al- yankovic-58244.

80 Berger writes that absurdity “works by making light of the ‘demands’ of logic and rationality as we traditionally know them.” (Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 19).

81 Exaggeration in and of itself is “not necessarily humorous,” and Berger emphasizes that the technique “must be tied to something else if it is to be seen as comic.” (Ibid., 33).

!94 expresses his willingness to endure a number of fates ranging from the unpleasant (“you can lick the middle out of my Oreos”) to the horrific (“you can even shove a six-inch railroad spike through my head”) as long as his partner complies with his sole request: “don’t wear those shoes.”

As befits these concepts, Yankovic’s songs are populated with eccentric characters. From the strange dreams of the protagonist “Stuck in a Closet with Vanna White” to the conceits of the

“Waffle King” to culinary obsession of a man “Addicted to Spuds,” Yankovic frequently uses eccentricity in tandem with absurdity or exaggeration to create incongruity with expected behavior. He uses these techniques to create a playful space outside social norms where atypical or aberrant behavior is tolerated and even expected, signaling to listeners that Yankovic’s incongruities are meant to be interpreted humorously and contributes to the song’s overall comic effect.82

Once the concept and narrative are created, Yankovic increases the comic density of his lyrics with puns and word play, allusions and direct references, and catalogues. In addition to titles like “Grapefruit Diet” (“Zoot Suit Riot”) or “The White Stuff” (“The Right Stuff”), the parodist’s lyrics often employ more sophisticated wordplay. “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” features rhyming couplets created by mixing English and Yiddish, while the lyrics for “Bob” are entirely palindromic. Yankovic typically uses allusions or direct references related to a song’s concept.83

82 This comic space also allows the parodist to poke fun at the seriousness of popular music. By exaggerating a pop song’s typical scenarios or the emotional responses these songs elicit, Yankovic calls our attention to the contrived and often artificial nature of these songs. For example, he treats Lorde’s ironic, cynical take on consumerism in “Royals” to a straight-laced and increasingly paranoid rant about the potential uses of “Foil.”

83 Yankovic sometimes alludes to or references ideas that are unrelated to the original song, such as his reference to The Gong Show in “You Make Me.”

!95 For example, “Inactive” alludes to the United States’ obesity epidemic while “Amish Paradise” refers to the religious beliefs of the Old Order Amish. Because many of his concepts draw from pop culture, these allusions and references place his humor in a wider and explicitly American context by increasing a song’s connections to the culture it addresses.

Yankovic’s songs often feature two types of catalogues. The first is comprised of conventional lists, like inventories of hernia types in “Living with a Hernia” or enzymes and hormones in “Pancreas.” These lists are typically short, unlike the second type of catalogue, which are extensive lists related to the song’s concept, like the relaxing behaviors rejected by the protagonist of “I’ll Be Mellow When I’m Dead” or the challenger’s boasts in “Sports Song.”

Both types of catalogues work towards the same end; by increasing the amount of incongruous items in each line, the parodist increases his songs’ comic density and ensures that his lyrics contain the greatest amount of humor per words in a line.

I draw my examples of Yankovic’s preferred techniques largely from the parodist’s lyrics, underscoring a key point about his humor: aside from the occasional use of sound effects,

Yankovic’s musical settings are rarely funny in their own right.84 Instead, music typically provides Yankovic with a framework for his lyrics or with additional incongruities that enrich the verbal humor. One type of incongruity involves a listener’s stylistic competency with the original or target recording music, as the parodist creates a cognitive dissonance between those expectations and the topics of his lyrics. In “Mission Statement,” for example, Yankovic presents a style parody of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The group’s folk-rock musical style and political

84 In “Eat It,” for example, the music includes nothing humorous aside from a brief moment of sonic absurdity (the culmination of the guitar solo arrives not in the expected high note resolving the ascending line but in an explosion conveying the ferocity of the guitarist’s tremolo picking). Sound effects are common on Yankovic’s first record but are rarely found on subsequent releases.

!96 activism are incompatible with the lyrics, which Yankovic creates by stringing together corporate buzzwords. The music contributes to humor for certain listeners but is not intrinsically comic.85

A second type of incongruous musical setting is both common and generic. Yankovic creates incongruity between lyrical and musical content without relying on familiarity with the target music. These incongruities involve generic Western expectations for “happy” or “upbeat” music, characterized by brisk tempos, major chords, conjunct melodic motion, and high levels of consonance. Yankovic often pairs these musical signifiers with incongruent lyrics, like “Trigger

Happy,” a buoyant surf rock parody with gruesome lyrics about a murderous, gun-obsessed lunatic prone to “shoot first and ask questions later” or “I Remember Larry,” an exuberant recounting of a series of pranks that escalates until the narrator snaps and murders his tormentor.86 In these examples, neither music nor (arguably) lyrics are independently humorous; only when they are combined does the incongruity create humor.

While Schickele similarly blends a variety of humor techniques, musical humor is far more important to his style than to Yankovic’s. Schickele’s music often serves as the principal source of humor; as a result, I have folded my discussion of his musical comedy into the

85 Another example is his reggae parody, “Buy Me a Condo,” which relies on incongruities between a Western listener’s expectations for reggae (including its socially aware lyrics) and a text focused on commercialism and possession of expensive material goods. As Yankovic remarked, “I thought it’d be fun to do a song about a Rastafarian who’d become Westernized, so I listened to a lot of Bob Marley and other reggae records, just to get the style down, and then wrote some lyrics about Cuisinarts and wall-to-wall carpeting.” (Barry Hansen, “Permanent Record: Al in the Box,” accessed June 18, 2014, http://dmdb.org/al/booklet.html).

86 This basic principle of creating incongruity between parodied music and text holds true for Yankovic’s polka medleys, but in these songs, incongruity plays between the two to create humor. The lyrics themselves are not funny nor is the music; rather, the appearance of a pre-existing lyric in a drastically different musical context creates humor. In 2002’s “Angry White Boy Polka,” for example, Yankovic twists the histrionics of Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” by replacing the original’s distorted electric guitars and aggressive drum accents with an accordion-driven arrangement. Aside from a sound effect replacing the curse word in the fourth line, the music is not intrinsically funny, and even those unfamiliar with the original song will notice the incongruity between the upbeat polka setting and lyrics (“Cut my life into pieces / This is my last resort / Suffocation, no breathing / Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding”).

!97 discussion of his humor techniques. I found that Schickele favors eight principle devices: four identity techniques (parody, mimicry, imitation, and eccentricity), one logic technique

(absurdity), one action technique (slapstick), and two language techniques (allusions and direct references and puns and word play).

Schickele, like Yankovic, primarily uses parody as a structural borrowing technique to provide a framework for the other types of humor. His parodies target both musical and social conventions. Many of his P. D. Q. Bach compositions parody specific pieces (the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in New Horizons in Music Appreciation or J. S. Bach’s Well-

Tempered Clavier in The Short-Tempered Clavier), genres (Renaissance madrigals in 2

Madrigals from Triumph of Thusnelda or secular cantatas in Iphigenia in Brooklyn), or styles

(bluegrass in Blaues Gras, galant music in the “Moose” String Quartet, and the tango in Peter

Schickele’s Last Tango in Bayreuth). Stylistic mélanges are also common in his non-P. D. Q.

Bach pieces; for example, Schickele’s Uptown Hoedown mixes popular styles with cultivated quotations, while his Far Away From Here is scored for bluegrass band and orchestra.

Schickele also targets the presentation expectations and social conventions of concerts or recordings of cultivated music. In several P. D. Q. Bach works, performers lose their composure and drop their parts (at the end of Iphigenia in Brooklyn) or their instruments (at the conclusion of the prologue to The Preachers of Crimetheus). Instead of demurely walking on stage to polite applause, “Professor Peter Schickele” customarily enters P. D. Q. Bach concerts by swinging, climbing, or zip-lining onto stage, and he sometimes affects intoxication while performing.

Like Yankovic, Schickele’s parodies often involve mimicry and imitation. In his P.D.Q. compositions, Schickele assumes the identity of a fictional Bach son, mimicking the style and

!98 distinctive mannerisms of a composer whose gestures are imitative of late Baroque or galant styles (with anachronistic forays into Romantic or minimalist styles).87 He composed his “half- act opera” The Stoned Guest in a Mozartian style, while his Fugue in C Minor from the Toot

Suite for calliope four hands draws inspiration from the late Baroque, particularly the music of J.

S. Bach.88

Building on the structural foundation of parody and the related procedures of mimicry and imitation, Schickele employs three other techniques: eccentricity, absurdity, and slapstick.

He uses eccentricity in virtually all of his P. D. Q. Bach compositions. Berger notes that the

“humor of eccentricity is based on the difference between what is customary, ‘normal,’ or what we are used to and what we find when we experience the abnormal or the deviant.”89 In this sense, Schickele’s eccentricities are extensions of parodic incongruities. The latter targets specific conventions, while the former creates incongruity between these conventions and the exaggeratedly inappropriate behaviors of Schickele’s performers.

Schickele relies on a listener’s notions of cultivated music and creates humor by deviating from these expectations. For example, the P. D. Q. Bach work Trio (sic) Sonata features several atypical elements, including aspects of instrumentation (two flutes, tuba, and tambourine), ensemble writing (fingers snaps to punctuate cadences and a tuba cadenza at the

87 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 37–38 and 42. In my experience surveying listeners with a passing knowledge of “classical music,” many people hear P. D. Q. Bach compositions as genuine examples of this style. They become aware that something is amiss only when they hear audience laughter on the recording or when they notice an incongruity.

88 His parodic Schickele-branded compositions similarly involve a neo-tonal language, like the Last Tango in Bayreuth, which re-styles Wagner’s Tristan Prelude as a tango.

89 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 32.

!99 conclusion of movement three), style (a canonic imitative flute part in the second movement that is interrupted by a stride bass line), harmony (the goal-directedness of tonal passages are subverted by the first movement’s often meandering chords), and rhythm (the tambourine’s shifting accent patterns in movement four).90 All of these gags rely on an established idea of how these musical elements are customarily treated and a listener’s recognition of Schickele’s incongruent treatment of these same elements.

Schickele similarly relies on our expectations surrounding cultivated music performance to create incongruity between such preconceptions and the eccentric behaviors of his performers.

P. D. Q. Bach’s Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments undermines our ideas of how ensemble performers are supposed to behave. Instead of the customarily harmonious ensemble working collectively towards an aesthetic goal, Schickele’s Echo Sonata pits the woodwind and brass players against each other. The brass players miss cues, refuse to make their

“correct” entrances or agree on a key, undermine the piece’s musical style, and even musically taunt the wind players by quoting a children’s mocking song.

Schickele’s absurdities similarly rely on his listener’s expectations.91 Unlike eccentricity, however, absurdity depends less on an individual’s stylistic competency with cultivated music and more on knowledge of conventions governing etiquette. Aspects of Schickele’s performance directions for P. D. Q. Bach compositions subvert “our sense of the way humans think and

90 Schickele is especially fond of playing with our expectations at cadences: “The O.K. Chorale” from the “Toot” Suite ends with a major seventh chord and lounge jazz flourish, the first section of the “Perückenstück” aria from The Civilian Barber includes a stylistic allusion to cowboy Westerns with a syncopated cadence that slides from the tonic down to the subtonic, and the first movement of Concerto for 2 Pianos Vs. Orchestra prepares us for repeated sol-do gestures in the brass over a tonic chord before petering out after a syncopated tonic chord.

91 I distinguish the two techniques through absurdity’s grossly exaggerated sounds or behaviors and the fact that no specific knowledge of cultivated music styles or conventions is necessary to understand absurd humor.

!100 behave.”92 In addition to including the parodist’s unexpected stage entrances (discussed above),

Schickele often instructs musicians to break the performance frame. For example, in The Stoned

Guest, the competing sopranos speak to one another in recitative (as if this were their normal mode of communication), break character mid-aria to discuss their careers, heckle one another during sustained notes, and compete to determine who can sustain the longest high note. Western audiences fluent in the general conventions of theatrical or musical stage performance realize that performers are not supposed to acknowledge (much less cross) the liminal threshold separating audience from performers. While audience members familiar with the customary modes of behavior during classical concerts might find such examples humorous, these absurdities do not require any specific knowledge of cultivated performance conventions. Rather, general ideas about risk taking, acting, and interpersonal behavior are the only concepts required to find these stunts amusing.

Eccentric or absurdist elements in Schickele’s P. D. Q. Bach compositions often involve slapstick humor targeting performance conventions. The Consecration of the House overture begins as Professor Schickele shakes the concertmaster’s hand and acknowledges the orchestra, who stand for a bow and then silently file offstage. Similar jokes play with our expectations of classical performances (like a snoozing ensemble musician in the Prelude to Einstein on the

Fritz), unconventional performance techniques (Iphigenia in Brooklyn features brass and

92 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 32. Elsewhere, Berger writes that absurdity makes “light of the ‘demands’ of logic and rationality as we traditionally know them” and plays with “our sense of order and intelligibility” and “of possibility and probability.” (Ibid., 19). Another example is the conclusion of P. D. Q. Bach’s WTWP Classical Talkity-Talk Radio, which features an improbable series of events including accidentally broadcasted DJ banter, a DJ’s increasing frustration and eventual hospitalization caused by a mental breakdown after hearing one too many performances of Pachelbel’s Canon, and the appearance of an irate listener intent on assaulting the DJ who had previously insulted him. Each element of this conclusion runs contrary to our expectations and “violates our sense of logic, our sense of the way humans think and behave.” (Ibid., 32).

!101 woodwind players buzzing directly into their mouthpieces and reeds), or ensemble types (e.g., like the Sinfonia Concertante which is scored for lute, balalaika, and ocarina or the

Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle, and Balloons, which features a pitched pedaled bicycle).

Slapstick humor provides what Berger describes as “an ‘attack’ on our claims to adulthood, importance, and status of any kind” by encouraging “an inner sense of egalitarianism we have, a feeling that all claims to superiority are invalid.”93 Schickele’s use of a low-brow comic technique in a high-brow context relies on our expectations regarding the appropriate decorum and behavior of participants in the Western cultivated music tradition. Within the context of classical music performances (either recorded or in concert), with their class distinctions and hierarchical nature, slapstick serves as “a kind of ‘democratic’ degradation” reminding us that “the similarities between people are more important than the artificial differences created by social institutions.”94

Schickele’s two other primary humor techniques, allusions and direct references, and puns and word play, usually provide incidental musical humor. The parodist uses both techniques largely to increase a performance’s comic density. Professor Schickele’s catalogue numbers for P.

D. Q. Bach’s music, for example, refer to the Köchel, Schmieder, and opus numbers ubiquitous on concert programs and liner notes. Instead of the expected chronological or genre ordering, the

P. D. Q. Bach catalogue numbers typically include a joke referencing the work’s title such as “S.

93 Ibid., 51.

94 Ibid.

!102 1.19/lb.” for The Art of the Ground Round and S. “Ω–1” for the Four Next-To-Last Songs or feature wordplay like “S. 6 string” for Blaues Gras.95

Schickele extensively uses spoken humor to introduce live or recorded performances. He revels in the double meanings created by puns and wordplay: the double meanings of “tooter” and “tutor” at the end of the Toot Suite fugue, a “Burt Bach-a-rock” pun in the introduction to

Capriccio La Pucelle de New Orleans, and a “musician third-class” quip in the introduction to the Dutch Suite. He employs similar musical puns in his texted P. D. Q. Bach works. Some gags rely on a listener’s familiarity with appropriate text setting, like the “running knows/nose” pun from the fifth movement of Iphigenia in Brooklyn, an allusion to Handel’s chorus “All We Like

Sheep” from Part II of Messiah. Others involve linguistic horseplay delivered during musical performance. Schickele’s rounds and vocal party pieces are especially fond of this type of wordplay; the second movement text from the Art of the Ground Round is sung in canon, but strategically placed pauses on key words turn the initially innocuous words of courtship into an act of voyeurism.

Schickele’s spoken introductions also use allusions and references. The performances on

P. D. Q. Bach’s The Short-Tempered Clavier and Other Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard, for example, occur around a concept referencing Professor Schickele’s testimony at a Congressional hearing, while the prefatory remarks to the String Quartet in F major (“The Moose”) on P. D. Q.

Bach and Peter Schickele: The Jekyll and Hyde Tour allude at Bach’s inability to compose competently for that medium. These introductions also serve to insert P. D. Q. Bach into music

95 These titles allude to works or styles like J. S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue, bluegrass, and Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.

!103 history, referencing P.D.Q.’s relationship with Beethoven (“Erotica” Variations) or his interactions with Leopold and W. A. Mozart (Sinfonia Concertante).

Considered together, both puns and wordplay and allusions and references help Schickele establish a comic framework for the audience, allowing them to interpret the incongruent behavior as comic. Schickele informs his listeners that the customary rules of behavior are temporarily suspended and that he has created a safe space for laughter in the otherwise serious world of cultivated musical performance. Puns and wordplay also provide a linguistic corollary to the multiple meanings of P. D. Q. Bach’s music. Schickele’s use of verbal puns primes the audience for his music’s polyvalence. By reminding his listeners of the slipperiness of verbal language, Schickele prepares them for a subsequent lack of fixity in his musical language.

Despite differences in their styles, both Yankovic and Schickele favor identity techniques and rely heavily on parody, mimicry, and imitation. Similarly, each parodist employs absurdity and exaggeration or eccentricity to create outlandish concepts or amusing plays with expectations. Finally, both employ language humor, principally allusions and direct references and puns and word play, to add a rich layer of verbal humor to their music. Considered together, these techniques augment the incongruous structure provided by the parodists’ structural musical borrowing to signal to audience members unfamiliar with the source music that they are hearing something humorous.

Such laughter originates with a listener’s personal experiences, stylistic competencies, and specific contexts. On this point I diverge from Berger’s argument to critique his emphasis on technique over context. Berger claims that his techniques provide analysts with “a means of taking any example of humor (created at any time, in any genre, in any medium) and showing

!104 what it is that generates the humor.”96 According to this formulation, Yankovic’s “Fat” would not be funny because of the lyrics’ numerous puns and jokes but because these rely on exaggeration.

Berger contends that it is Yankovic’s use of exaggeration that causes humor, rather than the idea he exaggerates (“the pavement cracks when I fall down”) or the incongruity he creates (a person grown so large they can shatter cement).

I argue that Berger overreaches with his claim that “something is funny or humorous, in the final analysis, not because of the subject matter or theme but because of the techniques employed by whomever created the humor.”97 I argue that analysts should not mistake the techniques underlying or creating humor for the humor itself, because the techniques are not inherently funny. Musical parody compellingly illustrates this distinction. Both Schickele’s Eine

Kleine Nichtmusik and George Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater parody a Mozart work or movement, with Schickele drawing from Serenade No. 13, K. 525 and Rochberg re-scoring the Adagio movement of Divertimento No. 15, K. 287. Berger’s argument cannot account for the very different effect that Schickele and Rochberg create with their parodies.98 According to

Berger, since Schickele and Rochberg both use the technique of parody, their works are funny.

His insistence on technique over “subject matter or theme” as the source of humor limits our

96 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 15 (emphasis in original).

97 Ibid., 17.

98 Richard Taruskin describes the second act of Music for the Magic Theater as “subject[ing] the ‘sublime, divine’ Adagio movement from Mozart’s Divertimento, K. 287, to the hurly-burly of modernity.” (Richard Taruskin, “After Everything,” in Music in the Late Twentieth Century [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], accessed March 13, 2011, http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-97 80195384857-div1-009004.xml).

!105 understanding of such works by privileging the ways ideas are expressed over the ideas themselves.

My second critique of Berger’s theory problematizes his devaluation of a humorist’s context. He contends that humor analysts should follow two principle steps. First, s/he should

“break down the example of humor used into its main elements or components . . . isolating the various techniques used to generate the humor.” Next, s/he needs to determine “which technique is basic and which techniques are secondary.” His model of analysis assumes that “humor has a process aspect to it which can be separated into various parts and analyzed,” but I find this problematic.99 Any type of humor is a performance inseparable from its act and context.100 His proposed method freezes a comic context, suspending it in time for observation. While an atomistic mindset can help analysts delve into the core components creating a humorist’s style, analysts should not forget that humor is created, delivered, and understood in specific contexts that influence the comedy’s meanings.101

99 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 17.

100 One potential analogy can be made between humor and harmonic analysis in music. Roman numeral analysis, for example, freezes and reifies the musical work as an object that can be dissected and understood within the agreed-upon conventions of the analysis. Such investigations can provide a wealth of a certain type of information, but are ill equipped to understand the underlying social, historical, and aesthetic contexts that created these harmonic systems (not to mention the modes of analysis) in the first place.

101 While I disagree with Everett’s argument that “knowledge of the composer’s intention” is necessary for “a well-grounded interpretation of parody,” I concur with the importance she places on understanding “the social convention and history of reception that surrounds a given work” as a way of “negotiating between the composer’s intention, social reception, and cultural discourses” grounding a listener’s aesthetic orientation.” (Everett, “Parody with an Ironic Edge”).

!106 Parody, Humor, and Context

While parodic borrowings and humor techniques create incongruities and signal to a listener that s/he is hearing something funny, a listener’s context has the potential to fundamentally alter their interpretations of humorous works. In this final section, I explore one example from each parodist in detail. I combine elements from this chapter’s previous sections by considering their musical borrowings and humor techniques, but my focus here shifts to how historical and social contexts influence the ways a listener can hear and understand these parodies. This section constitutes a rebuttal to Berger’s claims (discussed above) as well as an illustration of parody’s fluid nature and a listener’s role in creating and assigning meaning to a parody.

Yankovic released “Christmas at Ground Zero,” a style parody of holiday music, on his

1986 album Polka Party! He uses two types of borrowing in this song: quotation and stylistic allusion. During the song’s final chorus, Yankovic quotes the first four measures of “Jingle

Bells.” The parodist also paraphrases two fragments from Yogi Yorgesson’s novelty holiday song

“I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas.”102

Melodic correspondences between the third and fifth measures suggest that Yankovic borrowed these phrases from Yorgesson. In addition to these specific borrowings, much of the song is newly composed in a style alluding to holiday music. Yankovic delivers his text in a lilting singsong, creating a grimly ironic contrast to the lyrics with relentlessly buoyant music

102 “Christmas at Ground Zero,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_at_Ground_Zero, accessed December 4, 2015.

!107 replete with sleigh bells, choir, strings, baritone saxophone riffs, and a whole-step modulation for the final verse.

These allusions can be interpreted in a number of ways, and attempts by numerous commentators to determine Yankovic’s sources illustrates a range of potential interpretive options. Members of weirdalforum.com heard references to a variety of songs including “Holly

Jolly Christmas,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Jingle Bells,” “Winter Wonderland,” and “mid-60s

Christmas records produced by Phil Spector.”103 In an interview with Rabin, Yankovic remarked that the song “was supposed to feel at home on the Phil Spector Christmas album” and that he had consciously channeled “that whole big, glossy Wall Of Sound” style of production in his recording.104

In addition to these allusions, Yankovic’s song can be heard as a style parody of socially conscious Christmas songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” John

Lennon and Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over),” Johnny and

John’s “Christmas in Vietnam,” and Carlene Davis and Trinity’s “Santa Claus (Do You Even

Come to the Ghetto?).”105 These songs blend Christmas music tropes with politically themed

103 Bruce the Duck, December 10, 2003 (6:29 pm), comment on “Christmas at Ground Zero,” http:// www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2758&hilit=Christmas+At+Ground+Zero; Yankochick, December 10, 2003 (6:38 pm), comment on “Christmas at Ground Zero,” http://www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php? f=52&t=2758&hilit=Christmas+At+Ground+Zero; Super Sonic 5, January 16, 2006 (4:35 pm), comment on “Christmas at Ground Zero,” http://www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2758&hilit=Christmas+At +Ground+Zero; and SmadaNave, August 11, 2014 (4:26 pm) comment on “The Ultimate Parody Guide,” http:// www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5188&hilit=ultimate+parody+guide.

104 Rabin, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.”

105 Gerry Bowler, “Rock and Roll and Christmas,” in The World Encyclopedia of Christmas (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004), n.p., Google Books.

!108 lyrics commenting on current events or drawing attention to the gulf between holiday celebrations and the realities of crime, war, and poverty.

Yankovic’s song can also be placed in novelty song traditions, including a small number of humorous songs addressing nuclear holocaust. Tom Lehrer’s “We Will All Go Together When

We Go,” for example, describes in grisly detail the effects atomic weaponry have on human flesh.106 “Christmas at Ground Zero” also fits in a tradition of holiday-themed novelty numbers like Allan Sherman’s “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas,” Stan Freberg’s “Green Chri$tma$” or

“Christmas Dragnet,” Spike Jones’s “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” and

Elmo and Patsy’s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” These songs skewer banal-sounding holiday music and play incongruously with a listener’s expectations for the lyrical topics and social decorum presented in conventional holiday music.

Outside of Yankovic’s reliance on surface-level markers of holiday music—sleigh bells, lyrics about Christmas, and generally up-beat musical settings—there are few specific correlations between these potential sources and Yankovic’s parody. This illustrates a key point about his music: because he is a parodist, listeners are inclined to hear his songs as references to existing music and seek out these connections even when a valid musical case for influence cannot easily be made. Consequently, any specific musical parallels between Yankovic’s parody and other songs matters less than his parody’s inherently referential nature. I contend that it is less important how closely his song sounds like (for example) “Jingle Bells” than how a listener can hear a rich web of connections to holiday music. These relationships, regardless of their

106 Nuclear weaponry was a subject Lehrer addressed in other songs, including “Who’s Next” (about nuclear proliferation), “Wernher Von Braun” (about the Nazi scientist and aerospace engineer), and the “MLF Lullaby” (about a proposed Multilateral Force comprised of members from NATO nations).

!109 technical veracity or authorial intention, situate Yankovic’s material within a variety of musical genres and traditions and provide a context through which a listener can derive meanings from

“Christmas at Ground Zero.”

Regardless of how one hears Yankovic’s musical allusions, these stylistic borrowings create a stark incongruity between the conventional sounds and themes of holiday music and the parodist’s lyrics. His lyrics employ five humor techniques: absurdity, eccentricity, catalogue, puns, and allusions and references. Absurdity underlies the song’s premise, a catastrophic nuclear attack whose chief impact is the interruption of Christmas celebrations. Like many of Yankovic’s songs, “Christmas at Ground Zero” is populated with eccentrics who ward off zombies with shotguns, waltz about in radiated landscapes, and steal one final kiss under the glowing mistletoe.

Yankovic unfolds his narrative principally with catalogues of two incongruent vignettes, both full of references and allusions. The first involves conventional middle-class American celebrations of Christmas: ringing sleigh bells, carolers, shoppers rushing home with their presents, a reference to Jack Frost, an allusion to Santa Claus, and mistletoe (with Yankovic punning on “missile-toe”). The second catalogue is full of ghastly images: nuclear explosions, atomic missiles, radiation mutations, and duck and cover drills. The horrors of this second scenario are enhanced by Yankovic’s allusions to the concept of nuclear winter, Civil Defense radio and the Emergency Broadcast System, and the “Big Red Button” as well as references to air raid sirens, mushroom clouds, atom bombs, and Ground Zero.107

107 A “Big Red Button” is a fictional construct often used by the media to represent a nation’s capacity for launching nuclear weaponry. For more on its use as a visual motive, see “Big Red Button,” http://tvtropes.org/ pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BigRedButton, accessed December 21, 2015.

!110 Yankovic enhances these lyrical incongruities through well-placed sound effects. During the song’s introduction, ringing bells give way to a woodblock pattern mimicking the sound of horse hooves, a common sound in Christmas music and evocative of sleigh bells jingling as horses pull carriages through the snow.108 Atop this layer we hear a descending glissando that becomes recognizable as the whistle of a falling bomb after we hear an explosion sound effect.

Both sound effects explicitly link the two topics, as does a pitched air raid siren that rises and falls to the song’s tonic during an instrumental interlude midway through the song.109 This siren returns at the end of the song, lingering after the music fades out. Despite these sound effects, however, nothing about this music is explicitly funny. Instead, Yankovic creates humor through an ironic juxtaposition of cheery music with a grim lyric. I contend that neither lyrics nor music are comic in and of themselves; rather, it is their incongruity that creates the potential for humor.110 This potential is realized by Yankovic’s listeners, and consequently it can be placed in a specific context. I maintain that varying contexts allow a listener to make a multitude of

108 This passage could also be a specific reference to Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride.”

109 During the same instrumental break, Yankovic interpolates an excerpt of a Christmas address from then- president Ronald Reagan—“the big day’s only a few hours away now, and I’m sure you’re all looking forward to it as much as we are.” While clearly a reference to Christmas (Reagan stands in front of a decorated Christmas tree), the speech acquires ironic overtones with the double meaning that “big day” has acquired through Yankovic’s lyrics.

110 Yankovic’s music video creates humor in a similar way. Because he was unable to have his record company finance the video, Yankovic paid for it personally. The low-budget film is mostly a compilation of “public- domain Cold War-era footage.” The video’s ending includes the only portion of live footage, featuring Yankovic leading a choir of carolers bedecked in gas masks. The video eschews a conventional narrative; instead, Yankovic selects shots that imitate the lyrics. When he sings “but if someone’s climbin’ down your chimney,” we see footage of Santa Claus doing the same, while the line “you better load your gun and shoot to kill” features a man firing a revolver. Yankovic creates meanings primarily through incongruous cuts between holiday and nuclear-themed footage (explosions, duck and cover drills, etc.). The juxtapositions between the two topics creates humor in much the same manner the lyrics do; because either idea is not usually placed alongside the other, the incongruity of understanding each portion of footage in relation to the other creates humor. (Rabin, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic”).

!111 meanings from the same work, and that these contexts are crucial to understanding whether the song’s humor techniques are effective.

Interpreting this song through the history of the Cold War and the subsequent War on

Terror adds layers of meaning showing how historical and contemporary audience members have interpreted this song and its humor. Yankovic composed “Christmas at Ground Zero” after several decades of apprehension about the dangers of atomic war. Multiple generations lived or grew up under the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction, of armed forces peering at each other across the Berlin Wall in a divided Germany, and the ever-present threat posed by global superpowers wrestling for position via satellite states (illustrated most clearly by the Cuban

Missile Crisis). More specifically to Yankovic’s historical circumstances, the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan in late 1979, President Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and

President Ronald Reagan’s election later that same year marked a period of rising tensions between the United States and the USSR. During the Reagan administration, Robert McMahon writes, “inflammatory rhetoric became a hallmark of the renewed Cold War waged by the

Reagan administration.”111 President Reagan’s brinksmanship—illustrated rhetorically through his “Evil Empire” speech of 1983 and militarily through a series of NATO exercises and increased arms spending—threatened global stability in the years immediately preceding the composition of Yankovic’s song.112 While President Reagan’s softened rhetoric throughout his

111 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145. For more about President Reagan and the renewed Cold War, see Richard Dean Burns and Joseph M. Siracusa, A Global History of the Nuclear Arms Race: Weapons, Strategy, and Politics (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2013), 2: 413–46 and David R. Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985–1991 (New York: Routledge, 2004).

112 McMahon places the “nadir” of US-Soviet relations in “the second half of 1983.” (McMahon, The Cold War, 147–58).

!112 1984 reelection campaign and Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to General Secretary in 1985 marked a change in perestroika and glasnost and a corresponding deescalation of Cold War tensions, these changes were still in a nascent state in April 1986 when Yankovic recorded “Christmas at Ground

Zero.”113

This historical context offers numerous avenues for interpreting Yankovic’s humor techniques. At a basic level, his pun on “missile-toe” unlikely would have been missed by a contemporary listener used to hearing that word in news broadcasts. Yankovic alludes to or catalogues other common terms related to nuclear terminology and references the sound of an air raid siren, signifiers that circulated widely in contemporary media reports.

Historical context also helps explain the preposterous behaviors of Yankovic’s Americans who blithely continue about their holiday preparations despite broadcasted warnings (“sleigh bells are ringin’ and the carolers are singin’ / While the air raid sirens blare”). Yankovic’s response (“Just seconds left to go / I’ll duck and cover with my yuletide lover / Underneath the mistletoe”) affirms that individuals in this scenario are left with few choices. While some listeners might consider these incongruent behaviors as wholly inappropriate responses to the situation, others could understand them as the only rational decisions that remain; when individuals are left with the irrational alternatives, what better answer than the senseless? This type of ironic detachment was a common narrative strategy used by artists attempting to depict nuclear weaponry, which often resulted in representations of “unusual . . . complexity often

113 Ibid., 158–68. McMahon considers Gorbachev’s accession to general secretary “the most critical turning point in the Cold War’s final phase,” a factor that “above all others . . . hastened the end of the Cold War.” (Ibid., 160).

!113 approach[ing] paradox.”114 Both writers and their subjects deployed irony in an attempt to achieve normalcy in a hopelessly abnormal world.115 Viewed in this context, Yankovic’s song can be heard as a depiction of the utter helplessness individuals felt during the Cold War in the face of uncontrollable circumstances.

“Christmas at Ground Zero” can also be heard as a commentary on the absurdist rhetoric of the era of Mutually Assured Destruction. The populace, so inured to the threat of destruction that sirens no longer hold any warning for them, ignores the risks being run by their political leaders by focusing on the cultural celebrations that define the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation and distinguish it from the enemy. Late Cold War rhetoric positioned the United States as the antithesis of the Soviet Union: the former was god-fearing, democratic, and capitalist, while the latter was “godless,” totalitarian, and communist.116 Christmas celebrations can be interpreted as representative of a larger constellation of values encompassing religious freedom, economic prosperity, a free-market economy, and increased consumer choices.117 Within this context,

Yankovic’s lyrics encompass numerous sacred and secular associations likely to be interpreted as

114 David Seed, Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), 2.

115 Ibid.

116 Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech is filled with references to Judeo-Christian principles, helping him stake a position that, as McMahon writes, frames “the struggle against communism” as a “moral one ‘between right and wrong and good and evil.’” (McMahon, The Cold War, 145).

117 This context also influences how one can understand Yankovic’s musical setting, which can be interpreted as an incongruity arising between the rhetoric proclaiming American superiority during the Cold War and the reality that while American economic, political, social, religious, and other life ways were framed as superior to Soviet ones, both states faced the same threat.

!114 antithetical to Soviet positions through the lens of Cold War rhetoric, meanings that subsequent listeners can understand through historical awareness.

Almost thirty years after the song’s release, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. These geopolitical shifts suggest that the song has little resonance with contemporary listeners beyond providing a quirky artifact expressing a parodist’s response to the Cold War and the anxieties it created. Seen more abstractly, however, I contend that the song could resonate with the ideological struggle that replaced the Cold War, the “War on Terror.” The parody’s context—atomic warfare between geographically bounded nations—seems quaint when compared with its replacement, stateless bands of terrorists attacking military and civilian targets indiscriminately. While the song’s topics initially seem surrealistic in their absurdities, these correspond well with several aspects of contemporary American life: people continuing about their lives, striving for normalcy amidst the ever-present threat of violence as both sides in a somewhat hazy conflict strive to destroy one another.

Within a context dominated by terrorism, a contemporary listener might have a different response to the song. Over the past decade, the meaning of the phrase “ground zero” has shifted away from its original general definition (the site of a nuclear explosion) to refer to the specific location of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Yankovic’s use of an older phrase could influence how a contemporary listener might understand this song. On a Yankovic web forum, one fan commented they first heard the song “shortly after 9/11, so I initially thought ‘is it a reference to that?’”118 The title phrase’s new association with the Sept. 11 attacks has also

118 squishsquashgirl, December 9, 2003 (10:02 pm), comment on “Christmas at Ground Zero,” http:// www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2758&hilit=Christmas+At+Ground+Zero. Others have thought the same thing; see adoggie, November 5, 2006 (7:40 pm), comment on “Christmas at Ground Zero,” http:// www.weirdalforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2758&hilit=Christmas+At+Ground+Zero&start=50.

!115 influenced Yankovic’s decision to perform the song. While acknowledging that the song is “still a fan favorite,” the parodist has acknowledged the difficulties surrounding its performance: “I can’t really play the song live anymore because too many people misunderstand the connotations of Ground Zero. It’s not a reference to 9/11, obviously. It was written in 1987 [sic] when ‘ground zero’ just meant the epicenter of a nuclear attack.”119 Without understanding this context, however, the parody’s lyrics appear to mock the events of Sept. 11, an interpretation that inexorably changes the song’s meaning.

Such a move would be utterly out-of-character for Yankovic and his avoidance of the song after 2001 illustrates the importance of historical context in interpreting humor. While

Berger maintains that “something is funny or humorous . . . because of the techniques employed by whomever created the humor,” Yankovic’s song illustrates “that subject matter or theme” as well as historical context can play an equally significant role in an audience’s response to humor.120 Without understanding the song’s Cold War context, the potential exists for a misreading that fundamentally changes the song’s meaning. At that point, while “Christmas at

Ground Zero” would still employ absurdity, puns, and other techniques, their presence alone would not render the song humorous. Berger or any analyst would be hard-pressed to argue that the use of such techniques are enough to make such a misunderstood song humorous.

Given the specificity of his referents and his use of recent vernacular music, Yankovic’s songs must be situated in specific stylistic and historical contexts. Whereas Yankovic’s

119 Rabin, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.”

120 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 17.

!116 “Christmas at Ground Zero” exhibits a limited number of potential meanings, a listener can interpret Schickele’s New Horizons in Music Appreciation in a variety of ways. The already unstable process of interpreting a parody is further complicated by a contemporary listener’s creation of a host of meanings from Schickele’s structural borrowing. These meanings can (but do not have to) rely on the historical uses and interpretations of this music, but I suggest that interpretations are filtered simultaneously through recent modes of reception and association.

Schickele’s New Horizons in Music Appreciation (1967) presents the first movement of

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the style of a sporting event.121 Barring a sole musical alteration

(a wrong note added to the recapitulation’s horn fanfare), Schickele replicates Beethoven’s score in its entirety as the framework for parodies of the general presentation conventions of both orchestral performances and sport broadcasts.122 To complement the music, Schickele uses seven humor techniques: parody, eccentricity, imitation, absurdity, puns and word play, allusions and direct references, and slapstick. As is customary for Schickele, he uses parody as a structural borrowing technique. Like the Yankovic example discussed above, the music itself is not funny.

121 This work is absent from Tammy Ravas’s otherwise thorough Peter Schickele: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

122 While Schickele replicates entire works in other parodies and draws parodic material from cultivated performance conventions, this work is distinctive in Schickele’s output because of his concentration on these conventions as a source of humor. Examples of the former include P. D. Q. Bach’s Eine Kleine Nichtmusik and Schickele’s Last Tango in Bayreuth, works that involve musical humor almost exclusively. Examples of the latter include the album concepts for P. D. Q. Bach’s The Stoned Guest, WTWP Classical Talkity-Talk Radio, Two Pianos Are Better Than One, and The Short-Tempered Clavier and Other Dysfunctional Works for Keyboard. These examples differ from New Horizons in Music Appreciation in that non-musical comedy creates a context for the music, which remains the most significant source of humor.

!117 Rather, it is the altered context in which Schickele presents the music and the resultant incongruities created by combining music performance and sports broadcasting.123

Schickele’s parodies of these performance conventions create an incongruous framework with ample space for eccentricity, imitation, and absurdity. During the performance, a listener meets a host of eccentric figures that create additional humor by playing with our expectations for customary or normal behavior during an orchestral concert.124 Live performance features referees flipping a coin to determine who begins the piece and putting the horn player in a makeshift penalty box for flubbing a note. This eccentric behavior imitates the normal behaviors involved with starting sporting events or punishing infractions of the contests’ rules, creating incongruities with a listener’s expectations for orchestral concerts.

Schickele’s color commentary is similarly eccentric. He and Robert Dennis imitate the style of commentary typical of athletics radio broadcasts. Both men play their parts straight, responding to the unconventional elements of Beethoven’s music as if they were new events occurring in real time, presenting the music’s twists and turns to the listener with breathless enthusiasm. The commentators find themselves unable to determine whether the movement’s beginning “is slow or fast yet because it keeps stopping,” deride the oboist’s solo during the recapitulation as showboating (describing it as “disgraceful display” and a “lack of

123 Schickele’s parody can be heard as another example of a parodist targeting both cultivated music and sports, similar to Spike Jones’s “William Tell Overture” or “Dance of the Hours,” both of which feature Doodles Weaver narrating a horse race over the music.

124 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 32.

!118 teamsmanship”) and are startled by the extension of the motive’s development into the coda.125

This absurd premise toys with “our sense of possibility and probability” and of “order and intelligibility” as Schickele forces listeners to understand an orchestral performance through the medium of a sports broadcast.126 Heard from this perspective, orchestral performance conventions can seem ludicrous. The notion of an event with a pre-determined outcome and pre- constrained performance options seem antithetical to the open-ended and indeterminate nature of sports.127 Additionally, the concert’s lack of interaction between audience members and the absence of announcers and color commentators to provide information, analysis, or humor seems dull and lifeless. By framing one set of conventions with another, Schickele’s absurdities forces a listener to consider both simultaneously, suggesting that a divide between art and entertainment lies largely in the ear of the beholder.

In addition to the incongruities created by eccentricity, imitation, and absurdity, Schickele uses puns and word play along with allusions and direct references to provide surface-level verbal humor. His spoken introduction to the recording references the difficulties audiences have understanding long, complex compositions and then refers to program notes, the primary way

125 Peter Schickele, Report from Hoople: P. D. Q. Bach On The Air, Vanguard VMD 79268, 1988 (originally released 1967), CD. The commentators note, however, that “the fans really seem to go for these outbursts of temperament.” During live performances, the musicians stop playing while a referee reviews the play(ing) and throws the conductor in the penalty box for protesting a musical digression that was written into the score. “New Horizons in Music Appreciation,” P. D. Q. Bach in Houston - We Have a Problem!, directed by Alan Foster (Silver Spring, MD: Acorn Media, 2006), DVD.

126 Berger, An Anatomy of Humor, 19.

127 If these statements seem obvious, consider the logic of the one type of performance through that of the other—imagine if athletes recreated historically important or famous games, or if orchestral concerts routinely featured unknown pieces or works with indeterminate elements.

!119 orchestras have sought to prevent audiences “from falling into a confused slumber.”128 Later in the work, Schickele’s commentary describes the orchestral musicians as “players,” a double meaning in the context of either a musical or athletic events. His commentary references two players, “Bobby Corno” and “Highwood,” whose names are puns on the Italian term for the horn and the French term for the oboe. The parodist also refers to the “world twelve-tone series” (punning on both the final contest of the American baseball season and Schoenberg’s compositional technique) and the orchestra’s previous victories against Danish conductor

Heiliger Dankgesang (a reference to the third movement of Beethoven’s op. 132 string quartet).

His verbal humor draws from both parodic frames—orchestral concerts and sporting events—to better contrast the two while increasing the work’s comic density.

Schickele uses slapstick to provide surface-level physical humor. Live performance of the work feature numerous visual gags, including musicians bedecked in makeshift jerseys, an opening coin toss, a slow-motion instant replay, a bassist’s pulled groin muscle and subsequent substitution, and a brawl between the first oboe and the conductor. These bits parody athletic events, and Schickele heightens the humor by deploying them in an incongruous setting.

Like all parodies, Schickele’s New Horizons in Music Appreciation requires audience members who are familiar with the conventions and codes of the parodied events. In this case, the work necessitates knowledge of two seemingly unrelated events, with Schickele’s premise relying on the idea that sporting events and orchestral concerts are typically separate in Western culture. Having analyzed the techniques Schickele uses and the incongruities he creates, New

128 Peter Schickele, Report from Hoople: P. D. Q. Bach On The Air, Vanguard VMD 79268, 1988 (originally released 1967), CD. These notes are largely ineffectual, however, because “they always turn the lights down in concert halls so that you can’t read the notes while the piece is being played.”

!120 Horizons in Music Appreciation begs additional questions: why Beethoven’s music? why parody sports? why target orchestral performances? Unpacking these layers of meaning suggests ways that a listener can hear and interpret Schickele’s parody.

I argued that for Yankovic’s “Christmas at Ground Zero” historical context is foundational to understanding its humor and the range of responses it can evoke in a listener.

These issues are more difficult to parse with Schickele’s piece, a work of greater musical and social complexity that targets multiple conventions and borrows music with a host of its own meanings. Here, I select several interpretive vignettes to argue that Schickele’s parody—and the complex referents he targets—create a space for multiple and potentially contradictory meanings depending on how a listener understands his work. I will address Beethoven’s music, the dissimilarities and similarities between sports and music, and the related issues of gender and violence. These are not the only potential interpretive paths (for example, I omit issues related to the socioeconomic classes of the audiences for orchestral concerts and sporting events), and I do not attempt to force these issues into a coherent narrative. Rather, I use them to illustrate ways that different listeners can hear Schickele’s parody that depend on context rather than on technique.

There are several explanations for Schickele’s choice of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as a target for parody. The work has long symbolized something essential about the cultivated tradition, as evinced by its use at inaugural concerts given by Theodore Thomas’s Chicago

Orchestra (October 17, 1891) and Ureli Corelli Hill and the New York Philharmonic (December

!121 7, 1842),129 its prominent place in Walter Damrosch’s music appreciation and popularization efforts with NBC’s Music Appreciation Hour, Toscanini’s 1945 concerts celebrating Italy’s surrender and VE Day, Bernstein’s “Forever Beethoven!” Young People’s Concert (1968), and its subsequent appearance on the Voyager Spacecraft’s Golden Record (1977).130 One result of the work’s broad circulation is that the composer’s music also circulates widely in vernacular realms.

Beethoven’s widespread popularity can be heard through the frequent use of his music in stylistic crossovers. In this context, a listener hears Schickele’s parody of the Fifth Symphony as another example of a long tradition of American musicians using Beethoven’s music for waltzes, swing tunes, ragged versions of classics, and rock songs.131

These seemingly contradictory uses illustrate one way the composer’s music and persona have functioned as a blank screen onto which musicians and artists project a variety of meanings.

Michael Broyles considers Beethoven a “protean icon ” who has achieved “the same universal recognition accorded figures such as George Washington or Jesus” in American culture. By

129 Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 149 and 166. Beethoven’s Symphony was also excerpted for the Boston Peace Jubilee concerts in 1869 and was featured on the first program performed at the Chicago Orchestra’s new hall on December 14, 1904. (Ibid., 18 and 176). Michael Broyles writes that “Dwight attributed the establishment of classical music in Boston to the repeated performances of Beethoven symphonies, particularly the Fifth.” (Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011], 35). Another mark of its popularity is how frequently the work is performed and recorded by individual orchestras. For example, Mark-Daniel Schmid writes that following the 1997 season, Beethoven’s Fifth was one of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s most frequently performed and recorded pieces. (Mark-Daniel Schmid, The Richard Strauss Companion [Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003], 187). Horowitz affirms the work’s continued popularity as a recorded artifact, observing that “as of 2000, literally countless versions of Beethoven’s Fifth were available on CD.” (Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 505). The work also featured in Disney’s Fantasia 2000.

130 Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 283 and 404; “Music From Earth,” http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ spacecraft/music.html, accessed December 11, 2015. Toscanini billed these concerts as “Victory Symphony Acts I and II.” Horowitz writes that in part through Toscanini’s efforts, “American classical music . . . embrace[d] Beethoven as a wartime patriotic marker.” (Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 282).

131 Broyles, Beethoven in America, 292–302. Beethoven remains a popular source of inspiration, with musicians referencing his music in heavy metal and disco songs and on hip hop tracks. (Ibid., 306–22).

!122 recognizing the multitude of meanings “Beethoven” holds for American listeners, Broyles illustrates a number of ways “the man and his music deeply embedded in the American consciousness far beyond the concert hall.”132 As a result, a listener can hear Schickele’s parody with some understanding of Beethoven ranging from his popular mythologization and a fragmentary familiarity with his music to a deeper engagement with his life and works.

On a practical level, one consequence is that Beethoven’s music works well for

Schickele’s humor; the movement’s dynamism and unexpected or unconventional elements give the commentators much to discuss. While this lets Schickele add an additional level of excitement to the performance, his commentary often obscures or distracts from the music itself.

Given this, he needed to select a well-known piece. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was a logical candidate given the piece’s reception—and that of Beethoven in general—within American culture.

While Beethoven’s music is central to the parody, the work’s basic framework for humor arises from incongruities between Schickele’s fusion of sports and music, incongruities that rely on a listener’s understanding of these two activities as socially separate. Ken McLeod writes that athletics and popular music “are usually considered in isolation from one another” and that “the relationship between sports and popular music has often been unstable and antagonistic.”133 The

132 Ibid., 323 and 353.

133 Ken McLeod, We Are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Music (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 7 and idem, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” Popular Music and Society 29 (2006): 533.

!123 relationship between cultivated music and athletics is similarly fraught; despite occasional musical references to sports, these activities are typically perceived as worlds unto themselves.134

These differences create and amplify the cultural baggage a listener attaches to both activities, which exhibit divergent cultural capital through their links with economic class, ethnicity, social status, educational achievement, and distinctions between art and entertainment.135 Contemporary American culture reinforces these differences. Both sports and music largely target separate audiences for their events, which have their own expectations for behaviors, modes of dress, and appropriate decorum. Both occur in distinct physical spaces. Both use different standards for determining value and making judgments about a performance’s success or failure. They vary in their degrees of competitiveness and cooperation, in their uses of technology and equipment, in the ways they are marketed and their popularity, and a multitude of other factors. Heard in this way, a listener understands Schickele’s incongruities as collisions between two vastly different activities.

A listener can reach an entirely different and no less valid reading of the parody by considering the many shared characteristics between sports and music. McLeod argues that the two “are fundamentally connected,” citing a host of evidence including “cross-marketing tactics,

134 McLeod cites Satie’s Sports et Divertissements, Bizet’s Carmen, and Mike Reid’s Different Fields as examples of cultivated works “based on, or includ[ing] references to, sports and athletics.” McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 533.

135 While contemporary American audiences are conditioned to understand these events at opposite ends of a spectrum of entertainment and art, this interpretation contrasts sharply with previous modes of reception. Nineteenth-century audiences consumed music and other media with minimal concern for its social status, taking in Shakespeare and minstrelsy, La Sonnambula and marches. For more on this shift, see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Michael Broyles, Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); and Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

!124 metaphoric similarities of aesthetic and stylistic approaches, and issues of spectatorship.”136

Understood from this position, both sporting events and symphonic concerts are remarkably similar types of events. Individuals self-select to participate in such events, often signaling this involvement to others with behaviors and costuming different from everyday attire. The events occur in physical spaces that share numerous physical features, and that are typically located in the center of an urban environment and constitute a considerable investment of community funds and resources. They have additional commodities and services for purchase in addition to the ticketed entrances that separate the ritual world of the event from the everyday and mark a social distinction between “us” (those who have attended the event) and “them” (everyone else).137

Both involve their own discrete bodies of knowledge, with conventions, technical language, and rules (both explicit and implicit) governing the behavior of both players and audiences, and distinguishing fans from dilettantes. Each event has clear measures for judging value and quality and is often compared with exemplary performances from the past. Audiences for both events are largely comprised of non-participants who pay to watch professionals who have devoted

136 McLeod, We Are the Champions, 7. McLeod cites additional evidence including music used “to enhance sporting events . . . as an active part of the athletic event” or music “that has been written about or that is associated with sports” as well as “connections in the comparative, competitive aspects of music . . . the use of music in sports movies and video games, the importance of mutually influential stylistic approaches . . . and the important, though critically underacknowledged, similarities regarding spectatorship, practice, and performance that have often stereotyped various communities.” See also idem, “Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports,” American Music 27 (2009): 205–6. Other scholars have written on the connections between sport and music, including Hans-Dieter Krebs, “Sport and Music: An Uncommon Partnership,” Olympic Review 37 (2001): 41–44; Anthony Bateman, “Introduction: Sport, Music, Identities,” Sport in Society 17 (2014): 293–302; David Rowe, Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure (London: SAGE Publications, 1995); and several authors contributing chapters to Anthony Bateman and John Bale, eds., Sporting Sounds: Relationships Between Sport and Music (New York: Routledge, 2009), including Henning Eichberg, “The Energy of Festivity: Atmosphere, Intonation and Self-Orchestration in Danish Popular Sports,” 99–112; Dan Porsfelt, “Supporter Rock in Sweden: Locality, Resistance and Irony at Play,” 193–209; Mike Cronin, “‘Uíbh Fhalí, How I Miss You with Your Heather-Scented Air’: Music, Locality and the Gaelic Athletic Association in Ireland,” 210–21; and Claire Westall, “‘This Thing Goes beyond the Boundary’: Cricket, Calypso, the Caribbean and their Heroes,” 222–36.

137 This reading is indebted to Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

!125 themselves to sustained practice and high levels of technical achievement and who subsequently perform at levels than many in the audience consider themselves incapable of achieving. Finally, both exemplify a type of non-participatory entertainment that forms a primary mode of leisure in

Western mass culture.

Depending on the interpretation of the parody, a listener can hear the incongruities between athletics and music as foundational to Schickele’s humor. To such a listener,

Beethoven’s Fifth functions as a symbol for the cultured, rarefied world of cultivated music, while a sports match represents mass culture, commercialization, and physical exertion. The two worlds are so far removed from one another that their juxtaposition becomes a source of humor.

Conversely, a listener can hear Schickele’s parody as a breach of these conventional cultural registers and understand the parodist’s music in the context of early postmodernism’s rejection of previous high/low binaries.138 I maintain that neither reading is better than the other; either depends on a listener’s particular orientation to the parody, and each underscores the difficulty of analyzing a multi-layered parody from a sole vantage point.

These challenges are magnified when considering the additional strata of cultural meanings that have accrued around sports and music. One of the most important similarities between both events is what McLeod describes as their shared “action as synergistic agents in the construction of identity and community.”139 Anthony Bateman similarly argues that both are

“popular and culturally pervasive activities through which individual and collective identities are

138 Jonathan Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism” in Postmodern Music/ Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Aunder (New York: Routledge, 2002), 16. See also Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

139 McLeod, We Are the Champions, 7.

!126 produced, reproduced, negotiated and contested.”140 This can take a variety of forms ranging from “cultural value, ideology, globalization and commercialization”141 to nationality, race, and

“cultural colonization,” but I am principally concerned here with investigating how a listener can hear Schickele’s work through a context juxtaposing the gendered spaces of the sports arena and the concert hall.142

Some listeners can hear incongruities along a masculine-feminine athletics-music spectrum. Sports are largely depicted as masculine in American culture; as Sue Jansen writes, sports provide one of the “primary sites for cultivation of Promethean visions of male achievement,” a place where “idealized images of masculinity are represented, tested, and introduced into children’s play.”143 Music, conversely, has long been associated with the feminine. As Susan McClary writes, claims linking “musicians or devotees of music” with the

“‘effeminate’ [go] back as far as recorded documentation about music.”144 While many listeners can hear incongruities between the vigorous athleticism of the world of the commentators and players (framed as masculine) and the delicate artistry of the musicians (constructed as

140 Bateman, “Sport, Music, Identities,” 301.

141 Ibid.

142 McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 536 and idem, “Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports,” 204.

143 Sue Curry Jansen, “Football Is More than a Game: Masculinity, Sport and War,” in Critical Communication Theory: Power, Media, Gender, and Technology (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002): 185. Jansen’s chapter analyzes relationships between sports metaphors and the Persian Gulf War, articulating numerous correspondences between athletics, armed conflict, and constructions of masculinity.

144 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Press, 2002), 17.

!127 feminine), I argue that Schickele’s work plays with these gendered expectations in powerful and unexpected ways.

McLeod contends that both sports and music “remain bastions of masculine power and control.”145 While his original argument focuses on vernacular music, I extend his argument to cultivated music, suggesting that his description can also apply to orchestras given the difficulties around gender-neutral hiring practices and the dominance of male musicians in major orchestras.146 A listener who hears Schickele’s parody this way has the potential to invert the conventionally gendered sports-music dyad, understanding the work as a contest between two equal participants rather than a one-sided struggle between the virile/masculine and the effete/ feminine.

The cultural context contemporaneous with Schickele’s composition further complicates the relationship between sports and music. McLeod notes that during this time “sports, along with the military, were visibly male-dominated, patriarchal spaces.”147 During the 1960s and the beginning of the Vietnam War, the “liberal hedonism” of rock music and “Anglo-American youth culture” contrasted with “athletics, which stressed conservative values of practice, work, and

145 McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 533.

146 Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” The American Economic Review 90 (2000): 715–41; Amy Louise Phelps, “Beyond Auditions: Gender Discrimination in America’s Top Orchestras” (DMA thesis, University of Iowa, 2010); Michael Morreale, “Classical Music’s Shocking Gender Gap,” March 19, 2014, accessed December 7, 2015, http://music.cbc.ca/#!/ blogs/2014/3/Classical-musics-shocking-gender-gap; Suby Raman, “Graphing Gender in America’s Top Orchestras,” November 18, 2014, accessed December 7, 2015, http://subyraman.tumblr.com/post/102965074088/ graphing-gender-in-americas-top-orchestras; Curt Rice, “How Blind Auditions Help Orchestras to Eliminate Gender Bias,” October 14, 2013, accessed December 7, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/ 14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias; and Miranda Kiek, “Where Are All the Female Musicians?,” November 22, 2012, accessed December 7, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/where- are-all-the-female-musicians-8343938.html.

147 McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 533.

!128 effort over pleasure.”148 David Zang similarly argues that rock music represented noticeable divergence on key issues of “the nature and worth of manliness, physical prowess and competition, hard work, and authority.”149 In the United States during the late 1960s, participation in sports represented conventional gender roles resistant to the fluidity or rejection of “traditional masculine virtues” such as “competition, aggression, and violence.”150 In this context, classical performances represented the antithesis of rock and youth culture both musically and socially, with the former constructing and displaying ideologies more closely aligned with the dominant order than with the counterculture.151 Given this context, a listener might have heard Schickele’s blend of sports and cultivated music as a tacit affirmation of the existing order.

A listener can also hear connections between the gendered contexts of athletics and orchestral music and Beethoven’s symphony, particularly a relationship with masculinity and violence. McLeod contends that “the militarism of American society reflected itself in its sports culture, which reinforced the pressure on American men to live up to a masculine heroic ideal of

148 Ibid., 531 and 535.

149 David Zang, SportsWars: Athletes in the Age of Aquarius (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 12.

150 Ibid., 16.

151 For just one example, both cultivated music and group athletics permit “individuals to assert their excellence as soloists while remaining part of a cohesive group.” (McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 532 and idem, “Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports,” 205).

!129 fighting.”152 Music exhibits a similar relationship with violence, and Beethoven’s Fifth proved apt at underlining these connections.153 For American listeners of a certain generation,

Beethoven’s music was connected with democracy and the Allied war effort during World War

II. This relationship was stressed with imagery linking Beethoven explicitly with violence, like the visuals in a January 1943 issue of Real Life Comics that juxtapose Beethoven’s face, a conductor, and a score containing Fifth Symphony’s opening motive with a charging infantryman and tank.154 Beethoven’s music has also been framed as competitive, disruptive, and violent by scholars including Susan McClary and Christopher Small.155 Consequently, a listener can hear the symphonic excerpt as a sonic corollary to the ritualized aggression of the sports match.

Throughout this section, I have posited a number of potential readings of New Horizons in Music Appreciation and tacitly implied that all are possible interpretations. Regardless of a listener’s familiarity with these conventions or the ways s/he might interpret Schickele’s parody,

152 McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 536. He argues that this relationship principally manifests through the “idea of spectacle,” and he articulates a connection between cultural artifacts “whether sporting, musical, artistic, or other” that “typically reflect the sound of wealth” and have “been used throughout history to affirm power and prestige.” (McLeod, “Masculinities, Sports and Popular Music,” 534 and idem, “Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports,” 207). McLeod quotes Robert Kennedy’s belief that “except for war there is nothing in American life—nothing—which trains a boy better for life than football.” (McLeod, “Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports,” 208).

153 Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan, Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009). Scholars have investigated another relationship between music and violence by studying music’s use in a number of armed conflicts. Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack to the Vietnam War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); James A. Davis, Music Along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music, and Community during Winter Quarters, Virginia (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Elizabeth Morgan, “War on the Home Front: Battle Pieces for the Piano from the American Civil War,” American Music 9 (2015): 381–408; and Jonathan Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009).

154 Broyles, Beethoven in America, 341.

155 McClary, Feminine Endings, 127–31 and Small, Musicking, 173–76. See also Broyles, Beethoven in America, 64–67.

!130 each listener can derive a variety of meanings from the work. While Schickele can guide these interpretations through his musical borrowing and humor techniques, the impetus remains with the listener to unpack and understand the parodist’s work.

My analysis of both Yankovic and Schickele’s parodies corroborates two points. First, regardless of a listener’s specific interpretation, none of these meanings are reached solely through an understanding of the parodists’ use of humor techniques. Berger mistakes the comic means for the ends, and his insistence that technique and not subject matter create humor closes off a possible interpretive avenue. Second, the variety of borrowing and humor techniques parodists use both creates and reflects a range of potential meanings that a listener can interpret in these works. While parodists create various types of incongruities and offer clues for listeners that their music is meant to be funny, a listener hears and understands these incongruities in specific historical and social contexts.

Throughout this chapter, I have argued that comic parodies combine incongruities created by a parodist’s musical borrowing and humor techniques with an array of contextual factors. By emphasizing parody’s total nature as a comic statement, I stress parody’s complexity and the benefits of a multidisciplinary approach when analyzing these works. Humor scholarship allows us to understand how parodists create incongruity through their structural musical borrowing.

Regardless of the specific borrowing technique or type of incongruity a parodist creates, s/he typically employs a variety of humor techniques that create additional incongruities and alert a listener that these are meant to be interpreted as humorous. At this point, the interpretive focus shifts to the listener, who brings her or his individual listening competencies, familiarity with

!131 borrowed music, and historical context to these works. Each of these can influence—sometimes drastically—how a listener hears and interprets a parody.

!132 CHAPTER 3

PARODY, ETHNICITY, AND VERNACULAR MUSIC

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks, and the black folks hate the white folks. To hate all but the right folks is an old established rule.

—Tom Lehrer, 1965 “National Brotherhood Week”

But I am not a Negro, not a Redman or a Mex, I’m a member of the oppressing color, language, age, and sex. . . . And I keep singing the middle class liberal, humanitarian, meaningful dialogue, we are all responsible, well-intentioned blues.

—National Lampoon Radio Hour, 1974 “Middle Class Liberal Well-Intentioned Blues”

Vernacular parody and identity are deeply connected in American culture. Our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” and several of our patriotic songs are contrafactum parodies, including “Yankee Doodle” and “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” These parodies are emblematic of the sonic identity of the United States and play an important role in the creation and maintenance of that identity. Parodies also figure in the construction of cultural cohorts and individual identities.1 This connection is most clearly illustrated through blackface minstrelsy, a

1 Thomas Turino defines a formation as “a group of people who have in common a majority of habits that constitute most parts of each individual member’s self.” He defines a cultural cohort as a social grouping formed “along the lines of specific constellations of shared habit based in similarities of parts of the self,” such as “class, gender, occupation, and color.” (Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 111–12 (emphasis in original)).

!133 genre that exemplified the links between identity, humor, and parody, because these performances modeled relationships between groups divided by class, gender, and race.2

While blackface performances became untenable during the second half of the twentieth century, musicians continue to use parody as a stratagem to construct and contest ethnic identities.3 Such depictions, however, were created in a context of increased sensitivity to media depictions of minorities, demographic changes affecting the category of “minority” itself, and multiculturalism. Multiculturalist ideas inform the parodies cited above.4 Tom Lehrer’s singsong parody of racial integration suggests that even a token week of tolerance taxes nerves and patience. His lyrics demonstrate the complex interrelationships between race and gender

(“brotherhood”), class (“the poor folks hate the rich folks, and the rich folks hate the poor folks”), and religious identity (“the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the

Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Muslims, and everybody hates the Jews”). Lehrer stresses the connections between various types of prejudice, presenting such divisions as intrinsic to the

2 For example, Eric Lott writes that “early minstrelsy . . . took racial parody for granted.” Christopher Smith adds that “early blackface practices were neither simply incompetent imitation (of southern black folkways) nor mere racist parody.” William Mahar and Dale Cockrell cite multiple instances of both vernacular and cultivated parodies in minstrel shows. (Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 135; Christopher J. Smith, The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013], 30; William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999]; and Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997]).

3 Clayton Henderson writes, “Among amateur performers and producers, minstrelsy continued as a popular form of American entertainment until the early 1950s.” (Grove Music Online, s.v. “Minstrelsy, American,” by Clayton W. Henderson, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/ 18749).

4 Jon Stratton considers “multiculturalism in the United States” as a “political position” that “refers primarily to the social acknowledgment of American cultural diversity.” (Jon Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009], 6–7). For a broader history of multiculturalism (particularly in Europe), see Ali Rattansi, Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

!134 United States (“All of my folks hate all of your folks, it’s American as apple pie”). By reminding listeners of the deep-seated nature of intolerance and its roots in the lives of U. S. citizens, Lehrer ridicules the idea that token displays of equality will evoke substantive change.

Similar sentiments can be found in the “Middle Class Liberal Well-Intentioned Blues,” a style parody of Pete Seeger composed by Sean Kelly and Christopher Guest for the National

Lampoon Radio Hour (1974).5 Kelly and Guest tell of a folk musician torn between his desire to

“stay true to my ethnic roots” while performing the music of different races, nations, and classes.

His performances are complicated by his knowledge that his familiarity with these genres stems from his privileged position as “a member of the oppressing color, language, age, and sex.” In addition to addressing the issues of white privilege, the parodists also offer a tongue-in-cheek response to liberal guilt and political correctness by presenting the otherwise racially sensitive folk musician’s understanding of other cultures through reductions, essentializations (a “funky

Negro” who eats “soul food barbecue”), and racist language.

In their parodies, Lehrer, Kelly, and Guest play with our received notions about race and ethnicity. The parodists frame ethnic identity as paradoxically both constructed and biological.

Their challenge to essentialist ideas about racial identity competes with the stereotypes their songs reinforce about the culture of ethnic groups. This contradictory jumble of innate and acquired, and us versus them, are common themes in the ways that late twentieth-century parodists represent racial and ethnic identities.

5 Ellin Stein, That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream (New York: Norton, 2013), 138. The song aired on October 5, 1974. “Gala Second Season Show,” http://www.marksverylarge.com/nlrh/nlrh741005_47.html, accessed March 31, 2016.

!135 In this chapter, I explore how parodists are informed by shifting concepts of ethnicity. I favor David Beard and Kenneth Gloag’s definition of ethnicity as a term broadly applicable to

“social groups” sharing “a sense of cultural heritage and identity,” because this description detaches ethnicity from old concepts of race and skin color.6 By contrasting ethnicity with race, understood as “perceived social differences based on biological essences,” the authors clarify that race “often implies a lack of choice and opportunity.”7 Their understanding of ethnicity as a flexible, performative component of identity comports with Karen Brodkin’s formulations of ethnoracial assignment and ethnoracial identification (and, more broadly, Judith Butler’s theories of performative gender identity). She describes the former as a “popularly held classification” typically deployed by those with the “national power to make [these concepts] matter economically, politically, and socially to the individuals classified.” Such assignments are distinguished from ethnoracial identification because individuals construct those identities for themselves within the possible frames of available ethnoracial assignments.8 I am principally concerned with investigating the boundaries between these two positions: how do individuals use

6 David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2005), 45. The authors acknowledge the interrelationships of class and race on ethnic identities, and I would add that gender and sexuality also impact the ways individuals understand and enact these identities. While my primary concern in this chapter is the performance of ethnicity, class and gender are unavoidable when considering ethnic formations. I address these topics as they affect the ways in which parodists create, police, and assert ethnic identities.

7 Ibid., 113 and 45. Critical thought on race and ethnicity has shifted considerably over the course of the twentieth century. While previous scholars and policy makers assumed that racial or ethnic traits were biological, predetermined, and immutable, contemporary thinkers understand ethnic identities as constructed and performed. This view is summarized by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, who describe race as “both a matter of social structure and cultural representation.” In their examination of racial formation from the 1960s through 1990s, they describe the “sociohistorical process[es]” by which “racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed.” (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 1994], 55–56. See also Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], 20–44).

8 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 3.

!136 parodies to portray themselves and group others according to ethnoracial identification? How do individuals use parodies to affirm concepts of ethnoracial assignment, marginality, or Otherness?

How do individuals use parodies to confront, contest, or challenge their assignments?

The liminal spaces between ethnoracial assignment and identification are foundational to ethnic comedy. Werner Sollors argues, “Laughing at others is a form of boundary construction,” a process that involves both inclusion and exclusion because “the community of laughter itself is an ethnicizing phenomenon, as we develop a sense of we-ness in laughing with others.”9 David

Gillota extends Sollor’s argument, suggesting that ethnic humorists rely on an “insider/outsider or center/margins binary.”10 Interrogating this binary can offer “insight into the manner in which different ethnic groups view themselves in relation to each other,” particularly because “the ways in which we often talk about race and ethnicity” are structured and mediated by an underlying black-white racial binary.11 It is true that changes in official representations of ethnicities over the past fifty years have shifted ethnoracial assignments away from a binary and towards what

David Hollinger has termed the “ethno-racial pentagon,” a five-part division of ethnoracial assignments based largely on skin color.12 Despite this, Brodkin supports Gillota’s claim with her

9 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 132.

10 David Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 3.

11 Ibid., 2 and 4.

12 David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 19–50.

!137 argument that “any new map of a multiracial nation continues to rest solidly on the preservation of the old black-white binary.”13

The music of several contemporary parodists simultaneously undermines the duality of such reductive ethnic positions while contributing to their persistence. My chapter investigates ways that four ethnic parodists engage with this binary to negotiate their own identities and situate themselves within this discourse. I investigate three ethnic identities: whiteness,

Jewishness, and Chicanoness.14 After situating each of these ethnic positions in a larger historical context, I investigate how the parodists Cledus T. Judd, Alan Sherman, 2 Live Jews, and El Vez represent ethnic identity through lyrics, visual and moving images, and structural musical borrowings. These parodies can be understood as part of the racialized history and reception of vernacular musics in the United States, and show the sustained power of white and black musical categories as sonic markers of racial identification.

I argue that through their musical borrowings, each of these parodists interacts with an underlying black-white binary in different ways. Judd uses pre-existing music to define whiteness along regional and economic lines in order to maintain a white cultural and political hegemony. Sherman’s borrowings help him to position post-World War II American Jews as white to obtain economic and political benefits. This position has been contested by later parodists like 2 Live Jews, who use borrowed music to frame American Jewry as distinct from mainstream white culture. Chicano parodist El Vez uses parody to present Latino human rights

13 Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 74.

14 I recognize that each of these ethnic identities is a cultural construction. By using these terms, I do not wish to imply that there is an essentialist nature defining these ethnic positions. I am using terms that have their own discursive history, that circulate in popular memory, and that have meanings for insider and outsider community members.

!138 issues through musics once considered threatening to mainstream white interests; just as those sounds (and the people creating them) were assimilated, El Vez’s borrowings herald the eventual acceptance of his political causes. Overall, while these parodists present a range of ethnic positions in their songs, their strategy for negotiating ethnoracial identity suggests that U. S. ethnic identities remain largely formulated on a white-black axis.

Whiteness

“Whiteness,” Greg Jay describes, “is a delusion.”15 His provocative claim challenges readers to understand the historical and social factors impacting the creation of the concept of

“white.” His essay “Who Invented White People?” is a classic example in the burgeoning field of whiteness studies, an area of study where scholars seek to position white identity as a constructed position instead of an unmarked and unquestioned racial norm.16 Foundational scholarship in this discipline includes the work of David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and

Richard Dyer. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness interrogates ways that economic and political power intersect with whiteness. He seeks to “draw lines connecting race and class” by studying ways that “race has at all times been a critical factor” in class formation. He links whiteness with other ways that “white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the

15 Greg Jay, “Who Invented White People?,” in The Thomson Reader: Conversations in Context, ed. Robert P. Yagelski (Boston: Thomson-Heinle, 2007), 101.

16 For an overview and critique of the field, see Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” The Journal of American History 89 (2002): 154–73.

!139 necessities of capitalist work discipline.”17 Ignatiev’s work complicates the current concept of

“white” by reminding us that some Anglo groups were historically positioned as non-white. His landmark study How the Irish Became White investigates ways that Irish immigrants were positioned alongside (and sometimes below) African Americans. He also explores how categorizations of the Irish changed as these immigrants adopted strategies to “enter the white race” and “secure an advantage in a competitive society.”18 Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different

Color explores ways that European immigrants were racialized as they arrived in America, a process that often involved a collapse of their previous national and racial identities.19 Another exemplary work in whiteness studies is Richard Dyer’s White, which studies representations of whiteness in Western culture as a neutral racial norm. He acknowledges “the condition and power of whiteness,” especially in ways that “white people claim and achieve authority for what they say” without “admitting . . . [or] realizing that for much of the time they speak only for whiteness.”20 Subsequent scholars have built on these ideas, problematizing white normativity in

17 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2007), 11 and 13.

18 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2.

19 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

20 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), xiv.

!140 the United States by examining white privilege or advocating for the abandonment of racial thinking altogether.21

Whiteness studies in music have investigated a range of genres, styles, periods, and institutions. Carol Oja has studied interactions between whiteness, immigration, and race in musicals during the 1950s.22 Angela Denise Hammond’s dissertation explores the racialization of country music, an issue Peter La Chapelle touches on in his study of country music and migration between 1930 and 1970.23 Mike Daley and Julian Schaap have both examined whiteness in rock music.24 Miles White explores the intersection of whiteness, gender, and desire in rap music, a style Loren Kajikawa addresses in his study of Eminem.25 Julia Koza traces ways

21 Amy Eshleman, Jean O’Malley Halley, and Ramya Mahadevan Vijaya, Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011) and Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002). Such scholarship is not limited to the humanities. See for example Eric D. Knowles, et al., “Deny, Distance, or Dismantle? How White Americans Manage a Privileged Identity,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9 (2014): 594–609.

22 Carol J. Oja, “West Side Story and The Music Man: Whiteness, Immigration, and Race in the US during the late 1950s,” Studies in Musical Theatre 3 (2009): 13–30.

23 Angela Denise Hammond, “Color Me Country: Commercial Country Music and Whiteness” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2011) and Peter La Chapelle, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).

24 Mike Daley, “‘Why Do Whites Sing Black?’: The Blues, Whiteness, and Early Histories of Rock,” Popular Music and Society 26 (2003): 161–67 and Julian Schaap, “Just Like Hendrix: Whiteness and the Online Critical and Consumer Reception of Rock Music in the United States, 2003–2013,” Popular Communication 13 (2015): 272–87.

25 Miles White, From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Loren Kajikawa, “Eminem’s ‘My Name Is’: Signifying Whiteness, Rearticulating Race,” Journal of the Society for American Music 3 (2009): 341–64; and Meredith McCarroll, “Beyond the White Negro: Eminem, Danny Hoch, and Race Treason in Contemporary America,” in At Home and Abroad: Historicizing Twentieth-Century Whiteness in Literature and Performance, ed. La Vinia Delois Jennings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 221–54.

!141 that equity and racial politics manifest in undergraduate schools of music.26 Many of these varied studies deal explicitly or implicitly with the relationships between race and identity, as scholars interrogate how different political, social, and economic acts have collaborated or conspired to position certain groups as “Americans.”27

While scholarly work on white ethnic identity has focused on privilege, inequality, and systemic racism, popular commentators and politicians have harnessed the concept of whiteness to respond to threats to American national security, economic dominance, or ethnic identity.28

These fears can be understood as an expression of mounting anxieties about changes in American life. As Ashley Elizabeth Jardina writes:

Two decades of mass immigration to the U.S., the election of America’s first black president, and the nation’s growing nonwhite population have dramatically changed the political and social landscape. Such changes may signal an end to the security of whites’

26 Julia Eklund Koza, “Listening for Whiteness: Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 16 (2008): 145–55.

27 These issues figure prominently in Charles Garrett’s work on American identity in twentieth-century music. Garrett argues that American music “can be understood best as a series of conflicts or clashes between diverse, and often opposing, musical identities.” (Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 215–6).

28 To take one example, John Blake’s report on a Glenn Beck-arranged march on Washington, DC in 2011 includes a list of commonly cited white grievances including fears about America’s changing racial makeup, unproven reports of Black Panthers intimidating white voters, and general economic anxieties caused by the Great Recession. (John Blake, “Are Whites Racially Oppressed?,” CNN.com, March 4, 2011, accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/21/white.persecution/). Legislative responses to the changes that Blake articulates have also targeted cultural studies. In 2010, Arizona lawmakers passed legislation prohibiting Mexican American studies. While lawmakers expressed concerns that such courses ran the risk of creating “ethnic solidarity” instead of teaching students “to treat and value each other as individuals,” their bill was largely understood as an act of discrimination. (HB 2281 [2010], accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/ hb2281p.pdf). For responses to this bill, see the Modern Language Association’s “Statement on Tucson Mexican American Studies Program,” accessed April 12, 2016, https://www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Executive- Council/Executive-Council-Actions/2012/Statement-on-Tucson-Mexican-American-Studies-Program and J. Weston Phippen, “How One Law Banning Ethnic Studies Led to Its Rise,” The Atlantic, July 19, 2015, accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/07/how-one-law-banning-ethnic-studies-led-to-rise/ 398885/.

!142 dominance, which has previously allowed the group to take their racial identity for granted.29

While Jardina notes several threats to white identity, I propose extending her timeframe back three decades to better historicize these demographic shifts. I consider the 1965 Immigration and

Nationality Act a milestone in the widespread emergence of contemporary understandings of whiteness because of its impact on U. S. citizens. The Act eliminated immigration quotas established by the National Origins Formula in 1921.30 Consequently, resettlement from Asia and

Latin America increased as yearly limitations on immigration were abolished. These were replaced by new restrictions added to Western Hemisphere countries “for the first time,” which

Mary Waters and Reed Ueda argue led “to growing undocumented or illegal immigration” in the following decades.31 Significantly, the law marked the end of policies privileging white

Europeans as immigration targets and “a shift away from the typical pattern of immigration found earlier in the twentieth century.” While immigration during the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by Europeans emigrating principally from “Italy, Russia, Austria-

Hungary, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and Great Britain,” immigration during the second half of the century featured a wide range of individuals “from countries in Latin America, the

29 Ashley Elizabeth Jardina, “Demise of Dominance: Group Threat and the New Relevance of White Identity for American Politics” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014), 3.

30 David A. Gerber, American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 46–52.

31 Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda, “Introduction,” in New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965, ed. Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2. For more on the reasons behind this newly-added quota, see Maddalena Marinari, “‘Americans Must Show Justice in Immigration Policies Too’: The Passage of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Journal of Policy History 26 (2014): 219–45.

!143 Caribbean, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa,” emigrating predominantly from “Mexico, the

Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, India, and China.”32

One response to these demographic changes involved renegotiations of existing racial categories. The constitutionally mandated decennial Census, for example, was repeatedly amended to better represent America’s shifting racial makeup. The Pew Research Center’s visual history of the Census illustrates these demographic trends, marking official shifts in thinking about race and attempts to be inclusive of new immigrant populations. Several of these changes involve relatively straightforward additions of new categories, like the 1970 Census form’s inclusion of the term “Hispanic.” Other changes involve a greater sensitivity to regional differences; while the 1960 Census includes five categories for “Asian” (Chinese, Japanese,

Filipino, Hawaiian, and part Hawaiian), the 2010 form provided individuals with additional options to select their ethnoracial identification through seven revised or expanded subcategories

(including Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, or “Other Asian”).33

Such revisions are illustrative of increased immigration from certain countries, an official policy of acknowledging differences that are important to individuals, and a broader awareness of the differences between members of these national formations.

The Census also highlights two other elements of ethnic thinking in recent American life.

A policy change in 1960 allowed individuals to select their own race, rather than having a

Census taker make an ethnoracial assignment. Additionally, since 2000, individuals have been

32 Waters and Ueda, “Introduction,” 3.

33 Pew Research Center, “What Census Calls Us: A Historical Timeline,” June 10, 2015, accessed February 9, 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-timeline/.

!144 allowed to select multiple racial categories. These shifts reflect changing conceptions away from

“race” as an immutable biological category and towards an understanding of ethnicity as a construction. They also underscore the growing number of mixed-race Americans, individuals who feel that a single category no longer describes their ethnoracial identity.

These revised and flexible Census categories illustrate several ideas about race in

America. First, a greater number of racial divisions (exemplifying Hollinger’s ethno-racial pentagon) reflects demographic shifts and adds nuance into public discussions. However these divisions suggest that Americans remain obsessed with identifying, defining, reducing, and managing racial differences. Second, these differences have been largely conceived on a black- white binary. The Pew history reveals that some races come and go from the historical record, disappearing and reappearing as their re-categorization or deportation removes them from the official tally of (racialized) “Americans.” Throughout these changes, however, the categories of

“white” and “black” remain. As Waters and Ueda remark, historically “race relations consisted of interactions between whites and blacks,” with others like “Asians and Latinos . . . present only on the margins.”34 Finally, the Census reflects none of the realities of “white” and “black” as flexible categories that have been reconceived and renegotiated throughout American history.35

While many people celebrate these demographic changes and the official acknowledgement of a broad spectrum of racial identity, others interpret them and the minority

34 Waters and Ueda, “Introduction,” 3–4. While these trends can be said to reflect the demographic realities of early America, Waters and Ueda note that “this public notion was always incomplete and reflected an East Coast establishment view of the world.” They add, “The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a great deal of immigration from Mexico and Asia, mostly to the West and Southwest.” (Ibid., 4).

35 For one example, the conflicts between Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants and U. S. citizens regarding racial interrelationships in the nineteenth century suggests that the openness of “white” as an official category was not mirrored by a subsequent availability of cultural whiteness.

!145 populations they represent as a threat to their established lifeways. This period was rife with racialized debates around school busing and affirmative action, resistance to school integration and integrated housing, controversy surrounding the teaching of Ebonics in Oakland public schools, and inequities in the criminal justice system exemplified by mandatory minimum sentencing and jury verdicts in the trials of O. J. Simpson and Rodney King’s assailants.

I situate the work of Cledus T. Judd as an example of a reactionary white response to this tumult. Judd is the performance persona adopted by country music parodist, entertainer, and radio personality Barry Poole. Recording as Judd, Poole released ten albums and two EPs between 1995 and 2014 before retiring in 2015.36 Judd has been described as “country’s court jester” and as a “parodist whose humor lies somewhere between that of Ray Stevens and ‘Weird’

Al [sic] Yankovic.”37 In a review of Judd’s first record, Leo Stanley cites comedian Jeff

Foxworthy and the television show Hee Haw as precedents for Judd’s work, warning listeners

36 “Cledus T. Judd Discography,” accessed April 28, 2016, https://www.discogs.com/artist/2738451-Cledus- T-Judd. For more on Poole’s decision to retire, see Phyllis Stark, “Cledus T. Judd on His Decision to Bow Out of the Music Business for a ‘Higher Purpose,’” January 15, 2015, accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/ articles/columns/the-615/6443429/cledus-t-judd-leaving-music-business-country-comedy.

37 “Polyrically Uncorrect by Cledus T. Judd,” http://www.countryweekly.com/reviews/polyrically- uncorrect-cledus-t-judd, accessed April 2, 2016 and Paul Kingsbury, ed., The Encyclopedia of Country Music: The Ultimate Guide to the Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 271.

!146 that “if you don’t like corny country humor, you will not find [the album] amusing.”38 As this reviewer suggests, Judd’s greatest commercial success was with country music audiences.39

Judd’s parodies principally target contemporary country songs, generally favoring commercial country artists from the mid-1990s through the early-2010s. Through these borrowings, he depicts himself as an “authentic” country artist, and his preferences serve as stylistic markers by which he patrols the lines of “authentic” country music and presents his vision of whiteness. Judd is often critical both of country artists attempting to sound “pop” and of popular artists attempting to crossover into country, warning that because “every act sounds the same [so] this crossin’ over’s got to stop” on “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Pop.”

The parody is a contrafactum of Barbara Mandrell’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t

Cool” and also features a brief sample of Hank Williams, Jr.’s “Family Tradition.” The lyrics of both borrowed songs deal explicitly with the history and stylistic purity of country music, indicating that Judd’s borrowings function rhetorically to position the parodist within a body of songs addressed to those who seek to assimilate, exploit, or denigrate country music or its audiences.

38 Leo Stanley, “Cledus T. Judd (No Relation),” accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.allmusic.com/album/ cledus-t-judd-no-relation-mw0000173937. Such frames limit how audiences hear the parodist’s work, and Judd has reminded critics how seriously he takes his work. (Chuck Dauphin, “Cledus T. Judd Parodies Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town on ‘Parodyziac,’” October 16, 2012, accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/articles/ columns/the-615/474621/cledus-t-judd-parodies-miranda-lambert-little-big-town-on-parodyziac).

39 Judd had limited success with mainstream popular audiences; six of Judd’s albums charted on the Billboard 200, typically for one or two weeks. (“Cledus T. Judd Chart History,” accessed April 2, 2106, http:// www.billboard.com/artist/299420/cledus-t-judd/chart?f=305). Judd achieved considerably more success placing songs at or near the top of the Country Airplay, Top Country Albums, and Hot Country Songs charts. (“Cledus T. Judd Chart History,” accessed April 2, 2106, http://www.billboard.com/artist/299420/cledus-t-judd/chart?f=1226). Judd had greater and more sustained success on these charts than on the Comedy Albums chart, suggesting listeners hear him (and that his music is marketed as) a country artist first and a humorist second.

!147 In “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Pop,” Judd establishes a number of binaries on which listeners can understand his vision of country music, which focuses on traditional artists such as Patsy Cline, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, and Barbara Mandrell. Recent artists like Hank

Williams Jr. and LeAnn Rimes are permitted to join this pantheon because of similarities between their sounds and those of traditional artists (“I remember hearing LeAnn Rimes, when she sang ‘Blue’ it sounded like Patsy Cline”). Other artists are marketed as “country” performers, but they have more in common with popular music traditions (SheDaisy “sound[s] a lot like

Destiny’s Child” and “it’s a shame Shania Twain is mixin’ rock and roll and funky hip hop”).

Judd codes these artists and others like Britney Spears, Smashing Pumpkins, Huey Lewis and the

News, Kid Rock, and Michael Bolton; styles like rock, pop, and hip hop; and timbres like record scratches, distorted guitars, and doubled bass drums as distinct from his ideal country music.

These sounds have no place in Judd’s ideal country music, which is dominated by “twin fiddlin’” and slow waltzes featuring acoustic and pedal steel guitars. The parody’s final verse and chorus also feature Judd singing a duet with George Jones, affirming the ideal sound of the male country voice and lending the blessing of a traditional country artist to Judd’s style critique.

Judd establishes his authority as an “authentic” country musician to police a specific vision not merely of his preferred musical style but of whiteness. In addition to its country music culture, Judd situates whiteness as agrarian (“How Do You Milk a Cow” and “Plowboy”), concerned with interests and pursuits often associated with rural lifestyles (“I Love NASCAR” and beer drinking in “(I’m Not in Here for Love) Just a Beer”), and with a distinct culinary tradition (“Bake Me A Country Ham” and “Coronary Life”).

!148 Judd’s ideal of whiteness extends beyond lifestyle to include sexuality, gender, politics, and race. The parodist ends “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Pop” with an ageist and sexist comment about Barbara Mandrell (“I was country when Barbara Mandrell was really hot”). Such lines are typical of Judd’s lyrics and they figure in his depictions of white values. Judd’s whiteness is patriarchal, drawing on stock tropes of women as dispensers of chores (“Wife

Naggin’” and “It’s a Great Day to Be a Guy”), spenders of money (“Wives Do It All the Time” and “Paycheck Woman”), or objects of desire (“Double D Cups,” “Mindy McCready,” “If Shania

Was Mine,” “Shania, I’m Broke,” and “(If I Had) Kellie Pickler’s Boobs”) or derision (“Please

Take the Girl”).40 Judd’s positive valuation of “traditional” white culture depicts a space where female bodies—particularly those of popular musicians—are shared property and targets for male desire.41 He also constructs whiteness as heteronormative. His parody “My Cellmate

Thinks I’m Sexy” references an incident where country stars Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw were arrested. The parodist condones prison rape and his lyrics border on the homophobic.

40 Online reviewer Damian P. was unimpressed with the lyrics of “Wives Do It All The Time” and also knocks Judd’s videos as unsophisticated offerings featuring “jokes about bodily functions, poorly timed slapstick, and Hasselhoffian production values.” (Damian P., “Music DVD Review: Cledus T. Judd–The Essenshul Video Collection,” April 11, 2007, accessed April 2, 2106, http://blogcritics.org/music-dvd-review-cledus-t-judd/). Judd’s parody “You Have No Right to Remain Violent” addresses female violence against males, discussing a woman’s violent overreaction to his simple request for a dance. While his lyrics emphasis the woman’s physical strength, her inability to control herself and her violence continue Judd’s depictions of women who are both primarily physical (we never hear the woman’s side of the story or receive an explanation for why she responded the way she did) and demeaning.

41 Another example linking male privilege and class with female sexuality is “Trailer Park Woman,” where Judd describes “I often stare in her window when she is getting dressed inside, But she don’t mind she looks up to me ’cause I own a double wide.” In “We Own The World,” a parody targeting “We Are the World,” Judd describes Michael Jackson as “more feminine” than Lisa Marie Presley, rejecting Jackson’s claims to masculinity because of his plastic surgeries and physical appearance.

!149 Judd also connects whiteness with patriotism and political affiliation. He expresses suspicion towards Democrats and explicitly supports Republican policies and politicians.42 In the post-9/11 parody “Don’t Mess with America,” he samples speeches from George W. Bush, exclaims “thank goodness Bush is our President,” and describes both Osama Bin Laden and “that nut [Saddam] Hussein” as threats to American liberty. His support of the War on Terror includes attacks on those critical of the second Bush administration and calls for political conformity.

Each of the four songs on The Original Dixie Hick (2003) addresses the controversy surrounding the Dixie Chicks’ criticism of then-President Bush.43 On “Martie, Emily & Natalie (The

Continuing Saga Of),” a contrafactum parody of Brad Paisley’s “Celebrity,” Judd suggests a vision of whiteness with clear social limits to the freedom of speech and a narrow spectrum of acceptable political viewpoints. He frames the Dixie Chicks’ dissent as “pompous” and “super- hateful,” suggesting that the women should simply shut their mouths and continue entertaining.

He professes that “we hate to see you leave” and asks “why can’t we be friends?” yet indicates that his feelings are conditional on the women’s support of President Bush and his policies. Judd justifies his vitriol as retribution for the group’s anti-war stance, which he frames as antagonistic to President Bush, unsupportive of the armed forces, and anti-American.

42 While “Waitin’ On Obama” acknowledges that “polls have showed it’s way past time for Bush to go,” the parodist subjects President Obama’s claims to a level of skepticism he never leveled at President George W. Bush. Judd’s targeted song, Brad Paisley’s performance of “Waitin’ on a Woman,” adds a layer of gender critique to the parody. Selecting this song for a contrafactum adds a further derisive subtext by depicting Obama as feminine.

43 Judd’s album cover references an Entertainment Weekly cover featuring the Dixie Chicks’ naked bodies obscured by various positive and negative labels. (Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003; Gabriel Rossman, “Elites, Masses and Media Blacklists: The Dixie Chicks Controversy,” Social Forces 83 [2004]: 61–79; Molly Brost, “Post Dixie Chicks Country: Carrie Underwood and the Negotiation of Feminist Country Identity,” in The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror, ed. Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota [Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011], 161–172; and Jada Watson, “The Dixie Chicks’ ‘Lubbock or Leave It’: Negotiating Identity and Place in Country Song,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8 [2014]: 49–75).

!150 Judd describes the response of country music audiences to the Dixie Chicks’ actions, claiming “the chicks no longer rule, all country fans agree” and noting the group’s “lack of nominations at this year’s CMAs [Country Music Awards].” Through these lyrics, he introduces a stylistic argument for the Dixie Chicks’ fall from grace: as the musicians adopted markers of mainstream popular styles (depicted sonically with record scratches and with lyrics such as

“trading in their banjos for a drum machine and DJs”), they lost any claim to be “real” country musicians. Judd’s musical critique connects the sonic to the ethnic. He portrays the Dixie Chicks as race traitors who will appear on Soul Train and tour with rapper Eminem. Judd’s claim that

“they’ll put some bling-bling in their videos and we’ll all make fun of them” leaves no doubt that these behaviors are undesirable.44 Judd collapses distinctions between politics, musical style, and race to link unacceptable (white) forms of political engagement with similarly unacceptable

(black) forms of musical expression.

The parody typifies Judd’s tendency to compose songs that contain negative and one- dimensional stereotypes of African Americans, often depicted as a threat to European Americans.

Judd mitigates this danger by controlling what black individuals can say, do, or be in his parodies. Judd features black actors in only one of his videos, the impertinent “Waitin’ on

Obama,” which uses an African American mother and her children to lend racial credibility to

Judd’s critique of the country’s first black president. This lack of black representation extends

44 Judd’s critique also involves class, referring to the Dixie Chicks as “you bunch of multi-platinum jackass millionaires.” Their accumulated wealth adds another divide between the Dixie Chicks and the rest of Judd’s white working-class population. Class is also a theme in “The House That Broke Me,” which mentions government programs and targets President Obama for criticism. Overall, Judd’s parodies concentrate on lower- and lower- middle class whiteness. Other parodies create complex relationships between class, race, and gender. His parody “Luke Bryan” (which atypically targets a contemporary Top 40 popular song) links that artist with black musician “Flava Flavor” [sic], constructs Bryan as a “redneck tycoon,” and alludes to the size of Bryan’s penis. Judd’s parody links acceptable forms of white musical expression with racial and class elements and anxieties about depictions of white masculinity.

!151 from the visual to the sonic. When blacks are mentioned in Judd’s lyrics, they are rarely given a voice of their own. Instead, they are limited to the dialogue Judd writes for them. These lines are usually delivered through a musical style predominately associated with whiteness, and they often mock black culture and music.45 “Tailgatin,’” a non-parodic rap collaboration between

Judd and country musician and rapper Colt Ford, begins and ends with spoken dialogue from

Judd that mocks black vernacular speech. Judd’s references to speech patterns and slang associated with urban blacks and rap songs like Snoop Dogg’s “Fizzle My Shizzle” are meant to establish the musicians’ credibility as rappers, demonstrating their ability to perform “authentic” black music. These references also undermine the legitimacy of black vernacular expression; at the end of the song, Judd affects a black dialect while stringing together largely nonsensical phrases before adding, in his normal speaking voice, “whatever that means.” His parody “Riding with Inmate Jerome” (a contrafactum of “Riding With Private Malone” recorded by David Ball) presents another example of racial mockery. The song is riddled with affected dialect (“He said my nizzame is inmate Leroy Jerome, and if youse readin’ this judge says I isn’t coming home” and “I sho nuff of riding with inmate Jerome”); depictions of black men as criminals, pimps, and carjackers; and a vision of the “hood” as a place of both danger (represented sonically through police sirens, car alarms, squealing tires, breaking windows, and gunshots) and economic opportunity for white men who can enter and leave the space freely.

Judd’s stereotyping extends from the visual and lyrical to the musical. His songs contain no specific borrowings from African American artists. Rather, the parodist’s “black” borrowings

45 As scholars have shown, the commercial presentation of country music as white ignores the importance of black sounds and bodies in this style. (Hammond, “Color Me Country” and Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015]).

!152 are stylistic allusions consisting of newly-composed musics. This practice sends the message that black genres are so easy to create and interchangeable that anyone can imitate them, a clear contrast with the musical skill Judd depicts as necessary to create authentic country music. Judd proves willing, however, to employ and profit from forms of cultural production widely associated with black culture, such as rap and funk.

Several of Judd’s parodies unite ethnicity and music, sharpening distinctions between musical style and race to patrol the boundaries of both country music and whiteness. In his parody “Gone Funky.” Judd’s targets Alan Jackson’s “Gone Country,” which features vignettes of whites moving “back to their roots” and embracing a “country” lifestyle. While Jackson’s song highlighted the positive gains from such ethnic renegotiation, Judd’s parody underscores the perils of a white racial identity that strays too far from “us” and too close to “them.”

Judd’s characters try to find success creating black music (a failed country star “buy[s] a drum machine”), altering their musical preferences (“her favorite rap song’s ‘Shoop”) and physical appearance (getting “a brand new tattoo” and “a big nose ring too”), relocating to urban environments (leaving Nashville for Los Angeles), and widening their social circles (“hangin’ out with old Snoop Doggy Dog”). Judd’s opening verses tell the story of a down-on-her-luck performer dressed like Dolly Parton and grown sick of covering Reba McEntire songs. The performer’s frustration with her current circumstance is so extreme that she considers shifting styles and adopting African American culture and music as an escape from her stylistic and social quagmire. Judd’s comic vocal emphasis on the word “boombox,” his sardonic dance moves while he sings “and just turn to rapping,” and his smug, knowing nod at the camera at the

!153 verse’s conclusion send the message that affecting blackness is not a viable strategy for white individuals seeking a way out of economic or personal problems.

Judd underscores this message with stylistic allusions to black music during the chorus, including a bass line that emphasizes the front of the beat in sixteenth-note subdivisions, a male backup choir chanting “hey, ho!,” record scratching indexical of rap music, funk-inspired slap bass lines, and undifferentiated but clearly electronic background music.46 The stylistically disruptive sounds of black music contrast with the archetypically country sound world of the original song (dominated by acoustic and pedal steel guitars) to demarcate a sonic line between the two ethnic groups.

The song’s music video reinforces the difference between these ethnic positions. During the chorus, the verse’s female protagonist replaces her Dolly Parton costume with an “ethnic”

African outfit to join a large group of white people dancing in the streets. Their movements are not the choreographed and regimented unison motions of country line dancing but the break dances and unstructured movements of the chaotic and primitive Other.47

46 I find it suggestive that Judd depicts blackness for his largely white audience through a dense and incongruous mashing of sounds indexically associated with blackness, rather than through reference to a specific song or style. Seen in this light, Judd’s borrowings from “black” musics demonstrate the cultural hegemony that white artists such as Judd have to select, stereotype, and repurpose elements from African American musical culture.

47 Similar concerns about musical style, dancing, and race appear in Judd’s parody “If This is Country Music.” The song is contrafactum parody of Brad Paisley’s “This Is Country Music,” which similarly polices the borders of country music and its culture. Judd explicitly values certain eras of country music (“the 90s”) and types of dancing (“two step,” “Rebel struts,” and “electric slides”). He contrasts this with other musics and dance styles, reminding his partner that “I told you I don’t know how to two-step to no ‘Baby’s Got the Back,’” a mockery of the title of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s rap song “Baby Got Back.” Judd later references two funk and disco songs, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music” and KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty.” I interpret this contrast of the suitability of country music and line dancing with a belief that other sounds and dances are unacceptable because of their associations with black or gay cultures. Judd also voices his concern that the County Music Awards “will replace Brad [Paisley] with Dr. Dre,” an inadmissible substitution given the latter’s race and musical style.

!154 Collectively, these lyrical, musical, and visual cues emphasize Judd’s construction of

“gone funky” as a symbol for whites adopting elements of black culture. The parodist suggests that such ethnic renegotiations involve a rejection of their heritage (“burned his cowboy boots”) and becoming un-white. He suggests this transformation is negative, drawing on the multiple meanings of “funky” not just as a musical shorthand for blackness but as a state of depression or stench. While the song is remarkable in Judd’s catalogue for depicting whites unhappy with their circumstances and disconcerted by the social and musical obligations placed upon them, his distinctions between white and black culture and the danger of ethnic switching suggests that these characters should not be considered proper representatives of country music and whiteness.

Judd revisits these ideas in “Hip Hop & Honky Tonk,” a style parody of rap and country music. Judd’s lyrics describe a romance between aficionados of rap and country music who suspend their aesthetic judgments to share dance styles (“now I’m clogging to Snoop Doggy

Dogg and she’s break dancing to [George] Jones”) and different artists (“from outlaw country to gangsta rap . . . from Soul Train to Shania Twain”). The parodist emphasizes the equality of his partner’s musical exchange: they “meet in the middle,” attend “throwdowns” and “hoedowns” in equal measure, and “like all the Jacksons: Janet, Michael, Tito, Stonewall, Jessie, Reggie, Alan too.” In order to do so, both partners had to overcome their childhood conditioning. While Judd

“was born a country boy, raised on [Merle] Haggard and [George] Strait,” his partner “was born in da hood, she sure looks good, and she thinks rap is great.”48 The parodist’s reduction of his partner to her birthplace and looks, inability to name even one of her favorite musicians, and his patronizing tone (“she thinks” but we know better) undermine his claims for equality.

48 The words “hood” and “good” are reinforced by additional male voices in a parody of rap vocal delivery.

!155 Judd’s musical borrowings further undermine the cultural parity his lyrics describe. Black musics are used reductively without stylistic or functional distinctions, contrasting with Judd’s nuanced presentations of country artists and styles. Black music is also framed as an incongruous intrusion into white music, as the shared sonic space between these partners is dominated by the presence of country music. The song begins with a chants of “hey, ho, come on, let’s go” and a rhythm track featuring funky guitar and drum parts.49 These “urban” sounds are almost immediately framed as incongruous with the conventional country sound world that follows and that dominates throughout the song.50 During the chorus, as Judd sings “it’s hop hop,” the introduction music returns (with an additional sixteenth-note layer played on a closed hi-hat), but is immediately swept away by country music. The parody’s ending reprises this music but includes pedal steel filigree and Judd shouting a “holler out to my home boys.” While rap music gets the last sonic word, Judd’s spoken call-out positions these timbres as an inside joke, leaving us with the suggestion that meaningful cultural interchange remains unlikely.

Given Judd’s anxieties about black intrusion into white musical spaces, his decisions to integrate these sounds into songs like “Hip Hop & Honky Tonk” can seem paradoxical. I posit two reasons for these borrowings. The first is a logistical issue related to parody. As a parodist,

Judd’s musical decisions were largely dictated by the popular music marketplace. His choices were further constricted as commercial country artists integrated stylistic traits from rap and

49 These parts employ sixteenth-note subdivisions and push ahead of the beat, while the snare drum hits lay back in the groove to emphasize beats two and four. The guitar part features a percussive effect created through dampened strings. Such a strongly rhythmic depiction of blackness verges on essentialist ideas of “African” music.

50 Judd’s verses and most of the choruses feature traditional markers of country music including pedal steel guitar, fiddle, and acoustic guitar as well as a two-beat groove emphasizing beats one and three and conventional harmonic motion around tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords. These contrast sharply with the largely rhythmic “black” musical arrangement.

!156 mainstream pop. As rap’s circulation increased in white culture during the 1990s and as country artists began rapping in the early 2000s, Judd addressed these styles in order to stay relevant. His most frequent responses to these styles had been dismissal or derision; nevertheless, such references kept the parodist up-to-date with current musical developments.

Second, Judd treated these styles as sources of humor, using borrowings to create comic incongruities. The use of Other musics to evoke laughter in listeners from a dominant formation has a long history in American music; what distinguishes Judd’s parodies in this history is that overt racial mockery had become a largely unacceptable form of public speech by the mid 1990s.

I suggest that while conventional decorum dictated a lyrically circumspect treatment of race, the interpretive ambiguities of musical borrowings offered greater expressive freedom, a musical

“dog whistle” signaling a worldview with clear hierarchies of value for white and black cultures and peoples. While Judd’s parodies poked gentle fun at stereotypes of rednecks—humor often directed at Judd or at his expense—they also situated this representation of whiteness within a racial hierarchy. Judd’s borrowings underscore the primacy of country music, coded as white throughout his output. His music often created and maintained a version of whiteness that had little need for cultural exchanges and viewed blackness as a threat. The parodist attempted to contain the encroachment of black culture by placing these sounds—metaphors for the people who make and consume them—in their rightful place as sources of humor for white sounds and listeners. Judd also emphasized that white ethnic identity remains contingent on the rejection of black music and culture.

Throughout Judd’s musics, blacks serve as a universal Other. Judd’s essentialist America is populated by “pure” whites, by whites with questionable enthusiasm for black culture, and by

!157 blacks. Only rarely do his songs acknowledge the existence of other ethnic groups. Asian

Americans do not appear in his music, while indigenous peoples are included in one song.

“Indian In-Laws,” the parodist’s breakthrough single, parodies Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw.”

Judd blends classic comic grumblings about an in-law visit with puns and stereotypes about

Native Americans. Judd addresses Chicanos in two songs. “Tailgatin’” includes a boast that he serves “Jim, Jack, and Johnny, even Jose,” while “Illegals,” a non-parodic song written by Dan

Demay, specifies three threats illegal Mexican immigrants pose to whiteness.51

Broadly considered, Judd’s music constructs and affirms a specific vision of whiteness.

He acknowledges the popularity of black musical genres, but uses lyrical and musical rhetoric to denigrate these timbres and those who consume them. For Judd, anxieties about potential threats to whiteness are met with vigilant attempts to construct acceptable expressions of that ethnic identity, depict the potential consequences for racial commingling, and reaffirm the superior position of white lifeways, bodies, and musics.52 To do so, his parodies often connect unacceptable forms of white expression with black music. The two positions are diametrically opposed, marked by Judd’s guidelines concerning the proper scope of whiteness and his

51 Amanda, “Songwriter’s Spotlight: Dan Demay,” November 8, 2010, accessed April 2016, http:// www.nashvillemusicguide.com/songwriters-spotlight-dan-demay/. While the song is not a parody and it is not written by Judd, I have included it an example of Judd’s marginalization of non-white Americans. Judd’s version of the song appeared at #58 on Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” chart during the week of March 31, 2007. “Cledus T. Judd,” accessed January 26, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/artist/299420/cledus-t-judd/chart?f=357.

52 One irony is that on the surface, Judd’s parodies seem to embrace black music. Forum members on Stormfront, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the first major hate site on the Internet,” derided the parodist for appearing with, dressing like, and sounding like a black man. (“Stormfront,” accessed April 2, 2016 https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/stormfront and Long County Rebel, November 14, 2001 [7:20 pm], comment on “What the ### is happening to Country music?,” https://www.stormfront.org/forum/ t5805).

!158 representations of blackness. By depicting blackness as antithetical to whiteness both culturally and musically, Judd’s parodies evince a racial binary.

Jewishness

Understanding Jewish presence in American life as an ethnic phenomenon sheds light on racial negotiations in the post-World War II era as well as the constructed and contested nature of ethnoracial categories.53 Eric Goldstein argues that “tumultuousness” surrounded Jewish efforts

“to find acceptance in a society organized around the categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’” because

“members of the dominant society” drew “unity and superiority” from “a long-standing investment in the notion of a clear racial dichotomy between blacks and whites.”54 Jews challenged the solidity of this binary by proving “particularly resistant to categorization within the black-white system.”55

Required to position their ethnic identity within a nation dominated by white Protestants,

American Jews had to perform a complex series of negotiations. By affirming a racial binary,

Jews distinguished themselves from blacks and “divert[ed] attention away from the problems

53 My positioning of Jewishness as a racial or ethnic group has precedent in law. (Annalise Elizabeth Glauz-Todrank, “Jewish Identity Between ‘Religion’ and ‘Race’ in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb” [PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010]; Naomi W. Cohen, “Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb’: A New Departure in American Jewish Defense?,” Jewish History 3 [1988]: 95–108; and Kenneth L. Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]). Understanding Jews as an ethnic group also resonates in current debates within Judaism. (Shaul Magid, “Be the Jew You Make: Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness in Post-Ethnic America,” March 1, 2011, accessed February 2, 2015, http://shma.com/2011/03/be-the- jew-you-make-jews-judaism-and-jewishness-in-post-ethnic-america/ and Brent Sasley, “Jewishness as Ethnicity not Religion,” The Times of Israel, May 16, 2012, accessed February 2, 2015, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jewishness- as-ethnicity-not-religion/).

54 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1.

55 Ibid., 2.

!159 raised by their own distinctiveness.” By associating with whites, Jews often secured economic opportunities that would have be otherwise unavailable to racial Others. Jewish individuals also embraced elements from black culture to distance themselves from whites and retain a sense of in-group identity. Such confusing and often contradictory negotiations “involved a complex process in which conflicting desires for acceptance and distinctiveness often found no easy balance.”56

This chapter begins with a brief history that draws out two themes that continue to influence Jewish representations in contemporary America. The first involves debates about

Jewish identity and whiteness after World War II. I argue that Alan Sherman’s musical borrowings help the parodist position himself and post-war American Jews as white. Adopting this assimilative stance in his parodies minimizes a distinctly Jewish culture to obtain the economic and political benefits that accompanies whiteness. The second theme addresses the long history of Jewish-black cultural exchanges through the music of 2 Live Jews. I argue that these parodists use borrowed black music to position American Jewry as separate from mainstream white culture.

These ethnic positions must be understood in the larger history of Jews in America. Many

European Jews immigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1924 to escape religious persecution.57 The assimilationist desires of some of these immigrants were given a voice in

56 Ibid., 3.

57 The Library of Congress estimates that “as many as 3 million Eastern European Jews came to the U.S.” between 1880 and 1924. (“A People at Risk,” accessed March 5, 2016, http://www.loc.gov/teachers/ classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/polish5.html.) For a comprehensive history of American Jewry, see Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).

!160 Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot. Eager to forge a new life for himself, Zangwill’s protagonist writes a great “American Symphony” symbolizing his new nation’s embrace of immigrants and the potential for these groups to remake themselves in an American image. The playwright’s title suggested a metaphor for this integration, one that involved reducing or eliminating racial differences in favor of the strength of a combined American whole, assumed to be white, working- or middle-class, heteronormative, and Protestant.58

Zangwill’s idealized portrait conflicted with the realities of ethnic difference in

Progressive Era America, where biological understandings of race contributed to the persecution of ethnic groups by “white” Americans who favored repressive economic practices and restrictive immigration policies.59 Naturalized citizens were also concerned about the national loyalties of outside groups, resulting in pressure on recent immigrants to repudiate their origin countries particularly during swells of patriotic furor. Mark Cohen writes that during World War I

“all immigrant groups were advised to keep their heads down and wave the flag, but Jews most of all.”60

58 Joe Kraus believes that the play exemplifies a contradiction between American rhetoric and practice regarding difference: “The Melting Pot, which celebrated America’s capacity to accommodate difference, appeared on the scene at a moment when the American theater world ceased to accept heterogeneity in its productions and, more subtly, ceased to accommodate difference in its audiences.” (Joe Kraus, “How The Melting Pot Stirred America: The Reception of Zangwill’s Play and Theater’s Role in the American Assimilation Experience,” MELUS 24 [1999], 4). For more on Jewish Americans during the Progressive Era, see Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 35– 50.

59 These include the Immigration Act of 1924 and the establishment of the national origins formula. (Jennifer Nugent Duffy, Who’s Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity [New York: New York University Press, 2013], 203–6 and Gerber, American Immigration, 25–44).

60 Mark Cohen, Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013), 104.

!161 Fears of immigrant unassailability were supported by the pseudo-science of eugenics, which contributed to what Karen Brodkin describes as “a history of anti-Semitism and of beliefs that Jews are members of an inferior race.”61 Eugenics also contributed to concerns about racial pollution, which often corresponded to the class positions of immigrants. Such anxieties demonstrated the fears of a “wealthy, U.S.-born Protestant elite” as they faced “a hostile and seemingly unassimilable working class.”62 Consequently, during the “peak of anti-Semitism in

America” in the 1920s and 1930s, American Jews faced a number of “anti-immigrant, racist, and anti-Semitic barriers” limiting them to a small number of jobs and denying them access to higher education.63

Such discrimination was typical of the emerging culture of whiteness in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as whites denied political, economic, and cultural power to groups they perceived as racially non-white including Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants.

Consequently, European Americans frequently related Jews to African Americans, a group David

61 Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 26 and 29. She does point out an ironic silver lining: “Jews were hardly alone [as racialized targets]. American anti-Semitism was part of a broader pattern of late-nineteenth- century racism against all southern and eastern European immigrants, as well as against Asian immigrants, not to mention African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexicans.” (Ibid., 26).

62 Ibid., 28.

63 Ibid., 26, 30–33. While outsiders targeted Jewish difference with political, economic, and social sanctions, this difference was also commodified by Jewish Americans and used as a integrationist tool. For example, Jewish contributions to American popular song are well documented, as is the early twentieth-century fad for Jewish songs. (Kenneth Aaron Kanter, Jews on Tin Pan Alley: The Jewish Contribution to American Popular Music, 1830– 1940 [Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Pub., 1982] and Jack Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004]). These songs often depicted stock figures in a way that bordered on caricature, and such representations were the first target of the newly formed Anti-Defamation League in 1913. (M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 104).

!162 Gillota describes as “America’s primary other” during this time period.64 Eric Sundquist writes that the shared experiences of both groups “were as intimately connected as their histories were different” since both were “separated by color and religion . . . in a predominately ‘white,’

Protestant nation.”65 Brodkin similarly argues that Jewish Americans were understood along “the old black-white binary” as non-white.66 She identifies one outcome of this racialization as the development of a type of Jewish “double vision that results from racial middleness: of an experience of marginality vis-à-vis whiteness, and an experience of whiteness and belonging vis-

à-vis blackness.”67 As a result, the two groups formed an enduring (if sometimes uneasy) relationship, often advocating for the other’s status as Americans. Michael Rogin argues that

“Jews opposed racial prejudice in greater numbers, proportionately, than did any other white ethnic group,” activism that resulted in early twentieth-century Jewish involvement in civil rights organizations.68

64 Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, 52. He considers this otherness the result of patterns of Jewish immigration and believes it serves as a defining trait that forms an intrinsic part of Jewish identity, particularly concerning ethnic humor. For more on musical interactions between blacks and Jews in America, see Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 79–103 and Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

65 Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2.

66 Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 74 and 37.

67 Ibid., 1–2. She is careful to add her idea of a Jewish double vision is different from W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic formulation on African American double vision. (Ibid., 189). She places this identity within the larger context of whiteness in America, arguing that this “racial discourse” understands itself principally through “an inverted and contrasting blackness as its evil (and sometimes enviable) twin.” (Ibid., 151).

68 He cites examples including several nineteenth-century immigrant Yiddish publishers who “began to protest against the denial of equality” to black Americans. (Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 11, 16–18 and 66 and Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 51–85).

!163 While Jewish Americans related to African Americans as similarly marginalized figures,

Jews also distanced themselves from blacks to avoid assuming their bottom place in the

American racial hierarchy. This contradictory relationship, based on both association and dissociation, manifested in several ways including torch songs and blackface, a genre famously depicted in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927).69 Gillota considers the latter genre “one of the most fascinating and symbolically useful manifestations of Jews’ simultaneous identification with and distancing from African Americans.”70 Blackface representations involve complex layers of racial as well as class and gendered representations that reject facile analysis and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.71

Broadly speaking, Jewish blackface performances served two contradictory ends: they helped American Jews position themselves as racially different from whites, while simultaneously highlighting racial similarities between Jewish and white Americans.72 Rogin

69 Stratton discusses Jewish ethnic negotiations through the lens of torch songs. He notes that by the 1920s, Jews were “less thought of as black” but were “considered to be only marginally white.” Torch songs allowed early Jewish performers to use “African-American expressive techniques” on “the white vaudeville stage” and permitted performers in the 1960s to begin “to distinguish themselves again from white Americans.” (Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 9, 13–36, and 59–78). The Jazz Singer highlights contemporary anxieties about race, ethnicity, and musical performance. (Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996], 73–120; C. Scott Combs, “‘The Jazz Singer’ or the Corpse: Al Jolson, Diegetic Music, and the Moment of Death,” Music and the Moving Image 5 [2012]: 46–55; and Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 19– 20).

70 Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, 52.

71 For well-researched and nuanced work on blackface, see Annemarie Bean, James Vernon Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Cockrell, Demons of Disorder; Lott, Love and Theft; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask; and Smith, The Creolization of American Culture.

72 These similarities were not enough, however, to minimize racial fears or earn favorable political concessions including “additional admissions of Jewish refugees both before and during World War II.” (David W. Haines, “Refugees,” in New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965, ed. Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 56).

!164 argues that these representations “embodi[ed] desire . . . not just repulsion” by connecting blackface with civil rights issues as Jews invested “in the other side of the racial divide.”73 These performances could also serve to mock a black Other and situate Jews as part of a white majority.

Gillota argues that Jewish blackface helped “transform the immigrant Jew into an American. By participating in the exclusion and stereotyping of blacks, American Jews made themselves white.”74 While acknowledging that blackface was “available for migrants who were considered to have racial affinities with blacks,” Stratton presents a more cautious analysis. He argues that a transition into Jewish whiteness was underway by the early twentieth century; since Jews “were increasingly positioned as a race on the fringe of the white races,” Stratton believes that “the

Jewish use of blackface became increasingly less meaningful and more anachronistic.”75

Regardless of its timeliness, Goldstein argues that Jewish American cultural production generally relied on African American expressive forms to construct Jewish identity:

Positioned between the ideologically driven binary of black and white, Jews have mediated between African-American culture and the hegemonic white American culture. Sometimes Jews have, consciously or not, utilized African-American culture as a way of gaining whiteness. Sometimes they have used it as a way of expressing their disillusionment with white culture. Always, Jews have channelled aspects of African- American culture into white culture.76

73 Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 18. He acknowledges that “although minstrelsy advertised that interest as racial difference, while civil rights presented it as common humanity,” the films in his study “explore a less clearly divided picture.”

74 Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, 52.

75 Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 13 and 15.

76 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 198.

!165 Through these associations, Rogin argues that white Americans largely understood Jews as “the most black-identified immigrant group.”77 Before World War II, Josh Kun notes that Jews were marked as racially and biologically distinct from whites, branded as “‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental,’

‘less than white,’ or ‘off-white.’” Such labels denoted white perceptions of Jews as “significantly inferior to and categorically different from the whiteness of the naturalized American citizen.”78

In the years following the Shoah, however, several factors including increasing Jewish secularization, greater sensitivity to racial depictions (at least of biologically “white” citizens),

Jewish desires to join the growing middle class, and a shift in public focus from race to ethnicity meant that Jewish Americans were often caught in a complex series of ethnic negations. Kun describes these as a struggle between previous conceptions of “the Jew as a racial group (often held responsible for the racial contamination of imaginary national purity)” and post-World War

II efforts “to reconfigure the Jew as meltably ethnic, white Americans no different from anyone else on the suburban block.”79 Jon Stratton writes that this assimilation had a cultural cost:

“acceptance as white meant, in the main, assimilation to Anglo-America norms.” As a result, for

Jews to be successful, they “had to become invisible and, ideally, any sense of the Jews as a grouping would have to disappear.”80 While this shift helped Jews expand their access to higher

77 Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 165. Stratton agrees, situating Jews in a historical discourse of race at the turn of the twentieth century: “If European racial science considered Jews to be black, and in some way African, then in the United States, where all racial discussion was overdetermined by the black-white racial divide, Jews performing in blackface paradoxically offered the possibility that this practice might not only Americanize them but also help to place them on the white side of the American divide.” (Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 17).

78 Josh Kun, “The Yiddish Are Coming: Mickey Katz, Antic-Semitism, and the Sound of Jewish Difference,” American Jewish History 87 (1999): 346.

79 Ibid., 347 and Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 189–208.

80 Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 109.

!166 education and increased their upward mobility,81 Jews remained “subject to a variety of stereotypes and prejudices” as their whiteness was contested by others.82

These ethnic renegotiations affected popular culture as distinctive Jewish markers were deemphasized. In a marked divergence from previous eras, many Jewish performers downplayed ethnic characteristics as well as similarities between blacks and Jews, instead favoring assimilation and adoptions of mainstream white Christian values. On radio and television, for example, The Goldbergs (1929 to 1956) were depicted as Jewish largely through dialect, particularly through parents who spoke “English with Yiddish accents.”83 This sonic marker was one of the only indications the family was Jewish; as Shlomi Deloia and Hannah Adelman Komy

Ofir describe, the Goldbergs were “whitewashed: neither physical attributes nor religious practices suggested their Jewishness.”84 The tendency to minimize representatively Jewish ethnic traits and depict Jews as quietly assimilating into white culture continued until the 1990s.85 I do not wish to minimize the importance of Borscht Belt comedians (who largely performed for

Jewish audiences) or of Jewish entertainers who had mainstream success such as Mel Brooks,

81 Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 36–44.

82 Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 7.

83 Shlomi Deloia and Hannah Adelman Komy Ofir, “Jewish Characters in Weeds: Reinserting Race into the Postmodern Discourse on American Jews,” in Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about “Jews” in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Efraim Sicher (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 131. This television portrayal differed from the sometimes explicitly Jewish content of the radio show that preceded this television series from 1929 to 1949.

84 Ibid.

85 In an unpublished essay written in 1971, Alan Sherman addressed this theme, remarking that “American Jews of my generation had a gentleman’s agreement, a tacit conspiracy to kill off our own heritage. We grew obsessed with one goal, to assimilate.” (Quoted in M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 245 [emphasis in original]).

!167 Carl Reiner, Gene Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, and others.86 Despite the popularity of such figures, however, many media depictions of Jews understated or ignored their ethnic identity.

Mickey Katz personifies what could happen to entertainers who performed Jewish difference.87 Katz was a parodist who targeted mid-century popular songs and reworked them in different styles to blend the sounds of mainstream America with Yiddish dialect humor and klezmer music. This ebullient fusion often went too far; as Josh Kun writes, “Katz’s hybrid brand of antic-Semitic [sic] American pop performed Jewish difference too loudly for many Jews of the

’50s who preferred a more hushed and deethnicized entrance into the American national body.”88

While other Jewish parodists like Alan Sherman treated popular songs as “tickets into an authentic Americaness where Jewish difference became masked and silenced,” Katz chose to

“enact his difference, to turn the world upside down with strategically unleashed Jewishness, and

. . . bring the Jew out from the margins, unmasked and unveiled.”89 Katz’s performances flew in the face of the prevailing mood of contemporary American Jews. As Goldstein writes, “most

Jews of the Cold War era publicly conformed to the larger society’s expectation that they would

86 For more on Streisand and Midler, see Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 64–67 and 79–80. My thanks to Dr. Michael Bakan for his feedback on this issue.

87 Another example includes Jewish musicians and listeners swept up in the contemporary Latin-music craze, which Kun argues allowed Jews to reject “a total recuperation into whiteness while refusing to perform their Jewishnesss in traditional ways.” (Josh Kun, “Bagels, Bongos, and Yiddishe Mambos, or The Other History of Jews in America,” Shofar 23 [2005]: 64). Stratton argues that Latin stylistic markers in the music of Brill Building songwriters “signals simultaneously Jewish difference and Americanization,” a hybrid identity reinforced with lyrical themes of teenage love and courtship. (Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 53 and 54–55).

88 Kun, “The Yiddish Are Coming,” 345.

89 Ibid., 349.

!168 define themselves as a religious community” and not as an ethnic group.90 The waning of Katz’s popularity by the mid-1960s suggests that Jewish audiences rejected the parodist’s performance of Jewish identity in favor of an assimilationist stance minimizing difference.

Katz’s approach to parody and Jewish identity contrast with those of his contemporary

Alan Sherman (1924–1973), who worked as a television writer and producer before releasing his first album of parodies in 1962. Over the next five years, he placed three consecutive albums at the top of the Billboard 200 chart and released another six records, which were not well received given a precipitous decline in the parodist’s songwriting and musical ability (as well as other factors that I discuss below).91 I argue that the lyrical topics and musical borrowings of

Sherman’s parodies exemplify a post-war performance of Jewish whiteness.92 My reading differs from Mark Cohen’s interpretation of Sherman’s work and the significance of his popularity. In

Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman, Cohen frames the parodist as the first example “since the end of vaudeville more than a half-century earlier” of a performer whose

“Jewish dialect humor spread to mainstream culture and led to fame and fortune.” Cohen claims that “ethnicity was back” and that “the general culture’s insistence that minorities Americanize . .

. was over.”93 I agree with Cohen on Sherman’s importance and with his assertion that Sherman

90 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 212 and 86–115.

91 “Allan Sherman Discography,” accessed April 28, 2016, https://www.discogs.com/artist/431545-Allan- Sherman.

92 Later critics would value Katz over Sherman; as Cohen notes that by 1999, times had changed and “Sherman was seen as a virtual enemy collaborator that sold out the Jews to the majority culture.” (M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 256).

93 Ibid., xii.

!169 “crafted the perfect comic model for a country that continues to transform immigrants into

Americans.”94 I differ from Cohen, however, in my reading of the means by which Sherman affected this transformation. I believe Cohen overstates white acceptance of minorities as

“American,” and I read Sherman’s parodies not solely as “Jewish dialect humor”—although such humor figured prominently on Sherman’s first two albums—but rather as a trend towards reducing Jewish racial difference in popular culture.95 I also believe that Cohen does not fully consider the significance of the parodist’s musical borrowings, which I argue underscore

Sherman’s lyrical transformation of his subjects from racially mixed, cosmopolitan Jews to white, middle-class Americans.

Sherman represents an assimilationist trend in Jewish American relations during the early

1960s, part of a larger renegotiation of Jewish identity. I consider Sherman’s works an exemplar in the process by which “Jews in the United States were constructed as white” by the 1960s and

1970s. This new position was fraught with uneasiness, however. As Stratton suggests, Jews were still marked “as different from other whites” and might be placed “outside of whiteness.”96 For

Goldstein, Jewish whiteness involved “significant losses as well as gains” as individuals

“wrestled with its consequences and tried to preserve other cherished means of self-definition.”

94 Ibid., xiii.

95 The Civil Rights movement offers only the most vivid illustration of white resistance to extending full citizenship to non-whites. Later in his book, Cohen suggests that the election of Irish-Catholic John F. Kennedy indicates “the idea that whites could be ethnics, could be culturally different from Wasp Americans without being locked into a racial or religious category” was “enormously attractive to Jews.” His citation of an idea from Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity, however, seems to contradict his claim: Kennedy’s ascendency marked “the mainstreaming not just of a man but of a cultural ideal, that of white ethnicity itself.” Freedman’s reading of Kennedy suggests not the end of assimilation (as Cohen interprets it) but rather a turning point on the long road to that assimilation and an example of the successes others can have once they become “American.” (M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 117–18).

96 Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 110.

!170 As a result, “acceptance often came at a heavy price, belying the widespread notion that the pursuit of whiteness conferred only privilege.”97 While Sherman’s parodies enact an assimilationist trend and embrace whiteness, they also manifest the contradictions and uncertainties inherent in this new ethnic position.

On Sherman’s first album, My Son, the Folk Singer (1962), he explicitly presents himself as Jewish. In addition to using Yiddish vocabulary, the parodist’s narratives revolve around stereotypes concerning Jewish professions (“The Ballad of Harry Lewis” and “Sir Greenbaum’s

Madrigal”), families (“Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max” and “Sarah Jackman”), and thriftiness (“Jump Down, Spin Around (Pick a Dress o’ Cotton”). Notwithstanding the specificity of this ethnic humor, the album topped the Billboard chart. The album’s success helped make it a watershed moment in what Cohen describes as Jewish struggles “to win friends and influence

(non-Jewish) people to accept and even adopt the Jews’ comic, ironic, and irreverent view of non-Jewish culture.”98 Jeffrey Shandler argues that Sherman’s parodies helped define American

Jewishness as “a self-conscious difference in relation to the sensibilities of others, with which

Jews are familiar and against which they take measure of themselves. To be an American Jew, then, is to be parodic.”99 While I agree that Sherman projects a frankly Jewish persona on this record, I argue that scholars who only look at the album’s lyrics are missing a foundational element of Sherman’s identity construction, the musical borrowings that support his contrafacta parodies.

97 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 5–6.

98 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 259.

99 Quoted in ibid.

!171 The album’s parodies are based entirely on “folk songs.” Sherman draws from a range of

Irish, English, French, Caribbean, Mexican, and American sources, employing songs like “Dear

Old Donegal,” “Greensleeves,” “Frère Jacques,” “Matilda,” “Las Chiapanecas,” and “The Battle

Hymn of the Republic.” Sherman’s decision to select such material resulted from legal and practical concerns. Cohen notes that proposed changes to copyright laws complicated the process of licensing parodies. Given the increased difficulties securing permission for parodies, Sherman turned to the folk music revival as a source of popular and freely-available public domain material. Cohen indicates that Sherman’s sources for the parodied material were limited primarily to recordings of folk songs from a handful of singers, suggesting the parodist was sending up the pretensions of the folk revival.100 Finally, the variety of material ensured that

Sherman’s sources would be familiar to a large, non-Jewish audience, an important counterbalance to the specifically Jewish lyrical themes.

The album’s final cut, “Shticks and Stones,” best illustrates Sherman’s fusion of Jewish themes and global “folk” music. The song is a medley of contrafactum parodies. Sherman borrows the refrain/chorus (and sometimes a preceding verse) from ten different folk songs.101

Aside from the enhanced instrumental forces of a big band jazz ensemble at the recording’s

100 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 126–29.

101 The medley borrows “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “Kingston Town/Jamaica Farewell,” “Little David, Play on Your Harp,” “St. James Infirmary,” “God Bless You Merry Gentlemen,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” “The Riddle Song/ I Gave My Love a Cherry,” “Camptown Races,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “Shortening Bread.” Cohen writes that “part of the comedy in all these parodies is the recognition that no matter how much the blacks are despised, the Jews will never come close to having songs about their lives, problems, and traditions embraced by the country, leaving unsaid what that reveals about America’s acceptance of the Jews.” While I agree that the parodist creates incongruities with his Jewish transformations of African American material—for example in his modification of “St. James’ Infirmary” into “Mt. Sinai Hospital”—I believe Cohen overly credits white responses to black cultural practices, reading as acceptance what could more convincingly be framed as appropriation. (Ibid., 152).

!172 beginning and end, the medley consists largely of Sherman singing over a rhythm section's vamp. The parodist’s nasally voice is distinctive; while often struggling to maintain a steady pitch on sustained notes or reach climaxes of phrases, Sherman’s voice has a rough, accessible quality, which he augments by affecting a stereotypical accent (particularly when singing about

Jewish themes or situating these figures in New York City). The parodist compensates for flaws in his singing with his energy and interaction with the audience. Recording live before a studio audience, the parodist often delays singing the next stanza to allow the audience’s laughter to die away or draws out certain lines for comic effect. I believe the audience’s responses to this material are telling. Sherman gets audible laughs from the incongruity between “Jimmy Crack

Corn” and “gimme Jack Cohen,” with scenarios about moving out of Levittown and an overly talkative child, through his verbal play (“a feeling of dismay next May” and “paintners,” which

Cohen describes as “the standard Bronx pronunciation of “painters”), and bits about matzoh balls and Jewish women playing Mah-Jongg.102

The medley’s lyrics revolve around Jewish figures and stereotyped concerns: traveling salesmen, personal health, in-group values regarding marriage and child rearing, and home ownership. Many of the medley’s individuals have Jewish-sounding names (Jack Cohen, the television producer David Susskind, Jerry Mendelbaum, Yasha) or slip into Yiddish slang

(“zaydie”). Given the presence of these lyrics here and throughout the album, most contemporary writers initially believed the album would sell best to Jewish consumers. Cohen interprets the album’s subsequent popularity with a mixed audience as suggesting that “the line between Jews

102 Ibid., 151.

!173 and everyone else had blurred.”103 Sherman obscures these divisions by constructing Jewish identity as one component of a homogenized whiteness concerned with the suburbs, Medicare and health insurance, unwed mothers, and business success.104

I contend that the wide scope of Sherman’s borrowings contribute to this assimilation by positioning Jews as cosmopolitans and integrationists who are relatable figures because of their similarities to Anglo-American culture. Sherman sets tales of traveling Jewish salesmen to minstrel songs (“Blue Tail Fly”) or English carols (“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”), recounts stories of aging Jews to the music of African American spirituals (“Joshua Fit the Battle of

Jericho”), and blends Jewish culinary customs with those of southern Americans (“Shortenin’

Bread”). Such borrowings underscore Jewish ubiquitousness in American life and mitigate

Jewish difference; as Cohen remarks, “Sherman’s Jews are not cute or quaint and they do not live picturesque lives outfitted with colorful customs that non-Jewish Americans are meant to admire or envy.”105 Instead of presenting Jews as ethnic Others, Sherman relies on cosmopolitan subjects and themes, augmented by borrowings from a variety of American and European sources to convey a “universal” sense of Jewish identity; while his Jewish subjects have their own culture, this rests comfortably into broader national traditions. By stressing the ability of

Jewish voices to adopt white cultural norms, by minimizing the number of these voices, and by

103 Ibid., 121.

104 The theme of suburbia in Sherman’s music highlights a key factor of white middle-class social life during the post-war era. Stratton claims that the period between 1959 and 1963 (the years of Sherman’s first successes) constitutes the “high water mark of post-Second World War suburbanization and, in particular, the movement of Jews out of the cities to the new suburbs.” (Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 40).

105 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 136.

!174 personally singing a range of borrowed materials from a number of different countries, Sherman exemplifies a melting pot approach to assimilation.

On his second No. 1 album, My Son, the Celebrity (1962), Sherman minimizes Jewish timbres, names, and cultural references in favor of generic white, Christian, middle-class subjects. While occasionally presenting Jewish subjects in songs like “Harvey and Sheila” and

“Al ’n’ Yetta,” Sherman deemphasizes the prominence of these figures, suggesting that these individuals have become part of America.106 The best example of this comes from one of

Sherman’s only borrowings from Jewish musical traditions. “Harvey and Sheila,” a contrafactum parody of “Hava Nagila,” concerns a Hebrew couple who work hard, fall in love, get married, and climb social and economic ladders until they have reached the upper class.

While being marked musically as Jewish through Sherman’s borrowing (and reinforced through the indexically Jewish timbres of clarinets and percussion), his lyrics prize similarity and whiteness over Jewish difference. The song depicts an “Americanized, English-speaking world” marked in Kun’s analysis by a “cultural and financial landscape” revolving around “suburban lawns, Ivy League universities, attorneys, CEOs, trips to Europe, and GOP tendencies.”107 The protagonists are defined by their careers and purchases. Sherman’s principle comic technique involves abbreviations, creating in-group references that depict the couple’s enthusiastic embrace

106 Sherman suggests the whiteness of this national formation through his musical borrowings. While the parodist draws pre-existing music from a diverse range of sources (including French and Mexican folk songs, Tin Pan Alley and Neapolitan songs, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas), those from white musicians and cultures predominate. Sherman depicts this shared musical culture as a defining element of American identity. He enacts this vision in a parody march addressing impending changes in the telecommunications industry, “The Let’s All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March.” Sherman’s pronouns (“let us show him that we march in unity”) minimize individual differences in favor of a collective formation. His music creates a similar sense of togetherness through a large ensemble and a mixed choir of voices that reinforce, punctuate, or complete Sherman’s sentiments, a sonic metaphor for Sherman’s harmonious melting pot.

107 Kun, “The Yiddish Are Coming,” 373.

!175 of capitalism and consumerism.108 The pace of their spending increases with the song’s tempo, and the dramatic climax arrives at the song’s end, as the band drops out before Sherman’s rubato- laden intonation of the final line: “this could be only in the USA!”

Sherman depicts Harvey and Shelia’s Jewishness as incidental to their national identity and their adoption of markers of middle-class cosmopolitan formation represented through suburban lifestyles. In doing so, he depicts white suburban Jewishness as stable, avoiding the contemporary bind Jews in these new positions faced. Stratton notes that while “Jews were whitened as they moved to the suburbs,” they grew “increasingly disillusioned with the promises of whiteness, most especially as they were materialized in suburban living.”109 Sherman avoids or ignores these tensions. Consequently, I interpret his rhetorical blend of Jewish music with the

American Dream of upward mobility as reinforcing a narrative of assimilation. While I have no doubt that the parodist “playfully but proudly stood up for Jewish names, cultural achievements, and habits,” I maintain that Cohen articulates Sherman’s reactions to a significant issue facing

Jews at that time: “it was not clear what it meant to be a Jewish American.” Sherman navigated this issue by adopting a “comic Jewish persona that was helpful, calming, and healthy” as well as white, non-threatening, and willing to assimilate.110

108 For example: “They bought a house one day, financed by HFA, it had a swimming pool full of H2O. Traded their used MG for a new XKE, switched to the GOP, that’s they way things go.”

109 Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 50 and 80.

110 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 156.

!176 My Son, the Nut, released later that year to similar critical acclaim, furthers this assimilationist agenda.111 Only one parody deals with an overtly Jewish subject, “Hello Muddah,

Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp),” Sherman’s biggest hit.112 The song tells of a child’s initial reticence while attending summer camp and shares his pleas to return home before ending with a change of heart after the boy begins participating in activities. Cohen observes that the song

“retains a Jewish sensibility and speech patterns” and marries these with “summer camps and the

[white] middle-class activities promoted there.” He contends that this fusion hinged on perceptions of Jews as both “members of their own group” and “avid consumers of American life,” arguing that the parody is an integral part of Sherman’s contribution to a

new Jewish humor that left behind ethnic dialect comedy and paved the way for the mainstream Jewish humor. . . . This comedy did not erase Jewish names, styles of speech, or typical activities, but it was also not concerned with immigrants or Jewish religious matters, and so could be read as Jewish or not, depending upon the audience’s degree of familiarity with Jewish life.113

Sherman reinforces this potentially ambiguous identity with several parodies that present notions of white middle-class American life. “Here’s to the Crabgrass” recounts issues of suburbia and white flight to the tune of the English folk song “Country Gardens,” “Automation” concerns technology’s impact on the job market by parodying Fermo Dante Marchetti’s

“Fascination,” and “Headaches” sends up television advertising that peddles medication creating

111 The album topped the Billboard chart for eight weeks. Jason Ankeny attributes this success to “the strength of the Top Five novelty hit ‘Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh.’” (“Allan Sherman Biography,” accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/artist/278672/allan-sherman/biography).

112 The parody adds lyrics to the originally instrumental “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, a well-known piece because of its inclusion in the 1940 Disney film Fantasia. Cohen presents an interesting account of the song in light of parental issues from Sherman’s childhood. (M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 173–76).

113 Ibid., 176.

!177 more problems than it solves to the tune of “Heartaches” by Al Hoffman and John Klenner. On the album’s last track, the parodist frames his obesity as a patriotic act of global service in “Hail to Thee, Fat Person,” a dramatic spoken recitation accompanied by the strains of “America the

Beautiful.” I hear this number as Sherman’s overt attempt to associate himself with the nation in terms unrelated to his Jewishness, an exemplar of the album’s trend to replace Jewish icons with markers of white, middle-class culture.

The success of Sherman’s ethnic program can be charted through his contemporary reception, including a New York Times feature from August 4, 1964 that did not identify Sherman as Jewish. While Sherman could pass with many white audiences who did not hear him as a

Jewish entertainer, he faced difficulties performing for predominantly Jewish audiences at resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains.114 Cohen writes that Sherman experienced “the ambivalence that would trouble the careers of many public Jewish figures whose Jewish audiences expected, or were perceived to expect, or whose mere presence implied to observers and the public figure himself the expectation of an unreasonable level of Jewishness.”115 Sherman’s parodies could render his Jewishness invisible to Anglo American critics and not visible enough to Jewish critics.

This trend continued with his 1964 album Allan in Wonderland, where Sherman’s Jewish subjects have fully integrated into white America. The album’s sole Jewish figure is merely one

114 Ibid., 179 and 186–87.

115 Ibid., 187. These expectations were reflective of larger tensions in postwar culture; as Brodkin writes, it was “not just that Jewishness was chic in mainstream circles, it was also becoming mainstream.” (Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 142). She also notes that “despite this seeming acceptance, many Jews remained uneasy” and uncertain if “America’s love affair with Jews [was] temporary,” noting that “antiradicalism and anti-Semitism sometimes seems to overlap in McCarthyite anticommunism” as evidenced by the “execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” (Ibid., 144).

!178 aspect of Sherman’s representations of mainstream Americans as individuals who receive psychotherapy, overeat, collect green stamps, indulge in consumerism, and profess righteous indignation at youth culture. The parodist connects his vision of whiteness with love of the national formation in his “love song to the whole United States,” “Holiday for States,” a contrafactum of David Rose’s instrumental composition “Holiday for Strings.” Insisting that “the nation patiently awaits” such a song, Sherman breathlessly mentions each of the fifty states by name, as if overwhelmed by his enthusiasm for the subject. I hear the song as suggesting that

Sherman’s assimilated figures are still prickly about their new status, and counter this tendency with bravura displays of patriotism.

The parodist’s desire to fashion himself as white also manifests in his decision to primarily borrow from older white composers (Gilbert and Sullivan, Cole Porter, Victor Herbert, and Edvard Grieg) and the occasional contemporary popular song (like “Heart” from Damn

Yankees). Unlike his first album, Sherman no longer selects a diverse range of material to portray

Jewish subjects as global, cosmopolitan citizens. Instead, he targets songs by whites to reinforce the identity of white, middle-class Americans. The parodist seeks to leave no question that his characters are not just white themselves, they are singing white songs and deeply immersed in white culture.

Sherman employs a similar strategy throughout his final four albums, a period of rapid decline in the quality of his songwriting and vocal ability.116 Cohen writes that “there were not many good songs” on Allan in Wonderland (which reached No. 25 on the Billboard charts) and considers only one song on For Swingin’ Livers Only (1964) funny. Allan Sherman: Live!!

116 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 191, 204, 223, and 232.

!179 (Hoping You Are the Same) (1966) was his first album not to chart, a fate shared by the follow-up

Togetherness (1967), which met with a deafening critical silence.117 While Cohen explains the deterioration of Sherman’s output with his belief that by his fourth album, he was “running low on good Jewish material,” I am hesitant to articulate any single cause to this decline.118 In addition to a shift in national mood after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and changes in popular musical tastes following the British Invasion, Sherman’s self-destructive behaviors resulted in health concerns. Consequently, the parodist “was running out of steam and tiring of the hard work” required to create consistently award-winning material.119 Most of his final parodies borrow traditional American folk songs or recent hits but never rock music or related styles. His infrequent references to Jewish figures depicts these individuals as no different from other members of the larger white body politic. Moreover, Sherman is occasionally hostile towards Jewish figures. He delivers “Westchester Hadassah” from Togetherness in a voice that

Cohen describes as “weary with exasperation and contempt for the Jewish woman’s organization” and with lyrics where “wit takes a backseat to the tasteless denial of everything he once valued and represented.” The song also features a line where Sherman repudiates his heritage: “I’m not even Jewish, stop pestering me.”120 This decision to alienate a potentially sympathetic Jewish audience likely contributed to Sherman’s declining popularity.

117 “Allan Sherman Biography,” accessed April 2, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/artist/278672/allan- sherman/biography.

118 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 192.

119 Ibid., 198.

120 Ibid., 229.

!180 Another possible explanation involves growing disenchantment with Sherman’s ethnic positioning. Stratton notes that while American Jews between 1955 and 1965 “were given entry to whiteness and to the rewards that being white brought, such as suburban, middle-class life . . . large numbers of white, middle-class Americans were beginning to acknowledge that, rather than a utopia, suburbia was a place of confinement where women, especially, had great difficulty leading fulfilling lives.” Sherman’s paeans to suburban life may have been out of touch with this rising cynicism.121 This shift aligns with another contemporary trend in Jewish identity.

Goldstein writes that, following their success integrating into “white, middle-class society,”

Jews’ “drive for integration began to give way to very different concerns, ones that stressed the need for greater Jewish distinctiveness in American life.”122 Such themes are largely absent from

Sherman’s final records, which are full of parodies that value assimilation over difference, sentiments at odds with changing Jewish identity in the mid-1960s.

Over the course of his brief career, Sherman largely wrote parodies that Kun describes as

“humorous and harmless” and that “replaced popular songs with a cast of white Americans who also happened to be Jewish.”123 The parodist’s morphing of Jews from ethnically nondescript cosmopolitan subjects to white, middle-class Americans came at a crucial juncture in larger

121 Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 57–58.

122 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 212.

123 Kun, “The Yiddish Are Coming,” 373. One could even argue that Jewishness in Sherman’s music functions less as a racial marker or source of inspiration than as a flavored exoticism, offering just enough difference to titillate but not enough to frighten.

!181 national discussions about race.124 Goldstein notes that ethnic revivals between the 1960s and

1970s and then the influence of multiculturalism “allowed Jews to assert distinctiveness with less fear that they would be labeled outsiders.”125 The same revivals contributed to the Civil Rights movement, which David Biale argues resulted in contemporary Jews finding themselves “for the first time . . . doubly marginal: marginal to the majority culture, but also marginal among minorities.”126 Brodkin charts a rise of “ethnic pluralism” that encouraged “a new construction of specifically Jewish whiteness” by “contrasting Jews as a model minority with African Americans as culturally deficient.”127 Cohen situates Sherman’s racial positioning as a response to the increasing pressures of the Civil Rights movement, with the parodist “defend[ing] the established order as it crumbled around him” with songs about everything from “fad diets to name-dropping celebrity culture to television commercials touting scientific-sounding gobbledygook.”128 While

Sherman showed a willingness to engage with African American sources on his first two records in order to represent Jewish cosmopolitanism and worldliness, he was increasingly reluctant to

124 While I have focused on ethnicity in this chapter, gender also plays important roles in these debates about Jewish identity. Broken argues that “Jewish whiteness became American whiteness” when “images like Jewish mothers and JAPs [Jewish-American Princesses] were adopted by mainstream white America to form a misogynist version of white womanhood.” She also lists instances of Jews who spoke “as white and . . . for whites” and “Jewish public intellectuals [who] constructed Jewishness as white by contrasting themselves with a mythic blackness.” (Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 168–69).

125 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 223.

126 David Biale, “The Melting Pot and Beyond: Jews and the Politics of American Identity,” in Insider/ Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Hesche (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 27. Such marginality stemmed from a number of factors, including the December 1966 decision by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to exclude white members. Stratton notes that this left Jews “positioned as white while continuing to be subject to discrimination, and . . . being excluded from an alliance with African Americans.” (Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 79–80).

127 Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 144 and 145–53.

128 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 219.

!182 employ these borrowings as he strove to frame American Jews as white subjects first, Jews second. Affecting this rhetorical stance as the Civil Rights movement became increasingly contentious, Sherman minimized his use of black musical sources, instead opting to align his vision of Jewishness more closely with of white Protestant America.129

Sherman appeared reluctant to question this racial binary and instead focused on situating

American Jews in a position of power. The parodist targeted other contemporary issues, with songs mocking depictions of homosexuality on Broadway (“It’s a Most Unusual Play”),

“champion[ing] sexual conformity” (“Peyton Place, U.S.A.”), and criticizing changing sexual mores on prime-time television.130 Such songs signal that parodist’s refusal to engage with the most pressing social issue of his time was a conscious one, and Cohen argues that “nothing could have made Sherman more aligned with the generation the 1960s sought to overturn than his hypocritical sexual puritanism and passivity on racial justice.”131 While Cohen critiques

Sherman’s decision to stay mute on Civil Rights on generational lines, I would argue this also included Sherman’s vested stake in constructing and then reinforcing the status of Jewish whiteness. To establish this, his albums make an assimilationist case for similarities between white, middle-class Americans regardless of their religious or ethnic backgrounds. To maintain this construction, Sherman needed to separate Jews from African Americans, but his decision to downplay the connections between them involved more than evasions of racial topics or

129 For more on Judaism and the rise of black nationalism, see Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 213–23.

130 M. Cohen, Overweight Sensation, 219–20.

131 Ibid., 221.

!183 avoidance of black musical borrowings. Rather, it included his complicity in oppressive structures of white power both at home and abroad.132

Sherman’s collusion must be understood within the larger context of African American and Jewish American interactions.133 Jewish otherness manifested itself in economic, religious, and perceived biological differences from Anglo-Protestant majorities. As a result, Jewish racial history in America can be understood as a negotiation between two poles of a racial binary. As

Sherman’s parodies illustrate, by the late 1960s, the transformation of Jewish citizens into

“whites” had occurred without burnt cork. The parodist’s distancing of Jewish identity from blackness can be read as one manifestation of this transformation, since Sherman had far more to gain through his associations with whiteness. Despite shared interests in social justice (rising racism paralleled an increase in anti-Semitism), economic disparities and “the increasing stridency of public argument” meant that Jewish Americans’ “rapid ascent of the social and economic ladder” contrasted with black circumstances after “the downfall of segregation” and resulted in a widening gap between the two groups.134 Subsequent alliances between African

Americans and Jewish Americans “exposed the more privileged position of Jews, both in society and in the civil rights organizations themselves,” where “integrationist goals and legal means

132 For example, Sherman chose to perform in South Africa in December 1965. The parodist all but endorses apartheid in his claim to the South African Sunday Express that he would not pose the challenges Dusty Springfield raised the previous year with her refusal to entertain non-mixed audiences. (Ibid).

133 Sherman also should not be understood as representative of a majority Jewish viewpoint. Stratton notes, “In the later 1960s,” Jews “became disillusioned with the rewards of whiteness” especially because of the continued prevalence of anti-Semitism. As a result, Jews “began to assert their distinctiveness within whiteness,” a trend that Sherman’s assimilative parodies counters. (Stratton, Jews, Race and Popular Music, 60).

134 Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 4–5. I reject Sundquist’s claim that the “ascent” of African Americans was “destined to be far slower and more erratic.” This suggestion removes agency from black Americans and responsibility from white Americans by framing specific historical choices as “destiny.”

!184 would work better for Jews than for blacks.”135 The result was the loss of what Sundquist calls a

“once vibrant interlocution between two peoples,” as “a dialogue had become an acrimonious argument, then shouted epithets, then sullen silence, and finally somber reminiscence, in tribute and regret.”136

Whiteness, assimilation, and shifts in black-Jewish relations were only some of the challenges facing Jewish American identity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Fink writes of a “structural crisis” that occurred as Jews tried to “adjust to three new and disorientating facts of 1970s Jewish-American life.” The first involved “the unanticipated prospect of hyper- assimilation” as Jewish outmarriage rose from five percent in the 1920s to over thirty percent by the 1970s. This increase precipitated fears that American secularism would tempt “the next generation of Jews to total assimilation.” Consequently, fears about the destruction of Jewish identity “began to vie with the traditional aspiration to fit in.”137 Fink also cites the Six-Days War

(1967) as another factor threatening Jewish American identity. The war encouraged criticisms of the Jewish state as militaristic or as a colonial oppressor, complicating American Jewish attempts

“to maintain their liberal, multicultural identity.” He notes that as a result of this war, black and

Chicano liberation movements began to denounce Israel (and to some extent all Jews), and that

135 Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 230–31. Rogin believes this coalition had come apart by the end of the 1960s and cites 1949 as a turning point in this relationship, manifesting a trend seen as early as 1920. (Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 101 and 251–68). Sundquist sketches this arc differently, considering “a high tide of activist cooperation” peaking “during the civil rights era of the 1950s through the mid-1960s” and “undone . . . by the eruption of Black Power.” (Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 4).

136 Sundquist, Strangers in the Land, 1. Goldstein similarly argues that “a new era of acrimony between blacks and Jews” resulted from increasingly self-assertive black identities and the hardening of racial binaries around Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, both of which gave Jews “fewer means of claiming a status different from that majority of privileged whites.” (Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 216).

137 Robert Fink, “‘Klinghoffer’ in Brooklyn Heights,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17 (2005): 189.

!185 “openly anti-Semitic positions were publicly taken by groups like the Black Panthers and the

Nation of Islam.” The war also affected American Jewish conceptions of Israel. While the Jewish state had previously served as “the foundation of American Jewish identity, the rallying and unifying point for American Jews of all degrees of orthodoxy,” Israeli foreign policy became a source of contention and disagreement.138

Fink cites 1982 as the beginning of another “period of intense political anxiety,” which reached its apex between 1985 and 1991, when “almost every year brought a new attack on the integrity of American Jewish identity.”139 Between 1988 and 1989, Israeli Jews “dealt another stunning blow” to American identity by calling into question conversions performed by

Conservative or Orthodox rabbis. This triggered what Fink describes as “the most violent break with Israel in the history of American Judaism.” Within this context of widespread debates about

Jewishness in the United States, a national survey of Jewish populations released in 1990 reported that the increasing trend towards outmarriage observed in the 1970s had reached fifty percent. This news proved with “mathematical certainty that, if trends continued, Judaism in the

United States would eventually cease to exist.”140

Fink relates these issues to popular depictions of Jews in American media, as this “fast- evaporating, deeply fragmented, politically ambivalent community” proved it “would react explosively to almost any direct representation of its own middle-class American-Jewish

138 Ibid., 189.

139 Ibid., 190 and 191.

140 Ibid., 191 and Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 232–34.

!186 culture.”141 Such responses were not new, as criticisms of Jewish representation on television shows like Bridget Loves Bernie in March of 1973 contributed to a sixteen-year period bereft of

Jewish-themed sitcoms. This changed abruptly in 1989, the start of a three-year period in which

“no less than eight Jewish-themed situation comedies made their debut.” During the early 1990s,

Jewish characters were widely represented in mainstream media, and “most of these sitcoms took extraordinary pains to displace their Jewishness . . . or to remap older stereotypes” by representing Jews in unconventional ways.142

Another response during the 1990s was to display a frankly Jewish subjectivity, a strategy adopted by 2 Live Jews, a duo consisting of MC Moisha (played by Eric Lambert) and Easy

Irving (Joe Stone). Through their parodies, 2 Live Jews proudly claimed Jewish difference, situated American Jewry in national racial ideologies, and challenged the limitations of white power structures. Between 1990 and 1998, the duo released four albums, performing as octogenarian rappers complete with what Judah Cohen describes as “verbal tics and a stereotyped, avuncular cultural knowledge.”143 The duo’s Jewish personas dominated critical responses to their first album, which Johnny Loftus describes as an “ethnic joke with a beat.”144

Writers in People, the Baltimore Sun, and the Orlando Sun-Sentinel incorporated Yiddish slang

141 Fink, “‘Klinghoffer’ in Brooklyn Heights,” 190.

142 Ibid., 189–90.

143 “2 Live Jews Discography,” accessed April 28, 2016, https://www.discogs.com/artist/535628-2-Live- Jews and J. Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica,” 6.

144 Johnny Loftus, “2 Live Jews Biography,” accessed March 10, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/artist/ 431857/2-live-jews/biography.

!187 into their reviews, with Charles Fishman remarking that the pair “offer[s] cute rap music that pokes gentle fun at Jews.”145

These critics’ tendency not to take the group seriously fits with 2 Live Jews’ material and their light-hearted approach to interviews (which they often conducted in character), but I believe this tendency overlooks the duo’s serious cultural engagement. I concur with Judah Cohen’s argument that “under all the clowning and surface attitude lay a clear, hegemonic articulation of what constituted a ‘good’ Jewish life, along with an exhortation for Jewish listeners to take such steps.”146 The duo’s explicit Jewishness signals a departure from parodic practices over the preceding decades, as 2 Live Jews constructed an identity distinct from recent depictions of Jews in American popular culture. I maintain that the pair has more in common with Mickey Katz than with Alan Sherman as they embrace their Jewish heritage and insert an ethnically distinct

Jewishness into American culture. Like Katz, I believe that the parodists use borrowed African

American and Jewish music to frame American Jewry as separate from mainstream white culture, a decision that distinguished this ethnic identity from that of white Americans.

Many of the parodies on their 1990 album As Kosher as They Wanna Be concentrate on

Jewish difference. Their lyrics for “J.A.P. Rap” feature stereotyped representations of the Jewish-

American Princess as spoiled, privileged, materialistic, and superficial, traits framed as positives

145 David Hiltbrand, Craig Tomashoff, and Michael Small, “Picks and Pans Review: As Kosher as They Wanna Be,” People, October 9, 1990, accessed March 10, 2016, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/ 0,,20118903,00.html; Jonathan Takiff, “2 Live Jews ‘Just Kibitzing with Rhymes,’” Baltimore Sun, October 25, 1990, accessed March 10, 2016, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1990-10-25/features/1990298196_1_moisha-live- jews-rapping; Charles Fishman, “2 Live Jews Not Quite as Famous as They Wanna Be, But Still Trying,” Orlando Sentinel, October 7, 1990, accessed March 10, 2016, http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1990-10-07/news/ 9010040978_1_2-live-jews-live-crew-lambert.

146 Judah Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica: The Politics of Representin’ Heebster Heritage,” Popular Music 28 (2009): 6.

!188 because the women can offer their men otherwise inaccessible luxuries. In “Shake Your Tuchas,”

Lambert and Stone address their difficulties communicating through a language barrier (“we talk a different kind of Hebrew language”) and offer as a solution definitions for numerous Yiddish terms.147 In “Accountant Suckers,” “The Matchmaka’ Game,” and “Beggin’ for a Bargain,” the duo plays with stereotypes regarding Jewish professions, dating practices, and frugality, while the title song “As Kosher as They Wanna Be” discusses Jewish practices concerning food and

Sabbath celebrations.

This last song draws a connection between the parodists and 2 Live Crew by referencing that group’s 1989 album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. This album exemplifies the sound of

Miami bass (or booty bass) music, a regional style of hip hop influenced by the “futuristic electro sounds of artists like Afrika Bambaataa” and relying heavily on “synthesizers and vocoders,” a

“deeply resonant bass/kick-drum sound,” fast tempos, “sustained, multitonal bass sounds and sped-up breakbeats.”148 Most of Lambert and Stone’s first album consists of style parodies evocative of the Miami bass sound popularized by 2 Live Crew. The parodists stress this connection by parodying the rap group’s album cover (cf., figures 3.1 and 3.2) and through a contrafactum parody of the notorious single “Me So Horny.”

147 The group describes the words tuchas, shiksa, schmuck, kosher, putz, shtuping, kvetching, schlep, bagel, and meshugaas.

148 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Miami bass,” by Gavin Mueller, accessed April 16, 2016, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2256999.

!189 Figure 3.1. 2 Live Crew, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, album cover.

Figure 3.2. 2 Live Jews, As Kosher as They Wanna Be, album cover.

“Oui! It’s So Humid” features two quick-witted old men kvetching about the weather, providing “stereotyped depictions of Jewish Miami, albeit as imagined by Jewish geriatric retirees.”149 Moisha and Irving create explicitly Jewish subjects through speech (using Yiddish slang like “schmucks” as well as varied pronunciations like “schvetten” for “sweating”) and

149 J. Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica,” 6.

!190 references to food (including bagels, blintz, pumpernicks, Schulzies, corned beef, brisket, and salmon).150 The parodists create incongruities with this borrowing by playing with the original’s treatment of the trope of black men as sexually voracious (“I won’t tell your mama if you don’t tell your dad, I know he’ll be disgusted . . . won’t your mama be so mad”).151

In this parody and throughout the album, Lambert and Stone create incongruities between their borrowings—represented as hip, black, and young—and their characters—represented as square, white, aged, and Jewish.152 This incongruity provides fodder for humor while helping the duo create multi-layered identities that require listener familiarity with stereotypes in several cultural and racial registers. By signifying on these stereotypes, the parodists portray their ethnic identities as a performative decision selected from a continuum of possibilities. Furthermore, by playing with stereotypes concerning age, ethnicity, and musical style, the parodists align themselves with a rap group censored for their sexual content.

Through their borrowings from black musicians, 2 Live Jews distinguish themselves from aesthetic and moral values related to whiteness, a distancing act relying on the notoriety

150 The refrain features two other markers of Jewishness, as a female with a nasally, affected accent intones the song’s title faintly accompanied by a modal line evocative of Hebrew music.

151 The rappers relate this issue to ideas of power through a sample in the song’s refrain (as well as significant portions of the intro and conclusion). The sample draws from a scene from the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket featuring a Vietnamese sex worker propositioning and negotiating with two American servicemen. 2 Live Crew edit and repurposed the original’s largely white representations of sexuality, racial difference, and power to depict black masculinity, sexuality, and aural depictions of intercourse.

152 Playing with these nested relationships, 2 Live Jews invert images from hip hop culture, adorning themselves with chains and carrying canes that double as walking aids and signifiers of their masculinity. Judah Cohen writes that such treatment became common as many later Jewish musicians turned to hip hop as a way of asserting their masculinity. The duo also creates age-based humor revolving around Irving’s hearing loss, outdated dress, and physical movements. I believe this geriatric humor shift the comic focus away from reductive descriptions of “white people rapping” and towards a hybrid humor that creates multiple layers of incongruity. (J. Cohen, “Hip- hop Judaica,” 1–18).

!191 surrounding 2 Live Crew’s lyrics. Their 1986 debut 2 Live Crew Is What We Are provoked a legal battle after a “Florida record store employee was arrested in 1987 on felony obscenity charges for selling the album to a fourteen-year” old girl.153 Another arrest was made in Alabama the following year, with similar controversy surrounding the group’s third album, As Nasty as

They Wanna Be (1989).154 Sheriffs in Broward County, Florida instigated obscenity charges against the group, resulting in a judge’s ruling to remove all copies of the album from stores.

Miles White situates this “high profile case” as reflecting “the broader moral panic surrounding rap music at the time.”155 One of the major legal issues raised in these obscenity hearings involved the rapper’s “literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Such merit constitutes the third prong used by the Supreme Court to declare material obscene and beyond the scope of First Amendment protections.156 Consequently, 2 Live Crew’s trial involved the aesthetic merits of rap music as well as the capacity of a white-dominated criminal justice system to determine these merits. Arguing before federal district judge Jose A. Gonzalez in the Southern

District of Florida, political science professor Carlton Long testified that the group’s musical style “must be considered in its cultural context in order to pass judgment on its artistic value.”157

153 Grove Music Online, s.v. “2 Live Crew,” by Miles White, accessed April 17, 2016, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2218503.

154 For more on this 1988 arrest, see Peter Applebome, “Tape Obscenity Conviction Is Upset,” New York Times, February 23, 1990, accessed April 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/23/arts/tape-obscenity- conviction-is-upset.html.

155 White, “2 Live Crew.”

156 Brian O’Gallagher and David P. Gaertner, “2 Live Crew and Judge Gonzalez Too: 2 Live Crew and the Miller Obscenity Test,” Journal of Legislation 18 (1992): 113.

157 Ibid., 116 and 118.

!192 Long’s attempt to situate 2 Live Crew in the context of regional rap styles and previous forms of black vernacular expression (like the dozens) as well as his argument that the group’s independent release was a political act given the white majorities in the six contemporary major record labels failed to persuade Gonzalez, who ruled the album obscene.158

This decision—a first in American political and musical life—was largely understood as racially motivated. Both 2 Live Crew leader Luther Campbell and Harvard professor Henry

Louis Gates, Jr. described these responses to the record’s graphic depictions of sexual acts and its explicitly black musical style as a threat to white values. Each framed the deployment of police and judicial power to criminalize the record as an attempt to control and limit black expression.

Campbell recalls his case as “an attack on Hip Hop.”159 He described feeling “the full weight of

American racism come down on my head,” because his music violated the “single biggest racial taboo in the country.” Campbell explained that his group “had done the one thing you’re never supposed to do. We were black men coming across the color line talking about sex. We were black men in the company of whites, and we’d forgotten to lower our heads and shuffle away.”160

Gates likewise framed his response to the obscenity charges in racial terms. He argued, “2 Live

Crew is engaged in heavy handed parody, turning the stereotypes of black and white American

158 Ibid., 118–21.

159 Jay Balfour, “Uncle Luke Recalls Supreme Court Battle over 2 Live Crew’s Music,” April 23, 2015, accessed April 17, 2016, http://hiphopdx.com/news/id.33549/title.uncle-luke-recalls-supreme-court-battle-over-2- live-crews-music.

160 Luther Campbell, “‘Stale White Bitches Tried to Take Us Down’: Luther Campbell on 2 Live Crew, Race, Hip-hop and the Conservative, Southern ’80s,” August 29, 2015, accessed April 17, 2016, http:// www.salon.com/2015/08/29/ stale_white_bitches_tried_to_take_us_down_luther_campbell_on_2_live_crew_race_hip_hop_and_the_conservativ e_southern_80s/.

!193 culture on their heads” and maintained that the record could not be understood without knowledge of black vernacular traditions. The scholar closed his New York Times op-ed with a provocative and racialized assertion: “censorship is to art what lynching is to justice.”161

Given the racialized reception of 2 Live Crew’s music, the parodies of 2 Live Jews add a complex layer of ethnic constructions. It is possible to interpret As Kosher as They Wanna Be as a joke mocking or attacking African Americans, sending a message that the Jewish parodists are more in line with white values than the rappers.162 While parody’s polyvalence does not rule out such a reading, I contend the album is better understood as a statement about Jewish marginality.

My argument follows Gates’s line of reasoning about the original album, because understanding the parodies of 2 Live Jews requires similar cultural competency.

In this way, both the original and parody albums represent attempts to demarcate limits to an ethnic identity and perform this identity in a white-dominated cultural landscape. Lambert and

Stone created this identity by stressing endemically Jewish markers of religion, cuisine, language

(their definitions of Yiddish terms in “Shake Your Tuchas”), and humor. On “Jokin’ Jews,” the parodists not only highlight Jewish difference, they mark it off as inaccessible for others, staking a claim that Jewish humor should be avoided by Gentile audiences for reasons of comprehensibility and sensitivity: “if you’re not Jewish, it’s not funny.” This parody also features several jokes about the “sheriff coming to arrest us” because they keep saying “shtup” (a vulgar term for intercourse). These lines reference the 2 Live Crew controversy, suggesting that—in

161 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2012), 513–14. The piece appeared in the New York Times on June 19, 1990.

162 I thank Dr. Michael Markham for this challenge to my original argument.

!194 contrast to black culture—whites in power are so unfamiliar with Jewish culture that they are unable to exercise censorship or control over potentially controversial topics. By suggesting that

Jewish culture is unassimilable, the parodists position themselves within the power structures of the dominant racial discourse, both negotiating their identities within the larger black-white axis and marking ways that Jews are distinct within this axis.

2 Live Jews’ decision to borrow principally from a black musical style to depict their vision of Jewish identity is a change from Sherman’s practice, which deemphasized black markers in favor of white ones. Another difference between these parodists involves the duo’s sonic coding of Jewish difference into the timbres of their recordings. In addition to concentrating their lyrics on Jewish subjects and themes, Lambert and Stone also affect stereotypical accents meant to evoke the vocal patterns and sounds of New York City Jews who retired to Florida.163 These accents compliment their use of Yiddish slang on songs like “Shake

Your Tuchas,” which borrows the chorus of KC and the Sunshine Band’s dance hit “Shake Your

Booty” to reinsert Yiddish phrases into a broader American discourse.164 The parodists’ portrayal of Jewish difference extends beyond the voice to encompass a distinct musical culture that serves as a source of inspiration and source material. “J.A.P. Rap” features a klezmer-styled quotation of a children’s song, “The Ballad of Moisha and Irving/ Irving and Moisha” features the parodists musically reminiscing to quotations of the refrains of the Hanukah song “I Have a

163 I am grateful to Dr. Stephanie Schlagel for her dialogue about Jewish voices and bodies.

164 The parodists sample the original’s distinctive horn part and write new lyrics for the original’s chorus. This borrowing occurs over a style parody of Miami bass music.

!195 Little Dreidel” and “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof, and “As Kosher as They

Wanna Be” paraphrases “Hava Nagila.”165

Borrowings from Jewish music play an important role in the group’s boldest statement of identity, “Young Jews Be Proud,” which recounts the histories and traditions of the Jewish people. Jonathan Takiff of the Baltimore Sun interpreted the song as “militant,” a telling response given the parodists’ assertive depiction of ethnic identity.166 While the parody lacks any aggressive or confrontational lyrics, Takiff seems threatened by the song’s call for Jewish

Americans to identity themselves as different. The track begins with the sounds of children playing in the distance and a spoken reminder “that it wasn’t always this easy for us to sit back and enjoy the little ones.”167 Lambert and Stone then shift from nostalgia to pedagogy, directing their song to Jewish youth so they “never forget what your people went through to get you here.”

By recounting Old Testament events from the Books of Exodus, Joshua, Kings, and the Song of

Solomon, the duo connects historical events with recent memories of Jewish suffering to signal that Jewish pride remains a debt the living owe to those who perished seeking religious freedom.

This parody’s music is remarkable for two reasons. First, it features the album’s only instance where the duo raps with their normal voices (instead of affected aged voices), a personal touch lending a sincerity to their message. Second, Lambert and Stone quote a Jewish melody

165 “J.A.P. Rap” borrows a playground song known variously as “Senorita with a Flower in Her Hair,” “Going to Kentucky,” and “Miss Suzy.” (“Senorita With a Flower in Her Hair,” accessed April 17, 2016, https:// playgroundsongs.com/2008/08/06/i-met-a-senorita-with-flowers-in-her-hair/). My thanks to Lynne Stern Elkes for identifying this borrowing.

166 Takiff, “2 Live Jews ‘just kibitzing with rhymes,’” October 25, 1990.

167 These sounds could be allusions to James Brown’s “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which features a choir of children chanting a response to Brown’s assertion of black identity.

!196 that circulates as the folk song “Eitz chayim” (“Tree of Life”) and as “Hatikvah,” a sonic marker of Zionism and the unofficial anthem of Israel at the time of 2 Live Jew’s recording.168 I contend that this borrowing has multiple functions. For those unfamiliar with this borrowed music, the minor mode melody can signal general traits of Jewish music. The music can also create lyrical resonances for those familiar with either borrowed text. “Eitz chayim” envisions Judaism as “a

Tree of Life to those who hold fast to it,” while “Hatikvah” describes the yearning of “Jewish souls” towards Zion. The borrowed tune adds a layer of commentary to the parodists’ lyrics, situating their work in a history of songs that explicitly celebrate Jewish difference. Referencing this history helps the parodists enact their vision of contemporary Jewish identity. By fusing contemporary electronic dance music and rap with this folk song, the duo demonstrates one way that American Jews can blend the modern with the traditional, celebrating their heritage while understanding its relevance in daily life and maintaining a collective identity separate from that of white Americans. By relying predominately on black musics to present these borrowings and divorce Jewish identity from whiteness, however, I argue that Lambert and Stone end up reaffirming the existence of a racial binary in American life.

The duo’s subsequent albums construct similarly hybridized contemporary identities. On

Fiddling with Tradition, the duo rewrites songs from Fiddler on the Roof as rap parodies. The pair also released Disco Jews, an album of disco parodies, and Christmas Jews, which

168 My thanks to Sarah Pozederac-Chenevey for identifying the borrowing of “Eitz chayim” and sharing her copy of Bonia Shur’s arrangement. “Hatikvah” was sung communally during several of the Zionist Congresses, an association that continued through Israel’s adoption of the song as an unofficial (1948) and then official anthem (2004). (“Hatikva,” accessed April 15, 2016, http://www.hillel.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/ hatikvah-navigator-amp-history.pdf?sfvrsn=0 and “Hatikvah,” accessed April 15, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hatikvah).

!197 incongruously presents Jewish versions of Christmas songs.169 These albums confront issues of assimilation head-on by challenging the conventional categories that demarcate sonic and social space in America. The duo mixes rap music with borrowings from Fiddler on the Roof to highlight relationships between black and Jewish cultures while undermining the “Jewish” nature of the Broadway musical’s representations, while the idea of Jewish voices sending up a major

Christian holiday reminds us of the numerous other religious practices sometimes overlooked in a Protestant-majority nation.

Such hybridity constitutes a major trend present in the music of Jewish artists at the turn of the century. Recent Jewish American cultural production has shifted away from the assimilative whiteness exemplified by Sherman and towards the embrace of difference (religious, ethnic, and otherwise) exemplified by 2 Live Jews. Goldstein articulates a pattern wherein “Jews are becoming increasingly frustrated with the constraints of acceptance in white America,” which manifests in “a sense of alienation and disengagement from whiteness.”170 By the early 2000s, several artists began creating music “aimed specifically at instilling a sense of Judaism where such expression had traditionally been seen as absent.”171 Judah Cohen describes this as an

“American Jewish ‘hipster’ culture phenomenon,” which he interprets as a response to increased

169 Christmas Jews also includes “Jewish Is Jewish,” a parody of Lenny Bruce’s famous routine dividing the world into hip Jewish and square goyish.

170 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 235. Subsequently, he argues that American Jews grew disaffected from “the lures of a white identity” in part because of “the emotional costs whiteness has carried for them,” since American racial politics “often predicated full acceptance in white America on the abandonment of cultural distinctiveness and the disavowal of deeply held group ties, once expressed in the language of ‘race.’” (Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 236).

171 J. Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica,” 1. This trend is not limited to music. For descriptions of Heeb magazine and the “Jewxspolitation” film The Hebrew Hammer, see ibid., 235–36.

!198 social attention to the issues of Jewish youth, particularly “ominous reports of their increasing ambivalence toward religious life.”172 He writes that many of these artists “relied heavily on a doubly encoded complex of strategies that simultaneously aimed to critique the Jewish establishment and invite the disenfranchised to participate in alternate forms of Jewish expression” through hip hop aesthetics.173 Goldstein affirms that increasingly Jews began

“stressing their ‘shared history’ with African Americans,” a framing that stresses the persistence of a black-white binary even while it formulates an overt Jewishness portrayed as distinct from white culture.174

Rap music often became the soundtrack for this agenda.175 Judah Cohen notes several

“areas of convergence between Jews and rap/hip hop” including “education, parody, mimesis, and mainstream contribution.”176 For example, while principally rock parodists, the band Shlock

Rock also targeted rap songs and occasionally composed original raps “focusing on such topics as Jewish pride and Jewish history.”177 Matisyahu, Ju-Tang Clan, MC Paul Barman and Eric

172 J. Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica,” 2 and 8.

173 Ibid., 8.

174 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 5.

175 The Beastie Boys occupy a space of Jewish difference both mediated by and minimized by hip hop. (Charles Hiroshi Garrett, “Pranksta Rap: Humor as Difference in Hip-Hop” in Changing the Subject: Difference in Musical Scholarship, eds. Olivia Bloechl, Jeffrey Kallberg, and Melanie Lowe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], 315–37 and Jon Stratton, “The Beastie Boys: Jews in Whiteface,” Popular Music 27 [2008]: 413–32).

176 J. Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica,” 6. One example of a Jewish musician who combines these areas of convergence is Orthodox musician and parodist Country Yossi. Yossi performs educational vernacular parodies and eventually expanded his work into a brand with a radio show (debuting in 1986), magazine, and other media. (“About Country Yossi,” http://countryyossi.com/STAGE1/main.php?page=aboutus, accessed February 16, 2016).

177 Ibid., 5.

!199 Schwartz (aka Smooth E), and Hip-Hop Hoodíos all incorporated elements of hip hop culture in songs and parodies that unequivocally promote and support Jewish identities.178 Rap music serves as a sonic parallel to the sense of difference these artists champion, and musicians use these borrowings to position Jews ethnically in contemporary America.

Chicanoness

While scholars including José David Saldívar, Michelle Habell-Pallan, and Deborah

Pacini Hernandez have investigated El Vez, none have examined his musical borrowings. In this section, I analyze these borrowings as well as his parody of an American icon, Elvis Presley. I begin by situating El Vez’s work in the larger context of Mexican immigration to the United

States, the “Latino threat narrative,” and the Chicano Movement. I then analyze the construction of Chicano identity that El Vez creates through his lyrical themes and musical borrowings. I conclude by interrogating the icon of Elvis and his continued circulation in popular culture. El

Vez’s reliance on borrowings from Elvis reframes music once considered threatening to white culture because of its connections with black and lower-class white cultures. I argue that El Vez’s parodies rely on acceptance of this repertoire as a way of making his political lyrics acceptable to a mainstream audience. His music shows the lingering power of a black-white binary on ethnic groups striving to construct their own identity in contemporary America.

178 Despite their popularity with Jewish audiences (and Matisyahu’s crossover appeal), Judah Cohen writes that this music is often marginalized as comedy or novelty music because it “bear[s] such dissonance with conventional expectations of ‘Jewish music’” or is framed as “special-interest . . . bringing a Jewish point of view to a broader audience.” These artists have also been held as examples for critics concerned with transmitting messages to youth populations, which Cohen rejects, arguing that these spaces allowed “young Jews [to] define and redefine their own terms, celebrating their triumphs over the struggles of the past while forging an agenda for the mensches of the future.” (J. Cohen, “Hip-hop Judaica,” 14–15). An example of a group that brings “a Jewish point of view to a broader audience” are The Maccabeats, who perform Jewish-themed holiday parodies of contemporary vernacular songs like “Candlelight” and “Purim Song.”

!200 While recent political rhetoric has positioned illegal emigration from Mexico as a threat to U. S. security and sovereignty, such responses obscure a larger truth about Mexican peoples in

America. As Albert Camarillo writes, “people of Mexican origin occupy a unique status in contemporary American society” since they “are among the newest and oldest of ethnic groups within the U.S.”179 Permanent settlements of Spanish and/or Mexican peoples can be traced back almost four hundred years. Camarillo identifies four additional waves of immigration over the last one hundred years, with the previous three decades constituting “a high-water mark of immigration [sic] from Mexico,” propelling “the Mexican-origin population to unprecedented numbers” and contributing to the “formation of one of the most diverse and fastest-growing groups” in America today.180

Since “mass immigration from Mexico spans an almost uninterrupted period of nearly a century,” this pattern distinguishes Chicano/a immigration patterns from those of other groups who “tended to enter in one or two large waves during a concentrated period of years or decades.”181 This is best exemplified by immigration patterns during the opening decades of the twentieth century. These years were dominated by European immigration, with Mexicans accounting for under 2 percent of immigrants between 1910 and 1914. A decade later, however,

179 Albert M. Camarillo, “Mexico,” in New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965, ed. Mary C. Waters and Reed Ueda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 504.

180 Ibid.

181 Ibid., 516. Differences abound between the East Coast (dominated by European immigrants) and West Coast (dominated by Asian and Central American immigrants). West Coast immigration featured a wider variety of competing Others. Bill Hing remarks that while Mexicans were “subject to cultural, social, and racial complaints from the Anglo-oriented power structure, for some time in the early part of this century . . . they were not regarded as unassimilable as had been the Chinese. But Mexicans definitely had to be assimilated.” (Bill Ong Hing, To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation [New York: New York University Press, 1997], 19).

!201 this number increased to 16 percent as a result of the Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1920) and the

1924 Immigration Act, a policy “effectively halt[ing] immigration from Europe” and reinforcing

“restrictions against Asian immigration.” Consequently, nearly a tenth of the population of

Mexico, “perhaps as many as 1.5 million people, relocated to the U.S.”182 This migration explains a historical oddity in the U.S. Census. According to the Pew Research Center, the category for “Hispanic” is conspicuously absent, appearing once in 1930 where the category

“Mexican” appeared “as a separate race . . . for the first and only time” in the Census’s history.183

Mexicans seemingly disappear from official records again until 1970. One cause was discrimination from white South-westerners who intended to effectively put Mexicans “on the opposite side of the color line from whites.”184 Racial difference also drove Great Depression-era efforts targeting these individuals “as contributors to the economic problems of the Great

Depression and as dangers to the health and welfare of American citizens.” In response,

Mexicans were targets of both “a large-scale voluntary repatriation and an involuntary deportation program orchestrated by the U.S. Department of Labor and local police and welfare

182 Camarillo, “Mexico,” 506–7.

183 Pew Research Center, “What Census Calls Us.” This seemingly straightforward narrative is complicated by the fact that the “Census Bureau does not consider Hispanic/Latino identity to be a race. Ethnicity is asked as a separate question.” This caveat demonstrates the potential for conflict between ethnoracial assignment and identification, since contrary to the Census’s practice, “two-thirds (67%) of Hispanic adults describe their Hispanic background as a part of their racial background.” (Pew Research Center, “The Many Dimensions of Hispanic Racial Identity,” June 11, 2015, accessed February 21, 2016, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/06/11/chapter-7-the- many-dimensions-of-hispanic-racial-identity/).

184 Camarillo, “Mexico,” 506–7.

!202 relief agencies” that resulted in “perhaps as many as 750,000 Mexican immigrants and their

American-born children” leaving the country.185

Economic swings during and after World War II resulted in an increased need for agricultural labor, which the federal government regulated through the bracero program. The program continued until 1964, by which time approximately five-million temporary workers had entered the country. While many did so legally, the 1950s marked the “first large wave of undocumented immigration,” which the Immigration and Naturalization Service countered with

“Operation Wetback.”186 Despite hundreds of thousands of deportations and arrests, immigration

(legal and otherwise) continued unabated until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act resulted in a surge of immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin and South America.187 The resulting increase in illegal immigration occurred “not because there was a sudden surge in

Mexican migration” but because of an absence of “legal way[s] to accommodate the long- established flows” of migrants following Congressional adjustments to the total availability of guest worker and permanent resident visas.188

185 Ibid., 508 and Hing, To Be an American, 19–26.

186 Camarillo, “Mexico,” 508–9.

187 Bill Hing is careful to remind us that while immigration quotas were removed in 1965, restrictions were still placed on Mexican and Latino immigration between 1965 and 1977. (Hing, To Be an American, 23–24). Massey and Pren suggest that “paradoxical as it may seem, US immigration policy often has very little to do with trends and patterns of immigration,” instead suggesting that “prevailing economic circumstances and political ideologies” more significantly impact “the relative openness or restrictiveness of US policies.” (Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38 [2012]: 2).

188 Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy,” 4.

!203 Soaring immigration and a high birth rate meant that the percentage of the U.S. population considered of Mexican origin increased from one percent in 1960 to almost nine percent in 2005.189 While this group displays significant internal diversity that makes generalizations problematic, Camarillo’s socio-economic profile identifies several shared traits: these individuals are largely American-born, reside in urban centers in the southwest, lag behind non-Hispanic whites in terms of “educational achievement and jobs in higher-level occupations,” and lead transnational lives.190 Despite the documented diversity of this group, media depictions often collapse distinctions between “Mexican” and “illegal” or focuses on the large number of undocumented workers. This construction contributes to what Leo Chavez terms a “Latino threat narrative,” which he describes as the widespread belief that

Latinos are not like previous immigrant groups, who ultimately became part of the nation. According to the assumptions . . . in this narrative, Latinos are unwilling or incapable of integrating, of becoming part of the national community. Rather, they are part of an invading force from south of the border that is bent on reconquering land that was formerly theirs . . . and destroying the American way of life.191

Such narratives are promoted by conservatives including politician Patrick Buchanan, pundit Lou

Dobbs, and academic Samuel Huntington, who collectively frame immigration as a grave threat to white national identity.192 Consequently, government officials have reacted in a variety of ways to this perceived threat. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials fanned the

189 Camarillo, “Mexico,” 510.

190 Ibid., 513–16.

191 Leo Chavez, Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, 2nd ed. (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3.

192 Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy,” 5.

!204 rhetorical flames and successfully leveraged concerns about illegal immigration to increase their budget.193 This abuse of State power mirrors an increase in violence against Latinos perpetrated by individual citizens. The Southern Poverty Law Center charts an increase in “hate crimes targeting Latinos” attributable to “anti-immigrant propaganda . . . on both the margins and in the mainstream of society.”194 These sentiments have also been incorporated into legislative responses to immigration, both in state efforts including California’s Proposition 187 (1994) and

Arizona’s SB 1070 (2010) as well as in national laws like the Immigration Reform and Control

Act (1986), the Immigration Act (1990), and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant

Responsibility Act (1996).195 In this context, Chavez considers the Latino threat narrative’s pervasiveness one part of a “contemporary crisis in the meaning of citizenship.”196 Perceived threats to old conceptions of “being American” posed by demographic shifts and encounters with

193 For example, the INS budget increased 178 percent between 1990 and 1997. (“An Overview of Federal Drug Control Programs on the Southwest Border,” accessed April 19, 2016, https://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/ publications/enforce/border/ins_3.html and Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy,” 4, 22, and 28–29). Mexicans have also been disproportionally targeted for deportation under legislation intended to combat terrorism. For example, in 2009, 72 percent of deported individuals were Mexican, despite the fact that “none of the terrorist attacks involved Mexicans, and none of the terrorists entered through Mexico.” (Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy,” 8).

194 This 2008 finding marks a continuation of a four-year trend. (Mark Potok, “Anti-Latino Hate Crimes Rise for Fourth Year in a Row,” October 29, 2008, accessed March 22, 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/ 2008/10/29/anti-latino-hate-crimes-rise-fourth-year-row and Gabriel Gutiérrez, “Culture Wars, Violence, and Latinos/as,” in Latinos and Latinas at Risk: Issues in Education, Health, Community, and Justice, ed. Gabriel Gutiérrez [Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2015], 57–65).

195 “List of United States Immigration Laws,” accessed March 22, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_United_States_immigration_laws. At the state level, numerous pieces of legislation were passed in 2010 and 2011. Liberal news outlet Mother Jones has documented 164 “anti-immigration laws passed by state legislatures” since 2010. (Ian Gordon and Tasneem Raja, “164 Anti-Immigration Laws Passed Since 2010? A MoJo Analysis,” accessed March 22, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/anti-immigration-law-database).

196 Chavez, Latino Threat, 4.

!205 foreign languages and cultures have spawned, according to David Maciel, Isidro Ortiz, and

Marai Herrera-Sobek, a “rise of nativism and immigrant bashing.”197

One response to this hostile landscape is the Chicano Movement. Chicanos since the

1960s have engaged in what Ignacio García describes as “a full-fledged transformation of the way Mexican Americans thought, played politics, and promoted their culture.”198 García analyzes four phases of this movement, including a period of “critique and revisionism,” a second period devoted to developing “theoretical models” to aid “the hermeneutics of the

Chicano experience,” a third phase “characterized by a sense of affirmation,” and finally an engagement in “oppositional politics.”199 Maciel, Ortiz, and Herrera-Sobek are careful to note that this movement “was never univocal but rather was characterized by multiple perspectives.”200 This multiplicity of viewpoints is best seen in “the post-Movimiento decades” of the 1980s and 1990s when “Chicana/o cultural and artistic trends became more complex . . . matur[ing] and reflect[ing] various tendencies and perspectives” representing a new generation of cultural critics and artists.201

Robert Lopez’s performances can be situated within this post-Movimiento generation, since he was “exposed . . . to the movement’s ideology” through an “extended family of civil

197 David R. Maciel, Isidro D. Ortiz, and Marai Herrera-Sobek, eds., Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), xiii.

198 Ibid., Chicano Renaissance, xiii.

199 Ibid., xiii–xviii.

200 Ibid., xvii.

201 Ibid., xxi.

!206 servants and a Chicana activist aunt.”202 These experiences spurred Lopez to assert the basic human rights of migrant and immigrant Mexicans and positively voice the Other, which can be considered political actions given the hostility and often overt racism in much anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States. His advocacy takes a musical form through parodies of Elvis

Presley, a relationship prompted from his experiences curating an exhibition devoted to Elvis in

1988 at Los Angeles’s La Luz de Jesus Gallery. El Vez released eleven albums between 1992 and

2002, as well as eight singles and EPs, and he remains active as a performer.203

As El Vez, Lopez performs a Latino-flavored version of the King complete with supporting musicians billed as the Memphis Mariachis and the Lovely Elvettes. Habell-Pallan describes El Vez as “an incredible Chicano . . . translat[ion]” of Elvis, while José David Saldívar considers Lopez a “transculturation of Elvis.”204 The issue of crossing borders—whether political, linguistic, cultural, or musical—appears in popular writings on El Vez. Newsweek describes the performer as a “multiethnic, multicultural, multicostumed revolutionary who reinvents American rock from a socialist Hispanic perspective.”205 His act fuses progressive politics and parodies of Elvis with borrowed material from other vernacular musicians, bilingual

202 Michelle Habell-Pallan, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 185.

203 “El Vez Discography,” accessed April 28, 2016, https://www.discogs.com/artist/280198-El-Vez.

204 Habell-Pallan, Loca Motion, 3; José David Saldívar, “In Search of the ‘Mexican Elvis’: Border Matters, ‘Americanity,’ and Post-State-Centric Thinking,” Modern Fiction Studies 49 (2003), 87; and idem, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 191–97.

205 “Love that Blue Suede Sombrero,” Newsweek, November 3, 1996, accessed March 27, 2016, http:// www.newsweek.com/love-blue-suede-sombrero-176156.

!207 humor, and camp theatrics.206 His blend of styles can be considered representative of Chicano countercultural artists of the 1990s who created “a discursive framework that appeals to a wider audience” as a means of engaging with concerns about national identity and politics as well as such issues as “gender, alternative lifestyles, sexuality, and the challenges of the new millennium.”207

After performing to acclaim at a Memphis commemoration of Presely’s passing, El Vez began touring internationally in the early 1990s.208 Through this touring and despite the culturally or geographically sited nature of his work, he has “cultivated one of the broadest audiences of any contemporary producer of alternative Chicano pop culture.”209 Habell-Pallan argues that analyzing his popularity proves “crucial to understanding the impact of globalization on contemporary national and local culture.”210 By emphasizing his global appeal, Habell-Pallan suggests that El Vez’s popularity in Europe demonstrates one way that Latino “performance resonates across national borders and exceeds in significance as a local and regional art form.”211

Her work on El Vez investigates how the parodist uses “appealing and familiar forms of popular music to make provocative statements about citizenship, immigration, undocumented labor, and

206 Two other significant influences on Lopez include his experiences performing in punk bands in southern California during his youth as well as by the visual and gendered aspects of glam rock.

207 Maciel, Ortiz, and Herrera-Sobek, eds., Chicano Renaissance, xxi.

208 Habell-Pallan, Loca Motion, 185–86.

209 Ibid., 184.

210 Ibid., 2.

211 Ibid., 13. For example she cites his popularity in Germany as indicative of the internationality of themes of migrant labor. (Ibid., 201–3).

!208 sexuality,” but she is often vague about whose music the parodist uses and how such uses support his political messages.212

El Vez’s music is remarkable amongst contemporary vernacular parodists for his acknowledgement of ethnic groups that do not or will not align with a white-black binary. His performances often create a space to acknowledge and to celebrate Others. In “Say It Loud, I’m

Brown and I’m Proud,” El Vez marks a racial difference between black and brown, addressing

“La Raza” (Spanish for “the race”) and explicitly celebrating “the Mexican in me.” The parodist also distinguishes between white and brown cultures through differences in food and language

(“we call it maize while you’re still calling it corn”). He constructs Mexicans as targets of white oppression and suggests that Chicano issues constitute a pressing contemporary civil rights issue, identifying California governor Pete Wilson and Proposition 187 as examples of the state’s persecution of Chicano immigrants, lawful or otherwise.213 El Vez’s lyrical themes of resistance, desire for “better higher education,” “feelings of alienation,” and assertions of human dignity

(“we’re people too”) are set to a contrafactum of “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

Through this borrowing, he aligns himself with James Brown’s message of racial pride and empowerment but shifts the original’s target to assert Chicano identities.214

Chicanos are distinguished from other Americans through their hybridity. For Deborah

Pacini Hernandez, El Vez exemplifies “Mexican Americans’ increasingly creative and strategic

212 Ibid., 12.

213 The addition of sirens in the song’s “Adult Mix” signify a jailbreak or air raid and create a sense of urgency, heightening the song’s themes of persecution.

214 El Vez also clearly distinguish these identities from those of Latinos, as in “Never Been to Spain,” where he polices the lines of Spanish and Chicano identity.

!209 use of their hybridity,” since the parodist directs his music principally at “listeners who are bilingual, bimusical, and bicultural, all of which are necessary traits for understanding his unique brand of ironic humor and social commentary.”215 El Vez traces this hybridity in “Esta Bien

Mamacita,” which parodies Elvis’s cover of Arthur Crudup’s song “That’s All Right.” Lopez blends Spanish and English lyrics and adds an accordion to evoke the sound of norteño or mariachi music (coded as “Mexican” for some white American audiences). In “Chihuahua,” the parodist reworks Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” delivering the lyrics in a mix of Spanish, English, and

Spanglish, and sonically representing Mexico through a quotation of the B section of “The

Mexican Hat Dance.” Through these transformations, El Vez reworks two of Elvis’s biggest hits into bilingual statements about a hybrid identity.216 Such multi-layered borrowings are common in El Vez’s music.217 His depictions value individuals who can move fluidly between languages, styles, and cultures. The parodies reflect contemporary realities for citizens living within conventional nation-state formations as the United States becomes a “majority-minority”

215 Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Oye Como Va!: Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 42.

216 My thanks to Alicia Kinne for her translations. El Vez also creates incongruity with a second musical reference in “Chihuahua,” quoting the title and the opening guitar riff from Steely Dan’s “Bodhisattva.” My thanks to Michael Evans for identifying this quotation.

217 For example, his “Never Been To Spain” parodies the eponymous song by Three Dog Night and interpolates a portion of George Harrison’s “Wah Wah,” while “(Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide) If I Can Dream” blends “If I Can Dream” by Elvis and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” by David Bowie with the guitar part from the bridge of “Oh Darling” by the Beatles. El Vez’s Christmas version of “En el Barrio” parodies Elvis’s “In the Ghetto” alongside interpolations from “Silent Night” and Oasis’s “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova.” “Say It Loud, I’m Brown and I’m Proud” quotes the beginning of the backwards coda in the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Saldívar considers “JC, Sí, I am a Lowrider” as a signification on “Broadway musicals (Jesus Christ Superstar) and Aretha Franklin’s rendition of ‘CC Rider’” as well as “Prince’s gender-bending erotics.” (Saldívar, “In Search of the ‘Mexican Elvis,’” 96).

!210 nation.218 El Vez’s music depicts a process by which “minority” individuals articulate their identities, as the sonic markers of Chicano identity in his parodies are engulfed by white and black musics, a metaphor for El Vez’s struggle to voice a Chicano identity removed from this dominant racial discourse. This stylistic gumbo represents one way identities are constructed in transnational and global flows of culture and capital.

Economic issues are a core element of El Vez’s vision of Chicano identity. He depicts these individuals as frequent targets for economic marginalization, either tacitly or overtly. Many of El Vez’s parodies respond to this disenfranchisement by invoking progressive political views, which Habell-Pallan understands as a continuation of “a Chicano tradition of formulating public discourses that imagine a more kind, just, and equitable world.”219 For example, in “Taking Care of Business (1942-1977-199?),” El Vez asserts a Chicano identity that is sharply critical of the injustices commonly endured by migrant laborers and recent immigrants. He parodies “Taking

Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, repurposing the original’s celebration of rock music as a liberating force from the workaday world to remind his audience of the marginalized figures who do “the jobs you wouldn’t take anyway.”

Such lyrics can be read as a response to the economic component of the Latino threat narrative. By reworking this white anthem of labor (which ends with a list of the jobs that are

218 I consider this phrase to be a problematic construction assuming whiteness as normative, positioning non-whiteness as vaguely menacing, and valuing previous understandings of fixed national identity. (Bill Chapell, “For U.S. Children, Minorities Will Be The Majority By 2020, Census Says,” March 4, 2015, accessed February 20, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/04/390672196/for-u-s-children-minorities-will-be-the- majority-by-2020-census-says). For more on the political consequences of this shift, see Maureen A. Craig and Jennifer A. Richeson, “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America: Perceived Status Threat from the Racial Demographic Shift Affects White Americans’ Political Ideology,” Psychological Science 25 (2014): 1189–97.

219 Habell-Pallan, Loca Motion, 186.

!211 often relegated to Chicanos in American life), El Vez emphasizes what Habell-Pallan describes as “the interdependence of citizens and undocumented immigrant workers in the United States in socioeconomic terms” while exposing “the hypocrisy of annoyed middle-class citizens who object to granting basic human rights to individuals who are not recognized by the state.”220 He also opposes the conservative branding of immigrants as lazy welfare seekers by insisting that

“all we want is a good job so we can stand on our own two feet.” El Vez’s criticisms of those who blame Latinos/as for white unemployment also censures employers who avoid taxes and exploit undocumented workers.221

The parodist expounds on the impact of this economic marginalization by describing the ways such hardships impact all Americans. In “En El Barrio,” El Vez updates “In the Ghetto,”

Elvis’s allegorical tale of inner-city poverty, suffering, and violence. Avoiding Elvis’s vagueness as to his protagonist’s ethnicity, El Vez explicitly mentions race (“a little brown baby”), a position he clarifies through Spanish words and slang like “barrio,” “vato” and “mamacita.” His characters lead lives marred by pollution and gang violence, factors that cause them to reject their heritage and attempt to escape into a different world. El Vez reminds us they “won’t get far” and abruptly dissolves into a new section directly quoting “Dear Mr. Fantasy” by Traffic and portions of “I’ve Got a Feeling” by the Beatles. Following these interpolations, the parodist returns to Elvis’s song to express his protagonist’s desire to move “out of east LA, with no more gangs and no more crime, to the promised land, out in Anaheim.”

220 Ibid., 197.

221 Saldívar interprets the song as a series of questions forcing white Americans to consider their complicity in this marginalization and the barriers they create to citizenship. (Saldívar, “In Search of the ‘Mexican Elvis,’” 91– 92).

!212 These interpolations can be read as a commentary on the parody (“you are the one to take us out of this gloom”), but they can also be considered attempts to broaden El Vez’s audience.

His embrace of difference—use of Spanish vernacular and concern about problems of urban immigrant life, coming from a Chicano parodying the King—can lack the widespread reach of

Elvis’s original. By blending these lyrical themes with white vernacular music, El Vez can reach a broad base of fans and suggest that our common culture mirrors ways that problems facing one group of Americans can affect everyone. His borrowings also stress the shared nature of the

American experience. As Camarillo notes, “Though the circumstances prompting migration, both in Mexico and within the U.S., have changed drastically over the centuries, one unifying theme binds all who moved northward: improving their quality of life and searching for opportunity.”222

The parodist’s mix of specific referents to Chicano culture, white vernacular musics, and national rhetoric concerning self-improvement underlines similarities between disparate individuals who share not only a national space and elements of a musical culture but a fundamentally human desire for a better life.

El Vez displays his dissatisfaction with those who deny Chicanos the ability to achieve this life in a polemical critique of America. In “Immigration Time,” he parodies Elvis’s

“Suspicious Minds,” replacing the original’s theme of “emotional entrapment within a dysfunctional relationship” with “a contemporary immigrant narrative that recalls the predicament of displaced Mexicans.”223 Habell-Pallan believes the song “highlights the nation’s contradictory immigrant policy and its connection to an economy fundamentally based on

222 Camarillo, “Mexico,” 504.

223 Habell-Pallan, Loca Motion, 190.

!213 hyperexploited undocumented workers.”224 Lopez’s parody constitutes “a site where counterrepresentations of undocumented racialized immigrant voices . . . are considered” through the gulf between the ideal and the lived.225 He contrasts Mexico with the United States, depicting the latter as “the promised land,” a place set apart by economic opportunity and national character. Despite his desire to “live with the brave [in] the home of the free,” he is harassed and persecuted (“here they come again, they’re trying to fence me in” and “I’m caught in a trap, I can’t walk out, because my foot’s caught in this border fence”).

El Vez places these contemporary issues in a historical context through a dialogue with an index of national immigration (“why can’t you see, Statue of Liberty, I am your homeless, tired and weary”) and expresses frustration at the gulf between American rhetoric and policy.226 In

Saldívar’s reading, the song “thematizes undocumented Mexican border-crossers’ desire to move out of the margins . . . into the larger world.”227 Such desires are routinely frustrated, however, and the parodist seems almost wearied by the need to remind listeners that “this is the land of opportunity,” the home of “an American Dream that can be shared with everyone regardless of race, creed, national and sexual origin, anything. This belongs to everybody.”

In addition to his contrafactum of Elvis’s song (complete with a re-creation of the original’s false fade out), El Vez’s parody also alludes to the layered percussion and echoed

224 Ibid.

225 Ibid., 191.

226 The Statue of Liberty also figures prominently in “Trying to Get to You,” serving again as an index of the nation and its rhetorical stance of welcoming immigrants.

227 Saldívar, “In Search of the ‘Mexican Elvis,’” 94.

!214 shouts of the introduction to the Rolling Stones’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” This loaded reference conveys multiple messages depending on the listener. For some listeners, the

“sympathy” in the title could refer to the parodist’s human portrayal of demonized immigrants routinely depicted as lawless hoodlums threatening the American way of life, or as an expression of pity that he needs to remind a nation of immigrants that their ancestors likely encountered similar resistance. For other listeners, the allusion might refer to the Stones’s “devil,” with El Vez leaving few doubts about which group he considers the villain. The parodist could also refer more specifically to lyrics from the song’s refrain (“pleased to meet you,” an expression of national welcome to immigrants) or other references to human culpability in suffering (“I tell you one time, you’re to blame”), a potential rebuke to conservatives who advocate draconian policies and progressives who remain unengaged in Chicano’s struggle for civil rights.

Throughout his output, El Vez has heightened his critiques through his parodies of Elvis

Presley. Before addressing this in detail, I consider it important to summarize the various ways critics understand Elvis and unpack his relationships with the racial norms of his day. Michael

Bertrand writes, “It has become fashionable to read Presley as nothing more than an untalented and irreverent white usurper of black rhythm and blues.”228 Supporters of this interpretation find support in a spurious racist comment attributed to Elvis in 1957 as well as Sam Phillips’s apocryphal crack, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I

228 Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 11–12.

!215 could make a billion dollars.” These ideas gained traction regardless of numerous contemporary first-hand accounts describing Presley as unbiased.229

The resultant slip in popularity among African American audiences did little to quell censure from white critics and officials concerning the musician’s sexualized gestures, often portrayed or understood as black.230 Such notions of Elvis as musically biracial colors early coverage of his career; as Robert Johnson noted in February 1955, Elvis “has a white voice” but

“sings with a negro rhythm which borrows in mood and emphasis from country style.”231

Blurring lines between race, class, and style, Johnson’s article presents Presley as a hybrid of black and white musics and implies that these characteristics are performative, not innate.

Similar interpretations of Elvis attempt to place him in the minstrel tradition, charging Elvis as a thief or appropriator.232 For these critics, such cultural appropriation highlighted racial disparities, since white artists could find mainstream success—and the attendant financial and cultural capital—that was denied to black artists.

While white racial privilege inarguably had a positive impact on Elvis’s reception,

Bertrand further complicates reductive understandings of Elvis by “highlighting the class and regional bonds that frequently united southern rockers and their audiences.” Building on Antonio

229 Ibid., 11 and Gilbert B. Rodman, Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend (New York: Routledge, 1996), 30–38 and 40–56.

230 Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, 223.

231 Robert Johnson, “Suddenly Singing Elvis Presley Zooms into Recording Stardom,” Memphis Press- Scimitar, February 5, 1955, 9B, cited in ibid., 193.

232 Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, 194 and Eileen Southern’s charge that Presley copied Bo Diddley to create “diluted versions” of black music. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 103, cited in ibid., 192.

!216 Gramsci’s work, Bertrand argues that “the more important aspect of cultural appropriation” should investigate relationships between people who adopt a “cultural form not of their own creation” to express their world views.233 He suggests that “rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll became a shared vehicle of expression for various groups the mainstream had ignored, maligned, or rejected,” refashioning these not on racial lines but in terms of “poverty, economic oppression, and caste restraints” to explain the depth of Elvis’s connections to African Americans as well as similarities Presley shared with marginal southerners of all ethnic backgrounds.234 While acknowledging that race “inherently provided . . . working-class white southerners . . . with options and privileges, however illusory and deceptive, denied to African Americans,” Bertrand also cites an important similarity between these groups in terms of class, since both “poor whites and blacks were similarly estranged from society at large.”235 Simon Firth, Will Straw, and John

Street remind us that historical understandings of Elvis as a “redneck” or as “Southern white trash” collapsed a binary racial division along class lines.236 As a result, his performative blurring

233 Ibid., 195. Bertrand cites four other reasons why narratives of appropriation or exploitation are oversimplifications: Presley’s “immense popularity with African American audiences and record-buyers,” his “eclectic musical taste,” his legitimate interest in black culture (which manifested “before endeavoring to become a professional performer” and “despite the social rules that governed racial conformity”), and his own class background, which resulted in “little power, right, or motivation to question music business practices or those who devised them,” a “scenario [that] closely resembled that usually identified with similarly dependent and vulnerable black artists.” (Ibid., 199).

234 Ibid., 195–96. For more on race and Southern identity, see Erich Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2015).

235 Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, 196.

236 Simon Firth, Will Straw, and John Street, The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 76–77.

!217 of racial and class boundaries “inspired fear . . . among the cultural arbiters who protected the nation’s cultural standards.”237

Elvis’s success with “crossover” hits demonstrated his ability to negotiate and supplant divisions in the music industry that were primarily racial (“race records”) but that also invoked class (“hillbilly”). According to Bertrand, Elvis’s popularity with black audiences “transcended strictly musical boundaries” and should not be discounted because of later criticisms.238 This admiration was mutual and predated Presley’s success; one of the ironies of later charges of Elvis as cultural appropriator is that “the realities of southern conformity in relation to race . . . left

Presley’s later accomplishments far from inevitable. In the segregated South, it is doubtful that he . . . could have envisioned that racial cross-dressing guaranteed anything but social ostracism.”239 By redefining Elvis’s success in terms of class and not race, Bertrand argues that the artist’s “music and characteristics were not inferior attempts at burlesque or imitation but rather illuminations of a common experience of poverty and caste.” He celebrates Presley’s

“open-minded racial perspective,” which was uncommon among southern whites who came of age before the post-World War II era,” and hails Elvis as “an organic intellectual who reflects his society’s refurbished racial attitudes.”240

237 Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, 194.

238 Ibid., 200–4.

239 Ibid., 208.

240 Ibid., 218 and 224. Rodman explores Elvis in terms of cultural capital and class. (Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 71–82).

!218 I maintain that this understanding of Presley—synthetic, tolerant, racially aware and racialized, privileged yet marginalized— informs Lopez’s reading of Elvis. Through his parodies, El Vez refashions Elvis’s music along another racial and class-based hierarchy, representing a similarly multifaceted cultural and musical identity.241 Saldívar considers the parodist’s music an experience that “brings the discrepant American experiences together as a culture” through both Elvis’s “working class migratory roots and routes” and El Vez’s “cross- ethnic translation and geopolitical displacement.”242

Elvis also functions as an ideal target for parody. These significations on Elvis, similarly to Andy Warhol’s paintings, rest on the musician’s recognition and symbolic circulation in popular culture; as Gilbert Rodman quips, “for a dead man, Elvis Presley is awfully noisy.”243

Presley’s reproducibility both comments on and creates a media-saturated contemporary landscape, part of “the relentless machinations of contemporary capitalism” where his image or sounds are divorced from their original context yet retain some of those meanings in new contexts.244 “Elvis” fragmented after death, continuing a process begun during his life as his physical presence divorced from his image through product placement, artistic renderings, and imitations. Presley is perhaps the musician most commonly targeted for impersonation, spawning

241 Rodman explores ways of understanding Elvis through a gendered lens. (Ibid., Elvis after Elvis, 56–71).

242 Saldívar, “In Search of the ‘Mexican Elvis,’” 88.

243 Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 1. Edie Pistolesi has written on Elvis’s circulation as an icon in visual art. (Edie Pistolesi, “The Elvis Icon,” Art Education 55 [2002]: 40–46).

244 Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 10.

!219 a cottage industry of books, audio tracks, and armies of for-hire impersonators.245 He precipitates quasi-religious pilgrimages to Graceland and has appeared on two U.S. postage stamps.246 His body and voice serve as a tabula rasa onto which listeners can hear and project—sometimes ignoring, sometimes amplifying—their own desires and anxieties. Elvis can and has held a range of meanings: image of white youth culture, symbol of sexual danger, harbinger of racial commingling, villain and thief, from-the-waist-up Elvis, Elvis the Pelvis, fat Elvis, Vegas Elvis, a warning against excess, a folk hero, or someone who was “a hero to most, but [who] never meant shit to me.”247 Elvis’s recirculation through myth and fandom have rendered him a cipher, a point of articulation “by which two or more other phenomena come to be articulated to one another.”248 Through these various articulations, Rodman charts Elvis’s place in “mythical

245 The website www.eimpersonators.com, for example, features instruction books, reviewed vendors for “authentic” Elvis gear, and a networking space for up-and-coming impersonators. The site also has a searchable map of impersonators across the United States and Canada, one of numerous online resources for those shopping for the best local Elvis. http://www.eimpersonators.com/home.html, accessed March 24, 2016. Francesca Brittan has written on female Elvis impersonators. (Francesca Brittan, “Women Who ‘Do Elvis’: Authenticity, Masculinity, and Masquerade,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18 [2006]: 167–90).

246 For more on Graceland, see Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 97–129. For more on religious overtones in Elvis fandom, see Mark Duffett, “False Faith or False Comparison? A Critique of the Religious Interpretation of Elvis Fan Culture,” Popular Music and Society 26 (2003): 513–22. For more on the issues surrounding the first Elvis stamp, see Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 38–39 and “The Elvis Stamp: America Elects a King,” accessed March 22, 2016, http://postalmuseum.si.edu/artofthestamp/SubPage%20table%20images/artwork/rarities/Elvis%20Ballot/ elvisballot.htm.

247 This line is from a verse from Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” charging Presley with racism (“straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain”). In “Say It Loud! I’m Brown and I’m Proud,” El Vez defends Elvis: “Elvis was a hero to me, you’ve got to remember he was the first public enemy. . . . If you can’t stand the man, then don’t stand next to me.” For more on Elvis and gender, see Mark Duffett, “Caught in a Trap? Beyond Pop Theory’s ‘Butch’ Construction of Male Elvis Fans,” Popular Music 20 (2001): 395–408 and idem, “Elvis Presley and Susan Boyle: Bodies of Controversy,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23 (2011): 166–89.

248 Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 18 and 27 (emphasis in original).

!220 struggles” between high and low culture, adult and youth culture, “rebellion and conformity,

North and South, the sacred and the secular,” and other dichotomies.249

Mixing ubiquity with a lack of fixity, Elvis has become a national image representing the

United States. He has been described as one of “the most recognized American icon[s] internationally” and “the most influential single figure in the history of American pop culture.”250

Greil Marcus argues that “Elvis contained more of America—had swallowed whole more of its contradictions and paradoxes—than any other figure that I could think of” and describes Elvis

“as a force, as a kind of necessity . . . existing in every culture that leads it to produce a perfect, all-inclusive metaphor for itself.”251 Marcus’s attempts to situate Elvis within a larger tradition of

American culture extending back to Herman Melville and William Faulkner seem forced, yet whatever symbolism we attribute to Presley, it is undeniable that critics consider the entire swirl of culture surrounding Presley as a uniquely and representatively American invention. Rodman constructs Elvis “as the embodiment of the American Dream (and thus, by extension . . . of

America itself): a figure who simultaneously stands as a symbol for all that is most wonderful and all that is most horrible about that dream.”252

249 Ibid., 41.

250 Mark Busby, “‘I Don’t Know, but I Ain’t Lost’: Defining the Southwest,” in Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. Timothy R. Mahoney, and Wendy J. Katz (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 54 and Jimmy Iovine, “American Icons: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan & Bruce Springsteen,” Rolling Stone, May 15, 2003, accessed February 23, 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/american-icons-elvis-presley-bob-dylan- bruce-springsteen-20030515#ixzz411GbtcQP. Rodman finds themes of “economic gain and social mobility,” character, and “broader cultural values.” (Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 84). I find Elvis’s sobriquet of the “King” of rock ’n’ roll bemusing considering his status as an American icon.

251 Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3.

252 Rodman, Elvis after Elvis, 41 and 82–96.

!221 Presley, then, is an ideal choice for El Vez’s vision of Chicano identity. Presley can represent a similarly bifurcated cultural and musical identity, and his status as national icon means that repackaging this icon is a provocative political gesture. Hearing and watching Lopez enact a Mexican Elvis can be confusing, disorienting, and even threatening, as El Vez reincarnates the King with brown skin, accent, and provocative name (“the time”). El Vez transforms an older representation of the United States—white, young, energetic, upwardly mobile, marked by racial tensions between blacks and whites—and updates this vision for a twenty-first century nation marked by aging baby boomers, cynicism, systemic inequality, and increasing racial diversity.

I maintain that El Vez’s musical borrowings aid his political agenda. The parodist inserts

Chicano voices and musics into the larger soundscape of America, drawing on an artist famous for both his stylistic hybridity and influences from both white and black culture. The widespread embrace of Elvis and rock music ignores, sets aside, or moves past the racial issues that Presley and this style raised for audiences in the 1950s, as he drew from styles once considered threatening because of their links with African American culture. These styles were later assimilated into and appropriated by white mainstream society. El Vez’s borrowings fulfill a similar rhetorical purpose, presenting his likewise controversial political messages in formerly contentious styles. Drawing on George Lipsitz’s argument that pop culture “enables people to rehearse identities, stances, and social situations not yet permissible in politics,” Lopez remakes the American icon of Elvis into the Mexican figure of El Vez to present an optimistic vision of a

!222 future, tolerant, post-racial, transnational American identity.253 While Elvis’s music models one strategy for a greater acceptance of El Vez’s political viewpoints, Presley’s music also highlights the contingency of ethnic construction. The version of Elvis that many have adopted has been de- racialized.254 El Vez’s re-racialization of Elvis serves as a reminder of the way lines around racial boundaries can be formed and redrawn depending on contemporary need or political expediency.

The music of Cledus T. Judd, Alan Sherman, 2 Live Jews, and El Vez demonstrates the continued relationship between parody and ethnic identity in American vernacular music, a form of cultural production that allows individuals to create and debate both ethnoracial assignment and identification. Many of these parodies portray both individual and group ethnic identities as a mix of both biological essentialism and cultural construction. Parodists play with stereotypes and incongruous ethnic behavior to create complex, multi-leveled in-group identities. These identities also involve out-group formations—we often define who we are through who we are not—and such constructions often lack the nuance present in the parodists’ in-group identities. In this way, ethnic humor in contemporary America serves as, in Gillotta’s words, “a response to

253 George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (New York: Verso, 1994), 137, quoted in Saldívar, “In Search of the ‘Mexican Elvis,’” 92.

254 While musicologists and critics stress the racial issues at play during Elvis’s lifetime, these are occasionally presented as historical forces. The resulting suggestion that rock music has become un-racial (or white) and that Elvis’s music no longer represents a threat to American racial identity—the XXIII Super Bowl halftime show featured an Elvis impersonator and magician, signaling Presley’s new status as a safe, mainstream entertainment choice—is obviously problematic. While the stylistic terrain of American popular music has shifted, performers and listeners are still understood through racial markers. For example, the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation’s free online history course considers how Elvis’s “early career reflect[s] race relations and racial tensions in mid-1950s America” an “essential question.” Louis Menand writes that “rock and roll is usually explained as rhythm-and-blues music—that is, music performed by black artists for black listeners—repurposed by mostly white artists for a mostly white audience.” Christopher John Farley complicates Memphis celebrations of “the 50th Anniversary of Rock ’n’ Roll” that take their starting date from Elvis’s recording of “That’s All Right” and not Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88.” (“Elvis and Race in 1950s America,” http://teachrock.org/lesson/elvis-and-race- in-1950s-america/, accessed February 25, 2016; Louis Menand, “The Elvic Oracle: Did Anyone Invent Rock and Roll?,” The New Yorker, November 16, 2015, accessed February 25, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2015/11/16/the-elvic-oracle; and Christopher John Farley, “Elvis Rocks. But He’s Not the First,” Time, July 6, 2004, accessed February 25, 2016, http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,661084,00.html).

!223 our multiethnic environment,” functioning as a lens “through which we can learn more about what separates us, what holds us together, and how we would like to see ourselves.”255

Throughout this chapter I have argued that ethnic parodists negotiate and construct identities through black and white music and suggested that American ethnic identities continue to be understood on a white-black axis. Parodists like Judd and Sherman reinforced this reductive view of American racial identity as a means of retaining or obtaining the benefits of whiteness. Other parodists, like 2 Live Jews and El Vez, have challenged this binary lyrically and create a more inclusive ethnic space in their performances. Their musical borrowings, however, confront the racialized history of popular music in the United States as well as the extended legal, moral, and political discourse of Civil Rights and equality.

Within this discourse, and despite the prevalence of “visions of multiculturalism that do not collapse the entire spectrum of racial and ethnic diversity into such a stark dichotomy,”

Goldstein writes that contemporary ethnic groups engage with the “widespread dissemination and popularization of the black nationalist belief in the primacy of the black-white divide.” He notes the irony that “in an atmosphere that purports to value and encourage ‘difference,’” ethnic groups remain “stymied . . . by the tendency of American culture to make blackness and whiteness the critical categories of group life.”256 While Goldstein is writing specifically about

Jewish identity, I believe his statement applies equally well to Jewish, Chicano, Asian, and other ethnic groups that lie uncomfortably (if at all) on the nation’s lingering racial axis. Parodists

255 Gillota, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, 169.

256 Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 221 (emphasis in original).

!224 engage with racialized musical borrowings as a means of ensuring their ethnic visions are heard, understood, and situated within this racial hierarchy.

!225 CHAPTER 4

CULTIVATED PARODY IN THE AGE OF FRACTURE

In his prize-winning book Age of Fracture, historian Daniel Rodgers theorizes the late twentieth century as a “multisided contest of arguments and social visions.”1 He argues this era can be understood as a movement away from the ideas undergirding the previous half of the century, a distinct period marked by the dissolution of the guiding narratives and ideas that had structured and shaped American popular discourse since the end of World War II.2 As the Age of

Reform gave way to the Age of Anxiety,3 a host of “intellectual assumptions” that had previously provided “the common sense of public intellectual life” in the post-war era “were challenged, dismantled, and formulated anew.”4 For Rodgers, the middle of the twentieth century was characterized by “strong readings of society,” as thinkers “had encircled the self with wider and wider rings of relations, structures, contexts, and institutions.”5 Over time, however, intellectuals

1 Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 2.

2 As Rodgers notes, a broad range of “intellectual assumption[s]” that had “defined the common sense of public intellectual life since the Second World War were challenge, dismantled, and formulated anew.” (Ibid., 2).

3 Richard Hofstadter characterized the era between the 1890s and 1940 as the Age of Reform. (Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform [New York: Vintage Books, 1955]). The period after the Second World War until the beginning of the 1960s has been characterized as the Age of Anxiety, a name derived from a poem by W. H. Auden. (James Wierzbicki’s Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties [Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016]).

4 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 2.

5 Ibid., 4.

!226 began to talk “less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice.”6 During the last twenty five years of the twentieth century,

conceptions of human nature that . . . had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.7

Rodgers traces these shifts across “multiple fronts of ideational battle,” as Americans “tried to reimagine themselves and their society” through the economic crises and structural changes caused by globalization and finance capitalism, mounting uncertainties surrounding “the linguistic turn in culture in an age of commercial and malleable signifiers,” reconceptualizations of gender and racial norms, “the nature of freedom and obligation in a multicultural and increasingly unequal society,” and the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communist states.8

While Rodgers identifies these topics in particular as “the nubs on which issues were forced, assumptions shattered, ideas broached, categories naturalized, paradigms strained and reconstituted,” in this chapter I trace fracture’s fault lines through cultivated music. Drawing on

Rodgers, I position cultivated music both as a front of this “ideational battle” and as a reaction to it, a rhetorical mirror reflecting changes in the “ideas and metaphors capable of holding in focus

6 Ibid., 5.

7 Ibid., 3. Markets and free-market thinking played a key intellectual role in the public discourse of this period (for Rodgers, “no word flew higher or achieved a greater aura of enchantment than ‘market’”), but the impact of free market thinking on cultivated music during this time is beyond the scope of this chapter. (Ibid., 41).

8 Ibid., 10.

!227 the aggregate aspects of human life as opposed to its smaller, fluid, individual ones.”9 I discuss three parodies spanning the age of fracture: Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations (1967), John

Corigliano and William Hoffman’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), and Michael Gordon’s

Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (2006).10 I read these parodies through Rodgers’s framework as “ideas laid across the messier realities of experience, helping to construct its character and possibilities, framing and polarizing its meanings.”11 I argue that these parodies exemplify elements of the fractured age, including a disaggregation of once-stable categories of memory and history, new conceptions of time as pliable, “folded and short-circuited,” and challenges to institutional power through increased choice and agency for composers, performers, and listeners.12 Despite the multitude of ways that these parodies exhibit these themes, few were composed during this time.13 In the final section, I posit an explanation for this, arguing that parody’s nature as a structural borrowing technique meant it proved to be an inappropriate device for composers exploring newly fragmented musical and social identities.

9 Ibid., 6 and 10. Rodgers’s insistence on reading this era as dominated not by a “single, dominant idea— postmodern, new right, or neoliberal” but through “a contagion of metaphors” provides an appropriate context for artistic readings of the late twentieth century overwhelmed by a plethora of stylistic trends or focused overmuch on postmodernism. (Ibid., 10).

10 I included Gordon’s parody as a way of extending Rodgers’s argument and testing whether his theory held explanatory power beyond the end of the twentieth century. While Rodgers suggests that the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 signaled the beginning of a new era, he notes that the decades since 9/11 have shown how “the age of fracture had permanently altered the play of argument and ideas” and how “much of the distinctive intellectual character of the age of fracture would endure.” (Ibid., 256–57 and 271).

11 Ibid., 2.

12 Ibid., 246–47.

13 This low number is representative of both the time period under consideration here and throughout American music history. Parodies are rare in cultivated music, in direct contrast to parody’s long history as the most common borrowing device in American vernacular music.

!228 Memory, History, and Time

While “social thought and debate” during the middle of the century were dominated by

“history’s massive, inescapable, larger-than-life presence,” by the twentieth century’s end “time had wrinkled.”14 During the age of fracture, time was commonly represented as “radically foreshortened” and “instantly accessible,” with “not only the past but the future” understood as

“immediately accessible to the present.”15 While reality—particularly as it concerned the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War—proved that history “could not be folded up upon itself or short-circuited,” one of the age’s “contagious intellectual metaphors” made “time itself” appear “infinitely thin and pliable.”16

Postmodernity exemplifies the period’s foreshortened time. Rodgers argues that postmodern artists understood history not as a “process to be advanced or resisted” but rather as as an “open warehouse of reusable styles . . . a great consignment shop of reusable fashions.”17

Tropes and gestures were extracted from the past and brought into the present through pastiche and juxtaposition, techniques that featured “the play of time—time wrenched from history’s

14 Ibid., 255.

15 Ibid., 224 and 231. As examples Rodgers cites increased interest in genealogy, “growing interest in local history museums and heritage sites,” the political rhetoric of the culture wars, trends in economics, a proliferation of museums for various ethnic groups, and a host of other activities and conceptions. (Ibid., 221–30).

16 Ibid., 254.

17 Ibid., 230.

!229 strata, sliced and recombined, twisted and tumbled all over itself.”18 Postmodern works exhibited

“a kind of transgressive time travel,” with parallel “experiments in folded time” occurring “at the cutting edge of the arts” including in collages and parodies.19

As I discussed in chapter 2, one foundational aspect of parody is the incongruity a composer creates between a listener’s memory of the source material and the parodied music. At their core, all parodies play with memory and history, disaggregating these once stable and singular categories into memories and histories.20 This process can take several forms, including challenges to the stability of memory, folds in the conceptual space between past and present, and presentations of history not as fixed but as fluid.

18 Ibid., 230. Evan Fein situates Ghosts of Versailles within postmodernity particularly through its response to the past: “Unlike modernists, who needed to displace the past to create space for new work, postmodern artists successfully identified an alternative by rejecting teleological metanarratives.” Citing Jonathan Kramer’s formulation that postmodern artists reject the “linearity of historical progress,” Fein writes that this rejection freed composers “to quote and comment on music of the past, thereby engaging in a dialogue with it.” These descriptions apply to other late-twentieth-century parodies, including the works by Foss and Gordon discussed in this chapter. (Jonathan D. Kramer, “The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism,” in Postmodern Music, Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner [New York: Routledge, 2002], 17, quoted in Evan Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano: An Evolutionary Study” [PhD diss., The Juilliard School, 2014], 148).

19 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 231.

20 Ibid., 229.

!230 In Baroque Variations, Lukas Foss presents destructive homages of borrowings from

George Frideric Handel, Domenico Scarlatti, and J. S. Bach.21 During the first movement, “On a

Handel Larghetto,” a parody of the third movement of Handel’s Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 12,

Foss relies on a listener’s ability to remember the original context from which he draws the audible portions of his score.22 He begins by replicating the original, instructing the musicians to bow or blow each note but sound only some of these pitches audibly. The “inaudible moments,” in Foss’s words, “leave holes in Handel’s music,” sounding like an eraser was taken to the

21 Mary Elizabeth Shea considers Baroque Variations Foss’s “most innovative, non-traditional and large- scale use of collage,” constituting a “thoroughly original application of the technique.” (Mary Elizabeth Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss: A Study of Twenty-Three Avant-Garde Works” [PhD diss., Kent State University, 1997], 4–5). While I agree with Shea that the work’s use of pre-existing music is novel and even unprecedented in the history of musical borrowing, I disagree that the work constitutes a collage because it lacks “two or more distinct, independently meaningful musical objects” interacting within a work. The principle musical object in each movement is a parodic reading of a piece of pre-existing music, and Baroque Variations lacks the contrasting external materials that typify collage. (Blim, “Patchwork Nation,” 8). I understand the work as a parody, following Linda Hutcheon’s analysis. She considers the piece representative of modern parody’s complexity. She argues the work provides a “gloss on Bach” and “a commentary both on our view of the past tradition . . . and also on our experience of the present, the individuality of each performance.” She lauds Foss’s admiration of past composers alongside his “willingness to rework the music of cult figures.” For Hutcheon, Baroque Variations represents how twentieth-century parodists used pre-existing materials not as launching pads for jokes but as respectful models. (Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms [New York and London: Methuen, 1985; Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 102–3).

22 Foss drew inspiration from eighteenth-century music in two other compositions from 1967. These works can be understood as stylistic forebears of the Baroque Variations. Non-Improvisation, which Shea considers a “minor unpublished composition,” avoids chance elements but incorporates “collage and inaudibility,” as J. S. Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052 “is played continuously” albeit not always audibly. The fourth movement of Concert for cello and orchestra (which premiered in 1967) also features borrowings from Baroque music. Foss employs a ten-note series derived from the Sarabande of J. S. Bach’s C minor Cello Suite, BWV 1011. (Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 18, 111, and 117–18). A previous stylistic precedent for substantive Baroque borrowings is George Rochberg’s Nach Bach from 1966. Rochberg plays with music history, both through borrowed music referencing J. S. Bach and through an allusion to a common Baroque genre, the fantasia. Rochberg’s borrowings are limited and do not serve as a structural basis for the work. I read the title’s teleology as an assumption of a linear vision of history (regardless of its starting point), which I distinguish from Foss’s presentation of multiple historical instances.

!231 score.23 These erasures create an indeterminate effect; as Foss stated in a 1993 interview with

Mary Elizabeth Shea, “You don’t know where they (musicians) will have arrived in their inaudible playing when . . . the conductor turns them on.”24 I interpret this technique as a parody of a listener’s customary task; rather than the customary practice of following thematic material and harmonic relationships across a span of time, a listener must instead remember unheard music and relationships, drawing not on her/his memory of recent events but on disaggregated recollections of music heard beyond the live concert or recorded experience.25

Foss creates the sharpest conflict between memory and experience in the work’s final and arguably most disorientating movement. Foss borrows J. S. Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 in its entirety with segments composed by Foss and marked with letters on a

23 John Cage and Lukas Foss, Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra and Baroque Variations, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Lukas Foss, Nonesuch H-71202, 1968. This technique was inspired by electronic music. Shea considers inaudible playing a “significant” feature of Foss’s middle-period works, a group of twenty-three compositions composed between 1960 and 1975. Foss first explored “the concept of composition via omission and deletion” in Elytres, Fragments of Archilochos and For 24 Winds. Shea reads the Baroque Variations as a significant example of inaudibility, since the technique was featured as “an integral part of the creative process” and later appeared “as an ordinary part of his compositional language on a freer and wider scale.” (Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 3–4, 98–107, and 119–20).

24 Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 120. Her interview with Foss was conducted on March 24, 1993. During the Prologue to Ghosts, Corigliano uses similar techniques, including indeterminate and aleatoric passages, various types of graphic notation, and inaudible playing.

25 This process has analogies with the developmental procedures of Charles Ives’s cumulative form. In the second movement, Foss presents a similar procedure, playing with the space between a listener’s memory of the expected resolution of tonal patterns and melodic gestures, and the superimposed atonal music he composed. The second movement parodies Scarlatti’s Keyboard Sonata No. 23 in E major, K. 380, which is performed quietly on a backstage harpsichord and often buried beneath the orchestra per Foss’s performance directions. This keyboard part is accompanied by newly composed slowly moving microtonal glissandi in the strings. These provide a ghostly accompaniment to the winds and brass, which realize newly composed fragments that echo and distort patterns derived from Scarlatti’s music. These responses are, at first, relatively benign, like the oboe’s ornamented version of the harpsichord part in m. 19 or the solo violin’s doubling of the harpsichord at m. 22. As the work unfolds, however, the integrity of the Scarlatti borrowings proves increasingly brittle. Melodic gestures associated with tonality—such as scalar passages in the solo violin (m. 69) or a cadential figure in the ‘cellos (mm. 73–74)—avoid their conventional resolutions, often decaying into indeterminate microtonal clusters played by the strings. Throughout the movement, Foss plays with ways listeners will anticipate certain resolutions based on her or his memory of functional harmonic music, creating in essence two compositions: the one realized in performance by the orchestra, and another that a listener hears based on her or his expectations. This space between realized and unheard but “remembered” music destabilizes a listener’s memory.

!232 cue sheet given to all musicians.26 Throughout this movement, once-recognizable melodies become blurred as gestures are imitated in fragments and tightly paired canons or are modified through bent pitches. Robert Morgan writes that Bach’s music “seems literally to come apart before the listener’s ears, increasingly dissolved until it ultimately disappears entirely into the cacophonous din.”27

Morgan evokes the metaphor of sodden paper disintegrating, an apt image for the distorted, underwater sound Foss creates by placing the same melodic gestures out of rhythmic sync with one another. In the movement’s opening passages, for example, Foss quotes the original’s opening twenty-eight measures without alteration in the solo violin, with the remainder of the violins doubling the original with short gestures lasting from two sixteenth notes to two measures, playing rapid repeated note figures or echoing the solo violin a measure behind.28 He further disorients a listener in the following passages by assigning excerpts of different portions

26 This movement is distinct from the preceding movements because of its length, dynamic and timbral variety, expanded orchestral forces (particularly percussion), and “use of non-traditional sounds such as breaking glass, bent pitches, tone clusters and glissandi.” (Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 127).

27 Robert P. Morgan, “Rethinking Musical Culture,” in Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, ed. Katherine Bergeron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 55.

28 This temporal displacement prefigures further disfigurations at Reh. 1B, as Foss passes fragments of the Bach piece to the clarinets and first violins, supported by an electric piano’s distorted gesture retaining the original’s pitch contours and melodic shape but reducing the Bach piece to two groups of four eighth notes, a marked rhythmic contrast with the running sixteenth notes in compound duple heard in the other parts.

!233 of the partita to different groups within the orchestra.29 These excerpts are passed around the ensemble by a group of auxiliary instruments who double elements performed by the principal instruments according to the conductor’s cuing.30 Throughout the movement, which Shea describes as “aggressive, disruptive and intense,” Foss creates a confusing effect through his disjointed, multi-layered, and non-narrative presentation of Bach’s linear and harmonically directed original.31

Through this, Foss shatters a listener’s memory of Bach’s Violin Partita, guaranteeing through his directions that performers render the original’s passages are largely unrecognizable.

His newly composed music complicates a listener’s memory of either the original piece or the fragments that emerge out of place and in the incorrect order. Throughout the work, Foss challenges the limits of a listener’s memory, suggesting a plural conception of “memories” by destabilizing past music once understood as fixed and unchanging. Similar plays with memory and experience happen in other cultivated parodies, which offer a way of hearing a contested

29 At Reh. 2, for example, he presents concurrent and overlapping fragments of different portions of the Bach piece. Foss divides the ensemble into two parts. The principal part features violins, violas, flutes, and clarinets, who are given four cues from the conductor that direct them to fade in and out of audibility starting from different portions of the original. The solo and first violins begin at m. 43 of the Bach piece, playing short six- to nine-beat passages before fading in and out according to cues; once they are directed to play audibly again, the violins continue from “wherever they have arrived at this point.” The clarinets or violas are cued with similar directions, but start at ms. 29 of the original. Foss places the section’s climax at the fourth and most fragmented cue, which directs the conductor to cue clarinets, violas, or flutes, each of whom begins in a different place depending on the conductor’s previous directions. (Lukas Foss, Baroque Variations, [New York: Carl Fischer, 1968], 39).

30 The second part of the ensemble features “auxiliary instruments” which double elements performed by the principal instruments. The soprano saxophone and first horn imitate the first violins and violas in close canon, but only when these principles perform a rhythmic figure of paired sixteenth notes featuring an upper neighbor returning to the principal note. The auxiliary groups are also instructed to vary their performance of this rhythmic figure. An electric organ and second horn imitate the pedal points of the first violins and violas, with the horns further departing from the original by occasionally bending pitches. The first trumpet and third horn imitate the first violins and violas, in close canon but only in scalar passages of four or more steps in either direction. Foss also directs a pair of high and low cymbals to imitate the rhythms of the first violins and violas.

31 Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 127.

!234 past.32 Through challenges to the past as transmitted through memory, a listener’s understanding of that past becomes unstable and fluid.

I consider this illustrative of a the age of fracture. While parodists treating cultivated music used memories to destabilize histories (and often evoked nostalgia through longing for a fictional past), they also responded to changing conceptions of time by blurring or eliminating the lines between past and present. Contemporary writing about history provides one illustration.

President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, for example, treated history as a “river,” a “ribbon,” and a “connecting thread.”33 The teleology of these metaphors contrasted with another set of themes in presidential speeches from this period, where “history did not unfold step by step, organizing the chaotic patterns of causation and change, explaining the past’s continuous, irreversible pressure on the present.” Instead, this contrasting vein was marked by a virtual dissolution of “the boundary between past and present” as “history’s massive social processes

32 Gordon’s symphony relies on a listener’s memories of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony to hear and understand the changes the composer works with his borrowed materials. Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles similarly relies on specific and generic recollections, as heard in Act II, scene 5, which relies on a listener’s associations with courtly period music to convey one level of dramatic action. The scene also involves a musical allusion to “Se vuol ballare” from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, invoking not only the specific sound world of the late eighteenth century but the original’s associations with dancing, power, and class struggle. The space between memory and experience is a recurrent theme in Corigliano’s music; for example, he describes the first movement of Symphony No. 1 as “alternat[ing] between the tension of anger and the bittersweet nostalgia of remembering.” (John Corigliano, “Composer Note,” accessed December 9, 2016, http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer/work/ 27006). Similar arguments about the scope and shape of the past (and its relevance to contemporary affairs) were common throughout the age of fracture, particularly with regards to public school education and Constitutional interpretation. (Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 255–30 and 232–47).

33 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 222. Rodgers describes portrayals of history as “an unbroken line of reassurance up and down which the imagination could run freely. To dip into the past . . . was to be reminded of history as a force that undergirded, propelled, and vouchsafed the present. In that sense the mid-twentieth-century sensitivity to the powers of history, to the slow, glacial process of patterned social change, was sustained in the last decades of the century.” (Ibid.)

!235 disappeared” and “one traveled between past, present, and future in the momentary blink of the imagination, through a wrinkle in time.”34

For other writers, however, history simply ceased. The end of the Cold War spurred an

“ambition to short-circuit time, to imagine being propelled across the tortured processes of history in a single bound.”35 Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” in The National

Interest argued that, in Rodgers’s formulation, “the exhaustion of one pole of the twentieth century’s great political dialectic” indicated that “history itself had come to an end.”36 The much debated article does not clarify “what exactly Fukuyama thought had come to an end,” and

Rodgers considers the piece “an outward anomaly,” well-timed and “overwhelmed but not defeated by its rebuttals.” Despite this, Rodgers also believes that Fukuyama had “tapped with extraordinary force the notions of folded and short-circuited time that ran through late-twentieth- century social thought.”37

Understood in this context, parodic treatment of memory extends beyond simple plays with a listener’s recollection of a borrowed piece. Rather, these parodies play with the past— memory’s core component—treating history as a flexible and open-ended text. In Foss’s Baroque

Variations, a traditional understanding of history’s linear, teleological essence grapples with the composer’s presentation of folded, multi-layered time as new and old styles from different

34 Ibid., 222–23. These ideas are exemplified in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which Rodgers reads as a description of “the formation of modern nationalism as the process of bringing together events scattered across space into a sense of simultaneous time.” (Ibid., 223).

35 Ibid., 242.

36 Ibid., 246.

37 Ibid., 246–47.

!236 historical periods overlap. A related idea can be seen in Morgan’s suggestion that Foss’s

“variations” are on history itself, particularly in the way the final movement “faithfully retraces the historical evolution of Western music from integrated language to mechanistic construct.”38

My interpretation differs from Morgan’s in that I reject his suggestion of a single, unidirectional narrative. I am persuaded by Shea’s argument that the Baroque Variations

“maintain a unique balance in the precarious relationship between tradition and innovation,” with

Foss “successfully combin[ing] his European heritage with current American understanding” to fuse “tradition and progress with ties that bind and ties that loosen.”39 Foss’s “confrontational manner” juxtaposes several “contrasting ideas,” with the composer exploring, even reveling in, these “disparate ideas.”40 The parody presents multiple systems or methods of composition, which can be positioned on a series on continua including tonal and bi- or tri-tonal, patterned and unconventional, narrative and non-narrative, goal-directed and indirect, acoustic and electric, pitched and unpitched, heard and unheard, Baroque and avant-garde, old and new, past and present.41 While a listener could hear these systems in dialectical relationships to one another, I

38 Morgan, “Rethinking Musical Culture,” 55.

39 Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 121. Here, “tradition” and “European” serve as one pole of a dialectic opposite “progress” (or “innovation”) and “American.”

40 Ibid., 10–11.

41 Shea notes that the “juxtaposition of large-scale opposite ideas” was common in Foss’s music from this time. She writes that “in virtually every composition of the [middle] period, he explores the dichotomies of some or many of the following juxtapositions: control and freedom, the past and the present, classic and avant-garde, pre- composed and new music, art music and folk or popular music,” a combination of “diverse ideas” that “contrast and combine with each other to create depth and interest.” (Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss, 6). Lars Helgert takes a different view, considering Foss’s “compositional eclecticism” as natural “musical expressions of his immigrant experience.” (Lars Erik Helgert, “Lukas Foss’s American Works as Expressions of the Immigrant Experience,” Journal of Musicological Research 33 [2014]: 315–16). For more on Foss and migration, see Leon Botstein, “Reinventing Life and Career: The Perils of Emigration,” Musical Quarterly 90 (2007): 309–18.

!237 argue that Foss confounds these associations by avoiding blunt conflicts between systems, instead layering these atop one another.42 Baroque Variations becomes paradoxically old and new simultaneously. As a result, the piece cannot be understood through reference to historical modes of analysis or value judgments institutionalized in contemporary classical music. Styles that do not typically coexist because of historical distance and aesthetic independence mingle in a contextless void with no differentiation between past and present.

Michael Gordon’s Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony poses a related challenge to the idea of the past by folding music history and eliminating its distance from the present.43 In the first movement, Gordon borrows the symphony’s first four measures, which alternate accented chords in the full orchestra with woodwind solos.44 Where Beethoven creates motion towards a harmonic arrival point on a dominant pedal point in measures 10–14 by descending chromatically from the tonic, Gordon avoids any sense of goal directedness by alternating tonic and first-inversion dominant chords. He smooths the regular two-measure alternations of these chords by adding a descending Mixolydian glissando (initially in the first violins). Through this

42 John Corigliano’s music for Ghosts similarly avoids a dialectical relationship between past and present music and stage action. In the liner notes to the Los Angeles Opera’s recording of Ghosts, Thomas Mays notes how carefully the composer “avoid[s] tracing a simple one-to-one correspondence between types of music and its distinctive theatrical levels (the timeless ghost-limbo, the buffa characters, and the historical personalities),” which Mays believes resonates with “our polyglot, stylistically boundary-less new century.” (John Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Los Angeles Opera, soprano Patricia Racette, baritone Christopher Maltman, bass Kristinn Sigmundsson, tenor Joshua Guerrero, and conductor James Conlon, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016).

43 Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (particularly its second movement) is quoted in other works, including John Corigliano’s Fantasia on an Ostinato (versions for piano, 1985 and for orchestra, 1986), Kevin Puts’s Inspiring Beethoven (2001), and the film The King’s Speech (2010).

44 Gordon wrote that he “couldn’t resist working with the huge barbaric opening chords.” (Michael Gordon, “Program Note: Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony,” accessed September 21, 2106, http:// www.michaelgordonmusic.com/music/rewriting-beethovens-seventh-symphony). Like Foss’s Baroque Variations, Gordon’s parody involves a play with memory.

!238 combination of borrowing with processual changes, Gordon distorts the work’s recognizable opening.

As the movement unfolds, Gordon begins peeling instruments away from Beethoven’s chords to add parts to the glissando figure (sometimes in close rhythmic canon).45 The opening gesture grows increasingly unrecognizable as more instruments shift to performing glissandi, and by m. 57 an accented rhythmic pulse on the downbeat remains the only timbre identifiable from

Beethoven’s original. A final accent marks a moment of suspended time before the movement’s third section, beginning at m. 85. Here, Gordon’s music finally supplants Beethoven’s. Gordon retains the first section’s accented downbeats (while departing from the alternating tonic- dominant harmonic motion) and the ascending glissandi from section two, adding a pulsing electric bass line, swelling percussion parts heavily reliant on cymbals and evocative of rock music, and syncopated cross rhythms in the brass.46

The first movement’s process-oriented nature and its fusion of contemporary techniques with borrowed music creases musical time. Gordon gradually replaces Beethoven’s nineteenth- century music with twenty-first century music, which is characterized by greater imprecision of pitch, cyclicity and repetition of rhythm, reduction in (or elimination of) harmonic motion, and

45 At m. 25, a new section begins with the entrance of an ascending glissando in the ’cellos. This contrasting line gradually obscures the previously stable two-measure alternations, a key element in Gordon’s process of replacing the familiar with new music.

46 Each of the four notes in the bass line repeats a rhythmic pattern that divides the thirty-two sixteenth notes of a two-measure phrase into irregular groups.

!239 timbres and textures inspired by vernacular musics.47 A listener hears a process of historical change dissolve, as sounds from one era (and the gap of time each represents) metamorphose into those from another. By moving in one leap across centuries and eras, Gordon folds the space between past and present, an example of a tendency to conceive of history through “metaphors of folded, instantaneously accessible time” during the age of fracture.48

While parodies by Foss and Gordon demonstrate the increasingly fluid understanding of history and time characteristic of this era, Corigliano and Hoffman’s The Ghosts of Versailles treats the past as mutable rather than stable, with history offering a site for contesting past events and reinterpreting them according to current desires. Anne Shreffler describes the opera as

“intensely involved with history, both operatic and political,”49 an idea echoed by Hoffman’s

47 Gordon’s efforts to return Beethoven to the past and historicize the previous composer continue throughout the work. An attacca transition into the second movement catapults a listener back in time to the nineteenth century, to Gordon’s main source of inspiration, the “divine and other-worldly theme” from Beethoven’s second movement. Gordon’s music heightens a listener’s sense of dislocation by presenting a cyclic depiction of time. He loops the borrowed theme in a close canon, “adjusting it slightly so that when it ends, it is in a key one half-step higher.” As the theme “continues to cycle around and slowly spirals up,” a listener moves between earlier and later periods of music history. Sounds coil together ahistorically: Beethoven’s theme, tight canons reminiscent of Josquin or Ligeti, dense passages evocative of Renaissance works like Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium, a Glassian woodwind hemiola, long passages of formless dissonance that call to mind the spatial effects of Stockhausen, hocketed rhythms, a repeated pattern similar to a jazz drummer’s ride cymbal, and a throbbing bass line typical of Gordon’s totalist music or contemporary electronic dance music. (Gordon, “Program Note”).

48 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 224.

49 Anne Chatoney Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera: ‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano and William Hoffman,” Contemporary Music Review 20 (2001): 117. She does not consider Ghosts an “operatic parody.” Her reading contrasts with Colleen Renihan’s interpretation, which considers quotation and parody important parts of the work. (Ibid., 118 and Colleen Renihan, “‘History as It Should Have Been’: Haunts of the Historical Sublime in John Corigliano’s and William Hoffman’s ‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” Twentieth-Century Music 10 [2013]: 251). For more on Corigliano’s music, see Mark Adamo and Clark Rundell, John Corigliano: A Monograph (Todmorden, UK: Royal Northern College of Music in Association with Arc Music, 2000) and Mary Lou Humphrey, John Corigliano (New York: G. Schirmer, 1994).

!240 claim that the work attempted “to recreate the history of opera.”50 From inception, the work’s drama and music were conceived along fluid historical lines. William Higgins observes that the libretto is far reaching in its influences and allusions, combining characters and dialogue drawn from Beaumarchais’s trilogy of Figaro plays (Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, and

La Mère coupable), portions of Arrigo Boito’s poem “Il Re Orso,” historical testimonies and statements from Marie Antoinette’s trial, and an allusion to a Nazi propaganda film.51 The opera’s music is similarly wide reaching in its fusion of different sources and styles. Higgins notes that the opera “incorporates music that is reminiscent” of every style period of Western music history, including a medieval chant, a “‘stile antico’ . . . imitation of the Renaissance motets of Josquin Desprez and Giovanni Palestrina,” patter songs in the style of Rossini’s “Largo

50 Hoffman made this claim during an interview with Evan Fein on February 1, 2013. Fein makes several specific correlations between Ghosts and operatic history. (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 150–61). In other interviews, Hoffman similarly described the opera’s focus on time and history. Before the premiere, he categorized the opera as “primarily a love story” that also addresses “the French Revolution, the nature of revolution in general, the nature of love and the nature of time.” (Allan Kozinn, “Rushing in Where Copland Feared to Tread,” The New York Times, December 15, 1991, accessed November 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/ 1991/12/15/arts/classical-music-rushing-in-where-copland-feared-to-tread.html).

51 William Ladd Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’: A Character Study of the Opera by John Corigliano and William Hoffman” (DMA document, The University of Oklahoma, 1995), 52–56, 125–28, and 209.

!241 al factotum,” harmonic patterns derived from Mozart, Wagnerian leitmotifs, and modern and late modern atonal, serial, and aleatoric techniques.52

Creating a scenario that would fuse such disparate dramatic and music sources presented

Hoffman and Corigliano with a singular challenge. The librettist recalls that because Corigliano

“wanted to write in a variety of musical styles,” an opera that was “a period drama set in the eighteenth century would pretty much lock him into a neoclassical idiom,” and that Hoffman’s principal task as a librettist “was to find a structure that would allow him maximum stylistic flexibility.”53 The composer was similarly cautious about employing previous musical languages, realizing that “I couldn’t merely revisit their world” because “the eighteenth century isn’t ours.”54 Corigliano sought to avoid a predominately neoclassical language while employing its vocabulary to “build a musical bridge between” both past and present sounds. He recalls tempering his enthusiasm for “the exuberance and virtuosity of Mozart’s and Rossini’s opera

52 Ibid., 39–44. Shreffler writes about the specific operatic conventions Corigliano uses. (Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 120–24). Fein describes the compositional techniques used to create contrasting sound worlds throughout the opera. (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 89–90, 103, and 118). Corigliano’s references to previous styles was a common theme throughout writing on the work’s premiere. Allan Kozinn heard contemporary music in “twelve-tone rows and clusters” and in “stretches of the expansive lyricism familiar from Mr. Corigliano’s orchestral works.” Edward Rothstein noticed “music that merrily and sentimentally plundered” from Rossini and Mozart, while Matthew Gurewitsch heard passages owing “a debt to Schubert, perhaps to Beethoven, perhaps to late Verdi.” For Bernard Holland, “frilly costumes and Baroque interiors promise Richard Strauss” and “icy instrumental glissandos threaten sober post-Romantic drama.” Alex Ross heard the broadest range of influences, running a gamut from “scraps of Britten . . . long stretches of warmed-over Barber . . . nightmare- hangover Mozart . . . and reference[s] to John Laurence Seymour.” (Kozinn, “Rushing in Where Copland Feared to Tread”; Edward Rothstein, “At the Met, Ghosts Come to Applaud ‘Ghosts,’” The New York Times, January 5, 1992, accessed November 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/05/arts/classical-view-at-the-met-ghosts-come-to- applaud-ghosts.html; Matthew Gurewitsch, “Revolutionary Strains,” The Atlantic, December 1991, 116; Bernard Holland, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ Fills the Tumbrels with Conventions,” The New York Times, December 31, 1991, accessed November 18, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/31/arts/critic-s-notebook-the-ghosts-of- versailles-fills-the-tumbrels-with-conventions.html; and Alex Ross, “The Ghosts of the Met,” The New Republic, March 9, 1992, 33).

53 Peter G. Davis, “The Big Score: Composer John Corigliano Dares to Make Serious Music Fun Again,” Opera News, December 9, 1991, 66, quoted in Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 20.

54 Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016.

!242 buffa” and their representation of a “world of clarity and grace, as well as drama and ambition,” with his long held “ambivalen[ce] about modernism in music,” a response that combines an

“embrace” of “its thrilling experiments” yet “winc[es] at its presentism and exclusivity.”55

Corigliano’s desire for stylistic fluidity was complicated by the weakness of La Mère coupable, which Hoffman admits could “at best” be used “only as a subplot.”56 The opera’s creators worked around the source play’s weakness and, in Hoffman’s words, found a situation that “would allow a composer to write any kind of music he wanted” by setting the opera in a multi-layered time stream inhabited by ghosts watching an opera-within-the-opera, A Figaro for

55 Ibid. Despite his equivocal thoughts on modernism, some critics considered his use of modernist techniques successful. Shreffler claims the work “intentionally avoids the high modernist strategy of setting the artwork in an oppositional relationship to a past canonical repertory by casting a critical or ironic eye upon it.” (Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 120).

56 Davis, “The Big Score,” 66, quoted in Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 20. Despite the popularity of Beaumarchais’s first two plays as libretti, only two composers, André Grétry and Darius Milhaud, had used the third play as the basis for an opera. (Ibid., 10–16).

!243 Antonia.57 Writing a liner note essay for the 2015 Los Angeles Opera’s recording, Corigliano remarked that Hoffman’s scenario provided him with a way “to play the not-quite Mozartean idiom of the buffa characters against the not-quite-modernism of the ghost figures, and develop from both of them a music that embraces the past even while leaving it behind.”58

Through his search for “a way in which the music of the past could dance with the music of the present,” Corigliano uses a diverse blend of stylistic ideas to distinguish past and present.59

These folds in time (similar to the parodies by Foss and Gordon) collapse musical time and space, as Corigliano and Hoffman opera (in Shreffler’s phrase) seek “to blur” the “distance and

57 Davis, “The Big Score,” 66, quoted in Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 20. One inspiration for the opera’s temporal fluidity was film music. In a March 10, 1994 interview with William Higgins, Corigliano acknowledged the influence of film music and effects on the opera: “It’s cinematic. It’s an opera that’s made use of its time. It’s very cinematic, the way we cut from one thing to another with imagination. When we were staging it, we said it was like making a movie. You have to think of it that way, and that’s because it’s of our generation. Films are a part of our mentality.” (Ibid., 39). Fein argues that “the most striking organizational feat” of A Figaro for Antonia “is the way in which Hoffman and Corigliano managed to project the structure and pacing . . . without actually having to compose the entire opera.” Fein suggests that the pair employs a type of “structural quotation” by “evoking specific music and scenarios” to reference to the dramatic pacing of Rossini and Mozart operas. (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 115–16). The dramatic device of a performance-within-a- performance has a rich tradition in Western drama, appearing in works by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Bertolt Brecht, Tom Stoppard, and Mel Brooks among others. On the operatic stage, A Figaro for Antonia can be situated within a tradition of meta-operas including Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Hindemith’s Cardillac, and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. (Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 104–5; Alice Bellini, “Music and ‘Music’ in Eighteenth-Century Meta-Operatic Scores,” Eighteenth-Century Music 6 [2009]: 183–207; and Hermann Danuser, “Self-Representation in Music: The Case of Hindemith’s Meta-Opera Cardillac,” trans. J. Bradford Robinson, in Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 224–46). Ghosts can also be understood as a contribution to a history of operas written around Beaumarchais’s characters including Milhaud’s setting of La Mère coupable, Jules Massenet’s Chérubin, and Hiram Titus and Barbara Field’s Rosina. (Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 16–18). Renihan situates the work on another axis, that of contemporary operas written on historical subjects, including “John Adams’s and Alice Goodman’s operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and Doctor Atomic, Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison’s Margaret Garner, Harry Somers’s and Mavor Moore’s Louis Riel, and . . . Christopher Theofanidis and Donna Di Novelli’s Heart of a Soldier.” (Renihan, “‘History as It Should Have Been,’” 254).

58 Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016. Elsewhere, Corigliano described wanting to write in a style that “can only describe[d] as existing in ‘no time.’ It isn’t now, it isn’t the past, it isn’t the future. It’s just ‘no time.’” (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 35).

59 Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016. In an October 17, 2012 interview with Fein, Corigliano described his use of an onstage continuo group, which he referred to as his “Monteverdi recitative orchestra.” This ensemble helps him (in Fein’s words) conjure “style, time period, and genre.” (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 106).

!244 differences between the present and the past.”60 Corigliano’s bending of time, however, extends further than that heard in the other two parodies in its service of Hoffman’s treatment of history.61

Hoffman’s plot turns on the idea that history can be rewritten and its endings changed, epitomizing the era’s move away from historical structure and towards “narratives and consciousness.”62 Marie Antoinette’s lengthy entrance aria, for example, tells her story of the

French Revolution, full of sense impressions and fragmented, traumatic memories (“the October sun,” “‘you will wear white’ they say,” “the odor of blood on steel”).63 These narrative passages alternate with a conventional aria (“Once There Was a Golden Bird,” which Corigliano treats as a leitmotiv throughout the opera) during which the Queen reminisces about her life before the

Revolution. Her traumatic reliving of her execution occurs during the opera’s Prologue. During

60 Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 118. Her visualization of the opera’s “layers of time and space” depict these as concentric circles, suggesting a cyclic conception of time. (Ibid., 122). Colleen Renihan understands this blurring as part of opera’s capability to “transform the traditionally divided presentation of past and present into a temporalized presentation of the very formation of that distinction, the experience of which might be understood in terms of the theory of the sublime.” (Renihan, “‘History as It Should Have Been,’” 250).

61 Shreffler understands these shifts in a narrower sense, analyzing the “intricately structured libretto of Ghosts” as taking “full advantage of the postmodern permeability of fiction and history.” She interprets the work “neither [as] a historical opera nor an operatic parody, but [as] a work that draws upon images from history to create an image of opera,” drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of the “simulacrum, or ‘the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.’” Renihan offers an alternative interpretation, arguing that the work “draws upon images from opera to create an image of history” and suggesting that Ghosts illustrates a nonlinguistic model for historiography, demonstrating a “sublime historical experience” and enacting “the moment where a formless and anarchical historical past becomes narrativized and thereby divided into a past and a present.” (Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 118, 120, and 124 and Renihan, “‘History as It Should Have Been,’” 250 and 259).

62 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 40.

63 As the aria unfolds, the Queen describes reliving these moments ceaselessly, a poignant undercurrent as her continued pleas for forgetfulness demonstrate the power of memory to fix events in personal history. The dialogue surrounding the aria suggests that Marie Antoinette both clings to and regrets her past.

!245 this section, Corigliano uses collage to represent multiple levels of action and temporality.64 It is only with Beaumarchais’s entrance that time—in the form of musical meter—is organized, regulated, and controlled, a metaphor for the power the playwright manifests at the end of the

Prologue, when he reveals that his true intentions with A Figaro for Antonia are to alter the past, restore the queen to life, and show her “history as it should have been.” History is in the hands of those who dare (the Queen warns Beaumarchais that he risks his “immortal soul”) or with the lunacy (“you’re mad!”) to wield its power. While the opera is unclear from whence this power springs—suggesting both magic and the power of music—the mechanism by which the change will be affected is a simple diamond necklace.

Money’s ability to change history, however, has limits, as Act II reveals. A “theatrical revolution” occurs as Figaro moves off Beaumarchais’s script and decides to save his family rather than surrender the wealth to Count Almaviva for the Queen’s rescue.65 Hoping to restore order, Beaumarchais enters the opera-within-an-opera, re-staging Marie Antoinette’s trial to prove her innocence to Figaro. Just before saving the Queen and writing himself out of history, the reenactment culminates with the Queen recognizing that history “is as it should have been” and convincing the playwright to abandon his plan. Marie Antoinette’s psychological closure is depicted musically. Her entrance aria is characterized by shifts between tonal and atonal

64 These ideas were reinforced with production elements. The 1992 Met production changed the King’s stage directions during the Prologue. Rather than have him playing cards, he appears fixing a clock, calling attention to the theme of time that appears throughout the opera.

65 Throughout the opera, Corigliano and Hoffman rely on established cultural norms to present artists as people who shape and give meaning to experiences, yet the duo reminds us that artists have less power than laypersons typically assume. This scene underscores the plot device’s theatricality, showing that the power of composers and librettists to reshape history is largely one they give themselves, one that can go awry when they release their creations into the world.

!246 harmonies, composed and indeterminate music, recitative and arioso, monotone and melodic passages, and metered and rhythmically free music. Her final aria, in contrast, features music in a neo-romantic idiom (frequently tonal and clearly metric, with melodies characterized by large leaps, an expressive use of tempo and dynamics, and blended, heterogeneous orchestration). This stylistic fixity resolves the opera’s love story, dramatic action, and even its long-range tonal plan, but the work’s treatment of time lacks similar closure. Beaumarchais’s decision not to alter history is a choice. While he opted to leave the past unaltered, those events remain open for revision. The plot’s subtext suggests that time’s passage proves irrelevant to those with the desire

—and capital—to change previous events.

History’s malleability is one of the defining features of the age of fracture. Rodgers describes the pliancy with which Reagan’s speechwriters treated time, but he could just as easily be characterizing composer’s use of the past: “The work of their historical vignettes was to fold the very processes of time back upon themselves. It was to make the nation’s past and present part of each other: equally and immediately present.”66 Playing with musical history—its styles, composers, works, and performance practices—is foundational to the incongruities parodists create, destabilizing a listener’s memories of this history allows composers to treat it as a theme for development. The diverging visions of history these three composers present are related to

66 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 224.

!247 broader contestations of “history” and are representative of the age of fracture’s treatment of time as destabilized, warped, twisted, and folded.67

Power and Institutions

During the age of fracture, history was “a point of acute importance” because of many people’s sense “of living within fragmenting and accelerating time.”68 These changes both contributed to and resulted from a related feeling that “institutions, society, and power all seemed to be in recession.”69 These shifts manifested in varied forms ranging from “the movement of power from the megacorporations . . . to investment capital” to new forms of class analysis focused on individual actors instead of homogenous blocs like “nations” or “parties” to understandings of culture as “a conduit for power” that “gave history’s forgotten people the resources for resistance and agency” (while simultaneously imposing constraints from the top down) to new modes of symbolic and linguistic analysis.70 Throughout these disparate areas, as

“understandings of big social structures lost their force” and focus shifted to “power’s smaller

67 While considering several trends, Rodgers argues the most important was a “disaggregation of history into histories,” which took various forms ranging from arguments over textbooks to debates about historical events like the Columbus Quincentenary. (Ibid., 226–29). Similar discussions centered around multiculturalism and the elements of a shared American culture as transmitted through canons of texts and concepts. (Ibid., 209–14). Disagreements about historical interpretation and the constitution and importance of cultural canons had parallels in musical debates including the authentic performance movement, the “Shostakovich Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s, the disciplinary upheavals surrounding the New Musicology in the 1990s and 2000s, and ongoing efforts to include a range of previously ignored genres in music history textbooks.

68 Ibid., 221.

69 Ibid., 225. The fragmentation of power into “smaller, individually situated micropolitical acts” reflected the way “dominant languages for power grew thinner, less concentrated, and more difficult to grasp.” (Ibid., 255 and 79).

70 Ibid., 80–109.

!248 and actor-centered dimensions” or “its less tangible forms and symbolic manifestations,” power

“remained as it always does: instantiated in institutions, inequalities, and constraints.” Yet its

“means became more subtle” and it became harder to define and describe.71 Power and institutions also intersected with the age of fracture’s new “conceptions of human nature,” which

“stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire.”72 Parody exemplifies these themes, and shifts in power away from institutions and towards individuals can be traced through these three works, as the technique provided Foss, Corigliano and Hoffman, and Gordon with a strategy for challenging the power of conventional musical institutions.73

Foss’s unorthodox compositional procedures encourage a listener to confront the institutionalized aesthetic assumptions about cultivated music. His large-scale replication of an existing work in the second movement and his quip that “I composed the holes” in the first movement challenges Romantic paradigms of innovation and genius, and distorts Modernist charges to “make it new.”74 Both frameworks privilege a composer’s voice, a style that—while developing over time—remains distinct and recognizable. I argue that Foss’s Baroque Variations simultaneously fulfills and frustrates these expectations. Conventional understandings of

“newness” and “innovation” are realized through the composer’s experimental techniques—the

71 Ibid., 109–10.

72 Ibid., 3.

73 In this section I broadly define “institutions” to include both physical organizations such as the Metropolitan Opera and the intangible power structures they support, including aesthetic frameworks from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a canon of masterpieces, and entrenched ideas about the roles of composers, performers, and listeners.

74 Cage and Foss, Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra and Baroque Variations, Nonesuch H-71202, 1968.

!249 use of tri-tonality, for example—but are unfulfilled through his structural borrowings.75 Parody allows the composer to challenge received aesthetic values by crafting a style drawing freely from old and new, pre-existing and newly composed music, established styles and unfamiliar tropes. Foss blurs these binaries until stable ideas of music-historical progress collapse.

Foss’s most significant challenge to the institutions of cultivated music occurs in performance, which marks the intersection of history, memory, and power as choice and agency are reinvested from the composer and conductor to the performer.76 Such ideas had a long genesis in Foss’s musical thought; writing in 1962 about improvisation, Foss voiced his belief that the most successful collaborations involved sharing control with musicians: “if one desires a gratifying task for him, one must let him have a measure of power. He must be helped to develop initiative on his instrument.” Foss’s background in improvisation also explains his attraction to the prodigious feats of listening and ensemble he requires from his musicians, particularly in indeterminate passages where auxiliary instruments must follow principal partners in close rhythmic or melodic canons.77

75 In the first movement, for example, Foss retains Handel’s key of E major until m. 41, where he divides the orchestra into two groups playing in both E major and A-flat major. At m. 50, he further divides the orchestra, with a third group playing in C major. Foss returns each group to E major at m. 79. Foss also employs multiple concurrent rhythmic levels. During the second movement he increases the rhythmic density and complexity, as heard in m. 60, where the recorder and English horn play in groups of four within a triple meter, or in m. 63, where the flutes play another duple layer in dotted patterns across the existing meter.

76 Issues of power and representation appear in Foss’s work in other ways. The physicality of orchestral playing often seeps through the apertures Foss leaves in Handel’s music, like in the strained effect created in m. 19 when a trumpet player attacks a note inaudibly in a higher register before crescendoing to a mp dynamic level. This tangible demonstration of power creates an indelibly messy impression of live performance in an era dominated by high-fidelity, calling into question a recording’s authority to represent a composer’s vision.

77 Foss’s careful attention to foreground and background roles and his concern with structure are hallmarks concerning ensemble improvisation. (Martin Greet, “Lukas Foss’s Ensemble Improvisation,” MikroPolyphonie 4 [1997], accessed August 27, 2016, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nph-wb/20000831130000/http://farben.latrobe.edu.au/ mikropol/volume4/greet-m/greet.html). For more on the influence of improvisation on Foss’s music from this time, see Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 47–48 and 50–66.

!250 While “system and chance” provide a basis for many of Foss’s works from this period, another important facet is the composer’s power sharing, as the piece exemplifies a late- twentieth-century trend towards more active meanings of “performance” manifesting in increased agency for performers. According to Foss, “the players hold the reins [during performance]—no passive carrying out of instructions here.”78 Such music eroded the customary roles of both performers and composers, challenged the fixity of composed texts in their performed realizations, upended conventional wisdom regarding the precision of notation, and even called into question the divide between musical sound and everyday noise.79 Composers such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Lukas Foss allowed performers to enact new identities by extending to them control over choices normally reserved for composers.

These new identities fit into Foss’s larger disruptions by challenging deep-seated institutional notions of a composer’s power. Upending the unequal power structure inherent in a pantheon of master composers, Foss establishes his authority to borrow, augment, and distort pre-existing music as he sees fit. The composer was transparent about his desire to usurp the

78 Lukas Foss, “Improvisation versus Composition,” The Musical Times 103 (1962): 685.

79 Foss’s understanding of improvisation informed his use of indeterminate operations. In 1962, Foss claimed that “chance, in my opinion, becomes musically interesting only when it rubs against the will, when musical selectivity enters into the picture correcting the chance formations.” (Ibid., 684 [emphasis in original]). In a preface to a (later abandoned) project that would provide a textbook for ensemble improvisation, Foss stressed “order, direction, discipline” as necessary “lest anarchy and chaos” reign supreme. The composer hoped to balance “predetermined coordination of non-predetermined musical ideas” so that the result was “not chance in control, but chance controlled.” (Quoted in Marvin L. Silverman, “Ensemble Improvisation as a Creative Technique in the Secondary Instrumental Program” [PhD diss., Stanford University, 1962], 169, emphasis in original). While Ghosts’s extensive history of post-premiere revisions and reductions is atypical for an opera (as Fein notes these “demonstrate that even a very public piece like this one remained a work in progress for a long time after its premiere”), the changes undermine conventional understandings of “the score” as a fixed, permanent record of a composer’s vision. (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 173–91).

!251 roles between established geniuses and those who must follow as evidenced by the movement’s title, “Phorion,” which is widely translated as “stolen goods.”80

Foss’s radical reconfigurations of this music were the focal point of the work’s early critical reception. Writing after the premiere of the third movement by Leonard Bernstein and the

New York Philharmonic on April 27, 1967, New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant considered the music “a piece of vulgarity.”81 New York Times critic Alan Hughes reviewed the work more positively, but described the movement’s “remake” of Bach as a “disturbing dream, not quite a nightmare, that won’t stop.”82 Subsequent critics retained this imagery; Hutcheon writes that

Foss’s fragmentation “offer[s] an ironic, nightmarish world through distortion,” a theme echoed in Alex Ross’s description of Foss’s use of collage to “distort . . . Handel, Scarlatti, and Bach.”83

While Foss’s title refers playfully to his musical borrowings, many listeners considered the theft to be something much more serious. The work’s reception was distinguished by charges of violence against the sanctity of the original and claims the composer was “anti-Bach.”84 The third movement, in particular, “was both controversial and influential when it was first

80 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 102; Bernard Jacobson’s liner note essay for Cage and Foss, Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra and Baroque Variations, Nonesuch H-71202, 1968.; and Theodore Libbey, The NPR Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2006), 239. Ned Rorem noted that Foss’s understanding of the word was “stolen goods,” but writes that a friend corrected this translation: “Tom Prentiss says that only the plural phoria means stolen goods; phorion means damning evidence.” (Ned Rorem, The Later Diaries of Ned Rorem: 1961–1972 [New York: Open Road Media, 2013], 141).

81 Winthrop Sargeant, “Musical Events: Music to Listen By,” New Yorker, May 6, 1967, 158.

82 The full work was premiered by Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony on July 7, 1967. (Allen Hughes, “Music: ‘Phorion’ by Foss,” The New York Times, April 28, 1967, 32).

83 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 12 and Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2008), 533.

84 Shea, “The Middle-Period Compositions of Lukas Foss,” 126.

!252 premiered.”85 Hughes reported that Foss’s “musical result, which is fascinating, repelled many” at the premiere of the work’s third movement.86 Sargeant considered the work repugnant, and his review of the premiere included caustic cynicism. After deriding Foss’s title (interpreting

“Phorion” as the composer’s attempt to “disarm criticism in advance”), Sargeant’s describes the music with violent imagery: “torn to pieces,” “interrupted,” “booming,” and “crashes.”87

Sargeant even questions Baroque Variations’ status as a “work, if such it can be called,” and suggests that Foss would best serve music’s future by abandoning composition.88

After Sargent’s review, critic Bernard Jacobson made an opposing case in 1968, pleading that “it seems unfair to project moral indignation against one of the few composers to have been completely honest and purposeful about his theft.”89 Jacobson voices his lack of surprise at

Foss’s reception, given “the unreal quality of a musical culture in which an eminent Bach interpreter can be advertised by her agents, with complete seriousness, as ‘the High Priestess of

Bach,’ for all the world as if the poor man were a religion instead of a plain, honest composer.”90

85 Ibid., 10. Part of this reception was the result of the work’s “extensive exposure” because Foss’s commission guaranteed performances from ten major orchestras. (Ibid., 124).

86 Hughes, “Music: ‘Phorion’ by Foss,” 32. The critic seems sympathetic to Foss, writing that if these sounds had accompanied a Fellini film “they probably would have been accepted without question.” (Ibid.).

87 After claiming that the performance was “roundly booed,” he uncharitably pillories Bernstein, writing that the conductor “deserves censure for permitting such a piece of vulgarity on the Philharmonic’s programs.” Sargeant, “Musical Events,” 158.

88 Sargeant wrote, “Shortly after [completing L.H.O.O.Q.], Mr. Duchamp stopped creating art altogether and devoted himself to chess. A similar move by Mr. Foss might benefit the future of the art of music.” (Ibid.).

89 Bernard Jacobson’s liner note essay for Cage and Foss, Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra and Baroque Variations, Nonesuch H-71202, 1968.

90 Ibid. Jacobson’s “High Priestess” comment refers to keyboardist and Bach specialist Rosalyn Tureck.

!253 Jacobson’s criticism underscores the pressing weight of a pantheon of master composers on contemporary music, and while he criticizes Foss’s borrowing instead of questioning this premise, I consider his comment that “Foss dared to have fun with the cult figure” revelatory in his suggestion both of bravery on the composer’s part and the presence of enjoyment or amusement in cultivated music.91 Sargent’s criticism and Jacobson’s defense of Foss reveal a good deal about the power structures of cultivated music in the late 1960s, not least that a defense was deemed necessary, but also in the critic’s observations that Foss’s working career had offered obeisance to Bach and his reminder that “the original exists, unharmed, in its full splendor and will continue to do so.”92 Despite Jacobson’s spirited defense, to symphony audiences not yet accustomed to the borrowing, referentiality, and stylistic pluralism often found in cultivated music from the 1960s and 1970s and Foss’s modification of a “fixed” work by a canonical composer, Foss had challenged the power structures of cultivated music.

Of all the late-twentieth-century parodies, institutions and power had the greatest impact on the genesis and composition of The Ghosts of Versailles. Corigliano and Hoffman negotiated the institutional politics and economics of one of the most conservative enterprises in the

Western cultivated music marketplace, the Metropolitan Opera, as a brief history of the work’s genesis illustrates. Writing twenty-four years after the premiere, Corigliano remembers feeling

“both honored and intimidated” that the Metropolitan Opera—which he described as “one of the world’s most important theatres” and “the great historical house of our country”—commissioned

91 Bernard Jacobson, Nonesuch H-71202. For more on the ways interactions between humorists and cultivated music offers insight on “cultural history and the changing status of classical music in the United States,” see Charles Hiroshi Garrett, “‘Shooting the Keys’: Musical Horseplay and High Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 245–63.

92 Bernard Jacobson, Nonesuch H-71202.

!254 his first opera in 1979.93 The work had been intended to commemorate the Met’s centennial season in 1983, but was not completed until March of 1987.94 At this point, the Met’s history represented an impediment; as critic Matthew Gurewitsch remarked, “the grander the institution, the less it cares to gamble on the work of living creators.”95 For several years the opera’s future was “grim” since general manager Bruce Crawford “had stated publicly that the Met’s audience had no interest in contemporary opera” and “that the Met’s mission was to preserve the tried and

93 Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016 and Michael C. Nott, “The Long Road to Versailles,” Opera News, January 4, 1992, 10, quoted in Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 19. In an interview on October 17, 2012, Corigliano likened the Met commission to receiving “the Hope Diamond, complete with the curse. You don’t turn it down, but you know it’s going to get you in the end.” (Quoted in Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 24).

94 The first act was completed in 1984, at which point composition was paused until music director James Levine had reviewed and approved the score. According to Corigliano, the delay “was excruciating for us, but it had to be that way. And we didn’t want to start working on the second act, because the shape it would take, in terms of size and scope, depended on whether it was to be done at the Met or in a smaller house.” Kozinn, “Rushing in Where Copland Feared to Tread.” For more on the opera’s commission and genesis, see Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 22–50. He also describes the problems caused by the opera’s size and subsequent attempts by the composer to reduce its performing forces. (Ibid., 60–79).

95 Gurewitsch, “Revolutionary Strains,” 112. Allan Kozinn was similarly critical of the Met’s repertory choices, observing that “one wishes the company would move ahead more decisively” while admitting “a sudden change of pace would be regarded as imprudent, perhaps even dangerous.” He finds fault with music director James Levine’s programming decisions (with Levine defending the Met’s avoidance of new commissions by listing major twentieth-century operas that Met had yet to perform) and with assistant manager Joseph Volpe (who argued that older works were an economic necessity). (Allan Kozinn, “Why Met’s ‘Ghosts’ Will Be Disembodied until 1994–95 Season,” The New York Times, January 13, 1992, accessed November 18, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/ 1992/01/13/arts/critic-s-notebook-why-met-s-ghosts-will-be-disembodied-until-1994-95-season.html). From his perspective as a composer, Fein comments that “the perpetual trouble with evaluating brand new pieces” is augmented by “the ability of monumental cultural institutions such as the Met to christen works authoritatively as canonical, simply by virtue of presenting them,” a process that “heightens the temptation to uphold or deny the legitimacy of these new ‘masterpieces’ immediately.” (Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 133).

!255 true.”96 The premiere of Ghosts of Versailles on December 19, 1991 broke almost a quarter century of precedent, marking the company’s first world premiere in nearly twenty-five years.97

The concepts of history and institutions were paired from the opera’s earliest days, with

Corigliano shaping his concept as “a piece not only for, but also about, the Met, about what opera and its history meant to American art.”98 He and Hoffman believed that drawing on opera’s history “seemed an ideal way of celebrating the glory of the place,” but the duo was trepidatious about how their concept would be received by audiences. Hoffman recalls being “terrified at the prospect of writing a libretto that was bound to be compared to two certified masterpieces, which

I joined the world in adoring,” and which he “desecrate[d] by turning them into prequels to La

Mère coupable. The opera world might not love me for such chutzpah.”99 As Hoffman suggests, the conservatism of operatic institutions and their patrons hovered about the creators while they

96 Gurewitsch, “Revolutionary Strains,” 113. According to New York Times critic Will Crutchfield, the Met’s finances in September of 1985 “require[d] a ‘conservative’ swing,” which took the form of “shoring up the standard repertory with improved casting and a continued or even increasing reliance on such lavish spectacles” like Tosca. (Will Crutchfield, “James Levine: New Era at the Met,” September 22, 1985, accessed December 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/22/magazine/james-levine-new-era-at-the-met.html). In a panel discussion at the Central Opera Service National Conference on October 22, 1987, Crawford argued that there were “good reasons why the Metropolitan Opera . . . would not often commission new works,” including the historical conservatism of opera audiences, the stronger cultural ties European audiences had with operas, and the problem new operas face concerning revivals (and thus their long-term profitability). (“Opera at the Crossroads,” Central Opera Service Bulletin 28 [1988]: 18–21).

97 Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” xii. The two previous world premieres were Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra (1966) and Marvin David Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1967). Though premiered in 1934, Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts was not performed by the Met until 1973. Allan Kozinn revealed additional frustration with the inflexibility of operatic institutions in his criticisms of the Met’s inability to capitalize on the opera’s success, writing that “those who recognize that a musical form can only thrive when the repertory is continually refreshed often deride big conservative houses like the Met as museums that exist only to preserve the works of the past. But Ghosts showed that repertory is only part of the problem. The international system is so rigidly geared to the museum approach that even brand-new works are treated as museum pieces, wedged into the jig-saw puzzle of a season’s schedule in the same way as the Traviatas and Aidas are.” (Kozinn, “Why Met’s ‘Ghosts’ Will Be Disembodied until 1994–95 Season”).

98 Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016.

99 Ibid.

!256 worked.100 For Shreffler, “the opera’s fundamental intertextuality” situates the work

“ostentatiously” within the “institution of the opera house.” Because Ghosts “invites its audience to perceive it against the background of the other operas they regularly see on that stage,”

Corigliano and Hoffman could parody established operatic conventions as a means of subverting what Rodgers describes as “the containing power of structures and institutions.”101

The Ghosts of Versailles Act I finale provides an example, as the scene layers multiple conventions intended to signal a remove from reality. The finale contains several conventional elements—including a spectacular use of ensemble, a large chorus, special effects from stage machinery, an exotic location, a chase scene, and a cross dressing main character—that evoke a space of fantasy and imagination. The scene’s setting at a Turkish court provided the composer with an opportunity to reference a musical style unheard elsewhere in the opera.102 A tapestry of

“Oriental” music harshly blared on kazoos, recollections of newly composed music heard previously in the act, quotations from Rossini, stylistic allusions to Broadway musicals, and slapstick humor and farce are woven together through new music composed on the eighteenth-

100 Fein situates the work in another context, that of the contemporary new music scene. He describes the conflicts that resulted as “artists later categorized as modernists, antimodernists, and postmodernists” responded to Romantic and Modernist aesthetic ideals and negotiated different forms of institutional support. Fein describes how tonal composers “were obliged to withdraw from the metanarrative of music, by virtue of the historicist message espoused by the modernists,” and the resulting decision many composers made “to rejoin the mainstream” by insisting “that the flow of the narrative be circular, at least for the time being.”(Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 134–42).

101 Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 119 and Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 270.

102 Corigliano took the “wonderful chaos and wildness” of Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri as “the model for the ending of Act I,” describing watching “the whole audience bobbing up and down with joy” as “one of the happiest experience [sic] I’ve ever had in the opera house.” (Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016). Like his model, Corigliano’s finale likewise fuses serious and comic elements in an exotic setting. Shreffler proposes an alternative reading, interpreting the finale through the framework of camp, which she characterizes through artifice, flamboyance, extravagance, and a celebration of surfaces and images. (Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 130).

!257 century topic of “Turkish music,” with its attendant components both musical and extramusical.103 Within this mélange of styles, Corigliano relies on operatic conventions framing exotic locations as transgressive spaces, and couples the musical and cultural distance afforded by exoticism with a further narrative removal from “opera,” with the finale centered around a performance within an opera within Ghosts of Versailles.

This distance provided Hoffman and Corigliano with a way to disguise the scene’s subversion of operatic institutions by mimicking the artificial remove from reality that their class status provides the opera’s performers and patrons. An audience member watching the finale watches characters from the opera watch a performance. This performance is marked by conspicuous consumption, featuring an Egyptian diva brought in to entertain the Pasha and his guests in a lavish setting replete with dancing girls, musical entertainment, formal costuming, ample food, and other signifiers of class and excess capital. Lost in the moment, both the characters in the scene and the deceased courtiers watching this performance seem to miss the irony of the Queen’s supporters gathering for lavish displays of wealth just days before her trial during the peak of the French Revolution.104 Corigliano and Hoffman draw parallels between the characters (who work hard to project their class status despite the upheavals of the Revolution)

103 These traits include improvisation, extended melismas, harmonic stasis and drones, dense modal melodies prominently featuring augmented seconds, imitation of vocal parts on instruments, nasally or closed timbres as well as passages featuring brass and percussion instruments in a style evocative of a janissary band, vocal passages drawing attention to female bodies, and passages of shifting and cyclic rhythms as well as Western understandings of the East as different, loud, ostentatious, barbaric, physical, and sexual. The passage can also be interpreted as depicting the East as incoherent and irrational because the aria’s “absurdist lyrics” are “proverbs strung together from a phrase book of colloquial Arabic.” (Gurewitsch, “Revolutionary Strains,” 116).

104 The finale has parallels with Act II, scene 5, a ball thrown by Count Almaviva during which an on-stage orchestra plays Mozart’s “Se vuol ballare.” The marked irony of the borrowing relies on the “revolutionary associations” of the original and the fact that The Marriage of Figaro was a “theatrical hit” in “prerevolutionary France.” (Rothstein, “At the Met, Ghosts Come to Applaud ‘Ghosts’”).

!258 and the Met audiences (whose concern with status likewise blinds them to contemporary problems). An audience member attending a grand opera becomes a contributor to the performance’s spectacle, entering a world of wealth, splendor, and unreality where the AIDS crisis, periods of economic recession, declining employment in manufacturing due to globalization, cuts to social services impacting lower-class Americans, and other pressing social concerns are set aside, however temporarily.

This critique of operatic institutions seems timely given the way the Metropolitan Opera and cultivated music more generally trailed behind the dominant trends of the age of fracture.

Rodgers notes an overall tendency towards the fragmentation of power and the weakening of the accompanying institutions, as “understandings of big social structures” were replaced with a focus on “power’s smaller and actor-centered dimensions” or on “less tangible forms and symbolic manifestations.”105 This trend marginally affected opera companies like the Met, however, which manifested an older type of power that took shape both as “a category of domination” and a “category of inequality and differences in scale—a measure of the unequal capacities of wealth or influence or organizational resources that make domination possible.”106

105 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 109–110. Hoffman and Corigliano close the Act I finale by opening a space for these minor actors. As the scene’s visual and sonic chaos reaches its climax, a figure dressed in a full Valkyrie costume enters bellowing “this is not opera! Wagner is opera!” This gimmick is similar to one that Henry Brant employs in his Kingdom Come from 1970. (Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], accessed January 9, 2016, http:// www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-009004.xml?print). The gag also contributes a hip self-awareness to the scene, coming directly before intermission and the inevitable discussions of the new work’s merits, and I consider it a masterstroke that uses humor to empower the work’s supporters and delegitimize attempts to police the boundaries of opera. By challenging the institutionalization of an operatic canon focused almost entirely on works from the past, the opera’s creators use the institution’s symbols to disarm critics, empowering their supporters to understand evaluate the opera its own terms, without using a system of value judgments appropriate for previous works. My reading of this scene differs from Alex Ross’s, who believes the scene borders on “fine, all-out musical farce” before coming “to a swift end, having given the dignified Met regulars no more than a good scare.” (Ross, “The Ghosts of the Met,” 32).

106 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 78.

!259 The Met’s power manifests itself not merely in issues such as repertory calcification but more importantly in tacit support of a system of inequality. The Met’s conservative programming and focus on historical works meant that opera looked towards the past, not contributing to greater social awareness and presentism but rather offering audiences a fictive space for escaping the present, a space that reaffirmed their class standing and the larger hierarchies of capitalism that sustain their status and power.

Conflicts between an established order (represented by the Met and its audiences) and a new guard (represented by Hoffman, Corigliano, and their supporters) played out in early critical reception to the opera. Several critics interpreted the work as a mockery of operatic institutions.

For Bernard Holland, Corigliano and Hoffman were “cultural terrorists” who mocked “opera’s hard-won conventions” with a work that “may be less an opera than a commando raid against operatic cant.”107 Describing the Met as “a house notoriously conservative about its repertory,”

Edward Rothstein believed Ghosts was “partly engaged in mocking that house and its audiences.” He made several unflattering parallels between the in-opera audience of ghosts

(“petulant and demanding”) and the “live” audience at the Met, which he describes as “deadened, obsessed with the past, waiting to be amused, easily pleased by farce.”108 Alex Ross offered the sharpest criticisms, lambasting the Met as “the world’s greatest opera museum,” censuring the

107 Holland labels the work “subversive,” an “exercise in bait-and-switch” that contains “more music criticism than music, like the anti-operas of Virgil Thomson two generations ago.” The critic focuses on instances where composer and librettist “ignor[e] the pressures of accumulated tradition” and call attention to the work’s artifice through “levels of make-believe” whose “sacrosanct boundaries are continually violated” to confound audiences who “expect certain things in certain places” including “seriousness of purpose when such is promised” and “comedy that remembers its place . . . and never lets go of its dignity.” (Holland, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ Fills the Tumbrels with Conventions”).

108 Rothstein, “At the Met, Ghosts Come to Applaud ‘Ghosts.’”

!260 company’s “decades of hostility to the very idea of new music,” and rebuking James Levine for his part in “his house’s record-setting irrelevance to the twentieth century.”109

Despite their denunciations of the Met and support of Corigliano and Hoffman’s opera, most critics also rebuked its music. Ross connects his harsh characterization of Met audiences

(who would feel “endangered by any hint of living opera, of a musical drama that would set the pulses racing and the mind free of the past”) with the composer’s borrowings and allusions.110

While recognizing Corigliano as a shrewd choice for a Met premiere given his “ear for the general public,” Ross derided Ghosts as “an entertaining but numbingly unoriginal of operatic styles past and present.”111 Rothstein describes the music as a “postmodern pastiche of ‘bits,’ parodies, musical in-jokes and invocations” that creates humor “at the expense of operatic tradition.”112 While generally positive towards the work’s challenges to operatic institutions,

Holland describes Corigliano’s music as “clever and sincere” yet “as cheerfully disposable as

Kleenex.” He believes that opera audiences expect music that is “built to last, creation striving

109 Ross, “The Ghosts of the Met,” 29.

110 Ibid., 33.

111 Ross describes the audience’s enthusiasm during the first act as “unprecedented in the annals of contemporary opera,” but suggests that “the audience at the Met did not merely enjoy itself, it came prepared to enjoy itself” due to a wave of “before-the-fact entertainment journalism.” For Ross, “the premiere and its attendant publicity . . . had the air of a massive, corporate-sponsored conjuring act, a feat of cultural necromancy.” Despite moments where he hoped that the Met was “deconstructing itself before our very eyes,” he was resigned to recognize that “everyone was only having a good time.” Notwithstanding his negative judgments of the opera (and condemnation of Corigliano’s style in general), Ross left the hall with “at least one hope. If audiences can get this excited over something that would blow away in a sharp gust of wind, how might they react if confronted by music of substance?” (Ibid., 29 and 33).

112 The first act, for example, is “deliberately unnerving, not taking anything seriously, swerving from sentimentality to burlesque, from buffa to soapy opera.” Despite the stylistic competency necessary to understand such humor, the critic paradoxically argues that because the opera is “ungrounded by sureties and traditions,” it “floats, offering only an elevated attitude of nostalgia and parody.” The result is a “sentimental and ineffective” opera that is “too flashy, too clever, too full of turning wheels” and that “yearns for something it has too much irony to really want.” (Rothstein, “At the Met, Ghosts Come to Applaud ‘Ghosts’”).

!261 for immortality,” citing examples of the opera’s lowbrow styles as evidence that the work

“degenerates” as if “a rawer, newer culture has been parachuted into an old and protected bastion.”113 Such juxtapositions of high and low are not merely unsatisfying aesthetically. Rather, they “upset decorum and ridicule rules of civilized discourse” as part of a “violent revolutionary strategy” to “put things where they don’t belong.” For Holland, this is indicative of “sociological wars between lower and higher orders.”114

A theme of class conflict seems to lie at the heart of many critics’ unease with the work.

For Rothstein, Ghosts is exceptional as “a twentieth-century opera . . . that so honors the notion of ‘nobility.’” He takes issue with the opera’s longing for “the prerevolutionary world,” situating the opera within a context of “recent revisionist histories of the French Revolution” framing that event “as fundamentally destructive.” Both composer and librettist “palpably mourn” the “world of prerevolutionary France, the world of Voltaire and Beaumarchais,” presenting the Revolution as “a total disruption of beauty and order.”115 Alex Ross decries “the work’s idée fixe,” the

“maintenance of aristocratic order,” as well as the opera’s depiction of the French Revolution “as the insane whim of demagogues.”116 Writing after the Met’s revival of Ghosts in 1995, Rothstein dryly remarked, “Beaumarchais enters his own opera trying to create ‘history as it should have

113 Corigliano’s music serves as a reminder of “the way all music used to be until a certain Beethoven got us on the posterity kick.” (Holland, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ Fills the Tumbrels with Conventions”).

114 Ibid.

115 He contrasts Hoffman and Corigliano’s portrayal of the Revolution with other operatic representations including Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier and Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. (Rothstein, “At the Met, Ghosts Come to Applaud ‘Ghosts’”)

116 Ross, “The Ghosts of the Met,” 32.

!262 been’ by proving that the French Revolution wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.”117 Shreffler simply describes the work’s “commentary on history and on opera” as “both rather distasteful anti-revolutionary messages, when you stop to think about them.”118

Critical responses to Ghosts’s positive depictions of the French Revolution and the work’s reception following its premiere typify a feature of the age of fracture, its contested nature. Both the libretto and music demonstrate awareness of the conventions, characters, and texts of the operatic canon while frequently mocking them. The opera casts aspersions on the institutions of cultivated music while relying on their cultural and economic power to realize the work in performance. Ghosts both supports and criticizes the historical class inequalities that make such institutions possible, valorizing the upper-class (likening the revolutionaries to

Brownshirts during Bégearss’s Act II, scene 4 aria and having Figaro kneel to beg forgiveness from the Queen during Act II, scene 3) while portraying opera goers as vapid individuals with more wealth than taste or social awareness. The opera’s tension between critique and support for institutions suggests how themes of institutional power played our during the age of fracture.

117 Edward Rothstein, “A Young Opera Heavy with the Past,” The New York Times, April 5, 1995, accessed November 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/05/arts/music-review-a-young-opera-heavy-with-the- past.html.

118 Shreffler, “Phantoms at the Opera,” 120. Corigliano and Hoffman situate their revisionist history of the French Revolution within a debate over modern and postmodern responses to history and the past. The composer describes modernity as “a war” focused on the destruction of the past in order to create something new, and states that he and Hoffman felt “that that kind of change—of which the French Revolution is an example—is not the only way to go.” While his depiction of bloodless regime change following the collapse of the Soviet Union is naive, it exemplifies his desire for “healthy changes” that “embrac[e] the past” while “going to the future.” (Quoted in Fein, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ by John Corigliano,” 161–62). In a December 9, 2004 interview with Frank Oteri, Corigliano characterizes the French Revolution as “the ultimate modernist statement” because of its destruction of the past. He expands on his vision of reconciling cultivated music’s past with its present, arguing that “starting from nothing is very good because you’re not inhibited by the past. But starting by understanding the past and then being able to go into future is even better. It’s everything. It’s the past. It’s the present. And then you must think to the future.” (Quoted in Frank J. Oteri, “The Gospel According to John Corigliano,” February 1, 2005, accessed January 5, 2017, http://www.newmusicbox.org/assets/70/interview_corigliano.pdf).

!263 While the institutions that Gordon targets revolve around one figure instead of a network of works and composers, they are no less entrenched than those targeted by Corigliano and

Hoffman. Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony challenges Beethoven’s figurehead status as a sonic, compositional, and aesthetic ideal for contemporary composers and institutions. The parody reimagines Beethoven’s sonic and aesthetic legacy. Rather than remember Beethoven’s motivic treatment, expansion of conventional forms, and development of the interiority and emotional expression of Romanticism, Gordon calls attention to alternative ways of understanding the composer, using terms often reserved for vernacular music including

“brutish,” “loud,” full of “raw power,” and “burn[ing] through the style of the time.”119 His parody removes the classic-period harmonies and colorful orchestrations that cloak Beethoven’s ideas in a palatable guise to spotlight other aspects of Beethoven’s music: its rhythmic excitement, violent contrasts, rapid shifts of mood, overwhelming volume, and sheer dynamism.120

This shift in focus helps Gordon confront the idea that Beethoven presents an ideal precedent for conceiving, developing, and manipulating certain types of musical ideas, yet composing music that would do this proved to be (in Gordon’s words) “a challenging request.”

119 Taken out of context, Gordon could just as easily be describing Iggy Pop or the Grateful Dead. (Gordon, “Program Note”).

120 These stylistic ruptures challenge an ahistoric notion of Beethoven. Gordon reminds us that the ways that Beethoven composed were mediated by the stylistic conventions of his day, however handily he went out of his way to depart from them. By returning Beethoven to the past, removing him from an ageless canonic void, Gordon folds time, treating stylistic materials not as compositional elements but as sonic representatives of previous periods, like family voices distantly heard on old recordings. Finally, while the music powerfully represents Beethoven’s importance to the Western cultivated music, he is relocated from the center of this tradition. Instead of a long Germanic tradition from Beethoven through Wagner to Schoenberg and beyond, Gordon refigures Beethoven as one example of a recurrent idea in Western music, as composers search for new procedures for increasing volume, managing density, and enhancing the sonic impact of ensembles for their audiences.

!264 Describing his 2006 commission from the Beethoven-Fest Bonn as “perhaps the most interesting interaction with classical music that I’ve had,” Gordon confessed, “For a while I wasn’t sure how to proceed.” He eventually “decided to take one theme from each movement of Beethoven’s

Seventh Symphony and work with them as if they were my own.”121 His program note for the premiere presents this solution as a thought experiment: “What if someone, while writing a piece of music for orchestra, just happened to stumble over the same material that Beethoven used?

What if someone unknowingly used this material in the course of writing his or her new work?”122

This passage is telling for two reasons. First, Gordon’s claim that someone could

“unknowingly” use Beethoven’s material “in the course of writing his or her new work” presents a vision of composers in the Western cultivated tradition who compose without a complete familiarity with canonic masterpieces composed largely along the models created by Beethoven or in response to his musical legacy.123 The idea of composing for orchestra without knowing previous reference works and understanding how other composers have treated these materials seems heretical in a genre that places a high value on its own history, but Gordon demonstrates

121 Michael Gordon, “Orchestra Hero,” October 31, 2009, accessed November 14, 2016, http:// thescore.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/orchestra-hero/?_r=0.

122 Ibid.

123 Ibid.

!265 how composers unbeholden to tradition might provide fresh approaches to orchestral music.124

Second, while Gordon’s feigned ignorance seems disingenuous given his borrowing, I argue that his realistic depiction of composition as a mixture of conscious choices made for aesthetic and expressive reasons and unknowing borrowing of patterns is incongruent with romanticized notions of composition involving brooding geniuses laboring over every note, ideas that are rooted in Beethoven’s extensive sketchbooks.125

Such associations underscore an irony: composers hoping to secure orchestral commissions are often expected to produce music indebted to the harmonic, rhythmic, developmental, and ensemble practices typified by Beethoven, but must do so in novel ways, without sounding like the previous composer. Such a system works against subsequent composers, and Gordon’s parody can be heard as a challenge to this uneven distribution of power. By suggesting that the best way to honor Beethoven’s memory is not to consecrate his music but to valorize the concepts of risk-taking, originality, and inventiveness, Gordon suggests

124 Gordon’s comment could also be interpreted as speaking to the limited palette of sounds the tonal language provides to a composer. Corigliano’s opera offers another illustration of this idea; while he drew inspiration from procedures Mozart often used in his love/seduction duets during the Act I, scene 3 love duet between Rosina and Cherubino, Corigliano composed tonal music that bore a striking resemblance to Mozart’s “Voi, che sapete.” In an interview, Corigliano informed Higgins that the quotation was unintentional, describing the “smaller compass of things you do” while writing in a Mozartian idiom and the ways new passages “will resemble [pre-existing ones] . . . without you knowing it.” (Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 161–62).

125 Gordon does not happen across similar harmonic, melodic, or even gestural concepts in the course of brainstorming a composition with stylistic indebtedness to the early nineteenth century, but rather relies on Beethoven’s specific realization of certain materials to generate ideas. The theme of Beethoven as a laboring genius appears frequently in popular culture in media ranging from the Peanuts comic strip (1950–2000) to films like Immortal Beloved (1994) and Copying Beethoven (2006). Corigliano similarly rejected this understanding of composition. As Gurewitsch writes, “the megalomaniacal nineteenth-century image of the composer as a lonely titan is not his. He prefers to think of a composer in the eighteenth-century way: as a craftsman (this went even for Mozart) with a job to do.” (Gurewitsch, “Revolutionary Strains,” 113).

!266 one way institutions could celebrate the memory of Beethoven without further contributing to the cult of personality that has proven hostile to new music since the early twentieth century.126

This fixity of repertory has resulted in a corresponding reverence for idealized performances based on faithful replications of printed scores, a key aesthetic premise underlying cultivated institutions focused on “authentic” reproductions of fixed texts (and a frequent issue with the reception of parodies, as we have seen in the critical reception of Foss’s and

Corigliano’s music). Gordon offers a provocative challenge to a historical notion of compositions as changeless works by treating Beethoven’s music not as a fixed text but as a source of material to be manipulated and changed. The idea of “rewriting” Beethoven might be interpreted as a sacrilege, but it connected with a longer history of nineteenth-century practices, including

Beethoven’s own reworking of his Second Symphony for piano trio; Mahler’s re-orchestration of

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies by Czerny, Hummel,

Liszt, Wagner, and others; and arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies for a range of chamber

126 Gordon considers engaging “an audience that usually turns off when new music is presented” as one of the work’s successes. He hoped “the piece built a bridge from the new to the old as it drew from a music that the audience revered.” (Michael Gordon, “Orchestra Hero”). Gordon is not the first composer to grapple with Beethoven’s legacy, and parodying that composer and his music helps him respond to the anxiety of Beethoven’s influence. Corigliano and Hoffman experienced similar doubts about how comparisons with past music would affect the reception of their opera. Corigliano wanted to avoid a neoclassic style in part because he doubted he could “improve upon the neo-classicism of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.” (Corigliano, The Ghosts of Versailles, Pentatone PTC 5186538, 2016). Hoffman likewise worried about the shadow cast by Rossini’s Figaro: “Once we realized we were doing an opera with Figaro, there was one problem that made us both quake, namely Figaro’s first aria. What were we going to do with the first aria, since for most of the opera-going audience, the last appearance of Figaro is ‘Largo al factotum’? Our precedent was one of the most famous arias in opera history, large enough to be a cultural icon for even non-opera-lovers. This got me physically ill. I mean, I love ‘Largo.’ The one opera composer I really adore is Rossini, and I didn’t want to follow that number.” (Quoted in Higgins, “‘The Ghosts of Versailles,’” 39).

!267 ensembles.127 Understood within this legacy, Gordon’s parody invites a listener to consider her or his ideas about a composition as a static, unalterable text.

Gordon claims that the institutionalization of Beethoven’s music and aesthetic norms has contributed to the declining social importance of cultivated music. Writing in the New York

Times, Gordon compares the current state of orchestral music with its heyday and pronounces that “the orchestra no longer has the platform for cultural dialogue that it once held.”128

Reimagining Beethoven through parody offers one solution for restoring this power. Parody allowed Gordon to insert himself into the symphonic tradition by resisting a power differential that marginalizes new music.

The power in a canon of masterworks has negative implications for listeners as well, discouraging critical listening by transmitting pre-formed value judgments and sustaining aesthetic premises better suited for previous music and social contexts.129 In the case of

Rewriting Beethoven, festival staff placed projectors around the venue’s lobby following the symphony’s premiere to allow audience members to share their responses to Gordon’s music.130

Given the location and the celebratory context of a festival devoted to Beethoven, the audience at

127 The International Music Score Library Project, an online public domain sheet music repository, lists hundreds of these arrangements, including thirty four arrangements of the Seventh Symphony. (“Symphony No. 7, Op. 92 [Beethoven, Ludwig van],” accessed January 2, 2017, http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.7,_Op. 92_(Beethoven,_Ludwig_van)). A recent example of a piece that repurposes Beethoven’s music is Herbert von Karajan’s arrangement of the “Ode to Joy” melody from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the anthem of the European Union. (Esteban Buch and Richard Miller, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 239–42).

128 Gordon, “Orchestra Hero.”

129 Louis Andressien used a similar strategy in his The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven, a collage of Beethoven’s music for orchestra and ice cream bell.

130 Concert goers were not empowered with the agency to respond to Beethoven’s music; perhaps such opinions could be taken for granted given the festival context and the composer’s unassailable status.

!268 the premiere was, in Gordon’s opinion, “one of the most musically conservative I’ve ever faced.”

He elaborates:

I fully realized that what I set out to compose was going to be controversial, especially to Beethoven purists. When the music was over, the audience was decidedly mixed. . . . I got pans and raves. I was booed and I was called a prophet. I had tread on hallowed ground—no, I was leading the way into the future. Well, all in a day’s work.131

Gordon’s seemingly blasé response reminds us that composition mixes art and craft, aesthetics and commerce. He also reveals the limitations of choice that cultivated institutions place on their audiences.132 While composers of new music obviously have vested personal and financial stakes in challenging a canon and championing new music, Gordon’s parody of

Beethoven’s music demonstrates one strategy for subverting the conventional power structure institutionalized in cultivated music and restoring interpretive agency in individuals, giving them more choice in their response to both new and old music.

131 Gordon, “Orchestra Hero.” Predictably, the work received mixed responses in the digital world, including on YouTube and social media websites like Reddit. Doyle Armbrust’s review represents these reactions: “Beethoven puritans will undoubtedly get their proverbial undies in a bundle while listening, but for those of us more interested in exploration than reverence, Michael Gordon offers a considered and splendid bit of modification.” (Doyle Armbrust, “Michael Gordon’s Chaotic, Life-Affirming Dystopia,” February 23, 2015, accessed January 2, 2017, http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/michael-gordons-dystopia-life-affirming-meticulously- orchestrated-chaos/).

132 Corigliano addressed this issue during his interview with Frank Oteri. The critic admitted that he was initially “dismissive of [Ghosts] without really paying attention to it,” but changed his mind after seeing a live performance, understanding the opera as “not safe. You’re actually implicating the institutions and the audiences for classical music through these ghosts. It’s a metaphor for classical music becoming a celebration of ghosts.” The composer replied: “It absolutely is and it’s scary. We have to wake up people. We have to make them see their blindness. And, of course, I think the only way to do that is through the music. I believe that replaying the old music, no matter how grand it may be done, is not going to do that. . . . You must understand the importance of the past. But if you don’t realize the importance of the present and the future, you don’t nourish that—and our art form does not —then it’s like a tree that grows no new shoots. Without new shoots the tree dies.” Later in the interview, Corigliano discussed the idea of audiences and interpretive freedom: “Instead of making [new music] a new adventure where they’re permitted to dislike something—the biggest problem is we’ve taken away their rights—when they dislike something, they’re told they’re idiots. When they like something, they’re told they’re idiots and that it was really just pandering. And after a while, since its diametrically opposed to their feelings and since the composer prides himself because of this romantic vision of not reaching people rather than reaching people, on being unintelligible rather than being intelligible, they don’t understand it.” (Quoted in Oteri, “The Gospel According to John Corigliano”).

!269 Given the stylistic and historical differences between them, it is difficult to summarize works as different as these three parodies, and perhaps it is more important to situate them within the broader musical currents of the age of fracture. Each parody exhibits what Rodgers describes as a “theme of limitlessness” running “through the social thought of the age,” which called for

“fresh starts, unfettered choices, and new historic ages.”133 While no trend was absolute, the dominant tendency during this period was a move away from a canon of masterworks conforming to a specific metanarrative of stylistic “development.”

As the power of previous gatekeepers declined, the network of institutions they supported similarly disaggregated, which can be traced through the rejection of structuralist and formalist interpretations of music towards those rooted in context and circumstance, the democratization of access to the technology necessary for recording and distributing music, and the increased choices in available music for listeners. These shifts resulted both in and from increase in individual agency and choice.134

Parody and Identity

Parody resonates with many of the dominant intellectual themes of the age of fracture.

Parody likewise parallels the musical trends of the past fifty years. One could reasonably have expected cultivated parody to flourish during an era of polystylism, extra-referentiality,

133 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 111.

134 While I am not suggesting that parody played a determining role in this process, it is clear that each parody can be understood as both responding and contributing to these shifts, exemplifying what John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene considered “the great unifying theme at the conclusion of the twentieth century,” the “triumph of the individual.” (John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990’s [sic] [New York: William Morrow, 1990], 298).

!270 unparalleled access to past music, and acceptance of multiple modes of listening.135 Given how clearly parody exemplifies or responds to these ideas, the low number of parodies composed during this period—I identified only ninety-eight, a number that shrinks to fifteen when humorists such as P. D. Q. Bach are removed—must be explained. While parody’s association with vernacular music offers a partial explanation, the increasing porousness between these two styles since the 1960s suggests that mere association with vernacular music no longer disqualifies a technique from use in cultivated composition. In a similar way, parody’s long relationship with humor might explain why the technique is infrequently used, but fractured-era irreverence towards institutions and canons suggests that, if anything, parody would be on the rise.

Parody’s essence as a structural borrowing technique offers the most convincing explanation for the dearth of cultivated parodies composed during the age of fracture because this was a period marked by a plurality of choices. In his discussion of ethnicity and racial memory, Rodgers suggests that “the retreat of history” was connected with “the growth of more

135 Cultivated parody can be situated within a larger trend towards nostalgia. As the end of the century neared, David Lowenthal has argued that “nostalgia was everywhere.” (David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History [New York: Free Press, 1996], 4). Music shared in this trend as nostalgia manifested in a variety of peculiar forms, including the costumed reenactments of early music performers, the blues and folk music revivals, re-releases of “classic” rock albums, the trend towards previous playback technologies like vinyl records, the creation of new institutions for the conservation of “classic” jazz like the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra or Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and the revival of storied concert experiences like the Newport Folk Festival and Woodstock ’99 (which can be interpreted as unsuccessful parodies of the originals). Historical time distinguishes cultivated nostalgia from many of these forms; cultivated music engages with music long removed from its inception, while romanticizations of earlier decades of the twentieth century deal with stereotyped ideas in popular memory as well as with events held in living memory. A fitting end for a century marked by considerable amounts of music “written to evoke a sensibility of loss for a past that neither listener nor composer could have experienced or known,” nostalgia provided a listener with one way of interfacing with history by situating her or himself inside a longer tradition. (Leon Botstein, “Memory and Nostalgia as Music-Historical Categories,” The Musical Quarterly 84 [2000]: 534.)

!271 complex understandings of identity.”136 Analogously to “debates over fluid markets and decentered power,” conceptions of identity were affected by “the emergent intellectual themes of the age,” including “choice, provisionality, and impermanence.”137 At every level from the personal to the collective, conceptions of identity grew “thinner and more fragmented as older meanings fell out.”138 The result was that

identities were more openly imagined now: more fluid and multiple, less tightly packaged by gender and social-role theory, less quickly read as the expression of social norms and structures. Despite the backlash of the culture wars, a broader range of being human was tolerated than before. . . . The era’s emphasis on choice . . . was not merely a simplification of ideas of human nature under the influence of the economic model markers. There were more choices than before—not just more consumer goods but more worlds of ideas and sleeves and aspirations from which to choose.139

During an era characterized by a move away from identities conceived as single, static, fixed, and clearly expressed and towards self-conceptions understood as plural, changing, fluid, and indistinctly articulated, parody offered composers a single compositional technique. However parodists altered their borrowings through silence, chance, combination with other styles, and other devices, the structural nature of these borrowings restrained their ability to explore simultaneous subject positions.140

136 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 143.

137 Ibid., 144. He is careful to note that the tendency towards destabilizing “traditions, certainties, truth itself” was often contested, most vigorously through the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. (Ibid., 145).

138 The destabilization of gender roles, for example, had parallels in “the reimagining of society as a bundle of smaller, more intently bound communities.” (Ibid., 145 and 191).

139 Ibid., 270 (emphasis in original).

140 Parody might be incapable of fusion in the same way that collage might. Unlike collage, where musical and personal identities can shatter to reconstitute themselves moment by moment, parodies present longer and more stable identities.

!272 Parodies present two subject positions: that of the parodied music and that of the parodist.

Parody allowed Foss to reconfigure musical space and time in Baroque Variations through a range of antithetical positions, including unheard-heard, high-low, new-old, indeterminate-fixed, modern-classic, and discontinuous-linear, yet it also situated the work along a Foss-Bach binary.

Gordon’s parody can be understood along similar lines; despite the second movement’s web of allusions to different styles and techniques, a listener principally understands this music as an oscillation between “Beethoven” or “Gordon.” While the complexity and genre-bending nature of Corigliano and Hoffman’s Ghosts of Versailles allows the composer to speak in range of voices, each is distinct and separable from one another, identifiable as either Corigliano or an previous composer’s style.141 Considered together, each parodic position is understood through reference to the other, limiting not only a parodist’s compositional outcomes but her or his ability to depict a fluid, flexible subject position, whcih could move between these poles, simultaneously inhabit both, or draw from ideas beyond this delimitation. In my reading, parodic binaries like those explored here ineffectively negotiated a broad range of subjectivities and discouraged exploration of the full range of the composer’s self, a fundamental problem for an era marked by radical reconceptualizations of both individual and group identities. Parody proved too restrictive a means of expression for cultivated composers during the age of fracture.

141 The solution these composers employ to escape from this parodic trap is to demolish their models. Foss and Gordon deconstruct their borrowings during the course of their works. Corigliano’s work differs in that the “musical apotheosis” of his work was, according to “not a blossoming of the Marie Antoinette theme . . . but rather a full orchestral extension of Marriage of Figaro material.” (Ross, “The Ghosts of the Met,” 33). In Ghosts of Versailles, the model Corigliano destroys is his own, leaving the parodied music intact. The problem of parody and identity can be seen in other examples, most notably in the works of Peter Schickele, the most prolific cultivated parodist of the age of fracture. Schickele attempted to escape from these restrictions by an adopting entirely new persona as a parodist, but rather than permit him space to maneuver, this identity proved confining and limited the popularity of his work as “real” composer.

!273 CONCLUSION

Parody is a rich area for further musicological exploration. My work has concentrated on the past fifty years, but parody has a long history in the music of the United States. In addition to extending research to early periods of American history, I also hope to expand my focus stylistically. Studying parody in jazz, for example, would strengthen the claim that parody has been the most common structural borrowing technique in American music. Another topic would broaden my focus from parody in the United States to parody of the United States, investigating parodic depictions of this nation from external viewpoints.1

This study has highlighted connections between parody and humor, ethnic identity, and intellectual history. While Peter Schickele is one of the most performed twentieth-century

American composers, his music remains understudied. His “accessible” musical language and work as a humorist have lingering associations with cultivated music, which have led to a neglect of his work by American musicologists. Likewise “Weird Al” Yankovic has had a successful career spanning four decades, but considerable research remains to be done on his music, cultural importance, and business practices. Several other humorists including Tom Lehrer, Spike Jones, and Stan Freberg are topics needing further research. Another project might include ethnographic work with amateur and professional musical humorists and parodists who post their work to

YouTube or FuMP, have their songs aired on the Dr. Demento radio show, share their videos on

Reddit, or post lyrics to www.amiright.com.

1 Blanka Hemelíková, “American Elements in Czech Parody,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48 (2015): 102–113.

!274 My study included three case studies on contemporary ethnic identity and parody, research that can be expanded to include contemporary parody within the longer history of ethnic parodies in the United States as well as expanded to include performances that are not wholly parodic in nature (such as Notorious B.I.G.’s parodies of black female voices in “Nasty Boy,”

“Can I Get Wit Cha,” and “Party and Bullshit” or of prayer in “Sky’s The Limit”). The incongruities parodists rely on can create humor, but they can also signal clear lines of demarcation that police gender, class, religious, political, and regional identities. Investigating

Cledus T. Judd’s depictions of gender and class, for example, would enrich the current discussion of ethnic themes in his music. Another potential topic involves parody as a type of hate speech.

The Westboro Baptist Church, for example, includes in their ministry dozens of parodies espousing their far-right agenda.2 Investigating religious identities through studies of Jewish parodists like Country Yossi, Shlock Rock, and Ju-Tang Clan or Christian parodists like

ApologetiX could offer insights into how the discourses of contemporary popular culture can be adapted to serve didactic functions for fundamentally differing theological worldviews. Finally, parody forms a dominant mode of contemporary political discourse, an area that warrants further exploration.3

2 “Westboro Baptist Church Parodies,” accessed April 1, 2017, http://www.godhatesfags.com/audio/ parodies.html and “Music Videos,” accessed April 1, 2017, http://www.godhatesfags.com/video/musicvideos.html. Another topic includes KKK-themed parodies. I am indebted to Angela Denise Hammond for her conversation with me about this topic.

3 Parody, satire, and political discourse has been studied in other disciplines. (Dominic Boyer and Alexei Yurchak, “American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West,” Cultural Anthropology 25 [2010]: 179–221; Christopher J. Gilbert and Jonathan P. Rossing, “Trumping Tropes with Joke(r)s: The Daily Show ‘Plays the Race Card,’” Western Journal of Communication 77 [2013]: 92–111; and Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam, “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report,” International Journal of Press/Politics 14 [2009]: 212–31).

!275 Concerning intellectual history and cultivated parody, additional research is warranted, including parody during the age of terror.4 Parody also challenges deep-seated notions about the

“Work,” inspiration, influence, and appropriation. I alluded to these issues with my discussion of

2 Live Crew in the third chapter, but to my knowledge no one has explored the legal and aesthetic ramifications of parody’s protected status, a distinction it shares with no other borrowing technique.5 The intersection of parody, reception, and technology would be another fruitful area for investigation, because parody offers an unconventional way of tracing a song’s popularity that moves beyond sales figures to suggest depth of cultural permeation, a metric conventionally difficult to trace. Another area to be studied is how new technologies affect parody. The time between the release of an “original” song, its popularity and subsequent permeation, and its parody has been compressed by the internet (and web 2.0 social media platforms in particular).

Perhaps the most important future work to be done on parody involves education. Parody offers an unconventional approach to teaching musical style, and provides a way for teachers to address cultural conventions and canons. The technique also offers a way to teach critical thinking, because understanding and evaluating a parody involves comparing multiple responses to the same stimulus. Because parody involves exaggeration, irony, and allusion, teachers can use it to encourage students to investigate the lines between sincere and insincere in non-text

4 One of the major shifts distinguishing the age of fracture from the age of terror is a move away from irony as a dominant aesthetic mode.

5 Parody also raises issues with appropriation, a freighted term in our contemporary political climate. For a recent example surrounding legal controversy and parody in the art world, see Jonathan Jones, “Jeff Koons: Master of Parody or Great American Conman?,” December 16, 2015, accessed February 14, 2017, https:// www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/dec/16/jeff-koons-master-of-parody-or-great-american- con-man.

!276 mediums. For a generation who grew up with the internet, the relationship between parody and

Poe’s Law can assist teachers teaching the critical thinking skills necessary for recognizing and interpreting extremist ideologies. Finally, parody offers a practical solution to teaching songwriting (contrafactum) and composing (new music composed to evoke indexical associations with other styles or artists). Parody can be considered the most democratic and accessible type of music making, a form available to everyone regardless of their training in music. As such, its neglect seems fundamentally un-American.

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!293 APPENDIX 1: SELECTED LIST OF VERNACULAR PARODISTS AND WORKS

Stan Freberg (1926–2015) Tom Lehrer (1928–) Mark Russell (1932–) Allan Sherman (1924–1973) Country Yossi (Joseph Toiv) (1948–) “Weird Al” Yankovic (1955–) El Vez (Robert Lopez) (1960–) Paul Shanklin (1962–) Richard Cheese (Mark Jonathan Davis) (1965–) The National Lampoon Radio Hour (1973–1974) Capitol Steps (1981–) Forbidden Broadway (Gerald Alessandrini) (1984–) Bart Baker (1986–) Shlock Rock (1986–) Rucka Rucka Ali (1987–) Ju-Tang Clan (no dates available) 2 Live Jews (1990–2005) ApologetiX (1992–) The Lonely Island (2001–) Comedians MC Paul Barman and Eric Schwartz (aka Smooth E) (2003–2012) Altar Boyz (lyrics and music by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker) (Off Broadway production 2004–2010) Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades of Grey Musical Parody (written by Bradford McMurran, Jeremiah Albers, and Sean Devereux) (Off Broadway production 2010–2012) Maccabeats (2010–) Book of Mormon (Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone) (Broadway and touring productions 2011–)

!294 APPENDIX 2: SELECTED LIST OF PARODIC BORROWINGS

I. Contrafacta A. Allan Sherman (1924–1973) 1. “The Ballad of Harry Lewis” (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe) 2. “Shake Hands with Your Uncle Max” (“Dear Old Donegal” by Steve Graham) 3. “Sir Greenbaum’s Madrigal” (the traditional song “Greensleeves”) 4. “My Zelda” (“Matilda” as performed by Harry Belafonte) 5. “The Streets of Miami” (the traditional song “Streets of Laredo”) 6. “Sarah Jackman” (the traditional song “Frere Jacques”) 7. “Jump Down, Spin Around (Pick a Dress o’ Cotton)” (the traditional song “Jump Down, Spin Around (Pick a Bale o’ Cotton)”) 8. “Seltzer Boy” (the traditional song “Waterboy”) 9. “Oh Boy” (the traditional song “Chiapanecas”) 10. “Al ’n’ Yetta” (the traditional song “Alouette”) 11. “Mexican Hat Dance” (the traditional song “Jarabe Tapatío”) 12. “The Bronx Bird Watcher” (“Tit-willow” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 13. “Harvey and Sheila” (the traditional song “Hava Nagila”) 14. “Won’t You Come Home, Disraeli” (“(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey” by Hughie Cannon) 15. “No One’s Perfect” (“Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” by Archibald Croswell Weeks and Wilmot Moses Smith) 16. “When I Was a Lad” (“When I Was a Lad” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 17. “Me” (“Torna a Surriento” by Ernesto De Curtis and Giambattista De Curtis) 18. “Automation” (“Fascination” by Fermo Dante Marchetti and Maurice de Féraudy) 19. “I See Bones” (“C’est si bon” by Henri Betti and André Hornez) 20. “Here’s to the Crabgrass” (the traditional song “Country Gardens”) 21. “Headaches” (“Heartaches” by Al Hoffman and John Klenner) 22. “One Hippopotami” (“What Kind Of Fool Am I?” by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley) 23. “Rat Fink” (“Rag Mop” by Johnnie Lee Wills and Deacon Anderson) 24. “You’re Getting to Be a Rabbit with Me” (“You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me” by Harry Warren and Al Dubin) 25. “Eight Foot Two, Solid Blue” (“Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” by Ray Henderson, Sam M. Lewis, and Joseph Widow Young) 26. “Skin” (“Heart” by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross) 27. “Green Stamps” (“Green Eyes” by Adolfo Utrera and Nilo Menéndez)

!295 28. “You Need an Analyst” (“I’ve Got a Little List” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 29. “The Drop-Outs March” (“Victory March” by Michael Shea and John Shea) 30. “Night and Day (With Punctuation Marks)” (“Night and Day” by Cole Porter) 31. “Little Butterball” (“I’m Called Little Buttercup” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 32. “Grow, Mrs. Goldfarb” (“The Glow-Worm” by Paul Lincke and Heinz Bolten-Backers) 33. “Your Mother’s Here to Stay” (“Love Is Here to Stay” by George and Ira Gershwin) 34. “Pills” (“Smiles” by J. Will Callahan and Lee S. Robert) 35. “Shine On, Harvey Bloom” (“Shine On, Harvest Moon” by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth) 36. “J. C. Cohen” (the traditional song “The Ballad of Casey Jones”) 37. “Pop Hates the Beatles” (the traditional song “Pop Goes the Weasel”) 38. “Beautiful Teamsters” (“Beautiful Dreamer” by Stephen Foster) 39. “Kiss of Meyer and Whatever Meyer Wants” (“Kiss of Fire” by Ángel Villoldo and “Whatever Lola Wants” by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross) 40. “America’s a Nice Italian Name” (“Funiculì, Funiculà” by Luigi Denza and Peppino Turco) 41. “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas” (the traditional song “The Twelve Days of Christmas”) 42. “Bye Bye Blumberg” (“Bye Bye Blackbird” by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon) 43. “It’s a Most Unusual Play” (“It’s a Most Unusual Day” by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson) 44. “That Old Back Scratcher” (“That Old Black Magic” by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) 45. “Call Me” (“Call Me Irresponsible” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn) 46. “Secret Code” (“Secret Love” by Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster) 47. “The Painless Dentist Song” (“The Continental” by Con Conrad and Herb Magidson) 48. “Chim Chim Cheree” (“Chim Chim Cheree” by Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman) 49. “An Average Song” (“Sweet Genevieve” by Henry Tucker and George Cooper) 50. “A Song Written by Elizabeth Taylor” (“The Second Time Around” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn) 51. “Taking Lessons” (“Makin’ Whoopee” by Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn) 52. “A Waste of Money” (“A Taste of Honey” by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow) 53. “Smog Gets in Your Eyes” (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach) 54. “Dodgin’ the Draft” (“Ballin’ the Jack” by Chris Smith and Jim Burris)

!296 55. “When I’m in the Mood for Love (You’re in the Mood for Herring)” (“I’m in the Mood for Love” by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh) 56. “Second Hand Nose” (“Second Hand Rose” by James F. Hanley and Grant Clarke) 57. “Sam You Made the Pants Too Long” (“Lord, You Made The Night Too Long” by Sam Lewis and Victor Young) 58. “Westchester Hadassah” (“Winchester Cathedral” by Geoff Stephens) 59. “Strange Things in My Soup” (“Strangers in the Night” by Bert Kaempfert, Charles Singleton, and Eddie Snyder) 60. “Shine On Harvest Moon” (“Shine On, Harvest Moon” by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth) 61. “Spanish Flea” (“Spanish Flea” by Julius Wechter and Cissy Wechter) 62. “If I Were a Tishman” (“If I Were a Rich Man” by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick) 63. “There’s No Governor Like Our New Governor” (“There’s No Business Like Show Business” by Irving Berlin) B. Stan Freberg (1926–2015) 1. “Banana Boat Song” (traditional song as performed by Harry Belafonte) 2. “C’est si Bon” (“C’est si Bon” by Henri Betti and André Hornez) 3. “Green Chri$tma$” (includes short parodies of the traditional songs or carols “Deck the Halls,” “The Twelve Days Of Christmas,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful,” and “The First Noel” as well as “The Christmas Song” by Bob Wells and Mel Tormé and “Jingle Bells” by James Lord Pierpont) 4. “Heartbreak Hotel” (“Heartbreak Hotel” as performed by Elvis Presley) 5. “Rock around Stephen Foster” (“Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Ring, Ring De Banjo,” “Old Folks at Home,” “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Massa’s in De Cold Ground” by Stephen Foster and “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Jesse Stone) 6. “Rock Island Line” (traditional song “Rock Island Line” as performed by Lonnie Donegan) 7. “Sh-Boom” (“Sh-Boom” by James Keyes, Claude Feaster, Carl Feaster, Floyd F. McRae, and James Edwards) 8. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Sale Of Manhattan: Top Hat, White Feather, and Tails” (“Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” by Irving Berlin) 9. “I’ve Got You under My Skin” (“I’ve Got You under My Skin” by Cole Porter) 10. “The Great Pretender” (“The Great Pretender” by the Platters) 11. “The World Is Waiting For the Sunrise” (“The World Is Waiting For the Sunrise” as performed by Les Paul and Mary Ford) 12. “The Yellow Rose of Texas” (the traditional song “The Yellow Rose of Texas”)

!297 13. “Try” (“Cry” by Churchill Kohlman) C. Tom Lehrer (1928–) 1. “The Elements” (“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 2. “A Christmas Carol” (the traditional songs or carols “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and “Angels We Have Heard on High”) 3. “Clementine” (the traditional song “Clementine”) D. Mark Russell (1932–) 1. “Master of the House” (“Master of the House” by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Jean-Marc Natel) 2. “Seventy-Six Complaints” (“Seventy-Six Trombones” by Meredith Willson) 3. “I Could Write a Book” (“I Could Write a Book” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart) E. Country Yossi (né Yossi Toiv) (1948–) 1. “Cuz I’m a Jew” (“I Walk the Line” as performed by Johnny Cash) 2. “Then He Potched Me” (“Then He Kissed Me” as performed by The Crystals) 3. “The Cholent Song” (“Donna the Prima Donna” as performed by Dion) 4. “Rabbi Black” (“The Reverend Mr. Black” by Billy Edd Wheeler, Mike Stoller, and Jerry Leiber) 5. “Speak to Hashem” (“Speak to the Sky” by Rick Springfield) 6. “Big Bad Moish” (“Big Bad John” as performed by Jimmy Dean) 7. “In the Year Rof Shin Ayin Gimmel” (“In the Year 2525” by Dennis Zager and Rick Evans) 8. “The Rabbi” (“The Gambler” as performed by Kenny Rogers) 9. “Peel One More Potato” (“Put Another Log On the Fire” as performed by Tompall Glaser) F. “Weird Al” Yankovic (né Alfred Matthew Yankovic) (1955–) 1. “Achy Breaky Song” (“Achy Breaky Heart” as performed by Billy Ray Cyrus) 2. “Addicted to Spuds” (“Addicted to Love” as performed by Robert Palmer) 3. “Alimony” (“Mony Mony” as performed by Billy Idol) 4. “Amish Paradise” (“Gangsta’s Paradise” as performed by Coolio) 5. “Another One Rides the Bus” (“Another One Bites the Dust” as performed by Queen) 6. “Another Tattoo” (“Nothin’ on You” as performed by B.o.B) 7. “Bedrock Anthem” (“Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away” as performed by Red Hot Chili Peppers) 8. “The Brady Bunch” (“The Safety Dance” as performed by Men Without Hats) 9. “Buckingham Blues” (“Jack and Diane” as performed by John Mellencamp) 10. “Ricky” (“Mickey” as performed by Toni Basil) 11. “I Love Rocky Road” (“I Love Rock and Roll” as performed by Joan Jett)

!298 12. “Stop Draggin’ My Car Around” (“Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” as performed by Stevie Nicks) 13. “My Bologna” (“My Sharona” as performed by the Knack) 14. “Eat It” (“Beat It” as performed by Michael Jackson) 15. “I Lost on Jeopardy” (“Jeopardy” as performed by the Greg Kihn Band) 16. “King of Suede” (“King of Pain” as performed by the Police) 17. “Theme From Rocky XIII (The Rye or the Kaiser)” (“Eye of the Tiger” as performed by Survivor) 18. “Like a Surgeon” (“Like a Virgin” as performed by Madonna) 19. “I Want a New Duck” (“I Want a New Drug” as performed by Huey Lewis and the News) 20. “Yoda” (“Lola” as performed by the Kinks) 21. “Girls Just Want to Have Lunch” (“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” as performed by Cyndi Lauper) 22. “Living with a Hernia” (“Living in America” as performed by James Brown) 23. “Here’s Johnny” (“Who’s Johnny” as performed by El DeBarge) 24. “Toothless People” (“Ruthless People” as performed by Mick Jagger) 25. “Fat” (“Bad” as performed by Michael Jackson) 26. “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” (“Got My Mind Set On You” as performed by George Harrison) 27. “I Think I’m a Clone Now” (“I Think We’re Alone Now” as performed by Tiffany) 28. “Lasagna” (“La Bamba” as performed by Los Lobos) 29. “Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies” (“Money for Nothing” as performed by Dire Straits) 30. “Isle Thing” (“Wild Thing” as performed by Tone Lōc) 31. “She Drives Like Crazy” (“She Drives Me Crazy” as performed by Fine Young Cannibals) 32. “Spam” (“Stand” as performed by R.E.M.) 33. “Smells Like Nirvana” (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” as performed by Nirvana) 34. “The White Stuff” (“You Got It (The Right Stuff)” as performed by New Kids on the Block) 35. “Taco Grande” (“Rico Suave” as performed by Gerardo) 36. “The Plumbing Song” (“Baby Don’t Forget My Number” and “Blame It on the Rain” as performed by Milli Vanilli) 37. “Jurassic Park” (“MacArthur Park” as performed by Richard Harris) 38. “Livin’ in the Fridge” (“Livin’ on the Edge” as performed by Aerosmith) 39. “Headline News” (“Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” as performed by Crash Test Dummies) 40. “Cavity Search” (“Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” as performed by U2) 41. “Gump” (“Lump” as performed by the Presidents of the United States of America)

!299 42. “Syndicated Inc.” (“Misery” as performed by Soul Asylum) 43. “Phony Calls” (“Waterfalls” as performed by TLC) 44. “The Saga Begins” (“American Pie” as performed by Don McLean) 45. “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi” (“Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” as performed by the Offspring) 46. “Jerry Springer” (“One Week” as performed by Barenaked Ladies) 47. “It’s All about the Pentiums” (“It’s All about the Benjamins” as performed by Puff Daddy) 48. “Grapefruit Diet” (“Zoot Suit Riot” as performed by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies) 49. “Couch Potato” (“Lose Yourself” as performed by Eminem) 50. “Trash Day” (“Hot in Herre [sic]” as performed by Nelly) 51. “A Complicated Song” (“Complicated” as performed by Avril Lavigne) 52. “Ode to a Superhero” (“Piano Man” as performed by Billy Joel) 53. “eBay” (“I Want It That Way” as performed by Backstreet Boys) 54. “White and Nerdy” (“Ridin’” as performed by Chamillionaire) 55. “Canadian Idiot” (“American Idiot” as performed by Green Day) 56. “Confessions Part III” (“Confessions Part II” as performed by Usher) 57. “Do I Creep You Out” (“Do I Make You Proud” as performed by Taylor Hicks) 58. “Trapped in the Drive-Thru” (“Trapped in the Closet” as performed by R. Kelly) 59. “You’re Pitiful” (“You’re Beautiful” as performed by James Blunt) 60. “Whatever You Like” (“Whatever You Like” as performed by T.I.) 61. “Perform This Way” (“Born This Way” as performed by Lady Gaga) 62. “TMZ” (“You Belong With Me” as performed by Taylor Swift) 63. “Party in the CIA” (“Party in the U.S.A.” as performed by Miley Cyrus) 64. “Handy” (“Fancy” as performed by Iggy Azalea) 65. “Foil” (“Royals” as performed by Lorde) 66. “Word Crimes” (“Blurred Lines” as performed by Robin Thicke) 67. “Inactive” (“Radioactive” as performed by Imagine Dragons) 68. “Tacky” (“Happy” as performed by Pharrell Williams) 69. “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me” (“It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” as performed by Billy Joel) 70. “Pac Man” (“Tax Man” as performed by the Beatles) G. El Vez (né Robert Lopez) (1960–) 1. “Immigration Time” (“Suspicious Minds” as performed by Elvis Presley) 2. “Say It Loud, I’m Brown and I’m Proud” (“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” as performed by James Brown) 3. “Misery Tren” (“Mystery Train” as performed by Elvis Presley) 4. “Chihuahua” (“Hound Dog” as performed by Elvis Presley) 5. “Esta Bien Mamacita” (“That’s All Right” as performed by Elvis Presley) 6. “Brown Christmas” (“White Christmas” as performed by Elvis Presley) 7. “Viva La Raza” (“Viva Las Vegas” as performed by Elvis Presley)

!300 8. “Mexican Radio” (“Mexican Radio” as performed by Wall of Voodoo) 9. “It’s Now or Never” (“It’s Now or Never” as performed by Elvis Presley) 10. “(Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide) If I Can Dream” (“If I Can Dream” as performed by Elvis Presley and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” as performed by David Bowie) 11. “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” (“I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” as performed by Elvis Presley) 12. “God Bless America” (“God Bless America” by Irving Berlin) 13. “Never Been to Spain” (“Never Been to Spain” as performed by Three Dog Night) 14. “Maria’s the Name” (“(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame” as performed by Elvis Presley) 15. “Taking Care of Business (1942–1977–199?)” (“Taking Care of Business” as performed by Bachman–Turner Overdrive) 16. “En el Barrio” (“In the Ghetto” as performed by Elvis Presley) H. Paul Shanklin (1962–) 1. “I Saw Her Derriere” (“I Saw Her Dancing There” as performed by the Beatles) 2. “We Hate the U.S.A.” (“I’m Proud to Be an American” by Lee Greenwood) 3. “Al Gore Paradise” (“Gangsta’s Paradise” as performed by Coolio) 4. “Ball Of Fire” (“Ring Of Fire” as performed by Johnny Cash) 5. “U Can’t Say That” (“U Can’t Touch This” as performed by M. C. Hammer) 6. “Hey, Mister Tan Marine Man” (“Hey, Mister Tambourine Man” as performed by the Byrds) 7. “Bomb Iran” (“Barbara Ann” as performed by the Beach Boys) 8. “Barack the Magic Negro” (“Puff, the Magic Dragon” as performed by Peter, Paul and Mary) 9. “Osama Obama” (“La Bamba” as performed by La Bamba) 10. “I Am Barack, I am the Messiah” (“I Am a Rock” as performed by Simon and Garfunkel) 11. “Once You Worked Fulltime” (“Once in a Lifetime” as performed by the Talking Heads) 12. “Banking Queen” (“Dancing Queen” as performed by ABBA) 13. “Just the Constitution” (“Just My Imagination” as performed by the Temptations) 14. “The Man Who Shot Osama Bin Laden” (“(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Vallance” as performed by Gene Pitney) 15. “Every Cent You Make (I’ll Be Taxing You)” (“Every Breath You Take” as performed by the Police) I. Cledus T. Judd (né Barry Poole) (1964–) 1. “Gone Funky” (“Gone Country” as performed by Alan Jackson) 2. “Indian In-Laws” (“Indian Outlaw” as performed by Tim McGraw) 3. “Refried Beans” (“Refried Dreams” as performed by Tim McGraw) 4. “Motel Californie” (“Hotel California” as performed by the Eagles)

!301 5. “Please Take the Girl” (“Don’t Take the Girl” as performed by Tim McGraw) 6. “We Own the World” (“We Are the World” as performed by USA for Africa) 7. “Stinkin’ Problem” (“Thinkin’ Problem” as performed by David Ball) 8. “If Shania Was Mine” (“Any Man Of Mine” as performed by Shania Twain) 9. “(She’s Got a Butt) Bigger than the Beatles” (“Bigger than the Beatles” as performed by Joe Diffie) 10. “The Change” (“For a Change” as performed by Neal McCoy) 11. “Skoal: The Grundy County Spitting Incident” (“Sold (The Grundy County Auction Incident)” as performed by John Michael Montgomery) 12. “Jackson (Alan That Is)” (“Jackson” as performed by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash) 13. “You Have No Right to Remain Violent” (“You Have the Right to Remain Silent” as performed by Perfect Stranger) 14. “Cadirac [sic] Style” (“Cadillac Style” as performed by Sammy Kershaw) 15. “I’m Not in Here for Love (Just Yer Beer)” (“(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!” as performed by Shania Twain) 16. “Cledus Went Down to Florida” (“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” as performed by the Charlie Daniels Band) 17. “Stoled: The Copyright Infringement Incident” (“Sold (The Grundy County Auction Incident)” as performed by John Michael Montgomery) 18. “Grandpa Got Runned Over by a John Deere” (“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” as performed by Elmo and Patsy) 19. “Wives Do It All the Time” (“Guys Do It All the Time” as performed by Mindy McCready) 20. “Every Light in the House Is Blown” (“Every Light in the House” as performed by Trace Adkins) 21. “Third Rock from Her Thumb” (“Third Rock from the Sun” as performed by Joe Diffie) 22. “Mindy McCready” (“Little Bitty” as performed by Alan Jackson) 23. “Did I Shave My Back for This?” (“Did I Shave My Legs for This?” as performed by Deana Carter) 24. “Wives Do It All the Time” (“Guys Do It All the Time” as performed by Mindy McCready) 25. “Cledus Don’t Stop Eatin’ for Nuthin’” (“Mama Don’t Get Dressed Up for Nothing” as performed by Brooks and Dunn) 26. “She’s Inflatable” (“Unbelievable” as performed by Diamond Rio) 27. “Coronary Life” (“Ordinary Life” as performed by Chad Brock) 28. “Christ-Mas” (“This Kiss” as performed by Faith Hill) 29. “Shania, I’m Broke” (“Honey, I’m Home” as performed by Shania Twain) 30. “Where the Grass Don’t Grow” (“Where the Green Grass Grows” as performed by Tim McGraw) 31. “In Another Size” (“In Another’s Eyes” as performed by Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood)

!302 32. “Livin’ Like John Travolta” (“Livin’ La Vida Loca” as performed by Ricky Martin) 33. “My Cellmate Thinks I’m Sexy” (“She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” as performed by Kenny Chesney) 34. “Goodbye Squirrel” (“Goodbye Earl” as performed by the Dixie Chicks) 35. “What the *$@# Did You Say” (“Whatever You Say” as performed by Martina McBride) 36. “More Beaver” (“Me Neither” as performed by Brad Paisley) 37. “How Do You Milk a Cow?” (“How Do You Like Me Now?!” as performed by Toby Keith) 38. “A Night I Can’t Remember” (“A Night To Remember” as performed by Joe Diffie) 39. “Wife Naggin’” (“Sin Wagon” as performed by the Dixie Chicks) 40. “Plowboy” (“Cowboy” as performed by Kid Rock) 41. “It’s a Great Day to Be a Guy” (“It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” as performed by Travis Tritt) 42. “Breath” (“Breathe” as performed by Faith Hill) 43. “My Voice” (“One Voice” as performed by Billy Gilman) 44. “Man of Constant Borrow” (“I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” as performed by the Soggy Bottom Boys) 45. “Let’s Shoot Dove” (“Let’s Make Love” as performed by Faith Hill and Tim McGraw) 46. “1/2” (“Yes!” as performed by Chad Brock) 47. “Just Another Day in Parodies” (“Just Another Day in Paradise” as performed by Phil Vassar) 48. “Don’t Mess with America” (“Only in America” as performed by Brooks and Dunn) 49. “Tree’s on Fire” (“Ring of Fire” as performed by Johnny Cash) 50. “All I Want for Christmas Is Two Gold Front Teef” (“All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” as performed by Spike Jones and The City Slickers) 51. “Where’s Your Mommy?” (“Who’s Your Daddy?” as performed by Toby Keith) 52. “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Pop” (“I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool” as performed by Barbara Mandrell) 53. “My Crowd” (“My Town” as performed by Montgomery Gentry) 54. “270 Somethin’” (“19 Somethin’” as performed by Mark Wills) 55. “Riding With Inmate Jerome” (“Riding With Private Malone” as performed by David Ball) 56. “New Car” (“Big Star” as performed by Kenny Chesney) 57. “Martie, Emily and Natalie” (“Celebrity” as performed by Brad Paisley) 58. “The Chicks Did It” (“Chicks Dig It” as performed by Chris Cagle) 59. “Natalie” (“Celebrity” as performed by Brad Paisley) 60. “Toby vs. Natalie” (“Celebrity” as performed by Brad Paisley)

!303 61. “I Love NASCAR” (“I Love This Bar” as performed by Toby Keith) 62. “Hell No” (“Hell Yeah” as performed by Montgomery Gentry) 63. “Paycheck Woman” (“Redneck Woman” as performed by Gretchen Wilson) 64. “Bake Me a Country Ham” (“Paint Me a Birmingham” as performed by Tracy Lawrence) 65. “Martie, Emily and Natalie” (“Celebrity” as performed by Brad Paisley) 66. “Polyrically Uncorrect” (“Politically Uncorrect” as performed by Gretchen Wilson and Merle Haggard) 67. “Garth Must Be Busy” (“God Must Be Busy” as performed by Brooks and Dunn) 68. “Waitin’ on Obama” (“Waitin’ on a Woman” as performed by Brad Paisley) 69. “Washing Airplanes” (“Watching Airplanes” as performed by Gary Allan) 70. “Hard Time” (“Good Time” as performed by Alan Jackson) 71. “Merger on Music Row” (“Murder on Music Row” as performed by George Strait and Alan Jackson) 72. “Cledus T.” (“Springsteen” as performed by Eric Church) 73. “Double D Cups” (“Red Solo Cup” as performed by Toby Keith) 74. “Feel Like a Pawn Star” (“Feel Like a Rock Star” as performed by Kenny Chesney With Tim McGraw) 75. “A Little More Hungry Than That” (“A Little More Country Than That” as performed by EasTon Corbin) 76. “Honeymoon” (“PonToon” as performed by Little Big Town) 77. “Tebow” (“Banjo” as performed by Rascal Flatts) 78. “Tweetin’” (“Creepin’” as performed by Eric Church) 79. “The House That Broke Me” (“The House That Built Me” as performed by Miranda Lambert) 80. “If This Is Country Music” (“This Is Country Music” as performed by Brad Paisley) J. National Lampoon Radio Hour (Tony Schueren and ChrisTopher Guest) (1973– 1974) 1. “Deteriorata” (“Desiderata” as performed by Les Crane) 2. “I’m a Woman” (“I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy) K. The Capitol Steps (1981–) 1. “Embraceable Jew” (“Embraceable You” by George and Ira Gershwin) 2. “Wouldn’t It Be Hillary?” (“Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” by Allan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe) 3. “The Sunni Side of Tikrit” (“On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Fats Waller) 4. “Someone Dumber Might” (“Summer Nights” by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey) 5. “I Like Big Cuts and I Cannot Lie” (“Baby Got Back” as performed by Sir Mix-A-Lot) 6. “There Is Nothing Like Ukraine” (“There Is Nothing Like a Dame” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II)

!304 7. “Fakey Purple Hearts” (“Achy Breaky Heart” as performed by Billy Ray Cyrus) 8. “I’ve Taken Stands on Both Sides Now” (“Both Sides, Now” by Joni Mitchell) 9. “It Don’t Mean a Thing if Your State’s Not a Swing” (“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing”) by Duke Ellington and Irving Mills) 10. “He Works Hard for the Country” (“She Works Hard for the Money” as performed by Donna Summer) 11. “If I Only Had a Plan” (“If I Only Had a Brain” by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg) 12. “The Impossible Dean” (“The Impossible Dream (The Quest)” by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion) 13. “Sunni and Cher” (“I Got You Babe” as performed by Sonny and Cher) 14. “The Land’s Not Your Land” (“This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie) 15. “The Supremes” (“Stayin’ Alive” as performed by the Bee Gees) 16. “Here’s to You, Reverend Robertson” (“Mrs. Robinson” as performed by Simon and Garfunkel) 17. “I’m So Indicted” (“I’m So Excited” as performed by the Pointer Sisters) 18. “What a Difference Delay Makes” (“What a Diff’rence a Day Made” as performed by Dinah Washington) 19. “Three Little Kurds from School” (“Three Little Maids from School Are We” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 20. “Can’t Get to a Church” (“Get Me to the Church on Time” by Frederick Loewe and Allan Jay Lerner) 21. “GOP-BS” (“Bye Bye Blackbird” by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon) 22. “Sam Alito” (“Mona Lisa” by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston) 23. “In the Metro” (“In the Ghetto” as performed by Elvis Presley) 24. “How Do You Solve a Problem like Korea?” (“Maria” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) 25. “Dubai Dubai Doo” (“Strangers in the Night” by Bert Kaempfert, Charles Singleton, and Eddie Snyder) 26. “FU Airlines” (“Snowbird” by Gene MacLellan) 27. “Old Finger” (“Goldfinger” by John Barry, Leslie Bricusse, and Anthony Newley) 28. “Michael Brown” (“Charlie Brown” by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) 29. “When I’m 84” (“When I’m 64” as performed by the Beatles) 30. “God Bless My S.U.V.” (“God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood) L. Forbidden Broadway (Gerald Alessandrini) (1984–) 1. “O-Todd-Ao” (“Oklahoma” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) 2. “Gump, the Magic Movie” (“Puff, the Magic Dragon” as performed by Peter, Paul and Mary) 3. “Somewhere under the Rainbow” (“Somewhere over the Rainbow” by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg)

!305 4. “Kristen [sic] Chenoweth: Glitter and Be Glib” (“Glitter and Be Gay” by Leonard Bernstein) 5. “I Couldn’t Hit That Note” (“I Could’ve Danced All Night” by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe) 6. “Old Revivals” (“Oklahoma” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) 7. “Trouble in New York City” (“Trouble” by Meredith Willson) 8. “Don’t Cry for Me” (“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice) 9. “Madonna’s Brain” (“The Rain In Spain” by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe) 10. “Teeny Todd” (“Ballad of Sweeney Todd” by Stephen Sondheim) 11. “Back to Broadway” (“On a Clear Day” by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe) 12. “Streisand’s Farewell Tour” (“Happy Days Are Here Again” by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager and “Mame” by Jerry Herman) 13. “Beauty’s Been Decreased” (“Beauty and the Beast” by Alan Menken and Howard Elliott Ashman) 14. “Find Mary Martin” (“Climb Ev’ry Mountain” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) 15. “Bombay Wet Dreams—The Lullaby of Bombay” (“The Lullaby of Broadway” by Harry Warren and Al Dubin and “Hooray for Hollywood” by Richard A. Whiting) 16. “Movin’ Out” (“My Life” by Billy Joel) 17. “The Impossible Song” (“The Impossible Dream” by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion) 18. “The Be-Littled Mermaid” (“Part of Your World” by Allan Menken and Howard Ashman) M. Bart Baker (1986–) 1. “Big Old Pubes” (“Boom Boom Pow” as performed by the Black Eyed Peas) 2. “ChiK KoK” (“Tik Tok” as performed by Ke$ha) 3. “Teeny Weeny” (“Eenie Meenie” as performed by Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber) 4. “California Boys” (“California Boys” as performed by Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg) 5. “Used to Be a Guy” (“Love the Way You Lie” as performed by Eminem) 6. “Call Me, Maybe” (“Call Me, Maybe” as performed by Carly Rae Jepsen) 7. “What Makes You Beautiful” (“What Makes You Beautiful” as performed by One Direction) 8. “I Knew You Were Trouble” (“I Knew You Were Trouble” as performed by Taylor Swift) 9. “22” (“22” as performed by Taylor Swift) 10. “Blurred Lines” (“Blurred Lines” as performed by Robin Thicke) 11. “Best Song Ever” (“Best Song Ever” as performed by One Direction)

!306 12. “Applause” (“Applause” as performed by Miley Cryus) 13. “Royals” (“Royals” as performed by Lorde) 14. “Problem” (“Problem” as performed by Ariana Grande) 15. “Break Free” (“Break Free” as performed by Ariana Grande) 16. “Shake It Off” (“Shake It Off” as performed by Taylor Swift) 17. “All about That Bass” (“All about That Bass” as performed by Meghan Trainor) 18. “Love Me Harder” (“Love Me Harder” as performed by Ariana Grande) 19. “Blank Space” (“Blank Space” as performed by Taylor Swift) 20. “Lips Are Movin’” (“Lips Are Movin’” as performed by Meghan Trainor) 21. “Style” (“Style” as performed by Taylor Swift) 22. “Bad Blood” (“Bad Blood” as performed by Taylor Swift) 23. “Bitch I’m Madonna” (“Bitch I’m Madonna” as performed by Madonna) 24. “Where Are Ü Now” (“Where Are Ü Now” as performed by Justin Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo) 25. “Worth It” (“Worth It” as performed by Fifth Harmony) N. Shlock Rock (1986–) 1. “Learning Is Good” (“Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry) 2. “Abarbanel” (“Barbara Ann” as performed by the Beach Boys) 3. “Throwing It All Away” (“Throwing It All Away” as performed by Genesis) 4. “Under the Chupah” (“Under the Boardwalk” as performed by the Drifters) 5. “Every Bite You Take” (“Every Breath You Take” as performed by the Police) 6. “To Unite All Jews” (“With or Without You” as performed by U2) 7. “We’ve Got a Strong Desire” (“We Didn’t Start the Fire” as performed by Billy Joel) 8. “Reaping for Six Years” (“Reeling in the Years” as performed by Steely Dan) 9. “Bring Back That Shabbos Feeling” (“You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” as performed by the Righteous Brothers) 10. “Grapewine” (“Heard It through the Grapevine” as performed by Marvin Gaye) 11. “Fast Days of the Year” (“I Saw Her Standing There” as performed by the Beatles) 12. “The Melachot” (“The Elements” by Tom Lehrer) 13. “Prayer Jumping” (“Tub Thumping” as performed by Chumba Wumba) 14. “Bar Yochai’s World” (“Brown Eyed Girl” as performed by Van Morrison) 15. “Watching the Sunshine” (“Walking on Sunshine” as performed by Katrina and the Waves) 16. “The Smorgasbord King” (“Sultans of Swing” as performed by Dire Straits) 17. “Fish with Chrain” (“King of Pain” as performed by the Police) 18. “Tekiah” (“Maria” by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) 19. “Did You Hear the Rov Last Night” (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight” as performed by Elton John)

!307 20. “Hello Mohel” (“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter From Camp)” as performed by Allan Sherman) 21. “Neighbor’s Yard of Spoken Scenes” (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” as performed by Green Day) 22. “The Seder Started” (“Let’s Get It Started” as performed by the Black Eyed Peas) 23. “Observing Jews Today” (“Surfin’ USA” as performed by the Beach Boys) 24. “If You Want to Be a Mensch” (“If I Only Had a Brain” by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg) 25. “Mitzvos Today” (“YMCA” as performed by the Village People) O. Rucka Rucka Ali (1987–) 1. “I Can Do Whatever I’m White” (“Whatever You Like” as performed as performed by T.I.) 2. “Go Cops” (“Tik Tok” as performed by Ke$ha) 3. “Ching Chang Chong” (“Boom Boom Pow” as performed by the Black Eyed Peas) 4. “Ima Korean” (“I Gotta Feeling” as performed by the Black Eyed Peas) 5. “Emo (Like a Nazi)” (“Paparazzi” as performed by Lady Gaga) 6. “I Love Minorities” (“Girls” as performed by Katy Perry) 7. “Let’s Go Jesus!” (“Blah Blah Blah” as performed by Ke$ha) 8. “Justin’s Beaver” (“Magic” as performed by B.O.B.) 9. “Osama Bin Found” (“E.T.” as performed by Katy Perry) 10. “I’m Obama” (“Thrift Shop” as performed by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis) 11. “Only 17” (“Just a Dream” as performed by Nelly) 12. “Ebola (La La)” (“L.A. Love” as performed by Fergie) 13. “Because I’m White” (“Because I Got High” as performed by Afroman) 14. “I Wanna Rape” (“Wide Awake” as performed by Katy Perry) 15. “Ginger” (“Timber” as performed by Pitbull and Ke$ha) 16. “Fuck Australia” (“Black And Yellow” as performed by Wiz Khalifa) 17. “Don’t Be a Playa, Haiti” (“Replay” as performed by Iyaz) 18. “Minecraft” (“Light It Up” as performed by Fall Out Boy) 19. “Smack My Bitch” (“Catch My Breath” as performed by Kelly Clarkson) 20. “Brony Style” (“Gangam Style” as performed by Psy) 21. “Fat Violent Dykes” (“Last Friday Night” as performed by Katy Perry) 22. “Peein’ on the French” (“Confident” as performed by Demi Lovato) 23. “Fuck France” (“Just Dance” as performed by Lady Gaga) 24. “Eff Germany” (“Talk Dirty” as performed by Jason Derulo) 25. “Dago” (“Payphone” as performed by Maroon 5) 26. “Eff Australia” (“Black and Yellow” as performed by Wiz Khalifa) 27. “Hippies Always Smell like Balls” (“3” as performed by Britney Spears) 28. “Trump” (“Stitches” as performed by Shawn Mendes) 29. “Just Like Black Peoples” (“Animals” as performed by Maroon 5) 30. “Niggas” (“Levels” as performed by Rick Jonas)

!308 31. “Some Black Guy” (“Good Feeling” as performed by Flo Rida) 32. “I’m Afraid (Of Blk Ppl)” (“Take It Off” as performed by Ke$ha) 33. “Blame It (On the Black People)” (“Blame It” as performed by Jamie Foxx) 34. “(We Need Some) White Kids” (“I Like It” as performed by Enrique Iglesias) 35. “Wigger” (“Wiggle” as performed by Jason Derulo) 36. “We’re All Asian” (“Just the Way You Are” as performed by Bruno Mars) 37. “I’m Chinee” (“Imma Be” as performed by the Black Eyed Peas) 38. “Talking Chinese” (“Talking Body” as performed by Tove Lo) 39. “All about That Rice” (“All about That Bass” as performed by Meghan Trainor) 40. “If I Was Mongolian” (“Boyfriend” as performed by Justin Bieber) 41. “My Korea’s Over” (“International Love” as performed by Pitbull) 42. “Ima Dirty Iraqi” (“Sorry for Party Rocking” as performed by LMFAO) 43. “I’m Osama” (“Thrift Shop” as performed by Macklemore) 44. “I’m Obama” (“Thrift Shop” as performed by Macklemore) 45. “Al Qaedirection” (“Die Young” as performed by Ke$ha) 46. “Zayn Did 9/11” (“Come and Get It” as performed by Selena Gomez) 47. “In the Jungle” (“Stronger” as performed by Kelly Clarkson) 48. “Free Kony, Dog” (“Part of Me” as performed by Katy Perry) 49. “Without Jew” (“Without You” as performed by David Guetta) 50. “Jews and Faggots” (“Moves Like Jagger” as performed by Maroon 5) 51. “Whutchu Jewin’” (“Right Thru Me” as performed by Nicki Minaj) 52. “Anne Frank Bash 2009 (Ima Jew)” (“Sugar” as performed by Flo Rida) 53. “I’m Not Racist” (“Fancy” as performed by Iggy Azalea) 54. “Let’s Talk about Race” (“All about That Bass” as performed by Meghan Trainor) P. Ju-Tang Clan (no dates available) 1. “Ain’t No Love (LA edition)” (“Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love)” as performed by Jay-Z) 2. “Wack and Mellow”(“Black and Yellow” as performed by Wiz Khalifa) 3. “JuTang State of Mind” (“Empire State of Mind” as performed by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys) 4. “Jerkin’” (“Teach Me How to Jerk” as performed by Audio Push 5. “Full Grown Jus” (“Opposite of Adults” as performed by Chiddy Bang) Q. 2 Live Jews (1990–2005) 1. “Oy! It’s So Humid” (“Me So Horny” as performed by Two Live Crew) 2. “As Kosher as They Wanna Be” (“As Nasty As They Wanna Be” as performed by Two Live Crew) 3. “Shake Your Tuchas” (“Shake Your Booty” as performed by K.C. and the Sunshine Band) 4. “Moisha Got Run over by a Wheelchair” (“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” as performed by Elmo and Patsy) 5. “Civil Suits” (“Silver Bells” by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans)

!309 R. ApologetiX (1992–) 1. “Lazy Brain” (“Crazy Train” as performed by Ozzy Osbourne) 2. “Don’t Be Fooled” (“Don’t Be Cruel” as performed by Elvis Presley) 3. “Hotel Can’t Afford Ya” (“Hotel California” as performed by the Eagles) 4. “Christmasnite” (“Kryptonite” as performed by 3 Doors Down) 5. “Enter Samson” (“Enter Sandman” as performed by Metallica) 6. “The Real Sin Savior” (“The Real Slim Shady” as performed by Eminem) 7. “Smells Like Thirtysomething Spirit” (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” as performed by Nirvana) 8. “Bethlehemian Rhapsody” (“Bohemian Rhapsody” as performed by Queen) 9. “Story of a Squirrel” (“Absolutely (Story of a Girl)” as performed by Nine Days) 10. “More Than a Healing” (“More Than a Feeling” as performed by BosTon) 11. “The Devil Went Down to Jordan” (“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” as performed by the Charlie Daniels Band) 12. “We’re Not Goin’ to Canaan” (“We’re Not Gonna Take It” as performed by Twisted Sister) 13. “Set Him Free” (“Let It Be” as performed by the Beatles) 14. “This Is From Paul” (“This Is a Call” as performed by Foo Fighters) 15. “Are You Gonna Be Ike’s Girl?” (“Are You Gonna Be My Girl” as performed by Jet) 16. “JC’s Mom” (“Stacy’s Mom” as performed by Fountains of Wayne) 17. “The Voice of Sodom” (“The Boys of Summer” as performed by Don Henley) 18. “It’s Tough (Song About Nehemiah)” (“This Love” as performed by Maroon 5) 19. “Welcome to the Judges” (“Welcome to the Jungle” as performed by Guns ’N’ Roses) 20. “Good News Bookie” (“Boot Scootin’ Boogie” as performed by Brooks and Dunn) 21. “Corinthians” (“In the End” as performed by Linkin Park) 22. “Narrow Way to Heaven” (“Stairway to Heaven” as performed by Led Zeppelin) 23. “People” (“Pepper” as performed by Butthole Surfers) 24. “Bad Dude Risin’” (“Bad Moon Rising” as performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival) 25. “Trust Him” (“Truckin’” as performed by the Grateful Dead) S. Comedians MC Paul Barman and Eric Schwartz (a.k.a. Smooth E) (2003–2012) 1. “Hanukkah Hey Ya!” (“Hey Ya!” as performed by OutKast) 2. “Crank That Kosha Boy” (“Crank That (Soulja Boy)” as performed by Soulja Boy) T. Ben Klein (no dates available) 1. “Hey There Gedaliah” (“Hey There Delilah” as performed by Plain White Tees)

!310 2. “Dumb” (“Numb” as performed by Linkin Park) 3. “Shalom” (“No One” as performed by Alicia Keys) U. Cuff Me: The Fifty Shades Of Grey Musical Parody (written by Bradford McMurran, Jeremiah Albers, and Sean Devereux) (Off Broadway production 2010–2012) 1. “Mommy Porn” (“Poker Face” as performed by Lady Gaga) 2. “I’m a Virgin” (“Like a Virgin” as performed by Madonna) 3. “Grab That Paddle One More Time” (“Hit Me Baby One More Time” as performed by Britney Spears) 4. “All You Horny Ladies” (“Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” as performed by Beyoncé) V. The Maccabeats (2010–) 1. “Candlelight” (“Dynamite” as performed by Taio Cruz) 2. “Purim Song” (“Raise Your Glass” as performed by Pink) 3. “Book of Good Life” (“Good Life” as performed by OneRepublic) 4. “What’s Next? Sukkos Style?” (“Gangnam Style” as performed by Psy) 5. “D’ror Yikra” (“Cups” as performed by Anna Kendrick) 6. “Burn” (“Burn” as performed by Ellie Goulding) W. “Bowling Green Massacre”-themed parodies 1. “‘Bowling Green’ w/apologies to Neil Young,” posted by “Robert Kekuna” (“Ohio” as performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young) X. Parodic responses to Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” 1. “Robin Thicke Blurred Lines PARODY,” posted by Bart Baker 2. “Blurred Lines Parody (Obama Been Watchin’ NSA),” posted by Rucka Rucka Ali 3. “‘Good Wall’ A Pokémon Parody of Blurred Lines,” posted by NateWantsToBattle 4. “Robin Thicke - Blurred Lines Parody - ‘Church Signs,’” posted by Dustin Ahkuoi 5. “Blurred Bynes,” posted by DWV (Detox, Willam & Vicky Vox) 6. “#HungryGirl - Robin Thicke - Blurred Lines Parody,” posted by Aja Dang 7. “Doctor Who - ‘Time Lines’ (Blurred Lines Parody),” posted by TripleThreatProdux 8. “Blurred lines - Robin Thicke parody - GOOD BOY,” posted by Niv 9. “Robin Thicke - ‘Blurred Lines’ Cover | Jessica Cook and Katherine Hughes Ft.- Darmirra Bronson,” posted by Jessica Cook 10. “Blurred Vision (Blurred Lines Optometry Parody),” posted by AJ Pastor Productions 11. “Lame Lines (Douchebag),” posted by Melinda Hughes Comedy 12. “Blurred Lines: The Reply,” posted by Rosalind Pearl 13. “#WomensRights: A Pro-Choice Parody of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines,’” posted by FullFrontalFreedom

!311 14. “Robin Thicke - Blurred Lines [Feminist Parody] ‘Defined Lines,’” posted by Auckland Law Revue 15. “Robin Thicke - Blurred Lines (Dirty Version) Parody Cover,” posted by MsRondaRush

II. Stylistic allusions A. Allan Sherman (1924–1973) 1. “Sam You Made the Pants Too Long” (stylistic allusions to Jewish and Oriental music) B. Stan Freberg (1926–2015) 1. “A Dear John and Marsha Letter” (parodies soap opera dialogue with newly- composed dramatic underscoring; also references “A Dear John Letter” by Billy Barton, Fuzzy Owen and Lewis Talley) 2. “Rock around Stephen Foster” (parodies early 1950s rock and roll) 3. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Pilgrim’s Progress: Take an Indian To Lunch” (stylistic allusion to Native American music) 4. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Yankee Doodle Go Home (Spirit Of ’76)” (stylistic allusion to jazz) 5. “Tele-Vee-Shun” (parodies calypso) 6. “The Old Payola Roll Blues” (parodies early 1950s rock and roll) 7. “Wun’erful, Wun’erful” (parodies Lawrence Welk’s television show and musical style) C. Tom Lehrer (1928–) 1. “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” (style parody of college fight songs) 2. “The Old Dope Peddler” (allusions to songs about “the old lamplighter and the old umbrella man and the old garbage collector and all these lovable old characters that go around spreading sweetness and light to their respective communities.”)1 3. “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be” (style parody of songs about the American West) 4. “The Irish Ballad” (style parody of murder ballads and Irish-American popular songs) 5. “The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz” (style parody of waltzes) 6. “Bright College Days” (style parody of college alma mater songs) 7. “A Christmas Carol” (style parody of Christmas songs) 8. “Oedipus Rex” (style parody of “motion picture title songs”)2

1 “Tom Lehrer Revisited,” accessed March 9, 2017, http://dmdb.org/lyrics/lehrer.revisited.html.

2 “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” accessed March 9, 2017, http://dmdb.org/lyrics/ lehrer.wasted.html.

!312 9. “In Old Mexico” (style parody of songs about that “magic and romantic land south of border,” stylistic allusion to topic of bullfighting/Spanish music)3 10. “Clementine” (allusions to “La ci darem la mano” by W. A. Mozart, “52nd Street Theme” by Thelonious Monk, and patter songs by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 11. “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier” (style parody of official songs of military branches 12. “She’s My Girl” (style parody of “love songs on the order of ‘He’s Just My Bill’”)4 13. “The Masochism Tango” (style parody of tangos) 14. “The Folk Song Army” (style parody of protest folk songs, stylistic allusion to Mexican music) 15. “Pollution” (stylistic allusion to Latin/Caribbean music) D. “Weird Al” Yankovic (né Alfred Matthew Yankovic) (1955–) 1. “Albuquerque” (allusions to “Dick’s Automotive” as performed by the Rugburns) 2. “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota” (style parody of Harry Chapin and Gordon Lightfoot) 3. “Bob” (style parody of Bob Dylan) 4. “Buy Me a Condo” (style parody of Bob Marley) 5. “Callin’ In Sick” (style parody of grunge) 6. “Dare to Be Stupid” (style parody of Devo) 7. “One More Minute” (style parody of doo-wop) 8. “Slime Creatures from Outer Space” (style parody of 1950s-era science fiction movie soundtracks) 9. “This Is the Life” (style parody of 1930s-era jazz music, allusions to heavy metal and hip hop) 10. “Dog Eat Dog” (style parody of Talking Heads) 11. “Good Enough for Now” (style parody of country love songs) 12. “Christmas at Ground Zero” (style parody of Christmas carols) 13. “You Make Me” (style parody of Oingo Boingo) 14. “Velvet Elvis” (style parody of the Police) 15. “Twister” (style parody of the Beastie Boys) 16. “Good Old Days” (style parody of James Taylor) 17. “Generic Blues” (style parody of the blues) 18. “Trigger Happy” (style parody of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean) 19. “I Was Only Kidding” (style parody of Tonio K.)

3 “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” accessed March 9, 2017, http://dmdb.org/lyrics/ lehrer.wasted.html.

4 “An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer,” accessed March 9, 2017, http://dmdb.org/lyrics/ lehrer.wasted.html.

!313 20. “Young, Dumb and Ugly” (style parody of AC/DC) 21. “Frank’s 2000-inch TV” (style parody of R.E.M.) 22. “Waffle King” (style parody of Peter Gabriel) 23. “Everything You Know Is Wrong” (style parody of They Might Be Giants) 24. “I’m So Sick of You” (style parody of early Elvis Costello) 25. “My Baby’s in Love With Eddie Vedder” (style parody of zydeco) 26. “Your Horoscope for Today” (style parody of third-wave ska) 27. “Truck Drivin’ Song” (style parody of country) 28. “Party at the Leper Colony” (style parody of Bo Diddley) 29. “Wanna B Ur Lovr” (allusions to Beck and Prince) 30. “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?” (style parody of Ben Folds) 31. “Genius in France” (style parody of Frank Zappa) 32. “Pancreas” (style parody of Brian Wilson) 33. “I’ll Sue Ya” (style parody of Rage Against the Machine) 34. “Virus Alert” (style parody of Sparks) 35. “Close But No Cigar” (style parody of Cake) 36. “Don’t Download This Song” (style parody of 1980s-era charity songs) 37. “Craigslist” (style parody of the Doors) 38. “Skipper Dan” (style parody of Weezer) 39. “Ringtone” (style parody of Queen) 40. “CNR” (style parody of the White Stripes) 41. “If That Isn’t Love” (style parody of Hanson) 42. “Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me” (style parody of Jim Steinman) 43. “Lame Claim to Fame” (style parody of Southern Culture on the Skids) 44. “Sports Song” (style parody of college fight songs) 45. “My Own Eyes” (style parody of Foo Fighters) 46. “Mission Statement” (style parody of Crosby, Stills and Nash) 47. “First World Problems” (style parody of the Pixies) 48. “Jackson Park Express” (style parody of Cat Stevens) E. Cledus T. Judd (né Barry Poole) (1964–) 1. “Swingin’” (restylization of “Swingin’” as performed by John Anderson) 2. “Gone Country” (allusions to hip hop) 3. “Hip Hop & Honky Tonk” (style parody of hip hop) F. Richard Cheese (né Mark Jonathan Davis) (1965–) 1. “Rape Me” (lounge jazz restylization of “Rape Me” as performed by Nirvana) 2. “People = Shit” (lounge jazz restylization of “People = Shit” as performed by Slipknot) 3. “Baby Got Back” (lounge jazz restylization of “Baby Got Back” as performed by Sir Mix-A-Lot) 4. “Girls, Girls, Girls” (lounge jazz restylization of “Girls, Girls, Girls” as performed by Mötley Crüe) 5. “Closer” (lounge jazz restylization of “Closer” as performed by Nine Inch Nails)

!314 6. “Bust a Move” (lounge jazz restylization of “Bust a Move” as performed by Young MC) 7. “Nookie” (lounge jazz restylization of “Nookie” as performed by Limp Bizkit) 8. “Down with the Sickness” (lounge jazz restylization of “Down with the Sickness” as performed by Disturbed) 9. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (lounge jazz restylization of “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as performed by U2) 10. “Freak on a Leash” (lounge jazz restylization of “Freak on a Leash” as performed by Korn) 11. “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” (lounge jazz restylization of “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” as performed by Pink Floyd) 12. “Rock the Casbah” (lounge jazz restylization of “Rock the Casbah” as performed by the Clash) 13. “Fight for Your Right” (lounge jazz restylization of “Fight for Your Right” as performed by the Beastie Boys) 14. “Hot for Teacher” (lounge jazz restylization of “Hot for Teacher” as performed by Van Halen) 15. “Gin and Juice” (lounge jazz restylization of “Gin and Juice” as performed by Snoop Dogg) 16. “Come Out and Play” (lounge jazz restylization of “Come Out and Play” as performed by the Offspring) 17. “Badd” (lounge jazz restylization of “Badd” as performed by Ying Yang Twins) 18. “Creep” (lounge jazz restylization of “Creep” as performed by Radiohead) 19. “Tik Tok” (lounge jazz restylization of “Tik Tok” as performed by Ke$ha) 20. “Paradise City” (lounge jazz restylization of “Paradise City” as performed by Guns ’n’ Roses) 21. “Toxic” (lounge jazz restylization of “Toxic” as performed by Brittany Spears) 22. “Just Dance” (lounge jazz restylization of “Just Dance” as performed by David Bowie) 23. “My Neck, My Back” (lounge jazz restylization of “My Neck, My Back” as performed by Khia) 24. “Gimmie That Nutt [sic]” (lounge jazz restylization of “Gimmie That Nutt” as performed by Easy-E) 25. “Smack My Bitch Up” (lounge jazz restylization of “Smack My Bitch Up” as performed by the Prodigy) G. National Lampoon Radio Hour (Tony Schueren and ChrisTopher Guest) (1973– 1974) 1. “Hite Report Disco” (style parody of disco) 2. “What About Reupholsterers?” (style parody of Johnny Cash)

!315 3. “What Were You Expecting - Rock and Roll?” (style parodies of Devo, Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, and ABBA) 4. “Cocaine” (style parody of country) 5. “Godspeak Suite: Born Again Bob” (style parody of late 1970s- and early 1980s-era Bob Dylan) 6. “Godspeak Suite: My Bod Is for God” (style parody of religious revival music) 7. “Apocalypso Now!” (style parody of calypso) 8. “Colorado” (style parody of John Denver) 9. “Middle Class Liberal Well-Intentioned Blues” (style parody of Pete Seeger) 10. “Kung Fu Christmas” (style parody of 1970s-era R&B songs) 11. “Pizza Man” (style parody of 1950’s-era teen tragedy songs) 12. “The Immigrants” (stylistic allusions to yodeling, French and Italian music, Appalachian music, Western American cowboy music, and folk music) 13. “Those Fabulous Sixties” (style parody of Bob Dylan) 14. “Magical Misery Tour” (style parody of post Beatles-era John Lennon) 15. “Lemmings Lament” (style parody of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young) 16. “Positively Wall Street” (style parody of Bob Dylan) 17. “You Put Me through Hell” (style parody of Joni Mitchell) 18. “I Do for You” (style parody of Joni Mitchell) 19. “Papa Was a Running Dog Lackey of the Bourgeoisie” (style parody of Motown recordings, allusion to “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” as performed by the Temptations) 20. “Highway Toes” (style parody of James Taylor) 21. “Pull the Triggers, Niggers” (style parody of Joan Baez) 22. “Lonely at the Bottom” (style parody of Joe Cocker) 23. “Megadeath” (style parody of Megadeath, stylistic allusions to heavy metal) 24. “Old Maid” (“Southern California Brings Me Down”) (style parody of Neil Young, allusion to “A Man Needs a Maid” by Neil Young) 25. “Nirvana Banana” (style parody of Donovan, paraphrases the traditional song “Day-O”) 26. “Closet Queen” (style parody of lounge jazz performers) 27. “The Ballad of K. C. River Rat” (style parody of trucker songs) 28. “Saint Leonard’s Song” (style parody of Leonard Cohen) 29. “Mother Goose’s Sweet Potato Sparkling Wine” (style parody of James Taylor) 30. “Riding Out on a Rail” (style parody of the Grateful Dead) 31. “Bleeding Heart” (style parody of Cat Stevens) 32. “Psychology Ptoday [sic] Blues (Every Day I Feel Depressed)” (style parody of B.B. King, allusion to “Every Day I Have the Blues”) 33. “Methadone Maintenance Man” (style parody of James Taylor) 34. “Goodbye Pop” (style parody of Elton John) 35. “The B Side of Love” (style parody of country ballads)

!316 36. “Art Rock Suite” (style parody of progressive/art rock) 37. “Down to Jamaica” (style parodies of Bob Dylan and reggae) 38. “Little Miss Muffet” (style parody of Otis Redding) H. The Lonely Island (2001–) 1. “Lazy Sunday” (style parody of gangsta rap) 2. “Dick in a Box” (style parody of early 2010s-era R&B slow jams) 3. “Natalie’s Rap” (style parody of gangsta rap) 4. “I’m on a Boat” (style parody of rap) 5. “I Just Had Sex” (style parody of early 2010s-era popular songs) 6. “The Creep” (style parody of vernacular dance music) 7. “Motherlover” (style parody of 1990s-era R&B songs) 8. “Jack Sparrow” (style parody of early 2010s-era dance music and ballads) 9. “YOLO” (style parody of early 2010s-era popular songs) 10. “I Run NY” (style parody of rap) 11. “When Will the Bass Drop” (style parody of EDM, allusions to DJ Steve Aoki) I. Altar Boyz (Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker) (Off Broadway production 2004–2010) 1. “God Put the Rhythm in Me” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 2. “We Are the Altar Boyz” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 3. “Church Rulez” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 4. “The Calling” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 5. “The Miracle Song” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 6. “Everybody Fits” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 7. “Something about You” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 8. “Body Mind and Soul” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 9. “La Vida Eternal” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 10. “Epiphany” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 11. “Number 918” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) 12. “I Believe” (stylistic allusions to 1990s-era boy-band popular music) J. Garfunkel and Oates (2007–) 1. “This Party Took a Turn for the Douche (Early Mix)” (style parody of early 2010s-era vernacular dance music) 2. “Save the Rich” (style parody of 1980s-era charity songs) 3. “Sports Go Sports” (allusion to “Eye of the Tiger” as performed by Survivor) K. Book Of Mormon (Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone) (Broadway and Touring productions 2011–) 1. “Hasa Diga Eebowai” (allusions to “Hakuna Matata” by Elton John and Tim Rice)

!317 2. “Hello” (allusions to “The Telephone Hour” by Michael Stewart, Lee Adams, and Charles Strouse) 3. “I Believe” (allusions to “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again” by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross) 4. “Turn It Off” (allusions to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) L. “Bowling Green Massacre”-themed parodies 1. “‘That Day in Bowling Green’ written by Dave Stinton,” posted by Nick and Gabe (style parody of American folk songs) 2. “The Bowling Green Massacre Song,” posted by PrincessMithril (style parody of Scots folk songs, especially as performed by Jack Beck) 3. “The Eleventeenth of Never (Bowling Green Massacre tribute),” posted by Matt Wixson (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 4. “The Ballad of Bowling Green,” posted by Sam Rolens (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 5. “Bowling Green Massacre!,” posted by Patrick Costello (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 6. “Ballad of the Bowling Green Massacre,” posted by Noah Budin (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 7. “The Ballad of the Bowling Green Massacre,” posted by Mitch Benn Patreon (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 8. “Massacre at Bowling Green Song,” posted by Mike Offutt (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 9. “Ballad of Bowling Green,” posted by Nancy Cook (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 10. “Ballad of the Bowling Green Massacre,” posted by Cris Swanson (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 11. “Bowling Green - The Kellyanne Version,” posted by Dan Schatz (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 12. “BOWLING GREEN NONEXISTENT TRAGEDY TRIBUTE SONG,” posted by Rob I. (style parody of Anglo American ballads) 13. “The Ballad of Bowling Green,” posted by Mandy Troxel (style parody of Woody Gutherie)

III. Quotations A. Allan Sherman (1924–1973) 1. “Go To Sleep, Paul Revere!” (quotes the traditional song “The Girl I Left Behind”) 2. “Go To Sleep, Paul Revere!” (quotes the traditional song “Yankee Doodle”) B. Stan Freberg (1926–2015) 1. “Christmas Dragnet” (quotes theme from television show Dragnet by Walter Schumann) 2. “Green Chri$tma$” (quotes George Gershwin’s American in Paris)

!318 3. “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (quotes the traditional song “On Top Of Old Smoky”) 4. “Little Blue Riding Hood” (quotes theme from television show Dragnet by Walter Schumann) 5. “Rock around Stephen Foster” (quotes “Beautiful Dreamer” by Stephen Foster) 6. “Rock around Stephen Foster” (quotes “Nelly Bly” by Stephen Foster) 7. “Rock around Stephen Foster” (quotes “Oh! Susanna” by Stephen Foster) 8. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, Overture (quotes “America, the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward) 9. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, Overture (quotes the traditional melody “Sailor’s Hornpipe”) 10. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, Overture (quotes “I Wish I Was in Dixie” by Daniel Decatur Emmett) 11. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Columbus Discovers America” (quotes “America, the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward) 12. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Columbus Discovers America” (quotes “Adiós Muchachos” by Julio César Sanders and César Vedani) 13. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Pilgrim’s Progress: Take an Indian To Lunch” (quotes “I Wish I Was in Dixie” by Daniel Decatur Emmett) 14. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Pilgrim’s Progress: Take an Indian To Lunch” (quotes the traditional song “Ten Little Indians”) 15. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Declaration Of Independence: A Man Can’t Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days” (paraphrases “Rule, Britannia” by James Thomson and Thomas Arne) 16. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Declaration Of Independence: A Man Can’t Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days” (quotes Entrance of The Gladiators by Julius Fucik) 17. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Washington Crosses the Delaware (Command Decision)” (quotes “Kingdom Coming” by Henry C. Work) 18. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Yankee Doodle Go Home (Spirit Of ’76)” (quotes the traditional song “Yankee Doodle”) 19. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Battle of Yorktown” (quotes the overture to William Tell by Gioachino Rossini)

!319 20. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Battle of Yorktown” (paraphrases “Rule, Britannia” by James Thomson and Thomas Arne) 21. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Finale: “So Long, Friend” (quotes the traditional song “Yankee Doodle”) 22. Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years, “Finale: “So Long, Friend” (quotes “Rule, Britannia” by James Thomson and Thomas Arne) 23. “St. George and the Dragonet” (quotes theme from television show Dragnet by Walter Schumann) 24. “The Great Pretender” (quotes “Lullaby of Birdland” by George Shearing and George David Weiss) 25. “Wun’erful, Wun’erful” (quotes “Bubbles in the Wine” as performed by Lawrence Welk) 26. “Wun’erful, Wun’erful” (paraphrases the traditional melody “Sailor’s Hornpipe”) C. “Weird Al” Yankovic (né Alfred Matthew Yankovic) (1955–) 1. “Christmas at Ground Zero” (quotes “Jingle Bells” by James Lord Pierpont) 2. “Polka Power!” (quotes “Der Fuehrer’s Face” as performed by Spike Jones and His City Slickers) D. El Vez (né Robert Lopez) (1960–) 1. “Maria’s the Name” (quotes “I Want Candy” as performed by the Strangeloves) 2. “Never Been to Spain” (quotes “Wah Wah” as performed by George Harrison) 3. “(Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide) If I Can Dream” (quotes “Oh Darling” as performed by the Beatles) 4. “En el Barrio” (quotes “Silent Night” by Franz Xaver Gruber) 5. “En el Barrio” (quotes “Wonderwall” as performed by Oasis) 6. “En el Barrio” (quotes “Champagne Supernova” as performed by Oasis) 7. “En el Barrio” (quotes “Dear Mr. Fantasy” as performed by Traffic) 8. “En el Barrio” (quotes “I’ve Got a Feeling” as performed by the Beatles) 9. “Say It Loud, I’m Brown and I’m Proud” (quotes “Strawberry Fields Forever” as performed by the Beatles) E. Paul Shanklin (1962–) 1. “I Am Barack, I’m the Messiah” (quotes “Hail to the Chief” by James Sanderson) F. Cledus T. Judd (né Barry Poole) (1964–) 1. “Cledus T.” (quotes the traditional song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”) 2. “Cledus Went Down to Florida” (quotes the traditional song “Shave and a Hair Cut”) 3. “Dang It, I’m Vixen” (quotes “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Johnny Marks)

!320 4. “Don’t Mess with America” (quotes “Star Spangled Banner,” set to a melody by John Stafford Smith) 5. “Honeymoon” (quotes “Jolene” by Dolly Parton) 6. “Indian In-Laws” (quotes the traditional song “Ten Little Indians”) 7. “It’s a Great Day to Be a Guy” (quotes “Arkansas Traveler” by Sanford C. Faulkner) 8. “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Pop” (quotes “Family Tradition” by Hank Williams, Jr.) 9. “Merry Christmas from the Whole Fam Damily [sic]” (quotes “Silent Night” by Franz Xaver Gruber 10. “Swingin’” (quotes “Jam on It” by Newcleus) 11. “Waitin’ On Obama” (quotes “Hail to the Chief” by James Sanderson) G. Richard Cheese (né Mark Jonathan Davis) (1965–) 1. “Rape Me” (quotes “Break on Through” as performed by the Doors) H. National Lampoon Radio Hour (Tony Schueren and Christopher Guest) (1973– 1974) 1. “Mission: Impeachable” (quotes Symphony No. 5 by Ludwig van Beethoven) 2. “The Immigrants” (quotes “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin) I. The Capitol Steps (1981–) 1. “George Bush Speaks” (quotes “Hail to the Chief” by James Sanderson) 2. “GOP-BS” (quotes “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street” by Joe Raposo) J. Rucka Rucka Ali (1987–) 1. “Ebola (La La)” (quotes theme from television show Power Rangers by Ron Wasserman) K. 2 Live Jews (1990–2005) 1. “J.A.P. Rap” (paraphrases the traditional song known variously as “Senorita with a Flower in Her Hair,” “Going to Kentucky,” or “Miss Suzy”) 2. “The Ballad of Moisha and Irving/ Irving and Moisha” (quotes the traditional song “I Have a Little Dreidel”) 3. “The Ballad of Moisha and Irving/ Irving and Moisha” (quotes “If I Were a Rich Man” by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick) 4. “As Kosher as They Wanna Be” (paraphrases the traditional song “Hava Nagila”) 5. “Young Jews Be Proud” (the traditional song “Eitz chayim” (“Tree of Life”), also known as “Hatikvah”) L. ApologetiX (1992–) 1. “Hotel Can’t Afford Ya” (paraphrases “Silent Night” by Franz Xaver Gruber) M. Altar Boyz (Gary Adler, Michael Patrick Walker) 1. “The Calling” (quotes Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega) N. Tom Lehrer (1928–) 1. “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be” (quotes “Home on the Range” by Daniel E. Kelley)

!321 2. “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier” (quotes the traditional melody “Reveille”) 3. “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie” (quotes “I Wish I Was in Dixie” by Daniel Decatur Emmett) 4. “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie” (quotes “Home! Sweet Home!” by Henry Bishop and John Howard Payne) 5. “Lobachevsky” (quotes Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt) 6. “The Elements” (quotes the traditional song “Shave and a Hair Cut”) 7. “We Will All Go Together When We Go” (quotes “Down by the Old Mill Stream” by Tell Taylor)

IV. Medleys (3 or more songs) A. Allan Sherman (1924–1973) 1. “Shticks and Stones” (the traditional songs “Jimmy Crack Corn,” the traditional song “Jamaica Farewell” as performed by Harry Belafonte, the traditional songs “Little David, Play on Your Harp,” “St. James Infirmary Blues,” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,” and “I Gave My Love a Cherry,” “Camptown Races” by Stephen Foster, and the traditional songs “The Yellow Rose Oof Texas” and “Shortening Bread”) 2. “Barry Is the Baby’s Name/ Horowitz/ Get on the Garden Freeway” ( “Mary,” “Harrigan,” and “Give My Regards To Broadway” by George M. Cohan) 3. “Shticks of One and a Half a Dozen of the Other” (the traditional songs “Molly Malone,” Auld Lang Syne,” and “Billy Boy,” “Mary Ann” by Roaring Lion, “On the Banks of the Wabash” by Paul Dresser, the traditional song “On Top Of Old Smokey,” “Aura Lee” by W. W. Fosdick and George R. Poulton, “My Grandfather’s Clock” by Henry Clay Work, and the traditional songs “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” “Polly Wolly Doodle,” and “Down by the Riverside”) 4. “You Went the Wrong Way, Old King Louie” (“La Marseillaise” by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis” by John Benson Brooks and Bob Russell, and theme from the television show Peter Gunn by Henry Mancini) B. “Weird Al” Yankovic “Weird Al” Yankovic (1955–)

!322 1. “Polkas on 45” (“Jocko Homo” as performed by Devo, “Smoke on the Water” as performed by Deep Purple, “Sex (I’m A . . .)” as performed by Berlin, “Hey Jude” as performed by the Beatles, “L.A. Woman” as performed by the Doors, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” as performed by Iron Butterfly, “Hey Joe” as performed by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Focus” as performed by Hocus Pocus, “Burning Down the House” as performed by Talking Heads, “Hot Blooded” as performed by Foreigner, “Bubbles in the Wine” as performed by Lawrence Welk, “Every Breath You Take” as performed by the Police, “Should I Stay or Should I Go” as performed by the Clash, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” as performed by the Rolling Stones, and “My Generation” as performed by The Who) 2. “The Alternative Polka” (“Loser” as performed by Beck, “Sex Type Thing” as performed by Stone Temple Pilots, “All I Wanna Do” as performed by Sheryl Crow, “Closer” as performed by Nine Inch Nails, “Bang and Blame” as performed by R.E.M., “You Oughta Know” as performed by Alanis Morissette, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” as performed by the Smashing Pumpkins, “My Friends” as performed by Red Hot Chili Peppers, “I’ll Stick Around” as performed by Foo Fighters, “Black Hole Sun” as performed by Soundgarden, and “Basket Case” as performed by Green Day”) 3. “Angry White Boy Polka” (“Last Resort” as performed by Papa Roach, “Chop Suey!” as performed by System of a Down, “Get Free” as performed by the Vines, “Hate To Say I Told You So” as performed by the Hives, “Fell in Love With a Girl” as performed by the White Stripes, “Last Nite” as performed by the Strokes, “Down with the Sickness” as performed by Disturbed, “Renegades of Funk” as performed by Rage against the Machine, “My Way” as performed by Limp Bizkit, “Outside” as performed by Staind, “Bawitdaba” as performed by Kid Rock, “Youth of the Nation” as performed by P.O.D., and “The Real Slim Shady” as performed by Eminem) 4. “Hooked on Polkas” (“12th Street Rag” as performed by Euday L. Bowman, “State of Shock” as performed by Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson, “Sharp Dressed Man” as performed by ZZ Top, “What’s Love Got To Do with It” as performed by Tina Turner, “Method of Modern Love” as performed by Hall and Oates, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” as performed by Yes, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as performed by Twisted Sister, “99 Luftballons” as performed by Nena, “Footloose” as performed by Kenny Loggins, “The Reflex” as performed by Duran Duran, “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” as performed by Quiet Riot, and “Relax” as performed by Frankie Goes To Hollywood)

!323 5. “Polka Party!” (“Sledgehammer” as performed by Peter Gabriel, “Sussudio” as performed by Phil Collins, “Party All the Time” as performed by Eddie Murphy, “Say You, Say Me” as performed by Lionel Richie, “Freeway of Love” as performed by Aretha Franklin, “What You Need” as performed by INXS, “Harlem Shuffle” as performed by the Rolling Stones, “Venus” as performed by Bananarama, “Nasty” as performed by Janet Jackson, “Rock Me Amadeus” as performed by Falco, “Shout” as performed by Tears for Fears, and “Papa Don’t Preach” as performed by Madonna) 6. “Polka Your Eyes Out” (“Cradle of Love” as performed by Billy Idol, “Tom’s Diner” as performed by Suzanne Vega, “Love Shack” as performed by the B-52s, “Clarinet Polka” by A. Hupfat, “Pump Up the Jam” as performed by Technotronic, “Losing My Religion” as performed by R.E.M., “Unbelievable” as performed by EMF, “Do Me!” as performed by Bell Biv DeVoe, “Enter Sandman” as performed by Metallica, “The Humpty Dance” as performed by Digital Underground, “Cherry Pie” as performed by Warrant, “Miss You Much” as performed by Janet Jackson, “I Touch Myself” as performed by Divinyls, “Dr. Feelgood” as performed by Mötley Crüe, and “Ice Ice Baby” as performed by Vanilla Ice) 7. “Polka Power!” (“Wannabe” as performed by the Spice Girls, “Flagpole Sitta” as performed by Harvey Danger, “Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are)” as performed by Pras, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Mýa, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” as performed by the Backstreet Boys, “Walkin’ on the Sun” as performed by Smash Mouth, “Intergalactic” as performed by the Beastie Boys, “Tubthumping” as performed by Chumbawamba, “Ray of Light” as performed by Madonna, “Push” as performed by Matchbox Twenty, “Semi- Charmed Life” as performed by Third Eye Blind, “The Dope Show” as performed by Marilyn Manson, “MMMBop” as performed by Hanson, “Sex and Candy” as performed by Marcy Playground, and “Closing Time” as performed by Semisonic) 8. “Polkarama!” (“Chicken Dance” as performed by Werner Thomas, “Let’s Get It Started” as performed by the Black Eyed Peas, “Take Me Out” as performed by Franz Ferdinand, “Beverly Hills” as performed by Weezer, “Speed of Sound” as performed by Coldplay, “Float On” as performed by Modest Mouse, “Feel Good Inc.” as performed by Gorillaz and De La Soul, “Don’t Cha” as performed by Pussycat Dolls and Busta Rhymes, “Somebody Told Me” as performed by the Killers, “Slither” as performed by Velvet Revolver, “Candy Shop” as performed by 50 Cent and Olivia, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” as performed by Snoop Dogg and Pharrell, “Pon de Replay” as performed by Rihanna, and “Gold Digger” as performed by Kanye West and Jamie Foxx)

!324 9. “Polka Face” (“Liechtensteiner Polka” by Will Glahé, “Poker Face” as performed by Lady Gaga, “Womanizer” as performed by Britney Spears, “Right Round” as performed by Flo Rida, “Day ’n’ Nite” as performed by Kid Cudi, “Need You Now” as performed by Lady Antebellum, “Baby” as performed by Justin Bieber, “So What” as performed by Pink, “I Kissed a Girl” as performed by Katy Perry, “Fireflies” as performed by Owl City, “Blame It” as performed by Jamie Foxx, “Replay” as performed by Iyaz, “Down” as performed by Jay Sean, “Break Your Heart” as performed by Taio Cruz, “The Tick Tock Polka” as performed by Frankie Yankovic, and “Tik Tok” as performed by Ke$ha) 10. “The Hot Rocks Polka” (“It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It),” “Brown Sugar,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Under My Thumb,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Miss You,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Get Off Of My Cloud,” “Shattered,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones) 11. “Now That’s What I Call Polka!” (“Too Fat Polka” by Arthur Godfrey, “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus, “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People, “Best Song Ever” by One Direction, “Gangnam Style” by Psy, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, “Scream and Shout” by will.i.am, “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye, “Timber” by Pitbull, “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO, “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk) C. The Capitol Steps (1981–) 1. “Rolling Kidney Stones” (“Angie,” “Paint it Black,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and “Get Off of My Cloud” as performed by the Rolling Stones and “A Little Help from My Friends” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney) 2. “Rafael Palmeiro’s Greatest Hits” (“Lookin’ for Love” as performed by Johnny Lee, “I Shot the Sheriff” as performed by Bob Marley, “Time in a Bottle” as performed by Jim Croce, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” as performed by Brian Hyland) D. Forbidden Broadway (Gerald Alessandrini) (1984–) 1. “Gagtime” (“Prologue: Ragtime,” “Make Them Hear You,” and other numbers from Ragtime by Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens, and Stephen Flaherty) 2. “Hits and Bombs Sequence” (“Guys and Dolls” by Frank Henry Loesser, “Bali Ha’i” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, “I’ll Know” by Frank Henry Loesser, and “Hello, Dolly!” by Jerry Herman) 3. “Les Misérables (volume 2)” (“C’est Magnifique” by Cole Porter and “End of the Day,” “I Dreamed a Dream,” and “Bring Him Home” by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Jean-Marc Natel)

!325 4. “Pirates Of Penzance Sequence” (“I Am a Pirate King,” “Oh, Is There Not One Maiden Breast?,” and “Poor Wand’ring One” by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert) 5. “Guys and Dolls Sequence” (“Guys and Dolls,” “I’ve Never Been In Love Before,” “A Bushel and a Peck,” and “Sue Me” by Frank Henry Loesser) 6. “The Lion King Segment” (“The Circle of Life” by Elton John and Tim Rice, “The Lonely Goatherd” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” by Elton John and Tim Rice) 7. “Yoko Ono on Broadway” (“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and “Oklahoma!” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and “Imagine” by John Lennon) E. 2 Live Jews (1990–2005) 1. “The Jewish Follies Christmas Megamix” (“Feliz Navidad” by José Feliciano, “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie, “Jingle Bells” by James Lord Pierpont, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” as performed by Elmo and Patsy, “Jingle Bell Rock” by Joseph Carleton Beal and James Ross Boothe, the traditional song “Deck the Halls,” “The Little Drummer Boy” by Katherine Kennicott Davis, the traditional song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Silver Bells” by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, “Winter Wonderland” by Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith, “Frosty the Snowman” by Walter Rollins and Steve Nelson, [unidentified borrowing], and “Money” as performed by Pink Floyd) F. Garfunkel and Oates (2007–) 1. “Worst Song Medley” (“I Love You Always Forever” as performed by Donna Lewis, “I Don’t Want to Wait” as performed by Paula Cole, “Dancing Too Close” as performed by Next, “Kiss Me” as performed by Sixpence None the Richer, “I Wanna Sex You Up” as performed by Color Me Badd [sic], “Barbie Girl” as performed by Aqua, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as performed by Deep Blue Something, “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” as performed by Michael Jackson,” “Cotton Eyed Joe” as performed by Rednex, “Rush, Rush” as performed by Paula Abdul, “I’ll Be Missing You” as performed by Puff Daddy, and “I Love You Always Forever” as performed by Donna Lewis)

V. Parodies with a new text for existing textless melody A. Allan Sherman (1924–1973) 1. “Hungarian Goulash No. 5” (Hungarian Dance, No. 5 by Johannes Brahms) 2. “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! (A Letter from Camp)” (“Dance of the Hours” by Amilcare Ponchielli) 3. “Lotsa Luck” (“Badinage” by Victor Herbert) 4. “Holiday for States” (“Holiday for Strings” by David Rose) 5. “I Can’t Dance” (Norwegian Dances, No. 2 by Edvard Grieg)

!326 6. “Hello Muddah - Nevada Style” (“Dance of the Hours” by Amilcare Ponchielli) 7. “Return to Camp Granada (Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh! I Am Back at Camp Grenada)” (“Dance of the Hours” by Amilcare Ponchielli)

!327