European journal of American studies

12-4 | 2017 Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12383 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.12383 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 12-4 | 2017, “Special Issue: Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music” [Online], Online since 22 December 2017, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https:// journals.openedition.org/ejas/12383; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12383

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music Frank Mehring and Eric Redling

Looking Hip on the Square: Jazz, Cover Art, and the Rise of Creativity Johannes Voelz

Jazz Between the Lines: Sound Notation, Dances, and Stereotypes in Hergé’s Early Tintin Comics Lukas Etter

The Power of Conformity: Music, Sound, and Vision in Back to the Future Marc Priewe

Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016) Johanna Hartmann

“Talking ’Bout My Generation”: Visual History Interviews—A Practitioner’s Report Wolfgang Lorenz

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Introduction. Sound and Vision: Intermediality and American Music

Frank Mehring and Eric Redling

1 The medium of music represents a pioneering force of crossing boundaries on cultural, ethnic, racial, and national levels. Critics such as Wilfried Raussert and Reinhold Wagnleitner argue that music more than any other medium travels easily across borders, language barriers, and creates new cultural contact zones (Raussert 1). With the turn to reception and rise of Cultural Studies, the field of American Studies has expanded its focus on literature and historical narratives to include a broad range of media and practices. As a transdisciplinary field of investigation, the conjuncture between American Studies and media studies has produced new transnational approaches to the functions, attractiveness, and uses of American culture in the age of a digitally connected world. In our special volume we want to put a particular focus on intermediality and American music as an emerging field in transnational American Studies. While intermediality as a theoretical concept has been most widely used with reference to “multiple discourses and modalities of experience and representation, as examined in aesthetic and other humanistic traditions of communication research” (Paech and Schröter, 10, see also Jensen), we are putting our academic spotlight on material mediality (rather than discursive intermediality or institutional intermediality) signaling discursive approaches to media and texts that are interrelated.1 In comparison to communication theorists, we, as transnational American Studies scholars, are particularly interested in the interplay between music and other art forms such as literature, painting, photography, video, film, television, graphic novels, and performance cultures. How can we critically analyze, map, and evaluate the nexus between sights, sites, and sounds in different media and genre? How can we trace the effects, exchange, transformations, appropriations, and cultural flows (William Uricchio) as well as processes of (re)mediation (Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin) of American music? Our volume brings together German scholars and critics in the field of American Studies to investigate the potential of an innovative research agenda with a focus on music in transnational contexts.

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2 Rather than limiting the concept of intermediality to reading literary texts as frames for medial contexts, we understand intermediality as an analytical concept to systematically analyze the manifold interconnections between acoustic and visual media. While critics argue that we live in a world dominated by images, the pictorial turn has contributed to broaden the boundaries of the visual medium affecting film studies, Cultural Studies, literature, and the visual arts. However, while most scholars agree with W. J. T. Mitchell that “all media are mixed media” (211) and are part of a process which, for instance, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin identify as remediation, the multifaceted interactions between sound and visual media are often neglected or downplayed. Building on the work of American Studies scholars such as A. Böger, Ch. Decker, W. Fluck, U. Hebel, G. Rippl, and P. Wagner, who investigate the complex dialogues of textual studies with visual studies, we expand current intermedial theoretical approaches by emphasizing the musical dimension in visual media. We want to rethink the nature of sound, the practice of listening, as well as the function and use of music in the interaction with the arts in transnational and transcultural contexts. We thereby hope to refine current discussions on intermediality, remediation, transmedialilty, and multimodality (as found in, for instance, the 2015 Handbook of Intermediality: Literature, Image, Sound, Music edited by G. Rippl). In four original articles, our novel approach to the exploration of sound and vision takes its first cue from American music to investigate the interdependencies, overlappings, and interactions between music and other media (e.g., photography—J. Voelz, graphic novels—L. Etter, film—M. Priewe, popular performing arts—J. Hartmann). The final section will offer excerpts from a visual interview archive created by Wolfgang Lorenz asking: How can biography, African American culture, music and cultural heritage be interlocked successfully with visual culture, i.e. in video or film, or in filmed and archived interviews?

3 In his article “Looking Hip on the Square: Jazz, Cover Art, and the Rise of Creativity” Johannes Voelz explains that in the early 1950s, American jazz entered a phase of artistic blossoming that was accompanied by widespread popularity and unprecedented cultural influence. By the late 1960s, however, this “second jazz age” had come to an end. His article draws on two approaches within cultural sociology to explain the historically specific cultural force of jazz: it follows American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s method of reconstructing “art worlds,” i.e., the networks of cooperation that include the institutional structures of marketing and distribution. In the jazz art world, the article suggests, sound becomes intermedially embedded in visual culture and textual repertoires. The essay also follows German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, whose history of creativity allows for interpreting the impact of the jazz art world as a chapter in the rise of a creativity dispositif. In particular, Voelz’s essay focuses on the photographic and illustrative work artists like William Claxton and Andy Warhol created for the newly emerging format of the record cover. The visual art of jazz helps account for jazz’s ability to transport artistic hipness from the enclave of modernist art into the everyday.

4 Lukas Etter’s article “Jazz Between the Lines: Sound Notation, Dances, and Stereotypes in Hergé’s Early Tintin Comics” zooms in on the intersection of music and graphic novels. “Jazzy” or not, Etter argues, the close intermedial encounter of jazz and comics, i.e., two medially and semiotically complex forms of expression already by themselves, asks for a general reflection on the nature of sound in combination with visual notes,

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scores, movement, and performance in the comics medium. His essay illuminates how such encounters take shape in specific Francophone Belgian comics of the 1920s and 1930s; it consists of a close reading of musical and sound notation in Hergé’s early Aventures de Tintin albums. It departs from the observation that somebody like Hergé, with an oft-reported affinity for jazz, would shy away from making allusion to thriving dancefloors and the presence of African American musicians so central in the “white” Western European discourses of these decades. The essay sheds light on whether this is closely linked to or, conversely, contrasted from colonialist attitudes Hergé propagates especially in his earliest albums—and on how allusions to the jazz age and American music may be read between the panel lines in some Tintin albums all the same.

5 In “The Power of Conformity: Music, Sound, and Vision in Back to the Future” Marc Priewe turns to the fields of music and film. This essay investigates the aesthetic and political functions of the choice and placement of music in Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis). After an overview of the movie’s cultural contexts, the focus shifts to the interplays between sound and cinematic mise-en-scène, with a particular emphasis on popular music. Priewe argues that the film employs music strategically in order to convey a nostalgic view of American culture and society in the 1950s and 60s by including certain songs and excluding others, as well as by a score (written by Alan Silvestri) that is deeply rooted in the traditions of Hollywood film music. The intermedial use and remediation of music not only amplifies the movie’s quasi- philosophical treatment of time and history in intricate ways, it also resonates with the contemporary sense of American exceptionalism.

6 Johanna Hartmann’s “Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016)” zooms in on a particularly complex and innovative approach of discussing race and ethnicity within a new audio-visual approach by Beyoncé. Lemonade represents a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyoncé locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America.

7 In “‘Talking ’Bout My Generation’: Visual History Interviews—A Practitioner’s Report” Wolfgang Lorenz provides a special contribution to our volume emphasizing the field work in creating visual history archives. Lorenz argues that the critical appreciation of videotaped oral history interviews has been hampered by one-dimensional interpretations of the spoken word alone. The addition of the visual dimension in which voice and gestures are necessary constituents to the reading of the material has so far been widely ignored. Unjustly so, because it enriches the discipline with new interpretative approaches that can lead the way to a more human evaluation of

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historical events and personalities, thereby enlivening the dry facts that empirical historical sciences usually provide. The article endeavors to describe what we see when we listen, and how this visual component can enhance informative values.

8 “‘Talking ’Bout My Generation’” discusses these aspects in connection with African American culture and music. The sound bites in this article are part of a series of videotaped oral history interviews with some of the most influential artists, producers and music managers in the history of recorded music. Historically, they cover the period from the 30s to the 60s of the last century. Lorenz’s article features hitherto unpublished interview material of the soul singer Ben E. King, the Southern musician Jimmy Johnson, the record producer Jerry Wexler, Solomon Burke, the American preacher, singer and one of the founding fathers of 1960s soul music, and Joel Dorn, the former jazz producer for the iconic Atlantic Records label.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999. Print.

Decker, Christof and Astrid Böger (eds.). Transnational Mediations. Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. Print.

Fluck, Winfried. Romance With Amerika. Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Ed. Laura Bieger and Johannes Völz. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. Print.

Hebel, Udo J. “‘American’ Pictures and (Trans-)National Iconographies: Mapping Interpictorial Clusters in American Studies.” Journal of Transnational American Studies. 6.1 (2015): 401–431. Print.

Jensen, Klaus Bruhn. “Intermediality.” The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. 1–12. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ Accessed 28. Feb. 2018. Web.

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: The Chicago UP, 2005. Print.

Paech, J., and Schröter, J., eds. Intermedialität—Analog /Digital: Theorien, Methoden, Analysen. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007. Print.

Raussert, Wilfried, and James Miller Jones, eds. Travelling Sounds: Music, Migration, and Identity in the U.S. and Beyond. Berlin: LIT, 2008. Print.

Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 1–31. Print.

Uricchio, William. “Things to Come in the American Studies-Media Studies Relationship.” American Studies Today: New Research Agendas. Ed. Winfried Fluck, Erik Redling, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. 363–382. Print.

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. “Jazz—The Classical Music of Globalization.” Travelling Sounds: Music, Migration, and Identity in the U.S. and Beyond. Ed. Wilfried Raussert and James Miller Jones. Berlin: LIT, 2008. 23–60. Print.

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NOTES

1. Klaus Bruhn Jensen describes this interrelation as “material means of interaction” (5). He explains that the term denotes “communication through several discourses at once, including through combinations of different sensory modalities of interaction” (5).

AUTHORS

FRANK MEHRING Frank Mehring is chair and professor of American Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He teaches twentieth- and twenty-first century visual culture and music. His publications include Sphere Melodies (2003) on Charles Ives and John Cage, Soundtrack van de Bevrijding (2015) on WWII sheet music and The Mexico Diary: Winold Reiss Between Vogue Mexico and the Harlem Renaissance (2016). In 2012, he received from the European Association for American Studies the biennial Rob Kroes Award for his monograph The Democratic Gap (2014). He organized the first international symposium on Winold Reiss in Berlin (2011) and co- curated exhibitions on Winold Reiss, the Marshall Plan, and Liberation Songs in New York, Nijmegen and The Hague.

ERIC REDLING Erik Redling is Professor of American Literature and founding Director of the Muhlenberg Center for American Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He is the author of “Speaking of Dialect”: Translating Charles W. Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales into Postmodern Systems of Signification (2006) and Translating Jazz Into Poetry: From Mimesis to Metaphor (2017). He has co-edited (with Winfried Fluck, Sabine Sielke, and Hubert Zapf) the volume American Studies Today: Recent Developments and Future Perspectives (2015) and edited the essay collection Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Negotiations of Cultural Concepts in Transatlantic Intellectual Networks (2016). He has published in the fields of literary theory, cognitive theories, intermediality and translation, dialect literature, jazz poetry, and the graphic novel. His current book project explores the linguistic-aesthetic history of vernacular cultures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

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Looking Hip on the Square: Jazz, Cover Art, and the Rise of Creativity

Johannes Voelz

1 Jazz is usually considered a musical genre with its own history, consisting of stylistic innovations and developments that range from New Orleans jazz of the early twentieth century to various forms of fusion and jazz rock of the 1970s and beyond.1 The historical trajectory leads from folk art to commercial popular culture, onward to modernist high art, and finally to pluralized eclecticism. But next to this view of jazz as a musical and artistic evolution, there has for a long time been an alternative perspective that embeds jazz in a spectrum of African American cultural expression. From that perspective, jazz is part of a “black aesthetic” or “blues aesthetic,” which runs through African American painting, dance, photography, literature, and even architecture.2

2 From this latter perspective, jazz would lend itself to being analyzed as a phenomenon that is “intermedial” or even “transmedial”—technical terms that since the 1990s have had a steep career in media and literary studies, initially in Germany and subsequently internationally. Intermediality broadly refers to “relationships between media and is hence used to describe a huge range of cultural phenomena which involve more than one medium” (Rippl 1), whereas transmediality, in the usage of most scholars, refers to “phenomena that are non-specific to individual media (motifs, thematic variation, narrativity) and which appear across a variety of different media” (Rippl 12). There is a reason why jazz, or rather the critical tradition of incorporating jazz into a blues or black aesthetic, has only rarely come into contact with discussions of intermediality and transmediality.3 Claims of an African American idiom pervading different media are driven first and foremost by a political agenda that reacts to the systemic cultural marginalization of black artists and the African American experience more generally. The study of inter- and transmediality, on the other hand, has either pondered philosophical questions, such as (to cite philosopher Sybille Krämer) the “epistemological condition of media-recognition [Medienerkenntnis]” (82, cited in, and translated by, Rajewsky 48), or it has explored analytical and formalist challenges that arise—in the case of intermediality—from the endeavor to account for the ways in

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which media, for all their specificity, interact in particular works. By and large, the study of inter- and transmediality has not been invested in the cultural politics of representation, identity, or recognition by any group of people, whereas proponents of the black aesthetic mostly seem to find it beside the point to formalistically and terminologically belabor the claim of cross-medial continuities of black expression beyond rather vague and impressionistic references to pervasive aesthetic principles such as call-and-response and improvisation.4

3 Rather than bring together both of these approaches—i.e., the study of the black aesthetic and the study of intermediality in its present form—I will introduce a perspective on intersecting medialities that both of these critical traditions lack. This is the perspective of cultural sociology, which, in my deployment, comprises two facets: first, an awareness of the networks of cooperation involved in the act of artistic creation, including the institutional structures of marketing and distribution. Such networks extend the individual work or performance into a host of different media, embedding sound in visual culture and textual repertoires. Following American sociologist Howard S. Becker, I call this cooperative model of artistic production an “art world.” The second facet of cultural sociology I bring to bear on my approach opens up a historical perspective on the place that a specific art world inhabits in the larger society at a particular time, and on the structural impact that art world has on society. Following German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, I describe the impact of the jazz art world on American society as contributing to the rise of a creativity dispositif that has flourished, in the last three decades, into a full-fledged “aesthetic capitalism.”

4 Approaching the inter- and cross-medial phenomenon of jazz from these two sociological perspectives has a key advantage over both the story of the musical evolution of jazz and the emphasis on jazz as an exemplar of a black aesthetic: it provides an explanation for how jazz flourished in a relatively short span of time, roughly between 1945 and 1965, and why it since then has become increasingly relegated to a cultural niche. The musicological perspective has given us the terms and descriptors of how the music evolved, and how one new school followed the next within only a few years. (In the firmly established sequence of jazz styles, modern jazz began with bebop, followed shortly after by cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, and fusion.) This musicological perspective alone cannot account for the cultural and economic relevance the music gained and lost between the rise of bebop and the turn to free jazz. On the other hand, the politicized account of jazz as the crowning achievement of a black aesthetic is even more strongly, indeed self-consciously, ahistorical in that it aims to emphasize a continuity of black expression despite historical changes and the various different musical genres emerging over time. This perspective is emphasized by Amiri Baraka’s much-quoted phrase of “the changing same,” which he defined as “THE BLUES IMPULSE transferred… containing a race, and its expression. Primal (mixtures… transfers and imitations). Through its many changes, it remained the exact replication of The Black Man In The West” (“The Changing Same” 180, ellipses in original).

5 I bring analytical methods of cultural sociology to bear on the intermedial dimension of jazz not so as to deny the existence of African American aesthetic principles running through different fields of expression. Rather, I do so because the problem animating this essay—namely, how to explain the rise and fall of jazz in the twenty years after World War II—requires an historical perspective that can account for something as

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elusive as the relevance and vibrancy of jazz in U.S. culture at large. I will begin by outlining, in the briefest manner, the “creative revolution” (Thomas Frank) that led to the establishment of what Andreas Reckwitz calls the creativity dispositif. Subsequently I will make a few suggestions of how the jazz art world came to play a central part in this larger development (showing this in detail requires a book-length study). For this purpose, I will provide an initial sketch (again, a more comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this article) of how jazz became linked visually to two different cultural spheres, which, for all their differences, routinely intersected: on the one hand the world of fine arts, and on the other hand that of commercial art. At the center of my analysis will be some more or less famous specimens of LP cover art by photographers and designers such as William Claxton, Reid Miles, Andy Warhol, and Esmond Edwards. To varying degrees, these artists—and their many colleagues, both famous and unknown—straddled the worlds of fine arts and commercial art. It is no coincidence that they provided their artistic services for the production of jazz records, considering that at the moment of its highest cultural impact, the position of jazz was precisely located between commercial and high art—with the various actors involved in the jazz art world pulling in both directions at once.

1. The Rise of Creativity

6 Beginning in the 1990s, sociologists, cultural and media studies scholars, and economists began to track how Western societies have tended, in the past few decades, to elevate “creativity” to a core cultural value, thus releasing it from the cultural margins and promoting it to the very heart of the structures of contemporary capitalist society. Media studies scholar John Hartley, who, along with Richard Florida, Thomas Frank, Lawrence Lessig, Terry Flew, Angela McRobbie, and others, has been at the forefront of this line of scholarship, argues that there is an argument for re-purposing the very idea of ‘creativity’ to bring it into closer contact with the realities of contemporary commercial democracies. ‘Art’ needs to be understood as something intrinsic, not opposed, to the productive capacities of a contemporary global, mediated, technology-supported economy. Both art and creativity need to be looked for within the living practices of a multi- cultural, multi-valent population that is neither aristocratic nor dumb. (8-9)

7 Hartley’s proposal to view art as intrinsic rather than opposed to the economy bespeaks a post-Fordist constellation that increasingly organizes cultural, economic, and social relations. His suggestion is analytical as much as it is symptomatic of the place contemporary society has allotted to creativity.

8 Being concerned with the reign of creativity already in place, Hartley’s focus on the contemporary leads to the question of how creativity could rise to its present position. Andreas Reckwitz has recently worked out a systematic genealogy of this development. His account is as far-reaching as it as is persuasive, but it necessarily needs fleshing out in the details. For the United States, the prominence of the jazz art world from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s is an essential chapter of the story, omitted by Reckwitz. But the point of bringing in Reckwitz is not to fill in the gaps of his account but rather to use his perspective in order to get a better grip on the vicissitudes of jazz in American culture.

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9 Reckwitz argues that since the eighteenth century, Western societies have undergone a process of social aestheticization. As part of this process, the aesthetic—by which Reckwitz means neither aesthetic categories like the beautiful, nor sense perceptions in general (as denoted by the classical term aesthesis), but rather “perception [that] is an end in itself and refers to itself” (11)—became tied to novelty, and innovation itself increasingly took an aesthetic form: “the creativity dispositif reorients the aesthetic towards the new while at the same time orienting the regime of the new towards the aesthetic” (9).5 The bundling of both of these terms ought not to be taken for granted. Historically, aesthetics has often been unrelated to the new (for instance, in the everyday aesthetics of ritual) and innovation has long been regarded as a rational process that is adverse to sense perceptions for their own sake (for instance, in technological innovation). Reckwitz thus charts the historical process by which the joint focus on the new and aesthetic traveled from marginal niches—particularly in the field of art—to the center of social organization, ultimately reaching the point where it became a systemic social organizing principle. In this final stage, social aestheticization has become what Reckwitz, following Michel Foucault, calls a creativity dispositif.

10 Reckwitz divides this process of social aestheticization into four phases. He calls them 1) preparation, which he dates from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, 2) formation, which “covers the period from around 1900 to the 1960s,” 3) crisis and concentration, which he locates between the 1960s and 1970s, and 4) domination, which describes the developments since the 1980s (30). According to Reckwitz, in the “phase of formation”—again, located from around 1900 to the 1960s—“bits and pieces of different social and cultural practices emerge here and there in various social fields, promoting (aesthetic) novelty and its creative production” (31). Among them are the beginnings of the “creative industries” of fashion, design and advertising, the field of audio-visual mass media and the concomitant rise of creative stars from film, music and the art scene. However, in this phase these various agents of social aestheticization have not been bundled to shape the core of the social structure. This changes in the following period, during the sixties and seventies: Individual elements of the creative complex previously existing in isolated social pockets now attract wider attention, occasionally becoming radical and giving rise in their turn to varyingly radical alternatives to the dominant forms of the economy, art, self-technologies and urbanity. Historically, jazz’s period of bloom I am concerned with falls right between these two phases. In this sense, jazz is a transitional phenomenon.

2. Jazz as an Art World

11 In what follows, I will sketch out a few elements of the development of jazz from 1945 to 1965 from a perspective that is intermedial insofar as it comprehends jazz as an “art world.” Howard S. Becker, in his seminal study of the same title (1982), defined the concept of the art world as the “network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for” (x). From this perspective, all artistic production is cooperative—a totally solipsistic act of creation would result in unintelligibility. The level of cooperation and degree of organization, however, changes from art world to art world. In music, it includes anything from the makers of musical instruments to the suppliers of the material to be played, and reaches all the way to the

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networks needed to stage performances, make recordings, and distribute them. Even the listener becomes an essential element for the social realization of an art world.

12 Becker’s approach, which might be seen as a Chicago-school precursor to network- actor-theory, pursues several implicit agendas. First, it redefines the role of the artist, placing emphasis on the network of people involved, instead of singling out one creator, as if he or she acted in a vacuum. At the same time, the theory is acute to the hierarchies involved in such networks, which usually become apparent through the differentiation between who counts as artist and who is considered support personnel. This hierarchy translates into a practical distinction: from the perspective internal to a given art world, the essential artistic personnel cannot be replaced, whereas the support personnel is interchangeable.

13 In applying Becker’s model to jazz, I take up Becker’s own frequent references to the jazz world (they reflect his inside perspective as a former professional jazz musician) and further build on sociologist Paul Lopes’s study The Rise of a Jazz Art World (2002). Focusing on the time period from the 1930s to the 1960s with the intent of understanding more fully the jazz renaissance of the 1950s, Lopes “looks not only at the impact of this art world on jazz music and jazz musicians, but the different meanings and associations non-artists brought to jazz as an art form during this period” (5). In his book, this effectually translates into a study of jazz criticism, with some considerations of changing performance venues and the recording industry. But since the concept of the art world radically expands the concept of artistic creation, it ought to be expanded even further so as to include marketing, design, advertisement, journalism, distribution, and ultimately the reception of jazz. In particular, acts of embedding musical sounds in visual discourses deserve critical attention. It matters, for instance, how jazz takes on its own visual vocabulary through the design of album sleeves, promotional publications, and press coverage. To a degree, these components of the production process are fully professionalized craft practices that can be taken over by any number of specialized professionals. But if the audience is kept in mind as an integral part of the artistic process, then the visual dimensions of the music begin to play a crucial role because these dimensions begin to shape the cultural meaning that makes the final artistic product appealing in the first place. (The same can be said for jazz criticism, but this aspect has been studied extensively, not least by Lopes himself; see also Gennari.)

14 Becker’s model—which is self-consciously commonsensical, but which suggests ramifications that often are at odds with the central assumptions we bring to art (particularly high art)—also raises awareness of the crucial importance of artistic conventions for the practical realization of art worlds. As a rule, the more complex the network becomes, the greater importance is accorded to conventions. Instead of seeing conventions as a standardizing force of the culture industry, Becker regards them as taking over the role of facilitating and coordinating cooperation: “Conventions make collective activity simpler and less costly in time, energy, and other resources; but they do not make unconventional work impossible, only more costly and difficult” (35).

15 This leads to the recognition that the regime of radical artistic innovation requires specific institutional conditions. Most typical is a funding structure capable of supporting the extra costs incurred by radically changing the game. An example would be New Music compositions that require the musicians to learn to read the composer’s individualized notation system before they can perform the piece—an extra effort that

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costs time and money. Another way of facilitating radical innovation may come from start-up business structures that have not yet reached a level of routinized organization and thus operate on the basis of experimentation and gathering of best- practice experience. For example, independent record labels operating outside of the well-rehearsed structures of major companies are convention-bound in some respects but are forced to experiment in others. As we will see, the entry of such companies into the music industry indeed helped jazz flourish after World War II. Moreover, such companies were instrumental in pushing the process of social aestheticization to the next level. Ultimately, however, such innovative practices of the art world of jazz built on the continuous reliability of musical conventions established in the 1940s, even when the spirit of innovation was prized musically as well. As I show in the next section, these musical—and ultimately visual—innovations of the 1940s themselves grew out of changes in the commercial infrastructure of the jazz art world of the time.

3. The Image of Bebop: The Artful, the Hip, and the Popular

16 As the swing era declined in popularity and economic profitability in the late 1930s, the future of jazz looked uncertain, particularly for black dance band musicians, who suffered most from the restrictions imposed on the music industry by World War II. From the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, some predominantly African American professional musicians, the majority of whom were much in demand in black big bands with national name recognition, began to forge a new musical style during late-night jam sessions in Harlem. Played by small combos rather than big bands, this style was based on fast tempos, intricate rhythms, complex chord progressions, augmented and diminished harmonies, angular melodic lines (whether improvised or used as actual melodies), and extended space for improvisation as well as for rhythmic interplay.

17 Initially, this music was not geared to public performance; rather, the professional big band musicians who gathered at these after-hour clubs used jam sessions as experimental laboratories. Only beginning in 1943, as employment opportunities in black dance bands dried up, did these musicians take their new small-combo music to the clubs of 52nd Street in midtown Manhattan. The new sounds quickly caught on, and they proved to be moderately profitable. A new cabaret tax imposed on live performances had left a loophole for instrumental music, which made improvised small-combo jazz competitive (see DeVeaux, Birth 285). In addition, a recording ban of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), which had stopped all recording activities of unionized musicians in 1942, came to a partial settlement in 1943, when Decca, one of the three major record companies, gave in to the AFM’s conditions. With the other two major labels—Victor and Columbia—still holding out, independent recording labels began to sprout up. In effect, the recording ban thus managed to break open the monopoly of the recording industry, mobilizing the field with the emergence of new companies. (The majors meanwhile focused on vocal pop music, since singers were not organized in the AFM.) As we will see, such independent record labels would prove to be a key factor in making jazz a flexible, creative industry.

18 As World War II ended, record companies no longer faced material shortages, while, on the other hand, the economic downturn of the postwar years made big bands financially untenable. It was at this point that some of the small independent labels

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caught on to the new music played in the clubs of 52nd Street. Initially, the new jazz appeared as a viable product. Perhaps the major advantage the new type of jazz had over swing was that it was artist-focused. Companies did not need to hope for popular hits—always a high financial risk in the nobody-knows-economies of the cultural field (see Caves 3–5)—but could rely on the name recognition of leading musicians.

19 In order to help turn the complex and challenging new music into a profitable commodity, it needed to be packaged so that—in accordance with the rules of an aestheticized consumption economy—what was sold was not merely recorded sound, but the suggestion of a whole lifestyle. The focus on individual artists was a helpful prerequisite, since it allowed attaching jazz to the romantic tradition of the individual artist hero who lived, and styled, his life according to the mandates of his art—who could, in other words, be encountered as the embodiment of his sound, and who could be listened to as the sound of a particular style of life.

20 This identification of the jazz improviser with the image of the artist was forged visually through the work of photographers like William Gottlieb and Herman Leonard. In the early years, their photos were not yet used for record covers—using photographs on record covers became common only in the mid-1950s—but they appeared, in Gottlieb’s case, in such music publications as Down Beat and were used, in Leonard’s case, “as promotional material by record companies including RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol, Mercury, and Verve” (Pinson 35).

21 Leonard’s photographs are particularly significant for the stylization of the jazz improviser as an artist rather than entertainer, and they have had a lasting impact on the image of jazz.6 In his signature style, Leonard depicted individual musicians on stage, surrounded by smoke, lit by two strobe lights, one positioned in the back, one in front of the musician. The dramatic lighting is underlined by laser-sharp focus of the textures of musicians’ skin, instruments, and clothes, by diagonal lines subdividing the image (sometimes the result of a tilted camera angle), and by a sharp differentiation between a soloist in the foreground and accompanying musicians or audience (often also composed of well-known musicians) in the background. In such scenes, Leonard showed musicians either playing in performance or pausing and reflecting on their music. Whereas before, jazz musicians had been presented with standardized headshots, Leonard presented them as serious, concentrated artists, dressed in stylish, classy clothes, and shrouded in clouds of smoke that functioned metaphorically and metonymically at once—as signs of artistic creativity and inspiration, and as traces of the underground nightlife venues at which the new music was played. These images, in other words, made a claim for the recognition of the music as a serious art and simultaneously expressed a subcultural authority of hipness.7

22 Link 1: Herman Leonard: Dizzy Gillespie, 1948 http://hermanleonard.com/graphics/images/_full/DZG04.jpg

23 However, in order to make a bid for popular and commercial success, more was needed than a generalized association with artfulness and hipness. The new jazz needed to plug into the emerging star system, and it needed a marketable name or label. Dizzy Gillespie provided both. One of the scat-syllables he used on his recordings—bebop— provided the catchy name for the new music. And he himself—in part thanks to his relentless publicity efforts—became, as Benjamin Cawthra writes, “the face” of bebop: “Due to Gillespie's puckish personality and distinctive fashion sense, white journalists made him a symbol of the new music” (76).

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24 Before musicians like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and other bebop innovators became venerated hipster artists, it was Gillespie who become a living icon, providing a look that could be copied by followers. In 1948, the magazine Metronome named Gillespie’s ensemble “Band of the Year.” The encomium of editor Barry Ulanov emphasized not the music but the look Gillespie had made trendy: All over America, young boppers who had never worn a hat donned the Dizzy cap: young boppers, who had never been able to raise a sufficient hirsute covering to prove their age, struggled with chin fuzz in an attempt to build the Gillespie goatee: young boppers with their own little bands began to lead from the waist and the rump; some, with perfect eyesight, affected the heavy spectacles. (17–18)

25 Bebop as represented by Gillespie was self-consciously personality-driven, artistic, subcultural, and popular at the same time. These elements, however, hardly led a harmonious co-existence. Claiming bebop as art was a political move in that it effectively asked for the recognition of African American cultural achievement based on modernist aesthetic criteria of innovation. Ever since, jazz has been burdened with the problem of securing artistic legitimation, and the problem of artistic legitimation in turn became tied to the inequalities imposed by a racist society. A profile of Dizzy Gillespie by Richard O. Boyer, published in The New Yorker in July, 1948, made the connection between racial politics and the modernist high art status of bebop explicit by citing the association of traditional jazz with Uncle Tomism: Bebop, according to its pioneer practitioners, is a manifestation of revolt. Eight or ten years ago, many Negro jazz musicians, particularly the younger ones, who were sometimes graduates of music conservatories, began to feel, rightly or wrongly, that the white world wanted them to keep to the old-time jazz. They held the opinion that the old jazz, which they called ‘Uncle Tom music,’ was an art form of a meeker generation than theirs. They said that it did not express the modern American Negro and they resented the apostrophes of critics who referred to them, with the most complimentary intent, as modern primitives playing an almost instinctive music. (30)

26 But the claim for high art status could also run into conflict with the aims of a racial politics if it entailed the adoption of the aesthetic standards of European (white) high culture. Such contradictions were faced, for instance, by the Modern Jazz Quartet, or, a little later, by Nina Simone, when she bemoaned not being allowed a career as a classical concert pianist but “only” as a performer of blues, jazz, or soul. (The longer story of the conflict between a black cultural politics and the aspiration to established high culture standards reaches back all the way to the debates around W.E.B. Du Bois’s program of racial uplift.)

27 Similar conflicts run through the understanding of bebop as a subculture. On this level, bebop represented the marginalized culture of African Americans and also supplied a model of hip stylization for (self-identified) outsiders of all types—hence the strong identification of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac with bebop musicians, or the slogan “Bird Lives!” painted onto sidewalks and walls in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in 1955.8

28 Jazz of the bebop years can be seen, in fact, as the historical origin of hipster-culture, and white writers of the time—most explicitly, with a few years’ delay, Norman Mailer, in his essay “The White Negro” (1957)—helped foster the meaning of the black musician as a hipster outsider-figure, who responded to the conformism of mainstream culture with a quasi-existentialist attitude and a style of knowing defiance. The point is not to blame white Beat writers for romanticizing and depoliticizing the cultural styles of

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black bebop pioneers but to take seriously the fact that bop musicians like Gillespie, without intending to do so, established a mode of stylization that employed, to borrow from Reckwitz, a “hip/square-code,” which distinguished “between original and conventional,” rather than simply “old and new” (109). Reckwitz sees the hip/square- code as a change within a longer historical trajectory of the fashion world. “No longer fettered by strict class divides… this distinction [between original and conventional] doesn't apply primarily to status groups; rather, it focuses on successful individuality (and is secondarily extendable to lifestyle groups)” (109). Here we see how the hipster idea came into conflict with the expression of the life of a marginalized minority. Gillespie may have been one of the original hipsters, but to the extent that his style reflected the realities of racist discrimination, it clearly did not fit easily with the aim of successfully achieving one’s individuality—although it arguably did pursue that aim as well. The conflict becomes pronounced by the fact that the hip/square-code, by its very logic, contains an inbuilt obsolescence. How could the bebop style be a fashionable expression of the black experience if, understood as a fashion, it was destined to become outmoded? As a result of the music’s popularization, sudden obsolescence was, in fact, precisely what happened to bebop a few years later, thus bringing to the fore a dilemma for the political project implied in the bebop subculture.

29 This brings us to the final element—bebop’s (short-lived) popularity. For bebop, the code of hipness cut two ways: it created an avant-garde position ahead of the crowd that lent itself to seeking recognition as a serious, modernist art, but it also—because of its emphasis on style—sought being emulated, at least by those in the know. Like any pop culture phenomenon, bop sought distinction and popularity at once. What mattered was that popularity was achieved on the aesthetic terms of the jazz world, without suffering the dilution resulting from commercialization. This ambiguity complicates the well-worn narrative that bebop musicians replaced the model of the entertainer with that of the artist. Bebop musicians, as Scott DeVeaux has emphasized throughout his path-breaking book The Birth of Bebop, had all been successfully integrated into the swing music industry before it faltered. Indeed, in aspiring to gain a wider audience with the help of (tele-)visual self-marketing campaigns, bebop musicians like Gillespie followed in the tradition of making a modernist art that could appeal to broad audiences—though with ultimately limited success. Bebop musicians were not averse to the popularization strategies of the music industry so long as they built on the musical aspirations of musical hipness. However, bebop did fail to fulfill the major recording companies’ hopes for large sales numbers and consequently was abandoned by the industry and the broader audience after a few short years.

30 In more senses than one, bebop left an important legacy. While most jazz historians emphasize that the musical innovations of bebop turned into the conventions of mainstream jazz within just a few years (a claim that is certainly correct), another way of understanding the legacy of bebop is to identify it as the uneasy combination of the artful, the hip, and the popular. Thanks to this combination—and thanks to the conflicts of the various elements just outlined—bop laid the ground for the culturally influential spurt of jazz innovations that lasted from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, a time period that soon came to be called the “New Jazz Age.”

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4. Designing Music in the “New Jazz Age”

31 Though the popularity of bebop had substantially waned by 1950, jazz did not therefore decline as a whole. On the contrary, in the 1950s jazz saw an unexpected phase of growth and innovation. Jazz musicians were in demand in recording studios on the East and West Coast and in performance venues across the country. Next to jazz clubs— which continued to face economic instability despite the boom—new types of performance spaces across the country opened up for jazz musicians, including concert halls, festival, college campuses, and high schools. Non-specialist national media began to report regularly on jazz—on the music as much as on its boom—in print, TV, and radio.

32 In 1954, both Time Magazine and Life Magazine reported on what they described as the rebirth of jazz, paying particular attention to the white protagonists of the West Coast scene, such as Dave Brubeck, whom Time put on its cover in November, 1954. Time proclaimed a “New Jazz Age” (Time, November 8, 1954, quoted in Lopes 226), and Life announced that there was “New Life for U.S. Jazz: Young Innovators Share Boom with Old Hands.” As the Life writer pointed out, “Its fans see and hear the ranking players at work in small clubs and big concerts. But it is largely the records, selling at seven times the rate they were selling five years ago, that have given jazz the widest audience in its lavish history” (Life, January 17, 1954: 42, quoted in Lopes 227).

33 The boom in jazz recordings had to do with the rise of independent companies in the aftermath of World War II. While the discovery of jazz by the major companies was a sign that around the music there had grown a sustainable market, independent productions far outnumbered those by the “big four” (Columbia, Decca, RCA-Victor, and Capitol) and played a crucial part in driving aesthetic innovation. As Paul Lopes’s research shows: By 1955, the number of jazz records produced were ten times the number produced in 1950.… The big four, however, continued to play mostly a reactive role in producing jazz. The majors did sign important figures in modern jazz, but only after they had proven themselves on independent jazz labels.… In 1961–62, for example, Down Beat listed 188 jazz ensembles with 78 percent recording for one of 60 independent labels and the other 22 percent with one of the major record companies. (228–230)

34 The virtual recording frenzy of those years depended to a considerable extent on the technical innovation of the LP record—around 1950, most companies began producing ten-inch vinyl records, and by 1955 the twelve-inch record had become the industry standard. This allowed for a significantly longer playing time, which fundamentally changed recorded jazz. Only now could recordings reflect the performance practice of extended solos. This enhanced the possibility for improvisers to become known for their individual style of improvisation, which, in turn, deepened the understanding of jazz as a music that deserved to be called art, but that was simultaneously trend-setting and popular.

35 Significantly, the twelve-inch format also posed a new problem—and a new opportunity —for record companies: the enlarged record sleeves needed to be designed more carefully than had been common so far. Even during the ten-inch years in the early 1950s, independent labels mostly did not yet design their sleeves other than in the most perfunctory manner. On several of Miles Davis’s ten-inch albums, Prestige printed the

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same small photograph in low quality, each time in a different single-color tint. Compare, for instance, the covers of The New Sounds (1951) and Blue Period (1953).

36 Link 2: Miles Davis: The New Sounds (1951), Prestige. Cover design and cover photo: unknown https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8b/MilesNewSounds.jpg

37 Link 3: Miles Davis: Blue Period (1953), Prestige. Cover design and cover photo: unknown https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Blue_period.jpg

38 Only with the invention of the twelve-inch record, then, did the jazz art world begin to branch out, with force, into the visual arts, turning records into aesthetically designed material products with new possibilities to tie the music to a visual rhetoric, and ultimately to the image of a lifestyle. Record producers began hiring photographers for cover shoots and liner photographs, and they began to employ designers to give their record sleeves a recognizable look.

39 The new design challenge required independent companies—who usually employed no more than a handful of staff members—to create working conditions conducive to experimentation. Riverside, which was founded by Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer in 1953—at a point when leading independent labels on the East Coast and West Coast were just beginning to leave an imprint on the look of jazz—put conscious effort into allowing its artists to come up with new creative ideas. As Benjamin Cawthra writes in Blue Notes in Black and White (2004), the most meticulous study of jazz cover art to date: Keepnews and Grauer hired Paul Bacon—a writer, illustrator, designer, and contributor to the [magazine] Record Changer—to design for Riverside, paying by the cover. Keepnews and Grauer gave Bacon and his colleagues Harris Lewine, Ken Braren, and photographer Paul Weller a ‘free hand,’ Bacon recalled. ‘We did what we wanted.’ (211)

40 On the West Coast, too, design and photography came to be embraced as a key element of music production. Los Angeles, though not nearly as central to jazz as New York City, bustled with recording activity. Independent jazz labels like Pacific Jazz and Contemporary recorded both traveling East Coast musicians and locals. The local scene recorded by these companies included both white and black musicians, but the companies turned white band leaders, such as Brubeck, Chet Baker, and Gerry Mulligan, into the scene’s biggest stars, thus indirectly fostering an association of West Coast jazz with white musicians and East Coast jazz with black musicians. In part, this association came about because West Coast labels recognized early that they could capitalize on their regional affiliation by giving their recordings a different look, and this meant visually taking jazz out of the world associated with urban black music. (A different sound was more difficult to come by, though the media insisted that musicians in California—read: white musicians—played in a more orderly and intellectual manner and put more emphasis on composition than their East Coast colleagues.) Though calling West Coast jazz “white” and East Coast jazz “black” is more narrow-minded than the actual music produced on both coasts, it is crucial to emphasize that the increased importance of the visual dimension of the jazz art world was from the start involved in the frictions of a racist, overwhelmingly segregated society.

41 Reflecting the extraordinary standing of visuals, Richard Bock, the founder of Pacific Jazz Records—one of the pace-setting independent labels from L.A.—hired photographer William Claxton as art director, and soon after even promoted him to partner of the company. As Claxton remembers it, “[f]ollowing several successful

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covers, Dick [Bock] asked me to join the organization as Art Director and ‘Chief Photographer’; a month later I was made a partner in the company” (Claxton, “Clickin’ with Clax” 7). Claxton, like the artists working for Riverside, was encouraged to be continuously innovative, which led to his choice of motifs that differed as drastically as possible from the existing jazz image (which concentrated on musicians in smoke-filled clubs, and was forged, as we have seen, by artists like Herman Leonard and William Gottlieb during the bebop years): Dick Bock… pushed me to come up with more and more new ideas for the record cover designs. I put Chet Baker and his quartet on a boat for Chet Baker and Crew; I shot Bud Shank and Bob Cooper with children and Bush Shank with the funny papers; I mounted Shelly Manne, Barney Kessel and Ray Brown on carousels of a merry-go-round; I put Shorty Rogers in a space helmet and up a tree house; and I shot musicians on the sandy beaches and in vintage cars… It became my signature to photograph jazz musicians in unlikely places. But what to do next? (Claxton, “Clickin’ with Clax” 10)

42 Link 4: Chet Baker: Chet Baker and Crew (1956), Pacific Jazz. Cover design: unknown, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Chet_Baker_%26_Crew.jpg

43 Link 5: Bud Shank and Bob Cooper: Flute ’n Oboe (1956), Pacific Jazz. Cover design: Bob Sullivan, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/da/Flute_%27n_Oboe.jpg

44 Link 6: Bud Shank: Bud Shank Quartet Featuring Claude Williamson (1957), Pacific Jazz. Cover design: unknown, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/ Bud_Shank_Quartet_Featuring_Claude_Williamson.jpg

45 Link 7: Barney Kessel with Shelly Manne and Ray Brown: The Poll Winners Ride Again!, (1958), Contemporary. Cover design: Guidi/Tri-Arts, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/ The_Poll_Winners_Ride_Again%21.jpg

46 Link 8: Shorty Rogers and his Giants: Martians Come Back! (1955), Atlantic. Cover design: unknown, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/df/Martians_Come_Back%21.jpg

47 Link 9: Shorty Rogers and his Giants: Way Up There (1955), Atlantic. Cover design: Marvin Israel, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c4/Way_Up_There.jpg

48 Link 10: Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars: Vol. 6 (1955), Contemporary. Cover design: Burt Goldblatt, cover photo: William Claxton https://img.discogs.com/B82PycWkLfnvvmqQ5MQtt2Xf9I8=/fit-in/600x600/ filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/ R-3486855-1385591579-9263.jpeg.jpg

5. Jazz as a Creative Industry: Amateurs and Innovators

49 In part because of its small-scale infrastructure, in part because of the modernist aesthetic principles of innovation insisted on by the recording artists, and in part

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because the jazz art world, as Lopes points out, had “no centers of authority” (218), jazz was becoming an industry that ran not only on the image, but on the structures, of creativity. Independent record companies thus anticipated the so-called “creative revolution” that beginning in the 1960s increasingly restructured American capitalism into an aesthetic capitalism. Aesthetic capitalism differed from the older type of rationally organized, “Fordist” capitalism in that it began to rely on “work activities that demand the constant production of new things, in particular of signs and symbols —texts, images, communication, procedures, aesthetic objects, body modifications—for a consumer public in search of originality” (Reckwitz 2).

50 In fact, these flexible recording start-ups may be seen as a model adopted by cutting- edge American advertisement agencies—like Doyle Dane Bernbach (DBB)—when these firms began to leave behind the then-regnant advertising conventions, which Thomas Frank has described as the “Cold War orthodoxy of prosperity, progress, and consumer satisfaction” (47). This advertising orthodoxy was mirrored by a rigid and hierarchical division of labor, in which management ruled and the artists routinely fulfilled orders. As Frank has shown, in the 1960s ad agencies consciously began freeing up their creative personnel from a rigid command structure so as to facilitate the creation of advertising campaigns that were different, original, and innovative. Bill Bernbach, of DBB, in particular stressed that advertising was not a science but an art, and could only become an art if admen could create unfettered by bureaucracies and hierarchies. Indeed, he transposed to his agency the practice that independent record companies had used since the mid-1950s: he gave his artists a free hand.

51 The differences, of course, cannot be overlooked. Advertising agencies were large companies holding multi-million dollar accounts. Independent jazz labels were niche companies so small—and economically insignificant—that a Fordist organizational structure (a semblance of which could be found among major record companies) was not even an option. This also explains how creativity and artfulness could at times be indistinguishable from amateurishness. Some companies, like Prestige, took some time until they realized the importance and potential of the visual design of their product. Prestige founder Bob Weinstock took many of the cover photos himself and even took over design responsibilities, with results that hardly qualified as the new look of hip. A good example is the cover for Sonny Rollins’s album Work Time, from 1955.

52 Link 11: Sonny Rollins: Work Time (1955). Cover design and cover photo: Bob Weinstock https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Work_Time.jpg

53 The photograph shows Rollins with saxophone in mouth, shot dramatically from below. The image aims to establish Rollins’s colossal presence (a metonymy of his large tenor sound—his musical trademark). One year later, for what would become Rollins’s most famous Prestige recording, Weinstock repeated this motif with yet another one of his photographs and elevated it to become the record’s explicit theme. The title: Saxophone Colossus. In the Work Time image, the camera angle and the lighting led to the unfortunate result that the largest part of Rollins’s head is blacked out. Moreover, the right half of his face is blocked by the saxophone. If Weinstock’s image was mediocre, he arguably was even less adept at designing the cover. The giddy, overly playful lettering in green, white, and black – with each sideman being listed in a different font, scrawled along the right margin – clashes with the effect of sheer force to which the image aspires.

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54 At the request of sound engineer Rudy van Gelder, Weinstock soon took greater care of the visual dimension of his records (Marsh and Callingham, Coast to Coast 22). Only at first glance should it surprise how quickly the company moved from substandard cover art to cutting-edge avant-gardism: in a minimally structured economy like the jazz art world, the line between the two was remarkably thin. Weinstock hired skilled photographers (several of whom also overtook overall production tasks) like Esmond Edwards, Ray Avery, and Don Schlitten. Edwards, in particular, helped bring a different look to what had quickly become one of the leading East Coast hard bop labels. He captured musicians outside of the studio, without instrument, as can be seen, for instance, on Miles Davis’s album Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet (1956), released just as Davis was transferring over to the major company Columbia Records.

55 Link 12: Miles Davis: Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet (1956). Cover design and cover photo: Esmond Edwards https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/MilesDavis_Workin.jpg

56 Weinstock also hired freelance designers Tom Hannan and Reid Miles (who later became best-known as the in-house designer of Blue Note Records shortly after). Miles, in turn, hired artists for individual records that did not feature photographs, among them, on several occasions, Andy Warhol. Even when Warhol’s input was minimal, it was strikingly effective and helped turn the attention to the cover for its own sake. For Thelonious Monk’s album Monk (1954), Warhol provided calligraphic handwriting of the featured players’ names. Next to the capital letters MONK, set in Futura and covering almost the entire cover square, Warhol’s input was so small that it was hardly noticeable at first sight, but this only added to the self-consciously stylish tension arising from the combination of ornate hand-lettering with minimalist print-font.9

57 Link 13: Thelonious Monk: Monk (1954), Prestige. Cover design: Reid Miles [and Andy Warhol, unattributed] http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_1080/MI0002/395/MI0002395179.jpg? partner=allrovi.com

58 Throughout his career, Warhol designed close to sixty sleeve designs.10 Though many of them preceded his breakthrough as an innovator of pop art, even in his commercial output Warhol crossed the border between professional support person and artist in his own right. For the Monk cover, he had his mother Julia Warhola provide the handwritten letters, and later he returned to her hand-lettering for several other covers, thus effectively turning the device into a signature element of his style.

59 Link 14: Moondog: The Story of Moondog (1957), Prestige. Cover design: Andy Warhol [unattributed hand-lettering by Julia Warhola] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/fi/c/ca/The_Story_of_Moondog.jpg

60 Link 15: Tennessee Williams: Reading from the Glass Menagerie, The Yellow Bird And Five Poems (1960), Caedmon. Cover design: Andy Warhol [unattributed hand-lettering by Julia Warhola] https://s3.amazonaws.com/vf-images/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/6-tennessee- williams1.jpg

61 In 1956, the year he designed the Monk cover, his sleeve designs also began to feature his signature, further amplifying the status of his contributions as works of art in their own right. Thus, the jazz art world and the fine art world began to intersect, and it became a question of perspective who provided the support for whom. What started casually in Warhol’s jazz illustrations during the mid-1950s became the key maneuver

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of his most famous record sleeve design, The Velvet Underground & Nico, from 1967. Instead of depicting the band, Warhol placed a banana at the center of the cover and added his signature (or rather, what was supposed to look like a mechanically mass- reproduced signature), thus overtly and ironically claiming autonomous art status for the cover design. In effect, Warhol turned the record cover into a pop art version of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. While Duchamp had used a signature to claim art status for an industrial ready-made, Warhol repeated the gesture for an image that undeniably served illustrative (i.e., non-autonomous) purposes. By that time, Warhol’s idea of signing cover designs had traveled a considerable distance towards conceptual maturity. By contrast, his first jazz cover wearing his signature—designed in 1956 for the Prestige album Trombone by Three by J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding, and Benny Green— was marred by the fact that Warhol seemingly mistook a trombone for a clarinet or soprano saxophone. This may, of course, also have been a subversive gesture. In any case, the jazz art world was not ready to deal with it. The cover design was only used as an alternate version—which makes it all the rarer today.

62 Link 16: J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding, Benny Green: Trombone by Three (1956), Prestige. Alternate cover. Cover design: Andy Warhol http://vf-images.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/trombone-by- three.jpg

63 Link 17: The Velvet Underground and Nico: The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), Verve. Cover design: Andy Warhol https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Velvet_Underground_and_Nico.jpg

6. High Art, Ordinary Life, and the Jazz Image: The Case of William Claxton

64 Considering Warhol’s cover designs along with Claxton’s cover photographs, two intersecting visual strategies of the booming jazz art world become noticeable: one forged links to other spheres of the art world; the alternative route decoupled the jazz image from its older associations with a twilight subculture located in smoky night clubs, and instead brought jazz into the good life of what economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in the title of his 1958 bestseller, had termed “the affluent society.”

65 Though it makes sense to distinguish between these two avenues for analytical reasons, in actual fact they often intersected. Claxton’s work is a good example. No one was more instrumental in giving jazz the look of popular everyday stylishness, yet Claxton —as we shall see below—was also keen on placing jazz in the context of visual fine art. Even when integrating jazz into everyday life, Claxton searched for a balance that kept the association of jazz with creativity in place. Racially integrated groups of jazz musicians playing on the beach or on sailboats radically undermined traditional jazz connotations of illicit transgression. Yet the very act of showing musicians in these settings—not in a documentary manner, but rather in self-reflexive arrangements— attested to a sense of originality, which encompassed not only the photographer but the depicted protagonists as well. Claxton’s imagery, in other words, made jazz safe for everyday consumption and for its incorporation into an all-American lifestyle without displacing the hip/square-code.

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66 By necessity this had a racial dimension: in a largely segregated society,11 bringing jazz into the mainstream also meant bringing it into “white” American life. Race, however, remained a subtext in these images, since what made this life “white” is also what made it Californian, or Western. And it was this regional dimension that Claxton’s photographs emphasized. These primarily regional, and secondarily racial, connotations of his attempts to make jazz all-American also involved aligning the music with the dominant myths of American popular culture.

67 Claxton’s most famous record cover, from 1956, shows East Coast tenor saxophone star Sonny Rollins in the Mojave Desert wearing a Stetson hat and an empty holster for a six-shooter (instead of a gun, he is holding his saxophone). Rollins came up with the idea for the cover shoot himself—the album was entitled Way Out West—and rather than aligning himself with John Wayne, he later explained that he had aimed to impersonate black cowboy actors from the 1930s, such as Herb Jeffrey—who was a dual reference point for Rollins, since he was also a musician and later in his career sang in Duke Ellington’s band under the name of Herb Jeffries (cf. Cawthra 190–191). While some listeners—particularly African Americans—were probably hip to the reference, for other listeners the image must have simply related to mainstream Westerns. In its bluntness, the association was unusual, but by no means impossible. If jazz musicians could be depicted golfing and diving, why couldn’t they be cowboys as well?12

68 Link 18: Sonny Rollins: Way Out West (1956), Contemporary. Cover design: unknown, cover photo: William Claxton https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/Sonny_Rollins- Way_Out_West_%28album_cover%29.jpg

69 Though not necessarily by intention, Claxton also emphasized the connection of jazz to mainstream American popular culture through his photographic work outside of jazz. His pictures—later published in thematically ordered books—helped launch trumpeter Chet Baker as a photogenic icon.13 He shot him in concert, in the studio, in front of cars, at home, with various girlfriends, and surrounded by groupies—and used largely the same photographic language the he also employed for his extended work with film star Steve McQueen (though the images of McQueen, as a rule of thumb, are a bit more candid and intimate). Claxton’s visual vocabulary of turning a male artist into a charismatic, mysterious, vulnerable, and overtly sexualized icon could be applied to many different subjects, whether jazz musicians or film stars, so long as their developed image displayed the right mix of sensitivity and subliminal toughness. It should be noted that this type of masculinity was racially coded as well. Despite his memorable portraits of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, Claxton never created an intense photographic relationship with any African American male comparable to that with Baker and McQueen.

70 Link 19: William Claxton: Chet Baker with Helima, Redondo Beach, 1955 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 57eba5686b8f5be752cb5b77/57ebcf1c197aea92a6c44a75/581c5f1e197aeaf96c68606e/ 1478617190962/Chet+Baker+with+Helima%2C+Redondo+Beach%2C+1955.JPG? format=750w

71 Link 20: William Claxton: Steve McQueen Sitting Cross-Legged in Beverly Hills, 1962 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 57eba5686b8f5be752cb5b77/57ebd13c03596ed76b29687b/58348c3e37c5812128e8b94b/ 1479839865791/stevemcqueen+-+2015.jpg?format=750w

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72 Link 21: William Claxton: Ornette Coleman, Hollywood, 1959 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 57eba5686b8f5be752cb5b77/57ebcf1c197aea92a6c44a75/581e9885e58c62bd0980a088/1478616062427/ Ornette+Colman.jpg?format=750w

73 Link 22: William Claxton: John Coltrane at the Guggenheim, NYC, 1960 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ 57eba5686b8f5be752cb5b77/57ebcf1c197aea92a6c44a75/581c5f2246c3c4918971b8e3/1478364034453/ John+Coltrane+at+the+Guggenheim%2C+NYC%2C+1960.JPG?format=750w

74 The portrait of John Coltrane, taken in 1960 in front of a Franz Kline painting at the newly opened Frank Lloyd Wright building of the Guggenheim, is a memorable example of Claxton’s attempt to stress the art status of jazz via association with the visual arts. In contrast to Sonny Rollins, who came up with the idea for being photographed as a cowboy, the idea of associating Coltrane with an abstract expressionist painter was Claxton’s. As he recalled in 2005, I took the picture when I was traveling through the United States with Joachim Ernst Berendt for our book Jazz Life. Joachim, a very organized German, had all these interviews lined up for us. I had read in the paper about the opening of the new Guggenheim, and I wanted to see it. So I took Coltrane there. He told me he had never consciously been to a museum. I didn’t get any permission beforehand to shoot at the museum. Coltrane was walking around with his saxophone. I put him in front of the Kline painting—which was a favorite of mine—and simply took the picture. (Voelz, Interview)

75 Claxton’s image is unusually tricky in its composition. Whereas art photographers— particularly recent artists such as Thomas Struth—tend to show viewers of paintings along with the paintings they view, Claxton captures Coltrane, whom we get to see from the side, as he intently looks straight ahead at what is presumably an artwork on the wall he faces. We, the viewers, on the other hand, get to see the Kline painting behind Coltrane’s back. It is cropped on the top and bottom of the photograph and thus seems of enormous proportions. Instead of allowing us to create an imaginary relation between ourselves and Coltrane (which would require that both parties look at the same artwork), Kline’s painting, from our perspective, enters into a direct visual dialogue with Coltrane. It is as if he were physically drawn into the Kline painting towering beside him. The result is a striking metonymy. It isn’t that Coltrane’s art is being compared to abstract expressionism. Rather, the art he embodies becomes physically engulfed by the painting, while the very shape of his body becomes an ensemble of gray-scale forms that interact with those of the painting. Claxton’s emphasis on the physical relation between Coltrane and the Kline painting may be regarded as an homage to the bodily nature of both art forms. This common denominator was even more pronounced in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, which became associated with jazz on a regular basis, perhaps most famously on the cover of Ornette Coleman’s album Free Jazz (1961).

76 Several years before taking Coltrane to the Guggenheim, Claxton worked towards associating jazz with the fine arts as part of the regionalist agenda of Pacific Jazz: Since the name West Coast Jazz had become so firmly entrenched with the music media, I came up with an idea that would further the importance of an art movement that was going on in the Los Angeles area at that time. The art galleries were flourishing with the talents of local artists.… Dick Bock and I commissioned several of these artists (Bob Irwin, Keith Finch, Sueò Serisawa, and John Altoon). We would either give the artist a recording of a specific jazz artist or group to work

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with, or we would actually have the group play for the artist at his studio to ‘inspire’ the painter. (Claxton, “Clickin’ with Clax” 11)

77 Link 23: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Pacific Jazz, West Coast Artist Series, vol. 1. Cover painting by Keith Finch https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Cs-OTuYPQ2Q/T6P7QKuhElI/AAAAAAAACCs/ wEqlMBFY5ls/s640/WP-1207.jpg

78 Link 24: Chet Baker, Pacific Jazz, West Coast Artist Series, vol. 2. Cover painting by Bob Irwin https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aIcLo4WBlBc/T6P4ip6eXUI/AAAAAAAACAk/-vVfuKSfY1E/ s640/WP-1206.jpg

79 Link 25: Jack Montrose Sextet, Pacific Jazz, West Coast Artist Series, vol. 3. Cover painting by Sueò Serisawa https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ho6PHbXaO3c/T6P4wC5jBYI/AAAAAAAACA0/ d5pTQCNvu5E/s640/WP-1208.jpg

80 Link 26: Jim Hall: Jazz Guitar (1957), Pacific Jazz, West Coast Artist series. Cover Painting by John Altoon https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Jazz_Guitar_%28album%29.jpg

81 The result was a special line of reissues and new releases Bock and Claxton called “West Coast Artist Series.” It garnered plenty of attention and was recognized as breaking new ground. In its March 7, 1956 issue, Down Beat published an article by Don Freeman that carried the headline, “Bock Becomes First to Fuse Modern Art, Jazz LP Covers.” In the article, label owner Bock is quoted saying, “Why not have a synthesis of the west coast’s cultural activity?” Later on, he expands on this vision of synthesis: “We can use mosaics and sculptures, all kinds of graphic arts. And we’ll try to get liner notes from leading novelists and poets. They’re all a part of our cultural life out here on the coast, and they all make our lives more meaningful” (Freeman).

82 Bock’s vision did not come to pass in its most ambitious scope, but what is remarkable is the audacity of this scope itself. Not only did Bock and Claxton try to secure the art status of jazz by aligning it with fine art painting; they envisioned jazz to take up a central coordinating function for all artistic activity. The idea made sense if one considers the cultural position which jazz since bebop had inhabited. Jazz still aimed to balance the dictates of the artful, the popular, and the hip. Thriving as a commercially successful form of expression, the distinction between hip and square remained as essential as the striving for artistic recognition. This narrowed opportunities of growth, since jazz could not systematically aim for chart positions without losing its triple identity. If jazz was to grow, it had to expand within the market segment made up of customers with an affinity to innovative art. And if the whole ensemble of the field of art could be tied to jazz, then jazz could come to exist—much like the Claxton’s leisure scenes suggest—in the midst of American life, without losing its edge of distinction.

7. Conclusion

83 This brings us back, finally, to the thesis that jazz acted as an agent of aestheticization. Bound to its triple allegiance to the artful, the hip, and the popular, the jazz art world flourished in a specific constellation that began to change during the 1960s. This constellation was characterized by an expansion of the norm of creativity from the sphere of art to ever more social and economic arenas. Reckwitz has described the

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creativity dispositif’s phase of formation, which he dates from approximately 1900 to the 1960s, as a conglomerate of phenomena that includes “the beginnings of the ‘creative industries’ of fashion, design and advertising, the organizational discourse around… innovation economics, a positive psychology defending artistic genius against its stigmatization as pathological, … the rise of interest in creative stars from film, music and the art scene, … and a far-reaching dissolution of the boundaries within and around artistic practices and aesthetic objects while breaking down the myth of artistic individuality” (31). These developments, Reckwitz concludes, “cause the aesthetic and creativity to break out of their containment within the classical, bourgeois conception of art” (31).

84 Without mentioning jazz, Reckwitz’s description captures many of the characteristic components of the jazz art world I have discussed in this essay. As the attention which record labels paid to cover designs demonstrates, the jazz art world participated in the emergence of the creative industries; while it did not directly participate in a discourse of innovation economics, actors in the jazz art world nonetheless reflected on how to create conditions most conducive to the demand for constant innovation; by lifting jazz out of a nightlife scene with shady associations, jazz played a key role in freeing the image of the artist from the older connotations of the pathological; in the jazz world, musicians began to turn into stars and sometimes directly overlapped with the visual culture of the Hollywood star system; and finally, while seeking high art status, jazz crossed the boundaries that keep art forms separated from one another and guard the difference between artistic and non-artistic domains of life.

85 Crucially, during the high tide of jazz, the creativity dispositif was beginning to break out of its narrow artistic bubble. Art promised to supply a model for an aestheticized life. Due to its complicated racial, economic, and artistic history, jazz came to incorporate and embody that trajectory. This helps explain how jazz could become, for a short span of time, such a popular and culturally relevant phenomenon. Jazz promised the availability of a creative and original way of life at a moment when many Americans perceived U.S. culture to be meek, conformist, stifled by corporate over- organization (encapsulated in the image of the “man in the gray flannel suit”) and lacking aesthetic richness in everyday life. For jazz to be able to play this transitional role, the bebop triad of artfulness, hipness, and popularity became an opportunity rather than a burden.

86 By the same token, however, this also begins to suggest why jazz—though present as a niche phenomenon in American, indeed, global cultural to this day—began to lose its luster at some point in the 1960s. Usually the explanation offered rests on purely musical aspects: While the modernist ethos of innovation drove jazz into a level of complexity that made the music unrelatable for wider audiences, popular music became redefined in such a way that jazz lost its foothold in the popular. Such an account is not incorrect, but the diminishing appeal and cultural relevance of jazz beginning in the 1970s can better be explained by the structural transformation effected by the onset of the next phase of the process of social aestheticization. As creativity became the norm both of an entire counterculture and a type of capitalism that increasingly became aesthetic, the tenuous balance between artfulness, hipness, and popularity that had explained the success of jazz a few years earlier lost its appeal. By now, creativity no longer needed to be transported from the arts into everyday life. It had already arrived there. The world of music exemplifies this: Popular music was no

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longer a commercial music aiming for hits that met the widest possible taste, but had by now incorporated the hip/square code and thus adopted an avant-garde dimension of its own. The album The Velvet Underground & Nico, with its close ties to pop artist Andy Warhol, is a telling instance. What had been popular music was now pop music.

87 Henceforth, the creativity dispositif could operate, and further develop, in a whole range of social fields, including the arts, advertising, management, politics, etc. Jazz, however, was stuck with its capacity to facilitate the expansion of creativity from the field of art to the everyday. It had succeeded as a form of expression that could transport creativity to the cultural center. To this day, it continues to perform this transport in an almost ritualistic manner. This gives jazz a lasting appeal to those invested in the jazz tradition. But for the culture as a whole, this redundancy has led to the increasing cultural irrelevance of jazz and its art world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baraka, Amiri [Leroi Jones]. “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture” [1990]. Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. 19–28. Print.

---. “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” Black Music. New York: William Morrow, 1967. 180–211. Print.

---. Blues People. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963.

Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Print.

Boyer, Richard O. “Bop.” The New Yorker, July 3, 1948. 28–37. Print.

Caves, Richard E. Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.

Cawthra, Benjamin. Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. Print.

Claxton, William. “Clickin’ With Clax: A History of Pacific Jazz Records.” William Claxton and Hitoshi Namekata. Jazz West Coast: Artwork of Pacific Jazz Records. Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, 1992. 6–11. Print.

---. Steve McQueen. Cologne: Taschen, 2004. Print.

---. Young Chet. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1993. Print.

DeVeaux, Scott. “Bebop and the Recording Industry: The 1942 AFM Recording Ban Reconsidered.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 41 (1988): 126–165. Print.

---. “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography” [1991]. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. Ed. Robert O’Meally. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 483–512. Print.

---. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999. Print.

Flew, Terry. The Creative Industries: Culture and Policy. London: Sage, 2012. Print.

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Florida, Richard L. The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Print.

Frank, Thomas C. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Print.

Freeman, Don. “Bock Becomes First To Fuse Modern Art, Jazz LP Covers.” Down Beat 23.5 (March 7, 1956): 14. Print.

Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.

Hartley, John. “Creative Industries.” Creative Industries. Ed. John Hartley. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. 1–40. Print.

Jarrett, Michael. “The Tenor’s Vehicle: Reading Way Out West.” Representing Jazz. Ed. Krin Gabbard. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 260–282. Print.

Krämer, Sybille. “Erfüllen Medien eine Konstitutionsleistung? Thesen über die Rolle medientheoretischer Erwägungen beim Philosophieren.” Medienphilosophie: Beiträge zur Klärung eines Begriffs. Eds. Stefan Münker, Alexander Roesler, and Mike Sandbothe. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003. Print.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.

Lock, Graham, and David Murray, eds. The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Lock, Graham, and David Murray, eds. Thriving on a Riff: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Lock, Graham, and David Murray. “Introduction: The Hearing Eye.” The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. Eds. Graham Lock and David Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 1–18. Print.

Lopes, Paul Douglas. The Rise of a Jazz Art World. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Marsh, Graham, and Glyn Callingham, eds. Coast to Coast: Album Cover Art from New York to Los Angeles. London: Collins and Brown, 2011. Print.

Marsh, Graham, and Glyn Callingham. “Foreword.” Coast to Coast: Album Cover Art from New York to Los Angeles. Eds. Graham Marsh and Glyn Callingham. London: Collins and Brown, 2011. Print.

McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge: Polity P, 2016. Print.

Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo P, 1976. Print.

Ouelette, Dan. “Bird Lives Forever: Modern Graffiti Makes Its Debut in New York.” The Huffington Post, August 24, 2016. Web. Last viewed September 2, 2017. Print.

Pinson, K. Heather. The Jazz Image: Seeing Music Through Herman Leonard's Photography. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010. Print.

Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6 (Autumn 2005): 43–64. Print.

Reckwitz, Andreas. The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2017. Print.

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Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature, Image, Sound, Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 1–31. Print.

Robinson, Jason. “The Challenge of the Changing Same: The Jazz Avant-garde of the 1960s, the Black Aesthetic, and the Black Arts Movement.” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation 1.2 (2005). Web. Last viewed Sept. 1, 2017.

Stearns, Marshall. The Story of Jazz. New York: Oxford UP, 1956. Print.

Stein, Daniel. Music is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2012. Print.

Ulanov, Barry. “Band of the Year: Dizzy Gillespie.” Metronome, January 1948: 17–18. Print.

Voelz, Johannes. “‘Blues and the Abstract Truth’: Or, Did Romare Bearden Really Paint Jazz?” The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art. Eds. Graham Lock and David Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 194–218. Print.

---. Interview with William Claxton. Savoy Hotel Berlin, September 27, 2005.

NOTES

1. This narrative can be traced back to Marshall Stearns’s The Story of Jazz (1956). For a critical perspective, see Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition.” 2. Graham Lock and David Murray write that “close links between African American painting and music have been evident since the early years of the twentieth century. Aaron Douglas, a pioneering figure of black modernist art, recalled that when he set out in the mid-1920s to create a new, distinctive African American aesthetic in his painting, his Harlem contemporaries looked to black music and dance to provide the model: ‘At that time, pleas could be heard on all sides for a visual pattern comparable to, or rather expressive of, the uniqueness found in the gestures and body movements of the Negro dance, and the sounds and vocal patterns as found in the Negro song’” (“Introduction” 1). The idea of a “black aesthetic” was later promoted by the Black Arts Movement. See, for instance, Amiri Baraka [Leroi Jones], Blues People and his later essay “The ‘Blues Aesthetic’ and the ‘Black Aesthetic’: Aesthetics as the Continuing Political History of a Culture.” See also, from a different perspective that emphasizes the “idiomatic authenticity” of the blues tradition, Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues. For an insightful discussion, see Jason Robinson, “The Challenge of the Changing Same: The Jazz Avant- garde of the 1960s, the Black Aesthetic, and the Black Arts Movement.” 3. One of the exceptions is Daniel Stein’s study Music is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz, which brings to bear an intermedial and transmedial method on its subject. It is no coincidence that Stein is a German scholar. 4. For an attempt to substantiate the cross-medial references and techniques between jazz, the visual arts, and literature, see the collections The Hearing Eye and Thriving on a Riff, both edited by Graham Lock and David Murray. See also my “’Blues and the Abstract Truth’: Or, Did Romare Bearden Really Paint Jazz?,” which critiques the black aesthetic approach on the grounds that it neglects the dimension of media-specific aesthetic experience. 5. I have Americanized the spelling of the English translation of Reckwitz’s book for the sake of consistency. 6. His photos gained their prominence only later on, in the late 1980s, when they were rediscovered and became recognized as fine art in and of themselves (see Pinson). During the late

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forties, Leonard’s photographs traveled in narrow circles. As Benjamin Cawthra writes, “Besides semi-regular publication in Metronome and one or two other niche magazines, the only public display of his 1948 and 1949 Royal Roost and Birdland images occurred in the clubs themselves” (72). 7. The point here is not to reiterate a prejudicial differentiation between high art and popular art, but to reconstruct how the high/low-divide operated as a historically specific discourse in the creation of a particular image of jazz. 8. As Dan Ouellette writes, “Bird Lives appeared everywhere in the city, from subway platforms to brownstone walls, in chalk, black crayon and even pressurized paint cans” (unpaginated). 9. Reid Miles claimed the overall design as his own—indeed, he called it “one of his all-time favorite covers” (Marsh and Callingham, “Foreword” 7)—and added his signature in the lower right corner. 10. The Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI exhibited Warhol’s collected record covers in 2014–2015 in the show “Warhol on Vinyl: The Record Covers, 1947-87.” A brochure is available at http://www.cranbrookartmuseum.org/product/warhol-on-vinyl-the-record- covers-1949-1987-gallery-guide/ (last visited Sept. 3, 2017). 11. As far as the jazz world was concerned, L.A. was in fact becoming more segregated than it had been in the 1940s. As Cawthra writes, “The Central Avenue entertainment district that had flourished until the mid-1940s had declined precipitously by the 1950s. Supported by the surrounding (and rapidly growing) African American community, it had provided a home base in Los Angeles for musicians such as Howard McGhee, who led perhaps the first working bebop band in the city after leaving Coleman Hawkins’s visiting group in 1945. It had also been a site of interracial youth culture for Asians and Latinos in addition to adventurous whites.… While the geography available for African Americans to inhabit in the area increased in the postwar years, the racial concentration in older settlements such as South Central increased, leading to an urban crisis in the years following the 1940s phase of the Great Migration. Police chief William Parker, while enjoying a favorable national reputation for cleaning up corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department, also presided over this hardening of racial lines” (174–175). 12. On the Way Out West cover, see also Michael Jarrett, “The Tenor’s Vehicle: Reading Way Out West.” 13. In the present context, the two most relevant later book publications are Young Chet (1993) and Steve McQueen (2004).

ABSTRACTS

In the early 1950s, American jazz entered a phase of artistic blossoming that was accompanied by widespread popularity and unprecedented cultural influence. By the late 1960s, however, this “second jazz age” had come to an end. This article draws on two approaches within cultural sociology to explain the historically specific cultural force of jazz: it follows American sociologist Howard S. Becker’s method of reconstructing “art worlds,” i.e., the networks of cooperation that include the institutional structures of marketing and distribution. In the jazz art world, the article suggests, sound becomes intermedially embedded in visual culture and textual repertoires. The essay also follows German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz, whose history of creativity allows for interpreting the impact of the jazz art world as a chapter in the rise of a creativity dispositif. In particular, this essay focuses on the photographic and illustrative work

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artists like William Claxton and Andy Warhol created for the newly emerging format of the record cover. The visual art of jazz helps account for jazz’s ability to transport artistic hipness from the enclave of modernist art into the everyday.

INDEX

Keywords: Jazz, visual culture, LP cover art, record labels, art worlds, social aestheticization, creativity, cultural sociology, William Claxton, Andy Warhol, Howard S. Becker, Andreas Reckwitz

AUTHOR

JOHANNES VOELZ Johannes Voelz is Heisenberg-Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (UP New England, 2010) and The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge UP, 2018). He has moreover edited several collections of essays and special issues, among them Security and Liberalism, a themed issue of Telos (2015). In his pre- academic past he worked as a freelance jazz critic for the Berlin daily paper Der Tagesspiegel and several magazines.

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Jazz Between the Lines: Sound Notation, Dances, and Stereotypes in Hergé’s Early Tintin Comics1

Lukas Etter

1 Comics’—or, more broadly, graphic narratives’—relationship with jazz has been long- standing and complex. Artists and critics frequently use musical metaphors, particularly those related to improvisation, in their analyses of specific comics pages. As early as 1924, Gilbert Seldes drew a connection between jazz and comics in his assessment of what he termed the modern “lively arts,” and Art Spiegelman and Philipp Johnston recently teamed up to revisit this connection in their comics-and-jazz projection performance titled Wordless! (2014; see also Bremgartner). Historical jazz scenes, such as that of Berlin nightlife in the 1930s or New York in the 1950s form an important thematic pool for contemporary graphic narratives (e.g., Lutes, Parisi; cf. Glaude, Stein).

2 Yet even when such thematically explicit references to jazz—such instances of “nested reception” (Newark)—are absent, we may find implicit allusions to jazz, and earlier musical and dancing styles that later came to be subsumed under this umbrella term. If an intermedial approach to cultural artifacts is best carried out by highlighting specificities not only of their medial but also their historical context (Rippl 2), it should be rewarding to examine pre-1945 Western European comics in terms of their notation of music and sound, as well as their depiction of musical performance and dance. I will zoom in on Hergé’s early comics, particularly examples from the Tintin series, as a historically specific expansion of the visual dimension (text-image connections) into a musical one. While having been called the “most studied comic book series globally” (Beaty/Woo 18n2), its relationship to the “jazz age” seems understudied thus far. The present essay cannot single-handedly change this; rather, it consists of a series of close- readings, framed in discourses on (racialized) jazz historiography and details of Hergé’s biography (as well as their auteurist mediatizations)—to be understood as an invitation for further studies on the topic.

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1. Racial Politics and “Art Nègre” Discourse in 1920s Europe

3 By the mid-1920s, American society was, in Gilbert Seldes’ terms, “full in the jazz age” (qtd. in Kammen 96). European cities, including those in Belgium, were soon following suit (Danval 54–60, 116–121). During this period, in Brussels, Hergé started experimenting with a prototype hero (“Totor”) and eventually sent his newly created Tintin on his first adventure (1929-1930, Tintin au pays des Soviets). Hergé’s comics significantly shaped the tradition of Franco-Belgian comics storytelling. Interestingly, there are almost no explicit references to North American comics,2 and the same is true for jazz in the early Tintin albums. At the same time, most biographers note at least in passing that Hergé was fond of listening to jazz when drawing for Le Boy-Scout belge and later creating other illustrations and comics (cf. Mouchart/Rivière 34; Peeters, Son 304; Sterckx/Soupart 37). Sterckx contends that Hergé considered early jazz as a “noise” and a “force” at the same time (Sterckx, Médias 25–26).3 Most of this took place decades before Hergé’s interest in jazzy forms of pop and progressive rock as of the 1960s.

4 Hergé once famously claimed that his influences had come from the visual arts more so than from music, and that he had never received any formal education in the latter (Sadoul); but even so, the popular craze for cakewalk, Charleston, and swing on the dancefloors of the period did not escape him. The same holds true for jazz’s origins in and associations with African American culture(s), as a simple drawing (dated 1922) from one of his early sketchbooks illustrates (Goddin I.10): a group of three presumably African American musicians are playing wind instruments and percussion on stage while laughing and moving their limbs in an almost jumping-jack fashion. The drawing recalls the widely distributed vaudeville-inspired depictions of early jazz performances, problematized for their racializing or racist implications only much later (cf. also Blake 66; Higginson 11–13).4

5 A detailed discussion of white Western European intellectuals’ and artists’ reactions to, and involvement in, the interwar jazz cultures is beyond the scope of this article.5 In her study Le Tumulte Noir, Jody Blake has retraced the nexus between African American music and the several groups of white visual artists who drew on white ethnographers’ material from the African continent for their inspiration (Picasso’s and Matisse’s “primitivism,” French futurist artists, the Parisian Dada events, and so on). Blake’s main focus is on France, yet several of the major threads of her argument extend into other parts of Western Europe—including Hergé’s native Belgium, particularly in regards to the art periods after Picasso and Matisse. The Western European public of the 1920s was steeped in visual popular culture of exploration and travelling the world, and ethnography had just established itself in the colonialist and exoticist view of the time. Yet the principal focus for many French-language intellectuals in their perceptions of things “African” were the forms of rhythm, music, and dance that started to become common features of both exhibitions and music-halls in Paris (cf. Blake).

6 At least in the 1910s and early 1920s, African American musicians in France and Western Europe were predominantly catering to white audiences, de facto resulting in a restriction of what types of music were played (Tucker 320–324). As Blake notes, there were exceptions. Among them figured several Paris-based clubs where African Americans played improvised instrumental music after the end of the official set—

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reportedly for their own pleasure and beyond commercial constraints. Langston Hughes, who financed parts of his stay in Paris by working in one of these clubs, observed and described them retrospectively as jam sessions avant la lettre (Blake 114– 115). According to José André Lacour’s memories, Brussels’ early jazz club Le Bœuf sur le Toit received its name less from an eponymous Paris-based club than from the fact that “bœuf,” the French word for ox, was a slang term for this kind of open-ended improvisation (cf. Lacour 37).

7 Several French and Belgian surrealists frequented these scenes and wrote enthusiastic accounts, seeing immediate links between the concepts of automatism and improvisation. As present-day scholars point out, these writings are in large parts steeped in exoticist perspectives and racial essentialisms, and many of the friendships with African Americans some surrealists would later write about can be assumed to have been asymmetrical (cf. Blake 185n88; see also Lane 35–64; Higginson 37–43). Although highly problematic from this angle, the surrealists’ embrace of the jazz of the années folles—the 1920s in Paris and beyond—also crucially coincided, for many, with their decidedly anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist political convictions, as Blake notes.

8 Such anti-colonialist sentiments were not exactly the politics of Hergé’s environment, as is well known. The conservative reaction to what was subsumed under the expression art nègre (referring to cultural productions by Africans, African Americans, and other hyphenated blacks) and the jazz tunes closely linked to it at the time were often harsh in Western Europe. Rallying against what they saw as decadence, the Catholic church and nationalist organizations had started their calls to return to ‘decency’ especially as of 1925 (Blake 1–9; Higginson 41–43).6

9 Racist caricatures of black people were a frequent means of expression of this viewpoint. It is in this context that we have to read the earliest substantial notation of music in the Tintin series, namely, a panel from the first version of Tintin au Congo, a narrative serialized between May 1930 and June 1931.7 To say that this version was set in black and white may sound like a mediocre pun: Even more so than its (only slightly toned down) later full color version, the early Congo adventure has rightly been accused for its depiction of the “Congolese,” who speak in infinitives and behave childlike and naïvely for the most part. This colonialist stance would resurface occasionally in later albums—less so with Tintin’s blackface used as a disguise in L’Oreille cassée, but prominently at other places, e.g., Tintin’s explicit wish to talk to the “whites” in the jungle of Les Cigares du pharaon—before racism and Othering is directly addressed in the last albums.8 Yet never again have they acquired as direct and prominent a role as in this early Tintin au Congo album.

10 Link 1 [image to the left]: http://www.moliba-makasi.fr/olele-olele.php

11 And never again has a Tintin album addressed musical notation in a more intermedially explicit manner than in this panel, taken from the 34th planche (page) of Tintin’s Congo adventures (Link 1). In a landscape-oriented rectangular panel, the white priest offers to show Tintin and Milou their “mission”; they are being rowed there in a canoe by six black Congolese young men with stereotypically broad, minstrel-like lips, who sing a Congolese folk song. The song, “U-élé! U-élé! U-élé! Ma-li-ba! Ma-ka-si!,” circumscribed by Costantini as “Oélé [i.e., a specific river in the Congo basin], the current is very strong,” is reportedly a song in Lingala frequently sung by European boy scouts.9 If we

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include Milou, whose renaming as “Missié” is part of the Congolese’ supposedly funny obsequiousness in this album (Hergé, Congo 6.1), the highly detailed partition of the song placed in the singing canoeists’ speech bubble is mirrored in the choice of stereotyped characters depicted: Three half notes, whose long duration mimics the three white figures in power, and six pairs of “black” notes (almost exclusively eighth notes), for the six pairs of arms who do the physical work necessary for transporting the whites, in addition to singing. Hergé’s panel interpictorially revisits a nineteenth- century canoe-with-notes caricature drawn by Eugène Burnand, too. Though there are no “white” figures in the canoe, Burnand’s drawing (Punch, July 1878) was published as an illustration of a starkly colonialist short story, a story that prominently satirized the contrasting skin colors of its protagonists (Link 2; see also Bachmann 243, 249).10

12 Link 2 [central image]: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/punch1878a/0028

13 Whether it is because this “joke” on the black-and-white contrasts was too controversial even for Hergé and his team, or whether the reasons lay elsewhere: When the black-and-white version was abandoned in favor of a colored one (1946) and some of the immediate allusions to the Belgian colonial contexts were eradicated (while “petit-nègre” talk stayed on), the panel in question was replaced. The new one (35.7; Link 3) occupied more space on the page and depicted an astoundingly detailed setting in terms of plants in the back- and foreground. The altered number of characters— Milou is not visible; the rowers are reduced to five, one of whom playing the drum—has the numerology disappear. The precisely noted partition in the speech bubble is gone; the three pairs of eighth notes seem randomly interspersed between the lyrics, with no evident connection between the two. Burnand’s example, conceptually connected to the old panel and iconographically to the new one, can formally serve as the missing (aesthetic) link.

14 Link 3 [image to the right]: http://www.moliba-makasi.fr/olele-olele.php

15 Apart from the black-and-white Congo panel, there are hardly any Tintin albums that contain a musical score that is concretely referential. An exception is found in La Castafiore’s first two appearances—an example indeed which comes without an evident baggage of racial stereotyping (although gender stereotypes abound). In a black-and- white panel from Le Sceptre d’Ottokar, published in January 1939, opera singer Bianca Castafiore sings her famous “Air des bijoux” with two notes randomly placed in the speech bubble (cf. Goddin II.43); in terms of precise musical transcription, there is not much to be observed. The 1947 color version of the same panel is more sophisticated (Hergé, Ottokar 28). Although the missing lines and missing links between syllables from the lyrics and particular notes make it hard to ascertain that the second part of the speech bubble is precise in its transcription, at least it could be interpreted as such; the famous upward glissando-type coloratura on “Ah!” is, in any case, clearly sketched out by an upward set of sixteenth notes, in the same manner as in Gounod’s musical score. The glissando is also used in the second scene that repeats the same aria (though not in the first one) and—in a manner even closer to Gounod—in one of La Castafiore’s later appearances (cf. Hergé, Ottokar 28; Cristal 11). With the upward glissando as a starting point, the partition is recognizable—fittingly for an aria whose lyrics principally touch upon recognizability: Margarethe tries on Faust’s and Mephistopheles’ jewels and rhetorically asks whether it is really still herself that she sees in the mirror now.11

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16 The two distinctly referential cases discussed here are untypical both for Hergé’s early Tintin albums and for musical notation in comics in general. For the biggest part, Hergé makes recognizable only the lyrics of songs played and sung by his characters. The notes outside of speech bubbles are not immediately linked with these lyrics, and those within can be attributed to particular syllables with a fair deal of goodwill at best. Usually such an association is not possible at all—as is obvious in cases such as the Sur le pont d’Avignon minuet sung by Tintin, a minuet whose famous partition consists exclusively of quarter and eighth notes, but which is here linked to quarter and sixteenth notes alike (Hergé, Étoile 54.12; cf. Famille-Gras n.pag.).

2. Sounds and Signs in the Asian “Jazz Mecca”

17 While the few musical references in the European Tintin scenes were mostly concerned with ridiculing opera, this form of the “culture mélodico-dramatique” considered increasingly outdated by many (Sterckx, Médias 70–71), and while Tintin en Amérique is void of references to American popular culture, including jazz, as well, Tintin’s eastwards ventures—the strips that together would eventually become Le Lotus bleu—is a place we have yet to examine. The setting is Shanghai in the 1930s, a city that had a reputation not only for the speed of its traffic and the high number of brothels and opium dens, but also for a highly international and flourishing live music scene, as Steen notes. It was dubbed Asia’s “jazz mecca”—analogously to Paris as the European “outpost” for swing and jazz (Steen 145–147). Several of the main sources Hergé used to learn about “the East” helped popularize this view—for instance, the prominently jazz- accompanied 1932 movie Shanghai Express, whose dialogues inspired Hergé’s choice of title (cf. Koren 265–269; Mérand/Li 32).

18 Advertisements, movie theaters, and opium are omnipresent in the album (notwithstanding the looming atmosphere of military conflict), as are Chinese signs and posters protesting Western imperialism (Mérand/Li); yet there are no explicit jazz references here, either. Nevertheless, the album was—as many have argued—the beginning of a new era in the Tintin series. The enhanced attention for detail and cultural nuance in Le Lotus bleu (first version serialized in 1934–1935 and published as a book in 1936) is obvious in several aspects, among them the Mandarin signs that Hergé asked his Chinese friend Zhāng Chōngrén to write for him, and the two main protagonists’ famous discussion of cultural stereotyping. Yet this newfound nuance can equally be illustrated with the multiple forms in which sound is noted, transcribed, and evocated. Several different noises stem from cars, trucks, spans of oxen, rickshaws, bicycles, trains, junks, and steamboats. At the same time, none of them are present as onomatopoeia, with the exception of the “TOOO(O)T” of the ship’s horn before Tintin’s departures (14.12; 62.7; 62.10). Rather, they are implied in metonymical ways, as synecdoches (cf. Dammann): Characters visibly react to the implied presence of the noises produced by vehicles, which offers playful connections with the text in the speech bubbles. To name but one example: As they supposedly hear and see the Japanese military planes of an air force brigade that is searching for Tintin, Shanghai’s pedestrians are turning their heads upwards (41.10)—an action anticipated by the reader, who has seen that the Japanese military official exclaimed “tonnerre!” (‘thunder!’) in the previous panel, to emphasize the immediate necessity for these planes to fly.

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19 In terms of the plot of Le Lotus bleu, these airplanes are a threat, as they testify to the imperialist Japanese presence and the consistently hyperbolic asininity and brutality of their military officials. Visually, however, they are a reflection on notation as such. For a Western European audience, the three planes’ silhouettes recall the ever-present Traditional Chinese characters in the album—just as the power poles and other silhouettes in the album’s many night scenes do (e.g., 55.14; see also Fresnault- Deruelle). The silhouettes as an assemblage of strokes: as historically unlikely as this is, it is as if the Lotus album and the most famous Chinese manhua set in Old Shanghai, Zhāng Lèpíng’s Sānmáo series (as of 1935), had mutually stimulated each other.12

20 The airplanes’ noise is unbearably present for Shanghai’s pedestrian population, while the rickshaw apparently only produces negligible sounds. An early scene including this means of transportation illustrates the emphasis Hergé placed on decoding and encoding sounds and visual patterns throughout the album. Tintin’s rickshaw runner is here shouting “Mister! Pardon!” in Mandarin, but a white pedestrian, whom we later get to know as the corrupt American industrial businessman Gibbons, does not pay heed (cf. Mérand/Li 20). As a consequence, he causes an accident—and then blames the “chink” for it (Hergé, Lotus 6.7). The noises of this particular strip are implied in the characteristically colorful stars that emanate in panels 6 and 7, stars that equally seem to symbolize the pain for both parties involved in the accident (in panel 6), and the subsequent pain of the rickshaw runner particularly, who has to endure Gibbons’ beating (panel 7). The runner’s (polite) exclamation in the first panel stands in opposition to the insults and immediate infantilizations uttered by Gibbons; visually, the former’s cultural finesse—fine strokes assembled as four characters in a rectangular speech bubble—contrasts the latter’s sense of white supremacy—Gibbons holds a newspaper that is presumably implied to be Latin-lettered, but visually only shows blank paper.

21 Le Lotus bleu had a publication history comparable to that of Le Sceptre d’Ottokar discussed above, black-and-white and color versions having been published just briefly before the two versions of the Ottokar album, respectively, and during the golden age of Shanghai’s and Brussels’ jazz scenes (cf. Steen, Henceval, Danval). Western Europeans at the time had quite a few early texts about the popular craze for ragtime, and later, jazz, at hand. These texts had a common denominator: an acknowledgment of the performative aspect of ragtime and jazz. 13 In this context, the aforementioned jam sessions in urban environments, with their solos that famously escaped classical notation, “translat[ing] poorly to the printed page” (DeVeaux 82), may have inspired Hergé’s experimentation with transcribing and evocating rhythms, tunes, and sounds.

22 One last example to show how idiosyncratic these transcriptions and evocations are in the Lotus album: As readers of the album’s color version,14 we are introduced within the first three pages to one of the author’s major concerns in the visual narrative, namely, the connection of sounds on the one hand with conventionalized codes (including letters, script, digits, characters) on the other. On page 1, Tintin is tapping out Morse code, with sounds that are first depicted via Latin letters (i.e. onomatopoeia) and then with actual Morse signs (shorts, i.e. dots, and longs, i.e. dashes), and which ultimately result in the reception of a strange (i.e. seemingly incomplete) message—and in noise disturbance for the environment, as Milou complains (Lotus 1.3). The message Tintin has received via Morse code is the first of many in the Lotus album that lead him in a

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particular (geographic) direction, always without absolute certainty whether following the suggestion is a good idea.

23 Beyond the Morse instruments, Tintin receives an even more explicit hint on these first pages. It is brought to him by a messenger from Shanghai, who attempts to specify Tintin’s quest to China, but is cut short by a poisonous dart—the “poison of madness” (cf. Link 4). The messenger’s song, only added by Hergé in the color version of the album, is the beginning of a Chinese description of the universe, the four cardinal directions, usually supplemented by the “Middle” (“Zhōng”; cf. Stouff n.pag.). For historical reasons, it is unsurprising that the transcription of these directions is accompanied by four musical notes but not with the four tones we would nowadays expect to see in the Hànyǔ Pīnyīn transliteration.15

24 Link 4 [fifth line of images from top]: http://ulislespres.wixsite.com/ulis/copie-de-chap-1-descente-dans-le-te

25 What we can say, however, is that these two pages form an intermedial reflection on readability of various forms of signs on the page. This becomes more striking in comparison with an older strip. In terms of (Western European conceptions of) politeness, the singsong of the messenger in Le Lotus bleu is the positive counterpart to the torturers that seek to afflict Tintin during his journey in the Pays des Soviets (1930). In the Soviets album, Tintin is supposed to be brutally questioned by Russians, who in turn delegate the particularly foul task of torture to two Chinese characters—as do, incidentally, the American gangsters in the original black-and-white version of Tintin en Amérique (1931–1932). Yet Tintin and Milou outwit them: The Soviet-Chinese are tortured with their own weapons; they singingly utter “unpleasant cries”16, as a result (Link 5).

26 Link 5 [fourth line of images from top]: http://ongong.canalblog.com/archives/2013/01/01/25994296.html

27 The stereotypical nature of the Soviet-Chinese’ clothing and hairdo stands in a tradition going back to at least the early nineteenth century. The same is true for the asemic ‘Chinese’ writing in the speech bubbles, which in turn connects with asemic (or at least non-conventional) musical notes, namely, a hybrid of sixteenth and half notes.17 I read this as a reflection on the comics medium. It highlights the fast performance of reception—decoding certain symbolic signs, reducing others to their iconic nature— and the liveliness of their production—a type of improvisation originating in high- paced seriality, scarcity of paper, and similar factors. Performativity, improvisation and especially “liveliness,” and their use to link comics and jazz, have been a famous discursive trope especially since Gilbert Seldes’ essays. As for Hergé, they are typical of his early comics (cf. Sterckx, Médias 25–26; Sutliff Sanders 129–137; Goddin II.142) much more so than of the later works, where the clear line is more firm and less “spontaneous” (Groensteen, “Nez” 35), the material albums less “improvised” (Goddin I.5) and ultimately more prestigious (Gabilliet 258–262). In Hergé’s early comics, improvisation seems to stand for a decreased—rather than an increased—sense of control.18

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3. Dancing without Dancefloors

28 To return to the color version of the Lotus album, the messenger in the former is the Soviet’s two torturers’ sophisticated counterpart: He is respectful, lawful, gentlemanly, dressed in modern fashion; he knows that the tone makes the music, as the French saying goes. At the same time, he anticipates the album’s focus on urban velocity, via the topic of dancing. The messenger illustrates the four cardinal directions with his four limbs. The zero-perspective chosen by Hergé results in the messenger’s standing on the bottom demarcation of the panel, a self-reflective phenomenon that turns the case into a boîte.19 Coincidentally but fittingly, the messenger prefigures the aspect of Shanghai that is left out in the album: its jazz cafés and dance floors.20

29 Hergé populated his version of Shanghai almost exclusively with male characters, going so far as to replace women with men when copying certain photographs as a source for particular backgrounds and social settings (cf. Mérand/Li 35; Hergé, Lotus 25). Unsurprisingly, Western-style heterosexual couples’ dancing is absent from such a town; kinetic dynamics are only found in fights and chases. Yet the absence of nocturnal dancefloors here connects with the oft-discussed scarcity of romance elements in the overall series (epitomized by the figure of Tintin); it is a constant that connects the early and the late comics by Hergé and his team. It is essential for the comic effect of the many single, or male-male dancing activities in the Tintin series to play out: From the Shanghai messenger in Le Lotus bleu via Tournesol in Rackham le Rouge and Tintin in Tintin au Tibet all the way to Haddock’s free-floating three-quarter dance in space in On a marché sur la Lune21, the main characters rather frequently dance when they are intoxicated with either alcohol or the pure ecstasy of some successfully completed action. The characters’ temporary lack of control has been written about from various perspectives (e.g., Groensteen, Rire; Sterckx, Schizo). They could easily be connected to the conscious ceding of control that Belgian surrealists adored about early jam sessions. Is not perhaps the aforementioned polysemy of “bœuf” present in Haddock’s famous stumbles and ramblings in Les Sept Boules de cristal (11)? Haddock involuntarily holds an artificial oxen’s head on his own “roof,” and his “dance” eventually leads him back to the music—landing him in the orchestra’s bass drum.

30 It is tempting to continue in this vein: pointing out that the music-hall setting was reflected upon in historical artists’ visual depiction of the jazz scene (see Hadler 93–94), or referring to early jazz critics’ discussion of the animalistic names chosen for early dancing styles—from “chicken wheel” to “bully dance,” from “turkey trot” to “bunny hug,” from “bear and hug” to “fox trot.” Yet when carried away by such associative chains, we must bear in mind that even enthusiastic and affirmative depictions and writings regularly based themselves on essentialist and primitivist assumptions about race (understood as “nonwhiteness”), as was the case with Gilbert Seldes’ earliest writings about the aforementioned liveliness of jazz (cf. Kammen 97–99). As Pim Higginson points out, white jazz critics participated in “producing race” and perpetuating the “racial score” quite prominently in the interwar period, but this practice had much older roots (13–35), and it lived on after WWII (Higginson 4, 41–46). In the postwar context, the Coke en stock album (serial publication 1956–1958) is noteworthy, as it reinforces and simultaneously subverts such essentialisms. Here, the “Africans”—depicted as simple and comparably de-individualized—are puzzled to witness Tintin and his European friends enthusiastically celebrating the fulfillment of

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their plans. As one of the Africans comments, this must, without any doubt, be a performance of the “white men’s folk dance” (Coke 57.10).22

4. Speculations about Later Albums

31 To end this on a speculative note: Might it be the case that Bianca Castafiore is not exclusively based on the physical appearances of opera singer Maria Callas and/or on that of Hergé’s friend José De Launoit’s mother (cf. Peeters, Lire; Goddin II.43), but additionally on a singer from a blues and jazz context?23 Lizzie Miles had gained fame in Paris while living and performing there between 1923 and 1927 (cf. Tucker 320–331). In addition to the fact that her stage name was Rose Noire, or Black Rose,24 she famously ended her career by giving one more proof of her skills in New Orleans from the audience stand rather than from a stage. This happened and was mediatized in 1959, the time of Hergé’s preparation for La Castafiore’s most prominent appearance—Les Bijoux de la Castafiore (serial publication 1961–1962). Incidentally, La Castafiore, too, ended up giving her last performance from a place other than a stage (in the Picaros album), and while one could argue for this to be a coincidence,25 there are some striking further parallels. Tournesol’s gift to the Opera singer, a white rose reflecting her first name (Bianca)26 and the “chaste flower” (Casta-fiore), would match Miles’ black rose image and her final years in which she shunned all public musical activity, instead living and working as an “old-fashioned nun” in New Orleans (cf. Tucker).

32 On the surface level, La Castafiore remains a foreseeable character even 13 albums after her first appearance; she is the cliché of classical opera, standing for Gounod and Puccini and, hence, exactly for the type of classical music that Gilbert Seldes famously dismissed on the basis of lacking liveliness (cf. Kammen 105). Yet it is also at the moment of heightened prominence for this most classical of classical performers that more modern forms of music and a more diverse array of folk tunes are hinted at. The Bijoux album is not only full of complex polyrhythms in terms of its panel structure (Molotiu). It also bears a long passage where very minimal scales are “played” up and down and up and down again—in a manner that might bring minimal forms of music of classical and of jazz origin in dialogue with one another. The arpeggios of fingerpicking guitar folk music are one such association—brought forth by cartoonist Jochen Gerner. For Gerner, the scales, ladders, calls and responses in the visual patterns on the page, such as the sequence of chrysanthemum-type flowers blossoming at the foot of Moulinsart castle, thus bring to mind “American Primitive Guitar” musician John Fahey.27 Openness for music beyond the classical opera could be read into other passages as well: European modernist composers with an interest in jazz may, with some goodwill, be seen insinuated, as Igor Stravinsky in the first name of La Castafiore’s pianist, and Béla Bartók in one of the singer’s phonetic mutilation of Haddock’s name (“Bartock”). Ultimately, it is a form of folk music—with plucked guitar notes rather than the more continuous sounds of violins (as Molotiu notes)—that appeals to the series’ protagonist (Hergé, Bijoux 40).

33 Thus it may be that Hergé’s unease with his own early address and depiction of the Other, of cultural diversity and visually marked alterity, has influenced his allusions to jazz in the Tintin series. In this vein, Hergé’s ambivalence is mirrored in Stephen Spielberg’s 2011 movie version of his works, or more precisely, in Spielberg’s apparent unease with depicting complex non-white personalities (Berlatsky). In any case, in their

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visual innovations as regards depicting sound, tones, and dancing, Hergé’s early Tintin comics display a type of nuance far beyond the slapstick clichés he used for the depiction of cultural and racial alterity especially in his earliest albums. Hergé seems to borrow from jazz music’s vigor and creative innovation, without, however, turning his full (visual) attention to the richness of jazz culture.

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Maricq, Dominique. “Hergé, Tintin et la musique.” Revue des amis du Musée Hergé 6 (2013): 23–24. Print.

Mérand, Patrick, and Ziaohan Li. Le Lotus bleu décrypté. Saint-Maur-des-Fossés: Éditions Sépia, 2009. Print.

Molotiu, Andrei. “The Shape of the Jewel: Polyphony, Polyrhythm, and Musical Structure in The Castafiore Emerald.” The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not so Clear. Ed. Joe Sutliff Sanders. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. 47–61. Print.

Mouchart, Benoît, and François Rivière. Hergé intime. Nouvelle édition. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2016. Print.

Newark, Cormac. “Faust, Nested Reception and La Castafiore.” Cambridge Opera Journal 25.2 (2013): 165–184. Print.

Parisi, Paolo. Coltrane. Florence: Black Velvet, 2009. Print.

Peeters, Benoît. Hergé, Son of Tintin. Transl. Tina A. Kover. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print.

---. Lire Tintin: Les bijoux ravis. Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2007. Print.

Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music. Ed. Rippl. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2015. 1–31. Print.

Sadoul, Numa. Tintin et moi: Entretiens avec Hergé. Tournai: Casterman, 2004. Print.

Screech, Matthew. Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes Dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2005. Print.

Seldes, Gilbert. 1924. The Seven Lively Arts: The Classic Appraisal of the Popular Arts. New York: Harper & Brothers, 2001. Print.

Steen, Shannon. Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2010. Print.

Stein, Daniel. “Graphic Musical Biography: An Intermedial Case of Musico-Comical Life Writing.” Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann. Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2018. Print.

Stein, Daniel, and Lukas Etter. “Long-length Serials in the Golden Age of Comic Strips: Production and Reception.” The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel. Ed. Jan Baetens, Hugo Frey, and Stephen Tabachnick. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2018. Print.

Sterckx, Pierre. Tintin et les médias. Modave: Le Hêtre Pourpre, 1997. Print.

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---. Tintin Schizo. Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2007. Print.

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Sutliff Sanders, Joe. “Hergé’s Occupations: How the Creator of Tintin Made a Deal with the Devil and Became a Better Cartoonist.” The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines Are Not so Clear. Ed. Sutliff Sanders. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2016. 126–140. Print.

Thompson, Harry. Tintin: Hergé and His Creation. London: John Murray, 2011.

Tucker, Sherrie. A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazz Women. New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. 2004. 22 Aug. 2017. Web. https://www.nps.gov/jazz/historyculture/upload/New_Orleans_Jazzwomen_RS-2.pdf

Vihlen McGregor, Elizabeth. Jazz and Postwar French Identity: Improvising the Nation. New York: Lexington Books, 2016. Print.

Wilmet, Marcel. Tintin noir sur blanc: L’aventure des aventures. Tournai-Paris: Casterman, 2011. Print.

NOTES

1. I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers as well as Frank Mehring, Erik Redling, and the participants of academic events at the universities of Halle (2016) and Liège (2017) for their valuable feedback on early drafts of this article; further thanks to Regina Ammann, Thomas Coendet, Benoît Glaude, Daniel Stein—and, with particular emphasis, Benoît Crucifix, Christina Maria Koch, and David Pinho Barros. 2. This can at least partly be explained with the Cold War atmosphere that shaped the development of national comics markets (Etter, “Pond”). In my summary of the critical literature about legal restrictions on comics publishing in several countries, a typo is noteworthy: The year of the UK’s Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act is 1955, not 1995 (295). On Hergé’s general precursors, see also Stein/Etter; Screech 18. 3. Given the rhetoric of contrast, Sterckx’ use of the French term “force” seems to be meant in a positive fashion here—“vigor” or “energy,” rather than “coercion.” 4. According to Goddin (I.53), Hergé had a habit of bringing a notebook and a pencil even to a dance date with Germaine in Brussels. Among other visual connections to jazz, Goddin also reprints a photo collage Hergé created to accompany a 1928 reportage about jazz in Brussels (I. 44). 5. See Higginson for his discussion of the “jazz shibboleth,” a sort of tacit agreement by white critics and fans on the possibility of verbally defining the details of jazz culture, and in such a way that “race—its importance as a central condition for the music’s authenticity—plays a central role” (36). Vihlen McGregor (77–124), Lane (35–89), and Higginson (35–47) provide and discuss further literature on these discourses, the latter including a reflection on studying the practices (e.g., musicians’ gatherings) of the Western European interwar jazz scenes alongside feuilleton texts. 6. Among the conservative writers dismissing jazz was Georges Duhamel, whose writings about the United States were a major inspiration for Hergé’s Tintin en Amérique (cf. Lane 1–3). 7. On the details of the publication history see Wilmet 24–33; among other contextual elements that would warrant further study here are the vicious “coon” images from the late nineteenth

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century, the trope of spirituals or field songs sung during coerced labor, and the discourses on “clowning” and “mugging” in, e.g., Louis Armstrong’s performances. 8. Cf. the critical reflection on racist stereotyping going on in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, where the accusations against the town’s Roma people are ultimately revealed as unjustified, and a comparable scene in Hergé’s Jo, Zette et Jocko series (cf. Goddin II.44). Albums between Le Lotus bleu and Les Bijoux de la Castafiore often overtly address social injustice, yet as so many other comics they do so through the use of stereotypical notions of marked Otherness—cf. the Coke en stock example discussed further down. 9. Cf. Costantini n.pag., n.37. The song is still frequently sung today by Belgian children. I am indebted to the members of a discussion in the ACME Speaker series at Université de Liège (Nov. 2017) for this information, and further useful hints. 10. Costantini names other comics with similar connections. The personified musical notes in Johan de Moor’s Quick & Flupke album Haute Tension, 12–13, could also be studied in this context. 11. Cf. Newark 173–180. Another somewhat concrete set of notes is found in Hergé, Lotus 23.16. Benoît Glaude deserves credit for pointing out Newark’s text to me. 12. This is particularly evident for the black-and-white versions of Sanmao, this impoverished boy’s adventures. Lèpíng’s clear line of the character outlines, ornaments, and medium conventions such as speed lines, often seem to be deliberately causing friction with the strokes of the few verbal elements in this otherwise pantomimic comic strip (e.g., pages 9, 116–117, 182–183 in Sānmáo liúlàng jì). Its depiction of Shanghai’s poverty serves as a stark contrast to the city’s world of entertainment. To reiterate the introductory paragraphs, it would necessitate further in-depth studies to do justice to such connections. 13. Innumerable critics and writers have focused on this aspect, in the 1910s (e.g., Ernest Ansermet) just as much as in the 1940s (e.g., Albert Bettonville), and beyond (cf. also Blake 121). When listing these texts, one would have to add a two-page essay published in 1947 and signed under “Hergé” (cf. [Pseudo] Hergé)—most likely, a pun by Hergé’s contemporary and countryman Robert Goffin, whose initials match the (inverted) ones of “Georges Rémi” (cf. Maricq). For literature on the racial essentialism that routinely shaped such writings, see the secondary literature listed in earlier notes; for a discussion of Ansermet’s critical afterlife in the Journal de Tintin, see Fry 200–232. 14. The publication history of this album is again rather complex (cf. Wilmet 60–73), but for our purposes it can be summarized that the pages in question have been substantially redone and extended in the color version of the album, published in 1946. 15. As Stouff notes, Hergé and his team used the official system of transcription of the time, that of the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (n.pag.). It would be tempting to push further the notion of tones in this example, claiming that the three tones used in the Pīnyīn Romanization (Dōng, East; Xī, West; Nán, South; Běi, North) are associated with the three types of length of musical notes. Yet this would remain speculative, as the clearly different pitch levels of the first and second pair of eighth notes would yet have to be addressed. 16. This is the sarcastic comment made by Tintin (Soviets 71.5; my translation). 17. Irrespective of whether this was inspired by the plants in Burnand’s illustration, similarly asemic ‘musical notation’ can be found in the same album (Soviets 121) and later in the series (e.g., Ottokar 29; Picaros 33; Cristal 11). The early albums almost consistently diverge from standard musical notation in the places where musical notes with downward-directed stems are used. Livio Russi deserves credit for this observation. 18. To name just one example: A sample page Hergé and E. P. Jacobs prepared in order to start genre fiction under a pseudonym (“Olav”) towards the end of 1944 showed a white man being assaulted by a Chinese criminal (again, in clichéd traditional garb) in nocturnal Shanghai. Having

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evidently no access to the expertise of their Chinese friend at this time, Hergé and Jacobs relied on the same background advertisement Zhāng had prepared for Lotus bleu. Yet the strokes that are supposed to read “Siemens” next to a drawn light bulb, i.e., this copy of the tonal transliteration of “Siemens” into Chinese syllables, resulted in asemic writing, incidentally resembling a violin clef more so than a Chinese character. The sample page (along with two others, equally genre fiction) has not been bought by a publisher, nor has it ever been expanded. Biographer Goddin notes that the production atmosphere was one of hectic and insecurity (Goddin II.142); nevertheless, it is a crucial episode that debunks the myth of a monolithically working auteur that Hergé was often mediatized as in the postwar period. 19. On the expression “boîte de nuit” and its use in the 1920s, cf., for instance, the entry in the CNRTL’s dictionary; on “zero-perspective” cf. Etter, “Fragments” 234–236. 20. Interestingly, one of the sources consulted by Hergé, Blasco-Ibañez’ description of China (cf. Mérand/Li 62), describes Shanghai’s “café-chantants” as part of its “boom” phase and then adds a critical reflection on the onomatopoetic nature of this English term (154–155). 21. The three-quarter rhythm, although not explicated on the comics page, is at the basis of the marine song “Goodbye Farewell” that Haddock sings in a state of severe inebriation. 22. In the original French: “[la] danse folklorique des hommes blancs” (57.10). The depictions of “Africans” in Coke en stock has stirred debates; their way of talking has been altered in later editions (cf. Costantini). On such controversies more generally cf. Frey. 23. Such a transfer seems to be implicitly suggested in Blutch’s Castafiore pastiche; cf. Glaude. 24. In the 1950s, there was an important Brussels-based jazz club with the same name (cf. Danval 162–171). 25. Judging from the sketches of the unfinished Tintin et l’Alph-Art, La Castafiore was going to have a prominent appearance there, too. 26. How the expressions “black” and “white” may retain specific colonially or postcolonially defined associations, is a prominent topic of younger artists iconographically connected to Hergé’s albums. Artists like Anton Kannemeyer follow Hergé’s ligne claire style but use it for new, often radically anti-imperialist and deliberately iconoclastic images (cf. Kannemeyer n.pag.). 27. Gallois/McCarthy 17. Benoît Crucifix contributed this reference.

ABSTRACTS

“Jazzy” or not, the close intermedial encounter of jazz and comics, i.e., two medially and semiotically complex forms of expression already by themselves, asks for a general reflection on the nature of sound in combination with visual notes, scores, movement, and performance in the comics medium. The present essay illuminates how such encounters take shape in specific Francophone Belgian comics of the 1920s and 1930s; it consists of a close reading of musical and sound notation in Hergé’s early Aventures de Tintin albums. It departs from the observation that somebody like Hergé, with an oft-reported affinity for jazz, would shy away from making allusion to thriving dancefloors and the presence of African American musicians so central in the “white” Western European discourses of these decades. The essay sheds light on whether this is closely linked to or, conversely, contrasted from colonialist attitudes Hergé propagates especially in his earliest albums—and on how allusions to the jazz age and American music may be read between the panel lines in some Tintin albums all the same.

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INDEX

Keywords: comics, interwar Europe, intermediality, jazz, musical notation, racism, Tintin

AUTHOR

LUKAS ETTER Lukas Etter is a scholar of American Studies at the Seminar für Anglistik of the University of Siegen, Germany. In 2014, he defended his doctoral dissertation Auteurgraphy: Distinctiveness of Styles in Alternative Graphic Narratives at the University of Bern. His research interests include several aspects of comics studies (especially visual style) and the discourses on mathematics education in 19th-century literature and culture. Recent and forthcoming publications include (with Daniel Stein) “Long-length Serials in the Golden Age of Comic Strips: Production and Reception” in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (ed. Baetens/Frey/Tabachnick, forthcoming 2018), and “Visible Hand? Subjectivity and Its Stylistic Markers in Graphic Narratives” in Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives (ed. Reinerth/ Thon, 2017).

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The Power of Conformity: Music, Sound, and Vision in Back to the Future

Marc Priewe

1 In his 1986 State of the Union address, the previous actor and then-President Ronald Reagan ends with a quote from the top-grossing block buster movie Back to the Future, which had been released a year earlier. Reagan cites Doc Brown’s famous closing line from the film, “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” (BTTF 01:51:37), to suggest that the future of the United States looks hopeful, despite some aspects that may need improvement. Ironically, Reagan’s optimistic vision of America’s future is in part based on its past. As neo-conservatives embraced seemingly American core values such as self-reliance, hard work, and the nuclear family—which supposedly had gotten lost during the 1960s and 70s—the 1950s became the ideal focal point for projecting both the past and the future onto the present U.S. politics, society, and culture. In fact, that President Reagan referenced the movie in his address is but one indication of how Back to the Future lends itself for propagating a return to a “simpler” and “better” America of the 1950s that was, at the same time, geared towards a technological future, at least since the Sputnik shock (cf. Justice).

2 As research in American history and cultural studies has shown, nostalgia for the 1950s was a widespread cultural phenomenon during the 1980s. Sorcha Fhlainn, for instance, has illustrated how the so-called “Me-decade” was marked by “a desire to return to a mythical past, to reinvigorate narratives which reassert and reify the American Dream,” and “to forget the realities of the 1980s: unemployment, class inequality, crime, increased drug use, AIDS, and rising levels of poverty” (5). Cultural productions such as novels, films, records, paintings, photographs or TV series functioned as central locations and locutions for shaping and conveying nostalgic desires for the post-WWII decade during the Reagan years. Michael Dwyer has recently analyzed how pop nostalgia for the 1950s played itself out at the intersections between visual arts and popular music during the 1970s and 80s. He argues that “[t]he retrospective invocation of the Fifties teen struggling to define her identity or trying to make his way into the

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world often functioned as a synecdoche for a United States poised on the verge of maturity, at a point in its national history when everything (for better and for worse) began to change” (Dwyer 7). This assumption holds true for a number of 1980s Hollywood movies, but is perhaps best exemplified by Back to the Future which enacts a traditional narrative of American exceptionalism rooted in a revised and sanitized vision of the 1950s.

3 Back to the Future has entered the cultural vocabulary of the United States like few other films of the era. Critics and scholars generally agree that it is also among the most conservative and pro-Reagan movies at the time (Fhlainn 6). Three decades after its release, the movie is being remediated in numerous ways in the digital realm, signaling its continued audience support, and has prompted a number of research projects, especially in cultural studies, musicology, and film studies. One of the main points of interests for scholars has been the ways in which Back to the Future and its two franchises released in 1989 and 1990 suggest the possibility of, and necessity for, revising history during the Cold War era. The present article seeks to advance research on the film by investigating the role that sound-image interactions play in the cultural work that scholars have ascribed to the first part of the trilogy. This entails studying the aesthetic employments and ideological functions of sonic elements in Back to the Future with a particular emphasis on popular and orchestral music. I argue that the film music serves to underscore a revisionist and conservative view of American culture and society in the 1950s and 1980s by including certain songs and excluding others, as well as by an orchestral score (written by Alan Silvestri) that is firmly rooted in the tradition of Hollywood film music. To support this argument, I will analyze how sourced music, scored music, and sound interact with narrative and visual features throughout the movie and how they function as a cinematic device that embellishes and highlights certain elements of the visual representation, in this case the revisionist aspects of the plot.

4 In order to conceptualize the interplays between several distinct semiotic modes in the film, especially between audio and visual codes, Bolter and Grusin’s notion of “remediation” and Werner Wolf’s concept of “intracompositional intermediality” (30) constitute productive lenses because they highlight how media in general, and film in particular, variously reproduces, replaces, and comments on other media. The present article takes theoretical discussions on intermediality and remediation as a springboard from which to engage in a study of sound-image relations that are central to the meaning-endowment in American movies, especially during the 1980s. These discussions have, among others, shed light on the traditionally close symbiosis of film and music as well as on how media have increasingly referenced and absorbed each other in the course of the twentieth century (Straumann). The present case study aims to generate insights into how intermediality and remediation turn into transmedia storytelling by explicating how the narrative of conservatism and individualism in a central movie of the 1980s Hollywood canon is actually spread out across a range of media.

5 Back to the Future is certainly not the first movie engaged in “cross-platform marketing” or “synergies,” as remediation has often been called in advertising parlances since the 1980s, with the popular music industry. With the rise of MTV in the early 1980s, a new “media player” entered the scene, providing artists, record companies, and advertising specialists wider access to young, especially white audiences. The producers of Back to

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the Future were able to make artistic and financial use of cross-platform narration that would inadvertently morph into what Henry Jenkins has identified as “transmedia storytelling” in the decades following the release of the film. The initial remediation and intermedial referencing took place between film, music, TV, and video in intricate ways. The movie’s theme song, for instance, is written and performed by the U.S.-based band Huey Lewis and the News, whose MTV video for the song includes Doc Brown and the famous DeLorean time machine; Marty McFly’s actor, Michael J. Fox, also played a famous TV sitcom character named Alex P. Keaton in the successful show Family Ties between 1982 and 1989; newspaper clippings are used throughout the trilogy to advance the plot; and images of past TV series and media stars such as Michael Jackson or Max Headroom are recycled and referenced repeatedly.

6 The film music for Back to the Future is comprised of a composite score, i.e. it uses pre- existing pop songs and an orchestral score to perform central functions of music in film: setting mood, providing commentary, and enhancing identification with characters on the screen (cf. Psujek; Rothbart xv). Huey Lewis and the News is the pop music focal point for the film, contributing two songs to the sonic landscape of the movie: “The Power of Love” and “Back in Time.” The band was already established by the early 1980s with their retro-inspired, yet modern sounding rendition of radio- compatible American Rock. Huey Lewis and the News was a mainstream act that looked to the past for inspiration and one of the first bands to cash in on the emergence of MTV, providing videos for five of the songs from their 1983 album Sports. Among them was the hit single “Heart of Rock’n’Roll,” a song which follows a similar narrative as Bob Seger’s song “Old Time Rock’n’Roll” (1978) and also evokes Chuck Berry’s version of “Route 66” (1961), which also performs a search for roots through routes that crisscross the United States. Claiming that “the heart of rock’n’roll is still beating” in various U.S. cities, Huey Lewis conveys a conservative message, one that seeks to continue to locate the present and presence of contemporary music in an American tradition represented by aging white men, despite all the changes in musical tastes and styles since the late 1950s. As a consequence, rock’n’roll is emptied of its teen rebellious content, as well as its historical origin in African-American culture, and given a new meaning, one of stasis, reaction, and continuation of (white) traditions. The message of conservatism is further cemented by Huey Lewis’s 1986 hit single “Hip to be Square,” with which the band was able to cash in on the exposure gained through their involvement in Back to the Future the previous year. Changing the popular adage “Be there or be square” to “It’s hip to be square,” the song proposes conformity and rejects the kind of anti-establishment attitude that rock’n’roll claims for itself as a foundational myth and raison d’etre. As the first-person narrator in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho, published in 1991, remarks after his third gruesome murder in his typical would-be music journalistic fashion: “Hip to be Square” is “not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends—it’s also a personal statement about the band itself, though of what I’m not quite sure” (357). What Patrick Bateman fails to realize, or is not willing to admit, is that the title of the song is indeed a personal statement by a band that seems to feel obliged to reconcile the idea of rock’n’roll as non-conformism with mainstream success through the apologetic statement that “being square” is actually desirable.

7 Huey Lewis and the News’s song “The Power of Love” was written for Back to the Future, released shortly before the opening of the film, and reached number 1 on the U.S. Billboard charts in August 1985. The MTV video for the song marks a remediation of

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the movie by including Doc Brown and the iconic DeLorean time machine. Both appear at a concert of the band, apparently after time traveling, and a young couple steals the car for a joyride as Huey Lewis performs its hit song, mimicking a live performance in a small club. The video is part of the afore-mentioned marketing mechanisms introduced during the 1980s, when movies, videos and single releases occurred together to create a marketable brand across an array of media platforms.

8 In Back to the Future “The Power of Love” serves as a musical and thematic anchor that is used three times: after the opening scene, as an instrumental cover version during the high school audition, and again in minute 00:11:00 when Marty is about to kiss his girlfriend in front of the broken clock tower. The various placements of the song frame a roughly five-minute narrative sequence in which the main conflicts and ideas of the movie are introduced. The interplay between “The Power of Love” and the visual elements prepares the viewer for an intricate love plot that includes questions about time and generational relationships. Initially, the audience hears the song up to the first chorus when Marty is late for school and tailgates on his skateboard through Hill Valley (BTTF 00:06:00). Here, the song also functions as the soundtrack for 1980s America as Marty, and the viewers watching him, encounter cultural emblems and name brands associated with the time of the movie’s release: aerobics classes, portable cassette players, skateboards, soft drinks, and sneakers. Throughout this scene/song the audience also hears diegetic sounds of cars and, especially, Marty’s skateboard which adds a sense of realism and, at the same time, of subjective perception of the film’s main character.

9 A few minutes later, “The Power of Love” appears as an example of intracompositional intermediality when Marty and his band, The Pinheads, participate in an audition for the school’s battle of the band contest and perform an instrumental rendition of the song (BTTF 00:08:00). Marty’s song choice can be read as a sign of identification with the music of Huey Lewis and the conformist message that the band’s music insinuates. Marty’s amateurish cover version of the theme song is, moreover, a tongue-in-cheek comment on time travel and knowledge about music history, because on the film’s diegetic level the song could not have been known. The release of the film and the single “The Power of Love” occurred after the fictional events in the movie had been recorded. Huey Lewis’s presence is further jokingly included in the time-travel movie by having him act the part of the main juror. After only a few bars from Marty’s band, he interrupts the performance and tells them, “I am afraid you’re just too darn loud” (BTTF 00:08:48), which not only ends Marty’s music career in the film but also jokingly emphasizes the negotiation of the theme of conservatism and of the notion that acceptance of art is dependent on a particular time and place.

10 “The Power of Love” is played a final time when Marty and his girlfriend, Jennifer, kiss in front of the broken Hill Valley clock tower (BTTF 00:10:57). In contrast to the earlier two employments, in which the music was a dominant feature in the cinematic presentation, the song is slowly faded in, leaving it unclear whether we are hearing sourced or scored music. As Jennifer’s father pulls up in his car and the volume of the music increases, it is suggested that the music originates from the car stereo (Gengaro 115). Moving from the level of underscore to that of score, the song picks up at the end of the first chorus and the frame is established by recurring back to the first placement of “The Power of Love” when Marty is riding his skateboard into town. At the end of the sequence, Marty secretly tailgates a police car (thus briefly showing his rebellious

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side) to return to his suburban, conformist world. The song fades out rather abruptly before the second chorus when the camera shifts to the humiliation of George McFly in 1985, which no longer fits the themes of love and time travel suggested by “The Power of Love.”

11 Huey Lewis and the News enter the scene one more time towards the end of the movie on a poster in Marty’s bedroom when he wakes up after his return and when “Back in Time” is played on the radio (BTTF 01:46:45). The song was specifically written for the movie by the band and is also used as a short plot summary underlying the closing credits: “Tell me, doctor / Where are we going this time? / Is this the fifties? / Or nineteen ninety-nine?” This Huey Lewis song again mixes saxophone and a drum beat that reference earlier renditions of rock’n’roll music with modern sounds, represented by synthesizers, the bass sound, and the sonic allusion to Prince’s song “1999” (1982). It is hence important to emphasize how Huey Lewis’s music variously frames Marty’s time travel. “The Power of Love” is first played when the protagonist leaves Doc’s house in 1985. Then, when he is back home, in bed, having returned from his quest and recuperating from time travel, “Back in Time” signals his final home coming in a revised 1985. Despite all the changes that have occurred in Marty’s family—especially that his parents are now successful and happy rather than poor and miserable—the music of Huey Lewis serves to show the consistent setting before and after time travel. In contrast, other songs and sounds are used to indicate the differences in the movie’s temporal settings. Just as “typical” 1950s music (e.g., “Mr. Sandman”) introduces the viewer to a different time, so does pop music with electronic drums and synthesizers on the radio that belongs to a homeless person tell us we are back in the 1980s (BTTF 01:42:00).

12 Sound design is another important component of the movie’s sonic landscape. The film starts in Doc Brown’s laboratory with culminating noise produced by chiming bells, a malfunctioning breakfast robot and, most notably, ticking clocks, which symbolize the thematic engagement with time. The latter sounds are also reminiscent of the introduction to Pink Floyd’s 1973 song “Money,” which, as an intertextual reference, may suggest the underlying, hidden theme of Back to the Future since, in the end, the McFlys have become materially successful. In the next scene, still at Doc’s house, the audience watches and hears Marty McFly plugging his electric guitar into a home-built amplifier (presumably by Doc). After he turns up several volume and overdrive knobs, a hum is getting louder. Then, through a visual effect the guitar pick in his hand begins to sparkle with electricity before Marty, wearing coolness-suggesting sunglasses, hits a chord on his electric guitar. Only a dissonant sound is heard that is so loud that it propels him several feet through the air, crashing into furniture. This humorous and fictional “blowback” can be read as an indication of the power of music, but more likely it anticipates the technical expertise of the “mad scientist,” the inventor of powerful guitar amps and time machines alike. Marty is literally blown away and will be even more so figuratively by what he is about to encounter during his time travel that also “takes him back.”

13 The sounds of screeching guitars appear at another significant moment in the plot. In order to convince George McFly to ask Elaine out for the high school dance, Marty uses his knowledge of the future and his soon-to-be father’s interest in science fiction to stage a performance comprised of sounds from the 1980s. In the “science fiction theatre” scene, Marty is dressed up in a pseudo-scifi radiation suit, playing loud guitar

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and drum music by Van Halen on a Sony Walkman into the ears of sleeping George McFly (BTTF 01:02:00). His voice distorted, his presence commanding due to his appearance and his sonic “weapon,” Marty injects a vision of the future into George’s mind, who from now on will tell the story that an alien has ordered him to withstand his adversary, admit his love for his future wife, and write science-fiction novels.

14 Up to this point, my claim has been that the interplay between sound and vision in Back to the Future supports and strengthens the conservative message that the film conveys overall. Another indication that Marty represents yuppie republicanism of the 1980s, aside from the employment of Huey Lewis and the News as sole pop music act in the score, is the “remediation” of Michael J. Fox as an actor in Back to the Future and in the famous 1980s NBC sitcom Family Ties. For several weeks, Fox played his parts for the television show during the day and those for the movie at night. In the TV show Fox is Alex P. Keaton, who challenges and ridicules his aging ex-hippie parents by propagating the economic policies of Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Keaton is a young, ambitious American eager to excel in the business world and, in doing so, showcases the cultural changes from 1960s rebellion to the embrace of materialism and conservatism in the 1980s. As Dwyer has claimed, the show “positions Sixties radicalism as the outdated establishment and conservatism as hip and rebellious” (37), similar to Huey Lewis’s song “It’s Hip to Be Square.” The political position of Alex P. Keaton seems to concur with that of Marty McFly (and Huey Lewis), who at the end of Future I takes pride in his family’s new wealth and social status, represented by a Toyota pick-up truck in the suburban garage. For original audiences of the film and the TV show, the two characters merged transmedially into one and “Marty McKeaton’s” conservative values and allegiance with the Me-generation set the ideological tone for both the movie and the TV series (Dwyer 36–37).

15 During the first twenty-seven minutes of the movie, popular music is the only music supporting the action and events on the screen. Classic Hollywood film score is first introduced when Doc Brown injects plutonium into the flux capacitor that powers the DeLorean and is about to embark on the first time travel that the audience witnesses. To amplify tension, classical orchestration is employed, making full use of typical post- WWII Hollywood sounds, timbres, and timings, leading up to Doc being shot by the Libyan terrorists and Marty traveling to 1955. As the DeLorean reaches 88 mph, sending Marty to the past, the rather chaotic orchestral sounds merge into a coherent motif that becomes the second iconic theme song of the movie next to “The Power of Love” (BTTF 00:31:03). With its employment of classic Hollywood film music, however, the orchestral score as a whole seems a bit “big” or too majestic for a comedic film about time travel and, thus, helps to raise Back to the Future into more epic and serious proportions (Gengaro 117).

16 Scored and sourced music are used separately throughout the movie, but significantly merge during the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance scene, when Marty’s existence is threatened because his parents do not manage to fall in love. It begins with scored music that creates suspense similar to a Hitchcock or sci-fi movie and thus supports Marty’s anxiety of existence by relating to the past. Then, the band on stage plays a slow dance tune, “Earth Angel,” and as the song progresses, diegetic and extradiegetic musical themes fuse to create a sonic climax that emphasizes the climax of the plot (i.e., George and Lorraine finally kiss and the future, including Marty’s existence, is set for good). The literal joining of seemingly opposing musical strands of the film—

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popular music and classic Hollywood orchestral score—into a postmodern pastiche underlines the resolution of one of the major themes in the movie, namely that the past can be fixed to create a better future (BTTF 01:26:10; Gengaro 120–121). The music that the diegetic band, The Starlighters, plays is doo-wop, a pre-rock’n’roll, rather soft African-American music that relies on a recurrent chord progression and on pleasing vocal harmonies. Dwyer observes the significance of this song placement for advancing the revisionist take of the movie, claiming that it signifies ‘past-ness’ more than a song from a different genre would. Had the Starlighters played another song from 1955 (Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ for example), the scene would not have the sonic connotation of a wholly different era, since rock and roll has maintained a central position in popular music since the 1950s. Doo-wop, on the other hand, had by 1985 been long relegated to the oldies circuit. (Dwyer 38–39)

17 Music, in other words, here serves to guide the audience’s perception of a specific, romanticized version of the 1950s. The movie has been criticized for leaving out racial tensions, McCarthyism, the Beat Generation, the Sputnik shock, wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the “Feminine Mystique” (Friedan) felt by many women across the country. And indeed, as Marty discovers Hill Valley in 1955, pop songs are strategically placed to highlight certain features of his consciousness and to convey a sanitized social environment of a quintessential U.S. small town in California. Hill Valley epitomizes the notion of American exceptionalism through its titular connection to the Puritan “City upon a Hill” and the motto internalized by its inhabitants that, “if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” Yet, because of its fictionality and oxymoronic name, Hill Valley remains a material impossibility, a non-place, a utopian vision of an ideal community in the past. Rather than striving for historical accuracy, it represents the idyllic American small town that the 1980s wanted or were supposed to remember.

18 This nostalgic vision of a 1950s small town is underscored by the musical choices made by Zemeckis and Silvestri. The use of “Mr. Sandman” when Marty first enters 1955 America is a typical remediation of music in film, where the semiotics of the song are used to emphasize parts of the plot. Marty McFly hears the music through loudspeakers in the town square and the song signals that his experiences are just “a dream,” a statement repeatedly voiced throughout the film. In addition, this particular song suggests that the setting itself is a dreamlike fantasy land before the advent of rock’n’roll music and the social disruption it signified and caused. Dwyer has pointed out that this musical choice marks a strategic, ideological move because of what it omits. In the narrative universe of the film, a pop song such as “Mr. Sandman” (and “Earth Angel”) represents the 1950s and not a Jazz, hillbilly, country or rock’n’roll song from the same era such as Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” which ranked at number two of the Billboard charts for the year 1955 (Dwyer 19–21). The emphasis on sentimental, comforting, and encouraging music to represent the 1950s to a mid-1980s movie audience is further stressed when Marty sees a poster advertising the latest popular songs in the store window of the record shop, featuring “The Ballad of Davy Crocket” by Fess Parker, “16 tons” by Ernie Ford, and Nat King Cole’s ballad “Unforgettable.” These songs assist Marty’s orientation in the past and also the viewers’ orientation in the present for constructing a specific version of the past. Again, we are introduced to a selective, rather cleaned-up rendition of the 1950s, a society not yet in turmoil over war or equal rights, via the music selection: “The Ballad

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of Davy Crocket” re-animates the pioneering spirit of the nineteenth century, “16 Tons” the American work ethic (while also conveying an anti-capitalist message), and “Unforgettable” self-referentially points to the continuous creation of memory in and through music and film.

19 One of the movie’s rare hints at the social ills of the 1950s is the separation between an all-black band entertaining an all-white audience at the high school dance. The band performing at the dance is led by Marvin Berry, whose last name suggests that they not only know doo-wop but also rock’n’roll. After Berry hurts his hand, Marty is invited onto the stage to replace him, first as a guitar player and then as a singer of The Starlighters. In an act of racial substitution and appropriation, the white teenager becomes the leader of an African-American band and introduces rock’n’roll to the musicians and the audience, self-confidently instructing the band about the key and the chord changes of the song that turns out to be Chuck Berry’s famous song “Johnny B. Goode” (1958).

20 As I have indicated, a central idea posited by the film is that the past can be fixed or rather that an “elect few” can return to the past in order to make the present financially and emotionally successful. The movie plays with the theme of changing and revising history in various ways but perhaps at no point as strongly as when Marty is asked to play “something that really cooks” (BTTF 01:26:50) by Marvin Berry after his parents have fallen in love during the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Marty announces “Johnny B. Goode” as a song that “is an oldie where I come from” (BTTF 01:27:10) and thus refers to the success of 1980s Golden Oldies and AOR radio stations that relied on the spirit and sound of 1950s rock’n’roll, sometimes interpreted anew by artists such as John Cougar Mellencamp, Bob Seger, George Thorgood or Huey Lewis and the News.

21 In Future I, Marty omits any tribute to Chuck Berry, which would ruin the joke of Marvin Berry calling his cousin to play him the new sound over the telephone. What only the audience of the film knows is that Marty is able to create music from a canon that is in the past for him and yet the unheard-of future for the audience in the film. The writers and producers of the movie chose an ironic reversal of history during which the viewer is playfully taken back to the time when rock’n’roll was invented, pretending that black musicians discovered rock’n’roll after hearing a white teenager play it in 1955. Because of Marty’s re-enactment of appropriating African-American culture, without giving due credit, one might criticize the movie for being too naïve and pseudo-innocent about the troubled history of race in U.S. cultural history (Matterson).

22 Marty is not allowed full credit for inventing rock’n’roll, however, because later in the song, the mood of the performance and the audience’s reaction changes abruptly when they are taken into the sonic future (for them). During an extended guitar solo, Marty again attempts to put time travel to his advantage, as in the “science fiction theatre” scene, by copying guitar licks and antics from the 1960s through the 1980s by Pete Townshend, Edward Van Halen, Angus Young, and Jimi Hendrix, including playing behind his back, trashing an amplifier, and mimicking sexual intercourse with his guitar. Soon, the band stops playing and the audience remains in shock and awe at the sounds they are hearing and the performance they are witnessing. Marty ends the scene saying, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it” (BTTF 01:30:00), claiming generational allegiance across time. Again, this scene

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exemplifies how music lends itself particularly well for illustrating the theme of time travel. It is only through the knowledge of music history that Marty has a seeming advantage at this moment in time. The scene thus recurs back to the audition for the battle of the bands, which similarly played with the idea that art is only recognized at a certain time and by a consensus of the audience.

23 The Chuck Berry scene, which might be said to feature the actual theme song of the movie (i.e., “Johnny B. Goode” & guitar solo), contradicts at least in part the suggestion put forth by Fhlainn, Dwyer, and other scholars that Back to the Future skips over the turbulent and undesired 1960s and 70s (cf. Dwyer 21). When reading the cultural references in Marty’s guitar performance it becomes clear that the film does not simply forget or omit the decades that many 1980s neo-conservatives thought to be harmful and demoralizing for America. Rather, the film seeks to ridicule the values of the decades between the staged past and present as inappropriate for audiences (and voters) in the 1950s and in the 1980s.

24 In his analysis of the scene, Dwyer reaches the conclusion that “[w]hen Marty performs ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in Back to the Future, it is neither a forgery nor a copy. It is a repetition with a difference, a transparent cover that layers new meanings on top of existing ones” (92). Seen this way, Marty turns his performance of rock’n’roll into an untimely event that surpasses the mere birth of a musical style through appropriation and racial substitution. Extending the song with a guitar solo gone awry, Marty poses repetition with a difference as a central aesthetic principle in 1955 and 1985 which, one might argue, blurs the lines of racial separation by creating musical synergies that consistently connect past, present, and future.

25 In conclusion, the choice of scored and sourced music in Back to the Future resonates with larger cultural and political attempts at re-making the United States in the cultural image of the 1950s. For Americans living in the 1980s, an expanding repository of media texts and delivery devices enabled them to look both backward in time and inward in character on the individual as well as on the national level. Back to the Future provides a means of cultural introspection where the nation can congregate around the movie screen, the VCR, the TV and, increasingly, the computer to laugh and muse about their histories as individuals, families, and as a nation. Moreover, the film is part of an ensemble of cultural narratives which allowed the nation to reassemble and revise the narrative of America, toning and honing further the notions of political and cultural exceptionalism. One might call the movie a popular postmodern jeremiad, since it echoes a number of Puritan values, such as the work ethic, the elect few, the City upon a Hill, predestination (even though the film suggests that one’s destiny can be changed), and the idea that the present is lacking past virtues but that it is not too late to return to the original promise of America. The proposed return to 1950s values is enacted by Marty McFly, the transmedial doppelgänger of Alex P. Keaton, who personifies like few other male characters in 1980s Hollywood film the values of individualism, materialism, and conformity.

26 In its performance of the 1950s, Back to the Future remediates only certain sounds and images of that decade for contemporary audiences and shapes cultural self-perceptions during the 1980s by recycling and rewriting icons and narratives from a sanitized past. During the thirty years since its release, the movie has thoroughly entered American popular culture and has undergone further remediations and media convergences. One can read about Doc Brown and Marty McFly in a novel, replay scenes from the trilogy

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and additional time travels on a computer or tablet, watch intertextual and transmedial references to the film in cartoons and comedy shows, or discover digital rewritings and movie scenes posted by global audiences on YouTube. Especially with the “return” of Marty and Doc on October 21, 2015, news shows and the internet witnessed a revival of Back to the Future. It is particularly the user-generated, participatory rewritings such as “Brokeback to the Future,” pointing out the special relationship between Marty and Doc, or mockumentaries that claim references to 9/11 in the trilogy, that attest to the ongoing remediation and significance of the film in American popular culture in the present. In most of these renditions, the two theme songs, “The Power of Love” and the orchestral theme, have become iconic musical cues that function as anchors of memory and aid in the re-construction of the 1980s for present and future generations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Back to the Future. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Universal, 1985.

Back to the Future II. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Universal, 1989.

Back to the Future III. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Universal, 1990.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston: MIT Press, 1999. Print.

“Brokeback to the Future.” YouTube, uploaded by Gillian Smith, 01 Feb. 2006. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017. Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY&t=8s

Dwyer, Michael D. Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Print.

Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho: A Novel. Vintage Books, 1991. Print.

Family Ties—The Complete Series, written by Gary David Goldberg, CBS Home Entertainment, 2013. Print.

Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní. “Introduction: It’s about Time.” The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Ed. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 1–27. Print.

Gengaro, Christine Lee. “Music in Flux: Musical Transformation and Time Travel in Back to the Future.” The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Ed. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 112–132. Print.

Huey Lewis and the News. “Power of Love (Official Video).” YouTube, uploaded by GTABTTFMAN, 11 Mar. 2011. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017. Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkgYhtz64U

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.

Justice, Christopher. “Ronald Reagan and the Rhetoric of Traveling Back to the Future: The Zemeckis Aesthetic as Revisionist History and Conservative Fantasy.” The Worlds of Back to the

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Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Ed. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 174–194. Print.

Matterson, Stephen. “‘Don’t you think it’s about time?’: Back to the Future in Black and White.” The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Ed. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 62–72. Print.

Psujek, Jennifer L. The Composite Score: Indiewood Film Music at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 2016. Print.

Reagan, Ronald. “Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the State of the Union.” February 4, 1986, House Chamber of the Capitol, The American Presidency Project. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017. Web. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=36646%20

Rothbart, Peter. The Synergy of Film and Music: Sight and Sound in Five Hollywood Films. London: The Scarecrow Press, 2013. Print.

Straumann, Barbara. “Adaptation—Remediation—Transmediality.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 249–267. Print.

Wolf, Werner. “The Relevance of Mediality and Intermediality to Academic Studies of English Literature.” Medality/Intermediality. Ed. Andeas Fischer, Martin Heusser, and Andreas H. Jucker. Tübingen: Narr, 2008. 15–43. Print.

ABSTRACTS

This essay investigates the aesthetic and political functions of the choice and placement of music in Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis). After an overview of the movie’s cultural contexts, the focus shifts to the interplays between sound and cinematic mise-en-scène, with a particular emphasis on popular music. I argue that the film employs music strategically in order to convey a nostalgic view of American culture and society in the 1950s by including certain songs and excluding others, as well as by a score that is deeply rooted in the traditions of Hollywood film music. The intermedial use and remediation of music not only amplifies the movie’s quasi-philosophical treatment of time and history in intricate ways, it also resonates with the contemporary sense of American exceptionalism.

INDEX

Keywords: Back to the Future, intermediality, film music, 1950s nostalgia, cultural conservatism

AUTHOR

MARC PRIEWE Marc Priewe is Full Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Early American Literature at St. Lawrence University, a part-time online instructor at the New School, and a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University. His books include Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/o Narratives (2007), Imagined Transnationalism: U.S-Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity (2009), and Textualizing Illness: Medicine and Culture in New England, 1620-1730 (2014). His

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main research interests are Early American Studies, Transnational American Studies, Digital Humanities, and Popular Music.

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Sound, Vision, and Embodied Performativity in Beyoncé Knowles’ Visual Album Lemonade (2016)

Johanna Hartmann

Johanna Hartmann

1. Preliminary Remarks

1 On April 23, 2016, with no advance advertisement, Beyoncé1 released Lemonade, a complex artwork that combines and interrelates various visual and auditory media and aesthetics. It was distributed both via traditional and digital outlets. Lemonade is a work of popular art intertwining mass culture, technology, and the public discourse. By doing so, the album functions as a “means of social and cultural self-understanding” (Hebel 402) and as a decisive source and a shaping force of a society’s values (Fiske 43– 45). The release of the album was preceded by her contested performance at the culturally significant Super Bowl halftime show in February 2016, where she challenged contemporary race relations by drawing aesthetically on the Black Panther movement. This performance and the release of Lemonade took place only a few months before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, in the midst of a presidential campaign of contested visions for the United States, bringing to the fore an increasing polarization of the American cultural and political landscape. The release of Lemonade on the streaming network Tidal (co-owned by Beyoncé) was accompanied by the HBO screening of a “visual album”2 that features Beyoncé’s songs in the form of video clips which are connected through narrated passages of the poetry by the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. The release of the album was followed by individual singles and her Formation World Tour (between April and October 2016). The hard copy of Lemonade contains a music album with twelve songs, a booklet with production stills of every chapter of the visual album, and the visual album itself, which will be the main focus of analysis in this article. Through the publication of this transmedial, intramedial, and

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intermedial artwork, Beyoncé created a sensation that not only boosted the sales of her album but also enabled her to make a statement on contemporary political issues.

2 All forms of publication of Lemonade were aimed at a global audience that watched her performances live, via internet streaming providers, or on TV. Therefore, it is vital to look at intermediality in this artwork “against the backdrop of [its] medial networks” (Rippl 1). Lemonade, as a work of popular culture, is an artwork that is “not narrowly intellectual or creatively elitist and … generally though not necessarily disseminated through the mass media …, [it] consists of the spoken and printed word, sounds, pictures, objects and artifacts” and is therefore genuinely intermedial (Browne 11). Additionally, because of processes of digitalization and an increasing global interconnectedness, the time difference between performance, digital dissemination, and meta-discourse on social media has almost reached simultaneity. This synchronicity between performance and reception intensifies the connection between Beyoncé and her audience and thus increases her cultural power. Beyoncé’s popularity, creativity, and entrepreneurial talent enable her to influence the public discourse and weigh in on political issues. With Lemonade she uses her clout 3 to speak out on the African American experience of discrimination and suffered injustices in the past and the present, and particularly the experience of African American women. At the same time, she portrays her own success story as the realization of the American Dream accomplished through hard work, sacrifices, and resilience. The reactions to Lemonade by liberal media and from within the music industry were overwhelmingly positive, claiming that she made African American women again the center of a southern regional culture and historiography (e.g. Robinson n.p.).4 Conservative outlets, however, criticized her for its explicit language and depicted violence (Ozzi, n.p.).

3 It is the argument of this article that Lemonade is a highly interconnected intermedial collage, interrelating visual and auditory dimensions, various media, genres, and visual and musical aesthetics. The nexus between music, singing, dance, and performance art, and the juxtaposition of absence and presence of both sound and vision lies in the embodied performance of Beyoncé and the singers in visually significant and recurring locations. I define “embodied performance” as an artistic performance that is tied to a specific spatio-temporal situation but also relies on the corporeality of the artist—in Beyoncé’s case being an African American female artist from the American south—for processes of signification, e.g. in the form of specific gestures, hair styles, or dresses. The performance as art form is thus overlaid with a subversive impetus that stems from performative acts that produce and shape reality (Butler, Hempfer). This layered constellation of intermedial references fulfills a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyoncé locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to experiences of discrimination by people of color in the US.

4 In her previous work Beyoncé has proven that she is not only an excellent singer but a performance artist, as she traverses between musical and performing art genres, e.g. in Carmen: A Hip Hopera (McCarthy 17, Trier-Bienieck) in which the musical genres of Hip Hop and of opera, both having strong performative dimensions, are brought together. In the visual album Lemonade, there is no clear hierarchical relationship between

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auditory and visual dimensions. Therefore, instead of assuming an approach that takes the literary or visual as a starting point, the following analysis is interested in a more balanced and comparative approach that focuses on the intricate relations and the interplay between word, music, visuality, and performativity. From a theoretical and methodological point of view, intermediality will be used in a very broad sense to “refer[] to the relationships between media and is hence used to describe a huge range of cultural phenomena which involve more than one medium” (Rippl 2). Analyzing the intermedial dimensions in particular of a work as complex as Lemonade allows for a better understanding of the relationships and functional spectrum of auditory and visual dimensions, their materiality and ephemerality, notions of production, textual aesthetic and conditions of synaesthetic experience by the recipient. However, it also allows to explore the boundaries of traditional interpretive frameworks of intermediality when applied to multilayered intermedial constellations.

2. Intermediality: Theoretical Perspectives

5 Since the 1980s, intermediality has served as a theoretical framework that can be productively applied to the constellations between various media and art forms and references across media boundaries. It enables us to investigate and improve our understanding of the meaning-making processes entailed in a given cultural configuration both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives, e.g. in works of literature, visual artworks, performance art, or music. Research on intermedial practices is particularly conclusive as it determines “how people communicate: with one another, with the past, with others” (Bal 169).

6 At the same time, Rippl makes us aware of the fact that the question of how to define “intermediality” and its foundational concept “medium” depends on the research question, the theoretical approach, and the cultural phenomenon under investigation (Rippl 2). A definition of media as “the production and distribution as well as the storing and reception of signs” will be used here, as it focuses on the “need[] to be linked back to the social and material dimension of media” (Emden and Rippl 8). Beyoncé’s success is not least the result of her understanding “that media do not simply carry signs, that is, they are not simply the tools of communication; rather, they are themselves signs, both in their symbolic and their material dimension” (Emden and Ripp 8). Lemonade can be described with both Grišakova and Ryan’s as well as Wolf’s definitions of intemediality; for the former, intermediality comprises both “any kind of relation between different media” and “the participation of more than one medium—or sensory channel—in a given work” (Grišakova and Ryan 3). Wolf conceptualizes intermediality as the “direct or indirect participation of more than one medium in the signification and/or structure of a given semiotic entity (a ‘work’), an involvement that must be verifiable within this entity” (Wolf 2015 460).

7 Wolf and Rajewsky have proposed concepts and subcategorizations for intermediality that allow for a systematization and description of the relationships between various art forms in Lemonade. Firstly, Rajewsky defines “media combination,” as “a communicative-semiotic concept, based on the combination of at least two medial forms of articulation” (phenomena that Wolf would term “multi- or plurimediality”) (Rajewky 53; Wolf 2005 255). Secondly, “media transposition” is in her model “the transformation of a given media product… or of its substratum into another medium.”

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Finally, “intermedial reference” means the imitation or evocation of a medium in another medium. Wolf integrated these three forms of intermediality into a larger framework in which intermediality (that involves the crossing of media boundaries) exists alongside intramediality (for relationships within the same medium), e.g. when a work of music refers to another musical piece. “Transmediality” then refers to phenomena that exist irrespective of their medial manifestation, e.g. irony or narrativity (Wolf 2014 20–25). Lemonade is a complex plurimedial artwork that combines and interrelates various art forms, e.g. instrumental music, vocal music, spoken language, dance, choreography, performance art, photography, documentary film, television, music videos, or home videos. Further, it combines various musical traditions and genres—e.g. Hip Hop, RnB, pop music, country, blues, reggae, or jazz—, visual styles, and aesthetics. The above introduced concepts of intermediality allow for an investigation on these various levels.

8 An intermedial angle lends itself to the investigation of Lemonade due to its performative dimension and its material manifestation in a filmic medium. Connecting to the argument of this article, in particular the performing arts, as Georgi claims, have the quality to integrate every other art and medium (530). This too, as Straumann has it, holds for film as a “synthetic medium which devours and transforms other arts and media together with their respective iconographic traditions and techniques—a process that renders film an intermedial form of expression from the start” (Straumann 251). Already Aristotle was aware of the significance of the correlation between the multimedial character of the performance of a tragedy and its affective dimension. The impact of an artwork on the one hand relies on the quality of the performance. On the other hand, in a more general sense, the artwork “produces” a certain situation and thus impacts the discourses that shape communities and societies, shapes and shifts their values, norms, and political agendas.

3. Functions of Intermedial Constellations in Beyoncé’s Lemonade

9 The DVD with the visual album, titled “Visual,” opens with the menu and the options to either “PLAY ALL” or “CHAPTER SELECTION,” the former resulting in the playing of the whole album in a chronological order, the latter option leading hypermedially to two further screens that allow for the choosing of individual chapters. This paratextual menu frame is underlaid with the looped theme of the song “Formation” that Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl. The album is structured into 24 parts: “Intuition,” “Pray You Catch Me,” “Denial,” “Hold Up,” “Anger,” “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” “Apathy,” “Sorry,” “Emptiness,” “6 Inch,” “Accountability,” “Daddy Lessons,” “Reformation,” “Love Drought,” “Forgiveness,” “Sandcastles,” “Resurrection,” “Forward,” “Hope,” “Freedom,” “Redemption,” “All Night,” and “Formation.” As 24th part, the album ends with an extensive credits section that lists the people who participated in the production of Lemonade. The italicized titles in the above list refer to chapters between songs that consist of filmic images featuring as a voice-over Beyoncé reciting texts that are based on poems by the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. These texts, according to Hess, are “the backbone of Beyoncé’s album and its exploration of family, infidelity, and the black female body” (Hess n.p.). These chapters between songs thus interrelate Warsan Shire’s poetry with songs and performances by Beyoncé. Even though all songs have a

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distinct character, they are interlinked by themes, visual and auditory leitmotifs, and symbols. Also, the performative elements in various recurring settings function as means of cohesion between the individual chapters. The visual album then has—in opposition to the music album—a dramaturgy that derives from the constellation between the songs and the lyrical, spoken passages that add an affective dimension by either referring to or evoking emotional responses. In order to allow for a better understanding of the compositional practices, I will, in the following, describe and analyze the structure of and intermedial constellations in the first four chapters.

10 Visuality, performance, and the auditory dimension are integral parts of Lemonade. In opposition to the music album that only contains the music tracks, in the visual album various media in different constellations create cohesive forces that are integral for processes of signification. Instead of assuming a hierarchical relationship or the dominance of one medium, in Lemonade the entanglement between various medialities rather assume a notion of interdependency and interrelation through either discrepancy or congruence (Wenzel 9). The album draws on itself and is intricately interrelated through proleptic and analeptic visual and auditory references that result in its coherence. The individual parts of the album are interlinked by the embodied performances of Beyoncé and the dancers in various settings which become soundscapes that vary in loudness, ranging from almost silence at the beginning of the album, when we only hear the rustling of the wind, to the yelled lyrics of “Don’t Hurt Yourself” that are accompanied by powerful instrumentalization.

11 The first chapter, “Intuition,” begins with a montage of Beyoncé in settings that recur throughout the visual album: A parking garage that is also the background of the album’s front cover, a plantation home and its natural surroundings, a dilapidated fort that is surrounded by tall grass (a remainder of the wars fought in the South of the US), and, significantly, a stage with a red curtain and a row of footlights. This visual montage is complemented by a soundscape that also recurs throughout the album: a threatening metallic sound in the parking garage, the wind and the chirping of birds in the black and white plantation setting, the rustling of the wind and the tall grass surrounding the fort. The sounds of nature are superseded by vocal music when, during a pan shot of tall grass, a women’s ensemble starts singing individual staccato notes which culminate in a musical pause. The next images show Beyoncé walking through the tall grass outside the fort. Then, the filmic images show a red curtain, the camera tilts down and captures Beyoncé sitting between the curtain and the row of footlights. Only at this point, more than one minute into the album, the song “Pray You Catch Me” begins (1:04). After the first verse and the chorus, this song about trust and betrayal in a romantic relationship is interrupted by a narrated passage. This sequence begins with a black and white shot at the roots of trees with Spanish moss and a wooden cabin behind a plantation house which is overlaid with the word “Intuition” (01:59) in white, cursive letters. This setting has been already alluded to during the chorus when women in antebellum clothing stand in a brick tunnel of the fort. The view onto the plantation setting is again accompanied by the sound of wind and birds. Beyoncé then recites the following: I tried to make a home out of you, but doors lead to trap doors, a stairway leads to nothing. Unknown women wander the hallways at night. Where do you go when you go quiet? You remind me of my father, a magician, able to exist in two places at once. In the tradition of men in my blood, you come home at 3 a.m. and lie to me.

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What are you hiding? The past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck. What a fucking curse. (2:05–3:14)

12 Only after this passage—the first instance of Warsan Shire’s poetry in the form of a voice-over—the song “Pray You Catch Me” sets in again. It ends with Beyoncé standing on a high rise at night in front of billboards with illuminated advertising. The sequence sung by the women’s choir that leads into the song is repeated and culminates in her falling down from the building. Instead of crashing into the concrete however, she falls into a bedroom filled with water. The view of her submerged body, illuminated from behind, is overlaid with the word “Denial,” the title of the third chapter in which the spoken words thematize the speaker’s efforts to conform to the wishes of a male other who could be a romantic partner but who is also described with the characteristics of a deity: “I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake. Fasted for 60 days, wore white, abstained from mirrors, abstained from sex, slowly did not speak another word.… Went to the basement, confessed my sins, and was baptized in a river. I got on my knees and said ‘Amen’ and said ‘I mean’” (4:29–5:40).

13 Visual and verbal processes of signification overlap in various instances with the spoken words, e.g. when Beyoncé’s body is visually doubled as she says “mirror,” or when the word “abstinence” is matched with the view of the bed, or, when the camera shows a bible floating in the water as she says “I grew thickened skin on my feet, I bathed in bleach, and plugged my menses with pages from the holy book” (5:57-6:06). The themes of religiosity and spirituality are resumed in the first frame of the next chapter, the song “Hold Up.” It is a view onto the staircase of a house with double doors that are opened from the inside by Beyoncé, only to release a torrent of built-up water that runs down the white stairs. “Hold Up” is another song about infidelity, the lack of trust, and the suspicion of being betrayed. The lyrics also express the feeling of being measured by standards impossible to fulfill. The aggressiveness of the lyrics is matched by the visuals of the clip: Holding a baseball bat, Beyoncé destroys a hydrant and numerous cars that are parked on the street; finally, she strikes against the camera. As the camera seems to fall to the ground, the color scheme changes from bright colors to black and white. At this point, there is an abrupt switch to the melody of a music box playing the theme of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that accompanies a destructive rampage with a monster truck that runs over and crushes a line of cars. While the music box is still audible and, in combination to the violent images, creates an eerie atmosphere that seems almost gothic, the visuals change to a parading marching band followed by cheerleaders in a run-down inner cityscape. This collage of the sound of a music box and the footage of the marching band is overlaid with the word “Anger,” which refers analeptically to the previous and proleptically to the next song, “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” which is predominantly set in a parking garage. At the end of this song, the music box sets in again and constitutes the background to the chapter “Apathy.” This brief description already shows cohesive forces between individual chapters and intermedial relations between auditory and visual dimensions via the embodied performance of Beyoncé and the other performers. In the remainder of the album, the songs are on an auditory level either interrelated or interrupted by spoken passages or moments of silence which can be accompanied by blackouts. This results in a soundscape of presences and meaningful absences. Lemonade thus presents not so much a sequence of songs but rather a soundscape that combines natural sounds, instrumental music, and singing and juxtaposes it to visual and auditory stillness and pauses that install a contemplative rhythm into the visual album.

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14 The performative aspect is present throughout the visual album. We hear Beyoncé recite poetry by Warsan Shire, she performs her songs which involves acting, singing, and dancing, and she also interacts with the camera and in this way appears to seek eye contact with the audience. In “Freedom” e.g. she stands behind bowls of fire which function as footlights on a stage in the southern plantation setting. In “Hold Up” she even interacts with the camera when she smashes it with a baseball bat.

15 Performativity is not only a central theme of Lemonade but through the embodied performances the above-mentioned forms of intermediality are brought together, interconnecting the aesthetically varied visualizations of the settings and performances. Beyoncé’s and the performers’ bodies become media of signification through on the one hand their performative actions in relation to the auditory and textual dimensions of the album but also through their embodied presence as women of color, wearing different clothes and dresses, make-up, and hair styles, through their body and finger gestures, the choreography, and their facial expressions. The aspect of performativity is introduced in the very first sequence, when Beyoncé is seen on a stage between a curtain and footlights. Throughout the visual album, the stage is a recurring visual and meta-aesthetically charged motif that interconnects the individual chapters. The theme of seeing and being seen, and thereby being recognized pervades both the spoken passages and the lyrics of the songs. In “Anger” e.g., she accuses a male other of not recognizing her: “Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me? Everyone else can” (13:15–13:28). In the song “Sorry” e.g., the verse “Middle fingers up” is accompanied by this gesture of defiance by both Beyoncé and the dancers who, in this song, either sit on chairs inside a plantation house or on benches inside a bus or a military vehicle. These different settings are interconnected through the finger gestures and the forwards and sideways rocking body gestures of the dancers.

16 The album’s reliance on the body as a symbolic force relates to the female body as a central subject of both Shire’s poetry as well as Beyoncé’s songs. The female body is a source of nurturing, a life-giver in the process of birth, when in Hope she recites “That night in a dream, the first girl emerges from a slit in my stomach” (48:48–48:53). On hearing the word “slit” the camera moves through an opening in a wall, symbolizing the opening through which the child emerges. In particular in this scene the artistic process itself is analogized to the act of giving birth and thus acquires a meta-aesthetic function.

17 In Lemonade, inter- and transcultural signatures emerge through an intermedial constellation of both the transversal character of music and the combination of and with visual references that bring together European, African, African American, and Caribbean influences. The transcultural signature manifests itself in Lemonade in the form of instrumentation, the integration of Warsan Shire’s poetry and again, in the embodiedness of Beyoncé and the dancers’ performances that epitomize and celebrate cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity. This appeal to accept variety in people, their looks, skin color, and hair styles also bears a feminist dimension which becomes manifest in references to the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s, e.g. in the display of a variety of hair styles and facial features. In “Formation,” she hints at her own mixed heritage singing “My daddy Alabama, momma Louisiana / You mix that negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama / I like my baby heir with baby hair and

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afros / I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils” (58:37–58:53), a sequence that is accompanied by images of her daughter with an Afro hair style.

18 The album features a variety of transcultural references to various regions in the US, Central America, and Africa—hair styles, clothing, or specific regional settings, e.g. the southern fauna, or the explicit references to her home state Texas. In “Sorry,” the dancers’ hair is styled and braided in a variety of ways, their white make-up resembles African masks, and, towards the end of the song, Beyoncé is seen sitting on the floor with a hairstyle resembling Nefertiti’s conical headdress. Another example of many is the song “Hold Up” in which she appears in a yellow dress that, together with the ubiquity of water, references the Yoruba deity, Oshun (Wright n.p.). Furthermore, famous women of color whose work also bear transcultural signification appear throughout the visual album, e.g. the French-Cuban duo Ibeyi (Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz) who sing in Yoruba, the actresses Cloe and Halle Bailey, Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, Zendaya, the tennis player Serena Williams, or the model Winnie Harlow, who suffers from the skin disease vitiligo that results in black and white patterns on her skin,5 Their appearance in Lemonade add to the transnational and intercultural orientation of the artwork as their work is intertwined with Beyoncé’s.

19 With Lemonade, Beyoncé inscribes herself into an American cultural and musical history by interrelating her own life and work—apparent in autobiographical references—with the work of other artists. This is achieved either by referencing their work or by collaborating with them. Lemonade includes a number of home video clips in which the autobiographical dimension of the album becomes apparent. E.g. the songs “Daddy Lessons” and “Sandcastles” are interrupted and accompanied by home videos of Beyoncé’s childhood and marriage, respectively. The chapter “Redemption” includes a home video of her grandmother’s 80th birthday, where she claims “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade” (52:52–53:05). Before this clip, Beyoncé recounts the recipe for lemonade as an intergenerational form of knowledge that also constitutes a cure and a means of healing and working through traumas of the past and the present, on both individual and collective levels. This process is symbolized by her grandmother, the “alchemist” (52:16), whose process of “sp[inning] gold” (52:17–52:18) from lemons enables processes of redefinition, reappropriation, and re-interpretation. On a personal level this form of appropriation expresses itself in the line “My torturer became my remedy” (53:32–53:35). The eponymic reference to lemonade is again taken up at the beginning of the last song “Formation” in the form of a black frame and the word “Lemonade” in bold white letters. In “Formation,” a highly political song, the reference to lemonade extends to a supra-individual level and to notions of discrimination and traumatization but also the ability to work through, overcome, and grow through suffering.

20 Through the appropriated visual styles, Lemonade inscribes itself in the visual history of the United States. A recurrent visual style in the album is the grainy but colorful aesthetic which is reminiscent of polaroid images but also the documentary photography of inner cityscapes and portraits of African American women by Gordon Parks. These portrait shots of women constitute forms of “remediation” as Grusin and Bolter would have it, meaning the “appropriat[ion of] techniques, forms, and social significance of other media” (Bolter, Grusin 65).

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21 Beyoncé’s work also references the work of other African American artists, e.g. Michael Jackson or Nina Simone, to name just two. References to Michael Jackson’s work can be detected in the elaborate choreographies and narrative and plot-driven music videos. Also, the outfits worn at the Super Bowl halftime show on February 6, 2016 were reminiscent both of the uniforms worn by members of the Black Panther movement, but also of Michael Jackson’s performance outfits. Homages to other artists are more subtle, e.g. the reference to Nina Simone’s work is implemented in the integration of a vinyl cover of the album Silk and Soul in the song “Sandcastles” (41:35–41:39). Finally, the collaboration with other musicians and artists, e.g. Jack White, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, or James Blake, embeds Lemonade in and connects the album to a wider cultural context. For the song “Freedom” she worked together with Kendrick Lamar and thereby connected her performances with his, in particular to his 2016 Grammy performance, in which he entered the stage as part of a chain gang, addressing the disproportionately high rate of African American men within the prison population of the US.

22 Intermediality and the performative mode in Lemonade fulfill cultural-critical functions that manifest themselves in references to racially motivated injustices against African Americans in both the past and the present and on individual and collective levels (e.g. through slavery, police brutality, or negligence during Hurricane Katrina) and references to the Civil Rights and the Black Lives Matter movements.

23 The critical dimension of this performative mode is manifested in the performing African American female body in specific settings. Plantation houses in the south point to slavery (e.g. Intuition, “Sorry,” Hope), barren inner cityscapes reference police brutality, flooded areas refer to Hurricane Katrina (e.g. “Formation”), a bus alludes to the Middle Passage (e.g. “Sorry,” Apathy), and the setting of the football stadium (e.g. “Reformation,” “All Night”) on the one hand points at a corner stone of American sports culture but also at the exploitation of African American college students. These settings epitomize the African American—and in particular the female African American—experience of suffering, exploitation, discrimination, sexual abuse, and disenfranchisement in the US. In “Don’t Hurt Yourself” the dancers wear dresses where the sleeves are connected and through which their hands are literally tied, symbolizing a restricted agency through structural discrimination. The portrait shots of women’s faces is a recurring visual theme in Lemonade, e.g. in the chapter “Resurrection,” when this montage has a voice over of a conversation between two women who talk about the possibility of a future for their children. One of them claims that the answer is love on the one hand and the belief in Jesus on the other hand. This optimistic view is counterpointed when, during the following song, “Forward,” Gwen Carr, Sybrina Fulton, and Lezley McSpadden who lost their sons Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown in police shootings hold pictures of their dead children. “It’s in those moments that Beyoncé displays most profoundly what Butler called ‘hyper empathy— the ability to identify with and feel the pain of others. Which, of course, has always been at the heart of black music, black style” (qtd. in Als n.p.).

24 Integrated into the album are, in addition to the spoken passages by Beyoncé, other spoken passages that either match the visual level or serve as a voice-over. In the song “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” the line “Motivate your ass, call me Malcolm X” (14:37–14:40) is followed by a recording of Malcolm X claiming, “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman, the most unprotected person in America is the black

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woman, the most neglected person in America is the black woman” (14:40–14:59). This sequence serves as a voice-over for a silent montage of the portrait shots of African American women on the streets (see above) before the song sets in again. Further references to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s interconnect the songs “Don’t Hurt Yourself” with the chapter Apathy when Beyoncé is looking out of the window of a bus in a visual reference to the photograph of Rosa Parks on a bus in 1955 (17:51), or in the visual reference to Martin Luther King Jr. who is on the cover of the newspaper “The Truth,” held up by an African American man in the song “Formation.”6

25 “Formation,” the last song of the album, bears special significance. Already in the starting menu, in the intermedial and proleptic reference through the looped theme of “Formation,” the political dimension of the album becomes manifest. Beyoncé performed the song “Formation” at the Super Bowl halftime show, a spectacle which provoked public attention by its many references to the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, and the legacy of slavery in the structure of oppression and discrimination against people of color. She and her dancers wore leather clothes and black berets that referenced the clothes worn by the Black Panther movement. This song thus references discrimination against people of color in the United States but also forms of resistance, both in the past and the present. At the beginning of the song, Beyoncé is sitting on the roof of a New Orleans police car that is halfway submerged in a flooded cityscape, a reference to Hurricane Katrina that flooded New Orleans in 2005 and cost the lives of disproportionally many people of color.

26 The tone of the album is rebellious, at times angry but also conciliatory and hopeful. The performance features gestures of defiance, of reclaiming the past and the present throughout the album: A feast of African American women, images of them sitting and standing on large magnolia trees (49:30), the act of dancing inside plantation homes that feature paintings of an imaginary African American nobility (in “Formation”). With “Formation” the album ends in a demand for peace and justice. The song’s last sequence shows a young boy in a hoodie opposite a line of police men. This image is montaged with a pan view of graffiti that says “Stop shooting us.” When the young boy holds up his hands the gesture is reciprocated by the policemen. The album closes with the halfway submerged police car sinking with her on top of it and a final view of Beyoncé in a white corsage and a parasol. In the form of this visual montage the feminist statement of the album is connected to a political statement that calls for more justice for African Americans. Their performances however also epitomize the process of spiritual and emotional healing, self-empowerment, and the resistance against oppression.

4. Conclusion

27 In Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade intricate constellations of auditory, visual, and performative dimensions create an aesthetic that fulfills cohesive, transcultural, and critical functions. Beyoncé thereby locates herself in a tradition of African American artists who are outspoken about racial injustice in the United States, e.g. Langston Hughes who performed his Jazz poems with instrumental accompaniment, Nina Simone, or Billie Holiday. The album provokes acts of listening and viewing that are ethically charged by bringing to the fore, on the one hand, practices of racism and

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discrimination against people of color and in particular women, but on the other hand juxtaposing these with forms of resistance against oppression, artistic creativity, and forms of healing and working through – as epitomized in the title of the album, Lemonade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Als, Hilton. “Prince, Cecil Taylor, and Beyoncé's Shape-Shifting Black Body.” The New Yorker 26 Apr. 2016. Print.

Bal, Mieke. “Art, Language, Thought and Culture: Cultural Analysis Today.” The Contemporary Study of Culture. Ed. Austrian Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und Verkehr and Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften. Wien, 1999. 169–192. Print.

Bolter, J. D., and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Browne, Ray B. “Popular Culture: Notes toward a Definition.” Popular Culture and Curricula. Ed. Ronald Ambrosetti and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1972. 3– 11. Print.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Emden, Christian J., and Gabriele Rippl. “Introduction: Image, Text and Simulation.” ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality. Ed. Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl. Bern: Lang, 2010. 1–18. Print.

Empire, Kitty. “Best albums of 2016: No 1 Lemonade by Beyoncé.” The Guardian 16 Dec. 2016. Web.

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Grišakova, Marina, and Marie-Laure Ryan. “Editor’s Preface.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Ed. Marina Grišakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 1–7. Print.

Georgi, Claudia. “Contemporary British Theatre and Intermediality.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 530–546. Print.

Hebel, Udo J. Einführung in die Amerikanistik, American Studies. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008. Print.

Hempfer, Klaus W. “Performance, Performanz, Performativität: Einige Unterscheidungen zur Ausdifferenzierung eines Theoriefeldes.” Theorien des Performativen: Sprache - Wissen - Praxis ; eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme. Ed. Klaus W. Hempfer and Jörg Volbers. Bielefeld: transcript, 2011. 13– 41. Print.

Hess, Amanda. “Warsan Shire, the Woman Who Gave Poetry to Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade.’” The New York Times 27 Apr. 2016. Web.

Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé. Lemonade, Parkwood Entertainment, 2016. DVD.

McCarthy, Shannon, and James M. Manheim. “Beyoncé.” Contemporary Musicians. Ed. Tracy Ratiner. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2015. 16–19. Print.

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Ozzi, Dan. “The Angry Conservative Response to Beyoncé's ‘Lemonade’ Has Been Swift and Pointless: From Sean Hannity to Michelle Malkin, conservatives have been having a shit-fit about this ‘bad role model’ this week.” noisey. 29 Apr 2016. Web.

Petridis, Alexis. “‘Beyoncé is not a woman to be messed with’—Lemonade review.” The Guardian 25 Apr. 2016. Web.

Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Interetextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialites 6 (2005): 43–64. Print.

Redling, Erik. “The Musicalization of Poetry.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound —Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 494–511. Print.

Rippl, Gabriele. “Introduction.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 1–31. Print.

Robinson, Zandria F. “Beyoncé’s Black Southern ‘Formation’.” Rolling Stone 8 Feb. 2016.

Straumann, Barbara. “Adaptation—Remediation—Transmediality.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound—Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 249–267. Print.

Trier-Bieniek, Adrienne M. ed. The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism, 2016. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2016. Print.

Wenzel, Anna-Lena. Grenzüberschreitungen in der Gegenwartskunst: Ästhetische und philosophische Positionen. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. Print.

Wolf, Werner. “Intermedialität: Konzept, literaturwissenschaftliche Relevanz, Typologie, intermediale Formen.” Intertextualität, Intermedialität, Transmedialität: Zur Beziehung zwischen Literatur und anderen Medien. Ed. Volker C. Dörr and Tobias Kurwinkel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. 11–45. Print.

Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman. Repr. London: Routledge, 2010. 252–256. Print.

Wolf, Werner. “Literature and Music: Theory.” Handbook of Intermediality: Literature—Image—Sound —Music. Ed. Gabriele Rippl. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. 459–473. Print.

Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Print.

Wright, Matthew. “Revealed: African goddess of water and fertility that blesses mothers with TWINS who Beyoncé paid homage to at last night’s Grammy’s (and in Lemonade).” Daily Mail 1 Sep. 2017. Web.

NOTES

1. The artist’s name “Beyoncé” will be used in this article to refer to Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. 2. The artwork Lemonade by Beyoncé will be referred to as “visual album.” This term highlights the visual and auditory dimensions of the album but also hides its complexity that results from multilayered interrelations of medialities, art forms, and forms of signification. 3. In 2016 she was added as 51st on the Forbes’ List of the world’s 50 most powerful women, a list that comprises women entrepreneurs, politicians, CEOs and decision makers. 4. Many reviews focus on the interrelations between the lyrics of her songs on infidelity and betrayal in her marriage and her own relationship to her husband Jay-Z (cf. Empire)

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5. Als claims that the major inspirational force of this movie was the African American science fiction author Octavia Butler, in particular referring to the black female body. 6. There is a significant overlap, both textual and visual between the visual reference in “Formation” and the article by Charlene Muhammad in the newspaper The Final Call, published on January 19, 2016.

ABSTRACTS

In 2016, Beyoncé published Lemonade, a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyoncé locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America.

INDEX

Keywords: intermediality, sound, vision, performativity, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Werner Wolf, Gabriele Rippl, Kendrick Lamar

AUTHOR

JOHANNA HARTMANN Johanna Hartmannis a scholar of American literature at the University of Augsburg. At the moment, she also holds a position as a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. In her dissertation she focused on intermediality and the study of literary visuality in the works of the contemporary American author Siri Hustvedt by combining concepts of intermediality studies with a phenomenological approach (Literary Visuality in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Phenomenological Perspectives, 2016). She furthermore co-edited the collected volume Zones of Focused Ambiguities in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (together with Christine Marks and Hubert Zapf, 2016) andCensorship and Exile (ed. with Hubert Zapf, 2015). In her second book project (habilitation), she focuses on the American drama and theatre, analyzing repositionings within the cultural field at the beginning of the 20th century.

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“Talking ’Bout My Generation”: Visual History Interviews—A Practitioner’s Report

Wolfgang Lorenz

1. Oral and Visual History

1 Oral history, in a modern sense, is about 100 years old. The first to mention the term, and practice it, was Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a Harvard educated eccentric and Greenwich Village bum on the brink of madness. Gould claimed that he had written down everything he had overheard in subway trains, on “EL” platforms, in Bowery flop houses and in Harlem. “I imagine that the most valuable sections will be those which deal with groups that are inarticulate such as the Negro, the reservation Indian and the immigrant. It seems to me that the average person is just as much history as the ruler or celebrity,” he wrote to the Harvard historian George Alfred Sarton in 1931.

2 After Gould’s death in a mental hospital in 1957, the whereabouts of his Oral History of our Time remained shrouded in mystery. No-one can say with certainty that his magnum opus ever existed. Although Joe Gould’s oral history accounts were not filmed or audio recorded, but written down, they are considered to be influential historical antecedents of today’s form. “His early belief that oral history was a way to document the lives of everyday people… animates much 21st century oral history practice” (Oral History Association).

3 While mostly unknown in Europe, oral history still flourishes in the US. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, this is how the American Oral History Association (OHA) defines the term: Oral history refers both to a method of recording and preserving oral testimony and to the product of that process. It begins with an audio or video recording of a first person account made by an interviewer with an interviewee, both of whom have the conscious intention of creating a permanent record to contribute to an understanding of the past. (OHA)

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4 Though conclusive and adequate, the definition provided by the OHA sees oral history only as a vehicle leading to a better understanding of the recent past. This is but one part of the full picture. Because the OHA does not distinguish between audio and video recording, it fails to acknowledge that the visual aspect of an oral history interview opens up a second layer of meaning that is significant. Facial expressions and gestures also reveal meaning, not only what is being said. More often than not a flicker in the eye, or an agitation during a narrated passage supports, underlines, and emotionally verifies what is being communicated.1 The addition of the visual dimension to the rulebook of oral history interviews in which voice and gestures are necessary constituents to the reading of the material would lead to an “intermedial” history and enrich the informative value of the discipline.

5 Oral history would therefore not just contribute to a better understanding of the past, but also to a better understanding of the interviewee. Put simply: It would help the recipient get to know the narrator as an individual. This is an eminently relevant aspect whether the person interviewed is well-known in their field or not. 2 6 Oral (and visual) history is a purely academic subject of the social and history sciences, which is in many respects very similar to librarianship with a few TV and radio production skills thrown in. It rests on the threshold between journalism and academic research. From its practitioners it requires meticulous research capabilities, empathy, curiosity, patience, and very good organizational skills. Although it may sound dry and unsexy as an academic discipline, the OHA alone lists 52 affiliated centers and collections in the US. Arguably the three most prestigious Oral History research centers and collections are located at the Columbia University in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and the University of Southern California, which houses the Shoah Foundation, established by Hollywood film director Stephen Spielberg. From 1994 to 1999 the Shoah Foundation videotaped, catalogued, and indexed a monumental 52.000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, yielding a spectacular 120.000 hours of interview material. The Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, as it was formally known, permits many universities around the globe online access to its archives, among them the Freie Universität in Berlin.

7 Oral history archives cover a large array of topics associated with newer socio-cultural and political developments. They are mostly arranged mono-thematically in content, dealing for instance with the Civil Rights Movement, the women's movement, the lesbian and gay movement, and the migration to the northern states or trade unionism to name but a few. Archives or research centers dealing with musicians are relatively rare in comparison. This might come as a surprise given the impact of American popular music in the last 100 years. Two of those are worth a mention. Their subject matter is Jazz, America’s classical music.

8 The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutger’s University in New Jersey is probably the more prestigious of the two. It has a collection of 120 oral histories of pre-Swing and Swing Era Jazz musicians—the “most comprehensive and widely consulted body of Jazz oral histories in the United States” (Rutger’s University website). For the interviews, taped between 1972 and 1983, the musicians had to be sixty years and older. They range in length from 5 to 35 hours and are accompanied by typewritten transcripts. “The interviews have been consulted by hundreds of scholars and writers producing articles, books and dissertations, in addition to frequent use by producers of radio and television,” the Rutger’s jazz center proudly claims on its website. It was founded in

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1972, and its director of many years was Dan Morgenstern, the renowned jazz historian and a former editor of DownBeat, the prominent American music magazine dealing with jazz and blues music.

9 The Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program in Washington DC, the second important archive of its kind, “has documented more than one hundred senior jazz musicians, performers, relatives, and business associates” (Smithsonian website). Unfortunately the collection consists of audio-recordings only, each of which was conducted by a “jazz authority” and has an average length of six hours.

10 But what about the music that came after Jazz? What about Rhythm and Blues? No systematic approach to archiving R&B3 after WWII has as yet matured into anything remotely resembling the depth and scope of the collections of the two organizations mentioned above. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, claimed to have started an oral history project in 2015, but has been remarkably quiet about this subject ever since.

11 The reasons why academia still seems to shy away from R&B in general and oral history accounts in particular are twofold. Ever since Adorno, the mass medium of popular music has suffered from a severe image problem in academic circles, based on a deep distrust of anything that is openly commercial. From its beginnings around 1900, popular recorded music has always also been a commodity. If you wanted to own it, you had to buy it. It was produced, packaged, marketed, distributed, and promoted by corporations which specialized in selling recorded music. As the English scholar and music critic Simon Frith points out, “twentieth century popular music means the twentieth century popular record” (Frith 12).

12 Secondly, music is a non-verbal means of communication. To address it adequately is difficult in text based academic courses. Foot-tapping culture remains a contested area for scholars, although the situation has considerably improved in recent years with a new generation of academics.

13 There are good reasons, indeed, why this popular American art form should not be overlooked as it carries unusually strong political, economic, and cultural traces of what Stephen Greenblatt calls “social energy” (Greenblatt, 6). After all, the political and social turmoil of the time had a profound effect on and was reflected by popular music, especially of the 50s and 60s, and most revealingly so in the lyrics and music of Rhythm and Blues. “It is important to recognize that r and b, although it is rooted deep in the particularities of the African American experience,” Brian Ward points out, “had a phenomenal capacity to move hearts, minds, feet and other extremities, irrespective of race, class, gender, religion or nationality” (Ward 8).

2. Reading Interview Material

14 Versatile interpretative approaches to “life stories,” as oral history accounts were also labelled, have been developed by social scientists and historians. These provide the methodological backbone which helps us ‘read’ personal narratives as narratives “beyond the individual story” (Maynes, Pierce, Laslett 131). In this context we should consider “stories as evidence about how individuals are embedded in personal, social and political relations within the constraints of their particular cultural and historical

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contexts” (129). As we shall see later in the text, we will have to add to this the manifold production processes of the post-war American record industry as well.

15 Unfortunately, life stories are also subjective and memory can produce flawed, imprecise and unreliable accounts of the past. This aspect in particular has led to skepticism about the accuracy of those narratives in the community of scholars trained in analyzing precise empirical data. And surely this needs to be addressed. Personal life stories can never be the only true version of what happened because they are tainted by personal objectives. However, as the authors of Telling Stories argue, “the value of personal life narratives is related precisely to their tendency to go beyond the simple facts. They tap into the realms of meaning, subjectivity, imagination, and emotion” (Maynes, Pierce, Laslett 148). In other words: They deliver a personal or human dimension that would have been lost otherwise. However, to understand them, they need to be “read” in their historical context.

16 The following sound bites, recorded between 2004 and 2008, are part of a series of filmed “visual history” interviews with some of the most iconic artists, producers, musicians, recording studio owners and music managers in the history of recorded music. They cover the period of the 40s, 50s, and 60s of the last century and touch on topics such as the post-WWII migration of southern African Americans to the cities of the north, racism and segregation in the rural South, the origins and characteristics of the black musical idiom, or the erosion of the power of the black pulpit. All interviewees were older than 60 years of age.

17 The choice of interviewees was guided by the intention of producing a documentary film about the independent years (1947–1967) of Atlantic Records, a record label which was by some measures the most influential of all independent recording labels and by all measures the most successful. Every person videotaped was connected with Atlantic Records in those years as an artist, producer, owner/manager, or songwriter.

18 As disappointing as it may sound to some, American popular music history cannot be retold, or seriously analyzed, as a constant succession of artists and styles alone. Just as relevant in the creation of music are the many facets of the industrial production process—the division of labor in the music industry. Put succinctly: “The industrialization of music cannot be understood as something which happens to music, since it describes a process in which music itself is made” (Frith 12). Like Simon Frith, I would also argue that any understanding of American popular music is impossible if not all the ‘players’ representing the value chain of music making are represented and the geographical, social, cultural or historical context in which they operated is addressed.

19 I shall therefore introduce each of the following five video sound bites by Ben E. King, Jerry Wexler, Solomon Burke, Jimmy Johnson and Joel Dorn4 by providing a short descriptive biographical section. Apart from providing telling insights into the history of American popular music that should be fascinating, among others, for scholars of American culture, they also give a more detailed glimpse of the advantages of intermedial video history narratives. Unfortunately, a critical and systematic academic approach or tool kit for this is, as far as I know, still not available. The suggested interpretations are therefore subjective and, to be honest, informed more by enthusiasm than by method. Developing this method would make for a promising research topic.

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3. Ben E. King (1938–2015)

20 Quite unlike the singer Solomon Burke, who carried the designation “King of Rock and Soul,” or James Brown, who called himself “King of Soul,” Ben E. King cheekily chose an aristocratic stage name to start with. In contrast to the elaborated stage antiques of his two contemporaries, who laid bare their souls on stage, he thought of himself as an entertainer and interpreter of songs in the vein of Nat “King” Cole or such like.

21 King was born Benjamin Earl Nelson in rural Henderson, North Carolina in 1936, the oldest of 8 children. Until he rejoined the rest of his family in New York, to where his father had moved “to look for a better life,”5 King was raised by his grandmother. “The thing that we did the most was in and out of church almost 7 days a week,” he remembers in my 2004 interview with him. Like so many black performers of his generation he started singing in the gospel choir of his local church.

22 Coming to the big city was at first a frightening and disorienting experience for King. Adapting to the new situation was not easy, and not without grave mistakes. The still naive country boy from the Carolinas stumbled into potentially dangerous situations: “I’ve met pimps, I’ve met hustlers, I’ve met killers—I mean legit killers, contract killers —I’ve met these people, I’ve shook hands with them.”

23 Eventually King started to acclimatize to the rougher edges of big city life and joined a finger tapping, tight harmony singing Doo-wop group. The 1950s “revealed a process perceived by many blacks to be the dawning of a new era of black opportunity,” says Brian Ward (59). Its main musical expression was the vocal group sound of Doo-wop that for a short time reflected the experiences of black migrants in the big cities of the north. What also emerged was a new value system towards white cultural norms. King, who would eventually become a member of the prominent vocal group The Drifters and gain lasting international fame as the singer of “Stand by Me,” amplifies these new values when he says: “For most whites, the epitome of what could happen to them in show business was to reach Carnegie Hall. For most blacks, the epitome of what could happen to you was to reach the Apollo. Once you played the Apollo, that was it! To hell with Carnegie Hall!”

24 In the following excerpt, King talks about his first meeting with the Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, the white owners of Atlantic Records. My first time walking in there was my first time meeting Jerry and, er, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. It was strange because I was just standing there looking at two guys that owned the building. I say, ‘Whoo, I’m impressed with these guys—they own the building!’ [Laughs]. My father just owned one little restaurant and they own the building! [Laughs]. And, you know, and then too, you have to allow for the fact that I’m coming still—I still have that Henderson, North Carolina, mentality. It took me the longest to still be able to stand and look directly into the eyes of most whites.

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Link: http://www.ru.nl/nas/research/video/sound-vision/ ©Poparchive GmbH. All Rights Reserved

25 The authors of Telling Stories quite rightly point out that “if personal narrative analyses are to be of interest… they must go beyond the individual and grapple with issues of generalization” (Maynes, Pierce, Laslett 128). Reading the soundbite this way, what historical generalizations are in evidence? What does it tells us about race in 1960s America?

26 Without going into too much detail or stating what is so blatantly obvious, we are transported back into the time of the Civil Rights Movement when black men, especially in the South but also, albeit in a weaker form, in the urban centers of the north, had to hide behind a “mask of deference” (Estes 1), and most whites refused or were unable to see African Americans, as Ralph Ellison describes in Invisible Man. King still remembers those restrictions. But he remembers them as echoes of the past due to a new concept of racial self-assertion and self-esteem acquired on the streets of New York City where newly acquired social skills had weakened that “North Carolina mentality” of subservience and social exclusion. The terror that once must have been so strong is now subdued, but still very much in evidence for King—and the viewer.

4. Jerry Wexler (1917–2008)

27 Born in 1917, Wexler was the son of a Jewish window-washer. He was raised in Washington Heights, “a lower middle class enclave of Jews, Italians, Irish” (Wexler 3) in New York. His mother Elsa, a communist, had big dreams for her son: he was to write the Great American Novel. To her disappointment, however, Jerry was a “wayward youth,” spending more time in poolroom establishments than in school. (He finished a university degree in journalism much later). Early on he became fascinated with Jazz music and started to hang out in the Harlem Jazz clubs of the immediate post- renaissance years and on 52nd Street in Manhattan, the Jazz mecca of New York. He also started collecting Jazz records—and an all consuming passion for black music began to emerge that would shape his subsequent life. As a journalist for the music-

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industry trade paper Billboard in the early 1950s, he suggested renaming Billboard’s chart for black music from “race” to rhythm and blues chart, thereby inventing the term rhythm and blues which from then on became the new designation for African- American popular music.

28 In 1953 Wexler joined Atlantic Records as a partner. Perhaps the best record producer America has ever seen, he produced Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin. He did not care much for The Beatles, whose music he thought derivative, and he did not like the white rock bands that had joined the Atlantic label in the late 60s. To him The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were “rockoids.” Wexler was a self-professed “soul man” who had the ability to “connect with a soul singer like no-one else could,” as Ben E. King claimed in my 2004 interview. Under Wexler’s guidance Atlantic became the main provider for raw and fiery Southern Soul music provided by the Stax studios in Memphis and, later on, from Muscle Shoals.

29 In the middle of the 1950s, as a young man, Wexler was a frequent visitor to the numerous music venues that had sprouted up in Harlem between 110th and 136th street during the so-called Harlem Renaissance. This is what he remembers most: Before Rock’n’ Roll and even before the very beginning of Rhythm and Blues back in the thirties you would see all the great jazz performers there: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Bessie Smith. You would see the great dancers. It was a period of great elegance. It was just a little after the Harlem Renaissance but there still was a spillover of these great performers. They had great orchestras that you would see there: Jimmie Lunceford, Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson. And there were certain songs. The Apollo [Theater] had a theme song called ‘I may be wrong, but I think you’re wonderful’ and when you heard those strains, you know, there was an instant association with the whole culture. [Wexler sings]. And then there were the after hours places. The clubs in basements and so on where musicians would come to jam. The jam session is more or less forgotten. Musicians don’t do that anymore, as far as I know. But back in the day they would get together after hours and play together for pleasure and the playing was all improvisation and they had the great tenor men the great trumpet players, the great piano players. You had the great stride piano players of the day such as Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Willy ‘The Lion’ [Smith]…. and they would have, what you called cutting contests. One man would sit down and show that what he was putting down was much more effective than the next man or the prior man. And by mutual consent a winner would be declared. It was a contest without any animus…. The other thing in Harlem was there were certain places where they had ethnic food such as barbecued ribs done southern style. There was a comic [comedian] called Eddie Green, a negro comic, and he owned three of these rib joints. And when you went to one of these places which you would do after the Apollo Theatre or after The Savoy, when you were hungry, you could order a side of ribs, barbecued ribs and a choice of two out of three vegetables: cole slaw, potato salad or what we used to call rhythm and blues spaghetti. It was canned spaghettis. 35 cents for everything.

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30 Although in this sound bite only present in “animus,” Wexler was a man of difficult words. “He lived on the American dictionary, using 9 $ words or 12 $ words or 25 $ words” remembers Jerry Leiber, of Leiber and Stoller, the eminent rock and roll songwriters, “and took every opportunity to display his tremendously impressive vocabulary.”

31 But this is not really the decisive point here. What we see is not only the revered record mogul Jerry Wexler but also an actual eye-witness of the Harlem Renaissance. In 2004, when the interview was recorded, it was already next to impossible to talk to such a person. This is a marvelous peep through a ‘window’ that was slowly but surely closing. We also come to understand where Wexler’s fixation with black music originates from, and that there always has been a deep but seldomly investigated connection between R&B and soul food. (But that’s for another essay.)

32 Jerry Wexler was one of the iconic producers of American popular music and he was well aware of his status. In a recording industry that was at the time full of conmen and hucksters, he was a rare individual indeed—a street savvy intellectual with a great business sense. He had a reputation of being a witty conversationalist and was a spokesperson for all questions concerning African-American music. He knew he was a legend and you can see in the clip at hand that he tried hard to satisfy expectations. I think, he “overacted” a bit when he started to intone the Apollo song, but who is complaining when you have the chance to record an eye-witness of the Harlem Renaissance and the producer of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan on videotape?

5. Solomon Burke (1940–2010)

33 Burke was one of the most colorful music performers in show business blessed with a voice of treacle and hellfire. Some critics called him the best soul singer ever. He was also a church minister and a gifted business man. He called a chain of mortuary

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institutes his own, and yes, Burke had sold popcorn in the intervals of his own concerts back in the 60s, as legend has it. He purportedly had also fathered 21 children.

34 Jerry Wexler called him “wily, highly intelligent, a salesman of epic proportions, sly, sure footed, a never-say-die entrepreneur” (Wexler 150). Solomon Burke was rather modest when he referred to himself as being “a minister first, then a father, and then an entertainer.” In 1961, he was the first black performer who had a hit record with a Country and Western song, “Just Out Of Reach.” Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” often credited with being the first, was released a year later.

35 Until he died at the age of 70 on his way to a concert in Amsterdam, Solomon Burke still released highly acclaimed records.

36 The next sound bite mixes the personal, anecdotal, and historical. Burke’s statement echoes a time when R&B was still labeled “devil’s music” in the black community, when the markets for selling records were regionalized and even the radio stations were segregated. Just Out Of Reach was recorded, it was given to me because I think we made a mistake. We told Jerry Wexler that we couldn’t be classified as Rhythm and Blues and we would have to be classified as something else besides a Rhythm and Blues artist because of my commitment to the ministry. And he looked at us and said: ‘Are you crazy, we are the biggest Rhythm and Blues label in the world. This is it! There is no other, we’re rhythm and blues.’ We said, well, we have to be something else because it’s not gonna work for the church. He said: ‘Well, you figure some, come back and let me know. You don’t need these songs, these great songs that I’ve got from all these people. You come back and let us know what you’re gonna do.’ He was a little aggravated. When we came back he gave us four Country and Western songs. [Smiles] You know it was like the kiss of write-off. Next thing I know when they did release Just Out Of Reach we couldn’t get airplay because there was no format for a black artist singing country music in America. No black disc-jockey would play it because it didn’t fit their rhythm and blues format. The white disc-jockeys couldn’t play it because there was just no such thing as a black country artist. So it became an amazing feat. I didn’t even have a picture then. So then it became a point of putting my picture on a placard. One place in Florida, in the Everglades in Florida, thought I was Salome Burke. They thought I was a chick with a heavy voice. It was an amazing time. Just Out Of Reach was a fascinating time for us to learn about the different areas where we could perform, where the record was a hit. Basically in the south, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, you know, all those areas. Oklahoma, Texas. It was just a huge record for us.

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37 Not all oral history interviews are about honesty or truthfulness. Sometimes they just visually play back and verify what we already knew about a person. Burke was a larger than life artist. He might have been the first one who managed to become a brand. Larger than life is how he wants to project himself in an interview situation as well. His delivery is faultless, he never loses eye contact with the interviewer. We see him sitting on a throne-like armchair, not dissimilar to the actual throne he used during his concerts. Is he sincere or just acting? It doesn’t really matter. He performs and entertains in any situation and knows that this is expected of him. This interview was a slick performance indeed. What you see is what you get.

6. Jimmy Johnson (born 1943)

38 Jimmy Johnson was born into a musical family. His father Ray was a semi-professional country musician about to gain wider recognition but chose to opt out of the music business and work at the Reynolds Metals plant in Muscle Shoals instead when he started a family. “Dad had bought me a trumpet and I joined the Sheffield Junior High School band,” Johnson recalls, “but that wasn’t my instrument and I quit the band. Later, when I heard Chuck Berry, I wanted to play the guitar.”

39 Muscle Shoals, a small town at the north-western tip of Alabama was not exactly a music mecca before Rick Hall’s FAME studios brought some attention to the area. A budding musician had the choice of going to Nashville, the center of Country and Western or to Memphis, which was home to Rhythm and Blues and, ever since Elvis Presley had started his career here, to Rock and Roll.

40 Johnson decided on a career as a R&B musician because he “didn’t want to work in a shoe store” and eventually became part of the four piece Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, an all white musical setup. In the Southern states a recording studio was perhaps the only place with permeable racial boundaries and in these surroundings Johnson played rhythm guitar on some of the great recordings of all time, including Aretha Franklin’s

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“I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” and “Hey Jude,” Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock And Roll,” and the Staples Singers’ “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There.” As an engineer, Johnson recorded Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses.”

41 The following soundbite is, superficially read, quite humorous. Johnson remembers a day in the studio with Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic owner, who was known for his violent temper and for exchanging musicians who would not or could not play what he, the non-musician, had in mind. That Johnson can remember this at all points to the actual feeling of terror he must have felt when Wexler recorded with him. One time he came up to me and said: ‘Jimmy, Jimmy Baby, can you give me a little giggy, giggy, gongy, gongy.’ I thought to myself: Giggy, giggy, gongy, gongy: my ass, I can’t believe this, what the hell is that. And I’m saying, well, this is it for me I guess, and so I didn’t do giggy, giggy, gongy, gongy because I didn’t know what the hell he wanted, but I had another lick in mind and I said: ‘Jerry what do you think about this lick,” and I started playing it.’ He said: ‘Jimmy I like that!’ And I wanted to get down on my knees and thank the Lord right at that moment.

Link: http://www.ru.nl/nas/research/video/sound-vision/ ©Poparchive GmbH. All Rights Reserved

42 This is a good example of cross-referencing sound bites. It tells us as much about Wexler, who could be a fear-inducing presence, as it tells us about Jimmy Johnson, who was just plain scared. In oral history we always have to contend with the notion that memory can be faulty and misrepresentations of the past can be used to aggrandize the present. You only have to look into the eyes of Johnson to see that he is being very honest here.

7. Joel Dorn (1942–2007)

43 Joel Dorn “got hooked to black music,” he said, the day he heard Ray Charles for the first time on the radio in his hometown of Philadelphia. Since Charles would not have been available in the white downtown record stores, he had to venture into the black

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suburbs to find his records. The music of Ray Charles, he claimed, changed his life. When Dorn was 19 years old he became a jazz disc jockey at WHAT-FM in Philadelphia, choosing David “Fathead” Newman’s “Hard Times” as his signature tune. Newman was a member of the Ray Charles Band then.

44 From 1967 until 1974 Dorn worked for Atlantic Records as a jazz producer. There he supervised recordings of Max Roach, Yusef Lateef, Willy DeVille, the Neville Brothers, Herbie Mann, Les McCann, Mose Allison, Jimmy Scott and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Dorn also discovered Bette Midler at a gay night club in New York City.

45 As producer of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” Dorn won two Grammy awards in 1972 and 1974 for single of the year.

46 Here Joel Dorn talks about a night out in the dark heart of Harlem with his friend King Curtis, the famous Atlantic sax player, session musician and arranger. One time Curtis picks me up after session. When I first came to New York, you know, we would go and hang out. He would take me uptown, I would meet his friends. There was a whole other culture uptown, the nightlife crowd, you know, all kinds of characters: numbers writers, hookers and gangsters, musicians, bartenders —it just was a another world—and regular people too. And I kinda knew that scene from Philly but Philly was not New York. It was a much expanded, much more glamorous version of a little scene I’d known in Philly. So one night he picks me up after the session. Says: ‘Do you want to go uptown?’ It was great. I always loved going up there with him. Because he was like royalty in Harlem. You came in with King Curtis, you came in on a good ticket, you know. So we go to what looked like an abandoned neighborhood and we walked to this building, I got scared. ‘Where are we going?’ And there was a big metal door and there was a big metal guy in front of that door. And he goes ‘Hey Curtis’ and we went in. And what it was, it was a place where they cut drugs. And there were these old Cuban women, smoking cigars, with no teeth. And they would have like the heroin over here and the coke here and the cut over here. And they had these screens, like on a handle, like very fine screening and they would pick up a little bit of heroin, flip, pick up a little bit, a lot more cut, flip. They really knew what they were doing, because everything was white. If you made a mistake, you know, you can make a ten-thousand-dollar mistake. So these women really knew what they were doing. And they would cut it, other people would bag it. A real factory, you know. I had never been at a place like that. So he calls me over and he takes the pick of his finger and he dips it I think it was heroin first, I mean, the head of a pin. He says: ‘Stick your tongue out.’ Puts the finger on my tongue with the heroin on it. Says: ‘You got that taste?’ I didn’t get high, you know, I got scared. So I said: ‘Yeah, I got that taste.’ Then we hung around for about a half hour, forty-five minutes and then we went over there where the coke was, cocain. We did the same thing. [Puts his finger to his tongue as before]. ‘You got that taste?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t know what was going on. [Pauses] He said: ‘Never get involved with this stuff, but if you do, always taste it first. Do you remember the taste of the first one and the taste of the second one? If it doesn’t taste like that don’t touch it.’ I thought that was one of the wildest, sweetest things anybody had ever done. You know, he was kinda saying, ‘it gets tricky where you’re playing.’

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47 This is the best anyone can ever hope for in visual-oral history and a wonderful case study for intermediality. Dorn is a master of his craft. What we have here is a most fascinating example of cinematic storytelling. He conjures up images of places and people with amazing rhetorical athleticism and harnesses all his narrative skills to illuminate Harlem and the counter-culture of the 60s. The composition, the use of direct speech, the characters, the rhythm, and the denouement. It is all meticulously crafted and delivered with elegance and authority—a marvelous morality play, which must be seen for best effect. Now watch again!

8. Coda

48 The uses of oral history interviews are naturally not only confined to the walls of learned institutions as research and/or teaching material for lectures and seminars. When produced professionally, the material is also the perfect basis for TV or film documentaries as the recent Jim Jarmusch film about Iggy Pop, Gimme Danger (2016), shows. Still, in times when every project needs to have a marketing plan and is strait- jacketed into gain and loss cost analysis, an argument based on worthiness alone will not suffice. Collecting cultural memory is an almost impossible selling proposition. Often the “problem” is solved by the interviewees themselves. They die and slam the window to the past shut forever. This has already happened to most musical personnel of the 50s and early 60s.

49 Only recently, Hua Hsu in the New Yorker (July 24, 2017) maintained that oral history as a basis for biographical literature has these days become “the preferred format for revisiting the recent past.“ This is good news.

50 Meanwhile, seeing those people talk leaves most students and academics spellbound. They want to see more. Collecting hard facts might be more scientific, but it is not as humane. History, music history, is created by people, why not let them talk about it.

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Every interview not conducted is a wanton destruction of (African-American) cultural memory.

51 But what good is it talking about music? Can words swing? Can the sound and vision of interviews convey music? Listen and look carefully, I think they can, and do.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources:

All interviews were conducted by myself in 2004 (Ben E. King, Jerry Wexler and Joel Dorn) and in 2008 (Jimmy Johnson and Solomon Burke). Link: http://www.ru.nl/nas/research/video/sound- vision/ ©Poparchive GmbH. All Rights Reserved.

Secondary Sources:

Estes, Steve. I Am A Man: Race Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. Print.

Frith, Simon. Music For Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearian Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print.

George Sarton Additional Papers, 1901-1956 (MS Am 1803.4) Houghton Library, Harvard University. Print.

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NOTES

1. One of those emotionally revealing moments occurred during my interview with Ahmet Ertegun, the Chairman of Atlantic Records, in 2004. While most of his answers seemed to be routine, when he talked about the label’s first hit record, Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, he suddenly

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became agitated and it seemed that he was caught up in his memories. For a moment he was no longer the 81 year old grey eminence of the American recording industry but the young and eager Ertegun of 1949, who was very relieved indeed when his fledgling company on the verge of bankruptcy was finally saved by a successful record. 2. Oral history is the generic term referring to all such interviews. Visual history, or oral visual history, is videotaped oral history. The differentiation is important as many interviews in this field were recorded with audio equipment only. 3. R&B is used as a generic term for all music based on this form, for example Rock and Soul music and to a certain extent even some forms of Country and Western. 4. The process of choosing who I would include in my list of interviewees was not an easy one. I finally decided to go for originality, compendious brevity in content and, naturally, performance. No-one likes to listen to a boring soundbite. 5. All the following quotes from King, Wexler, Burke, Johnson and Dorn are from interviews conducted by myself. Please see also the Works Cited list.

ABSTRACTS

The critical appreciation of videotaped oral history interviews has been hampered by one- dimensional interpretations of the spoken word alone. The addition of the visual dimension in which voice and gestures are necessary constituents to the reading of the material has so far been widely ignored. Unjustly so, because it enriches the discipline with new interpretative approaches that can lead the way to a more human evaluation of historical events and personalities, thereby enlivening the dry facts that empirical historical sciences usually provide. The article will endeavor to describe what we see when we listen, and how this visual component can enhance informative values. “‘Talking ’Bout My Generation’” discusses these aspects in connection with African American culture and music. The following sound bites are part of a series of videotaped oral history interviews with some of the most influential artists, producers and music managers in the history of recorded music. Historically, they cover the period from the 30s to the 60s of the last century. Featured is hitherto unpublished interview material of the soul singer Ben E. King, the Southern musician Jimmy Johnson, the record producer Jerry Wexler, Solomon Burke, who needs no introduction, and Joel Dorn, the wonderful former jazz producer for the iconic Atlantic Records label.

INDEX

Keywords: oral visual history, intermediality, African American performance culture, racism

AUTHOR

WOLFGANG LORENZ Wolfgang Lorenz is Senior Editor Film and Text at facts and fiction GmbH in Cologne. After his MA in German, English, and American literature at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, he has

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been a lecturer at many European universities including Southbank University in London, Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg, the University of Bonn, Humboldt University, and Freie Universität Berlin. He specialized in music and business journalism working for various international magazines and media including Forbes and Stern, ZDF (Mainz), European Business Channel (Zurich), or VOX (Cologne). He is the founder of Poparchive GmbH, Hamburg, and producer of a documentary film on the US label “Atlantic Records,” best known for its numerous recordings of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz.

European journal of American studies, 12-4 | 2017