Simon Frith PLAYING with REAL FEELING
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
new formations NUMBER 4 SPRING I 988 Simon Frith PLAYING WITH REAL FEELING: MAKING SENSE OF JAZZ IN BRITAIN Britain has several languages and a multiplicity of accents, but the voice that dominates British pop is a commercial construct, a phoney diction that says more about our slavish relationship to America than it does about popular expression.1 So writes Stuart Cosgrove in a 1987 City Limits feature on rock's thirty-sixth birthday. 'It was only with the emergence of Rock'n'Roll', explain Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook, 'that the full impact of American culture thrust to the very heart of working-class experience',2 and the search for a surviving British pop voice has been an obsessive theme of left cultural criticism ever since. But even before the impact of Elvis et al., there was recurring anxiety about the effect of American music on working-class expression. Richard Hoggart brooded in his 1957 The Uses of Literacy on the decline of 'the open- hearted and big-bosomed' songs and singers of his pre-war childhood, while in 1946 Vaudeville historian Ernest Short noted that popular songs dating back to the turn of the century reflected the humorous outlook of the Cockney, the Lancashire lad, the Yorkshire lassies, the Tynesider, and the factory hand from 'Glasgie' rather than that of some alien with no firmer hold upon a traditional social atmosphere than an East Side New Yorker in the pay of Tin Pan Alley, as is so often the case today.3 For Mass-Observation in 1939 the Lambeth Walk was thus remarkable as a revival of community music: It proves that if you give the masses something which connects on with their own lives and streets, at the same time breaking down the conventions of shyness and stranger-feeling, they will take to it with far more spontaneous feeling than they have ever shown for the paradise-drug of the American dance-tune.4 This left dismissal of American pop as a 'paradise-drug' was matched by a conservative contempt for what Rudyard Kipling called 'the imported heathendom' of 'Americanized stuff, and even before the First World War there were, from this perspective, disturbing developments: With the passing of the old, healthy, sensual (but not sensuous) English dances came the rushing in of alien elements; chiefest and most deadly, the 7 cake-walk, a marvellous, fascinating measure of tremendous significance. The cake-walk tells us why the negro and the white can never lie down together. It is a grotesque, savage and lustful heathen dance, quite proper in Ashanti but shocking on the boards of a London hall.5 The twin themes of Americanization - corruption of working-class culture from above (the pop commodity, large-scale commerce), corruption of national culture from below (blacks, Jews, the masses) - are easily confused and it has become an orthodoxy of cultural studies that left and right responses to mass culture are in fact different facets of the same bourgeois defence. 'For there we have it', writes Iain Chambers. The howls of protest and outrage that accompanied the flamboyant signs of a post-war recovery and, by the second half of the 1950s, a newly discovered consumerism were not only directed westwards across the Atlantic. The fundamental target was industrial society itself. 'Educated' comment and opinion leaders, generally far removed from the daily workings and experience of post-war popular urban culture, claimed that it contained the alarming ability to 'level down' culture and sweep it away ... By the 1950s, popular culture was clearly flourishing without the parochial blessing and participation of that culture. It was increasingly indifferent to the accusations launched against it from 'above'. Existing beyond the narrow range of school syllabuses, 'serious' comment and 'good taste', popular concerns broke 'culture' down into the immediate, the transitory, the experienced and the lived.6 For Chambers 1950s 'American' mass culture was urban British popular culture, its authenticity (its 'livedness') guaranteed by its 'heathendom': it was the black elements of the new pop music that made it relevant for the new experiences of age and class and community. In Dick Hebdige's words: Just as the Afro-American musical language emerged from a quite different cultural tradition to the classical European one, obeyed a different set of rules, moved to a different time and placed a far greater emphasis on the role of rhythm, participation and improvisation, so the new economy based on the progressive automation and depersonalisation of the production process and the transformed patterns of consumption it engendered disrupted and displaced the old critical language. This new economy - an economy of consumption, of the signifier, of endless replacement, supercession, drift and play, in turn engendered a new language of dissent.7 Hebdige suggests that the British cultural establishment (the BBC, for example) attempted to neutralize pop's subversive language by making it available only after 'elaborate monitoring and framing procedures' - rock'n'roll was mediated by 'already-established "professional" presenters' like Pete Murray and David Jacobs. But this move was thwarted by the materiality of American goods, by the sound and look and shape of things. Just by being (by being desired) they mocked the values of their working-class users' supposed 'cultural heritage'. The oppositions set up here - Afro-American vs. European music, 'popular 8 NEW FORMATIONS urban' vs. 'educated' culture, the dissenting consumer vs. the established professional - underpin a new reading of pop culture: American sounds cross the sea to liberate not enslave us; the back-beat supplies the symbolic means of resistance to bourgeois hegemony. This is a cheering picture but increasingly misleading (the Tories are in favour of such American 'liberation' too - freeing market forces and all that) and in this article I want to make a counter-point: 'Americanization' means not the rise (or fall) of urban subcultures but the increasing importance of suburbia. I shall argue, in particular, that the 'dissenting' British use of black American music only makes sense in terms of middle-class ideology and that a 'European' sensibility has been just as important to the making of mass culture as US ways of doing things. I quite agree with Hebdige and Chambers that the so-called American 'take-over' really describes a series of local appropriations but the question is who is doing the appropriating and why. MAKING MUSIC SAFE FOR SUBURBIA - MINSTRELSY White men put on black masks and became another self, one which was loose of limb, innocent of obligation to anything outside itself, indifferent to success . and thus a creature totally devoid of tension and deep anxiety. The verisimilitude of this persona to actual Negroes . was at best incidental. For the white man who put on the black mask modeled himself after a subjective black man - a black man of lust and passion and natural freedom which white men carried within themselves and harbored with both fascination and dread. (Nathan Irvin Huggins)8 In the 1984 issue of his magazine Old Time Music Tony Russell has an entertaining account of the making of Malcolm McLaren's hit version of 'Buffalo Gals'. Russell had put McLaren in touch with the East Tennessee Hilltoppers, an 'old-timey' family string-band, and Joel Birchfield's fiddling duly took its place in the mix, together with McLaren's own square-dance spiel, lifted directly from the work of New York caller, Piute Pete (as recorded on a 1949/50 Folkways LP). What McLaren didn't mention in his gleeful appropriation of American 'roots' music for his own eclectic ends was that back in the 1850s there were already men and women wandering London's streets in pursuit of a similar livelihood from mixed-up American sounds. These 'Ethiopian Serenaders' had switched from glees to minstrel songs under the influence of the visiting dancer, Juba. They learnt the latest transatlantic tunes from the barrel organists and, as one performer told Henry Mayhew, their favourite was 'Buffalo Gals', originally written as a minstrel number in 1844.9 Minstrelsy was the first American pop form to leave its mark on British musical culture, but in those pre-recording days it reached its audiences more often in local adaptations than as performed by the occasional visiting troupe. Peter Honri notes, for example, that his great-grandfather, a travelling showman in rural Northamptonshire, billed himself in the 1870s: as The Original Black Cloud, Eccentric Jester and Funny Instrumentalist - the 'blackface' songs were just one strand of his act, and when Honri's grandfather, PLAYING WITH REAL FEELING: MAKING SENSE OF JAZZ IN BRITAIN 9 Percy Thompson, began to perform with his father (at the age of 5) it was as both a clog dancer and a minstrel.10 The remarkably rapid rise of the minstrel show was as much an English as an American phenomenon, and while there were, no doubt, early complaints about 'foreign' influences, even the original minstrel songs were quickly absorbed into British ways of entertainment - as novelty numbers, as fashion markers, as standards. The music publishing company Francis, Day & Hunter was thus founded on Harry Hunter's songs for the Francis Brothers' Mohawk Minstrels (David Day was their business manager), while the Moore and Burgess troupe, which merged with the Mohawks in 1900, had by then given from nine to twelve performances weekly for more than forty years - in the 1880s it employed seventy performers, including eighteen vocalists, ten comedians, and twelve 'unrivalled clog and statuesque dancers'.11 Why were such shows so successful? What was the peculiar appeal to British audiences of these white people acting out black stereotypes? In straight commercial terms minstrels were valuable for their versatility - a minstrel show was a seamless package of pathos, humour, and glamour.