[JWPM 3.1 (2016) 132-136] JWPM (print) ISSN 2052-4900 doi:10.1558/jwpm.v3i1.28266 JWPM (online) ISSN 2052-4919 Book Review Jon Stratton. 2014. When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines, 1945–2010. Farnham: Ashgate. 221pp. ISBN 978-1-4724-2978-0 (hbk) Reviewed by: Donna Weston, Griffith University, Australia [email protected] Keywords: diaspora; immigration; musicology; popular music; race As the title suggests, When Music Migrates focuses on the ways that music can traverse the “faultlines” produced by racial difference, tension and conflict, and how the music itself is transformed in the process. Racial diaspora encour- ages hybridity while creating power relations from which racial faultlines can develop. Examining music in the context of racial meetings, especially colo- nial and migratory ones, can inform our understanding of the present and the music of the present. Much of the music in the book formed the soundtrack to the author’s life in England in the 1960s and 1970s, but he looks back to post-World War II and forward to the 2000s in order to show the influence and impact of the periods which bookend those years. Growing up on the south coast of England, Stratton experienced a culture shock when studying at Bradford due to his exposure to a cultural diversity so very different from his largely white upbringing. The topic of the book evolves out of these kinds of personal experiences and an academic career in which he has often sought to make sense of the music that has resulted from these racial meetings. The book is largely based on the premise that race and music are inextricable: it is therefore not a history of music and race, but rather looks at popular music’s journeys, meetings and transformation during a period when much migra- tion—of people and their music—into Europe was occurring among people of the European colonies, with a particular focus on England, and music such as ska, rocksteady and reggae, which travelled to England from its Caribbean colonies. The first chapter traces the career of Kenny Lynch, a black London-born cockney with a successful career spanning over fifty years, yet almost absent from documented black music history. An account of Lynch’s friendship with British rock’n’roll artist Tommy Steele leads to a discussion of the introduc- tion of the rock’n’roll genre into Britain (while popular, British people were generally not aware of its African roots, and it tended to be played by white © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. BOOK REVIEW 133 artists). Originally a jazz singer, Lynch shifted to pop in the mid-1950s at a time when pop emerged as its own genre and was characterized by black musical- ity stripped of its connection to black culture. While he never achieved great success as a performer, Lynch achieved considerable success as a songwriter, perhaps as a result of the general British acceptance of black artists only if non-British. Stratton gives a detailed description of Lynch’s pop repertoire, discussed in the context of British attitudes to African American music. He describes Lynch’s “balancing act”; he needed to be white enough to please a British audience which did not yet accept black Britishness, and at the same time make sure the music wasn’t too white for an audience that did accept, and embrace, black vocal style. The overall theme of the second chapter is mediation between cultures. ‘My Boy Lollypop’ was one of three ska beat songs that made the Top 10 in Britain in 1964 and an early example of ska successfully entering the Brit- ish pop mainstream. It was sung by black Jamaican Millie Small, who was brought out to London in 1963 by London-born Jamaican record label owner Chris Blackwell (who later introduced Bob Marley and the Wailers to Brit- ain). Blackwell strategically developed Millie’s image as one representing the exotic Caribbean so as not to alienate white audiences. Stratton describes Blackwell as a “cultural mediator”, a Jewish Jamaican with an Irish father, situated between white and black, and outside of both in a way that made it easier for him to bring the two together. Blackwell moved to England because Jamaican Independence had changed the racial dynamics for a light-skinned person, but also due to the increasing popularity of his music there, as he suc- cessfully commercialized it for a white audience. His ability to move with ease between cultures and across racial faultlines was the key to Blackwell’s, and therefore Millie’s, success. Chapter 3 traces the evolution of the song ‘Johnny Reggae’. During the 60s, ska, rude boy culture, rocksteady and reggae grew in influence in the UK; however ‘Johnny Reggae’, a 1971 ska-pop song by The Piglets, was the first British ska song to be written and performed by a white English group. The original song told the story of fictional character Johnny Reggae, and in its subsequent reiterations became increasingly radicalized by Jamaican art- ists. From its white skinhead beginnings, it morphed to the Roosevelt Sing- ers’ rude boy, Big Youth’s toaster version of a pure reggae character, and the Rastafarian of Dr Alimantado and Prince Far I in an ultimate celebration of the transformation from white to black. The music of the colonizer, appro- priated from the colonized, is re-appropriated by the colonized in a radical feedback loop. Always marginalized, whether in the realm of the colonizer or the colonized, the fictional character of Johnny Reggae represents a power- ful cultural trope. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. 134 JOURNAL OF WORLD POPULAR MUSIC The Beatles’ 1968 song ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, written by Paul McCartney, is the focus of a discussion on diaspora and identity in the fourth chapter. The song is linked specifically to diaspora within the context of McCartney’s Irishness as well as the diasporic heart of Liverpool itself, but mostly of the West African and Caribbean people who made up most of its black popula- tion. Stratton notes that the year the song was released was also known for Shadow Defence Secretary Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration and “re-emigra- tion” speech, known as the “River of Blood” speech, which was specifically anti-black. The influence of Trinidadian music like calypso is discussed along with the ska-influenced rhythmic inspiration for the song, and the Nigerian connection of the song’s lyrics combined with elements of English music-hall. Tracing the song’s history through covers, Stratton finds that the song fol- lows a journey to complete Jamaican indigenization. The focus of chapter 5 is the British group Hot Chocolate’s 1973 hit ‘Brother Louie’ and its story of interracial relationships. The song reached no. 7 in the UK charts, while a toned-down US version by Stories reached no. 1 in the US pop charts; the “cleaning up” of the lyrics was no doubt due to the far deeper racial tensions there. Hot Chocolate’s version was not played in the USA. A parallel story is that of Hot Chocolate’s move from reggae to soul, and even- tually disco. While soul, and to a lesser extent disco, in the USA were inextri- cably related to the civil rights movement, this was not the case in the UK. This was because in the Caribbean, soul was seen as an apolitical import, and it maintained that status when exported to the UK, in no small part due to the fact that its audience was largely white. As in some other chapters, song covers provide an interesting insight into cultural change, specifically racial attitudes. In this case, Kentucky hip hop group Code Red’s 2005 version pro- vides a more confronting story of the near-impossibility of interracial rela- tionships in southern USA, with particular reference to lynching and cross burning, transforming the song from an account of the difficulties of inter- racial relationships to a confrontational critique of the situation in the south. Ska travelled to white Britain via West Indian migrants and came to repre- sent Caribbeanness, but was adopted by the white skinheads in the late 1960s. Its late 1970s to early 80s revival was headed by The Specials—a racially mixed group—with some claims to a role in easing racial tension. In chapter 6, Strat- ton however argues that this was a white reaction to second-generation black British growing demands for equality, and that this music represented the racial tension that culminated in the 1981 riots. Drawing on subcultural and punk theories of Dick Hebdidge and Ruth Adams that address the phenom- enon, Stratton argues that The Specials essentially reiterate white British racism and that the relationship between punk and ska cannot be understood outside of the context of white/black tensions. He finds that a reinforced © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. BOOK REVIEW 135 sense of otherness—a parallel identity—is why punk, as a white subculture, embraced Rastafarian roots reggae, whose authenticity is reinforced through being further distanced from white culture. White audiences preferred white or mixed-race groups to black groups like The Equators and The Equals, but by 1981 with its race riots, ska and punk’s brief relationship was relegated to white nostalgia, and punk and ska went their racially separate ways. Chapter 7 looks at the career of French-Algerian musician Rachid Taha in the context of métissage and French postcolonialism. It introduces beur iden- tity, a French slang term originally used to describe second-generation North African immigrants to France, but now generally is used to describe anyone of North African descent.