[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 , rocksteady and , 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 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 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 , 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 owner Chris Blackwell (who later introduced Bob 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, 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 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 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 in the late 1960s. Its late 1970s to early 80s revival was headed by —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 , 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 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. Stratton notes that beur can denote a self-identifi- cation with both heritages—a hybrid identity—but it is important to note that it is frequently used as a derogatory term by white French. Early in Taha’s career, this hybridity was expressed through his blending of pop with Western rock. This is a theme that has continued in his work. After a brief his- tory of the French in , French policies on Algerian immigration, and the clashing points thus created, Stratton turns to Rachid Taha’s experience in that context, which is problematized by the political relationship between France and Algeria and colonialist history, with resultant tensions between colonizer, colonized and what it means to be a citizen. His band Carte de Séjour, formed in the early 1980s with two Moroccan brothers, blended punk sound with rhythm and Arabic language. Stratton explores themes of hybridity through a number of songs, including ‘Rhorhomanie’, sung in Sabir, the hybrid language of the Mediterranean ports; a cover of the 1943 song ‘Douce France’, which offered a revisioning of France that rec- ognized its Algerian immigrants; and a cover of ‘’ (The Leaving), a late 1960s song by Algerian singer , which described the nostalgia for Algeria of first-wave immigrants who realized they would never return. Taha’s 2004 cover of ’s ‘’ presents a critique of Islamic fundamentalism as well as of American neo-imperialism. Taha describes rock as the natural expression of the racially oppressed and the “music of immigrants” for whom racism is quotidian. His expression of métissage in his work upsets the power of colonizer through overturning the binary. Chapter 8 explores The Equals’ 1967 song ‘Police on My Back’, a hybrid song that combined beat music and Jamaican ska, which was revisioned a number of times between the original and the four covers. The song changed from being a song about rude boy culture in to migrant oppression in colonizer countries, and parallels the shift in circumstances of migrants and their descendants. The Clash’s 1980 punk version focused more on themes of oppression, taken up in 1997 by Spanish artist Amparo Sanchez in homage

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016. 136 Journal of World Popular Music to The Clash and their political and musical influence. French métisse group Zebda with English group Asian Dub Foundation (of South Asian migrant her- itage) covered the song live in 2003 (later released on an Asian Dub Foun- dation ), with a focus on police treatment of those from immigrant backgrounds. Lethal Bizzle’s 2007 grime version provides a bleak first-person commentary of living with racial oppression, which casts a jaded light on The Clash’s call to rebel. In this chapter, the concept of hybridity or métissage is again drawn on in the context of the blending of musical and paramusical ele- ments, reflecting the tensions inherent to dominant and oppressed cultures divided along racial lines. Overall, this was an informative and enjoyable read. The book can be read as isolated chapters, which makes sense as some had been submitted previ- ously as journal articles. This does not in any way detract from the cohesion of the book; it just means that sometimes there is some repetition of material or references. The tone is somewhat conversational and conveys an almost personal investment in the topics at hand, the content moving sideways to topics as well as forward along the principal themes of each chapter, yet well grounded in its theoretical contexts. The theme of racial faultlines is implicit throughout the book without taking away from the depth of the content; each chapter retains its unique approach while maintaining continuity within the book as a whole. Anyone with interests in the styles of music and artists dis- cussed, and/or issues of race in postcolonial Europe will benefit from reading this engaging addition to the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music series.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2016.