Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking 9780822383604

Citation preview

percussion

pppppppppppppppppp percussion drumming, beating, striking

JOHN MOWITT Duke University Press Durham and London 2002

∫ 2002 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Sabon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Marcos: Runnin’ on MT

Acknowledgments ix Preface xi

4 3 2 1

Introduction: (Re)percussions 1

The End of Senseless Beating 14

Knocking the Subject 42

Different Strokes for Different Folks 67

Sound of the City: A Musician Is Being

5

Beaten 116

A Drum of One’s Own 166

Notes 209 Works Cited 239 Index 251

acknowledgments

At the risk of calling up a troubling and all-too-familiar association between writing and reproduction, I want nevertheless to open here by invoking the phrase, ‘‘It takes a village.’’ Indeed, this book has benefited enormously from my transient relation to numerous ‘‘villages,’’ the residents of which are owed thanks. Ultimately, of course, they are owed much more than that, but one must start somewhere. As this is a book about drumming, I feel compelled to acknowledge all the musicians and band members I have had the privilege of playing with, from Jeff Oliver, who gave me my first snare drum, to the members of the Medicine Sky Voices who invited me to ‘‘sit in’’ at one of their protests/rehearsals. Needless to say, listing all the astonishing men and women who have fueled my passion for drumming would take more space than I have, but I do want specifically to thank Jerry Molina, Jim Oliver, Leon ‘‘Buddy’’ Palmer, Andy Charleton, John Paulus, Brad Kanner, Chris Martin, Jim Hilley, Rick Rasmussen, Brooks Reid, Joe Ford, Enrique ‘‘Dado’’ Jardines, and Michael Willey, all with whom I have had the pleasure of both performing and composing. But special, though now mute, thanks are due to Marcos Tobal, whose recent death reminded me so poignantly of when and where I came to rock-and-roll. This book is dedicated to his memory. As is often the case with academic books, this book also owes much to the various students and colleagues who, in different ways, have

been part of its genesis. Here I want especially to thank some of those who participated in the seminar from whence the project arose— namely, Barbara Engh, Carrie Krasnow, Bruce Holsinger, Carol Mason, and the late, great Kristen Pfaff (formerly of Hole). Their brilliance and tenacity helped forge for me the creative and ultimately performative link between music and scholarship, a link on which this study depends but which also represents what it is about post-secondary education that makes it, at least for me, a contested terrain worth struggling over. In addition, graduate students serving as research assistants have played roles that deserve special recognition. Specifically, I thank Michelle Stewart and the former Golden Gloves titleholder Laura Schere for all of their inspired gathering, reviewing, and discussing of the primary research material drawn on in this study. Of equal, though quite different, importance have been the numerous conversations with colleagues, friends, and co-workers both here and elsewhere. Specific debts are owed to Gordon Bleach, Jonathan Bordo, Paul Bowman, Tim Brennan, Joe Brown, Peter Canning, Barbara Engh, Simon Frith, Keya Ganguly, Steve Kramer, Richard Leppert, George Lipsitz, Silvia López, Susan McClary, David Meissner, Paula Rabinowitz, Jose Rodriquez-Dod, Dave Roediger, Marty Roth, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Reynolds Smith, Gary Thomas, Barbara Tischler, Csaba Toth, Rob Walser, and John Wright. As any village-dweller will tell you, at the end of the day writing a book also takes money, and for this reason I acknowledge that the research that went into this book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, which on two separate occasions saw fit to bestow grant support on this study. While in process, various parts of this book were read at different public venues, and I especially thank the organizers of SoundCultures ’96—notably, Natalie Jeremijenko—for inviting me to present a draft of the final chapter to such a discerning audience. As most educators would probably acknowledge, we don’t really know what we think until we try to teach it. Finally, I acknowledge a profound debt to my immediate family: Jeanine and my two daughters, Rosalind and Rachel. What they have come to refer to as the ‘‘bongo book’’ has been very long in coming. When in the late ’70s I sold my drums, I did so because I was certain that ‘‘practice’’ would be intolerable to my graduate-student housemates. Little did I realize that writing a book about drumming could be even more grating. Thanks, girls.

x acknowledgments

preface

A few words at the outset about what follows. I used to play drums. I don’t anymore—or, at least, I don’t play professionally. When I used to play, I also wrote songs. I am grateful that the well-known, and now rather tired, drummer joke—What’s the last thing a drummer ever says to his or her bandmates? How about working on one of my songs!— was never inflicted on me (at least, not to my face). When we performed, our sets were always a mix of covers and originals. Originals had to be used judiciously because of the problem of ‘‘audience.’’ Would they work? In many respects, this book confronts the same dilemma. Will it work? The issue here is not about the adolescent dilemma of ‘‘originality.’’ It is about audience. In this book, I find myself deliberately trying to mix and sample a variety of academic discourses that don’t characteristically engage one another, and the risk taken is that of incomprehension. Why? Because discourses are also always already audiences, and if the history of rock and roll has taught us anything, it is that audiences don’t always ‘‘get it.’’ Undaunted, I will simply hope for the best. Case in point: sexist language (whether deliberate or not). It has become common practice over the years to mark one’s solidarity with those who find it offensive by following examples of sexist language (for example, ‘‘man’’ or the masculine pronoun used as pseudo-generic

terms) with ‘‘sic.’’ In the text that follows another strategy is used: letting authors simply incriminate themselves. In other words, under advisement from my editor I have suppressed all use of the expression ‘‘sic.’’ In cases where an author was writing prior to contemporary feminism it is perhaps insensitive to mark his or her usage as a ‘‘mistake.’’ In cases where the author has no such excuse, his or her use of sexist language will no doubt find the very audience to which it was directed. Either way the use of ‘‘sic’’ is not likely to be as effective as calling attention to the problem at the outset, for a term does not a discourse make. Lastly, I want to draw attention to the drum charts that appear in several chapters. They are not meant to provide professionals with exact notation for the drum parts they chart. Instead, in the absence of an accompanying cd with recordings of the appropriate tracks, they are meant to inscribe, in rudimentary form, the sonic profile of musical material under discussion. The heterogeneity of sign systems is perhaps as important to capture as the parts themselves, and I apologize for the frustrations they will inevitably produce. For those who own the recordings represented on the charts, may I suggest that you simply dig them out, put them on, and turn it up. Power, load, play, read on.

xii preface

introduction: (re)percussions

A white, middle-class man carrying a briefcase enters a waiting room. He joins another man who is also white, also middle class, and also carrying a briefcase. Soon after the second man sits he begins idly tapping the resonant surface of his briefcase, marking time. As though interpreted either as a provocation or as an invitation, his serial companion responds to this tapping by executing a modest but unmistakable percussion solo. Within moments, we are treated to a truly virtuosic exchange of solos, each more extravagant than the next, and soon the waiting room becomes a stage where something like a ‘‘drum battle’’ between Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich is taking place. At the height of this silliness, in walks the receptionist to inform the first man that he can now be seen. Her look of suspicious astonishment brings the hilarity of the situation to its moment of culmination, although almost immediately after the first man exits he is replaced by another man, and the tapping begins anew. Those familiar with the perverse world of ‘‘British humor’’ will recognize this as one of the many sublime gags performed by the now disbanded troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus. When I first saw this skit, I was drumming professionally, and if I remember straight, what got my attention was both the resourcefulness of the solos and the apparently irrepressible drive toward public humiliation (masculine masochism?) that, even today, triggers my convulsive and ultimately

painful laughter. Indeed, the entire group of my friends (including some band members) were, as we say, on the floor during this skit. The pain produced by this outburst was not, however, entirely physical. In our world (and I have since come to learn that we were not alone), drummers were dumb, and this skit resonated deeply with the tradition that sustained this perception, a tradition whose perhaps most recent expression lies in Charles Schwab’s use of Ringo Starr in its year 2000 ‘‘smart investor’’ promotional campaign. I begin here not to ‘‘out’’ myself as middle-aged, or even to set the stage for a revenge masque. Instead, I start here for reasons that are at once personal and theoretical. As if to simulate the gesture of full disclosure, it strikes me as important to acknowledge that this book about drumming (or, as I prefer, percussion) was written by a former, perhaps even a ‘‘recovering,’’ drummer. Although this might be taken as a move to ground what follows in something like ‘‘authenticity,’’ this is not my immediate aim. Nevertheless, by characterizing the reasons motivating this study as both personal and theoretical, I did not mean to separate them. But just as feminists were once asked whether the personal was political enough, so too must we ask personal criticism whether it is theoretical enough. I say it is not, and it will be one of the persistent, though indirect, aims of this book to say why. If one returns to the Monty Python skit in a more theoretical mood, two items of immediate relevance can be discerned. First, there is the perceived provocation. When the first man perceives the second’s idle tapping as drumming, his answering solo produces a correspondence that, in joining tapping and drumming, makes the latter emerge from and return to daily life. Competence in juba, the body patting practiced by Africans both before and after the Middle Passage,∞ is not required to grasp the important way that intermittent skin contact sustains this correspondence. Second, there is the whole phenomenon of what I will call ‘‘senseless beating,’’ by which I mean not simply the silliness of the excess staged in the skit, but the lack of apparent sense or meaning in the beating (whether tapping or drumming), a lack that seems to spur a recursive escalation that, as hilarious as it may be, is also unmistakably violent. This last, in particular, is what this book seeks to theorize, designating as it does the most general theme of my study—namely, the relation between music and meaning, or, as I prefer, sense.≤ Indeed, one might say that the entire point of this study is to come to terms with the sense made in and of senseless beating. Behind the preference for sense lies a perception of language, one that regards the human sensorium as a 2 percussion

piece of meaning, which will be defended in due course. But to return to the skit, in responding with his solo the second drummer provides the tapping with a sense. It becomes a call. The response, though equally inscrutable, thus loops sense-making through an exchange between two beating bodies. The sense of each beat becomes the beating it stirs. When the receptionist enters, the din of senselessness dissipates abruptly into senseless beating, her reaction sufficing to displace the entire exchange and register, in the humiliation she inadvertently produces, its intricate correspondence with violence. As I will labor to show, something crucial about percussive signifying is at stake here, indeed something that cannot be discerned without theorizing some of the conceptual tools necessary for doing so. An examination of the relation between music and meaning is far from new, and I claim no distinction here. Like many scholars who have embarked on this project, I perceive myself as working in the wake of Theodor Adorno—that is, as someone who is concerned not just with making social sense of musical practice, but also with joining this sense-making to a theorization of the practical field within which the subject of music arises. My contribution, if indeed it is one, is to the fleshing out of how (in accord with which principles and procedures) what has been called the ‘‘new musicology’’ produces the sense of rhythm.≥ In this way I am seeking to supplement the rather amazing work that has been done over the past twenty years in making tonality (including, of course, atonality) a social fact. Many artists and scholars have struck out in this direction before me, and in what follows I will draw attention to my debts, but a key concept organizing this study warrants introduction at the outset. To approach rhythmic sense-making with the double-consciousness or split attention set by Adorno’s example, I construct the concept of the ‘‘percussive field.’’ By stressing that this is a construction of analysis, I mean to imply both that it is imported into the domain of musical practice from elsewhere and that it is solicited from this elsewhere by what is taking place in musical practice. Because this broadly theoretical formulation is elaborated variously in the chapters to come, I will not belabor it here except to add that the percussive field is designed expressly to pose questions both to music and to its study, whether professional or academic. In questioning the study of music, the percussive field seeks to engage disciplinary reason and the social relations it organizes. Described less theoretically, the percussive field is structured by three divisions. To introduce and justify them, however, a prior admission is introduction: (re)percussions

3

necessary. In order to avoid theorizing the phenomenon of rhythm in its entirety (I’ll leave this to others more intrepid than I), I have pitched this study at a specific rhythmic ‘‘event’’—that is, at the advent, after World War II, of that beat-centered idiom we call rock-and-roll. Thus, to make sense of the ‘‘big beat,’’ I propose that the percussive field contains a musicological division, a sociological division, and, for lack of a more suitable term, a psychoanalytical division. Why? It strikes me as essential that, musicologically, one must approach rock-and-roll drumming as an amalgamation of African rhythmic traditions mediated, in the wake of the slave trade, by Anglo-American instruments and compositional strategies. At a rather irreducible semiotic level, the sense produced by drumming is constrained by the codes and messages that a distinctly musicological attentiveness is meant to discern. No insistence, however strenuous, on the productivity of consumption can overcome this without lapsing into the banality of idealism. By stressing the relevance of the slave trade in the mediation of African drumming, I have, of course, already breached the musicological with the sociological, but an account of rock-and-roll sense-making demands more. Specifically, rock-and-roll as an idiomatic precipitate of the developments that spawned the ‘‘urban blues’’ (the sort of music we associate with Muddy Waters once he left Mississippi) must be situated within the context of the northern migration—that is, the movement that began after World War I but culminated in the 1940s and ’50s of rural blacks into the violently segregated urban centers of the North. Although like the Middle Passage in registering the very texture and instrumentalization of percussive signifying, the northern migration subjected black bodies to the shock—ultimately, the beating—of urban space. Again, if sense-making derives from a matrix within which musical practice is embedded, then it cannot be accounted for without considering where, in the matrix, percussive associations encounter one another. In saying this, I am also implicitly justifying my recourse to psychoanalysis (the third division of the percussive field), though it should be said that, like Adorno, whose impatience with Freud gave him a stimulus that his thinking could not forgo, I treat the human subject even in its most intimate inwardness as a social achievement. Specifically, rock-and-roll drumming—especially insofar as the beat is regarded, by fans and dour Puritans alike, as the very locus of what was once called the ‘‘sex machine’’—must be approached through the psychoanalytical account of ‘‘beating fantasies.’’ What requires this is attentiveness to both the matrix of percussive associations and the indis4 percussion

pensable way that psychoanalysis links sexuality to fantasies about the subject as an abused and abusive embodiment. Of course, in insisting on the social character of the subject, I am also situating its relation to sexuality within a field of economic, cultural, and political forces that have everything to do with the fantasies that produce and sustain it. Against those materialists (cultural and otherwise) who avoid recourse to the subject, I am insisting on its indispensability. There can be no critical account of class, race, or gender (much less their interactions) that refuses to come to grips with how these modalities of consciousness are lived and rendered intelligible. Taken together, these divisions make up the analytical construct of the percussive field. To be sure, each division is historical to some significant degree but in ways that make separating out a distinctively historical division within the percussive field difficult. Moreover, because the problematization of the relation between history and historiography has reached something of a stalemate, it may make more sense to shift the conceptual burden of this study to the concept of ‘‘sociography,’’ where the stress falls on the ‘‘discourse networks’’ of what has been called the ‘‘history of the present.’’ Thus, if sense-making is fundamental to the holding sway of collectivities, to their very being in time, then musical sense-making, whether rhythmic or not, is an indispensable piece of social analysis. To this extent the percussive field is a construction of analysis whose object extends well beyond the practice of drumming—hence, the ‘‘declension’’ (drumming, beating, striking) of my subtitle. But what precisely is the status of rock-and-roll in this study? Is this in fact yet another book about rock-and-roll? Well, yes and no. This book is certainly about the percussive signifying that takes place within this musical idiom, but it is not pitched so as to exhaust itself in illuminating, partially or fully, the true character of rock-and-roll. As stated earlier, rock-and-roll figures here as a suggestive means by which to narrow the scope of this discussion of rhythmic sense-making, and in that sense rock-and-roll functions as something like a case study. What makes rock-and-roll more than that is the fact that within this idiom— perhaps for entirely ‘‘personal’’ reasons—I find the terms of my analysis predicted or called for. In this sense, the case study is more than a methodological conceit, without thereby acceding to the position of ground or cause. This might suggest that the percussive field is somehow unique or specific to rock-and-roll—that, in effect, it is a construction of analysis that exhausts itself in this one object. Although it is true, as I have proposed, that rock-and-roll solicits the terms of my introduction: (re)percussions

5

analysis, the same might be said of any percussively oriented study of postwar popular music. Moreover, if Charles Keil and Christopher Small (among others) are right in saying that what the study of popular musics teaches us transforms the very concept of music, then even if the relation between the percussive field and rock-and-roll is excessively intimate, this analytical construct nevertheless harbors implications whose claims reach beyond rock-and-roll and the study of music itself. Again, both music and its study are at stake here. Assuming then that the percussive field and its divisions, as well as the status of rock-and-roll, are now ‘‘on the table,’’ even if not fully clarified, how do I intend to deploy this construct as a way to engage the ‘‘senseless beating’’ of percussive signifying? To begin with, it bears specifying that I treat the drum (specifically in its membranophonic incarnation∂) as that which forms relays among the divisions of the percussive field. As an instrument long associated with the very emergence of music, the drum has a rich musicological significance. As we shall see, use of the drum has been codified in various ways by diverse cultures. Equally important, however, is that the drum is a richly catachrestic instrument. By that I mean not only that the drum must be abused to be played, but also that in possessing a body, a skin, a head, and a voice, the drum has long represented the expressive interiority that we call the subject, the human being insofar as it intones ‘‘I.’’∑ It is as though the drum cannot be represented without figuring it through the body; in this sense the drum links the musicological with the psychoanalytical. By the same token, of course, the body has also long functioned as a site of percussive beating. I am thinking here not only of patting juba but also of the medical practice—indeed, a practice that, in the West, dates back to the classical period—of ‘‘percussing’’ the body to determine, well before the advent of the clinical gaze, the state of the subject’s health. In a more aggressively violent register, flogging, flagellating, scourging, whipping, and spanking all exemplify the same phenomenon. Whether beaten by others or by oneself, the body, and specifically the skin, hinge the individual and the social, serving as the site of social contact in its most banal and intractable sense. Drumming often involves slapping the skin of the hand against an animal’s skin (though plastic is now more common) to produce a striking sound that moves the bodies of others through the medium of sonic contact. Thus, precisely by amplifying the catachresis of the skin, one is able to mobilize the percussive field to engage percussive sense-making where it lives—that is, in the beating that assembles sounds and bodies and the practices that articulate them. 6 percussion

Armed with this most catachrestic of instruments, I put the percussive field to work by attempting to situate rock-and-roll drumming in the context of something like a genealogy of the skin. My thesis is that percussive sense-making is caught up in the way that skin contact produces a subject who at once makes sense of various patterns of contact and who is itself the locus of sense for such contacts. To this extent, I accept the phenomenological stricture that meaning is unthinkable in the absence of a subject, though I, like various post-phenomenological writers, regard the subject as an effect of the socially organized production of meaning. Perhaps inevitably, such a genealogical project obliges one to engage the now voluminous scholarship on the body. What spares me the task of repeating this corpus is the rather particular emphasis I give to the skin, an emphasis that provides me with the occasion to build up my account of the subject insofar as it is fundamental to my analysis of percussive signifying. The point is to show, as with the drum itself, that the subject forms in and through the limits of embodiment. Put in summary form, my argument will be that drumming touches on and plays with these limits and, in so doing, makes sense. Thus, in Chapter One considerable time is spent working through what I regard as germinal statements on these matters—notably, Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin and Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego. This treatment of the subject, at least in cultural-studies circles, necessarily calls up the Althusserian concept of ‘‘interpellation.’’ For this reason, Chapter Two engages interpellation head on.∏ In addition to specifying how interpellation might be deployed in the domain of the new musicology, where, of late, much attention has been given to the themes of identity politics, this chapter draws on the surprising ‘‘percussive’’ resources of Althusser’s discussion to ward off a certain methodological crisis—namely, the highly overstated incompatibility of psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism. In particular, my preoccupation with the backbeat—the very backbeat that Chuck Berry once insisted could not be lost—finds here its fullest justification. Despite all the precautions against reductivism we have learned to take, no discussion of rock-and-roll drumming and skin can avoid the question of race and the problem of racism. Here, the percussive field must be deployed to engage this rather conspicuous feature of its object. Although race matters to all types of music, it bears on rock-androll with an intensity that requires patient delineation. I began this process when I introduced the divisions constituting the percussive field, stressing the importance of the forced separation by slave owners introduction: (re)percussions

7

of Africans and their drums during the slave trade and the northern migration. These issues are elaborated in separate chapters but always with an ear toward linking beating and the subject in a way that makes race matter to rock-and-roll. At the most general level, this is pursued under the heading of ‘‘lactification.’’ This term, used by Frantz Fanon to designate the desire for whiteness fostered among non-whites within colonial regimes, is invoked here to rename the oft-repeated notion that rock-and-roll began as a black music, but, with the appearance of Elvis Presley (among others), quickly became a white music. The transformation was oddly consummated, according to some, by the ‘‘British Invasion’’ of the 1960s when musicians deeply influenced by African Americans played back to Americans a music then heard as European, if not exactly white. Ultimately, I attempt to theorize lactification (as well as its less elegant corollary, ‘‘ebonification’’) in the context of the historical perspective introduced by Dudens, in which ‘‘blackness’’ and embodied consciousness exhibit an unsettling proximity. In detailing the pertinence of this concept, I stress less its link to interracial desire (though race is irreducibly ‘‘miscegenational’’) than its value as a way to illuminate how the backbeat of rock-and-roll, as a beating back against the shock visited on migrant black bodies in the urban centers of the North, provoked a flight from embodiment. This flight, perhaps consummately figured in the ‘‘black out’’ (a graphic censorship technique common in print advertising) that protected predominantly white eyes from Elvis ‘‘the Pelvis’’ (an episode not treated here), associates lactification with a certain denial of beating, both musically and pugilistically. At the end of the day, this denial exacts the price of the body itself. Despite its crucial impact on the ‘‘look’’ of early rock-and-roll musicians, the sartorial excesses of black vaudeville, where the body is obsessively adorned, has been smeared with inauthenticity by victims of this denial of the ‘‘blackened’’ body. Ebonification, then, functions to mark the phenomenon of identification wherein the ambivalence festering in denial expresses itself through the practice of ‘‘covering,’’ by which I mean both the musical gesture of performing one’s own version of another’s song and the donning of a hide, a skin, to shield one’s body from the beating that denial dissimulates in vain. In short, this entire discussion of lactification is committed to drawing attention to a link between rock-and-roll and violence, where racism is somewhat deinstitutionalized (that is, rendered less ‘‘attitudinal’’) at the same time that rock-and-roll is defended from those who insist that it fostered violence.π 8 percussion

At the core of the sociological characterization of urban shock I lodge the Freudian notion of consciousness as a callus—that is, consciousness as protective shield or hull. My aim is twofold. First, this sustains the methodological argument about the construct of the percussive field. If the field’s divisions matter persistently, then their different themes encounter one another at each turn. If drumming does indeed touch on the limits of embodiment, then making sense of drumming has to thematize and address those uncanny moments in which embodiment folds into both itself and the bodies of others. Second, though no doubt less clearly, my appeal to Freud’s callus aims to broach the problematic of sexuality, another obvious reference point in any discussion of rock-and-roll. How so? Put simply, the callus forms on both edges—that is, as a result of excessive stimulation from both without and within. Its functional texture associates libidinal discharge and shock. Thus, as an incarnation of violence, of beating, the figure of the callus prompts us to consider something that Freud did not: the relation between ‘‘beating fantasies’’ and the structure of the subject. This task was left to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, who in their reading of ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’ (Freud 1974, 107–32) discern a theory of the sexualized subject in Freud’s account of fantasy. Drawing on this material, as well as on various ‘‘autobiographical’’ accounts of beatings written by rock-and-roll musicians, I follow the lead of those who have argued for the social centrality of fantasy. In doing so, I bring rock-and-roll drumming into contact with an account of sexuality that, through a somewhat broadened concept of the fantasy of beating, links percussive sense-making with both dance and trance—or, less alliteratively, possession. Those who wished in the late 1940s to censor Wynonie Harris’s ‘‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’’ were not wrong about the title’s evocation of the sexual act. They were only wrong about the efficacy, and therefore appropriateness, of censorship. Those of us who wish to separate sexuality from ‘‘shakin’,’’ ‘‘rockin’,’’ ‘‘moanin’,’’ ‘‘reelin’ an’ a-rollin’ ’’—that is, the entire rhetoric of possessive ecstasy—risk repeating this mistake. At this point, I have no doubt created the false impression that the musicological division of the percussive field plays ‘‘second fiddle’’ to the sociological and the psychoanalytical ones. What makes this impression false is that, theoretically, this study rests on the assumption that if the percussive field can indeed allow us to make sense of otherwise senseless beating, then this can be demonstrated by reading particular rock-and-roll compositions. To move from sociology and psychoanalysis to music requires that specific practices come to factor in introduction: (re)percussions

9

the mix. However, this factoring must submit to the articulated logic of the field—that is, the musicological must be made to register the consequences of its encounter with sociology and psychoanalysis. Thus, rather than addressing myself to musical practice as such, I follow the lead of Christopher Small, who has argued that, especially when dealing with African American musics, that the proper object of attention is ‘‘musicking.’’∫ My earlier evocation of both trance (specifically, the sacred ecstasy of possession in voodoo) and dance is already an expression of this concept at work in my approach. However, its more immediate and sustained presence is manifested in my discussion of the ethnomusicology of African drumming and the performative and instrumental sources of the drums that came together in the ‘‘trap set’’ that constitutes the percussive core of the rock-and-roll ensemble.Ω With regard to African drumming, my aim is twofold. First, I approach it in order to get a feel for how African drummers perform their relationship to percussive music. I am not interested in showing which, say, Yoruban styles are ‘‘behind’’ rock-and-roll drumming. Although this kind of ethnomusicological work is as necessary as it is fascinating, my commitment to musicking—indeed, to the whole theme of the ‘‘subject of music’’—obliges me to turn away from such preoccupations. Second, as my sociological insistence on the musicological pertinence of the slave trade makes clear, I am concerned here with distancing this study from the forms of ethnomusicology that refuse to pose the question of our (North American) access to the authentically African in music. While we may wish to disagree with Fanon’s characterization of the blues as an aestheticization of misery, I think we need to confront the problem to which his formulation draws attention. For me, this problem is at once musical and political: I believe that it blocks Americans, black and white, from ‘‘grounding’’ rock-and-roll in some authentically African source while requiring that one recognize the irreducibly black character of rock-and-roll. Rock-and-roll is thus just another instance of an ‘‘American’’ music that is distinctly ‘‘unAmerican.’’ Though at first glance such concerns may seem difficult, if not impossible, to associate with the musicking embodied in and articulated by the trap set, the aim of my genealogy of this configuration of instruments is to underscore the way its assemblage, its coming together, traces the history of African drumming as it comes, via the Middle Passage, to North America. Of importance here are not just the ways African drummers ‘‘made do’’—that is, cobbled together instruments after they were legally deprived of their drums—but the performance 10 percussion

traditions associated with the bits and pieces brought into contact by this ‘‘wigging’’ strategy.∞≠ I have already mentioned dance and trance. Two other distinctly percussive legacies need to be addressed here: marching (now as intricately choreographed as dance) and what E. P. Thompson calls ‘‘rough music.’’ Aligned with discipline, as one sees in the work of Michel Foucault, marching serves as the means by which a martial strategy of ‘‘bodybuilding’’ is bound to both drumming techniques and drums (the two are indissociable). Again, what is vital here is less the musicological details of various martial strokes than the materialization of percussive catachresis realized in marching. The ‘‘ordering’’ spoken by the drum is carried off in the bodies it brings to order, even—or perhaps especially—when marching is done. These bodies associate this order with that voice, that ‘‘snare,’’ especially when the order of discipline is part of the very rationality of the social fabric and, in that sense, is constantly receiving reinforcements. Whether the beat says ‘‘March!’’ or ‘‘Dance!’’ is, at the end of the day, not all that important. Sense-making necessarily ricochets between the two. But it is therefore especially important to recognize that, within this order, wigging is already under way. Indeed, this is precisely what Thompson’s analysis of charivari, or ‘‘rough music’’ demonstrates. Marching, seen both historically and performatively, derives from and is thus corrupted by other processional logics—logics that conjoin percussion, bodies, and something like the law (or, to the extent that they can be differentiated, popular justice). Of particular interest to me is that, precisely in putting commodities (say, a pot or a pan) to alternative uses, rough musicians generate the principle of combination that supports the trap set, a hybrid collection of drums to be sure, but also a site where, characteristically, an astonishing collection of ‘‘noise makers’’ can be, and were, assembled for use. Though typically associated with European practices in the earlymodern period, rough music is also an important part of the musical culture of southern North America, manifesting itself most notably in lynch mobs and the African American wakes that often erupted into counterstrikes. In this clashing of drums, bodies, races, and musics, certain rudiments of percussive sense-making were hammered out. These rudiments therefore belong, as workouts, to the very limits of embodiment. Thus, when laboring to makes sense of drumming, it is vital that one listen for the associative clashing and clanging, the genealogical dramas that particular compositions put in play. Such listening, as I have already argued, need not be restricted to rock-and-roll or even musical practice, as my long concluding discussion of drumming pracintroduction: (re)percussions

11

tices within the contemporary men’s movement seeks to demonstrate. There, masculinity is under ‘‘reconstruction’’ in ways that confirm my approach to rock-and-roll drumming even while having, to its detriment, little acknowledged connection with it. A point then about style. When I said earlier that the percussive field was predicted or called for by what was going on in musical practice, part of my aim was to raise the issue of theory. What is at stake in putting it to work? How must it be written when it responds to the call of musical practice, especially when, as is the case with rock-and-roll, that practice is organized around patterns of call and response? Mercifully, more and more excellent work is being written on rock-androll, a development that has outdistanced the defiantly anti-theoretical era of ‘‘rock criticism’’ (I suppose epitomized in the ejaculations of Lester Bangs), without quite settling the claims of theory. By this I mean that even in the best of this new work, theory often remains ‘‘for external use only’’—that is, for application. The theoretical work is brought to the music, which is then illuminated through it. If music makes demands on theory, it is at the moment of selection—or, for interdisciplinarians, the moment of combination. Although I realize that this is difficult to avoid—indeed, my own study is complicit here—I want to stress the importance of proliferating and diversifying music’s claims on theory. Specifically, what is going on in music (recall that my preferred term is Small’s ‘‘musicking’’) must be granted the authority to provoke theorizing—that is, to provoke a reading of theory that challenges its integrity, that obliges theory to submit to the same, often violent, scrutiny that its detractors claim is visited on those practices to which it has been applied. In this sense, theory ‘‘responds’’ to the ‘‘call’’ of music not by smothering it like a salve, but by discovering in this encounter other possibilities of elaboration, other orientations. With regard to the theoretical practices drawn on here, this means underscoring both their explicit and implicit engagements with music while, at the same time, obliging theory to sound themes other than those associated with its canonical profile, as I stressed in the earlier discussion of interpellation. Only along such general lines of development will it be possible to discern whether the personal is indeed theoretical enough. By the same token, if what is going on in musical practice solicits the work of theorization, it is because music, too, is in need of the diversification of critical attention that theory can provoke as well as the conceptual rigor with which judgments about it can be debated. Quite apart from the specific insights its partisans have produced over the 12 percussion

past twenty-five years (and they have been legion), this is what I take to be one of, if not the, signal achievement of the new musicology. Small’s fabrication of musicking is a beautifully condensed expression of the ways this endeavor has radically transformed what constitutes the very disciplinary object of academic musicology. By focusing on beating, my aim is to contribute to this ongoing development. In particular, I hope to put into circulation an array of analytical terms, or a rhetoric, that will facilitate the ‘‘reading’’ of music—notably its percussive gesturing—for people who do not read musical notation yet may play or even simply listen with the rapt attention of a fan or lover. As a book about percussion and theory—indeed, a book that regards its core analytical construction as a ‘‘response’’ to a musical ‘‘call’’—this work cannot avoid registering in its own stylistic organization the very interplay it seeks to amplify. In other words, as part of the effort to rethink the relation between music and theory, this book attempts to rewrite the thought of this relation, producing in its expository rhythm a clashing of styles (a ‘‘parrying of blows,’’ as we shall hear) designed to confront the activities of theorizing and analyzing with the often unyielding demands they make on each other. True, this generates a text that continually moves either too fast or too slow (depending, of course, on the reader’s interests and preparation), but I would argue precisely that this approach produces a text that not only embodies what the Frankfurt School theorists called an ‘‘immanent critique,’’∞∞ but one that solicits a mode of interdisciplinary reading that, to my mind, is not practiced enough. As others have argued, the impatience that typically greets challenging, interdisciplinary scholarship often covers for a disavowed investment in disciplinarity. This is characteristically not an investment based in a thoughtful conception of the intellectual power of specific disciplines. Rather, it is based in precisely that form of interdisciplinarity deemed realizable solely by the members of one’s own discipline. As I have argued elsewhere, this constitutes a flawed ‘‘etiology critique’’ of disciplinary reason, and the pages that follow are written in the hope that our desire for something other survives.

introduction: (re)percussions

13

111111111111111111111111 1

the end of senseless beating

The Skinny I have proposed that percussive sense-making requires for its amplification recourse not simply to the body, but also to what I have called a genealogy of the skin. At one level, this proposal derives its motivation from my treatment of the drum as a catachrestic instrument. At another, it represents an important way in which the personal, precisely in the sense that we speak of being at ease in ‘‘one’s own skin,’’ is politicizable—that is, subject both to analytical reconstruction and practical transformation. This chapter thus opens with a discussion of the skin as a physical and a psychical phenomenon and concludes with a long analysis of Chuck Berry’s hit ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ from 1957. The backbeat that, according to this song, cannot be lost regardless of how it is used is made to sound off against all three divisions of the percussive field, a process that establishes the latter’s efficacy while, at the same time, taking a first, and perhaps emblematic, swipe at making sense of senseless beating. There are, of course, those who would claim that ‘‘the moment of the body has passed,’’ and I would count myself among them were it not for my conviction that, quite apart from the fact that bodies persistently matter (however differently), there are indeed more interesting ways to write what scholars have been calling the body’s history.

I am proposing, therefore, that a link exists between what some might regard as the premature burial of the body problematic and the efficacy, or intellectual force, of the scholarship responsible for its articulation. As a strictly contingent link, its current form (about which more in a moment) is a victim of circumstance, and one of the things I seek to effect here is an articulation of what I take to be an engaging strategy for proceeding otherwise. Because the specific manner in which I want to articulate the body and the percussive field draws heavily on the historical—indeed, genealogical—research of Barbara Duden, it makes sense to clarify such a claim by appealing directly to her work.∞ If one sets The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany alongside, say, Donald Lowe’s The Body in Late-Capitalist USA what becomes almost immediately obvious, beyond the comparative attenuation of feminist preoccupations in the latter, is the principled obliqueness of Duden’s approach to the body. Though she is constructing the body’s history, particularly as it is marked and marred by the social division of gender, she does so in a manner that avoids constituting the body as a center, as a substance, that patiently indexes sociohistorical developments. Instead—and this reflects her theoretical stance as much as it does her source materials (that is, the doctor’s writings she is analyzing)—she approaches the body fully aware that what it comes to be and how it is studied are intertwined. The body emerges in her analysis, rather than radiating elliptically from page to page, like a lighthouse signal, as it tends to in Lowe’s. What one avoids in proceeding thus is the predicament wherein the body is at once historical and ahistorical—that is, both the fixed referent of historical analysis and the product created through the illumination cast by it. I grant that I am overstating my criticism of Lowe (whose study is, after all, remarkable), but what concerns me more at present is a clear delineation of Duden’s exemplary strategy. Setting aside for the time being the vexed issue of whether Duden’s approach is in some immanent manner linked to a specifically feminine body, I want to underscore that my own project also seeks to have the body ‘‘emerge’’ in the course of its elaboration. But if this body is to emerge rather than emanate, then its uprising (as Michel Foucault might have said) must take place within an organizing problematic, which in Duden’s study is the analysis of Enlightenment medical discourse in Germany. Here the historicity of the body is to be made palpable through an inquiry into percussion—indeed, an inquiry organized around what I have been calling the percussive field. But what, the end of senseless beating

15

the skeptical reader might ask, is the necessary relationship between percussion and the body? Why insist on starting here? Although the theoretical perspective I have adopted obliges one to refuse the very category of necessity, responding to such a question in that way strikes me as disingenuous. Instead, I shall reiterate a point made in the introduction, where the practice of percussing the body was invoked as a way, if not to join the body and beating, then to underscore how making sense of either depended on thinking both together. In the context of Duden’s study, percussing the body has perhaps an even more obvious resonance. But why not begin at a more basic level? Surely it is the body that beats, not exclusively, but persistently. Even if the beating is inhuman—say, technological—the beating mechanism exhibits distinct allegorical or prosthetic features. It beats for or in the place of the body. Moreover, if we are to believe the ethnomusicologists, the body is not only that which beats; it is, as in the case of ‘‘patting juba,’’ a site of aboriginal beating. The reflexivity that positions the body as both the subject and object of beating suggests, if only in a ‘‘grammatical’’ way, that percussion comes to the body neither from outside nor from afar. As we will hear, certain scholars have proposed that beating was the aboriginal music—that is, the ordering of repetition and difference that prepared sound for a form of manipulation that was distinctly non-linguistic in character. John Blacking, in How Musical Is Man? (1973), has even suggested that, precisely because of its transcultural manifestation, musical practice is fundamental to the very emergence of the human. Although this sort of neostructural anthropology may not be entirely convincing, it nevertheless invites one to consider the likelihood that percussion and the body struck up a relationship early on. To put the key point very bluntly: The step from beating on one’s own skin to beating on an animal’s skin stretched over a resonating chamber is a modest one, even if that step took a long time to take. What interests me here is not the anthropological fact but, rather, as I have stressed, the kind of analytical writing such a plot element makes possible. If I characterize this discussion as ‘‘basic,’’ it is simply with an ear toward accounting for why the percussive field can be said to require reference to the body. In short, the body and its skin are tangled up in the associations drawn upon in making sense of percussive signifying. This, I argue, is one of the reasons why the sense of music feels so personal. The collectivity that makes the ‘‘I’’ possible is at stake within it. In The Woman Beneath the Skin, Duden plots the fate of the skin 16 percussion

along the trajectory of the body and does so in a most instructive way. She writes, The skin was fragile and it was a boundary, but it was not meant to demarcate the body against the outside world. It was above all a surface on which the inside revealed itself. . . . In the sixteenth century the holes of the body were places of continuous exchange between the inside and the outside, between the body and the surrounding world. The body’s interior conveyed itself through the body openings, which functioned as points of entry and exit. The permeable boundaries between the body and the environment served the fruitful metamorphosis in both directions. (Duden 1991, 123)

She goes on—in a manner, in fact, that recalls Norbert Elias’s discussion of homo clausus in The Civilizing Process (1978)—to underscore how, during the eighteenth century, the skin came to be seen no longer as ‘‘a collection of minute orifices,’’ but as a ‘‘sealed’’ envelope shielding the body and the individual from an anarchic outside.≤ Her commitment to feminism asserts itself as she moves to link a ‘‘hardening’’ of gender identity with the elaboration of this trajectory, where the skin— once a site for the expression of an essentially ‘‘runny’’ femininity— becomes a surface on which an austerely engendered identity inscribes its profundities. This is how she gets at what she regards as the specifically modern link between woman and the body. Obviously, it is Duden’s direct appeal to the skin as a way to get at the ‘‘laminated’’ historicity of the body that attracts my attention, but there is more. Because my aim here, at least in part, is to underscore how a historical approach to the body helps us rethink the domain of musical practice, it is worth foregrounding that moment in Duden’s discussion in which she broaches the theme of identity, setting aside, at least for now, the more general theoretical issue of using the body to rethink the conditions of its historical representation.≥ This angle leads one back to the formulation in which Duden speaks of ‘‘the inside,’’ which reveals itself on and in the skin, especially once the skin emerges as a hardened surface. If there is more than simple serendipity linking the projects of Duden and Elias, then this ‘‘inside’’ to which they both refer might well be construed as the very subject of what the Germans called Bildung, or cultural formation. Thus, the skin—as a specific genealogical thread—can be seen as a decisive component of the structure of a distinctly ‘‘modern’’ incarnation of subjectivity insofar as the production of the subject’s interiority is understood to involve not only a decisive cultural mediation, but also the mediation of a particular culture. the end of senseless beating

17

It might make sense to support such a claim by adducing additional historical evidence—for example, Richard Sennett’s discussion of the psychological importance of uniformly drab clothing at the end of the nineteenth century (Sennett 1978)—precisely because such a gesture might always be seen as avoiding the issue, that is, as always starting toward the subject from ‘‘outside.’’ I want instead to elaborate the issues raised here by making an appeal to the treatment of the skin in psychoanalysis. The aim will be to tease out how psychoanalysis comprehends the structure of the subject’s encounter with the social, not simply by starting from within, but from the production of the relation between within and without. It will be lost on no one that, in turning to psychoanalysis, I am also working the suture joining the sociological and psychoanalytical divisions of the percussive field. The most sustained and therefore useful discussion of this problematic appears in Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego (1989). Starting with the embryological insight that ‘‘both the skin (including the sense organs) and the brain are formed from the ectoderm [one of the three layers of the embryo]’’ (Anzieu 1989, 9), and drawing persistently on the analytical notion of anaclisis (in other words, the notion that structure derives from the ‘‘leaning on’’ or ‘‘propping’’ that characterizes the relations among its components), Anzieu establishes the indispensability of the skin to the very formation of the subject. Some of the force and significance of his project can be gleaned in the following quotation: Every psychical activity is anaclitically dependent upon a biological function. The Skin Ego finds its support in the various functions of the skin. . . . The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains inside it the goodness and fullness accumulating there through feeding, care, the bathing in words. Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps the outside out; it is the barrier which protects against penetration by the aggression and greed emanating from others, whether people or objects. Finally, the third function—which the skin shares with the mouth and which it performs at least as often—is as the site and a primary means of communicating with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is, moreover, an ‘‘inscribing surface’’ for the marks left by those others. (Anzieu 1989, 40)

The anaclitic relation invoked here between the skin and the Skin Ego allows Anzieu to conclude that the latter participates in identity formation, both structurally and developmentally, by providing a ‘‘mental image’’ allowing the child to represent itself as ‘‘containing psychical contents’’—in short, as possessing interiority. Clearly, it is from a per18 percussion

spective such as this that the expression ‘‘bruised ego’’ takes on a certain literal sense. And although one may well want to quarrel both with Anzieu’s inclination to reduce the subject to the Ego and his reticence on the matter of color, his discussion does invite the sort of historicization that many psychoanalytical discussions do not. In fact, when he later calls for setting limits to the violence wrought upon nature and human beings (everything from pollution to ‘‘fiscal discipline’’), and in drawing attention to the changing clientele of analysis (he claims that more than 50 percent of analysands are ‘‘borderlines,’’ or people suspended between neurosis and psychosis), Anzieu all but invites one to situate his study in the broad context generated by the likes of Duden and Elias. Thus, the ‘‘sealing’’ up of the skin and the walling in of the self must be seen as a reaction formation—in effect, a self-protective strategy in which the self is at once secured and compromised. In fact, many of the skin (Ego) disorders diagnosed and discussed by Anzieu, especially those in which patients complain of feeling like cracked and leaking eggs, hark back to the skin that Duden claims was sacrificed to Western modernity, suggesting, of course, that this very ‘‘backwardness’’ may well trigger the ‘‘borderline’’ identification. It is crucial here not to lose sight of the dialectical character of ‘‘leaning on.’’ Otherwise, Anzieu’s position appears as one in which the sheer physicality of the skin is deemed determinant in the ‘‘first instance,’’ thus making the gesture of historicization seem hollow. Precisely to the extent that it complicates the dynamics of derivation, anaclisis designates that importantly precarious state achieved by a tripod, where each element supports itself on the other two. Thus, the physicality of the skin does not ‘‘come first.’’ It arises—in the field of representation—in conjunction with the Skin Ego, which, although it may indeed be ‘‘leaning on’’ the dermal sac, functions rather like the Lacanian imaginary to produce, retroactively or belatedly, an organizing defect in the structure of the subject. This defect is interesting not as a void but as a passage, an unstable ‘‘worm hole’’ through which history and being commute, mediating the most immediate. In addition, anaclisis—even at this level—extends the field of its effects to include social relations as such. This is why Anzieu stresses the communicative function of the skin—or, as he says elsewhere (citing Turguet), ‘‘the relational frontier of the I [which I share] with my neighbor’s skin’’ (Anzieu 1989, 29), where the frontier itself becomes a border with multiple edges. The point being that just as the Skin Ego leans against the dermal envelope, the identity it contains leans on ‘‘the neighbor’s skin,’’ making the skin less of a surface or a fold than a space of organized contiguities, the end of senseless beating

19

rather like the delicious surface where pudding mix, boiled milk, and refrigeration commingle. History and the social are thus immediately part of a network within which embodiment takes place. Though Anzieu notes in passing that the skin has rich and diverse connotations in a variety of semantic paradigms (one thinks here of such expressions as ‘‘give me some skin, man,’’ or ‘‘by the skin of her teeth’’), he unfortunately does not link this to the skin’s anaclitic structure. To do so would not just mean acknowledging the catachresis that predicts our deployment of the sign ‘‘skin’’ in such expressions; it would also mean unfolding or elaborating the catachrestic web of associations that enables, and is enabled by, this situation.∂ Such an elaboration would, in my judgment, quickly lead one to what I call the percussive field, a significant portion of which is involved in the production (through drumming, beating, and striking) of our sense of the skin—hence, not strictly the body, but the embodied subject. To the extent that I am thereby linking the representation of musical practice and embodiment, I am clearly pursuing a line of inquiry that has been meticulously opened by my colleague Richard Leppert. But whereas his research concentrates on what he calls the ‘‘site’’ (pun intended) of the body, I am decidedly more interested in the body’s ‘‘resonance’’—its ‘‘tone,’’ as well as its connotative dispersion within the practices of music and painting (Leppert 1993). What follows from this engagement with Duden and Anzieu is an account of the subject that, through a genealogy of the skin (albeit thin), establishes first that interiority, the very consummation and refuge of cultural experience, is propped up on and in the body; and second, that making sense of beating will, at some point (so why not sooner rather than later?), have recourse to the infrastructural entanglements of embodiment. True, the implication of my reading is that both writers could have recognized the fundamental importance of percussion to their analyses, so some constraint or assumption must have interfered. Speculation might prove interesting here, but more consequential, I argue, is the discerning of solicitations of, or calls for, a theory of embodiment at work within musical beating. Back to Back During the 1940s and ’50s, in predominantly urban subcultures of the United States, ‘‘skins’’ was another way to say ‘‘drums.’’ This metonymy was yet another variation derived from the web of catachrestic associations, many centuries old, in which a drum could have a head, 20 percussion

ribs, a body, a skin, and, most important, a voice. In effect, the drum was construed as a speaking body. Mickey Hart, in his two justly influential publications on drums and drumming, has delineated some of the cultural traditions out of which such a matrix emerged (Hart 1990, 1991). It is striking, of course, that the drum’s speech, its resonant interiority, is constructed here as the effect of contact on its skin, as if the anaclitic relation between the envelope and the Ego detailed by Anzieu was literally retraced in the catachresis, the abusive use, the beating, of the drum itself. But beyond the important theme of the skin’s function in constituting the conditions of an expressive interiority—and it is worth recalling here the way Rousseau, in his Essay on the Origin of Language (1986), linked speech and le cri—there is the equally significant problem of the skin’s location. If, as Anzieu proposes, the skin is a gnarled border we share with others, then where exactly is it, and what does it cover or separate—in a word, hide? Insofar as the skin both has a sense and, in a certain sense, is where sense is sensed, I propose that we think of skin—the body bag, if you will—as arising at the point of contact, in the event, perhaps even the scene, of ‘‘beating.’’ In this respect, I am reading the catachrestic character of the drum projectively—that is, to borrow a well-known Derridean formulation, What sense must the expressive body have such that it can be figured in a drum? Moreover, as my emphasis on Duden’s treatment of identity has signaled, I want to extend her deliberately clinical argument, to argue that our skin—the closed, and yet endlessly vulnerable skin of late modernity—is very much defined by the drumming, beating, and striking involved in investing this surface not merely with sense, but also with an occupant, a sensor of sense. Indeed, it is precisely this connection between meaning and the subject that has prompted me to insist on ‘‘sense’’ when speaking of percussive signifying. It is crucial that, on this topic perhaps even more so than others, one proceed, as musicians are fond of saying, ‘‘with feeling.’’ Thus, if the percussive field is a way to designate the assemblage of practices that articulate beating contexts, constructing and mobilizing it effectively necessarily entails identifying those contexts which are especially relevant to a particular sociohistorical constitution of the skin. Of course, identifying all pertinent such contexts—even at the local level—would prove impossible without additional delimitation of the frame of relevance. For this reason, I propose to elaborate this account of the percussive field in and around a very particular musical idiom, one that rather non-controversially exhibits, if not beating, then certainly ‘‘the big beat’’—namely, rock-and-roll. This is not to say, or the end of senseless beating

21

even imply, that rock-and-roll is the only beat-centered musical idiom. Rather, I focus on rock-and-roll because beating transpires there in a way that is perhaps crucially relevant to the late-modern constitution of embodied subjectivity in the West—to, in a word, the skin. Because so little goes without saying today, I will not presume that the relation between rock-and-roll and ‘‘the beat’’ requires no further elaboration. Though this might be taken to mean that arcane elements abound here, I have a more immediate aim: to discourage the predictable reduction of the beat to its status as a strictly musical event. Although I do not want to downplay the importance of the beat’s musical status, starting there places the cart before the donkey. Let me suggest some ways to avoid the awkward and (though not for that reason) uninteresting procession that would result. When in the spring of 1955 Life magazine announced the emergence of what the Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed had christened ‘‘rock ’n’ roll’’ (initially ‘‘Rock and Roll’’),∑ it did so in the following terms: ‘‘Rock ’n’ roll is both music and dance. The music has a rhythm often heavily accented on the 2nd and 4th beat. The dance combines the Lindy and the Charleston, and almost everything else’’ (Life 1955, 166). It is worth drawing attention here to the thematic expansion that transpires in this brief characterization. The passage begins by establishing that, although one might think that rock-and-roll is merely a musical idiom, it is in fact both music and dance—a hardly controversial insight that I will nevertheless develop in Chapter Three. It concludes by overflowing the very bounds it sets for itself. For in addition to the Lindy Hop and the Charleston, rock-and-roll dancing includes ‘‘almost everything else.’’ What precisely does the qualification ‘‘almost’’ manage to exclude? Life’s description was written three years after Freed’s thwarted attempt to stage ‘‘Moondog’s Coronation Ball’’ in Cleveland, an event that, in bringing together an agitated crowd of some 25,000 black fans (more tickets were sold than seats were available in the Cleveland Arena), a solid lineup of black headliners, a hysterical local press, and the reproductive technology of the radio, might well qualify as aboriginal with regard to the sociogenesis of rock-androll spectacle. Thus, the description can be read as calling up this fragment of popular memory in its rhetoric of excess, as if to remind the magazine’s readers that, with rock-and-roll, popular dance shaded off even more precipitously than usual into domains of activity that one would be hard pressed to characterize as musical. These domains included, of course, not just sex but also race riots. Though it is obviously important to distance oneself from precisely 22 percussion

this sort of sensationalism, the connection made between a musical rhythm and—no doubt, for many of Life’s readers—unspeakable dispositions of the body is well worth hanging on to. This is so not simply because a musician such as Bill Haley (arguably the first rock-androll ‘‘star’’ and crucial to the stir produced by Richard Brooks’s film The Blackboard Jungle [1955]), when asked to characterize the ‘‘new sound,’’ would say, ‘‘I felt that if I could take, say, a Dixieland tune and drop the first and third beats, and accentuate the second and fourth, and add a beat the listeners could clap to as well as dance this would be what they [audiences] were after. From that the rest was easy’’ (as quoted in Gillett 1970, 24). It is also so because it is precisely through the link between beating and the body—however vilified—that rockand-roll offers one significant point of access to the percussive field. Indeed, in the opening sequence of Will Price’s film Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), the spectator’s access to ‘‘the scene’’ is mediated through a controlled but irrepressible rendition of ‘‘The Big Beat’’ (by Jimmy Cavello and the Houserockers), complete with ‘‘rockin’ ’’ teenage dancers in a malt shop. For this very reason, I argue that ‘‘the beat’’ ought to be consistently approached as at once musical and corporeal. Not only does ‘‘the beat’’ associate cultural production and the subjection of human agency—that is, the reduction of agency to the agent—but it also situates music outside itself—or, at least, outside that construal of it which reduces it to the relations among vibrations, pitches, notation, and performance. This is not to imply, of course, that academic musicology knows nothing of the beat. On the contrary. The point is that academic musicology has tended not to conceptualize what is construed as music as a cultural practice fundamental to the subjection of human agency. Consequently, it has not attended to the ways one might seek to model the study of even narrowly musical materials in a way that would underscore precisely this. With a suggestiveness I find irresistible, this broadly disciplinary dilemma has occasioned the clever analytical deployment of another percussive figure. It deserves brief comment. Essaying a stylistic experiment that was later to culminate in Glas (1990), Jacques Derrida opens Margins of Philosophy (1982) with a piece, ‘‘Tympan,’’ that sets his own reflections on the limits of the discipline of philosophy off against several passages from Michel Leiris’s autobiographical text, Scratches. What is relevant is how Derrida’s discussion of philosophy opens up the otherwise unremarkable term ‘‘tympan’’ in what—as a gesture of reciprocation—I will call a striking way. Due no doubt to the importance of the pun that motivates much of the argument in Speech and the end of senseless beating

23

Phenomena (1973) (in French, ‘‘understanding’’ and ‘‘hearing’’ converge in entendre), ‘‘Tympan,’’ which is committed with equal tenacity to the task of deconstructing the opposition between representation and expression, fixes on the eardrum as a structure that maintains both the separation and the relationship between sound and sense. In fact, precisely to the extent to which it functions simultaneously as surface (on which ‘‘beating’’ is inscribed) and medium or channel (through which the effects of beating are transmitted), the eardrum, in Derrida’s hands, comes to embody the dilemma philosophy faces in trying to think its limits. Although at one level this discussion reiterates Derrida’s signature critique of logocentrism, in his semantic stretching of the tympan he re-frames this critique in a way that invites one to see beating as precisely the sort of practice that, because it produces at the point of contact (or what Derrida has also called ‘‘the hinge’’) the relation between an inside and its outside, becomes difficult to subsume under or within a disciplinary object, regardless of whether that discipline is philosophy or musicology.∏ In the more recent ‘‘Les coups d’Artaud’’ (Derrida 1996), Derrida subjects ‘‘the blow’’ to a similar semantic distention, which prompts one to conclude that his recourse to percussive figures as the means by which to pose the problem of limits is far from accidental. Does beating or percussion more broadly, essentially incarnate the problem of undecidability, whether at the level of a discipline or a touch? The venerable Curt Sachs may have put his finger on what is at issue here in Rhythm and Tempo (1953), when he discovered that ‘‘rhythm’’ itself, to misquote Freud, is a primeval word with antithetical senses. On the one hand, rhuthmos (Greek) denoted river or flow. On the other, rhythmus (Latin) denoted blockage or dam. Sachs’s point is not that Greeks and Romans had different cultural coordinates (to a large extent they did) but that coiled within rhythm itself was a certain undecidability—perhaps the very same undecidability that Derrida traces in the connotative oscillations of ‘‘tympan.’’π Though I have yet to draw out the general consequences of the unsettling rhythmic qualities of the beat, some preliminary musicological distinctions can be made that will aid in establishing why ‘‘the big beat’’ (incidentally, the name of the television show that the ‘‘payola’’ scandal cost Freed), rock-and-roll, so invites a systematic delineation of its percussive field. Rhythm, pulse, accent. With these basic concepts one can generate a musicologically reliable account of beating. If we begin by characterizing rhythm—which the human subject may well perceive as palpability itself—as all the elements that bear on the duration of sounds, we can 24 percussion

not only grasp how it combines the antithetical senses of flow and blockage (a duration is an interval in that it starts, continues, and stops); we can also appreciate how intimately time and measure converge. In musical practice, rhythm is formed in relation to a pulse that is executed at a certain rate of speed and that is organized by groupings that exhibit a conspicuous—one might also say measured—regularity. The events that order the pulse are beats, and the iterative pattern that they form is the beat. Thus, there is a crucial passage from the plural (beats) to the singular (the beat). The beaten pulse is precisely what the body responds to in dance and, for that matter, in marching (two ‘‘percussive’’ activities invoked in the introduction and discussed at considerable length in Chapter Three). What gives the beat of a particular piece of music its most palpable character is accent—that is, the establishment of emphasis on particular beats within the beat. Of course, what is particularly remarkable about these musicological concepts is the way they instantaneously spill over into the domains of nature and human subjection. With a consistency suggesting that academic music theory is deeply committed to a form of conceptual minimalism, one finds rhythm discussed in terms of how we ‘‘naturally’’ or ‘‘instinctively’’ impose accent patterns on pulses that mimic, predictably, the heartbeat or the rocking of a restless child. Although I think we would do well to consider more thoughtfully how precisely the embodied subject and music engage each other, the ‘‘unearned’’ recourse to nature here only further complicates the problem embodied in the antithetical senses of rhythm. It is therefore perhaps wise to stick with a particular idiomatic articulation of rhythmic beating—that of rock-and-roll—where the passage between the plurality and the singularity of the beat is at the heart of virtually every composition. This is only part of the story. For when addressing oneself to the phenomenon of rock-and-roll, it quickly becomes necessary to displace a general consideration of the beat with a more immediate consideration of its manifestation as a ‘‘backbeat.’’ Indeed—but what precisely is a backbeat? Though it is no longer recognized as such, the backbeat is actually a syncopation. What one can see here is that the backbeat takes a pulse composed of four beats, reverses the ‘‘typical’’ pattern of accents (which would fall on the downbeat—the first beat—and the third beat), and builds a tension into the pulse by placing the accents on the second and fourth beats. If this beat is no longer perceivable as a syncopation, it is due precisely to the forces of standardization (though one should never underestimate the impact of poor drumming and equally poor recordthe end of senseless beating

25

fig. 1 Backbeat

ing): Virtually every popular song that actually has a drum part now employs some variation of the backbeat. Though rhythmic backbeating pre-exists rock-and-roll, its contemporary sense could be said to derive from the execution requirements of this beat when distributed across the standard ‘‘trap set’’ (a history of which I will detail later), where the interplay between accented and unaccented beats is effected by playing the bass (or kick) drum—on the downbeat and the third beat—off against the snare drum (on two and four), as though the snare is answering ‘‘back’’ to the bass drum. Though at this point it may seem forced to say so, the notion of the snare ‘‘answering’’ to the bass drum derives not simply from the generally catachrestic character of the instrument, but, more important, from the African tradition of ‘‘call-and-response’’ drumming patterns that, I will argue, have come to assert themselves in this fundamental rhythmic signature of rock-and-roll. In his recent autobiography, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, the extraordinarily influential and woefully underrated session drummer Earl Palmer situates the birth of the rock-and-roll backbeat in his recording sessions with Little Richard, claiming that ‘‘the only reason I started playing what they come to call the rock-and-roll beat came from trying to match Richard’s right hand. Ding-ding-ding-ding! Most everything I had done before was a shuffle or slow triplets’’ (Scherman 1999, 90). He goes on to speculate on whether Little Richard or Chuck Berry was the first to organize tunes around what he calls the ‘‘straight eighthnote feeling,’’ but what bears emphasis here is the fact that what we now call and recognize as the backbeat grew out of Palmer’s effort to answer to the accompaniment demands placed on him by a particular way of performing what were basically blues tunes. In Chapter Three I will elaborate the myriad issues involved here at much greater length, but for now I will settle for forging a more intimate link between the backbeat and the musical idiom of rock-and-roll. 26 percussion

Berry’s Cymballic Order While Bill Haley might be the first rock-and-roll ‘‘star’’ (‘‘Crazy Man Crazy’’ was the first rock-and-roll tune—so designated—to show up on the Billboard charts), Chuck Berry at least appears on the cover of Gillett’s The Sound of the City (1970). More important, as the preceding quote by Palmer reminds us, Berry wrote many songs devoted to articulating what he took to be the very being of rock-and-roll. It is therefore worth considering here at some length his much covered hit from 1957, ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music.’’ I’ve got no kick against modern jazz, Unless they try to play it too darn fast; And change the beauty of the melody, Until they sound just like a symphony, [Chorus] That’s why I go for that rock ’n’ roll music Any old way you choose it; It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it, Any old time you use it. It’s gotta be rock ’n’ roll music If you wanna dance with me, If you wanna dance with me. I took my loved one over cross the tracks, So she can hear my man a-wail a sax; I must admit they have a rockin’ band, Man they were goin’ like a hurrican’ [Chorus] Way down South they gave a jubilee, The jokey folks they had a jamboree; They’re drinkin’ home brew from a wooden cup, The folks dancin’ got all shook up. [Chorus: first line modified—And started playin’ that rock ’n’ roll music, etc.] Don’t care to hear ’em play a tango, I’m in no mood to hear a mambo; It’s way too early for a congo, So keep a-rockin’ that piano. [Chorus: first line modified—So I can hear some of that rock ’n’ roll music, etc.]

In the chapter of Berry’s autobiography devoted to ‘‘self-analyses’’ of his the end of senseless beating

27

various compositions, he writes of this song, ‘‘I was heavy into rock ’n’ roll even then and had to create something that hit the spot without question. I wanted the lyrics to define every aspect of its being and so worded it to do so’’ (Berry 1987, 154). Though I am loathe to restrict my reading of this piece to the lyrics, Berry’s subsequent remarks encourage us to take them quite seriously. It is important, of course, that Berry felt he was ‘‘defining’’ what the being of rock-and-roll is, and for this reason one can hardly be accused of overstating the evidentiary significance of the tune. Although we may disagree with him about whether he hits ‘‘the spot,’’ clearly the song attempts to stake out a claim about the—dare I say—ontology of this particular musical idiom, and it solicits a reading that engages it at this level. Several obvious points deserve to be made at the outset. Rock-androll is here defined in relation to dating, dancing, and—to invoke an anachronism—dissing. I say ‘‘dissing’’ because in the opening and closing verses Berry sets rock-and-roll off against a variety of musical idioms, all of which are deemed defective either because they evoke a high cultural tradition that is perceived as inhospitable (modern jazz degenerating through dissonance and acceleration into symphonic practice), or because they in some sense catch the listening subject at the ‘‘wrong’’ time (it’s too early, too intense, and so on). This is a crucial aspect of setting out the specificity of a musical idiom, and Berry is quite right to place rock-and-roll in the cultural configuration traced by his evocation of jazz and the dance styles of the Tango, the Mambo, and the Congo. (Although ‘‘The Congo’’ was also the name of a juke joint in Atlanta known to Berry, the context suggests that the reference to dance is more immediate.) Two relevant idioms conspicuous in their absence are the blues (particularly the ‘‘urban blues’’) and so-called rockabilly or country, both so deeply implicated in the emergence of rock-and-roll that for Berry to diss them would amount to biting the hands that fed him. The two inner verses evoke the ritual of dating, and both involve traversing a border: in the second verse, the ‘‘tracks’’ (a profoundly overdetermined figure, given the context, as will be shown in Chapter Four), and in the third verse, presumably the Mason–Dixon line, because Berry opens the verse with the phrase, ‘‘’Way down South.’’ The scenario of heterosexual courtship is clearly more pronounced in the second verse, where Berry takes his ‘‘loved one’’ (‘‘she’’) to hear a band with a sax player. Given that the band is performing ‘‘across the tracks,’’ we are invited not only to see this space as dangerous (on the ‘‘wrong’’ [read ‘‘black’’] side of town), but also to see it as a scene of 28 percussion

sexual seduction (‘‘her’’ desire is solicited repeatedly: ‘‘If you wanna dance with me’’). Nevertheless, because the third verse again stages a rock-and-roll performance (clearly associated with the socially unstable event of the jubilee or carnival, as Mikhail Bakhtin might have insisted) and is followed by the chorus, in which the shaking bodies are insistently recast as dancing bodies, it also evokes the dating ritual, though now very much defined in terms of the act of dancing. Of course, the jubilee and the ecstatic bodies it calls up tie the dating ritual to the ‘‘voodoo practices’’ that many scholars have associated with the performative roots of rock-and-roll. To this extent, the date involves not merely going to a ‘‘gig,’’ but, in an odd, almost meta-linguistic way, to the ritual sources of rock-and-roll itself. This is a route that, in channeling us through obscurity, is in its own way blocked or subject to interdiction. It is worth lingering over the evocative richness of the chorus. Having already invoked the sexual taunt of the line, ‘‘If you wanna dance with me,’’ it is vital to note that dancing here is intimately related to rock-and-roll music. In other words, were one to flesh out the ‘‘taunt,’’ it might initially be parsed as: Show me that you really want to dance with me by accompanying me to a place where rock-and-roll music is being played. But note here that Berry’s date is asked to render as the sign of her desire not her willingness to dance to rock-and-roll, nor even her willingness to attend a particular type of musical performance. Instead, her desire is to be signaled through her willingness to bond with the male singer in their shared recognition of what ‘‘a wailin’ band’’—in effect, what rock-and-roll—is. Not only is the woman asked to speak her desire ‘‘first’’ (forever then accepting the consequences of having ‘‘pushed’’ him), but its enunciation is framed within a test—a test in which the man’s desire (in this case, his passion for a particular type of music) must be both recognized and ‘‘ventriloquized,’’ or spoken for him. Heterosexual masculinity in the making. Significantly, rock-and-roll music as the embodiment of Berry’s passion is offered up as the desire that the date must desire. On one level, this is a simple articulation of the principle of compatibility: For this to work, we need to enjoy some of the same things. However, this circuit of desire—which I have characterized as a sexual taunt—particularly insofar as it sheds light on the ‘‘being’’ of rock-and-roll, assumes new contours when read against the other lines in the chorus. When explaining his passion for rock-and-roll, Berry says, ‘‘That’s why I go for that rock ’n’ roll music / Any old way you choose it; / It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it, / Any old time you use it.’’ Several points deserve the end of senseless beating

29

elaboration here. It is significant that through the verb ‘‘to choose’’ Berry not only calls up ‘‘the test’’ (suggesting, of course, that if one knows what constitutes rock-and-roll music, she or he cannot fail to recognize it); he also aligns the decision-making of the rock-and-roll composer (presumably himself, since, as we will see, ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ is driven by a heavy backbeat) and that of his date, again looping their desires around and through one another. The ambiguity this releases into the chorus achieves its symptomatic status in the pronomial drift from ‘‘I’’ to ‘‘you’’—indeed, a ‘‘you’’ that is at once singular and plural, specific and utterly indefinite. However, at the very core of the singer’s desire for rock-and-roll lies the rock-steady backbeat: no matter when you use it, you can’t lose it. Because I am arguing that Berry’s clearest articulation of the ‘‘being’’ of rock-and-roll emerges here, it is worth unpacking this presentation of the backbeat carefully. Having already established through the quote from Bill Haley that the beat of rock-and-roll, like that of virtually all African musics, is designed to articulate with a particular style of dance, let us not overlook one of the obvious implications of Berry’s lyrics. Though syncopated, the backbeat sets up a ‘‘groove’’ within which the dancing body can reliably find its footing. This is precisely one of the purposes of the backbeat, and although this relation between drumming and dance will be complicated in a subsequent chapter, it makes sense to read the line, ‘‘Its got a backbeat, you can’t lose it,’’ as an observation made by a dancer who finds the backbeat desirable precisely because it is easy to dance to—because, in effect, the beat tells the body where to be in such a way that one never feels out of step or off-beat. Because it is hard to imagine that one might be truly shaken by his or her inability to dance in step, it is important to recognize that the backbeat’s beacon might also be a source of comfort for the performers—that is, those for whom losing the beat might have more immediately humiliating consequences. In that case, the line might also be read as an observation made by a musician about the ease with which one can keep his or her rhythmic bearings in a tune with a backbeat.∫ A pattern begins to emerge here that warrants scrutiny. In a song where the composer has drawn attention to the precision of its lyrics, the ambiguities I have noted—Is the chorus referring to a musical idiom in general or to itself? Does it express the concerns of dancers or musicians?—grab our attention. If these ambiguities in some sense achieve symptomatic status in the relation between the man’s and the woman’s desire, a relation virtually driving the lyrical 30 percussion

tension in the song, then the pattern of these ambiguities would appear to involve a reiteration of the limits, the edges of the song. In other words, the ambiguities all hinge on the question of what is ‘‘in’’ and what is ‘‘out.’’ Which music, which woman, to be sure, but also which bodies: those of musicians–composers or those of dancers–daters? In light of this, one might reasonably argue that these lyrics obsess over something that they otherwise characterize as settled, an effect that is nowhere more prominent than in the chorus, where we are repeatedly told that the backbeat, no matter how or when it is used, cannot be lost. If it cannot be lost, then what’s the problem? Sure, a chorus is designed to repeat, but why, to re-quote Berry, ‘‘word it so’’? What anxiety speaks through the ambiguities? What might it tell us about the ‘‘being’’ of rock-and-roll? The answer, as it often does, comes down to choice. Once the backbeat is chosen, no matter how it is used it cannot be lost. Thus, the anxiety I have discerned within the lyrical ambiguities appears to have to do with the choice, or what I have called the test: Will she choose it/me? But, as such a formulation makes clear, this returns us to yet more pronominal ambiguity. Not exactly an advance. Perhaps, then, the anxiety has to do with choice itself—not with whether the right one will be made, but with the fact that the freedom of the choice is contradicted both by the necessity of making the choice and by the inevitability that follows from it. The backbeat, once chosen and used, cannot be lost. The rock-and-roller is, through the usurpation of a descriptive ‘‘cannot,’’ by a prescriptive ‘‘cannot,’’ overtaken by the expression of his or her own freedom. Clearly, my earlier point about the construction of heterosexual masculinity constituted a first pass at this insight, but if we add now the matter of the pattern—that is, the insistent interplay between what is ‘‘in’’ and what is ‘‘out’’—then perhaps what Berry has placed within earshot is the way the backbeat functions as something like the ‘‘constitutive exclusion’’ of rock-and-roll. Which means what? It means that one obsesses over the backbeat precisely because rock-and-roll, in order to be recognized as rock-androll, must solicit a choice that it simultaneously cancels. In a sense, rock-and-roll has always already lost the backbeat, because as the object of a choice that then surrenders you to its powers, the backbeat is both rock-and-roll and what rock-and-roll must exclude in order to embody the capture of the desire it has stirred. As virtually all histories of the idiom attest, the music was given its social sense, its capacity to hold sway in its being, through the passions of its fans, passions that were obviously dependent on rock-and-roll but also never actually in the end of senseless beating

31

its possession. The structural logic of fandom—that is, the fact that the choice, or even the fortunate accident, that initiates a compulsion is lost to the compulsive subject—is linked by Berry to the beating that calls out from within rock-and-roll. This may well be why the pattern that heralds the paradox of choice pivots around what is ‘‘in’’ and what is ‘‘out.’’ To be ‘‘in,’’ one must always already be in. To state this repeatedly is to establish that one might always be out. To link this with the backbeat is to suggest that it somehow embodies this predicament. How might that be? In my judgment, the musicological fact that the backbeat is, strictly speaking, a syncopation is not without significance. As we have heard, its accents fall in such a way as to produce an inverted echo of the more ‘‘typical’’ accenting of a four-beat measure on the first and third beats. Moreover, as stressed earlier, standardization has effectively effaced the backbeat’s status as a syncopation, so that now we perceive the backbeat as a report (as is said of gunfire) through which echoes—though in inverted form—the rhythmic ‘‘norm’’ it has displaced. Thus, it might reasonably be said of the backbeat that its own status as a syncopation is lost on us, or, put more theoretically, that in the becoming-‘‘normal’’ of the backbeat the very arbitrariness of the norm has itself become audible, rendering syncopation in some sense undecidable, if not imperceptible, as such. As we will hear, these issues are not lost on Berry, but such musicological considerations risk muffling a more psychoanalytical dimension of syncopation, a dimension explored at length in Catherine Clément’s rapturous study, Syncope (1994). With a tenacity that exceeds even Derrida’s in his stretching of the tympan, Clément not only establishes how the syncope is the intervalic structure of loss and recovery, of renewal, but she also invites us to consider how syncopation articulates intimately with the dynamics of subjection. In her deft concluding discussion of Jacques Lacan’s work from the 1940s, she writes: The mirror phase, if you recall, reproduces the scenario of musical syncope detail by detail. Weak beat: the baby is born prematurely, affected by the defect characteristic of the human race, the incompletion of the nervous system, which results in the inability to stand upright and walk, and which makes of man’s young a monstrous and moving imperfect animal. Strong beat: it is in the depth of this weakness, when he is not yet speaking, that the child is captivated by himself in the mirror, anticipates the complete figure of what he will be later, and prefigures his completion by recognizing himself as Subject, he, me, I, an identity not to be confused with the other. (Clément 1994, 255)

32 percussion

Though at first glance the relation she is drawing between music and subjection seems purely conceptual (if not, in fact, structural), in the opening pages of her text Clément establishes dance—in fact, her discussion orbits closely around one of the very styles referred to in ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’: the Tango—as a key practical mediation between music and the embodiment of the subject. However, what is particularly important about the link to subjection is that through Clément’s formulation of it, one can restate, from a different angle, what the backbeat must be such that ‘‘you can’t lose it.’’ If it makes sense to locate syncopation in the very emergence of the subject, and to argue that all syncopation—whether linguistic (for example, the ‘‘ ’n’ ’’ in ‘‘rock ’n’ roll’’) or musical, as in the backbeat itself—is caught up in the sociogenesis of the subject, then perhaps the backbeat cannot be lost because its loss is a condition for the emergence of a subject that cannot be without it. In other words, from the vantage point of the organization of human agency called the subject, a rhythm of development operates in which a certain belatedness prevails. One’s independence comes into being on the site of a prior dependence. In effect, the other is where my image comes from. For it to be my image (of me and mine), any record of this transaction must drop out. For Clément, ‘‘syncopation’’ is the name for this rhythm of development that, in her terms, explains why rapture arises whenever and wherever the subject finds itself back in this groove. From such a perspective, one’s image displays the paradox of choice described earlier. In other words, to be a subject requires that one choose his or her image from the other. In fact, doing so is the very condition for one’s independence, one’s freedom from the other. However, the necessity of choosing always already deprives one of that very freedom. The rhythm of this dynamic cannot be lost to the subject it produces, and yet precisely because this rhythm always eludes the subject—it is the senseless precondition for the subject—the impossibility of this loss must be obsessively repeated. Berry’s backbeat appears to engage this dynamic precisely to the extent that it raises the question of what belongs to the being of rock-and-roll. What makes the backbeat recognizable no matter how or when it is used is the fact that the subject’s relation to syncopation is reiterated in it—a relation that makes of loss the gain on which the subject qua subject depends. For this reason, it might make sense to read the ‘‘back’’ in backbeat not simply as an adverb, but as a noun designating the rear side of the human torso, that very stretch of the subject that, to the extent that it eludes one’s gaze, belongs to the other. the end of senseless beating

33

Because Berry himself has drawn our attention to the ontological implications of his song, I am reluctant to concede that I am overreading his lyrics. To be sure, his own perception of the backbeat is framed within the amorous discourse of dating. But in insisting that this gives one access to the being of a musical idiom, he clearly recognizes that music is fundamentally caught up in formation of the subject. It is worth stressing, however, that Berry’s map of desire—precisely to the extent that it retraces Lacan’s—invites us to recognize a masculinist cast in the libidinal economy of heterosexuality, a point whose implications I will attempt to flesh out in my concluding chapter. Nevertheless, two key points bear repeating: first, that Berry links rock-and-roll to the backbeat, implying that what the former is is caught up in this rhythmic articulation; and second, that the compelling sense of the backbeat, its power, derives from its belated involvement in the process of subjective embodiment. As persuasive as I find these claims to be, their pertinence to the task of making sense of the sound of ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ remains to be elaborated. To begin, it is worth reprising the point that the tune exemplifies the very backbeat its lyrics celebrate. In the Chess recording of the song from 1957, ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ opens with a percussive fill on guitar (in effect, a preemptive four-stroke roll) that segues directly into the chorus, where Berry’s guitar is joined by standup bass, piano, and, of course, drums. The drums enter when Berry hits the word ‘‘rock,’’ establishing a pattern that repeats throughout the cut whereby at the end of each verse and each chorus, the drums rest for a measure, reentering with a snare crack on the fourth beat that heralds the next downbeat. The backbeat used is classic, with heavy bass-drum kicks on one and three (in the chorus, the bass drum maintains a steady quarternote pulse throughout each measure); dense snare beats on two and four (I use ‘‘dense’’ as a descriptive term to capture the following sonic qualities: the comparative looseness of the snare tension on the bottom head, the depth of the snare shell itself, and the typical muffling of the drumheads during recording); and an eighth-note ride pattern on the highhat cymbals. (See Figure 1 for the backbeat.) Because this part is sustained virtually throughout the 2:30 tune, the invocation of the backbeat in the chorus appears to refer to the rather obvious way in which it provides a reliable groove within which the tune can unfold. However, in point of fact, the backbeat is repeatedly interrupted, as noted earlier. Although the very pattern thereby established would underscore precisely the way in which the backbeat is repeatedly lost and found, this routine losing or suspending of the backbeat invites us to 34 percussion

reflect more carefully on three other moments in the recording. In all of these moments, the suspension, or loss, of the backbeat is decisive. I have already noted the preemptive guitar fill that opens the song. This effectively reverses a rhythmic relation that otherwise holds, in which the backbeat sets the frame for the guitar-strumming and the execution of the chord progression, opening what might well be termed a ‘‘repercussive’’ relation between the drums and the guitar (though the pianist’s right hand and the bassist’s ‘‘walk’’ are certainly implicated here, as well). With this in mind it is worth shifting directly to the end of the song, where a rhythmic dilemma initiated in the lyrics of the fourth verse finds its consummate expression. Essentially, the piece concludes on a slow triplet executed by the entire ensemble, which in context has the connotative feel of a defiant, perhaps even ironic, ‘‘cha-cha-cha.’’ This qualifies as a suspension of the backbeat not simply because the song itself has concluded, but also because the decidedly Latin feel of the ending—aside from referring us back to the preemption of the opening guitar fill—refers us back to the lyrical complexity of verse four, where rock-and-roll music is set off against the Tango and the Mambo.Ω In the Chess recording, the fourth verse is the one in which what makes Berry ‘‘go for’’ rock-and-roll music is framed within reiterated antagonisms. Significantly, it is the one verse where the backbeat is at first deftly suspended, then, by the time we get to the fifth chorus, equally deftly reestablished. As if in response to the ‘‘other’’ musics invoked in the lyrics, the drumming in the verse switches the snare beat to the downbeat, abruptly ‘‘re-syncopating’’ the backbeat by setting it off against the rhythmic ‘‘norm’’ it came to displace. The effect is to give the verse an appropriately Latin feel, and if this development deserves emphasis it is precisely because here the backbeat is indeed lost. When film music mimics the movement of a character on screen, it is called ‘‘Mickey Mousing’’ (perhaps for obvious reasons: Think here, for example, of Disney’s groundbreaking ‘‘Silly Symphonies’’ or the performance of ‘‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’’ in the film Fantasia). One might be tempted to read verse four in these terms (the drum part mimicking musics that have ‘‘lost’’ the backbeat), except for the fact that the backbeat reasserts itself in the course of the verse, insistently staging a dramatic confrontation, in fact, between the drumming of rock-and-roll music and the drumming of Latin music. This, of course, makes the shift from ‘‘Congo’’ to ‘‘conga’’ in the later Mercury recording more than a simple expression of whimsy, for in this evocation of a particular percussion instrument (‘‘poetic license’’ works here to fuse the dance and drum), Berry links the being of rock-and-roll to a strugthe end of senseless beating

35

gle within the ‘‘contact zone’’ between the cultures of Africa and the Americas, a struggle that is figured in the song as a conflict of beats. I will attempt to justify this claim more thoroughly in the next chapter. In the meantime, this conflict of beats—precisely to the extent that it involves one in the dance of what is ‘‘in’’ and what is ‘‘out’’— interpellates the body in ways that constitute it as one of the things at stake in the conflicts of gender, race, and ethnicity. If the body makes sense—that is, if it both produces and has a sense—it does so as the statements that solicit its presence and its action hail it, providing it with a contour fashioned from the full repertoire of contacts that delimit the body and its surface as a site of ‘‘encounters.’’ Again, because the integrity of the embodied subject is at issue in ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music,’’ it should come as no surprise that the backbeat—perhaps never more so than when, in the fourth verse, it fades into its syncopated and ‘‘normative’’ double—is at once lost and found in the tune. When the song concludes with the Latin flourish (cha-cha-cha), it would appear that the backbeat has indeed been lost in the struggle. But two further observations seem pertinent here: First, neither percussive tradition survives the end of the song; and second, in the Mercury recording—where ‘‘conga’’ is heard—the Latin finale is removed. Thus, sonically, the song deploys the backbeat to reiterate the pattern of ambiguities—all of which hinged on the theme of limits (what is ‘‘in’’ and what is ‘‘out’’)—associating the clash of percussive traditions with the ‘‘constitutive exclusions’’ at the heart of the subject itself. In the end, rock-and-roll prevails not simply as part of what we now call the culture of globalization, but as the means by which one can have one’s percussive cake and eat it, too. Backbeating establishes a groove within which loss and recovery are so deeply inscribed that its presence is felt in virtually all the versions of its absence. As Berry says in ‘‘School Days,’’ ‘‘Long live rock ’n’ roll.’’ Hearing Things I suspect that for some readers, doubt has arisen concerning my earlier insistence on the separation between this way of constructing musical analysis and my chosen idiom. I may not be able to dispel it. However, it is worth underscoring the fact that approaching music as part of the subjection of human agency—even when the body is not immediately at stake—is transposable from one idiom to another—if not, in fact, from one medium to another. Indeed, the best of the new musicology, regardless of its idiomatic focus, concerns itself with the problem of 36 percussion

subjection even when, as in the case of Barry Shank’s marvelous Dissonant Identities (1994), the concept of identity virtually comes to substitute for subjection and the distinctive theoretical challenges that it poses. What is crucial, as I have maintained elsewhere (Mowitt 1992), is an approach to analysis that rises to the demands of a textual problematic—that is, an approach to cultural practice that insists on the weave of semiotic detail, the frames of intelligibility within which such detail makes sense, and the geographic and historical trajectories that animate both the practice and our relation to it. Even if the percussive field through which I have channeled this approach represents an expression of solidarity or even complicity with rock-and-roll, surely rock-and-roll is not unique in soliciting such an approach. Many musics can be, and have been, rocked. The clash of percussive cultures now teased out of the drumming in ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ cues us to a crucial issue: the fact that the body at stake in the song would appear to be not only male, but black. How are we to link this body to the being of rock-and-roll? Much more than can be covered in a chapter deserves to be said on this score. Nevertheless, because it is an issue that will surface repeatedly in the following chapters, it is worth establishing that I share the view of Robert Palmer, Christopher Small, Charles Keil, and numerous others, which holds that rock-and-roll is a musical idiom that is neither essentially black nor essentially white, neither African nor North American. But instead of designating this situation by appealing to the quintessentially postcolonial concept of ‘‘hybridity,’’ I want to accentuate its percussive character. That is, I want to approach rock-and-roll as an idiom formed at the frontier that, rather like a scar, arose as whites and non-whites collided with each other on, or bumped each other off, a social playing field that was, and remains, far from level. In evoking the scarred or cicatricial character of this frontier, I obviously mean to suggest that the embodiment of difference, especially racial difference, involves an irreducible miscegenation, a suturing (a splitting open and closing) that makes skin a graft and the social itself deeply integumental. Contacts, connections, beats, hits, strikes, strokes, blows, chops, licks, etc., etc., are all gestures that perform, that enact this miscegenational frontier. If one is prepared to construct the musical object with sufficient sensitivity, both are audible and readable within that object. Though this makes it sound as though the frontier is a site of violence plain and simple, it is important to recognize that—as Homi Bhabha (1994) has argued with regard to discrimination—a systematic ambivalence is at work here. If one takes as his or her cue the end of senseless beating

37

Frantz Fanon’s characterization of this ambivalence for blacks as ‘‘lactification’’ (the self-abnegating desire to accede to the condition of whiteness), then the correlative concept designating white ambivalence might well be (all predictable protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) ‘‘ebonification.’’ White ambivalence is, of course, utterly entangled with guilt, envy, and fear. (One thinks here of Norman Mailer’s provocative essay ‘‘The White Negro.’’ But for this very reason it reaches beyond mere exoticism to a rapturous fascination with precisely what is characteristic of the wood: its lustrous toughness, in effect the incriminating capacity to withstand, and move beyond, white abuse. Even if Fanon and I are wrong about the precise terms of this ambivalence, what retains its analytical value are the polyrhythmic crosscurrents of the miscegenational frontier underwriting it—a frontier of violations and of violence, but obviously one not without its dangerous pleasures. Chief among the dangers of ‘‘lactification’’ is the phenomenon of cultural appropriation. Though dated variously—with the emergence of Elvis, with the British Invasion, with the triumph of commercialization embodied in the Monterey Pop Festival, and so on—scholars agree that rock-and-roll became white. Even on this subject ambivalence prevails, but in ways that require one to insist that here, as elsewhere, African Americans got the proverbial short end of the stick. This theme will unfold later in a discussion of Buddy Holly. Returning briefly to Duden’s genealogy, I will observe that the black body figures rather distinctively in the process of the body’s closure that she sketches in her opening chapter. Certainly, it is a body that receives the brunt of white violence, but it is also a body that—to the extent that it has been both excluded from routine medical treatment (except, of course, as ‘‘lab animals’’ in clandestine syphilis studies) and produced as monstrous or freakish by both medical science and mass culture—is left open, vulnerable to the myriad sources of what Freud would call Unlust (un-pleasure). Thus, from the genealogical perspective, the black body constitutes what Clément might call the ‘‘weak beat,’’ the body that falls out of step with the white body that, more than simply closing in on itself, is virtually disappearing into the future (becomingAngels?). Of course, the white body is ‘‘there,’’ but only problematically. The black body represents for it precisely why closure, why the denial of ‘‘leaning on,’’ is so urgent. It can hardly be accidental that the trajectory plotted by Duden begins in the period of the slave trade. In such a context, the black body is grafted onto the white body as the gaps, the rests, that deprive it of 38 percussion

integrity and therefore menace it from within. This placement is silhouetted in Fanon’s trope of lactification, where black (and, let us specify, heterosexual male) ambivalence gapes at that point where the female (and, if we are to believe ‘‘The Man of Color and the White Woman,’’ specifically white) body runs. It cannot therefore be terribly surprising that during the 1950s someone like Chuck Berry would so vigorously struggle to beat back this body that threatened to reduce his own precisely to what the white body could no longer abide—namely, its sharing of the miscegenational frontier. In this sense, the backbeat whose ontological pulsation Berry hears in rock-and-roll must also be read as a tactic, a way to work this frontier in the interests of the black community, particularly as that community was constructed in the minds of its men. Perhaps this is why ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ ultimately cannot afford to lose its backbeat: It is the backtalk of what Martin Luther King Jr. once called ‘‘the unheard.’’ Needless to say, in its urgency rock-and-roll necessarily baffled other voices, other sounds. It is for reasons such as these that this study concentrates not simply on rock-and-roll but on this particular moment of its emergence—that is, on the point at which a musical idiom, centered on ‘‘the big beat,’’ operated as a social space in which an unbroken ‘‘color line’’ could not yet be drawn. That ‘‘line’’ effectively served as the basis for a diffuse and erratic cultural improvisation that did not really conclude until the day that rock-and-roll became decidedly, though hardly unambivalently, white, and African American music became idiomatically resegregated as soul, funk, R&B, and now, of course, rap. However, in justifying this focus I have perhaps created the mistaken impression that rock-androll—even from a percussive standpoint—is reducible to tunes in 4/4 time, with pronounced backbeats. Regardless of the ubiquity of this pattern, it does not, in fact, exhaust the percussive resources of the idiom. In fact, as we shall see in my extended discussion of Bo Diddley in Chapter Five, rock-and-roll drew on a diverse and complex array of percussive strategies. What I will nevertheless insist on is the aboriginal significance of the backbeat, by which I mean not its primordial status (though there is something to be said for this) but, rather, the fundamental character of the genealogical threads it calls up and knots. As suggested earlier, these associations remain inaudible, and perhaps even unthinkable, in the absence of an analytic construct that renders them accessible to interpretation. It is precisely in order to counteract this that I have deployed the concept of the percussive field. In insisting on this I am assuming a position on the contested terrain of the new musicology, and although I have situated this study in the the end of senseless beating

39

turbulence created by Adorno’s wake, more deserves to be said. In Music of the Common Tongue (1987), Christopher Small mobilizes a distinction between ‘‘musicking’’ (music as a process) and ‘‘music’’ (music as product) to establish which kinds of musical phenomena fall outside the purview of academic musicology. By establishing the nepotistic relation between the values affirmed within the performance of the so-called classical-music repertoire and the disciplinary values of musicology (a point he first worked out in Music, Society, Education (1996), Small makes the political character of this relation abundantly clear. Although it applies equally to classical and ‘‘vernacular’’ idioms, musicking has a special pertinence for the latter because, in vernacular idioms such as the blues, executing notation with rigorous precision has comparatively little value. Charles Keil captured this point through the suggestive though controversial concept of ‘‘participatory discrepancies’’ (Keil and Feld 1994). Small makes the political relationship so clear, in fact, that one might accuse him of producing a critique of musicology designed primarily to establish precisely how it ought to be ‘‘reoriented’’ rather than conceptually reorganized. True, musicking delimits a new disciplinary object—one that subordinates music to musical performance (and all the elements that the latter entails). But advancing the case for musicking does not necessarily clarify either the political character of what made such a gesture necessary in the first place or the stakes involved in continuing to study—what can no longer simply be called ‘‘music’’—otherwise. Thus, in aligning myself with those scholars who are involved in rethinking the disciplinary object of academic musicology (I am thinking here especially of those who have taken up the gauntlet thrown down in Keil’s ‘‘Motion and Feeling in Music’’ [1966]) while subjecting the latter to what I have called an ‘‘antidisciplinary’’ critique (Mowitt 1992), I hope to elaborate some of the discourses by which academic musicology would have to be supplemented in order to get a ‘‘feel’’ for the beating going on in early rock-and-roll. By stressing ‘‘feel,’’ I am accenting not sociology or psychoanalysis as such—they are, after all, familiar to a certain musicology—but the texture created by deploying them while subjecting music and theory to the rhythmic principles of call and response drumming. I suppose that I could invoke novelty as my warrant, but I take the matter more seriously. If we are prepared to concede that struggling over the institutional conditions of sense-making (whether in musicology or not) is part and parcel of the very sense made of any given cultural practice, then associating issues of public policy with the process of cultural enjoyment 40 percussion

will seem less strange, perhaps even delightfully uncanny. I believe that the current intellectual conjuncture is such that we can no longer be satisfied with cajoling the public into better appreciating musical culture—or, for that matter, with having more of our colleagues in the humanities pick up, or return to, instruments. Though it may seem cryptic to put it this way, I think that instead we want to involve ourselves in doing what will be necessary to begin hearing the theorizing that takes place when we ‘‘tympanize’’ disciplinary reason. Walter Kauffman was surely right to remind us that Nietzsche’s ‘‘hammer’’ was, among other things, a tuning (pitch?) fork. These ill-tempered (though not therefore ill-considered) remarks prompt a final conciliatory gesture. The difficulties to be encountered in reading this text are not the result of my lack of consideration for the reader—my lack of skill, certainly, but not lack of consideration. On the contrary. These difficulties arise from the struggle to consider, and to consider thoughtfully, how one might actually mime that which one’s writing seeks to illuminate—in this case, the reciprocal solicitations of music and theory as they blare from early rock-and-roll. ‘‘Difficult Listening Hour,’’ perhaps. Much depends on whether one ‘‘plays it too darn fast.’’ But if the room starts reelin’ and rockin’, remember: That’s not a bad thing. That’s the point.

the end of senseless beating

41

22222222222222222222222222222 2

knocking the subject

‘‘Hail, hail rock ’n’ roll’’ Those who are conversant with the intellectual preoccupations of Cultural Studies will have recognized that everything said in the preceding chapter about the link between the backbeat and the dynamics of subjection presupposes the concept of ‘‘interpellation.’’ Although introduced and quickly defined in the Introduction, this concept deserves sustained treatment in a study such as this, both because it represents perhaps the most fundamental complication of the ‘‘personal’’ available to us in the theoretical literature and because it has much to answer for in both theory and music. Thus, I will open this chapter by fleshing out interpellation (that is, both explicating it and confronting it with the body), then turn to what I regard as a particularly provocative solicitation of this concept from within the annals of rock-and-roll— the song ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ by the Rolling Stones. My aim is to change the way we read ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’ (Althusser 1971) (the published source of ‘‘interpellation’’) and the way we listen to ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud.’’ However, because it is here that the divisions organizing the percussive field encounter a decisive theoretical problem—specifically, the vexed issue of whether Marxian sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis are reconcilable—it will be necessary to address these issues head on. My hope is that in clarifying why

subjection matters to musical analysis, a certain stalemate will appear less stale. Indirectly, this may also heighten the palatability of the percussive field, whose capacity for making theory matter to music is also shown to entail recognition of the crucial way music spurs developments in the contemporary rethinking of ideology. Arguably the most enduring conceptual innovation resulting from Louis Althusser’s encounter with the texts of Marxism has been that of interpellation. Not only has this concept been deployed to radicalize and reinvigorate the discursive analysis of cultural practices (most notably literature and the cinema), but it has also played a constitutive role in the emergence of what is now, somewhat reluctantly, referred to as post-Marxism.∞ To this extent, interpellation participates in a ‘‘properly’’ dialectical elaboration of the very theoretical tradition which it might otherwise be said to have sublated. Though one would be hard pressed to construe the sad state of affairs that arose in the wake of his interpellation for the slaying of his wife as dialectical, there is nevertheless an odd way in which the category of interpellation possessed for Althusser what Walter Benjamin might well have characterized as weak prophetic powers: the theory that comprehended the ideological production of the subject was produced by an intellectual who was later apprehended as a subject.≤ Personal criticism indeed. Perhaps only to the extent that it could not be otherwise, was Althusser right about himself and others. But to assert this is to underscore the fact that, as the tabloids continually remind us, he was not alone. Of course, some have exploited the very oddity I am underscoring to absolve themselves of the task of coming to terms with the rigor of Althusser’s discussion (‘‘He was mad, you know . . .’’). This strikes me as a fatal strategy, and much of what follows will attempt to establish how crucial the concept of interpellation is for understanding the subjection of human agency and thus how tenaciously it resists being recast in the terms and concerns of identity politics. My own thought has been deeply influenced by the category of interpellation, and though I teach Althusser’s work in my courses regularly (both graduate and undergraduate) I am still surprised when students reveal in their papers that they do not distinguish, at least orthographically, between interpellation and interpolation; suggesting, of course, that the agency capable of introducing material into a text is too dear to them to permit the necessary conceptual discrimination. Despite the fact that I am clearly getting the point across (students’ papers indicate that they understand in what sense the subject is an ideological construct, for example), it is at the price of a deflected, and therefore knocking the subject

43

pedagogically compromised, response: The subject’s construction assumes the character of a textual emendation. To complicate matters, interpellation does not figure in the otherwise excellent and justly reprinted glossary that was prepared by Althusser’s English translator, Ben Brewster.≥ Perhaps his students were more ‘‘on the ball.’’ Because my remarks depend on a certain familiarity with the concept of interpellation, this is the moment to quote from Althusser’s famous discussion of it in ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’’: I shall then suggest that ideology ‘‘acts’’ or ‘‘functions’’ in such a way that it ‘‘recruits’’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘‘transforms’’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘‘Hey, you there!’’ . . . Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that ‘‘it was really him who was hailed’’ (and not someone else). (Althusser 1971, 174)

What is accomplished here theoretically was, and remains, significant. Through the category of interpellation Althusser was able to explain how, through institutionally organized material practices—notably, the production and dissemination of discourse—the positions carved out by the social division of labor, a fundamental and indispensable aspect of the Marxist concept of the ‘‘base,’’ were filled. Because Marx (and Lenin, for that matter) had rather ‘‘mechanistically’’ conceived the structure and function of class-consciousness (thus motivating the Herculean labors, the ‘‘dirty work,’’ of Georg Lukács), Althusser felt compelled to account for the process whereby real people came to imagine themselves as holders, or perhaps bearers, of the positions opened for them by the historical unfolding of the mode of production. Now, of course, there are problems with this theory, but before identifying the particular features with which I wish to take issue, it will be helpful to detail a bit further the analytical advances Althusser’s discussion enabled, particularly because they are significant to my approach to music.∂ Perhaps because the category of interpellation figured so minimally in the ‘‘Althusserian’’ engagement with literary discourse (I am thinking here of Althusser himself, but also of Pierre Macherey and Etienne and Renée Balibar, among others), it found its most dramatic and immediate resonance in film theory.∑ The pathblazers here, as Silvia Harvey has 44 percussion

shown, were the critics affiliated with the journals Cinéthique and Cahiers du cinéma who debated the cinema and ideology problematic in the early ’70s. Nevertheless, it was Jean-Louis Baudry, in his influential, though flawed, series of essays on the ‘‘cinematic apparatus,’’ who forged the abiding link between Freud and Marx that defines the heart of the concept of interpellation.∏ Baudry was able to show how hailing operated at the level of a specific cultural technology—namely, that of the cinema. By establishing how the relations among the screen, the projector, and the audience functioned to position individuated spectating sites—sites that were filled by viewers willing to accept the identificatory solicitations of the medium—Baudry was able, at the expense of a certain spectatorial agency, to delineate how ideological practice actually produced the subject who was thereby constitutively unable to differentiate between its own ontological integrity and the visual coherence of realist narrative film. This was decisive because, like Marx, Althusser had trouble specifying the more quotidian, or perhaps ‘‘ordinary,’’ aspects of class-consciousness and because the discipline of film studies had yet to comprehend the relation between the specificity of its medium and the political dimension of cultural experience with much theoretical rigor. Prior to the Althusserian intervention, ideology was still essentially confused with propaganda. That is, it designated ideas propagated through images and words. This said, it is worth reiterating Alan Williams’s dated but perceptive criticism of Baudry because it provides us with a convenient way to revisit Althusser’s discussion in a manner that gets directly to the problem of musical interpellation. Bluntly put, Williams (1980, 51–66) discloses how Baudry’s systematic avoidance of the film soundtrack works to sacrifice his own theory to the ideological power of the image it was designed to dismantle. In spite of its trenchancy, this analysis overstates its criticism in order to authorize itself. (Baudry does not avoid the soundtrack; he merely subsumes it within the logic organizing the image track—a gesture that Williams complicates but essentially reiterates.) If this discussion retains its pertinence, however, it is because Williams prompts us to consider the sound of hailing—that is, not the signified, ‘‘Hey, you there,’’ but the enunciation or what Michel de Certeau would urge us to call le coup (the blow or move) of the hail.π Because it is my contention that Baudry’s oversight is to a significant degree motivated by peculiarities within Althusser’s initial formulations, these call for brief elaboration. If we stick to the letter of Althusser’s text, interpellation is clearly a conspicuously sonoric event. In my judgment, this cannot be overknocking the subject

45

emphasized. Hailing, as Althusser’s example reveals, involves a situation wherein an individual becomes a subject because it misrecognizes itself in a call addressed to someone specific, but formulated as if addressed to no one in particular: ‘‘Hey, you there!’’ This is important. However, in his characterization of the role of interpellation within the discourse of Christianity—a characterization meant to clarify things— there is a subtle but persistent drift away from this sonoric paradigm toward a visual one. Precisely when it becomes important for his discussion to subsume, at least implicitly, Freud’s discussion of religious belief—that is, to account for the interdependence between the ontological structure of the believers and their god—Althusser introduces the freighted metaphor of the mirror: We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning. (Althusser 1971, 180)

With this structural claim, Althusser perhaps unwittingly authorized the very reading of the category of interpellation that not only led Baudry to subsume the soundtrack beneath the image track, but that also led film studies into an overdetermined investment in the significance of the shift from seeing the screen as a window to seeing it as a mirror.∫ Even those scholars such as Kaja Silverman, Claudia Gorbman, and even Michel Chion, who have deliberately labored to address the specificity of the soundtrack (at least with regard to music and the voice), have had recourse to the figure of the mirror in order to articulate, within the disciplinary paradigms of film studies, the ideological character of sound.Ω What gets misplaced here, obviously, is precisely the aspect of Althusser’s discussion that would bring it most immediately into the orbit of an analysis of music. It is not accidental that the experience Althusser seeks to capture in the category of interpellation is one where, because he stresses (as will I) the corporeal act of turning in response, the individual is addressed verbally from behind—that is, precisely from the place one cannot see. Although Althusser does warn against taking his example too literally, it is also true that the event that apparently best exemplifies the concept is one in which we experience ourselves as simultaneously embedded in an undifferentiated mass of potential addressees and isolated as the sole listening post within range of the hail. What is crucial is not the tension between the individual and the collective but, rather, the fact that interpellation at once presupposes and 46 percussion

settles a certain ambiguity in the boundaries of subjective identity. In other words, hailing divides a group into the members who thereby come to see their specifically bounded locations as possible, or even likely, addressees of the hail. Althusser’s point is not that just anyone could be the addressee, but that for all of us, it could be me. Perhaps this is why military discourse—which Freud, in his analysis of group psychology, disclosed as the consummate interpellating mechanism—feels impelled to evoke this site of reception through a predictable surfeit of deictical markers: ‘‘Now, hear this,’’ where the implied ‘‘you’’ forms in the congealing mass of the auditors of such an utterance. Is it not suggestive that, in the theoretical efforts to delineate the function of the senses in the genealogy of the human subject, hearing in general is characterized in a manner that is utterly consistent with what I have characterized as a key requirement of Althusser’s category? Consider in this regard the oft-cited remarks of Guy Rosolato in ‘‘La Voix: Entre Corps et langage’’ (The Voice: Between the Body and Language): The voice [has the signal property] of being at the same time emitted and heard, sent and received, and for the subject himself, it is as if, in comparison with the look, an ‘‘acoustic’’ mirror were always functioning. Thus the images of entry and departure relative to the body are strictly articulated. They can come to be confounded, inverted, to prevail one over the other. (Rosolato 1974, 79)

Though Rosolato stresses here the voice as an acoustic instrument, these remarks, with their foregrounding of the corporeal confusion that defines the sonic infrastructure of one’s self image, reiterate observations made elsewhere about hearing. Unlike seeing, hearing is omnidirectional and automatically receptive when it is not, as we say, differently challenged. As I hope is becoming plain, this sensory quality—indeed, the structure—of hearing can be construed as fundamental to Althusser’s concept of interpellation. Why? Because on the one hand, this category relies on an individual’s ability to perceive themselves addressed not by a signal that is focused by pointing (as in ‘‘Uncle Sam Wants You!’’), but by the fact that the signal is received regardless of whether one is paying attention—that is, in a state of what Benjamin might have called ‘‘distraction.’’ Interpellation must address more than you in order to constitute you without, thereby, immediately touching on the unconscious. On the other hand, if the effect of interpellation is to generate the state of confusion wherein one’s status as a subject becomes synonymous with the conditions of experience as such, then the fact that hearing carries within it the residue of corporeal differknocking the subject

47

entiation—what I earlier invoked under the broad heading of the ‘‘skin’’—would make hearing a necessary sensory structure of interpellation. In effect, as concerns the ‘‘moment’’ of interpellation, one not only thinks, ‘‘Who, me?’’ One also assumes the posture, or inhabits the position, of a possible me: The ears prick up, the head cranes, the body turns. As I have suggested, an unthematized ideology of the visual appears to steer Althusser’s discussion, forcing him and those influenced by him, such as Baudry, to orient the analysis of interpellation toward the organ of theory (theoria; a collective witnessing) and away from hearing and the field of cultural practices organized by it.∞≠ This point has been put nicely by Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, but from within the framework and rhetoric of a rather different set of preoccupations. It is nevertheless worth quoting at length: The human ear has not adapted itself to the bourgeois rational and, ultimately, highly industrialized order as readily as the eye, which has become accustomed to conceiving reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity. Ordinary listening, as compared to seeing, is ‘‘archaic’’; it has not kept pace with technological progress. One might even say that to react with the ear, which is fundamentally a passive organ in contrast to the swift, actively selective eye, is in a sense not in keeping with present advanced industrial age and its cultural anthropology. For this reason acoustic perception preserves comparably more traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities than optical perception. At least two of the most important elements of occidental music, the harmonic contrapuntal one and that of its rhythmic articulation, point directly to a group modeled upon the ancient church community as its only possible inherent ‘‘subject.’’ This direct relationship to a collectivity, intrinsic in the phenomenon itself, is probably connected with the sensations of spatial depth, inclusiveness, and absorption of individuality, which are common to all music. But this very ingredient of collectivity, because of its essentially amorphous nature, leads [sic] itself to deliberate use for ideological purposes. (Adorno and Eisler 1994, 20–21)

This passage from Composing for the Films, which anticipates the analyses of Ong, Havelock, and others concerning the fate of orality, frames the phenomenon of interpellation in terms of the link between hearing and the sociohistorical context of the emergence of individuality. What is stressed here, of course, is the way hearing is structured by a historically derived tension between regression, or the reabsorption of the individual within the mass that Eisler and Adorno associate with fascism, and resistance, or the refusal of commodity fetishism that 48 percussion

aural distraction enables. Though this complicates Althusser’s discussion in several decisive respects, Eisler and Adorno’s insistence on the inscription of a religious ‘‘subject’’ (the inverted commas functioning to mark a certain irony) within the musical articulation of the sense of hearing, indicates that the two discussions converge in profound and suggestive ways. Perhaps the most significant effect of this convergence is the way it underscores the historically decisive role of hearing in the constitution of the border that marks off the individual (what Althusser calls ‘‘the subject’’) from the pre-individualistic collectivity; the very demarcation that is comprehended in the concept of interpellation. To appreciate fully what is at stake here, it is necessary to remind ourselves how important musical practice is to Eisler and Adorno; at the same time, it is one of the few areas of popular culture to which the concept of interpellation has yet to be rigorously applied in any sort of sustained manner. Let us return first to the complications. Although some would no doubt argue that Eisler and Adorno situate hearing within the very concept of ideology Althusser wishes to outdistance (ideology as propaganda), it is doubtless significant that they structure hearing around the tension between resistance and regression. Althusser has been justly criticized for paying too high a political price for separating ideology from false consciousness. In other words, once ideology is understood as the state-organized material practices that constitute the conditions of subjective experience as such and, in particular, that maintain our imaginary relation to the real relations of production, the possibility of resistance—except at the level of party militancy, with all that it entails: science, organic intellectuals, discipline, etc.—is all but foreclosed. If we are always already subjects, and subjects are entirely the effects of the state apparatus, then from where within the social formation can even the interrogation of the subject (as the bearer of the imaginary relation to the relations of production) be articulated? These concerns are what prompted Ernesto Laclau’s enormously productive critique of Althusser’s category; a critique that makes what I have called the ‘‘conflict of interpellations’’ available to cultural politics (Mowitt 1988). When Eisler and Adorno stress the tension between seeing and hearing, they are writing something like a miniature ‘‘war of positioning’’ into the structural incoherence of the subject. More often than not— and this is true of Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, too—Althusser’s discussion of interpellation is aerated by appeals to the heterogeneity of discourses that hail different identities at what is assumed to be a single site: citizen, believer, wage earner, parent, etc. Although this is certainly knocking the subject

49

important, this evocation of cognitive overlays implicitly extends and consolidates the specularization of interpellation by locating its logic in the very infrastructure of identity. What constitutes this as fundamentally specular is the fact that we are still operating in the theater of recognition: It is because I see myself in the hails addressed to me that I respond. Positioning, whether homogeneous or not, is here principally treated as a matter of intellectual labor—namely, can I be all that I am being called to be? In Eisler and Adorno’s formulation, however, a different though related theme is sounded: the issue of the conflicted constitution of the site of hailing—that is, the embodied individual. By stressing that hearing situates the subject differently than does seeing, they not only gainsay resistance at the level of the conflict of interpellations; they also place the body, rather than consciousness alone, at stake in the dynamics of hailing. What this means, then, is that in addition to the overdetermined character of the hailings meant to slot subjects within positions generated by the division of labor, there is the conflictual positioning of the subjects within each slot—positioning that then registers the spatio-temporal distribution of the subject as a sensorium. In the formulations of Adorno and Eisler, this conflicted positioning has a decisive historical component in that the binary of resistance and regression is doubly oriented: toward a present in which vision dominates the sensory hierarchy, and toward a past where what preceded this hierarchy still threatens to undermine the developments that produced the present. In genuine dialectical fashion, both resistance and regression mark and qualify each other, without thereby neutralizing themselves. Because Adorno and Eisler are not particularly interested in the concept of the state, they make no effort to link the discussion of the sensory hierarchy with the specific preoccupations of Althusser’s discussion of ideology. Nevertheless, one would not need to strain much to recognize in their evocation of commodity fetishism and industrial society the broad contours of the very Marxism both challenged and defended by Althusser. I belabor these matters because I believe them to be crucial not only to the analysis of music—and, in particular, to what I have characterized as the psychoanalytical dynamics of the percussive field—but also to the legitimation of the category of interpellation within the broad, and vigorously contested (one might even say thwarted), domain of Cultural Studies. Because this gesture of theoretical rehabilitation, or refitting, contradicts leading tendencies within the field of Cultural Studies, the motivations behind it deserve a more thorough airing. 50 percussion

In the current debates about cultural politics and identity, resistance is linked intimately to the concept of agency. As indicated earlier, agency is something many fear cannot be preserved within Althusser’s perspective, except by virtue of recourse to elements available within Marxism prior to his intervention. To some extent I share this fear. What prevents me from embracing it however is the fact that, more often than not, the articulation of this fear appears designed to protect a notion of agency that is essentially nostalgic. In addition, agency has come to be afflicted with much of the same confusion that beset the concept of praxis, particularly during the 1960s, when praxis came to designate not simply practical activity, but also revolutionary practical activity—that is, activity that could be said to be involved in the production of a communist future. Thus, agency has come to mean ‘‘the capacity for effective resistance’’ in addition to—or, I argue, rather than—the general activating dynamic out of which such a capacity might arise. In effect, agency has come to be (re)constituted as the agent. I call this subjection of agency nostalgic because, instead of pursuing a line of reflection in which one is seeking to specify the systematic production of the possibility of both power and resistance, the defense of agency-cum-agent appears to retreat behind the theoretical and political advances of the past half-century in quest of an entity who can make decisions about political choices and be responsible for them. This agent might be a class or a gender, but it is conceived to be fundamentally grounded in a will that can assert itself against whatever contextual forces might be said to otherwise constrain it. Without some such entity, it is claimed, resistance is impossible, and because interpellation produces an entity that is wholly a subject (decidedly not an agent) it harbors the ultimate political danger. Perhaps one of the most trenchant articulations of this perspective has appeared in the debates that define the ever shifting front lines of post-Marxism. Of course, I am thinking here of the dispute that defines ˇ zek, projects the relation between the work of Laclau and Slavoj Ziˇ otherwise so entangled in each other that, over the years, they have literally parasitized each other’s publications. However, rather than turn directly to the speedily proliferating oeuvre of the latter, I will tease out the perspective I am concerned with here from an essay by Mladen ˇ zek’s) that has the signal virDolar (a colleague and collaborator of Ziˇ tue of addressing the issue of interpellation directly and at length. Dolar’s title says it all: ‘‘Beyond Interpellation.’’ Though he is eager to acknowledge that Althusser’s work represented something ‘‘unheimlich’’ (Dolar 1993, 75) and therefore ‘‘crucial,’’ the motivation for knocking the subject

51

Dolar’s intervention is to establish the insufficiency of Althusser’s account of subjectivity. And while the theme of agency does not figure explicitly in Dolar’s analysis, it is clear that what Althusser’s account lacks is a commitment to a structuring principle in the subject that accommodates both fantasy and the symptom—in other words, elements of self (over) determination. In Dolar’s vaguely antemetabolic formulation: ‘‘For Althusser, the subject is what makes ideology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails’’ (Dolar 1993, 78). It is therefore clear that the ‘‘beyond’’ of Dolar’s title has a location both within the structure of the subject and in the future of critical theory. Joined, these two locations map precisely what agency has come to designate within the terms and concerns of identity politics (which, by the way, the Slovenians are eager to repudiate): a concept that names that which outdistances ideological determination, and a topic that enables one to supersede what is deemed an otherwise moribund reflection on the subject. To Dolar’s credit he leverages his criticism precisely at that point where Althusser appeals to science—a discourse without a subject—in order to ground his own theory. Sensing that this is definitely the wrong way to outdistance ideology, Dolar tries to pinpoint what is nevertheless an alternative immanent to the logic of Althusser’s analysis. However, the analytical strategy pursued by Dolar escapes a fate identical to the one he imputes to Althusser only by obscuring his displacement of the category of science with that of psychoanalysis, a move heralded in Jean-Claude Milner’s L’ Oeuvre claire. In effect, Dolar must advance a new illusion—one in which the logic of psychoanalytical discourse, precisely in its formal, Cartesian rigor, renders knowable the preideological real not in its material reality, but in the psychic and therefore ‘‘pre-conditional’’ withdrawal of the real. Instead of a discourse without a subject, science becomes the discourse of the psychoanalytical subject—that is, the subject, to cite Luce Irigaray that is not one. The pre-ideological—the fact and necessity of ideology’s failure— operates to verify a theoretical discourse whose truth value resides in its status as a knowing lie. At the heart of Dolar’s reading is the figure of what he calls ‘‘the clean cut’’—that is, the break or rupture that operates everywhere in Althusser’s corpus, and certainly in his account of ideology. Dolar contends that, for Althusser, the ideological event, the becoming-subjects of individuals, transpires in one fell swoop. That is, once one even thinks of responding to the hail, one is always already a subject who, by definition, has a strictly imaginary relationship to the real material con52 percussion

ditions of the subject’s production. Against this, Dolar stresses the importance of the ‘‘remainder,’’ something in the individual that survives as an unassimilable kernel ‘‘in’’ (the topography becomes complex at ˇ zek, in ‘‘Beyond Discourse Analthis juncture) the subject. Though Ziˇ ysis’’ (note the titular parallelism), has argued the implications of this point more aggressively, it is clear that both he and Dolar regard the remainder as the element that actually accounts for why individuals respond to interpellation, why the slots generated by the division of labor and the accumulation of private property actually get filled—indeed, overfilled.∞∞ It is also clear that the remainder, to stick with Dolar’s vocabulary, in its strong affinity with the post-Lacanian unconscious is where agency is to be grounded. Though this remainder, strictly speaking, is ‘‘extimate’’ (the point where the ‘‘innermost touches the outermost’’ [Dolar 1993, 78], the kernel around which subjectivity is constituted) it is significantly tethered to the site of individuated particularity as if, yet again, the only satisfying way to account for the lure of ideological discourse is to place it within the compass of an agent—that is, someone who can and will be taken in by such a lure. A forced choice is still a choice. If Althusser’s account is indeed ‘‘insufficient,’’ it is certainly not because it underestimates the tenacious efficacy of interpellation. Dolar effectively repeats this insight by theorizing the subject as a structure that is thrown toward ideological discourse by virtue of the subject’s constitutive impossibility. While this may undercut in a useful way all utopianism, it offers up a model of agency that does little more than guarantee perpetual instability while holding out as its signal virtue the fact that it looks familiar—that it feels like an agent rather than a system. Though I by no means wish to disparage the experience of political dissidence that is clearly inscribed within such a position, it is hard not to conclude that this otherwise rigorous engagement with Althusser ends in what I have called nostalgia. The subject must be restored, because without one—even an impossible one—resistance is unthinkable and therefore futile. It is in this sense that I perceive the issue of agency to be at stake in this debate within post-Marxism, and furthermore that I feel entitled to kvetch about the way agency operates in the discourse of identity politics. The capacity for resistance and ideological critique is crucial to any cultural analytic that fancies itself as even remotely political in character. My aim here is not to undercut the legitimacy of Dolar’s preoccupations with such matters. Instead, I am challenging his revision of the category of interpellation. Although his revision acknowledges the ‘‘exknocking the subject

53

traordinary implications’’ of Althusser’s notion of science as a demystificatory discourse that recognizes, but cannot elude, the force of mystification, it nevertheless asks us to acquiesce in the substitution of psychoanalytical irony for science. I have no particular desire to defend the notion of science as such, but I am committed to defending the view that knowledge production at all levels of the social formation participates in the constitution of an activating dynamic (the forces behind the forced choice) through which subjects struggle for and against social, cultural, and economic power. This includes psychoanalytical knowledge (both clinical and theoretical) that vies with and is deployed among other knowing lies. What the ‘‘Slovenian School’’ has yet to do is persuasively address, in some detailed manner, the ‘‘outermost’’ conditions of the interpellative force of psychoanalysis. In other words, under what circumstances will subjects identify with the account of themselves as traumatic kernels and do so in the name of reaching back into the pre-ideological? As Jacques-Alain Miller once put it, the ‘‘archaeology of psychoanalysis,’’ of the ‘‘regime of truth’’ in which its effects could be produced, has not yet been written.∞≤ Needless to say, there is more at stake here than the theoretical redemption of interpellation. Indeed, to restate a theme from my opening paragraph, it is around this concept that the very theoretical cogency of the percussive field is itself at stake. In squaring off against Dolar, my aim has been to suggest that sociology and psychoanalysis must supplement each other, but not in order to shore up a nostalgic conception of the political agent. Rather, these divisions of the percussive field must lean on each other so that sense-making is obliged to engage the social production of a subject who remains ‘‘politicizable’’—that is, a subject whose relation to collectivization is part of both its past and its future. To clarify how these broad concerns also bear on the musicological division of the percussive field, steps must be taken to recover the relatively unaccented thematics of hearing in Althusser’s essay on ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Otherwise, the chain of associations forged by Eisler and Adorno—a chain linking collectivity and music through the mediating link of regression—will go unchallenged. Borrowing Dolar’s ‘‘move,’’ in which he legitimates his emphasis on the figure of the clean cut by locating its presence at various levels of Althusser’s work, I will start by drawing attention to the theme of structural causality that Fredric Jameson, among others, has retrieved from Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s Reading Capital (1979). What interests me here is not the causality problem as such but, rather, the link between its structural variant (the notion of overdetermination) 54 percussion

and the Althusserian chestnut concerning the ‘‘relative autonomy’’ of the superstructure. To put matters bluntly, if the superstructure is only relatively autonomous, it is because a dialectic articulates the relation between what Dolar calls the clean cut and the strata of its effects. In effect, the cut is never clean. This is so not because of an enabling remainder, but because of the discontinuous and uneven lamination of strata that come together as the subject. Although Althusser, who throughout his career remained eager to differentiate his position from that of Foucault, might well object to such a formulation, there is a strict sense in which his account of ideological interpellation presupposes an archaeological model (also, it bears emphasizing, a favorite of Freud’s), a model that when mobilized against the claims of historicism has suggestive recourse to the concept of rhythm (Althusser 1979, 99) By this, I mean the individual-cum-subject that ‘‘embodies’’ the capillary network of the base–superstructure relation emerges in a discontinuous space, a space of misaligned and abrasive determinations, that exhibits both cuts (clear distinctions among strata—being a worker, being a parent, being a citizen, etc.) and connections (both synchronic and diachronic dependencies). From such a perspective, what Dolar calls the ‘‘remainder’’ might well be recast as a designation for the undecidable economy that organizes the field of cuts and connections. Agency is thus not sacrificed; it is simply located at a different level from that of the agent. I have found Adorno and Eisler’s discussion of hearing so suggestive precisely because it helps one draw out the spatial discontinuity of the subject at the level of embodiment. In other words, by characterizing the torque that gives hearing its vitality in terms of the tension between resistance and regression, Adorno and Eisler not only complicate the dynamics of cinematic interpellation, but they also encourage us to consider how the subject, in general, is an unsteady locus of spatial and temporal discontinuities. Though neither they nor Althusser argue that this very situation is the condition of agency, that, indeed, is my point. In fact, the prevailing idée réçue has it that the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, utterly repudiated the very possibility of agency. I think, however, that if one considers the details of the discussion in Composing for the Films (regardless of how one assesses Eisler’s contribution), it becomes apparent that, as is often the case, the received wisdom is misleading. Hearing, as configured within the sensory and perceptual apparatus of the subject, not only cuts two ways (historically and politically), but it relates to seeing in a manner that cuts into, if not through, the subject of industrial society. knocking the subject

55

In Althusser’s analysis, the distinctive status of hearing is stated less emphatically. I have already suggested why. But this is not to say that its importance must be ‘‘read into’’ the text, except, of course, insofar as everything must be read into a text. Consider, for example, the other prominently quotidian example drawn on to illuminate the category of interpellation in Althusser’s essay: To take a highly ‘‘concrete’’ example, we all have friends who, when they knock on our door, and we ask through the door the question, ‘‘Who’s there?’’ answer (since it’s ‘‘obvious’’) ‘‘It’s me.’’ And we recognize that ‘‘it is him,’’ or ‘‘her.’’ We open the door ‘‘and it’s true, it really was she who was there.’’ (Althusser 1971, 172)

Note the priority given to the situation here: Hearing precedes seeing, and precisely in this precedence something crucial about the dynamics of interpellation can be comprehended. Although it is certainly true that this inverted echo of ‘‘Hey, you there!’’ moves quickly toward the ocular center of Althusser’s paradigm, it is equally true that both here and in the more familiar example of interpellation, a specific disjuncture between two sensory moments is presented as crucial to the account of interpellation, and hence to the production of subjectivity. It is tempting to think about this in terms of the way interpellation could be said to engage both consciousness and the body. Although I would defend the claim that the body is indeed constituted within the ideological field, I would prefer not to pursue such a defense in a context where hearing would perforce bear responsibility for delivering over the body. Instead, let me simply reiterate that, precisely in its rhythmic recourse to the quotidian, Althusser’s account of interpellation poses the problem of the relation, for the subject, of hearing and seeing. Thus, insofar as this relationship, as a metonym for the discontinuous space of the subject, allows one to broach the thematics of agency, interpellation cannot be said to deny the possibility of the latter, unless what one really means by agency is the agent—that is, an entity capable of asserting its will, or acting in accord with its desire, in any and every conceivable context. Such an entity has only limited value for the political project of radical democracy, because at the end of the day it squanders what Marx and Engels called ‘‘life’’—that is, the constraints that socialize consciousness. The question remains: What does all this tell us about music and interpellation in general, and the percussive field in particular? We can bring this chapter to conclusion by addressing ourselves directly to both matters. 56 percussion

One of the aims of Composing for the Films was to get film scholars (and to some extent ‘‘fans’’) to pay more attention to the place of music in the fiction-effect of the cinema. By doing this the way they did—that is, by grounding music in the sensory organization of the subject— Adorno and Eisler invite us to recognize the more general way in which music as a predominantly, but by no means exclusively, sonoric phenomenon factors within the social constitution of cultural experience. It is precisely this perspective that led Adorno to argue in ‘‘On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Hearing’’ (1978) that the very possibility of cultural criticism was being undermined by the then hegemonic sonoric discourses of European society.∞≥ For if subjectivity itself is effected by the cultural conditions of experience, then it is conceivable that those conditions might be organized in such a way as to make subjective reflection difficult, if not impossible, to sustain. Though Adorno never deployed the term ‘‘interpellation,’’ it is clear when he speaks, for example, about the ‘‘jitterbug’’ (his epithet for the devotees of popular music) that he conceives of subjectivity itself as one of the central ideological stakes in the production and reception of music. Would it not therefore be fair to argue that music is one of the cultural means by which interpellation is effected? Given that, even in the United States, the state is involved in the regulation of broadcast licensing, technology patents, censorship, and subvention of programming, one would not be stretching things to characterize music, at least at the level of its consumption, as an ‘‘ideological state apparatus,’’ or isa. Since, however, it is precisely the ordering principle of the state that undercuts the more archaeological aspects of Althusser’s account, I will only acknowledge here the possibility of something that might otherwise be dismissed out of hand. That music, and especially mass-marketed music (the hegemonic form throughout much of the world), is caught up in the expression and consumption of identities is not a controversial assertion. But it does need to be underscored, because, as the proponents of the new musicology ceaselessly remind us, academic musicology is composed of partisans for whom this lesson passes in one ear and out the other, though the point is hardly new.∞∂ What is somewhat more provocative is the notion that music is involved in producing the very bearer of an identity—that is, a subject. Of course, this raises the stakes, for if this is so, then music is not simply tendentious—that is, expressive of some particular line (white supremacy, heterosexism, etc.)—but also ideological through and through, or utterly involved in what I term the subjection of human agency (Mowitt 1992, esp. 23–47). Granted, this does more knocking the subject

57

than simply raise the stakes. It also risks losing the object of musicology altogether, for how else are we to make sense of the distinctly xenophobic rhetoric stirred by the exertions of critical musicologists? Obviously, this strikes me as a risk well worth taking, and in the long run it may turn out that now is a good time to be a lot less sure about what, precisely, music is. Another aspect of musical interpellation deserves brief, preliminary clarification, however, particularly because it plays a key role in my approach to the percussive field. The fusion of Althusser’s discussion with that of Adorno and Eisler has allowed me to show in what sense music could be said to be part of the history of hearing (and, by extension, the body), but in making this point I drew attention to the conflicted status of hearing in Althusser. I was driven there to appeal to de Certeau’s notion of ‘‘the blow’’ because, as important to his account as the sonoric event is, Althusser left it undeveloped. However, the issue at hand is not simply that of the suppression of hearing; it is also a matter of how the experience of interpellation is represented. As far as I am concerned, it is important to stress that the sonoric event of interpellation-qua-event is embodied in shock, or, as I will maintain throughout, in the beat of the hail or knock. The interpellative call strikes and moves the body, hailing it ‘‘into position.’’ Thus, in addition to music’s interpellative dimension, there is the matter of music’s irreducibly percussive character. Which means what? It means that beyond simply the beat effected by the rhythmic organization of any given piece of music, there is the duration and extension of the piece, the time and space of the performance, that breaks in on the subject in formation. The piece strikes us, catches our ear, regardless of whether it is scored for percussion instruments.∞∑ We are, one might say, subject to its blows. As if something has caught my ear, I will now turn back to rock-androll and revisit, from a somewhat different angle, my privileging of rock-and-roll music as a way into the percussive field. As I noted in the Introduction, there is, and remains, a significant contextual warrant for such a focus. Not only is rock-and-roll a conspicuously ‘‘beat-centered’’ musical idiom, but the emergence of rock-and-roll, precisely to the degree that it constituted a decisive benchmark in the drive of electronically reproduced popular music toward global hegemony, also posed explicitly the theoretical question: What are the limits of music? Not just how far can it go, but how does where it has been continue to extend its reach? From this vantage point, the routinely resuscitated British Invasion, insofar as it articulates an inverted and therefore garbled colonial legacy, must be seen as harboring a rare grain of truth. 58 percussion

It came here because people forced to come here went back there. Or something like that. Perhaps for these rather overdetermined reasons, it is not all that difficult to find songs in the rock-and-roll repertoire that, aside from being beat-centered, brandish the thematics of interpellation on their sleeves. What strikes one then when he responds to a musical call for precisely the kind of attention channeled through the percussive field? Hey, Hey, You, You! Sticking with my earlier evocation of the British Invasion, consider a track from the Rolling Stones’ album December’s Children: ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud.’’ There are perhaps four important recordings of this tune: this one, the ‘‘live’’ version from Got Live If You Want It, the second ‘‘live’’ version (actually part of a medley with ‘‘If You Can’t Rock Me’’) from Love You Live, and the ‘‘remixed’’ version released as part of the comparatively recent Complete London Recordings. But all contain the ‘‘refrain’’ that invites the scrutiny that follows. This refrain, or chorus, reads: ‘‘Hey, hey, you, you, get offa my cloud; Hey, hey, you, you, get offa my cloud; Hey, hey, you, you, get offa my cloud; Don’t hang around, cuz two’s a crowd.’’ Although the Althusserian formula of ‘‘Hey, you!’’ fairly leaps out at one here, this is only what prompts a reading that takes the problem of interpellation as its red thread. Alhough the lyrics will not be decisive in the argument that follows, they are worth reprinting: [Verse] I live on an apartment on the ninety-ninth floor of my block, And I sit at home looking out the window imagining the world has stopped. Then in flies a guy who’s all dressed up just like a Union Jack, And says, I’ve won five pounds if I have his kind of detergent pack. [Chorus, supra] Off my cloud, baby. [Verse] The telephone is ringing, I say, ‘‘Hi, it’s me. Who is there on the line?’’ A voice says, ‘‘Hi, hello, how are you?’’ Well, I guess I’m doin’ fine. He says, ‘‘It’s three a.m., there’s too much noise Don’t you people ever wanna go to bed? Just ’cause you feel so good, do you have to drive me out of my head?’’

knocking the subject

59

[Chorus] Off my cloud, baby. [Verse] I was sick and tired, fed up with this And decided to take a drive downtown. It was so very quiet and peaceful There was nobody, not a soul around. I laid myself out, I was so tired And I started to dream. In the morning the parking tickets were just like a flag stuck on my window screen. [Chorus] [Repeat 3 times to fade]

Though this song in many respects is little more than an all-too-familiar plea for solitude (when released as a single, ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ was paired with ‘‘I’m Free’’), there is something insightful about the way the lyrics detail the circuit that ‘‘goes nowhere’’—or, more precisely, that leads one to the solitary confinement of a traffic citation or summons. More than one commentator has characterized this song as being ‘‘about drugs.’’ Although I realize that my addictive account of fandom in Chapter One might be construed as supporting such a reading, it does so only at the most general level—that is, as a matter of principle. At the level of particulars, I regard such a reading as, in the language of the deal, selling the song short. Four general points about the lyrical contents are worth making at the outset. First, there is an unresolved, and therefore important, conflict between the narrative sketched in the verse (where the singer is crowded by a salesman) and the chorus (where ‘‘Baby,’’ despite its associative range, tends to constitute the one who crowds as feminine—there is, of course, a colloquial warrant for this that derives from the rhetoric of heterosexual courtship). Because the caller’s (dealer’s?) voice is ‘‘ventriloquized’’ by a male singer (Jagger), it tends to be masculinized, but in any case, it is left unspecified. This ‘‘shades’’ the character of the solitude sought, and because it is left unresolved—in effect, it is merely reiterated—it unsettles the very quality of solitude. Second, in the narrative there is a significant inversion of an organizing polarity of modern urban space. This inversion is traced in the sequences of drives: Driven out of his head by the two callers (one at the door, another on the phone), the singer leaves private space (his flat) and drives downtown in order to find peace and quiet in public space. The early60 percussion

morning hour certainly might ‘‘explain’’ this, but the crowd evoked in its absence would appear not only to articulate this inversion in miniature, but also to link, through the thematics of crowding, this spatial inversion and the soliciting or shaking up of solitude. In other words, if solitude is available precisely where one least expects to find it, what does this tell us about solitude? Third, in the lyrics there is the important procession of flags, from the Union Jack that ‘‘flies’’ into the singer’s apartment in the person of the salesman to the tickets that stick like flags to the windshield of the singer’s parked car. Two important things come together here: One is the connection drawn between the hailing of the state and the hailing of the commodity/economy (flags fly over both, as it were); the other is the way this procession traces a circuitous journey, where the effort, presumably, to get back into one’s head produces, through the intervention of the dream, a situation in which the singer is paradoxically called more deeply into the labyrinths of the state. Fourth—and here we begin to broach the specifically nonlyrical dimension of the song—there is the execution of the chorus (this is more pronounced in the ‘‘live’’ recordings when Jagger and Richards share the line), when the repetition of ‘‘hey, hey, you, you’’ assumes the structure of a call-and-response pattern that, especially with the pronounced quarter-note claps throughout, fuses a gospel and conspicuously African style with an echo—or, as I prefer, an interpellative reiteration that picks up, and in effect gives voice to, the twin hailing of the state and the commodity. In the way that this simulates a scrambled shifting between two interlocutors (as in the ‘‘hi, hello’’ of a phone conversation), it undercuts the appeal to solitude by rendering undecidable who is telling whom to get off of whose cloud. As with Chuck Berry’s ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music,’’ there is much here that meets the ear. If we begin to explore the tune’s more strictly sonic character and persist in drawing attention to the percussive musicking it expresses, other, equally important features emerge. Most basically, of course, the tune is extremely typical of rock-and-roll hits of the mid-1960s. (‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ was the follow-up hit to ‘‘Satisfaction.’’) It is two minutes and fifty-eight seconds long (designed obviously for radio play and released as a 45 rpm record); has a ‘‘hook’’ (the chorus itself); and, except for the fact that it lacks a ‘‘middle eight’’ or break (eight bars, frequently announced by a modulation of key where an instrumental solo or vocal reelaboration might occur), it is ‘‘standard’’ in every way. This is precisely what makes what happens within the song so interesting. ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ opens with two measures of the incomparable Charlie Watts laying down the basic percussive groove: knocking the subject

61

fig. 2 ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’

This part is played, with slight modifications (occasional grace-note syncopations, one as opposed to two snare strokes on the fourth beat of the bar, more or less sizzle on the highhat, etc.), during every measure of the piece except for the chorus, where, as the call-and-response pattern becomes most pronounced in the vocals, Watts plays a part that synchronizes the beating of the bass drum and the highhat (a steady sixteeenthnote pulse) with strong eighth-note accents on the snare. The six-stroke roll that concludes the two-bar phrase and well-timed splash accents on the crash cymbal lead us back to the opening pattern. This oscillation draws attention to the fact that, although the backbeat is evoked constantly, Watts never quite plays a steady backbeat. A backbeat is nevertheless evoked because, in certain measures (often during the singing of a verse), Watts’s play actually approximates one, but more typically the other pattern (Figure 2) prevails. What is remarkable about this pattern is the way it activates a micro-narrative, by which I mean that through the multiplication of snare strokes (one on the 2, at times two on the 4, then one on the 2, and six on the 4), it is as though the drums are building, almost accelerating. But then, through the fill, the drums reach a high point, or flurry of beats, that immediately falls off, only to build again. In the chorus, where a virtual ‘‘double-time’’ feel takes over without altering the tempo of the song, the micro-narrative takes on a somewhat more structural pattern that echoes what is going on in the verses. The percussive narrative is thus one of failed striving repeated over and over until the recording apparatus itself intercedes to end things through the fade. Significantly, the fade occurs during the chorus, in the absence of the backbeat. If we interpret the drumming here as a structural reiteration of the failed quest for solitude mapped in the verses, then the fade that terminates the performance might actually be heard to cause the song—or, at least, the micro-narrative of its effects— to go on forever. It is as if, in some perverse realization of the Doppler effect, the performance had somehow accelerated beyond the range of our hearing. The fact that this occurs under the chorus, where the interpellative effects are most prominent, is not without interest. 62 percussion

To appreciate this fully, some attention must be given to the harmonic character of the song. Though by no means a twelve-bar blues tune, the song, in its verse and chorus, makes use of harmonic strategies well recognized within that idiom. I want to draw particular attention to the movement in both of these parts of the song where the bass (played by Bill Wyman) and the two other guitars (lead played by Brian Jones; rhythm played by Keith Richards) engage in a subtle rhythmic game that, if one were talking about the movement of notes through a chord progression, one might subsume under the heading of ‘‘contrary motion.’’ This is especially pronounced in the chorus, where, as the bass line climbs through its pattern, the rhythm guitar straddles and then twice ‘‘picks’’ its way down within the harmonic positions available in the chord sequence. As a result, the portion of the composition that most deeply engages the interpellative call and response (‘‘Hey, hey, you, you’’) produces an inner torsion that, while working to fend off closure (an effect especially pronounced in the last eighteen bars), also effectively repeats, within the discourse of tonal composition, the failed quest at once narrated by the lyrics and traced in the verse-andchorus structure. This kind of parallelism leads one to expect that, at some level, the guitars and the drums actually do ‘‘acknowledge’’ this deep structural affiliation, and indeed they do. The persistent coda-like return to the beginning of the tune finds structural expression in the two measures that follow the delivery of each line in the verses. These measures essentially reestablish the opening of the tune, with the exception that the guitar accompaniment is present. Jones’s lead part is harmonically interesting (and especially audible on Got Live if You Want It), but rhythmically static. Richards’s part, beginning with the final two measures of the second verse, however, actually attempts to mimic—perhaps even preempt—the drum part. In fact, in these measures he plays the same six-stroke fill that articulates the culminating flurry of the drum track. At the end of the first line in the third verse, Richards returns to this strategy, playing a marvelously syncopated cross-rhythm over Watts’s basic pattern, as if to render the percussive affiliation established between them a conspicuous supplement to the backbeating that never quite fuses with the call and response of the chorus. What I shall later pursue under the heading of ‘‘African Musicking’’ is organized here by the logic of supplementarity—that is, the call-and-response pattern ‘‘finishes’’ the piece both by bringing it to completion and by underscoring a rhythmic allusion that it cannot assimilate. With all of these various articulations and re-articulations of the knocking the subject

63

‘‘same old place’’ to which this paean to solitude is headed, one would certainly be entitled to conclude that, at a fundamental level, the song is about itself. In effect, the lyrics—rather than being veiled or otherwise cryptic allusions to ‘‘drugs’’ (marijuana, in particular)—are perhaps equally veiled, though for that reason no less valid, allusions to the sonic profile of the song itself. Thus, the solitude that is both the subject and the object of summoning is effectively realized in the execution of the parts that define it as a 2:58 musical composition. This implies, of course, that the failure traced in the lyrical narrative and reiterated in the structure and the drumming of the tune is a failure that derives from and encompasses the interpellative work of the piece taken as a whole. Given the orientation of my chapter, this is obviously an explosive proposition, for does it not imply that here, if nowhere else, interpellation does not take place, that it fails? Rather than finessing this difficulty by suggesting, through the ruse of paranoia, that interpellation is most effective precisely when and where it is perceived to have failed, I will instead resound the theme of solicitation. In other words, what happens if we think of the song as calling for an intervention, an elaboration, that the song itself is incapable of making? What, then, are the signals? The most prominent of these is the reiterated impasse—what I have called the failed quest— traced and retraced throughout the composition. Insofar as this impasse has content, it is the conflict of interpellation the song is about but that it performs as a missed moment. In effect, in ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ we hear that the subject position produced through the hail of the commodity (Hey, you, buy this!), and that produced through the juridical summons (the traffic tickets) come to nothing. They do so not as indices of identity (certainly one can be both a consumer and a negligent driver) but as incommensurable trajectories across the terrain of solitude—that is, as subject positions in relation to which solitude makes sense in different ways. (Consider here the type of ‘‘peace and quiet’’ available to one in ‘‘solitary confinement.’’) Were this not the case—in other words, had the piece not made its peace with the narrative of a failed quest and settled for beating its head against the wall of Xanadu—what might have become audible is the background against which such beating could be measured against more striking alternatives—alternatives that would include beating the body against the mind, the ears against the eyes, and ultimately the singer against the song, or, at least, the clash of cultures embodied by the song. This background, as I have called it, is conditioned by the genealogical

64 percussion

threads that converge in this encounter between a unidirectional hailing and the multidirectional circuit of a call and its response. It indicates where the subjection of agency, as realized through popular musical expression, is, as we have learned to say, ‘‘happenin’.’’ Insisting on the impossibility of solitude is a radical insight worth articulating in song, but overstating its value may well prompt one to overemphasize the specific encroachments flagged by the detergent pack and the tickets. Doing so pushes one toward an evaluation of which of these represents the greater ‘‘personal’’ compromise rather than toward an assessment of the important lesson to be learned from recognizing the conflict between them, a lesson whose guiding proposition is that what renders solitude impossible is not the absence of proper conditions but the very ‘‘reach’’ of the social. This lesson, even if perceived, goes unheeded unless we are prepared to bring the concept of interpellation—though recrafted in the ways I have proposed—to the table of musical analysis. And this, in my judgment, is perhaps the most important way to characterize what the musicking of ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ solicits from theory. Its frustrated call calls for neither identification nor sympathy; rather, it calls for a response that plays with the puzzling energy of, in this case, a hit. Although too much is made of the prison house of fame in the discourse of ‘‘entertainment,’’ aggressive, angry music—music that flaunts its knowing ways (cynical though they may be); music that is nevertheless loved—demands an attentiveness that, as Adorno once said, is prepared to defend itself from its devotees. For me, this entails changing the scope and scale of what might be going on in musical practice by confronting the theory brought to bear on it, with its demands. In this discussion, I have tried to show that even when musical practice falls behind a certain theoretical possibility, it nevertheless generates an opening for reassessing the force and significance of that possibility. By prompting us to revisit the concept of interpellation—indeed, by restating the importance of conceptualizing interpellation as irreducibly conflicted—‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ draws attention to the conflict between sociology and psychoanalysis, a conflict I have characterized as jeopardizing the very coherence of the percussive field. In addressing this, one is, of course, tempted to smooth things over by suggesting, for example, that if the subject is caught up in ideological self-reproduction—a process that traverses without subsuming the domain of cultural practice—then our immediate problem (whether analytical or political) is not the tenacity of the subject but,

knocking the subject

65

rather, the mode of production within which sociology and psychoanalysis have come to find themselves at odds precisely over the subject. That, in effect, there is no conflict. But this strategy potentially repeats the failings of ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud.’’ How so? Essentially, such a gesture locates the conflict of interpellation outside the theoretical domain, missing the opportunity to convey, to pass along, the push and pull of conflict as an indispensable part of the very thought of the subject. Thus, the percussive field assumes its theoretical coherence not by reconciling the demands of Marxian sociology and Freudian psychoanalysis, but by avoiding the impulse to do so. This is not about the conversion of incoherence into a (no doubt, postmodern) virtue. Instead, it is about rigor. It is about the importance of implicating theoretical practice within the struggles it seeks to amplify, struggles that this chapter has situated in relation to the concept of interpellation. Musical practice is not above the fray. If my treatment of ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’ has created such an impression, it is a false one. But assuming for the moment, that the percussive field has indeed risen to the occasion represented by this challenge, clearly more deserves to be said about how one brings the conflict of interpellation to bear on what I have called the genealogy of the skin. If hailing strikes us ‘‘where we live,’’ then—as we shall hear in Chapter Four—where rock-and-roll has lived takes on marked significance. More immediately, though, as the phenomenologists might insist, we need to ‘‘return to the drums themselves.’’

66 percussion

33333333333333333333333

different strokes for different folks

The argument has been advanced with such frequency and from so many different angles that it hardly bears repeating, but in this chapter the matter of the encounter between African rhythmic traditions and Anglo-American musical practices—the very encounter regarded as having sparked rock-and-roll—will serve as the object of inquiry. So as not to re-cover familiar ground, and out of respect for the particularity of conceptualizing the percussive field, my inquiry will accentuate the specifically percussive character of this encounter. This means, of course, that equal attention will be paid to the interaction of ‘‘different drummers’’ and to the repercussions of the encounter itself—that is, to its percussive ‘‘ripples.’’ To give focus to these ripples—by which I mean the various manifestations of the encounter evoked here—this inquiry will be organized around the trap set (or, in British usage, the drum kit), which in effect came to ‘‘instrumentalize’’ percussive gesturing in rock-and-roll. The goal is to think about how the trap set as a very particular configuration of drums came to emerge on the locus of drumming in rockand-roll. The trap set, depending on the pretensions or compositional responsibilities of the drummer, may include from two to a dozen or more drums and cymbals, which are designed to execute very particular ‘‘drum parts,’’ whose particularities are at once rythmic and sonoric. I am primarily interested here not in the corporate histories of drum

manufacturers such as Slingerland, Ludwig, Rogers, or Gretsch (although this is indeed interesting as a way of thinking about the logic of commodification in the field of musical performance), or in the migration of the trap set through the various idioms of popular music (Dixieland, swing, jazz, etc.). Instead, like many scholars who are dissatisfied with the shortcomings of structuralism, I will approach the trap set as something like an apparatus—that is, as a configuration of limits and possibilities that are shot through with use, with, in effect, an ensemble of prior engagements, whose significance is distinctly, though perhaps distantly, available to all those touched by the trap set. Some would regard this ‘‘instrumental,’’ or perhaps even materialist, concentration as flawed in the way it fails to capture the autonomy of rhythmic performances that might be expressed through the trap set. In response, I would argue that this configuration of drums—the fact that it is meant to be played by one musician (in a marching band, for example, the three drums of the trap set would typically be distributed among multiple performers) who is charged with coordinating very particular rhythmic tasks—has a great deal, if not everything, to do with what kind of percussive gesturing a rock-and-roll drummer is capable of. My point is not that the talents of any of the great early rock-and-roll drummers—Earl Palmer, Hal Blaine, Clifton James, or D. J. Fontana—were somehow confined to what they did in the drum tracks they recorded, but that the trap sets they all used set the rhythmic conditions for the drumming they did. These conditions were as much musical (executing a fill at appropriate moments) as technological (distributing and executing parts with the clarity required by the microphones used in recording the track). Not surprisingly, drum charts themselves have developed so that their notation reflects the distribution of the drumming body while seated at a trap set. To warrant this focus on the trap set as a way to frame the percussive encounter between Africa and the United States, it is again useful to appeal to Christopher Small’s distinction between music and ‘‘musicking,’’ a distinction that he deploys to great effect in his pathbreaking analysis of this encounter in Music of the Common Tongue. No summary of this remarkable discussion will do justice to its insights, but a more thorough account than those I have already provided is certainly warranted. To narrow the scope of the discussion I will content myself with clarifying how ‘‘musicking’’ prompts one to think both differently and productively about the trap set. As was made clear in Chapter One, musicking designates—in Small’s formulation—‘‘not only performing and composing . . . but also listen68 percussion

ing and even dancing to music.’’ As he continues, ‘‘All those involved in any way in a musical performance can be thought of as musicking’’ (Small 1987, 50). Beyond clarifying what is meant by thinking about music as an event rather than as a thing, these formulations prompt us to think about the trap set as a collection not of musical instruments, but of musicking instruments—or, to contort the English grammar just a degree further, instruments made both of and for musicking. Of these two prepositions, ‘‘of’’ produces the odder formulation, but it is precisely this one that matters most. Although Small delineates in great detail how events come to inform musical practices, he does not place equal emphasis on how events come to be inscribed as genealogical laminations in instruments and the musical practices they enable. As we shall see, this has particular pertinence for thinking about that most catachrestic of instruments—the drum. But more immediately, such an emphasis invites us to recognize how the trap set exhibits something like diachronic and synchronic axes where, in the configuration of drums and the rhythms they are designed to produce, one finds a spatiotemporal condensation of bodies, cultural contexts, and political practices. It is here that I situate the encounter between African drumming traditions and the musical practices of Anglo-Americans. Though Small insists that musicking applies equally to the performances of symphony orchestras and those of village drummers in Ghana, it is clear from his presentation of African music that, in fact, musicking derives—as a specifically musicological concept—from his study of African music. In this respect, as I have already argued, Small’s study effects a deft dialectical reversal of academic musicology. However, because Small also stresses the important way musicking serves as a context of subject formation, it is important to think about how the apparatus of the trap set involves itself in the dynamics of interpellation. At the same time, stress must fall on the production of difference (specifically ethnic and racial difference) within these dynamics. Although the temptation is great to draw on the special proximity between musicking (as a concept) and African subjectivity, it ought to be resisted precisely so as not to let slip the conflicted production of difference that the musicking inscribed in the trap set embodies. In this respect, the trap set becomes a site for thinking the hyphenation of identities, almost as though the hyphen itself were to be read as a graphic inscription of the drum skin stretched between Africa and the Americas. Thus, one ought not think of the strokes evoked in the title of this chapter as related to different folks in a narrowly anthropological (or, for that matter, ethnomusicological) way, where ‘‘for’’ simply effects different strokes for different folks

69

the prepositional articulation of preference or perhaps possession. Instead, the concept of musicking prompts one to assume responsibility for delineating how different stroking interpellates different folks— how it works not simply as an expression of different identities, or, for that matter, as a solicitation of particular identities, but rather as an event where the differences ‘‘folks’’ share (however unequally) are called up and assembled, in effect, constituted. How does this contribute to my effort to articulate the percussive field of 1950s rock-androll? On the one hand, it will be important to establish how actual percussive instruments—the trap set—belong to or within such a field, a point worth making explicit because the disciplinary aspect of this construct always threatens to muffle its relation to sound production. On the other hand, organizing components of this field are defined by the historical, political, and cultural coordinates of the encounter between African and American musicking. Thus, in making sense of the percussive gesturing in rock-and-roll, we need to listen to the genealogical laminations that are there to be heard in the beating that moves us. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to teasing out the layers of this genealogy as they have come to lay down their tracks in the apparatus of the trap set. Drum Roles There is remarkable agreement among those who study music historically that percussion instruments figure among the very earliest musical instruments. James Blades’s formulation of this point bears repeating. The seeds of the first instruments were sown unconsciously by an early man as he stamped upon the ground, beat upon his throat, clapped his hands or slapped his body. He produced contrasting sounds with hollowed hands, flat palms, heels or toes, or by striking either bony or fleshy parts of the body. . . . Percussion—the act of striking—was an art in which primitive man was skilled. He survived in every sense by the dexterity of his blow; from which it is fair to assume that the first instruments to augment the hand clap and the stamp of the foot may have been the implements or weapons upon which he relied for food or survival. The striking of objects such as stones, the hide or (wood) shield, the hunting bow or the cudgels or clappers and so on, further suggests that implements used percussively were among the first instruments. (Blades 1992, 35)

Setting aside the characteristic chauvinism of pre-theoretical musicology, this citation deftly amplifies the distinctly catachrestic character of 70 percussion

drumming. However, rather than detail the ‘‘abusive turns’’ that stretch the body over the drum, it is worth drawing out the Freudo-Marxian implications of Blades’s formulation. If we grant that both Freud and Marx saw humanity as something torn from and then returned to nature, it is clear that Blades is situating percussion instruments not just at the origin of ‘‘music,’’ but as an unconscious, perhaps even disseminated, condition of humanity itself.∞ Though much has been made recently of the characteristically Western ‘‘hostility’’ this expresses toward nature (a view that risks losing the specificity of nature in the very act of its veneration), it seems clear that what Blades is registering is the way the relation between nature and culture is ‘‘folded’’ into the membranes, the surfaces, that developed as humans produced and reproduced themselves as social beings. In what might well be considered a classic articulation of Marx’s second ‘‘materialist premise’’ (Marx and Engels 1973, 42–43), this formulation establishes that the need for musical instruments arises out of the struggle to meet the needs of survival, thus producing not simply the ‘‘new’’ need for musical pleasure, but the relation between survival and pleasure itself. Though hardly a Marxist, Blades no doubt sought to signal his awareness of the bond between art and life in his generous glossing of percussion as ‘‘the activity of striking.’’ The point here is not to establish the priority of percussive instruments so much as it is to underscore what some of the relations are that derive from their emergence. Of the relations indicated earlier, I want particularly to retain the figure of percussion as an activity wherein the unconscious gesturing of an emergent humanity is pelted into the means for ‘‘making do’’ of a species. Why? Because it is precisely this aspect of percussion that makes thinking about drumming under the sign of ‘‘musicking’’ so productive. Although it may indeed be stretching things to interpret Small’s ‘‘all those involved in any way’’ as calling up the genealogical frame put in place by Blades, it is vital that we not render musicking overly synchronic. For in the long run, this would put a premium on ‘‘live performance’’ that misses much of what is crucial about rock-and-roll.≤ Moreover, it is impossible to make a membranophone drum without stretching things—a point that is true of the percussive field itself. What, then, of pertinence to the genealogy of rock-and-roll—and specifically to the development of the trap set—is to be learned by thinking about African musicking? Though this question is straightforward, a prior difficulty is posed by what Kofi Agawu has called ‘‘representing different strokes for different folks

71

African music’’ (Agawu 1992, 245). In an essay by that name, Agawu has hastened the reversion of ethnomusicology into what the Germans called vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (comparative musicology) by foregrounding the epistemological and, ultimately, political problems that have haunted it from the outset. Drawing on theoretical texts that have come to have resonance in the debates over postcolonialism, Agawu shows how mired ethnomusicological discourse is in pre-critical conceptions of ‘‘the other,’’ context, and observation (or witnessing). His point is not that we should abandon the study of non-Western musics. Instead, he insists that their study include a rigorously theorized autocritique, one geared to thematizing the conditions of our access to African music. This point has also been made forcefully by Charles Keil and Steven Feld (1994). Although I am in utter agreement with the broad contours and much of the detail of this critique and am prepared to concede that this chapter will necessarily succumb to the pitfalls of representing African music, two points should be made. First, the drumming relevant to the emergence of the trap set is not, strictly speaking, African. If we are to take seriously the facts of slavery and what has been called the Middle Passage, as odious as they may be, then this arresting syncope should be folded into what our conception of African drumming must be. As tenaciously as the African slaves clung to the traditions that preceded their enslavement, these traditions did not survive— intact—for them. Thus, we do not need to reconstruct, however problematically, what the Middle Passage, and later the Black Codes, made sure they could not bring. Second, like many of those whose work he criticizes, Agawu constructs music as an object. He does not think carefully enough about musicking and the issues that might arise in thinking about its representation. True, many of the same political strictures might well apply here, but precisely because musicking situates musicmaking within the domain of cultural representation and practice, not only are some of the thornier epistemological problems avoided (for example, that of translatability), but the residues of the Middle Passage—understood as the actions assembled in musicking— in an odd way are even more accessible to musicologists here than to ethnomusicologists there (that is, ‘‘in the field’’ in Africa). This is especially true when, in accord with a now troubled disciplinary logic, those ethnomusicologists begin by assuming that rhythmic truth begins ‘‘at home.’’≥ All of this restates the conceptual importance of musicking both as a functional transformation of the musical object and as a way to indicate what in African drumming might matter most to the percussive signifying enabled by the trap set. 72 percussion

A feature of Small’s presentation of musicking that has not yet been given sufficient emphasis merits further attention. With its privileging of the event of music, musicking would appear to lose all but the most tenuous link to the musical object. However, as can be shown in reflecting—however cautiously—on African rhythm, musicking reaches all the way into what Western academic musicology would call the substance of music, its notated sonorities. This can be clarified by appealing to one of Small’s own sources: John Chernoff’s slightly hagiographic but nevertheless remarkable study of Ewe drumming, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (1979). Early detractors of rock-androll, including everyone from church figures to ‘‘crooners’’ such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were certainly right to link rock-androll to African rituals—or, as the Reverend William Shannon put it in his reaction to Elvis Presley’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, ‘‘Presley and his voodoo of frustration and defiance have become symbols in this country’’ (as quoted in Szatmary 1996, 49). What Chernoff’s study makes clear is how moral indignation made, and continues to make, it impossible for those asserting such connections actually to understand their implications. In his chapter, ‘‘Style in Africa,’’ Chernoff goes to great lengths to show how what is valued in African drumming is not in fact the frenzy so insatiably reviled by the likes of Shannon and Sinatra, but coolness. Ibrahim Abdulai, Chernoff’s teacher and informant (who is also a boxer) establishes this point by introducing Chernoff to a distinction between yirin (by heart—that is, with passion, not by memory) and baalim (with control). As Abdulai puts it: As you are beating, it is your heart that is talking, and what your heart is going to say, your hand will collect and play. And unless you cool your heart, your drumming will not stand. When your heart cools, your arm will cool too, and as you are bringing your strength you will also be leaving it. At that time the drum will cry well, and you will beat and not become tired. The one who has learned to play well can beat a drum and the sound will spread out and you will hear it vibrating into the ground. But the one whose heart gets up and he is beating hard, his drum will not sound. . . . The one has learned well, he plays with understanding, and he has added his sense and cooled his heart; if he is beating hard, it will be more than the one who is using only force to play. And as he is beating, he will never become tired, because the understanding is not finished. (Chernoff 1979, 106–7)

One might, of course, ask whether Jerry Allison or even Earl Palmer would meet Abdulai’s uncompromising standards, but clearly the prejudice that African-inspired drumming, by virtue of its Africanness, was different strokes for different folks

73

synonymous with irrational abandon is a racist view that is flatly contradicted by Abdulai’s remarks, which are interesting in other ways, as well.∂ Notably, Abdulai establishes an important association between beating and understanding that not only illustrates how intelligibility mediates practice for Ewe drummers, but that also begins to underscore the suitability of musicking as a way to think about what is immediately significant about these traditions. The paragraph from which the earlier quote derives concludes, ‘‘Do you understand?’’ This otherwise innocuous and slightly phatic gesture cues us to the important continuity Abdulai perceives between the site of drumming and the site of instruction. As such, it sets up a dramatic episode late in the chapter in which Chernoff—to his obvious and, I might add, well-earned delight—is coaxed by Abdulai to assume control of a notoriously difficult Ewe beat (the Kondalia) during an actual dance. Thus, in characterizing the relations among masters and disciples, drummers and drums, and drummers and dancers, understanding serves to place beating in precisely the socio-aesthetic community envisioned by Small when he contrasts music and musicking. In fact, when Chernoff leads the dancers into the Kondalia, it is clear that what makes his drum ‘‘cry’’ is not that he gets the part right, but that he understands the context of musicking—that is, the complex dispersion of the event. This is not to say, however, that the part is detachable from the event. In clarifying the nature of its belonging, we can illuminate the border between African music and musicking. Two points stand out in Chernoff’s presentation of African rhythm. First, in confronting squarely the ethnocentric characterization of it as repetitious and narratively ‘‘uneventful,’’ he delineates with real precision the concept of the time line—that is, the conception that a ‘‘song’’ is not defined by a given number of measures in which certain developments are staged and executed at a set, though variable, tempo. Instead, the time line refers to an open-ended duration in which a constrained variety of rhythmic moves can be explored in relation to one another. The drama of repetition is the subtle one of making time itself warp by playing persistently with one’s ability to alter our perception of its passage. This aesthetic of the detail—the small variation that almost imperceptibly alters the flow of a rhythmic configuration—fully subordinates the musical thing to the event of its unfolding. True, the Kondalia is a recognizable configuration of beats and steps, but what gives it sense is its taking place, its assembling of the community to which it belongs. In the absence of the concept of musicking, this stubbornly musicological aspect of African rhythm might otherwise go undetected. 74 percussion

The second important point about Chernoff’s presentation bears on the Ewes’ perception of musical texture. Consider the following remarkable passage. Westerners trying to appreciate African music must always keep in mind the fact that the music is organized to be open to the rhythmic interpretation a drummer, a listener, or a dancer wishes to contribute. The music is perhaps best considered as an arrangement of gaps where one may add a rhythm, rather than as a dense pattern of sound. In the conflict of the rhythms, it is the space between the notes from which the dynamic tension comes, and it is the silence which constitutes the musical form as much as does the sound. It is in this sense that the small boys tapping on bottles can make more forceful music than a group of Westerners pounding on drums with all their might. Just as important as his own contribution is the time a drummer allows other musicians to have their say, and most important, of course, the drummer leaves room for a dancer. (Chernoff 1979, 113–14; italics in the original)

In reprising the earlier theme of playing under control (the boys tapping on bottles; one does wonder what Chernoff might make of Larry Wright, the street drummer who opens Peter Weir’s otherwise forgettable film Green Card), this ‘‘formal’’ characterization not only follows from the more psychosocial discussion of yirin. It establishes clearly how rhythmic texture registers, at the most intimate of levels, the vitally collective appropriation of the music. Western composition makes use of gaps and silences—what, after all, are rests if not gaps?—but what is different here is the sense of music arising not out of silence (as in much of the Western tradition) but out of a din that must be punctured so as to create possibilities of participation for others, including not just musicians, but also dancers and listeners. There is here a sense of music as dispersed over a terrain where its very nature engages the non-musical. Is it any wonder, then, that notating African drumming has proved to be such a vexed matter? For even if one were to capture the literal execution of the parts played by the drummers—as Jones, Agawu, Chernoff, and numerous others have—there is still the problem of notating the parts of those parts that were not played by ‘‘the drummers.’’ Thus, in placing at the core of African rhythm the enabling absence, the gap, Chernoff shows us how profoundly musicking— everything from improvisation to the open-ended context of reception (a context that allows one to conjoin teaching and playing)—defines the object of African musical practice. When dancing is part of music— that is, when stamping/shuffling is itself the execution of notes—it different strokes for different folks

75

becomes less difficult to treat music as essentially percussive. One might say, then, that the hail of beats is here redoubled. I have delineated how musicking effectively outmaneuvers an otherwise dismissive formalism. We have, however, strayed a long way from the rock-and-roll trap set. But this theme can be recovered directly through a somewhat more thorough reflection on the communal character of the drumming event. Though much more remains to be said about listeners and, especially, dancers, thought must be given to the ensemble of drummers and their drums. Here, too, we find a distinctly social network, and there is no point in mincing words: African drumming ensembles are hierarchies; they are dominated by ‘‘master drummers.’’ It was precisely Ibrahim Abdulai’s status as a master drummer that attracted Chernoff to him. This said, it is important to differentiate the structural position of the master drummer from the conductor and the bandleader. As Chernoff makes clear, the master drummer controls play much in the same way that a metronome does: He (lamentably, Chernoff gives us no reason to think that there are women who hold the position of master drummer) makes moves that fill gaps in other rhythms and create emptinesses that can be similarly filled. There is control here, but it is decidedly more democratic than, say, that of an orchestra conductor. That is, the master drummer can lead only by negotiating for the opportunities to do so within the collective of which he is a part. This is not to say that others are not subordinate to him; rather, his role, and the roll of his drum, is more that of a monitor— perhaps even an eavesdropper—than a leader. He listens for the moments that he then prompts others to seize. The master drummer is also an incarnation of popular memory. Like storytellers and healers, the master drummer embodies what de Certeau would doubtless call a repository of ‘‘moves.’’ His playing emerges from this repository, and precisely to the extent that a given piece and its characteristic beat are defined by the interplay of several parts (parts distributed among the ensemble of performers), the master drummer gives the community access to the repository of its memory in the collective act of its reincarnation. Because the community’s identity is at stake here—as Small insists—drumming forges a public link between identity formation and the blows called up from the repository embodied in the master drummer. It is not just that a particular community is represented in a particular beat, but that that beating in a particular way is where the folks of that community assemble themselves. The trans-subjective dynamism at play is nowhere more evident than in African dance, where, as Chernoff has indicated, musical gaps 76 percussion

are both filled and emptied by drummers and dancers alike. No doubt, this is precisely the kind of material that prompted Small to link musicking and African music so intimately. African dancers are not dancing to the music as much as they are dancing in, or perhaps even as, the music. The special power over participants this gives musical performance will merit further attention, but here the earlier point about the irreducibly percussive character of African music can be significantly nuanced. As we saw in the discussion of the rock-and-roll backbeat, this beat, in the interplay between the snare and the bass drum, embodies the push and pull of a call and response. Although one typically thinks about call and response as a quintessentially vocal phenomenon, Chernoff’s discussion of African rhythm obliges us to hear in the interplay between drummers and dancers something of an ur-manifestation of this phenomenon. As drummers drum, they call to the dancers, who, in moving to the beat, respond to it. Where precisely the call and its response emanate from is not as important as the exchange itself; although characteristically percussive, this exchange is not infrequently accompanied by ritual song. Chernoff refers intermittently to important links between African and African American musics. (His favorite example is James Brown’s backup band the Famous Flames, though the more recent, collaboratively written essay on conga rhythms is also well worth consulting [Chernoff and Johnson 1991].) But it is perhaps in the musicking as such of the call and response that the decisive link to rock-and-roll is to be found. Consider, in this light, Robert Palmer’s comparatively recent discussion of the ‘‘ring shout’’ in his enormously useful history of rock-and-roll: ‘‘I gotta rock, you gotta rock,’’ the Jennings, Louisiana, shouters insist, with what is most likely (as in so many spirituals) a double meaning. Jesus is the rock of salvation, a solid rock to cling to in times of trouble. But the shouters are also exhorting each other to rock with the forceful rhythm. A song leader rasps these and other telegraphic phrases, his voice so strained with emotion it frequently forsakes sense for pure sound. A chorus answers in the ubiquitous call-and-response format. The wooden floor of the rural church resonates like a huge drumhead to the inexorable momentum of coordinated foot-stamping rhythms, with handclapping patterns providing syncopated cross-rhythms. Again and again in the eyewitness accounts of shouting, the observer comments that the feet sound like drumming. They also function like drumming, triggering and then guiding or shaping trance experiences. The slaves had found, in the wooden floors of plantation houses and shacks and later in their

different strokes for different folks

77

own churches, the only efficient substitutes for the prohibited drums that were available to them. (Palmer 1995, 67–68; italics in the original)

Several aspects of this description call out for elaboration, but certainly one of its crucial features is the way that Palmer, who is implicitly drawing on the well-established link between gospel singing and rockand-roll, teases out the associations that join dance (a deeply percussive version of the ‘‘ring shout’’), call-and-response patterns, and an ecstatic religious interpellation. In particular, by calling attention to the function of the church floor—not simply as a metonymy for the rock of Christ or a somewhat more pagan figure for the body of Mother Earth—Palmer reminds us of a crucial feature of the Middle Passage: In every slaving center, with the important exception of New Orleans, slaves were legislatively prohibited from owning, making, or playing drums. In his brilliant chapter ‘‘Hear That Long Snake Moan,’’ Michael Ventura observes that this imposed on the Africans brought forcibly to North America the necessity—indeed, the inevitability—of musical bricolage, or of creating out of what was at hand alternative percussive instruments (Ventura 1985, 113). In a characteristically cunning strategy, slaves, who were alternately hustled and hassled by Christian missionaries, took the clapboard body of the rural church, often little more than a shotgun shack, and transformed it into a huge drum where quite literally drummers and dancers fused in their spiritual musicking. I emphasize this particular feature of Palmer’s discussion because one must recognize in the reappropriation of the church floor the ‘‘making do’’ that led African drummers to take up—literally, to gather—the percussion instruments available to them in the brutal plantation economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although it would indeed be difficult to argue that the trap set originated with slave drummers in the United States, it is equally difficult not to recognize the specificity of their experience as indentured bricoleurs and bricoleuses in Blades’s description of the trap set and its development: His [the trap drummer’s] equipment was simple: Bass drum, side drum, Chinese cymbal, and one or two Chinese tom-toms. In the pit of the theatre and elsewhere he was both orchestral player and effects man. His ‘‘kit’’ (traps) consisted of a bass drum with cymbal attached, side drum, a ‘‘crash’’ cymbal, a wood block, and a few luxuries (effects), such as a triangle, tambourine, castanets, slapstick, and a few whistles, a pair of sandpaper blocks, and later the wire brushes. In the early years after World War I the ‘‘pukka’’ jazz drummer added a number of tin cans, washboard, sauce pan lids, and similar 78 percussion

noise makers to the normal trap-drum outfit. Despite such atrocities, and the frugal nature of the early equipment the majority of these players were extremely skillful. The trap-drummer was not only the metronome of the band: his purpose was to colour it with every sound possible from the instruments at his disposal, and to give the combination style with his ad lib syncopation. (Blades 1992, 458)

The choice of words here deserves comment, particularly the slang expression ‘‘pukka’’ and the conspicuous hyperbole of ‘‘atrocities’’ as applied to the ‘‘instruments’’ integrated into the trap set by pukka drummers. As Blades’s description makes clear, practically anything could be so integrated. Taken together, the terms articulate a barely audible silence. ‘‘Pukka’’ derives from the Hindi pakka, which denotes ‘‘cooked,’’ ripe or firm. It is a term that in this context is unthinkable outside the history of British colonialism (Blades is British). It connotes, in the argot called up by Blades (indeed, an argot that circulates in South Asia), authenticity, even ‘‘coolness,’’ and Blades’s point is to suggest that the truly authentic trap drummer includes such percussive ‘‘atrocities’’ as cookware (‘‘sauce pan lids’’) in ‘‘his’’ set. In this sense, of course, good drummers really do, as we say, ‘‘cook.’’ The use of ‘‘atrocities’’ in naming the supplemental non-traditional instruments shifts one’s focus away from the immediate context of colonialism, itself clearly the greater atrocity, and places it on the pukka drummers—that is, on the drummers whose talents are apparently best named from within a historical experience that must itself go unnamed. Though Blades has genuine admiration for the percussive talents of trap drummers—he goes on to sing the praises of the undeniably virtuosic Gene Krupa—he is driven at some level as a conservatory percussionist to distance himself from the musicking embedded in the trap set. His rhetorical strategy is a familiar one: that of inverted projection. His invocation of Krupa notwithstanding, Blades characterizes the trap set as though it had virtually nothing to do with the United States. However, this very silence opens a channel between his slightly twisted evocation of colonialism and the history of slavery in North America, both only partially submerged in the term ‘‘atrocities.’’ In the U.S. context, of course, the atrocities that might be misrecognized in the ‘‘wild’’ constitution of the trap set would be directly linked to the historical issues raised by Palmer and Ventura—that is, the confiscation of the Africans’ drums in the wake of the Middle Passage. In other words, if the trap set was precisely the sort of assemblage of drums that could be supplemented freely with devices drawn from an indefinite number

different strokes for different folks

79

of practical contexts, then its very design embodied the sort of bricolage that was imposed on African drummers. It was, in this sense, a refuge, a congenial, perhaps ‘‘safe,’’ place where—as with Christian worship—restricted or even prohibited practices might be articulated by alternative means. Indeed, the trap set might reasonably be characterized as a material crystallization of the history of African drummers in North America. Its specific link to rock-and-roll can, I think, be grasped in pausing to think about its name. As a characterization of an ensemble of drums, ‘‘traps’’ no doubt strikes the uninitiated as anomalous—so much so that, when the side or ‘‘snare’’ drum is recognized among the members of this ensemble, the temptation is great to think that ‘‘trap’’ figures within the associative paradigm of hunting. This connection is perhaps motivated more by the stereotypical association of drumming and ‘‘possession’’ (about which more later) than by genealogy or etymology. In fact, when such concerns are foregrounded, the pertinent details of the name become audible. Oddly enough, ‘‘trap’’ derives from the German terms called up in Freud’s figure of humans ‘‘stamping’’ or ‘‘tramping’’ (Stampfen) on Mother Earth. Its German provenance registers the fact that the entire set is named after a technical innovation that changed the way the bass, or kick, drum was played. Originally, a trap drummer was a street musician. Perhaps the example with which we are most familiar is the trap drummer ‘‘Bert’’ (played by Dick Van Dyke) whom we meet in the opening scene of Disney’s Mary Poppins. As Bert dances, a unique spring pulley attached to his foot with a strap allows him to beat on his back-mounted bass (or ‘‘kick’’) drum. As he stamps—in fact, as he walks—he drums, a point poignantly and noisily made in the scene as Bert hustles his fast-dispersing audience. In moving from the street to the stage, where the trap drummer is typically sitting rather than standing, this device undergoes a crucial modification. What changed decisively was the introduction, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the foot pedal, a device fastened to the tension rim, or hoop, of the bass drum (not to the foot) allowing the drummer to perform on it using a foot (typically the right foot), thus freeing both hands to work the other drums, cymbals, and ‘‘atrocities.’’ Prior to the introduction of this innovation, the bass drum figured in the stage trap set as another drum struck by a handheld stick. This required a style of play that was referred to as ‘‘double drumming.’’ The design of the new pedal was standardized in 1909 by the German drum manufacturer William Ludwig, who worked out of Chicago and whose product quickly passed into general use by drummers working in the key popular idioms of 80 percussion

jazz, swing, and the blues. Thus, a trap set is a configuration of drums designed to coordinate stamping on the aptly named ‘‘kick’’ drum while executing other rhythmic requirements on the rest of the set. Especially in the early days of its use, the trap set complicated an important border by bringing the street indoors while taking the dancehall back outdoors into the space of intermittent carnival. Clearly, what Chuck Berry refers to as the backbeat in ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ leans heavily on the development and standardization of the trap set. This is not to say, of course, that there is no backbeat without the trap set. As the sole percussionist in Berry’s ensemble, Ebby Hardy would have had to ‘‘respond’’ on the snare to the ‘‘call’’ of the bass drum, while executing the running eighth and sixteenth notes on the cymbals, on a set designed to distribute his body over the percussive requirements of the piece in the manner dictated by the set up—the apparatus of the trap set. Even adept double drumming would have imposed certain compromises on his performance, and if we are to accept the genealogy proposed by Earl Palmer (see Chapter One), then it was precisely the effort to duplicate the running eighth notes of Little Richard’s right hand that transformed the shuffle beat into the backbeat of rock-and-roll, a beat more comfortably performed on the trap set. However, more becomes audible here than simply the important link between the backbeat and the trap set. Consider, for example, the genealogy of percussive musicking that the trap set embodies, a point perhaps best broached by recalling the amazement that attends watching skilled trap drummers. Each of their limbs appears to be doing ‘‘something different,’’ or something rhythmically distinct. It is as though the drummer’s body has been partitioned, with each limb given a separate part to execute at specific times. Although this is far from the way the drummer lives the piece, there is something important in our naive fascination with this capacity.∑ I would characterize this in terms of the blatantly ecstatic articulation of sociality that is contained in trap-set drumming. If we recall that the call and response of African drumming derived from the social ritual it effected, where percussive responsibilities were distributed among many bodies working in concert, then what is clear about the trap set is that it allows one to do the work of many. However, precisely when we marvel at how a drummer can pluralize himself or herself, what fascinates is not the cheap thrill of efficiency but the seduction of being possessed ourselves by the community that comes to guide the drummers’ limbs, as if they had ‘‘minds of their own.’’ Indeed, the first thing that happens when a novice sits down at a trap set (after the compulsory go at ‘‘Wipeout’’) is that all the limbs different strokes for different folks

81

start beating in unison. This reflects not simply a lack of competence, but also an approach to musicking that orbits more around marching rather than dancing. Pursuing such concerns in relation to the African American experience prompts one to hear in the design of the trap set the tangled genealogical weave of the bricolage evoked earlier. Clearly, the development of the foot pedal can be read as a culmination of the displacement that began with the floorboards of the rural church. Just as the church, in the absence of other resonating chambers, became a surface beaten by dancing feet (the floor itself a transplantation of the consecrated ground lost to the Middle Passage), the bass drum—with the development of the foot pedal—emerged as a resonating chamber calling to any and all respondents. Performing on it as a component of the trap set places the drummer’s legs not just in the ghostly position of dancers pounding on ‘‘planet drum’’ (Mickey Hart’s sublimely resonant figure), but also in the post-traumatic moment of recovering prohibited instruments through ‘‘wigging.’’ Although I see no point in dislodging the consensus that has emerged about the centrality of the black church in the emergence of rock-and-roll—a consensus that has centered on the gospel, and specifically vocal, dimension of this precedent—something is to be gained from nuancing it in the manner I am attempting. What makes this particularly true is the way in which constructing a link between the church and the trap set as percussion instruments facilitates situating the musicking body in relation to the percussive field. Two issues in particular merit emphasis. First, there is the issue of the drummer’s body. This body assumes new positions in relation to the demands that the performance places on it via the survival strategies that have found expression in the assemblage of the trap set. Although the hipster’s incitement, ‘‘Beat those crazy skins, man,’’ is almost always understood to designate the trap set as that which is to be beaten by the trap drummer (whether pukka or not), the shift in accents I am calling for might permit us to hear it as a call to the drums to, in effect, play the drummer, to recontour the drummer’s skin to produce the level of competence where the wrists and the ankles function as though attached to more than one subject. Crazy, indeed, but only from within the age of reason, where, as Duden argues, the body comes to seal itself off from its constitutive sociality, from the different folks, from the voices it hears. The trap drummer’s body in performance becomes a crucial locus for hearing the skin contact that registers the torturous genealogy of subjection. 82 percussion

The second issue bears more immediately on the theme of interpellation. If one aspect of the trap drummer’s sociality is the way his or her body reconfigures the traditional encounter between drummers and dancers (roughly, hands and feet), then attention is also due to the ‘‘horizontal’’ axis of this reconfiguration—that is, to the relations that arise as dancers dance to drumming, and to rock-and-roll drumming in particular. This, too, is an irreducibly social exchange, one that is deeply organized by the dynamics of a conflicted interpellation that may or may not be permitted to sound. Again, appealing to Small’s notion of musicking is useful. Fundamentally, musicking insists that one treat dance as part of music, a state of affairs crystallized, as we have seen, in the trap set itself. Although this might lead one to erase the distinction between dancer and musician altogether, an erasure that would complicate— perhaps definitively—the very structure of interpellation, I regard this as a mistake. What is clear in Chernoff’s discussion of the Kondalia, for example, is that although the dancers are fully integrated into the percussive performance of the ‘‘piece,’’ their participation is organized by a persistent—and, yes, repetitious—turn-taking or shifting. At one moment, a dancer might hail (call to) the drummer, and at another moment, the drummer would hail the dancer. In effect, all performers are interpellated by the beat—that is, their bodies are called into position by the relations they themselves have struck up in articulating the ritual. A vestigial trace of this dynamic in rock-and-roll dancing is the role played by finger snapping and clapping, both complex forms of beating with the body against the body (essentially patting juba) in response to the hail of the beat. Ventura has, I think, challenged those of us thinking about such processes to recognize that what must be confronted here is precisely what often gets dismissed as hysterical—if not simply ideological—projection: the phenomenon of possession. Because his discussion will allow me to flesh out an important issue, it warrants further scrutiny. Ventura broaches the theme of possession by grounding rock-androll not simply in African American musicking, but also in the specific ritual practices of voodoo. Two things relate his discussion to that of Palmer. Like Palmer, Ventura reads voodoo as bricolage articulated in the domain of religious ritual—or, as he puts it, ‘‘Voodoo is the African aesthetic shattered and desperately put back together, . . . recreated to serve its people under the shattering impact of slavery and poverty’’ (Ventura 1985, 113). In this respect, voodoo might be regarded as the general condition of African musicking in the Americas. Second, Vendifferent strokes for different folks

83

tura stresses the specific role played by Catholicism for slave bricoleurs and bricoleuses. Put bluntly, Catholicism served much like the church floor—that is, it served as indigenous construction material rendered unrecognizable by the work of reappropriation. Although Ventura might be accused of conceding an important point too readily, he clarifies precisely why rock-and-roll was consistently maligned as primitive and condemned as voodoo: because its detractors were right. It did derive from the sacred vodou. Of course, behind this concession is Ventura’s effort to rethink what voodoo was for those who survived the Middle Passage. Perhaps serendipitously, this effort centers—and Ventura’s entire chapter is presented as the peristyle of a voodoo ceremony—on the event of possession and the role of drumming in effecting it. Drawing heavily on the work of Robert Farris Thompson, Albert Métraux, and Maya Deren, Ventura establishes the sacred character of possession in a way that both rescues voodoo and enriches the concept of interpellation. In the religious bricolage that became voodoo, worship took place within the framework of a dance, where the participants’ objective was to position themselves in such a manner that they could be ridden by the divinity (the loa)—hence, Deren’s famous figure of ‘‘the divine horsemen.’’ Possession referred to the experience of being ridden, where the accent fell not on ‘‘loss of rational control,’’ but on the ecstatic fulfillment realized when one’s body was recognized as capable of supporting a divine horseman. As Deren explained in ‘‘Drums and Dance’’ (1976), drumming was crucial because it was the drummer’s task to position the dancing bodies by playing the signature rhythms of each loa in such a way that the riders would be swept into the dance, and possession would therefore take place. Just as Abdulai’s discussion of ‘‘sweetness’’ might have led us to predict, the drummer’s heart has to be cool in order to produce the drumming that will lure the loa, who are not, to the precise degree that they are themselves subject to seduction, perceived as transcendental or otherwise ethereal figures. Thus, possession is not about submission and manipulation. It is about coordinating movement to elude, however imperfectly, the constraints that subjected believers to the plantation economy, white supremacy, and the atrocities of cultural deprivation. As I believe is made abundantly clear in Willy Apollon’s study Le Vaudou: Un espace pour le ‘‘Voix’’ (1976), possession is also about interpellation. As underscored earlier, Althusser’s essay turns in important ways around religious practice, where it is perhaps the key example offered to illustrate how interpellation is effected as a material practice. No 84 percussion

doubt because he is concentrating on the cognitive subject of belief, he avoids the theme of possession. Because it reaches through cognition to the body, possession holds little, if any, interest for him. But just as his analysis is hampered by a lack of sensitivity to the conflicts within interpellation (cf. Chapter Two), this avoidance of ecstatic belief practices likewise compromises the subtlety of his discussion. I will put the point syllogistically: If drumming by a discrete collective arises out of and produces a social configuration (the mounting of the human horses by the divine riders), and if this configuration casts subjects in ecstatic positions, then possession might be understood to bear not on the loss of control, but on the sense (indeed, the overwhelming sense) that one is, even at one’s limits, but a moment in a rush of restricted possibilities that constitute the social at any given time. Ecstasy is thus not about surrender. It is about the disorienting recognition of one’s dependence on a relationship, on a field of relations, that an identity manages poorly, if at all. Though Apollon puts this in terms of a counterhegemonic and postcolonial national identification, we agree, I think, on the significance of the challenge represented by voodoo practices. This challenge is stated perhaps most directly in Joan Dayan’s astonishing study Haiti, History, and the Gods, where she twists together the dispossession realized in slavery and the possession exemplified in voodoo (Dayan 1998, 36). Obviously, by reading trap drumming as I have—where the accent has fallen on the perception one has of the drummer’s body fragmented by the act of playing a set in which drum skins have displaced drummers—the aim is to see the percussive interpellation of dancers as transpiring in, or on, two stages: first, in the very execution of a backbeat on the trap set; and second, in the dancers’ responses to these calls. As a way to think about the experience of positioning, possession thus might be understood to bear on the way the field of social relations asserts itself in musicking with a kind of palpability that renders positioning not only perceptible but conspicuously collective. Thus, for those who are terrified by the collective compromises of identity, ‘‘getting down,’’ or the ecstatic loss of place, might be immediately perceived as demonic possession. Althusser may well have been so terrified. Freud was likewise fascinated by demonic possession (Teufelnervose), and it is from his discussion that I want to lift the theme of fantasy and steer this discussion of percussive interpellation toward the dancer’s experience. In ways that Freud himself recognized, his analysis of the seventeenth-century painter Christoph Haizmann resonates with his better-known analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber (Freud 1972). Notadifferent strokes for different folks

85

bly, both studies are oblique in that they are conducted through secondary materials. This prompts Freud to hedge his observations, and, in his discussion of Haizmann, to wonder openly about whether his equation of demonic possession and neurosis is justified. Significantly, Freud’s repeated evocation of the link between possession and fantasy (Phantasie) survives this hedging. Although he may have his doubts about one’s ability to comprehend a narrative account of possession as neurosis, he is apparently confident about its relation to fantasy. An extended account of the percussive significance of fantasy will come in Chapter Four, but it bears noting here that fantasy plays a decisive role in Angela McRobbie’s provocative—and, I think, still undervalued— treatment of rock-and-roll dancing from the mid-1980s. It is in the earlier of McRobbie’s two discussions of dance and fantasy that the relation between the two is fully theorized. In ‘‘Dance and Social Fantasy’’ one finds the following remarkable passage. Like the cinema, the dancehall or disco offers a darkened space where the dancer can retain some degree of anonymity or absorption. This in turn creates a temporary blotting-out of the self, a suspension of real, daylight consciousness and an aura of dream-like self-reflection. Where the cinema offers a one-way fantasy which is directed solely through the gaze of the spectator toward the screen, the fantasy of dancing is more social, more reciprocated. This is because it allows simultaneously a dramatic display of the self and the body, with an equally dramatic negation of the self and the body. This latter works through the whole structure of the dance-floor. The crowded mass of bodies, the insistent, often trance-like disco rhythms and the possibility of being at once there and not there. (McRobbie 1984, 144; italics in the original)

In her invocations of ‘‘absorption,’’ ‘‘a temporary blotting-out of the self,’’ and ‘‘trance-like disco rhythms,’’ McRobbie situates her discussion squarely in the context of possession. Though she does not call up the link to voodoo explicitly, her language is overdetermined by it. It is crucial, I think, that she attempts to comprehend the phantasmatic character of dance by delineating how possession, or absorption, positions the dancer as an ontological flicker between ‘‘there and not there,’’ between da and fort, perhaps the aboriginal structure of call-andresponse patterns. As a subsequent paragraph makes clear, McRobbie locates fantasy here not because of the ideational activity required when calling to mind an absence, but because of the contrary motion activated by dance as it connects ‘‘desires for the self with those for some-

86 percussion

body else’’ (McRobbie 1984, 144). Thus, fantasy and possession touch where the sociality of desire arises in the corporeal disposition of dancers. McRobbie’s clear evocation of Laura Mulvey’s analysis of cinema and sexual difference (Mulvey 1989, 14–26) certainly prompts one to conclude that, like Freud, McRobbie sees fantasy as intimately linked to sexual identity, but this necessarily theoretical point is left unelaborated. As will become apparent, such an elaboration is crucial to situating the dynamics of subjection within the percussive field. Nevertheless, McRobbie’s discussion emphasizes precisely what has already been argued about possession: that it engages the subject at its limit, or at the point at which its dependency on a network of relations becomes palpable. Long theorized as a moment either of loss or of unmanageable excess, this limit might more usefully be comprehended as an opening, an opportunity to experience—through a well-timed blow—the unlivable state of our deep constitutability. Obviously, McRobbie’s fusion of trance and rhythm cannot pass unremarked. In particular, it is worth noting that she establishes a telling parallel between the call and response that structures the relation between the percussive surface of the music and the exertions of the dancers, on the one hand, and the flicker of the subject, on the other. Apart from the way this confirms Small’s assertion of the general importance of musicking, there is the more specific way that this parallel renders audible the skin contact that organizes the heart of rock-androll. However, we are not dealing here simply with the displacements charted earlier in the emergence of the trap set, where church floors became pedals and skins. We are also dealing with the notion that these displacements assume the structure of fantasy for those caught up in the musicking that is conditioned—in effect, made possible—by them. The dance step ‘‘The Bump’’ that came to popularity with disco during the ’70s, and that involved a carefully choreographed series of ‘‘body blows,’’ is therefore to be recognized as the enactment of a beating fantasy where contact with the other’s skin is rhythmically synchronized with stick and pedal strikes on the trap drummer’s drumheads. Mosh pits are only more Brownian articulations of this same phenomenon, and both are clear, though distinct, actualizations of the percussive gesturing that informs rock-and-roll. Such experiences of dance are not therefore subsumable under the dubious heading of sadomasochistic fantasies, as though dancers simply want to contract out for apportionments of violence. Instead, they would appear to be recognitions of the irreducibility of violence (and corporeal violence at that) in identity

different strokes for different folks

87

formation, recognitions that produce absorption at the point at which a general violence, a systematic violation of bodily integrity, is made to resound off the social fabric out of which it arises.∏ Recent studies of American popular dance such as Katrina HazzardGordon’s Jookin’ (1990) and Jacqui Malone’s Steppin’ On the Blues (1996) echo the groundbreaking studies by Langston Hughes (1954), Amiri Baraka (1963), and Murray (Albert, that is) in their insistence on the explicit link made between African American trap drumming and dance by performers in either field. After drawing our attention to the number of jazz drummers—from Big Sid Catlett to Buddy Rich—who were dancers, Malone quotes the incomparable Max Roach as saying, ‘‘We [Roach and Baby Laurence] usually did our act as an encore. I would play brushes on the snare and he would dance and we’d exchange things, call and response’’ (Malone 1996, 95). Although there is a considerable idiomatic distance between Max Roach and, say, Earl Palmer (another drummer who came to the instrument through dance), Roach’s explicit evocation of the call and response organizing his interaction with the feet of Baby Lawrence draws attention to the way trap drummers approached and developed their own ‘‘chops’’ through dance, in effect underscoring the agency of the very genealogy I have been at pains to sketch here. If McRobbie is correct in fusing popular dance and fantasy, then insofar as trap drumming and dance cannot be separated, fantasy also structures the experience that takes place at the point of contact, on a piece of what I am calling the skin, where sticks and feet meet. I accent this in order to insist not simply that percussive musicking is caught up in the dynamics of interpellation—a point that is likely to be conceded even by those who see all musicians as pied pipers—but that our inclination to treat interpellation as fundamentally ‘‘imaginary,’’ where the subject is utterly defined by the structural consequences of a fissure between vision and the gaze, is mistaken. Fantasy, which Freud conceives of as characteristically ‘‘acoustic,’’ complicates the discussion of music and interpellation by underscoring interpellation’s constitutive conflicts and, through the cognate thematics of possession, by destabilizing it—that is, by indexing its unsettled and unsettling character directly to its social nature. Thus, one might well argue that what disturbs the Reverend William Shannon and others preoccupied with the ‘‘primitive’’ threat posed by rock-and-roll is precisely its ecstatic connection to the sociocultural practices that render the body as a site where political futures are at stake. Before turning to the task of situating the trap set within the context 88 percussion

of Anglo-American musicking, a final distinctive feature of McRobbie’s analysis of dance warrants further scrutiny. In her study, women—or as she rightfully insists, ‘‘girls’’—represent the subject of dance. This perspective is motivated by her own political and scholarly commitments to feminism and by the fact that dance is indeed more tenaciously woven into the fabric of femininity. Under the influence of Mulvey’s austere reconstruction of the gaze, where men look and women are tobe-looked-at, McRobbie’s equation of dance and the social fantasy of girls invites one to see drumming (or perhaps musical performance in general) as essentially masculine. As in the case of all such binaries, this one holds some truth. Certainly, the vast majority of drummers who have crossed the threshold of international audibility are heterosexual men. Certainly, the bisexual ring shout has been, in the past century, sorted into a gendered binary where the church floor has been tanned into a drumhead beaten by those promising to become men. But if we take seriously the genealogical complexity of the trap set—and, in particular, if we treat it as a locus of fantasy where subjects are both there and not there, at once dancers and drummers; in effect, where the subjection of human agency is under construction—then would it not make sense to argue that what is at stake is not the engendering of the question, Who beats and who is beaten (for)? but, rather, How does the beating that forges the limits of our bodies become inaudible in the very division of gender, in the reduction of division to gender? Rock-androll, with its ‘‘incessant dance beat’’ and its ‘‘din,’’ stunned the entire field of social divisions.π What its beating made audible continues to resist dissipation. The difference constituted by these strokes still resonates in the folks who find themselves moved by it, and—as many have argued—the disciplinary regime of academic musicology has a stake in delimiting the sense of this difference. Remember, though, that the stake is a stick. Play with it. Marching to the Beat of a Different Drummer Two points made in Small’s Music of the Common Tongue will help sharpen the subsequent discussion of Anglo-American percussive musicking. First, against those who insist on linking rock-and-roll with African American traditions or Anglo-American ones, Small reminds us that rock-and-roll (as with the blues itself) is radically miscegenational—that it is, in fact, the result of the encounter (or, as I prefer, the contact) between these two traditions in the context of the slave trade. Like Combray for Proust, this is the auratic memory that always threatdifferent strokes for different folks

89

ens to resurface when we listen to these musical idioms. Second, in articulating this insight musicologically Small stresses that the twelvebar blues progression (the basic structural logic of most blues compositions and audible, for example, in the early rock-and-roll hit ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes’’ by Carl Perkins) derives from a harmonic scheme ‘‘based on the three primary triads of European classical harmony’’ (Small 1987, 201), triads that were equally important to the blues and that other essential precursor of rock-and-roll, ‘‘country’’ music, despite country music’s tenacious roots in the modalities of Anglo-Celtic folk songs. Thus, not only were the early audiences of rock-and-roll racially mixed, but the music ‘‘itself’’ was a site of skin contact. Not surprisingly, in Small’s succinct genealogy of rock-and-roll (cf. Small 1987, chap. 13), the decisive contribution to these lines of idiomatic development was the supplement of a ‘‘powerful dance beat’’ (Small 1987, 372) precisely the matrix within which I have been situating the skin of what Duden calls ‘‘the closed modern body’’ (15). Apart from what these points clarify about the details of an idiom and its emergence, there is the matter of the burden they lift from a study such as mine. Rather than spend time reiterating issues of concern chiefly to those whose approach to the new musicology orbits around harmonic problems, Small’s discussion establishes a frame within which the trap set and the percussive musicking it embodies can be situated relative to the Anglo-American dimension of the crosscultural encounter at the heart of rock-and-roll. Thus, two initial observations seem called for: 1) since the Middle Passage effectively stripped African drummers of their instruments and compelled them to take up the available percussive alternatives, it will be important to think about the musicking inscribed in the specific drums that came together in the trap set—notably, of course, the snare and bass, or kick, drum; and 2) though such a focus will require that we articulate the hinge between marching and dancing (a link that is examined to great effect in Malone’s study of African American collegiate marching bands and whose consummate realization no doubt would be the cakewalk), because of the prominence of musicking in my analysis, it will also be important to recognize in the trap set the legacy of what E. P. Thompson has discussed under the heading of charivari, or ‘‘rough music.’’ Though long associated with the interests and practices of those from the ‘‘rough’’ side of town, rock-and-roll, especially as a form of musicking perhaps irreducibly linked to touring (consider the enormous number of rockand-roll acts from the ’60s that are once again establishing themselves through ‘‘reunion tours’’) can usefully be heard as ‘‘roughing up’’ the 90 percussion

urban areas where it appears. Of course, such emphases as these bear more centrally on the percussive musicking inscribed in rock-and-roll and are meant primarily to supplement discussions such as Small’s, which give us such a rich sense of the harmonic and ultimately tonal emergence of this particular popular idiom. But as with all supplements, they alter as much as add. Knowing the Drill When one looks at the way many trap drummers set up their snare drums—mounted on their stands to slant, in some cases precipitously, away from the drummer’s body and toward the rear drumhead of the bass drum—a genealogical fragment is revealed. Though it is true that this angle has a certain practicality, facilitating as it does one’s rapid access to the other drums (especially in the era of ‘‘double drumming,’’ when the bass drum was played by hand), it also vestigially registers the snare drum’s prior martial deployment as what was called a ‘‘side drum.’’ As Blades makes clear, the side drum (which derives from the somewhat larger Medieval tabor) was typically mounted on a strap that slung the instrument on the drummer’s side (hence the name). This arrangement tilted the drumhead at a 45-degree angle away from the pelvis and required the drummer to perform by striking down and back toward the body—and, if we are to believe Henry Potter’s late-nineteenthcentury manual (cited in Blades), after virtually each blow lifting the sticks back up to eye level. In fact, it was during the nineteenth century that the side drum assumed the form that we now currently associate with the trap-set snare—that is, as a comparatively small drum (14 to 15 inches in diameter) with a metal (originally brass) or wooden body and ‘‘snares’’ held by a releasable tension against the bottom head. Although there is evidence to suggest that slave drummers encountered the snare drum in municipal marching bands, and therefore may well have persisted in simulating its marching set-up when assembling a trap set, it is through the drummer’s rudiments (the basic rhythmic units such as the flam, the ratamacue, and the paradiddle) and the stick positions they presuppose that the snare drum’s martial past imposes itself on the trap drummer. So tenacious is this legacy that even aggressive rock drummers such as Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, who took to using the socalled rabbit grip (named not for its proximity to the ‘‘snares’’ but for the silhouette cast when the drumstick is held not like a chopstick but like a club) for both hands, continued to slope their snare drums slightly away from their bodies. Needless to say, the significance of this imposition different strokes for different folks

91

lies in the musicking embedded in such materializations of percussive practice. Though the linguistic use of drums has long been acknowledged in the context of African traditions, it is also true that drums—and especially side drums—acquired a certain vocabulary within the history of various European armies. Notably, for the French and British armies, particular beats came to assume the status of signals, calling, for example, for infantry soldiers to fire on the enemy, or, when all else failed, to retreat.∫ Drum and pipe manuals from the Medieval period into the present spell out the various permutations of these beats, and it is clear that drumming—like languages themselves—define and occupy national territories. Blades quotes Francis Markham (writing in the seventeenth century) as saying, ‘‘It is to the voice of the Drumme the soldier should wholly attend . . . the Drumme being the very tongue and voice of the Commander’’ (Blades 1992, 217). As important as this is, it does not yet pose the question of martial musicking at the proper level. This level, to my mind, is achieved in Foucault’s chapter titled, ‘‘Docile Bodies,’’ in the still resonant Discipline and Punish (1977). As is well known, Foucault’s text seeks to detail (and therein lies perhaps its animating paradox) the slow emergence of disciplinary power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. Situating the prison within the eventually ordered swarm of techniques and practices that linked armies, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and factories, Foucault, when delineating ‘‘the temporal elaboration of the act,’’ draws on Jules de Montgommery’s treatment of military marching in order to sketch the shift from taxonomy to technique that the emergence of disciplinary power effects. The point hangs on the greater attention paid to the temporal articulation of movement visible in the marching manuals written during the eighteenth century—attention made manifest in the way these manuals reflect on the meshing of drumming and marching. Potter’s manual referred to earlier makes it clear that this meshing expressed itself not simply in the brute coordination of steps and beats, but in the total redisposition of the drummer’s body. Had Foucault paid more attention to these manuals (two important figures in his oeuvre, Descartes and Rousseau, apparently did), he might have found a more substantial warrant for his tropological tendency to see the distinctive character of disciplinary power in terms of the depth at which it effected the meshing of body and technique. For what becomes clear in manuals by Potter and others is that marching modeled not only the distribution of docile bodies in space but also the martialization of the performing, and presumably active, 92 percussion

body. That is, these writers literally worked out how detailed movements of the hands, arms, and feet could produce signals that, in turn, subjected both space and time to the aims of disciplinary reason. Drumming, as a site of the ‘‘meticulous meshing’’ of skins and as such fundamental to the army’s integration and deployment of disciplinary power, might thus be regarded as much more than simply an example of the practices asserting their historical novelty during the eighteenth century. Moreover, if the side drum is indeed the instrument so crucial to martial drumming throughout this period (entering into orchestral use toward its end), then the musicking inscribed within it cannot be disconnected from its broad role in producing the docility of the European body—that is, the body conditioned by a constricting link forged between ‘‘an increased aptitude and increased domination’’ (Foucault 1977, 138). In this respect, the identity formation that Small associates with musicking must, with regard to the traditions of AngloAmerican drumming, take place against the background noise of the emergence of disciplinary power and the subjection of human agency to which it was committed. In spite of the clear prominence of the side drum in these developments, neither the bass drum nor the tenor drum (the other ‘‘main’’ drums of the trap set) remained unmarked by them. Unlike the side drum, the bass drum did not enter into European military use during the Middle Ages. Developed in the Middle East and northwestern Africa, this drum came to Europe from ‘‘the outside’’ and bore with it this very relation in its cataclysmic sonorities. (Orchestrally, the bass drum has consistently been called on to evoke thunder or, somewhat more modestly, to herald the last judgment.) Once integrated into the marching band—a process that required that the drum be made small enough to be mounted on a shoulder harness and carried on the drummer’s chest—it was easily bent to the aims of disciplinary power. Potter states the point clearly: ‘‘As the general credit of a marching regiment depends upon the beating of the bass drummer, he should not only be a good ‘timist,’ but incapable of being led away by any melody detrimental to regulation’’ (as quoted in Blades 1992, 303). In effect, the bass drum becomes the marching metronome, and it is significant that Potter combines the drummer’s perception of time with his sensitivity to motor deviation—that is, the refusal to be ‘‘led away’’ or otherwise distracted. The tenor drum (or tom-tom) evolved from the tabor, and while its avatar within the trap set was (as we have learned from Blades) thought to derive from China, its genealogy strictly parallels that of the side drum, from which it is to be distinguished chiefly by the absence of different strokes for different folks

93

snares on its bottom head. In a march, the tenor drum’s parts often simply duplicate those of the side drum, adding volume and a distinctly different sonority, but little, if anything, else. These three drums came to be assembled in the modern trap set. Although this changed dramatically their percussive function—cymbals displacing the metronomic function of the bass drum, the tenor drum reduced to accents and fills, and the snare once again (as with the tabor) played primarily with one hand—they brought to the trap set this martial legacy. As with African drumming, the trap set—surely as a further elaboration of the disciplinary logic inscribed in its central membranophonic triad—enabled one percussionist to perform the work of at least three, thus installing a countervailing model of coordinated collectivity in the already crowded heart of the apparatus. The contact between feet and ‘‘Mother Earth’’ that fused African dance and drumming, comes—with Ludwig’s footpedal—to be recast as a step executed by marching soldiers, and the ‘‘correlation of body and gesture’’ exemplified in the eighteenth-century approach to martial drills is, by way of the trap set, wedged right through the drummer’s body, which is gesturally divided and subdivided at ever more refined levels. Of course, such an analysis always risks falling prey to its own procedures. In a telling footnote to ‘‘Docile Bodies,’’ Foucault indicates that what his chapter charts might just as fruitfully have been pursued in relation to the examples of ‘‘colonization, slavery, and child rearing’’ (Foucault 1977, 314). Indeed. Of these, slavery clearly does figure in the musicking configured in the trap set, among other places at the site of supplementation—that is, where the disciplinary legacy of marching is taken up, almost surreptitiously, by its victims. This nuances Foucault’s discussion of the meshing of bodies and techniques in an important way. In particular, if it makes sense to perceive in the appropriation of Anglo-American percussion instruments by African drummers a form of poaching, then what might otherwise be regarded as yet another instance of resistance produced by power presents itself instead as a constitutive destabilization. The point is that, although it may be true that the trap set drums the drummer, the trap set itself is an apparatus scored by genealogical conflicts that persistently unsettle the dynamics of subjection and leave drumming open to a variety of cultural and, ultimately, political alignments. If Foucault meant to suggest that the techniques that converged to form the emergent regimes of disciplinary power left no prior traces, then slavery is more than an example. It is precisely that which contradicts his analysis. For even if we acknowledge that slave rebellions can develop out of deeply conflicted political 94 percussion

alignments, this does not compromise the political significance of the poaching that conditioned them. And although Fanon’s repudiation of the blues as an aestheticization of slavery has pertinence (especially as a hedge against the excesses of the négritude movement), it cannot undercut or otherwise vitiate the striking power of lyrics such as those placed in the mouth of the character Paul D. by Toni Morrison in Beloved. Lay my head on the railway line, Train come along, pacify my mind. If I had my weight in lime, I’d whip my captain till he went stone blind. Five-cent nickel, Ten-cent dime, Busting rocks is busting time. (Morrison 1987, 40)

Morrison does allow her narrator to drain the political charge from such a song, but it is crucial that in weaving the heteroglossic texture of her tale, she knows better than to leave out the sort of beating fantasies that arise within the tradition of African American field songs. They are reconstructed as conditions for her own intervention. They are also unmistakably percussive in content, if not in tone. Pursued in terms that are less theoretical, such issues lead us back to the trap set and the musicking embodied therein. In particular, acknowledging the constitutive destabilization wrought by slavery as a disciplinary regime obliges one to consider that this effect is already manifest in the Anglo-American traditions assembled in the trap set. This point helps to undercut the racial binarism that might otherwise be understood to be asserting itself here. Consider again, in this light, what Blades referred to as the ‘‘atrocities’’ colligated in the trap set— that is, the ‘‘tin cans, washboard, saucepan lids, and similar noise makers.’’ Upon which genealogical thread are they strung? Hep Katzenmusik In 1956, the influential trade publication Variety connected rock-androll to an unprecedented level of ‘‘juvenile violence and mayhem,’’ suggesting that, ‘‘[on] the police blotters, rock ’n’ roll has been writing an unprecedented record. In one locale after another, rock ’n’ roll shows, or disc hops where such tunes have been played, have touched off every type of juvenile delinquency’’ (Szatmary 1996, 48). This is a familiar characterization: Indeed, it echoes some of the same things said about different strokes for different folks

95

jazz in the ’20s. However, apart from the way this particular formulation zeroes in on corporeal maiming (in legal terms, mayhem involves willful crippling or maiming), it calls up an aspect of the fantasy that associates rock-and-roll directly with urban violence. The personification of the music (rock-and-roll as a writing machine) invites us to hear more in this account than the familiar assertion about rock-and-roll’s capacity for inciting violent acts. Indeed, to the extent that music can apparently inscribe itself on the recording surfaces of the law, it is itself associated with urban violence, a point made explicit in a letter from a radio listener to New York Senator John Pastore: ‘‘Let’s clear the air of earsplitting clap trap’’ (as quoted in Szatmary 1996, 24). The rending of the body (in this case, the splitting of the ear) through the linguistic device of onomatopoeia is figured percussively. If, as has been argued, in displacing the distinction between the musical and the non-musical musicking obliges us to include within the percussive field practices that derive from sites contiguous with those of musical performance per se, then this association between rock-and-roll and urban violence needs to be explored in relation to the history of such practices. Because the trap set still serves to orient my arrangement of the contact zone between African and Anglo-American drumming, the practices that matter are precisely those that rendered its ‘‘atrocious’’ additions thinkable as percussion instruments. Hence, the importance of those popular practices in Europe that E. P. Thompson has discussed under the heading of ‘‘rough music.’’Ω Though Thompson’s essay abounds with thick descriptive characterizations of rough music, the following is perhaps most comprehensive’’ ‘‘Rough Music’’ is also a generic term, and even within the British islands, the ritual forms were so various that it is possible to view them as distinct species. Yet beneath all the elaborations of rituals certain basic human properties can be found: raucous, ear-shattering noise, unpitying laughter, and the mimicking of obscenities. It was supported, in Thomas Hardy’s description, by ‘‘the din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines, kits, crowds, humstrums, serpents, ram’s horns, and other historical kinds of music.’’ But if such ‘‘historical’’ instruments were not to hand, the rolling of stones in a tin kettle—or any improvisation of draw-tins and shovels—would do. In a Lincolnshire dialect glossary (1877) the definition [of rough music] runs: ‘‘Clashing of pots and pans. Sometimes played when any very unpopular person is leaving the village or being sent to prison.’’ (Thompson 1992, 3)

The allusion to ‘‘the rolling stones’’ is undoubtedly fortuitous, but if we juxtapose this passage with Blades’s characterization of the trap set, 96 percussion

suggestive details emerge. In particular, Thompson captures how rough music served as a context within which musical and non-musical instruments could take up an easy, virtually improvised relation with one another. As a form of musicking, this created the precedent of fusing noise with percussive hybridity—that is, the wanton mixing of, say, tambourines and pot lids. Prior to the arrival of the synthesizer— perhaps the consummate noisemaker—the trap set, in mounting cow bells, ratchets, and skiffles on or around the membranophonic triad, effectively ‘‘instrumentalizes’’ the approach to percussion contained within the practice of rough music. As such, the trap set brings with it a fragment of musicking that gives the bricolage imposed on African drummers in the United States a form that, although it certainly is not indigenous to their cultural preoccupations, was to some significant degree congenial to their ‘‘political’’ interests. The ‘‘joyful noise’’ was not simply about spiritual survival. It was also protest against what has been called ‘‘spirit injury.’’ A second important feature of Thompson’s remarks is the subtle emphasis placed on improvisation, a category that figures prominently in Small’s description of African American musicking. As Thompson’s discussion unfolds, improvisation is shown to apply not merely to the selection of ‘‘instruments,’’ but also to the composition of obscene ditties and the choreography of the ‘‘roughing up’’ undertaken on any particular occasion. Given that such events characteristically took place in what could hardly be called ‘‘controlled circumstances,’’ improvisation was to be expected. In spite of this, the recurrent use of certain props came to identify the ritual—notably, the ‘‘stang,’’ or rail (often an actual donkey or horse), ridden by the subject of the rough performance (in parts of England rough music was referred to as ‘‘riding the stang’’), an element of continuity that set up the framework within which improvisation could flourish.∞≠ Thus, despite the quite different rituals associated with drumming someone out of town and just drumming/dancing, what opens them to one another is the way they materialize or otherwise routinize improvisation. In addition to being open to variation (and thus subject to the vagaries of human agency), these rituals are open to one another precisely because improvisation is what one expects when a ritual, a performance, is radically receptive to the moment it seizes (in spite of its inner coherence). Let us pause to acknowledge that rough music is occasioned by particular events. Thompson—ever the hedgehog—resists generalizing such events as I have by affiliating them with the practices of popular justice. In so doing, he directs our attention to the ambiguity of the different strokes for different folks

97

precipitating causes for roughing someone up. No doubt Thompson and I have different feelings about the subject of popular justice. That notwithstanding, his account clearly shows that rough music is almost always retaliatory, retributive. Whether one is speaking about humiliating a cuckold or a rapist, there is a strong sense in which the resultant display of rough music takes the form of a community policing—in effect, expelling, or driving out, that which no longer belongs. Because ‘‘the clashing of pots and pans’’ (what Blades called ‘‘atrocities’’) is so blatantly percussive, it is hard not to hear in the retributive structure of rough music something like a beating back—a backbeat, in short, or a response on the part of the community to what it perceives as a provocation, a call to act. Though this might well be deemed an exaggeration, there is something extraordinary about the importance of beating, of creating a specifically percussive din, to the practice of rough music, as though a distinctly sonoric response was called for when a breach in the community’s self-perception was at issue. Because so many of the reported incidents of ‘‘riding the stang’’ appear to have been triggered by the foibles of heterosexual romance, one might be inclined to link rough music to the long-standing practice of serenading, thereby accounting for its musical character. But the details of Thompson’s discussion invite us to consider another striking possibility. Thompson’s essay first appeared on the pages of Annales in 1972. It was next given as a lecture in 1988, assuming final form on the pages of Customs in Common (1991). (The essay from which I have quoted, published in 1992, is an abbreviation of the 1991 version.) What stands out is that between 1972 and 1988, the essay changes to acknowledge the appearance in 1975 of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The acknowledgment is uttered sotto voce, but audibly. Specifically, Thompson situates what he calls the ‘‘vocabulary’’ of rough music within the symbolism of public executions—executions whose necessarily public character he, like Foucault, roots in the period prior to the early nineteenth century. What makes this important is not the ambivalence to which it bears witness (Thompson does go on in the essay to ‘‘rough up’’ structuralist readings of myth), but the connection it prompts us to recognize between the form of musicking vital to rough music and the form embodied in the martial practices illuminated by Foucault’s discussion of disciplinary power. In other words, if the birth of the prison was conditioned by an emerging social investment in docile bodies, and if the prison displaced the public forms of punishment that provided rough music with its vocabulary, then there would appear to be an essential connection between the drumming that distributed troops on 98 percussion

a grid and the drumming that drove cheats, thieves and abusers from their homes. The temptation is to regard the latter as the abject twin of the former, throwing out the baby of a conflicted interpellation with the bath water of resistance, and, on this basis, leveling (and ultimately misreading) the genealogical tension embodied in the trap set—that is, regarding pan lids or ratchets as essentially military drums in dialectical disguise. To avoid such a misreading while nevertheless continuing to play out the Foucauldian gambit, it behooves us to reflect briefly on the genealogical link between drumming and striking—that is, on the relationship between rough music and the act of withholding one’s labor, in effect withdrawing the body from the circuit of production. When the Iron Is Hot Music, chanting, and the hurling of invective have long been associated with the forms of proletarian culture that crystallize in the act of striking. Bosses are shouted down or roughed up, scabs are ‘‘serenaded,’’ and partisans are both roused and comforted through varieties of ‘‘musical’’ practice. It is striking, however, that in theorizing the strike as a weapon against organized capital, writers on the left have persistently called into question its relation to rough music. What is remarkable, of course, are the facts that rough music comes up at all and that the working class is called on to dissociate itself from—or, in the best of cases, draw energy from—such practices. This is nowhere more apparent than when the vexed phenomenon of the ‘‘general strike’’ is under discussion. Wilfrid Harris Crook argues that William Benbow—a member of the National Union of Workingmen and active during the struggles around the Reform Bill—is the British originator of the tactical concept of the general strike (Crook 1931). In an 1832 pamphlet, ‘‘Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes,’’ Benbow called for a day of rest during which the community—through an act of radical self-assertion—would move to institute equality at every level of society. Though Benbow himself made no direct reference to rough music, by conceiving of the general strike as a form of community selfpolicing he prepared the ground for Thompson’s later insistence on precisely this quality of rough music. However, in his discussion of the international development of the mass strike, Crook draws repeated attention to the tension between what he calls ‘‘charivari’’ and precisely those labor actions that deserve to be called mass strikes. His own perspective is clearly sympathetic to those on the left who insist that to be different strokes for different folks

99

effective at all (and thus worth serious tactical consideration), a mass strike must be thoroughly organized and ultimately subject to party discipline. To underscore this point, Crook shows how strike organizers frowned on the forms of ‘‘spontaneous’’ uprising represented by rough music. In his mind, such uprisings derive precisely from those carnivalesque practices whose politics have recently been rehabilitated by the likes of Bakhtin, Peter Stallybrass, and Allon White. As such, they are to be sacrificed to the requirements of an effective strike, which, in order to gain public support and realize its political purpose, must be above all discipline. Crook notes that the left was not inured to the passion and collective self-assertion embodied in rough music, but to distinguish the working class and ‘‘the masses,’’ the left needed to distance itself from those qualities of rough music that undercut, in effect, the disciplinary importance of marching. Rosa Luxemburg’s strategy in The Mass Strike, the Political Parties and the Trade Unions (1906) is even more sensitive to the political vicissitudes of such identity politics. Luxemburg is eager to distinguish the communist left from the anarcho-syndicalists whom, like Crook, she disdains. To effect this distinction, she links, albeit ambiguously, the mass strike and revolution, arguing that the mass strike presupposes a revolutionary situation, which in turn presupposes a certain ‘‘ripening’’ (her oft-repeated figure) of the antagonism between capital and labor. Significantly, in disparaging the mass strike as theorized by the anarchists, Luxemburg mobilizes the onomatopoetic expression ‘‘den großen Kladderadatsch’’ in order to underscore the folly of the anarchists’ investment in a singular and decisive moment of rupture (Luxemburg, 14). Though nowhere does Luxemburg appeal to the concept of rough music, two features of her rhetorical strategy suggest that this practice figured decisively in her thinking about Bakunin, Hebel, and others. First, it is well known that Kladderadatsch circulated in Berlin as a Witzblatt at the time Luxemburg was writing. In fact, in a letter from prison to her lover and comrade, Leo Jogiches, written just prior to the publication of her pamphlet on the mass strike, she complains of not receiving a copy of the ‘‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’’ and encourages Jogiches to send more copies of Kladderadatsch, which her jailers are happy to allow through (Ettinger 1979, 138). Though clearly liberal in its political orientation, this satirical ‘‘daily’’ (published every day except on weekdays, as the title page puckishly declared) enjoyed wide readership among leftist intellectuals. In her study of such papers, Ann Taylor Allen recounts the ‘‘origin myth’’ of Kladderadatsch, and in 100 percussion

doing so establishes, I think, why the term might have evoked associations of rough music for Luxemburg. Apparently, the name derives from an incident witnessed by the paper’s first editors. While drinking in a Berlin tavern, they were interrupted by a dog who raced through the tavern, upending tables and chairs and producing a startling din or clatter. David Kalisch, one of the editors, repeatedly yelled out ‘‘Kladderadatsch,’’ obviously attempting both to name and to participate in the episode. This narrative then became institutionalized on the paper’s masthead, from where—in true Bakhtinian fashion—its editors routinely declared that ‘‘time is turned upside down.’’∞∞ Thus, this paper epitomized, in the troubled space of the bourgeois public sphere, precisely the sort of mocking and ‘‘uncrowning’’ that rough music sought to realize by other less calendrically regulated means. Moreover—and this is the second important feature of Luxemburg’s rhetorical strategy—by making it clear that she is associating the anarchist model of the mass strike with a ‘‘great noise,’’ she is not only ridiculing the notion of a ‘‘single decisive blow.’’ She is also deriving the force of her ridicule from what she perceives to be a convenient distinction between revolt and ‘‘horseplay’’ (an obstinately literal reading of charivari). In spite of this, it makes sense to characterize Luxemburg’s strategy as ‘‘sensitive’’ because, as the pas de deux of revolution and the general strike make clear, she appears to recognize the strategic value of affirming qualities of rough musicking in her discussion of striking. In particular, she is concerned with the intractably rhythmic problem of timing—or, as she prefers, ‘‘ripeness.’’ Though Luxemburg is certainly no ‘‘chronosociologist,’’ her discussion of the mass strike orbits persistently around the theme of sustaining a pattern of blows that both reflect the immediate antagonism between capital and labor and produce the conditions for its radical overturning. This perforce commits one to a rhythmic scan of the sociopolitical conjuncture with an ear to its texture, to what Chernoff would no doubt characterize as its gaps— in effect, its opportunities for improvisational intervention.∞≤ This said, I hasten to add that I agree with Norman Geras, who in his evaluation of Luxemburg’s legacy argues that her allegiance to ‘‘spontaneism’’ has been overstated. Instead, what one finds is something rather like a musician’s often touchy awareness of structural dynamics, political tendencies, and practical possibilities, all of which are treated as rhythmic patterns that, if brought into the proper alignment, could sustain the struggle to change society. Though Luxemburg herself would no doubt refuse such a characterization, it matters that her text is different strokes for different folks

101

spattered not only with musical allusions (she refers at one point to the Social Democratic party as a ‘‘conductor’’ seeking to wave his ‘‘Dirigentenstöchen’’ and thus orchestrate the activities of the masses), but also with allusions that are straightforwardly percussive in character. She refers repeatedly to the importance of ‘‘einen Elektrishen Schlag’’ (an electrical shock or jolt) in producing class-consciousness (a figure that I will examine at length in Chapter Four), and in her most cutting disparagement of the anarchists’ perspective on the mass strike, she likens their position to that in which a single stroke (‘‘einem Ruck’’) is seen as capable of making the entire social process march in double-time (‘‘in Sturmschritt’’). The allusion here to the martial, if not proto-fascistic, practices of musicking is unmistakable. Quite apart from their evocative character as tropes, remarks such as these suggest that, lacking confidence in political leadership, Luxemburg is forced to embrace spontaneity. I think, however, that these remarks might just as profitably be read as indices of her subtle recognition of the importance of popular energies—energies that may certainly take form in rough music, the great noise, and are as indispensable to communism as communism is to them. In recasting ‘‘the great noise’’ as the cue that quickens the pace of marching, Luxemburg edges up to a redemption of rough music. For although she has clearly associated ‘‘the great noise’’ with the anarchists, she finds its most pernicious side not in its volume, but in its function. When ‘‘kerboom’’ is bent to the task of guiding the movement of troops, then it becomes problematical. What is important about this is the way these maneuvers indicate the degree to which practices of musicking figure within the political struggle to theorize the significance of the mass strike as a means to realize, in true dialectical fashion, the end of a communist society. Making up the very hinge of these practices is the conflict between marching and rough music, where, if we take our cue from Luxemburg, the decisive question is that of discipline. Although she is not interested in Foucault’s preoccupation with the production of docile bodies, Luxemburg invites us to affirm the urgency of not reproducing the disciplinary regime against which the proletariat struggles in the very production of the mass strike. In addition, her rhetorical strategies (appreciated by Lenin, among others) oblige us to hear a percussive dimension in the contact zone of rough music and marching. Thus, Thompson’s data, which are rife with references to side drums being included among the objects beaten during displays of rough music, present us with what amounts to an undecidable situation: Is this 102 percussion

evidence of the way discipline was asserting itself even within forms of popular protest (‘‘riding the stang’’ was often characterized as a ‘‘march procession’’), or is this evidence of the way discipline was being resisted by an act of popular reappropriation? Even if we assume the standpoint of the historical victor and insist that, indeed, punishment became less public during the course of the nineteenth century (and therefore, ‘‘resistance was futile’’—that is, so inconsequential as to be irrelevant), this does not diminish the importance of the undecidability that nevertheless conditioned this outcome. If it makes sense to conceive of the musicking relevant to the emergence of the trap set as defined in relation to the percussive manifestation of this undecidability, then we are once again encouraged to think about the encounter between African and Anglo-American practices as multiply conflicted and therefore ‘‘ripe’’ with political possibilities. Strictly speaking, the coordinating of the decisive components of the trap set (drums and ‘‘atrocities’’) takes place within rough music, for it is here that the percussive coherence underlying a disparate array of beating surfaces is effectively established, an efficacy that is indexed directly to the task—at once sonoric and ethical—at hand. At the heart of this coherence lies the undecidable conflict between marching and, for lack of a better word, ‘‘striking.’’ By the same token, the specific drums assembled in the trap set (the snare, the bass, and the tenor drums) were conceived as a distinct percussive ensemble within the disciplinary regime of martial music. Although it is true, as Blades delineates in his characterizations of the classical and romantic orchestras, that these drums had a certain symphonic value, the practices of musicking that made them important to trap-set drummers, and thus rock-and-roll, would appear to have derived little more than certain metric conventions from this provenance. One might argue, I suppose, that the current tendency among many trap-set drummers to mount their snare and tenor drums in level playing positions derives from standard orchestral practice. Be that as it may, it seems clear that the membranophonic triad, as a configuration of instruments, is essentially overdetermined by the practice of martial drumming. For this reason, these drums strengthen the genealogical force of marching within the trap-set configuration. But due to the improvisational disposition registered in the very array of ‘‘atrocities’’ and, most decisively of all, in the foot pedal’s utter recontextualization of the bass drum, this genealogical force is held in check or, at least, is made to beat against countercurrents that belong equally to the heart of the trap set. Thus, when laboring to make sense of trap-set drumming, one has to give some thought different strokes for different folks

103

to the beating within the beat—to, in effect, the percussive ‘‘etymologies’’ that swarm within the apparatus of the trap set and that to a significant degree organize the drumming performed thereon. Though I am by no means suggesting that strikes are, at bottom, musical events, their complex and irreducibly percussive character cannot be separated from the broad practices of musicking that both constitute and exceed them. ‘‘We’re Gonna Rock This Town Tonight’’ To clarify what has been illuminated here about the place of the contact between Africa and America relative to the percussive field, two additional points about rough music require further elaboration. First, there is the question of the complex status of rough music in the American context—particularly in the post-Emancipation period, when the trap set emerged. And second, there is the vexing matter of the ethical character of rough music: its realization of a form of popular justice. I call this vexing because at the beginning of this section I offered sample perceptions of rock-and-roll that, although heard as ‘‘earsplitting clap trap’’ and in that sense ‘‘rough,’’ were not regarded as ethical in any way. On the contrary, these comments were made by those who saw their own positions as the exclusively ethical ones. Does it then make sense to associate the musicking important to rock-and-roll drumming with the stubbornly ethical practice of rough music? I think so. Following a lead offered by Thompson, we can proceed directly to the problem of rough music in North America in general, and the southern United States in particular. In ‘‘Charivari and Lynch Law’’ (1986), Bertram Wyatt-Brown lays out the complex relations between rough music and lynching, a relation that has rather obvious and terrifying implications for African drummers. Starting with an account of tar and feathering, which WyattBrown reads as the equivalent of riding the stang, he delineates how practices of popular justice, or community policing, established themselves in the United States, introducing local variations within the basic rough-music pattern. This pattern includes among its constituent elements the preparing of ‘‘effigies’’ and the making of ‘‘noises imitating howling wolves, cackling geese, and clucking chickens while ringing cowbells and beating on pots and drums’’ (Wyatt-Brown 1986, 440). Only the prominence of the animal sounds would appear to differentiate the British and American versions of rough music. As in the British example, tar and feathering targeted those within a community deemed 104 percussion

transgressors by participants. Because Wyatt-Brown’s particular concern is with constructing the discourse of ‘‘Southern honor,’’ it is honor that is discovered to be at stake in such transgressions. Needless to say, it is precisely around the pivot of honor that ‘‘shivaree’’ (another name for tar and feathering, particularly among the Creole communities of southern Louisiana) and lynching come into contact. In Wyatt-Brown’s construction, shivaree and lynching represent two forms of popular justice separated primarily by their intensity (though beating was de rigeur in the former, lynching almost always involved murder) and by the identities of participants (shivaree took men and women as its objects and included men and women as well as blacks and whites among its perpetrators, whereas lynching almost always involved men, and although whites numbered among the victims, the vast majority of victims were black men and boys).∞≥ As such details no doubt imply, lynching was not simply the evil twin of shivaree; it was the popular practice used to police it, producing—especially for Africans and African Americans—a twisted complexity to the practices of rough music. Of course, this only intensifies the undecidability I have discerned in the percussive dimension of rough music, not because lynching is in any sense ethically ambiguous, but because the horror that it represents, from the standpoint of a black rough musician, might always erupt from within a popular practice organized to ridicule, not to murder. One would never know for certain. Of course, as I hinted earlier about popular justice in general, this does not usefully differentiate between community self-policing and policing in general, a situation that illuminates why ‘‘neighborhood-watch’’ programs are fraught with such ambivalence. Although I would much prefer rough musicians to uncompensated deputies of the state as ‘‘neighbors,’’ much about daily life in the United States conspires to make this unlikely. Be that as it may, lynching in the South after 1863 represented what I would characterize as the most gruesome articulation of the disciplinary regime embodied in marching. For while white mobs and the Ku Klux Klan could hardly be construed as ‘‘marchers’’ (except, perhaps, in the general sense of their being ‘‘Christian soldiers’’), the discourse of honor within which their actions were rendered intelligible was nevertheless deeply committed to locating bodies within spatial grids and enforcing their segregation. In this sense honor represents the local ‘‘franchising’’ of panopticism. In his study, Wyatt-Brown concentrates on white groups of rough musicians, no doubt because of his interest in their relationship to lynch mobs. He does, however, draw our attention to black rough musicians different strokes for different folks

105

and their propensity for mocking white processional practices whether they be instances of marching or tar and feathering. In Harnett Kane’s account of such practices in Queen New Orleans (1949), it becomes clear that such mockery, though often misunderstood and therefore tolerated, could always provoke a violent response from white authorities. According to Kane, it was the Spanish who established the link between African American rough music and antiracist uprisings by forbidding people to mask during Carnival—the occasion, predictably, for most non-white rough musicking. What was to become Mardi Gras thus served, like the rural church, as a site of bricolage and passing. Both Kane and Wyatt-Brown underscore the fact that the raucous din produced by African American revelers was frequently construed as a pretext for a preemptive strike against the black rebellion presumed to be heralded therein. Thus, one might well conclude that black rough musicians’ practice would have been perceived as caught up in a dizzying exchange of calls and responses. As a mocking of a white procession, rough music responded to the call of pomp and poor execution. As the object of violent persecution, rough music became the call that provoked this brutal response. Insofar as African American identity formed through this intricate musicking, it was an identity forged of blows and counter-blows, strikes and counter-strikes—features that gave this identity a lived relation to rhythm that had little to do with ‘‘being African.’’ No Africans in this sense survived the Middle Passage, even if they lived to talk about it. Precisely because black rough music could not be separated from this exchange of blows, its important proximity to the Carnival traditions of New Orleans is crucial to the emergence of the trap set. For, as one will recall, New Orleans was the only urban center in the United States where slaves were not forbidden access to drums. In fact, in a space in what became the French Quarter—Congo (now Beauregard) Square—slaves were permitted, probably even encouraged, to observe the tenaciously remembered rituals of dancing and drumming. Although Kane’s account of this is concerned with providing an origin myth for jazz, it is worth citing in this context: The ancient dances at Congo Square . . . had continued until the 1880s. Year after year the dancers had worn away the grass and made deep grooves with the stamping and scraping of bare feet in the mud. White observers noticed that Negroes used sticks and bones to beat drums that were sometimes mere boxes, while white haired elders chanted strange quivering words and younger ones danced. In the women’s dances, their bodies twisted but their feet barely

106 percussion

left the ground, whereas the men leaped and jumped in the air. Here were heard chants dimly recalled from the Negroes’ homeland, and the pound of primitive African rhythms. . . . Among the onlookers wandered salesmen carrying curious packages—good luck charms and bad, the Voodoo for which many of the blacks came to Congo Square. The white people who watched would never forget the scene, and the Negroes of postwar years grew up with its sounds in their ears, its tempos in their blood. (Kane 1949, 278)

In Chapter Four, I will consider at length the notion, barely more than implicit here, that urban space inscribes itself within the very formation of subjectivities. However, in spite of certain variations in the details (not to mention the troubling, but to some extent unconscious, rhetoric), what leaps out here are the resonances between Chernoff’s analysis of African rhythm and what appears to have been going on at Congo Square on Sundays. Clearly, Congo Square served as a context in which African drumming/dancing took place in the United States, a point confirmed by both Tony Scherman, Earl Palmer’s biographer, and the musicologist Robert Palmer in his early history of rockand-roll: Slave gatherings at which Africans were allowed to congregate according to their tribal origins and to play instruments, sing songs and dance dances of their own were outlawed in Protestant North America due to their apparent connection with slave uprisings, but in New Orleans they continued to be tolerated. The Yankees who arrived in and after 1803 and found the slaves congregating every Sunday in Congo Square could hardly believe their eyes and ears. (Palmer 1995, 6)

And in characterizing the kind of music one could hear in Congo Square and elsewhere in New Orleans especially prior to Mardi Gras, Palmer goes on to observe: Polyrhythms are established by tambourines, bottles played with combs, and other homemade percussion instruments. A song leader calls out traditional verses, some of which are a mixture of French and English, with possibly some African words, and a chorus responds with a fixed unison refrain. (Palmer 1995, 6)

I cite this material not out of deference to those who are reluctant to take Kane at his word, but because of the way it establishes two important points. First, Congo Square functioned rather like a reservation— that is, it served as a site of the ‘‘officially unofficial,’’ where musical practices associated with rough music and the traditions nurturing ra-

different strokes for different folks

107

cial uprisings could be contained. Hence, Palmer’s deft evocation of ‘‘toleration.’’ Second, the quotes from Palmer underscore Kane’s recognition of the uniqueness of the percussive instruments (boxes played with a bone—a venerable and long-standing drumstick) that were brought to, and played at, Congo Square. In particular, what both writers capture is the hybridity of the instruments, the mixture of drums and implements (‘‘atrocities,’’ in Blades’s idiom). This is worthy of our attention because it illustrates how the disciplining of African musicking (in this case, its subjection to the logic, such as it was, of urban planning) created the circumstances for an encounter between two percussive traditions. These circumstances projected their own structure into the percussive instruments played therein. In his elaboration of the musical culture of New Orleans, Kane draws attention to the fact that, after 1863, former slaves who entered the ranks of the employed began avidly purchasing the musical instruments that crowded pawnshop windows all over the city, especially in the wake of the war, when returning soldiers were eager to liquefy their assets. Thus, the encounter orbiting in and around Congo Square was actually taking form in the acquisition of used military-band instruments (hardly surprising, given their source). These typically were brasses of various sorts and drums—bass and side drums, in particular. Predictably, the musicians formed by these developments gravitated either toward band societies (during this period, New Orleans saw an explosion of so-called burial clubs—the bands that would accompany funeral processions and, after interment, often reassemble as vehicles of rough music), or toward dancehalls, where trap-set drumming came to prevail within a variety of musical idioms. In fact, what one can perceive here are not only the material conditions of the contact between African and Anglo-American practices of musicking, but how these practices can be heard in the specific instrumental configuration of the trap set and the drumming it enables. I realize, of course, that in this discussion of New Orleans I might be accused of excavating the maternal body of rock-and-roll drumming, but in spite of the undeniable distinctiveness of this city, New Orleans can at best be characterized as a site where the traditions of percussive musicking necessary to—though not sufficient for—its emergence entered into contact. This dimension of the percussive field of rock-and-roll cannot be overemphasized. What, then, of the ethical quandary I have posed? Does it make sense to link a music so persistently and routinely decried as immoral to the expression of popular justice one finds in rough music? And if not,

108 percussion

is there really much to be gained from linking rock-and-roll to the musicking one associates with ‘‘roughing up’’? While these are certainly important questions, they appear more consequential than they are. For at one level, although the concept of musicking is meant to make musical analysis responsible to much more than musical notation, it does not commit one to all-or-nothing propositions. And even if rock-and-roll musicians did not happen to think of their earsplitting clatter as engaged in the task of dispensing popular justice, this would not make what is to be learned about the percussive traffic between marching and drumming someone out of town irrelevant, or even tangential, to the struggle to understand beating in the idiom of rock-and-roll. Besides, there is Little Richard. I invoke Little Richard not simply because his early hits were recorded in New Orleans and were, if we believe the ur-drummer of rock-and-roll, Earl Palmer, the structural cause of the contemporary backbeat. I invoke him because his relation to rock-and-roll has consistently been defined by an intricate dialogue with evangelical Christianity. Moreover, what makes Little Richard so interesting in the present context is that, when he entered the church for the second time, he renounced his homosexuality, his addictions, and, most significant, rock-and-roll music, which—although he still performs it—he has characterized as ‘‘demonic’’ (White 1984, 203). It is precisely this ideological proximity with those who first demonized him that gives his case a special value here. Lest I be accused of repeating the error of conflating Christianity and morality (unfortunately, an essential, and ultimately brutely ideological, feature of the contemporary debate over values), it is worth stressing that Little Richard invests Christ (not Christianity) with moral authority, and although this clearly aligns him with odious trends within Protestant sectarianism, it complicates and unsettles his relationship to those who approach morality as a strictly doctrinal matter. In Charles White’s The Life and Times of Little Richard, Little Richard’s ‘‘conversion’’ is presented in a provocative way. Quite apart from the way Richard’s life is offered up as the precipitating cause (visions, legal problems, drug addiction, a failed marriage, etc.), his second conversion, in particular, is narrated as a sublation of rock-androll. Not only does he retranslate the term ‘‘rock-and-roll’’: ‘‘I wanted people to know that the only rock they needed was the Rock, Christ Jesus. [That the] only roll they needed was the Roll of Glory, the roll of Heaven’’ (White 1984, 199). He also, as the following passage makes

different strokes for different folks

109

clear, sees what made him effective as a singer and what makes him effective as an evangelist in the same terms: I can never see myself going back to Rock ’n’ Roll. I have no desire to do it. I enjoy preaching the gospel. I enjoy living the gospel. . . . Yes, I feel that I still have the charisma and magnetism that I had when I was in show business. But I believe it is more now. (White 1984, 208)

This point is made even more explicitly by Little Richard’s biographer, who witnessed his preaching at the ‘‘Jesus ’79 Campaign’’ convened at Mount Morris Park in Harlem: Richard’s preaching techniques are in direct line with his Rock ’n’ Roll showmanship. He is mesmerizing, gaining total control over the listener, using the call-and-response pattern, the black gospel formula which was so much a part of his life and his music, bringing the audience together into one entity. (White 1984, 208)

This is important not because it reminds us that the black rural church indeed was, and will remain, crucial to rock-and-roll musicking, but because it underscores the fact that at the level of performance, at the level of engaging one’s audience, Little Richard regarded rock-and-roll as synonymous with preaching, with moral influence. Would it not seem odd, if he really believed that rock-and-roll performances contradicted morality, that he would—especially from the vantage point of his own conversion—continue to align preaching and playing, especially at the practical level? Moreover, if he returned to performing, as he periodically does, surely it would not be out of hypocrisy but out of some similar sort of insight into the common ground between playing and preaching. It is unlikely that he treats his congregations to ‘‘Tutti Frutti’’ (although on an episode of the now canceled black sitcom Martin, Little Richard abandoned his career as an exterminator [!] and played a few bars). But if one peruses the material that White has gathered from a number of his sermons (see the book’s closing chapter), it is clear that Little Richard is calling on old tricks to ‘‘drum up’’ converts. One might object that evangelism is not about ‘‘roughing’’ someone up (or out), but, in fact, it is. Evangelism very much relies on the shaming of those who, from the vantage point of the ‘‘City of God,’’ have demonstrated through their acts (and, more often than not, through their inaction) that they are living outside the community of believers. With the advent of televangelism and telemarketing, these erstwhile rough musicians do indeed come directly to your home, where, should 110 percussion

one let them, they blare from within. Little Richard, by contrast, continues to tour. He comes to ‘‘rock your town’’ either by appearing at a local venue, often not far from a club or theater where he used to perform, or at one of those very same clubs. Those nearby continue to complain about the earsplitting noise: A ‘‘sanctified church’’ in Minneapolis, for instance, was embroiled in litigation for years. What is missing here is an insight that Nietzsche may have been the first to articulate concerning the very nature of morality. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)—perhaps Nietzsche’s most consistently materialist analysis—a historical connection is drawn between morality and punishment. Although Foucault, in the very text drawn on earlier, would tease out the most important theoretical consequences of this (consequences to which I will return), Nietzsche recognized clearly that morality cannot exist without memory, for ultimately morality is about remembering that one is in debt to a creditor. Thus, as today’s Promise Keepers implicitly understand, the most fundamental constituent of morality is the promise. In characteristic fashion, Nietzsche argued that the premium placed on memory was realized at the expense of a prior investment in, and cultivation of, forgetting. In order for this displacement to occur, a means for reliably producing memories had to be devised. Noting, in a distinctly psychophysiological register, that pain leaves the most indelible memories, he then argued that morality is impossible without punishment—in the sense of a deterrent and as an incentive. For in the end, the moralist is the one who derives pleasure from punishing himself or herself and others. Those who do what they must to keep their own promises relish the prospect of visiting punishment on those who do not. In a brilliant insight, Nietzsche recognizes the enjoyment of cruelty in Kant’s only slightly more secular notion of the categorical imperative. Anticipating Foucault’s (and, for that matter, Thompson’s) insight into the sequestration of punishment, Nietzsche listed the memorable forms of torture and torment that had to assume new guises in the ‘‘modern’’ period. Virtually all of them involve corporal punishment, from whipping to quartering and decapitating. By insisting that morality produces the need for punishment, Nietzsche set up Foucault’s intervention, which, as is well known, sees the body itself as the product of corporal punishment. Thus, in the penal colony—as Kafka glimpsed— the surface on which the law writes its authority is the very body rendered thinkable by such writing. The body hemmed to the law, as the Marquis de Sade understood, is only a particular incarnation of the body, though one that is repudiated, even today (consider, for example, different strokes for different folks

111

the hackles raised in certain quarters by piercing and tattooing), at the risk of committing a moral infraction. Though the story may well be apocryphal, the onset of Nietzsche’s paralysis is said to have been ‘‘triggered’’ by his witnessing a violent beating administered to a stubborn horse by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin. We will never be certain, of course, but in light of the position Nietzsche took in the Genealogy (written fewer than three years earlier), what may well have been disturbing about this beating is the way it played out the horror of spreading morality to the animal kingdom, a position whose uncompromising ‘‘sanity’’ radically unsettles those who, in the name of ‘‘animal rights,’’ want to render the beings granted such rights ‘‘moral subjects.’’∞∂ There has to be a better way. In any case, what the episode points up once again is the link to beating. In other words, from the genealogical perspective, morality is indissociable from beating, not simply in terms of the ascetic value of self-flagellation, but in the sense of aggressively seeking out opportunities to breed animals with ‘‘the right to make promises’’—that is, with the right to swear their allegiance to a principle then empowered to guide and judge their actions. What was outrageous about the coachman’s actions was not their violent intensity but their misdirection. For Nietzsche, horses should be spared subjection. Rough music and preaching are both acts of debt collection. They remind the debtor of his or her debt and, in different ways, shame him or her into repaying it—or, at the very least, into suffering the consequences of not doing so. This activity joins with the musicking in rockand-roll at the point where the body takes a beating. But where precisely is this point? If we return here to the ‘‘exchange of blows’’ that organized African American identity, then perhaps its location can be, if not determined, at least isolated. When white soldiers marched against black demonstrations of rough music, they did so with an eye toward settling the score. For them, the beating (or worse) they inflicted was justified by the beating visited on them, or those whose interests they served, by the act of rough musicking. ‘‘Settling’’ here does not mean resolving or otherwise simply concluding a disagreement. It is about memory. In particular, it is about establishing—as children do when growing their super-egos—who hit whom first. But this almost always involves forgetting another beating, the very beating without which morality cannot exist, that is, the subjection of human agency wherein pain, memory, and debt (among other things) are grafted onto one another. The body is crucial here because it is the surface beneath, or within 112 percussion

which, this other beating is concealed. For if the hit, whose priority memory seeks to record, can be confined to a very particular evidentiary stratum, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to undercut or otherwise complicate it by appealing to a hit that leaves no sign on this stratum. But here we can appreciate the force of Foucault’s subtle reversal of Plato. The soul is indeed the prison of the body, because in the refusal to think through the genealogy of morals, the body becomes the intelligible site of a violence whose relation to the moral authority of the soul can never be named. In particular, the skin—the locus of bruises, scars, and stains—becomes the body as the body is cast in the supporting role of evidentiary stratum. The skin, then, would appear to be the place where the body takes a beating. But if this beating always only muffles another, and one that is tangled up in the genealogical skein of morality and its history, then the skin, as Anzieu insists, is a remarkable envelope indeed. Little Richard was not simply obsessed with his body. (Touching it so preoccupied him that he claims to have ‘‘beat off’’ six or seven times a day after puberty.) He was named after it. As White quotes him as saying, ‘‘I was the only one [out of 12 children who was] deformed’’ (White 1984, 12). Born with a right leg that was slightly shorter than his left, Richard developed a look and a walk that he explained by saying (with the full prophetic powers of retrospection), ‘‘I was little’’ (White 1984, 12), and that garnered him the early nickname ‘‘Big Head.’’ Both, of course, are pointed corporeal exaggerations. Richard’s mother, whom he adored, admits to having hit him on this easy target with a pop bottle, and in recounting his childhood Little Richard regales us with tales of being ‘‘whupped’’ by parents and teachers alike. Awop-Bomp-Aloo-Momp, Alop, Bomp-Bomp, indeed. In becoming Little Richard and leading the Upsetters to international stardom, he can be seen as striking back, as using his body—adorning it, displaying it—in order to shock those who, through epithets, sought to shame and humiliate him. The aim here was not, I think, to determine ‘‘who started it’’—to seek justice in that sense—but to touch and be touched, to, in effect, make the beating that forms our shared skin a site of exchange and passionate negotiation. Not surprisingly, the love that came to dominate the era of rock-and-roll’s lactification—a love that was used to shame and often rough up those of our neighbors who wanted to ‘‘make war’’—appears to have emerged from the musicking that circled back to the black church through the big beat. Two final points. First, if this effort to situate the trap set at the juncture, the contact zone, between African and American practices of different strokes for different folks

113

percussive musicking does indeed belong to the genealogy of the skin, then the preceding discussion of morality must be made to fit here. Though the details of this point will be fleshed out in the next chapter, it is important to underscore the link between what Duden has called the modern closure of the skin and the constitution of the skin as an evidentiary stratum. In other words, part of what happened when the skin sealed the inside of the body in, thereby encasing the locus of consciousness, was that the skin formed the tissue of half-truths behind which the violence of promise-keeping could legitimately be muffled. (Therein lies the limit of legitimation: It cannot rationalize what it cannot think.) The skin’s surface hardened as it became constituted as the place where what was intelligible as beating took place. Pigment plays a role here of irreducible importance. One of the extraordinary feats accomplished by the defense during the Rodney King trial—quite apart from the defense attorneys’ inadvertent reinvigoration of the textual analysis of film—was the disjunction the lawyers created between white beating and the black body. By producing King’s black body as always already about to beat others, the defense team made an open secret of the fusion between beating and blackness, arguing that the white defendants could not have ‘‘beaten’’ (and thus violated the civil rights of) a body that, by virtue of its blackness, was destined to beat them. Only under the spell of such a perversely symptomatic reading could King’s patently defensive gestures become attacks. Only under the spell of such a reading could the struggle to beat back against the constitutive beating, the ‘‘spirit injury’’ of blackness, go unheard. Not surprisingly, a full session of King’s trial was devoted to clarifying the juridical meaning of ‘‘a beating.’’ Second, and with this we can conclude, what I have tried to make audible in the genealogy of the trap set is ‘‘the exchange of blows,’’ the beating and beating back, that it came to embody and that it continues to display. Insofar as it is indeed central to the percussive idiom of rockand-roll, rock-and-roll itself—that is, the very musical idiom driven by the trap set—needs to be approached as fully invested in the struggle over and for the skin. The undecidability that organizes the musicking embodied in the trap set (is it discipline or resistance, neither or both?) continues to hold open a moment that in most other respects appears to have been missed. By this I mean to underscore not merely the sad fact of lactification—that is, the becoming ‘‘white’’ (and conspicuously European/British) of rock-and-roll and the cunning tenacity of racism it reflects—but also the disappointment of ‘‘world beat,’’ where contact among different folks and their different strokes threatens constantly to 114 percussion

reduce difference to diversity, as Homi Bhabha would say. I realize that if the percussive field is a construct necessary to the recognition of what is to be heard through the trap set, it, too, is implicated in the future of this missed moment. It, too, has to measure up against a racism that is capable of converting miscegenational hybridity into more, yet more subtle, legitimations of the ‘‘inevitablity’’ of Elvis or the fantasies inflicted on the body of Rodney King. This is as it should be, and certainly no pronouncements on my own behalf should be given much credence. I will nevertheless insist that many pertinent matters remain opaque in the absence of the complications and complexities brought to the table by the percussive field. Whether in the end these make a difference will depend on a struggle that is hardly academic. In the spirit of precisely such complications, scrutiny is called for of the historical process by which rock-and-roll emerged as a quintessentially urban sound in the United States during the 1950s.

different strokes for different folks

115

444444444444444444

sound of the city: a musician is being beaten

I begin this examination of the importance of urban space for the percussive field by revisiting the Beatles, because I believe there is indeed something in a name. The official story is that the name is modeled on that of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets (initially the ‘‘chirping’’ crickets). It is said that John Lennon always admired this name because of the homonymic pun it contained (especially in a British context), impishly fusing a national sport and an insect. This fusion might have had genuinely surrealist overtones were it not for the fact that, to Adorno’s dismay, insects—in the guise of jitterbugs—were already a rockand-roll commonplace.∞ ‘‘The Crickets’’ being taken, ‘‘the Beatles’’ emerged as a compensatory formation, with the orthography (‘‘beat’’ for ‘‘beet’’) assuming responsibility for the otherwise nationally circumscribed pun in the original. Two aspects of this displacement deserve emphasis. First, in Holly’s metaphor, the band’s name alludes to another sound through which the band’s music is paralleled with a ‘‘natural’’ mating call. And if we are to believe at least one film version of the story, this call—which began as interference during a makeshift home recording—became a name in response to a misdirected query during a telephone call between Holly and a disc jockey. Lennon, through the orthographic gesture, displaced the appeal to nature altogether and established a metaphor between the band’s sound and the musical style referred to as ‘‘the big beat.’’ In

effect, the name ‘‘the Beatles’’ is ostentatiously reflexive. Second, and this is what strikes me as decisive, the displacement traced in the two names is also one in which a rural sound, that of crickets, is drowned out by beating—that is, the sort of sonoric practice one associates with the urban milieu of ‘‘joints,’’ clubs, and concert halls, a phenomenon implicitly underscored in those accounts of the Beatles’ name that emphasize the decisive influence of Lee Marvin’s gang ‘‘the Beetles’’ in The Wild One (1954). Quickly perusing the titles of the many histories of rock-and-roll, one is struck by entries such as Charlie Gillett’s The Sound of the City (1970) or Robert Palmer’s A Tale of Two Cities (1979). The claim advanced in such books (among numerous others) is that rock-and-roll is an essentially urban phenomenon, that its sound is in some significant sense derived from urban experience. My point about the naming of the Beatles is that this was not lost on or by the musicians themselves. However, what this chapter seeks to detail is why, specifically, ‘‘the beat’’ or ‘‘beating’’ figured so fundamentally in the ‘‘urbanization’’ of popular American youth music in the ’50s. Though my chief aim is to articulate what this enables us to grasp about percussive gesturing, it is my hope that this discussion will help illuminate what Roger (then Jim) McGuinn meant when—in the liner notes to Mr. Tambourine Man—he said: ‘‘I think the difference [between rock-and-roll and the music that preceded it] is in the mechanical sounds of our time. Like the sound of the airplane in the forties was a rrrrrrrrooooooaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh sound and Sinatra and other people sang like that with those sort of overtones. Now we’ve got the krrrriiiiisssssshhhhhhhh jet sound, and the kids are singing up there now. It’s the mechanical sounds of the era: the sounds are different and so the music is different’’ (McGuinn, 1965). Although the technological determinism here is unabashedly reductive, McGuinn does underscore something that is often ignored in studies such as Gillett’s, which conceptualize the link between urban space and music in narrowly sociological terms. In such studies, rock-and-roll is urban because it was written and recorded by city dwellers, a descriptive tendency encouraged by industry practices in which recording labels became linked to cities (Sun Records and the ‘‘Memphis’’ sound, Chess/Checker and the ‘‘Chicago’’ sound, Motown and the ‘‘Detroit’’ sound). As important as these facts are, overemphasizing them obliges the ‘‘sound of the city’’ to lose one of its significant connotations—namely, the sound that the city makes and how that might affect the practices of musicmaking. Thus, the point I will open with is put strikingly in Ian Softley’s film Back Beat, which deals with the early history and formation of the sound of the city

117

Beatles. Because I have perhaps already belabored the phenomenon of the backbeat, I will turn directly to the opening scene of the film, where we encounter the characters of John Lennon and Stuart Sutcliffe (the ‘‘fifth Beatle’’—that is, before Billy Preston) as they drink at the Anchor, a small pub and dance hall. The scene comprises two segments, each thirty shots long. The sound bridge that links the credit sequence to the opening scene is essentially a song rendered by a female vocalist who appears on stage in the first shot. Almost immediately, we realize that her singing is being parasitized by Lennon and Sutcliffe, who are seated together at a table against a wall. The conflict of musical idioms and generations is obvious. Angered by this show of disrespect, a group of working-class men confront ‘‘the lads,’’ and a thematically overdetermined argument ensues about whether Sutcliffe’s sketch of a nude (discovered by the men once they arrive at Sutcliffe and Lennon’s table) is ‘‘art’’ or ‘‘filth.’’ Insults are traded, and a fight breaks out. In the second segment, we see the men viciously attack Lennon and Sutcliffe, reserving their most violent exertions for the latter. In a shot that prefigures Sutcliffe’s later death, we see him slammed up against the wall of a building—literally, a surface of the city. Although this episode certainly serves the trajectory of the narrative by establishing the general if slightly clichéd theme of ‘‘working-class life for men’’ in Liverpool, it does so by explicitly staging the encounter between the city and the emergent Beatles as a beating—a beating in which the Liverpool sound is implicitly cast as the backbeat, the percussive rejoinder, to a physical assault. Of course, even if such an event did actually take place (and why not?), it still operates in the film as something like a figurative hypothesis, which is precisely what ought to interest us about it. Softley trusts in such a figure not because he is filming a documentary (which he is not), or because he is a genius (which he is not), but because beating— in some yet-to-be determined sense—functions to name the space of the encounter between the city and rock-and-roll. The question is, Why? Furthermore, what more does the answer to such a question tell us about the percussive field? And let us not lose sight here of what I earlier called up under the heading of lactification: the fact that the Beatles beat back against Liverpool by donning black skins. Shocking Subjects The questions posed here require that we begin thinking about urban space, the city, and the subjection of human agency effected there. As 118 percussion

should be obvious from the previous chapters, I am not interested in dwelling on how the human subject is victimized by the inhuman space of the city. Instead, consistent with my analysis of the skin, I will delineate the surface that forms between and among subjects and urban structures. My point is certainly not that victimization does not occur. Scholars such as Mike Davis, Marshall Berman, Adrian Rifkin, Kristin Ross, David Harvey et al. have established this beyond serious doubt. I would rather supplement these discussions by concentrating on a slightly different problematic, one in which human agency is regarded as a construction material built both up and on in the urban context. In general terms, this will enable me to sustain two related lines of argumentation. First, I will challenge those readings of rock-and-roll that—from secular or religious perspectives—condemn it for ‘‘primitivism.’’ To quote from a well-known source: ‘‘Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. . . . Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse’’ (Bloom 1987, 73). Though often criticized as simply a neoconservative ideologue, Alan Bloom’s view of popular music—which shares a certain dialectical kernel with Adorno’s—is mistaken not because it is prudish but, rather, because he fails to hear the backbeat that constitutes it. In linking ‘‘rock’’ to sexuality, sexuality to the unconscious, and the unconscious to the ‘‘dark continent,’’ Bloom—who in this book, after all, is worried about educating America’s youth—does not recognize that rock-and-roll might well be construed as phronetic—that is, as practical wisdom about how to ‘‘strike back’’ and ‘‘make do’’ under conditions of adversity and cynical humiliation. The primitivist impulse obliges him to downplay the historical emergence of rock-and-roll as an urban musical practice in favor of an evocation of its dark roots, which are at once sinister and, what else? African. Although Bloom is certainly right to link the beat of rock-androll to African cultures, his ready-made and racist reduction of Africa to ‘‘untutored’’ sexuality not only obscures the important link between sexuality and beating. It also sails over the specific history of beating that rock-and-roll preserves. The second analytical tendency that this chapter seeks to challenge is the one in which rock-and-roll is characterized as a cause of social violence. This perspective is one we now associate—thanks to the tireless efforts of the former drummer ‘‘Tipper’’ Gore (whom Courtney Love, in fact, characterized as a ‘‘kick-ass drummer’’ on The Late Show with David Letterman) and the Parents’ Music Resource Center (pmrc)— with those attacks on rock-and-roll (and the idiom of metal, in particusound of the city

119

lar) that accuse it not so much of ‘‘primitivism’’ but of a form of nihilism that encourages suicide and the destruction of property.≤ Although the focus has typically been on the lyrics of songs, Carl Raschke, in the provocative Painted Black (1990), does insist that the sound of rockand-roll (what he characterizes as ‘‘noise’’) is meant to ‘‘erode the nervous system’’ (Raschke 1990, 244). Against such a perspective it does little good to deny flatly that rock-and-roll has anything to do with violence (the countervailing link often being with ‘‘fun’’), or to insist that the nervous system is utterly impervious to contextual erosion. Instead, what ought to be stressed is the contingency that haunts, and ultimately undermines, the notion of causality that is central to such an analysis. This enables one to avoid defending rock-and-roll in the name of reflection aesthetics, where music simply reflects a deeper cause while nevertheless allowing analysts to insist on the ideological agenda of the pmrc by delineating how it seeks to ‘‘disarm’’ rock-and-roll through moral intimidation. My argument will attempt to undercut these two perspectives by laying out an alternative account of the relation between rock-and-roll and the ‘‘sound of the city.’’ At bottom, this account insists on the shared concept of subjectivity that links the primitivist and nihilist repudiations of rock music. In effect, regardless of whether one insists on sexuality or violence as a precipitating cause of cultural regression, one is implicitly treating the subject as trans-historically rooted in an instinctual economy that, when all is said and done, renders the labor of contextualization, however conceived, superfluous. Sadly, this warrant for what Foucault called the ‘‘repressive hypothesis’’ (Foucault 1980, 17–49) finds its way into even those defenses of rock-and-roll that decry the puritanical character of its detractors. Although I count myself among those who are critical of those detractors, rock-and-roll must also be protected from its supporters. Retrieving the discussion of interpellation that dominated the pages of Chapter Two, I will revisit the theme of the spatially discontinuous, or ‘‘laminated,’’ subject and pursue it in relation to everyday life in the urban context. Although this ultimately will oblige us to consider the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on the topic, I broach the issue by making yet another ‘‘return to Freud.’’ As it turns out, his work provides us with the most detailed account of the psychical implications of situating (as Sartre would later say) the subject in the city—the very account from which Benjamin departs, in fact, in his justly influential reading of Baudelaire and Proust. Specifically, let us consider the materials presented in the ‘‘far120 percussion

fetched’’ (Freud’s characterization) and richly speculative fourth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Although Freud’s attempt to step beyond the pleasure principle (as Derrida might phrase it) falters, his text does engage the heady mix of pleasure and death that detractors and devotees alike perceive to be at stake in rock-and-roll. This alone might recommend the text to our attention. However, this is not primarily what interests me about it. Much more striking is the following formulation about consciousness and the formation of subjectivity: What consciousness yields consists essentially of perceptions of excitations coming from the external world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the mental apparatus; it is therefore possible to assign the system Pcpt.-Cs. a position in space. It must lie on the borderline (der Grenze) between inside and outside; it must be turned toward the external world and it must envelop (umhüllen) the other psychical systems. (Freud 1961, 18)

And again later, in an even more suggestive articulation, Freud wrote: This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of the external world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli (einem Reizschutz). It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface (seine äußerste Oberfläche) ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane (Hülle oder Membran) resistant to stimuli. . . . By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate—unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield. (Freud 1961, 27)

Freud’s evocation here, through the figures of the inorganic and death (Absterben, to mortify or die off), of the death drive is surely what marks the passage as speculative, despite its clear evocation of the later essay ‘‘Note on a Mystic Writing Pad.’’ However, what constitutes the pertinence of these formulations for a reading of Simmel and Benjamin (Benjamin, in fact, cites these very pages) is their representation of the relationship between consciousness, as a structural component of subjectivity, and an outer world (eine Außenwelt) characterized as a source of excessive stimulation. What is crucial is that, instead of simply opposing consciousness and the world, Freud joins them in and on a borderline where their precise connection becomes undecidable to the degree that they are entangled in a structure that is at once dead and sound of the city

121

alive. The subject here (as Anzieu would insist) is ‘‘contained’’ by consciousness not in spite of the encroachment of the world, but because of this very encroachment, a state of affairs that decisively undercuts those accounts of the subject that place it decisively and preemptively on the (in)side of life. Benjamin’s interest in this material is indexed to the theme of memory (about which there is always more to say), but Simmel, who anticipates Freud’s formulations by nearly twenty years, situates these structural aspects of subjectivity within a theory of modernity that Freud pointedly—and to my mind, unnecessarily—skirts. In ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ Simmel argues as follows: The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individual consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation (Steigerung des Nervenlebens) which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli (Eindrücke [‘‘stimuli’’ takes on a much more scriptural quality here]). . . . With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. . . . Thus the metropolitan type of man—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ (ein Schutzorgan) protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head (mit dem Verstande) instead of his heart (mit dem Gemüte). (Simmel 1903, 409–10; emphasis in the original)

In my final chapter, I will revisit the distinction Simmel draws here between the head and the heart. At this juncture, however, I will underscore the degree to which the silhouette cast by the light Simmel throws on the city traces precisely the contours of Freud’s account of consciousness, or what Simmel calls Geistesleben. In particular, note Simmel’s contention that the ‘‘head’’ develops as a protective organ against the excessive ‘‘nervous stimulation’’ of the city. This insight obliges us to supplement Freud’s speculations by recognizing the city limits in the ‘‘borderline’’ between consciousness and the world. If my choice of words implies an association between the city and what Freud might otherwise call the repressed, this is not by chance. This is not the place to work out the network of connections that fastens Freud’s early writing practices to Vienna, but it is worth recalling the role played by Immanuel Lowry’s topographic maps of Rome in the opening chapter of Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 1961, 11–20). There, as if to demystify once and for all Romain Rolland’s 122 percussion

‘‘oceanic feeling’’ Freud invokes the trope of urban ruins in order to illustrate literally his theory of the psychical apparatus, a point reiterated in the very late essay ‘‘Constructions in Analysis.’’ Repressed structures are thus understood to persist in a way much like that of ancient ruins, which one might—in genuine psychoanalytic fashion— imagine as ghostly apparitions jutting up into the contemporary landscape. Perhaps only the general ‘‘para-practical’’ character of psychoanalysis can account for why the city did not matter more for Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents is also the text in which Freud restates the formulation that initially attracted Benjamin to Beyond the Pleasure Principle: ‘‘Consciousness arises instead of a memory trace’’ (das Bewußtsein entstehe an Stelle der Erinnerungsspur); a formulation whose distinctly topographic stands out more clearly perhaps in the context of a discussion of ‘‘the eternal city.’’≥ As emphasized earlier, Benjamin approaches Freud’s text with an eye toward Freud’s discussion of memory—a discussion that deploys two concepts, Erinnerung and Gedächtnis, without distinguishing them as sharply as Proust distinguishes mémoire involontaire and mémoire volontaire. Indeed, Benjamin notes that Freud is significantly corrected by Proust in this regard, and all of this would be of ‘‘mere’’ academic interest were it not for the fact that, through this discussion, Benjamin manages to politicize poetry—or, the practice of cultural production more generally—in a way on which my account of rock-and-roll leans heavily. It thus bears further elaboration. ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ the chapter of Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1983) in which Benjamin discusses Freud and Proust, is often treated as evidence of the contradictory (or perhaps more charitably, ‘‘dialectical’’) character of his thought.∂ Specifically, in that chapter the concept of ‘‘aura’’ is given a political meaning that appears to contradict the meaning it is given in the slightly earlier ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’∑ There, aura, as ‘‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it [the object, whether historical or natural] may be’’ (Benjamin 1983, 222), is linked to fascism through the ideology of authenticity and the cultic rituals of aesthetic consumption. Precisely because mechanical reproduction has created conditions within which this ideology might be superseded do the cultural practices that nevertheless exploit such conditions while continuing to exalt aura deserve the characterization ‘‘fascist.’’ By contrast, in ‘‘Some Motifs,’’ aura is again set opposite mechanical reproduction but is regarded as politically progressive for that very fact. Thus, in a move that is as prosound of the city

123

vocative as it is enigmatic, Benjamin has modernist literary practice usurp the cinema as the leading cultural edge of the European Popular Front. My aim is not primarily to resolve the matter of Benjamin’s thought. However, in order to glean from this essay what is crucial to my discussion of the relation between rock-and-roll and urban space, it is necessary to unpack the terms of Benjamin’s apparent volte-face. At a very general level Benjamin is interested in the concept of heroism, and in the course of his discussion two examples of it emerge: the modernist poet (Baudelaire) and, drawing on Baudelaire, the lesbian. What these figures share is a capacity to endure modernity—that is, to engage its idiosyncrasies while simultaneously developing the resistance that allows one to work through it. The formula Benjamin develops for this engagement is derived from Baudelaire’s invocation of the link between writing and fencing. The hero must ‘‘parry the blows’’ ( pariert seine eigenen Stöße) of modern life. To unpack this formula, he appeals to Freud’s discussion of psychical formation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where, as noted earlier, he stumbles on the two concepts of memory. Quite apart from the way this discovery resonates with Benjamin’s reading of Proust (another modernist ‘‘hero’’), the problematic of memory enables him to detail the subjective conditions of the resistance called for in his formula. Notably, it is in relation to these conditions that the political orientation of aura is decided. The Erinnerungsspur on which consciousness erects itself lies on the ‘‘outer’’ edge (these inverted commas are meant to acknowledge the difficult topography of Freud’s model) of the Reizschutz that is consciousness. Benjamin associates Proust’s notion of mémoire involontaire with the Erinnerungsspur, emphasizing the way both form below and before consciousness and, most important, as the result of shock that is absorbed through the very materialization of consciousness. Stealthily recapitulating much of Simmel’s discussion, Benjamin proceeds to cast involuntary memory as a socially produced shelter from the social, and, as such, the portion of modern subjectivity that grounds the subject’s capacity to work through the shock of modernity through the practice of cultural critique. It is in this general context that he reinvokes the thematics of aura: Experience (die Erfahrung) of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look

124 percussion

at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of mémoire involontaire. (These data, incidentally, are unique; they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend themselves to a concept of the aura that comprises the ‘‘unique phenomenon of a distance’’). (Benjamin 1983, 148)

The quote that concludes these formulations derives from Benjamin’s ‘‘Work of Art’’ essay, which renders the displacement of aura even more conspicuous. One might well be tempted here to follow Ian Balfour in reading this gesture as an act of Messianic historiography, were it not for the fact that the ‘‘memory that seeks to retain’’ the data of involuntary memory has, at this point in the essay, been decisively linked to photography—that is, to the technology of mechanical reproduction (Balfour 1991). In other words, mechanical reproducibility—understood now as a mnemonic technology driven by the purposiveness of mémoire volontaire—threatens aura (as before), but at a level that now requires that it be given a different political evaluation. The decline of aura is seen no longer as a blow to fascism but as a serious threat to the project of politicizing art. Motivating this evaluative shift is Benjamin’s concern that the shock producing auratically charged contents of the mémoire involontaire is likely to be ‘‘normalized’’ through the deployment of a mnemonic technology, such as photography, that seeks pointedly to retain ‘‘memories’’ of the travails and traumas of ordinary experience (Erlebnis). Such normalization would have the effect not just of accelerating the occupation of involuntary memory by voluntary memory (Kodak, citing Shakespeare, has long been characterizing itself as marketing ‘‘the stuff of which memories are made’’), but, more seriously, of so thinning the skin of consciousness—in effect, of so heightening its receptivity to stimuli—that the shelter of involuntary memory would virtually implode, eliminating the subjective capacity for resisting modern life. Thus, the Chockabwehr (defense against shock) so crucial to Benjamin’s account of the subject’s relation to urban space would be rendered dysfunctional, breached or punctured, as it were, not by a passing moment of excessive intensity, but through an abrasive attrition produced by the unrelenting and willful accumulation of memories. The heroic age would thus reach its definitive end. Those familiar with Benjamin’s work will recognize in the neurasthenic city dweller the shell-shocked soldiers of ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ where the trauma of mechanized warfare has left them incapable of sharing their experience (Erfahrung) in narrative form (Benjamin 1969). Although veterans would

sound of the city

125

be loathe to admit it, there are some for whom the ‘‘war at/as home’’ is every bit as ‘‘disabling’’ as the front lines. Aura in this context assumes its political importance for the left in that it indexes the existence of traces that the hero might activate or draw on—though ‘‘unintentionally,’’ to be sure—in the struggle to resist modern urban experience. To the extent that Baudelaire embodies such a figure, Benjamin would appear to be arguing that there is a crucial, class-specific dimension to heroism and implying that it required the specific sort of cultural alienation available to lower-middleclass men in order to give emancipatory expression to the structural resources of consciousness. Lyric poetry thus becomes a form of resistance. It is not about resistance: The stricture against intentions prohibits this. It is resistance. And although Benjamin nowhere addresses the Gramscian problematic of hegemony (that is, how to theorize the organization and leadership of the class constituencies of poetry, storytelling, and the cinema), it is clear that, as with the bohemians he redeems from Marx’s criticism, he sees modernist poetry as an important political possibility for the Popular Front. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the formulation that opens the eleventh section of the Baudelaire essay: ‘‘If we designate as aura the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception, then its analogue in the case of a utilitarian object is the experience (Erfahrung) which has left traces of the practiced hand’’ (Benjamin 1983, 145), where something like an homology between labor and aura is posited directly. Earlier, this trope of the inscription of practice (which, as we shall see in Chapter Five, is explicitly Brechtian) was introduced as though cited from the essay ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ in terms of ‘‘die Spur der Töpferhand an der Tonschale’’ (Benjamin 1983, 113). In this context, the trace resonates strongly with the Freudian motif of the Erinnerungsspur, further underscoring the link to be forged between political consciousness and the politics of consciousness. It is as though Benjamin is reconceptualizing Marx’s concept of dead or alien labor, associating it in the domain of cultural expression with the auratic contents of involuntary memory.∏ In doing so, he not only distinguishes between aura and fascism. He also delineates a concept of alienation that effectively supports what we have since come to call—without, it deserves to be said, always knowing what we mean— cultural politics. In ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ the trace of dead labor is effaced within the context of urban experience by the circulation of information. Thus, supplementing Simmel’s concentration on the shock effect of traffic and 126 percussion

the tempo of daily life, Benjamin insists on the role of newspapers and novels in the formation of that protective organ called consciousness. Though one is tempted here to insist on a distinction between shock and schlock (the latter referring primarily, if not exclusively, to shoddy intellectual merchandise), it is important to acknowledge that the body in question, the body at stake, in the urban setting is not simply ‘‘physical’’ in some crude sense. Benjamin insists that our materialism be more subtle than that. In my judgment, without such subtlety it is impossible to understand the heroism he attributes to Baudelaire. He seizes on Baudelaire’s reflexive figure of the fencer because he conceives of poetry—and the modern lyric, in particular—as a practice conditioned by the auratically charged images that accumulate as the urban subject ‘‘parries the blows’’ of lived experience. Though this figure is typically mined for the way it confirms the wisdom contained in the adage, ‘‘The pen is mightier than the sword,’’ it is perhaps just as important to recognize in the fencer the intimate relation between poetry and the subjectivity that it registers. Consciousness as the cauldron of romantic poetic expression is here refigured as the skein of defensive gestures that allows the poet to withstand, and ultimately rise above, ‘‘the grind.’’ Reinvoking ‘‘The Storyteller’’ in this context, one can recognize the ‘‘deliberateness’’ of voluntary memory in the discourses of information that define the poet’s public sphere, and, further, that the ‘‘explanation’’ (Erklärung) that gives information its deliberative cast has implications not merely for the contents of consciousness, but also for the social formation of consciousness as an index of subjectivity. Precisely because ‘‘explanation’’ is what is lacking in lyric poetry, it must be seen as arising out of a field of experience constituted against the institutions of information. Moreover, what is heroic about producing lyric poetry is not first and foremost the decision to do so. Instead, heroism lies in the ‘‘letting go’’ that allows one to become a site for the transfer, the exchange, of auratic memories. Thus, the fencing poet, spattered with the ink spilled in ‘‘battle,’’ is heroic only in the principled maintenance of an involuntary posture, not, as one might have assumed, in the deliberate or methodical execution of deeds. She or he comes into being when the shocking traces return from the dead and once again enter into commerce with the living. But what are we to make here of the other hero, the lesbian? If there is a theoretical link between the heroism of the lyric poet and the lesbian, it would appear to be evinced here in the way both withdraw from traffic—one refusing to capitulate to the flow of information, the other refusing to serve as the homosocial token. Though, as concerns sound of the city

127

the domain of cultural politics, this would appear to place the accent on the at best ambivalent gesture of repudiation, I think it is also important to stress here the ‘‘parrying of blows’’ that enacts Baudelaire’s withdrawal. In other words, the constitution of heroic subjectivity through refusal cannot be effected through mere passivity. It must, like the Reizschutz, be forged. Earlier, I argued that, if we follow Benjamin, lyric poetry should be understood as the form of a resistance. Through the notion of heroism, I have now associated this resistance to the formation of urban subjectivity, a formation that constellates around a scar or crust that joins people, places, and things. Because such a ‘‘nominal’’ formation orders the matrix of the personal and the political in a way that leaves the matter of the body unspoken, brief consideration of Richard Sennett’s provocative discussion of resistance and the body in Flesh and Stone (1994) will be helpful. Sennett’s thesis—which, although more explicitly evangelical, mirrors that of The Fall of Public Man—is that ‘‘urban spaces take form largely from the ways people experience their own bodies’’ (Sennett 1994, 370), and that with the emergence of the individual—that is, a subject preoccupied with unobstructed circulation through what Benjamin might have called ‘‘homogeneous empty space’’—people have come, literally, to embody cities where the space for public acknowledgment of chronic bodily pain no longer exists. Sennett unpacks the notion of resistance not by seeking to gauge the relative tensile force of skin, but by stressing how systematically the individual, modern body seeks to surmount resistance—or, put another way, to avoid touching. He reads this avoidance in everything from ‘‘the society of the spectacle’’ to the gridded urban plan of New York City. Although New Yorkers are likely to be wildly amused by his argument that such a plan was designed to facilitate motion through the urban center, surely he is right to claim that our—at times, lethal—rage about congestion stems from our frustration with a design that promises more than it now delivers. The conclusion he draws from such observations is that in its flight from resistance, the modern body has not only lost the ability to recognize its own limits; it has also aggressively withdrawn its interest in the bodies of others. In effect, the triumph of anesthetized individualism has undermined our capacity for compassion. Turning tellingly to Freud’s discussion of the Reizschutz, Sennett argues that we need obstructions precisely because they oblige us to share our limits with others. Thus, for my purposes, what is important here is the way Sennett’s analysis captures 128 percussion

the link between embodiment and the city while preserving its political character. We are not then political primarily because of the way we seek to realize either public or private ends through the available political institutions, but because our identities are politicized at the level of their constitution, at the level of their support systems. Seeing ourselves as people hindered by the presence of others is already the articulation of a racialized, class politics. And although I rather like the way Sennett situates the domain of the political, his belief that only a Christian articulation of human limits can frame the bodily disturbances channeled by the modern city in a progressive direction strikes me as troubled, to say the least. Sennett’s recasting of the political as the ethical (a gesture he shares with much contemporary scholarship in the humanities) registers what might be called a slackening in the theoretical rigor deployed by Benjamin in his tracing of the formation of the urban subject. Not only does Sennett spend less time actually characterizing the details of this formation—for example, taking a short cut through Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s powerful discussion of the industrialization of space and timeπ —but, he circles back to Freud primarily to retrieve the reality principle as a model of resistance immanent to a specifically modern subject. It is as though, at some level, he does not really accept the terms of his own argument. No doubt, this is what prompts him to forswear his allegiance to his dead friend Foucault. I, on the other hand, want to have my cake and eat it, too. That is, I want to talk about the ‘‘deep’’ formation of subjectivity in urban space and cultural politics in the same breath. Why? Because by doing so I believe we can radically extend the frame within which cultural practices, such as popular music, can be read, and at the same time we can make music fundamentally important to the practice of cultural critique. If how such practices can be read matters for how we determine what cultural work they can achieve, then there are specifically political stakes in extending the framework of one’s reading. Rock Around the Block What precisely does this help us understand about the constructive deployment of the percussive field? To answer, I will detail how early rock-and-roll is more than simply analogous to lyric poetry in Benjamin’s analysis. To be sure, this analogy is crucial, for music is indeed like poetry in the way that poetry works the broken line between interiority and exteriority. It is ‘‘heroic,’’ in Benjamin’s sense. But in the figure sound of the city

129

of the fencer—specifically, in the notion of ‘‘parrying the blows’’— what might otherwise be little more than an analogy extends into what I have been calling a catachrestic space, itself a locus of use and abuse. I recognize that ‘‘parrying blows’’ might more immediately apply to the gestures of a drummer, but if we consider rhythm in general as the sonic articulation of time, then ‘‘beating’’ occurs wherever time is marked, even—as we have seen—at the virtually inaudible level of frequency oscillations. In this regard, the fencer might legitimately be said to either have or lack rhythm. Aside from how this might invite us to supplement what associations we have with fencing, there is the far more important matter of deciding how such an addition prompts us to reconsider the limits of musical practice once rhythm in general, and percussive signifying in particular, are resituated in the contact zone of urban space.∫ From this angle, music is more than a technology of the self. It is an intervention in the urban fashioning of the skin that joins flesh and stones. The point here is not that Benjamin mysteriously failed to recognize the musical, or even percussive, subtext of Baudelaire’s figure; rather, given the details of his discussion, it is far from difficult to do so. Doubtless, this registers the fact that today the shock of modernist lyrics has quite literally been drowned out by the ‘‘pounding’’ of popular rhythms, which are again—at least in certain urban poetic practices—articulating themselves as lyrical technique. Consider here the very concept of a ‘‘rap’’ or a ‘‘poetry slam.’’ Thus, if—as Elias has argued—measurable time requires a social order of sufficiently dense interdependencies that an abstraction such as pure duration becomes an intelligible quality of all phenomena, then the percussive field of rock-and-roll must be understood to include the contact zone of urban space, where bodies form around the skin delimited through beating or, if one prefers, shock. Again, this is not primarily a matter of how music expresses the subject’s lived encounter with the city (though this is important; think, after all, of all the rockand-roll songs named ‘‘after’’ urban phenomena: cities, parks, streets, cafes, bars). Instead, what I am seeking to illuminate through the concept of the percussive field is the way ‘‘music’’ is in this encounter. What music can be made to do, or to ‘‘say,’’ depends deeply on how it figures in the way subjects assume their positions in the urban ‘‘war of positions.’’ To link such a claim to the emergence of rock-and-roll as such—and to do so in a way that both extends and complicates my earlier discussion of the film Back Beat—let us circle back to Palmer’s brief, but ultimately solid, A Tale of Two Cities: Memphis Rock and New Or130 percussion

leans Roll. I include the subtitle, because at this juncture it is worth emphasizing how intimately Palmer attempts to link the musical idiom of rock-and-roll to these two urban centers. Though in his introduction he places the accent on what he calls the ‘‘regional’’ dimension of his study, his conclusion sounds some resonant themes: Memphis, Tennessee, gave the world the first supermarket (Piggly Wiggly) and the first chain of standardized motels (Holiday Inn). It also gave the world Elvis Presley, who more than any other figure popularized and personified rock-and-roll. It was and is a vital, often violent, usually unpredictable city, and the developments in popular music that took place there during the fifties were mostly sudden bursts of energy and flashes of intuition, not cautious evolutionary developments as in New Orleans. . . . Memphis’s entire history is one of instability and casual violence. It was still new and more or less wide-open in the fifties, a place that was blending wildly divergent trends and traditions into an unpredictable, explosive mixture. (Palmer 1979, 32)

Palmer goes on to spin out a brief ethnography of the studio and performance cultures of the two cities, cultures that then effect the mediation between the sounds and their respective cities. Quite apart from whether this is a ‘‘true’’ explanation of the regional emergence of rockand-roll (one suspects that Palmer has his own doubts, because historically New Orleans emerges before Memphis, which, according to the temporal logic of the subtitle, should have produced roll-and-rock, not rock-and-roll), one cannot help but notice how persistently Palmer appeals to something like a ‘‘sociological profile’’ of Memphis—its violence, its unpredictability, its tendency toward miscegenation—in order to account for signature features of the emergent idiom of rockand-roll. In other words, if New Orleans gave rock its roll, this is because rolling (along?) is figured in what he describes as the ‘‘cautious, evolutionary’’ character of the city. Likewise, if Memphis gave roll its rock, this is because rocking (or, as he puts it in his introduction, the ‘‘steady rocking beat’’) is figured in the ‘‘bursts of energy’’ and ‘‘flashes of intuition,’’ that constituted the urban texture of Memphis. In the absence of precisely the sort of theoretical considerations on which this chapter has dwelled, one is entitled to dismiss such claims as the rhetorical clichés they have since become. But I think we miss something crucial if we dwell on the ‘‘energy’’ and the ‘‘intuition’’ and fail to recognize the prosaic, indeed mundane, inscription of shock in the ‘‘bursts,’’ the ‘‘flashes,’’ and the ‘‘explosive mixture.’’ At the risk of overstating the case, Palmer’s persistent ‘‘urbanization’’ of the very rhetoric of development (ways are ‘‘paved,’’ deals are ‘‘cemented,’’ sound of the city

131

terms are concretized, barriers are ‘‘tumbled’’) would itself appear to be a symptomatic articulation—at the level of sociomusicological discourse—of the sound of the cities. Of course, what is missing is an examination of how this dynamic participated in the subjection of human agency—that is, in the production of those ‘‘heroes’’ responsible for the production of rock-and-roll music. Such an examination is virtually solicited by the autobiographical accounts of numerous key players. Ellas McDaniel (aka Bo Diddley)—to take a figure who will figure prominently in my closing chapter—moved from rural Mississippi to Chicago in 1930. In an interview with Andy McKaie, Bo Diddley described this transition in the following terms: If I remember straight, moving to Chicago was a big change because I ended up having to fight every other day or two at school. I didn’t have that stuff when I was going to school in Mississippi. Kids calling me names, country and that, because I came from the country. I didn’t understand this so when I got to be about 14, 15 years old, I started boxing. And at 15, I started crackin’ heads. . . . The Bo Diddley thing started back then, I used it when I started boxing. Kids started calling me that. I think it had something to do with being colored, or a bully. You know, when I started fighting back, there wasn’t anyone around to whup me and they didn’t try, so the kids started calling me Bo Diddley. . . . The first group I had was a trio, a neighborhood trio, called ourselves the Hipsters. . . . I was like 14, 15 years old, and we were playing on street corners. We had this little amplifier, and for 50 cents, you could plug into one of the shop’s outlets and play for an hour, or until the police ran us off. (Palmer 1979, 5–6)

McDaniel goes on to describe the actual itinerary (‘‘from 47th Street to 63rd, 63rd back to 47’’) traversed by the Hipsters across Chicago’s South Side, and although this happened ten years before he began recording with Leonard Chess on Record Row, it is clear that Chicago brought about the reorganization of subjectivity named ‘‘Bo Diddley.’’ Several aspects of the preceding quote deserve comment. Most immediately, McDaniel’s emphasis on daily fights at school recalls the material I have highlighted in the opening discussion of the Beatles. His encounter with the urban setting of Chicago is marked by the presence of corporeal violence—violence inflicted on him precisely because his subjectivity was read as ‘‘country’’ in the urban context. Significantly, McDaniel responds in two ways: He takes up boxing, and he forms a musical trio. What joins these responses is his emergent

132 percussion

subject position, the one named (we might also insist, ‘‘called’’) ‘‘Bo Diddley.’’ Though there are as many different accounts of the emergence of this stage name as there are interviews in which the matter is broached, here McDaniel, who admits that he doesn’t know exactly why the name was applied to him (was it because he was a bully, colored, both, or neither?), associates it with the man he became when he began fighting back—or, in Benjamin’s terms, ‘‘parrying the blows.’’ When he starts to record with Chess in the mid-’50s, I regard it as decisive that he keeps this stage name, clearly fusing the timing involved in deflecting and landing blows with the production of one of the most distinctively marked rhythmic grooves in early rock-and-roll. In fact, this groove—to which I will turn at the end of this chapter— came to be called the ‘‘Bo Diddley beat,’’ effectively completing the fusion of music and boxing that repositioned Ellas McDaniel. There are two other aspects of the preceding quote that are worth noting. It is always possible to take violence, and therefore shock, too literally. This might well be the chief failure of Oliver Stone’s otherwise stunning Natural Born Killers. I invoke this here because it makes sense to think about beating in relation to timing and what de Certeau has called ‘‘making do’’ because shock is at issue in bargaining for electricity with shopkeepers and playing just long enough to form a crowd and to avoid getting busted. McDaniel constructs a scene in which the Hipsters, much like the black unemployed, are pounding the pavement—quite literally seeking an outlet—setting up; playing for an hour, at the most; and then packing up and hurrying off to avoid the law. The issues here have less to do with traffic as such—although if one has ever played on the street, she or he knows that one is always playing ‘‘with’’ the traffic (an insight perhaps not entirely lost on Steve Winwood, and the others when they called their British quartet Traffic)—than with the cognitive dissonance produced by trying to concentrate on one’s part, the prowl of a squad car, and the gnarl of extension cords that links your amp to an electrical outlet. This, too, is urban modernity. Although there are many good reasons to distinguish sharply between hip-hop and rock-and-roll, there is a shared intimacy with the surfaces and textures of urban space that complicates such distinctions. Finally, let us not overlook the feint that draws us into the quote: ‘‘If I remember straight. . . .’’ The conditional mood marks what follows as a story. ‘‘If I remember straight’’ thus functions rather like ‘‘Once upon a time’’ in that it simulates the reality of which it speaks—not by

sound of the city

133

pouncing on it, but by drawing attention to the limit of a memory that might always stray from ‘‘what happened.’’ The key issue is not whether what follows is correct (‘‘straight’’), but that there is some event against which memory’s power can be gauged. In light of this, the conditional mood might better be seen as a deferential gesture—a gesture that is made in acknowledgment of what Proust called involuntary memory, or the memory that works best when surrendered to the aleatory force of events themselves. Though legible as an authenticity marker—the rocker’s life has been long and hard—‘‘if I remember straight’’ can also be read as the trace of the potter’s hand. It is the sign not only that the past is being constructed, but that the act of construction is labored, as though Bo Diddley were coaxing something out that might resist or even refuse his efforts. My point is not that he conceives the effort to remember his past in these terms, but that in his reconstruction of his formation as a musician, his statements bear the traces of what Baudelaire and Benjamin sought to comprehend under the heading of modern ‘‘heroism.’’ Though by no means decisive, the discussion of Bo Diddley’s characterization of his arrival in Chicago is meant to establish that a theorization of urban modernity is indeed legible in his self-presentation. However, the detail in this presentation that calls out for further attention is Bo Diddley’s evocation of his identity as a black man—or, as he says, ‘‘being colored.’’ Is it precisely this that singles him out for the urban beating? Bo Diddley himself equivocates, suggesting his identification as ‘‘country’’—that is, rural (as Simmel would insist)—might be just as important. Clearly, this must be addressed. It is important not only because of the general thesis of ‘‘lactification’’ I am attempting to spin out here, but also because if there is a unique link between people of color and urban violence, the traditions that have relied on such violence in their ‘‘general,’’ or ‘‘color blind,’’ theorizations of urban modernity would have to be rethought, if not scrapped altogether. This might well imply that the tradition that spans from Simmel to Schivelbusch and Sennett needs to be reframed as a theoretical intervention exhibiting, in its basic concepts, the dynamics of lactification. Although formulated differently, it was this very prospect at which my earlier discussion of Softley’s depiction of the fates of Lennon and Sutcliffe was hinting. Instead of going this route, however, which would shift the discussion away from a further elaboration of the seam between sociology and psychoanalysis, I will turn to the pocked frontier that joins beating and sexuality. This allows us to further probe the resources of the percussive field without racing through race. 134 percussion

From One CB to the Other Chuck Berry, of course, is another black musician who found his way to the Chess Studios in Chicago during the 1950s. At that time, Bo Diddley was already recording with the Chess brothers, and Berry was able to garner a contract offer with a cheap demo recording of what was to become his hit ‘‘Maybellene.’’ It, too, is driven by a toned-down version of the backbeat that lies at the heart of ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music.’’ While serving time in prison for a spate of petty crimes, Berry also did a brief stint as a boxer (Earl Palmer, who facilitated the backbeat groove, also boxed while in the army). However, two things distinguish Berry’s experience from Bo Diddley’s. First, Although he was a big man, Berry was soundly defeated in his first serious bout and immediately retired. Second, unlike Bo Diddley, who linked this experience to his emergence as a musician, Berry came to boxing from music—or, at least, with a musical identity formed beforehand. To be sure, there are plenty of other similar aspects of their encounter with Chicago, but what I find striking in Berry is the connection drawn so insistently in his autobiography between his relation to music and what he refers to as ‘‘whoopin’ ’’ (Berry 1987, 4). Musical autobiographies, particularly among ‘‘popular’’ performers, are not rarities. What makes Berry’s autobiography so intriguing is not that it was written ‘‘phrase by phrase’’ by Berry himself (Berry 1987, xv), but that, embedded in a discussion of what justly deserves the characterization of a theory of language, it contains the following paragraph: Thus as you read this book, remember, it may not necessarily be what my thoughts were because I, as well as you, cannot be sure I’ve written a precise account of what dwells in my memory. So what I have seen, felt, or thought cannot possibly be transferred to another without a difference born from this journey. (Berry 1987, 313)

Perhaps sensing that framing his autobiography in the rhetoric of the liar’s paradox would hurt sales, Berry ‘‘buries’’ this suggestive formulation in its final pages. Quite apart from the way this paragraph echoes the deferential gesture made by Bo Diddley earlier, what catches my ear is the fact that the reader is implicated in the difference between what dwells in Berry’s memory and his autobiographical account. I take it that the point is not that the text’s autobiographical credentials are suspect but, rather, that the autobiographer—in not keeping (in this case) his memory to himself—is someone who works with the privasound of the city

135

tion of experience that the reader’s presence (whether real or imagined) demands. Even if we interpret this formulation as a defense against litigation, as Berry’s life might encourage us to do, we cannot get past the fact that Berry associates his own admission of uncertainty with the general problem of ‘‘transmission.’’ Central to this problem is the presence of ‘‘another’’ in one’s relationship to his or her own visual, tactile, and cognitive memories. I emphasize this not because I want to align myself with the legion of scholars who are now busy deconstructing autobiography. Instead, as we shall see, recognizing the presence in this text of ‘‘another’’ (maybe you, maybe me) adds something decisive—specifically, a witness or onlooker—to the several accounts of childhood beating that dot Berry’s text in its early chapters. In particular, two such accounts stand out: one involving his mother; the other involving both his mother and his father. What makes them important in this context is the way they inform Berry’s account of his own emergent musical identity. The beating centered on his mother takes place earlier and is motivated by the young Berry’s unwelcome ‘‘playing’’ with the family phonograph. I was also fascinated by a big wooden cabinet that also [that is, in addition to his mother] produced music. Thelma told me it was a Victrola, but we were not allowed to touch it. To me it was a box that talked and sang, making music by itself. I would sit on the floor and stare at it, trying to figure out how it worked. After I’d become a little older, I got the chance I needed one day when mother went shopping. I got a chair, climbed up, and by stretching was able to raise the top of the Victrola, look down in the turntable compartment, and study it. I’d seen Daddy place the needle of the horn to the edge of the record that was on the turntable. I did it and it played. Someone had left a fox trot on the turntable and when it sounded off, the jumpy rhythm floored me. I played it over and over until I heard a particular sneezing that signaled my mother returning. I hurriedly tried to put the Victrola back the way it was and thought I had. I’d managed to shut it down okay, but I’d forgotten to remove the chair I’d used to reach it. That afternoon I received my first whipping, which was known as ‘‘whoopin’ ’’ then. (Berry 1987, 4)

Through a subsequent onomatopoeic concatenation—whack, whack, whack—Berry sonorically evokes, then restages, the beating, establishing that he was forced to lie across the incriminating chair to receive his mother’s blows. As readers of this uncertain autobiography, we are positioned as onlookers. The scene is marked as ‘‘primal’’ not primarily because of the 136 percussion

unobtrusive way it mobilizes the son’s repetition of the father’s access to a cabinet that is clearly paralleled, as ‘‘source of music,’’ to the mother’s body (access that the mother rebukes allegedly by saying, ‘‘You’re going to learn to keep your hands off things they have no business on’’), but because it establishes a ‘‘first time.’’ It is important that this moment joins Berry’s first production of a ‘‘jumpy rhythm that floored’’ (in both senses) him to the first beating he remembers receiving from his mother. This is especially so because, at this moment in his text, Berry is clearly going out of his way to account for his talent, his musical roots. He even goes so far as to link his signature stage move, the ‘‘duck walk’’ (visible, for example, in his performance of ‘‘Maybellene’’ in Rock, Rock, Rock), with a specific childhood prank. Thus, what is first expressed here is the conjunction of producing rhythm and getting ‘‘whooped.’’ As witnesses who necessarily distance Berry from his own memories of sight and touch, we find ourselves framed at the edge of a scene that contains, among other things, Berry’s own act of rearranging a scene to efface his presence. The consequences of this will require elaboration. First, however, let us turn to the second beating. Although it was also administered by his mother, it centers on a memory of his father. Significantly, this scene is also explicitly linked to Berry’s emergence as a musician—in fact, to the very sort of lyricist who would come up with a phrase like ‘‘the gelding grant he gifted my gut’’: Somewhere in between my whippings, the church members performed a stage play entitled The Dream of Queen Esther at the Amytis Theater, one of the three ‘‘colored theaters’’ in the city that we were able to go to. The entire family was present and seated in the second row center of the theater. My father, in costume and makeup, playing the role of Mordecai, made his first entry about midway through the play. I didn’t recognize him strutting across the stage until he spoke his line, shouting: ‘‘Oh, Sire! Sire! Someone’s approaching the castle!’’ Immediately I stood straight up and shouted back, ‘‘There’s Daddy! There’s Daddy!’’ Mother yanked me back down in the seat (Mother is strong) and rendered me a dandy fanny chastisement. What really burned in was not behind me but what lay ahead through the inspiration I acquired from my dad’s and my big sister Thelma’s way of dramatizing things. The ability to construct a statement, manipulate a situation, or just do a job as well as they did it became my ambition. All the poems that Daddy used to recite to us after dinner settled in my bank of memories and encouraged me to create my own rhymes and ditties. (Berry 1987, 13)

Again, Berry presents us with a staged scene—in fact, a stage play witnessed by his entire family. Our witnessing is thus placed en abyme. sound of the city

137

Its reconstruction contains a spatiotemporal complexity worth reflecting on. This complexity is packed into the pun on ‘‘behind’’—precisely, one would think, the sort of statement construction being lauded in the passage—where the locus of ‘‘chastisement’’ and something like a ‘‘turning point’’ are unstably aligned. When the passage concludes by attributing his own verbal wit (certainly Henry Louis Gates would say, ‘‘signifyin’ ’’) to his father’s (and Thelma’s) way of ‘‘dramatizing things,’’ it is clear that the dramatic scene is one where Berry envisions himself on stage, presumably being recognized by those future sons who are inclined to call him—as Berry was indeed called—the ‘‘Founding Father of Rock’’ (Berry 1987, 275). His mother’s chastisement of his fanny thus burns into his memory a scene in which, in recognizing his father through a verbal performance, Berry derives a screen onto which he can project his own future career as one of rock-and-roll’s premiere lyricists. A poet musician is being beaten, indeed. Here, then, we have another elaboration of the irreducible link between beating and the emergence of rock-and-roll, but one with very different accents from those found in the memories of Bo Diddley. True, in both instances memory, decisively linked with pain, plays a pivotal role, but in Berry’s account—especially through the blatant Oedipal scenario (Mother punishes him for touching a ‘‘stylus’’ he should not be touching; indeed, one that he associates with her body)—a clear link between beating and sexuality emerges. Is this a ‘‘mere’’ coincidence, or is there something more intractable at work in this linkage? I propose that there is something here that is more than intractable. It is vital both to beating and to rock-and-roll. But to tease it out will require that we take up the theme of sexuality directly and render explicit all of my pointed allusions to Freud’s now immensely controversial essay ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’’Ω The Violence That Is Sexuality Freud’s essay, which dates from the same period as Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is one of the very few in which, in addition to differentiating sharply between boys and girls, he actually seeks to derive general psychoanalytical principles—in this case about sexual perversion— from the experience of girls. Although one is tempted to regard this association as ‘‘predictable’’ and dismiss it, Freud in fact goes out of his way not only to ‘‘normalize’’ perversion but to distribute it evenly among men and women. Perhaps because masochism (as a perversion) is at center stage in this essay, the otherwise indispensable concept of 138 percussion

‘‘fantasy’’ (Phantasie in the German, and therefore presumably ‘‘phantasy’’ in the Standard Edition) is left essentially unexamined, a state of affairs which prompted Jean Laplanche’s and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s spectacularly suggestive rereading of this essay to which I will turn shortly. This said, however, it is worth drawing attention to certain of the principles advanced in ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’’ What sparked the seduction-theory controversy are the enabling theoretical moves that initiate Freud’s discussion. After observing that a distinct subgroup among his patients share the fantasy evoked by the phrase, ‘‘A child is being beaten’’ (Ein Kind wird Geschlagen), and noting that in spite of literary incitements such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (an allusion whose perhaps overdetermined significance will become clearer in the concluding section of this chapter) and a widespread form of vigorously physical pedagogy where young patients certainly could have encountered the material content for beating fantasies, the structural details of these fantasies, not to mention their specifically libidinal character, are such that they could not be explained in terms of the experience of ‘‘real corporal punishment’’ (Freud 1974, 180). Hence, appealing to the concept of fantasy becoming necessary. In order to specify the perverse dynamics organizing this fantasy, Freud then lays out what are in effect three scenes. As we shall see, the scenic aspects of his discussion are key to that aspect of the psychoanalytical account of fantasy pertinent to the percussive field. In each case, a different articulation of the phrase ‘‘A child is being beaten’’ organizes as if captioning the attendant scene. In the first, the phrase is rendered as, ‘‘My father is beating the child (whom I hate).’’ This scene is conscious (as is the third scene) and dominated by the perversion of sadism. Visualized, the scene positions the analysand as the voyeur, the one deriving onanistic satisfaction from watching the father beat another child. There is no overlap in this scene between the analysand and the beaten child. In the second, ‘‘most important,’’ ‘‘most momentous’’ scene (Freud 1974, 185), the phrase is rearticulated as, ‘‘I am being beaten by my father.’’ It is decidedly unconscious—in fact, Freud characterizes this scene as a ‘‘construction of analysis’’ (Freud 1974, 185)—and it is organized by the perversion of masochism. However, it is in the third, and final, scene that the phrase by which the fantasy is named, ‘‘A child is being beaten,’’ comes to be articulated as such. The subject performing the beating is rarely if ever explicitly presented as the father, though it is often a father substitute—for example, a teacher (a mother?). The object of the beating is not the analysound of the city

139

sand, and it is often plural. Also consciously sadistic, this scene presents us with a staging wherein the analysand is again cast as a voyeur, and where all other players are hidden by symbolic or numerical diffusion. What makes the second scene ‘‘momentous’’ is the fact that it is dominated by the girl’s (remember her experience is the one at the putative center of the essay) masochistic desire for the father. The etiological trigger for this desire is Oedipal guilt over the daughter’s sexual attraction to the father, which is then repressed, only to return in the fantasmatic scene as a desire for punishment. Because Freud insists that this scene has never had a real existence, he leaves himself open to ridicule (and more) on the part of the legion of daughters who have indeed suffered incest or abuse at the hands of their fathers, whether or not these daughters harbored Oedipal desire for them. Momentous, indeed. Let us recall, however, that Freud was talking about a phase in the reconstruction of an experience. Thus, even if real incest has taken place (and is the Occidental world not now confronted with the truly perverse task of restoring a taboo?), Freud’s point is that the fantasy now haunting the analysand contains a structural phase that is by definition unconscious. It is the scene where the analysand stages her (in this case) role in the onset of the fantasy, where something in her tells her why she is the victim of a beating fantasy. Although the temptation is great to attribute a traumatic cause to the unconscious status of this fantasy, I will later argue that this is a temptation we might have good political reasons for resisting. The second phase of the fantasmatic scene is also ‘‘momentous,’’ because when Freud moves to extrapolate this analysis onto the beating fantasies of his male patients, he discovers that, unlike women, men are conscious of it. However, the caption is not, ‘‘I am being beaten by my father’’ but, rather, ‘‘I am being beaten by my mother.’’ Struggling, ultimately in vain, to preserve the analytic fantasy of sexual symmetry, Freud discovers beneath the conscious beating fantasy involving the mother a repressed, and therefore unconscious, homoerotic investment in the father—in effect, a caption reading, ‘‘I am loved by my father.’’ Thus, in slipping the father behind the mother, the ‘‘person who administer[s] the chastisement’’ (die züchtigenden Personen), the analysand protects the father not simply from the stain of violence, but from the consequences of his own desire. Though there is much here that might usefully be brought into dialogue with the contents of Berry’s autobiography, I would prefer to resist the impulse Freud gave in to in his reading of the Schreber case (using clinical knowledge to read a text that is then used to confirm and elaborate clinical knowledge), and turn 140 percussion

instead to the features of Freud’s discussion that establish fantasy as the medium through which sexuality and beating touch. As the various conjugations of the verb ‘‘to be’’ make clear, these scenes are temporalized only at the level of clinical reconstruction. Otherwise, they are spatially superimposed in a way that conforms to Freud’s general predilection for topographic models. Two important things follow from this. First, the scene of the beating fantasy is thoroughly staged—that is, the scene is composed of a system of spatial ‘‘overlays,’’ or animated scrims, in which key players are distributed and redistributed, including the player designated as ‘‘witness.’’ Hence, I argue, Laplanche’s claim that the fantasy is precisely not an event, but a scene (Laplanche 1999) is a point well taken. Second, precisely because fantasy stages the very position of witnessing, and does so within a system in which time is rendered chronologically ambiguous, its own punctuation or location is extremely dubious. No doubt this helps explain why even (or, perhaps, especially) the fantasies of others are so seductive: Not only do they travel well (from one medium, or moment, to another), but they also issue casting calls that accept all comers. I emphasize this to underscore the theatricality of Berry’s memories, both of which involve elaborate staging and a very precise distributing of roles. I realize, obviously, that Berry’s beatings ‘‘really happened’’ (though we have no independent confirmation of that), but before we therefore disqualify them as fantasies, let us continue to draw on them as ways to illuminate further the phenomenon of beating, particularly as it figures in the emergence of musicians deeply associated with a musical idiom often conflated with sex. Needless to say, I believe there is an important sense in which Berry’s autobiographical material can be understood as ‘‘fantasy,’’ but a credible case will depend on the introduction of additional preliminaries. At this juncture, reference to Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s reading of ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’ becomes crucial, because they situate their discussion of Freud’s essay in the context of a broader psychoanalytic discussion of the concept of fantasy (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986). In so doing, they expressly link together—under the heading of fantasy—beating and sexuality. Because it has long been argued that the expression ‘‘rock-and-roll’’ is African American argot for ‘‘fucking,’’ any effort to comprehend rock-and-roll through the construct of the percussive field must come to terms with sexuality (understood here as ‘‘sexual practice,’’ though obviously the issue of ‘‘sexual difference’’ can never be factored out entirely).∞≠ My strategy here will be to think about how ‘‘skin contact’’ is very much part of the way sound of the city

141

bodies define the relations that constitute both their limits and the sense of transgressing them. From such a perspective, one of the decisive aspects of ‘‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’’ (Fantasme originaire: Fantasmes des origines; Origines du fantasme), which Laplanche and Pontalis conceived as an exegetical supplement to their widely influential The Language of Psychoanalysis, is its reexamination of the temporality of fantasy. Their account opens, with disarming cleverness, by establishing just how clumsily fantasy fits within Freud’s epistemological distinction between reality (understood as ‘‘actual events’’) and imagination (understood, obviously, as ‘‘imagined’’ or even hallucinated events). In establishing this, Laplanche and Pontalis construct what they call (no doubt following Foucault) the ‘‘archaeology’’ of fantasy, delineating not only Freud’s theoretical indecision concerning the concept, but its oddly decisive status vis-à-vis Freud’s commitment to the seduction theory—the very matter that is central to the confrontation between Masson and Malcolm. Temporality makes its appearance in relation to the distinction between the real and the imagined, where—when Freud is allegedly committed to the seduction theory—an actual event of parental seduction is understood necessarily to have preceded the subsequent imagining of it in ‘‘fantasy.’’ Reality thus precedes fantasy. In a deft exegetical maneuver, Laplanche and Pontalis trace how Freud clung throughout his work to the concept of an original cause, a real event, whose repression could be said to be decisive in the same way for all subjects. Their point—much like the one that has become the very hallmark of Laplanche’s reading of Freud—is that Freud, in order to establish the theoretical necessity of this cause, ended up repressing even more important insights. Although in the final analysis it is the principle of Nachträglichkeit (‘‘afterwardness’’ or the notion that, for the subject, everything takes place after the fact) that Laplanche and Pontalis discern behind Freud’s preoccupation with the real cause, they elaborate the implications of their insight by first unpacking the concept of the ‘‘originary’’ (what I have been referring to throughout this study as the ‘‘aboriginal’’), as in ‘‘originary fantasy.’’ The basic argument, though of enormous consequence, can be stated in simple terms: If a temporal delay structures the relation between reality and fantasy, then this delay is in some sense part of our experience of both reality and fantasy. The delay is in both reality and fantasy insofar as they are related. Under such conditions, reality is separated from itself for us by the delay that makes it fundamentally fantasizable. (And vice versa: Fantasy is separated from itself by what makes it realizable.) 142 percussion

This means that, in what makes reality seem original to us, fantasy is at work. This fantasy is not particular in the sense of exhibiting distinctive or otherwise unique contents. Instead, it is general. It registers something like the fantasizability of reality—that is, the fact that for us reality is mediated by and through the psychical apparatus. As a consequence, the delay that structures the relation between fantasy and reality is not, strictly speaking, a chronological one. Reality does not absolutely come before, nor does fantasy necessarily come after, even though there is some sense in which there is indeed a delay between them. To capture this distinctively general sense of fantasy, Laplanche and Pontalis designate it as ‘‘originary’’—that is, fundamental to our sense of what is original without for that reason constituting an origin. What this startling line of reasoning puts in play is a ‘‘spatialization’’ of time—indeed, the very transfiguration on which rests the rich theatricality already discerned in the fantasy ‘‘A child is being beaten.’’ It is worth emphasizing that, although ‘‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’’ delineates how Freud both discovers and represses what complicates the seduction theory, the essay does not side with those who condemn Freud’s implicit sexual politics. Instead, it complicates this debate by proposing that ‘‘originary fantasy’’ interferes with one’s ability to invoke something like ‘‘mere fantasy’’ as a way to eliminate the possibility of a real seduction. By the same token, it makes the reality of a seduction, in particular, share with fantasy something that undermines its epistemological, and ultimately political, priority. What matters to Laplanche and Pontalis is not the issue of giving theoretical comfort to Malcolm or Masson. Instead, what matters is the striking pertinence of seduction in the debate over fantasy, and, most important of all, the theory of sexuality that sustains it. By bringing the principle of ‘‘afterwardness’’ explicitly to bear on the discussion of fantasy, Laplanche and Pontalis begin teasing out an account of sexuality from Freud’s discussion of perversion. If the basic logic of afterwardness has indeed been captured in the recent ad campaign for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes—‘‘Taste them again for the first time’’—then it is precisely this ‘‘flaky’’ logic that Laplanche and Pontalis deploy in order to establish that sexuality is structured like a fantasy—in other words, that our fantasy of the onset of ‘‘sexuation’’ (a term used by Lacanians to designate the subject’s engagement with sexual difference) arises after, but nevertheless precedes or prepares the sense made of, ‘‘sexuation.’’ To clarify this, it may help to cover what for some may be familiar ground. Though Laplanche and Pontalis do not read Freud’s account of the sound of the city

143

Oedipal scenario in any detail, their insistence on its importance in this context draws attention to one of its long recognized ‘‘sticking points’’—that is, the phenomenon of infantile sexuality. In order for the heterosexual son (perhaps the least well-advertised achievement of Oedipalization) to enter into the rivalrous relationship with the father, the son must be compelled by the father to abandon his ambiguously sensual relation to the mother. In order for this relationship to be ambiguous, it must genuinely contain a ‘‘sexual,’’ and therefore potentially ‘‘incestuous,’’ component. The question is: In what sense is the contact, the touching at the heart of nurturing, ‘‘sexual’’? The answer, of course, is in a belated sense. The son does not have specifically sexual feelings toward the mother, even though his experience is deeply marked by an affect that will only become ‘‘sexual’’ for him within a subsequent fantasmatic scenario in which he gives narrative shape to this highly unstable configuration of pleasure and pain—in short, excitement. What gives the nurturing relation its ambiguity—in addition to the ‘‘enigmatic signifiers’’ (one of Laplanche’s conceptual innovations) put into circulation by the unconscious dimension of the mother’s attentions—is the fact that the son’s excitement is fundamentally structured by afterwardness. That is, the future fantasy is already latent in the very perception of the excitement with no name. In securing this insight, Laplanche and Pontalis draw attention to the way the Oedipal scenario contains an account of subject formation. That is, if the superego is one of the products of Oedipalization (it embodies the internalized authority of the father that allows the son to control his rivalry with him by entering into a rivalrous, or disciplined, relationship with himself), then the subject of fantasy, its bearer, is effectively consolidated as a structure in or through this scenario. Thus, the ambiguity of nurture derives not primarily from the son’s inability to weigh the relative proportions of its sensual and sexual content, but from the ‘‘unfinished’’ character of the son’s subjectivity. The accent falls on the subject rather than on the content of the excitation. Originary fantasy is thus indexed to the psychical process through which the subject ‘‘stages’’ the history of its own formation. Although specifically sexual fantasies follow the encounters that later come to be grasped as sexual, this trajectory precedes and conditions our experience of those encounters. As we have seen, ‘‘originary fantasy’’ functions as the medium within which this preemptive delay takes place. It is ‘‘psychical’’ precisely to the extent that it stages the formation of the psychical apparatus—an apparatus that, as we have seen, models its own faulty tower on the enclosure of the skin. 144 percussion

In light of this, it is not hard to perceive how, when all is said and done, afterwardness must be the animating principle behind the concept of the ‘‘originary fantasy.’’ It complicates, in virtually the same way, the distinction between a merely sensuous touch and a sexual touch and does so in a way that obliges the site of this touch, the skin, to conform to the flaky logic of afterwardness. Which means what? It means that the skin as a separation between interiority and exteriority, and as a surface stretched between the presexual and the sexual, is properly fantasmatic not in the sense of being ‘‘merely’’ imaginary, but in the sense of being mediated, for us, by and through fantasy. Like fantasy itself, the skin mediates; like skin, fantasy folds and refolds what is first and what is last, what is in and what is out. Sexuality is implicated here—and ineluctably so—both because sorting between it and the ‘‘merely’’ sensual is crucial to securing the subject’s position within the circuits of a heterosexist (one might also say, ‘‘patriarchal’’) kinship system, and because sexuality is precisely what the infant is attempting to fathom in the question: ‘‘Where do I come from?’’ Seduction, as a particular way of thinking ‘‘sexuation,’’ comes as naturally as anything can to fantasy because fantasy is tied to the way we survive the origins of sexuality. It thus provides access to the structural dynamics of subject formation. In a sense, we take our places in fantasy. In characterizing the consequences of this for the seduction theory, we can appreciate how it complicates and refines my earlier remarks about ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’’ Essentially, what Laplanche and Pontalis argue about the link between fantasy and sexuality is that due to the flaky logic of afterwardness—where the sexual character of a ‘‘prior’’ unnameable incident comes to it from the unconscious reserves of ‘‘originary fantasy’’—sexuality is perceived by the subject as a ‘‘break in.’’ Our sexuality is lived not as endemic to us but, rather, as something that strikes us as an encroachment—or as Laplanche and Pontalis put it, ‘‘Sexuality literally breaks in from outside ( fait irruption du dehors)’’ and is perceived as ‘‘an inner ‘foreign body,’ which breaks out from within the subject ( fait irruption du sein même du sujet)’’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, 10). In complicating the surface, the locus, of the subject, this crosscurrent of in and out duly complicates the seduction theory, which, in presupposing—indeed, in insisting on—a real trauma of incest or abuse, disconnected not just sexuality and violence, but also fantasy and subjectivity. Those who criticize Freud for immorally abandoning the seduction theory often seem more intent on purifying sexuality than interested in understanding what Freud had to say about it. If we begin by acknowledging—as Freud did not—that sexuality is sound of the city

145

deeply organized by the sociohistorical conditions that constitute the ‘‘toxicity’’ of the relations said to embody it, then it is worth insisting that ‘‘our’’ sexuality is lived as a violation. Does this so radicalize what has been called ‘‘false memory syndrome’’ that any capacity to challenge one’s abuse as a child is thereby undercut? I think not, for if we start with the premise that a ‘‘break in/out’’ has occurred, then what becomes important is the frank effort to determine where the precise details of one’s memories, one’s fantasies, derive from. By thus ‘‘raising the bar,’’ we circumvent denial and dismissal and lend urgency to the collective task of developing the means by which to explore the question: What has happened to us? This is by no means an ‘‘apolitical’’ query. Sometimes such an inquiry will discover that incestuous violence or abuse has indeed taken place; at other times, however, it may discover that someone’s sexual identity is perceived—given a precise sociohistorical context—as an imposition or a source of humiliation for which someone else ‘‘must’’ be held accountable. Either way, sexuality, for the subject, has broken in or out. Obviously, it is in this sense that I will defend the political (and even sexual-political) importance of repudiating the seduction theory. I concede that the consequences of this account of sexuality for ‘‘beating fantasies’’ are not immediately apparent. However, if we begin by thinking about the obvious parallels—the oscillation between conscious and unconscious scenarios, the significantly Oedipal character of them (‘‘I am being punished for the excitement my father produces in me’’), and, last but not least, the perhaps serendipitous proximity between beating and breaking—then the articulation of these consequences becomes easier. As we have seen, fantasy maintains an intimate relation to sexuality not only because it conditions our experience of it, but also because that conditioning casts the experience as a moment in which the ‘‘then’’ sexual subject arises, albeit belatedly, at the site of a break in/out. The structure of fantasy, then, is such that sexuality and beating encounter each other within the associative paradigm of violence, if not, in fact, violation. That is to say, of course, that the notion of a beating fantasy is to some degree redundant. Although it may certainly make sense to characterize the theatrical content of a particular fantasy in terms of a beating, the fantasy as an instance of the subject’s formation—particularly insofar as it reposes the question, ‘‘Where do I come from?’’—constitutes itself as a violation, a break in/out where the subject’s skin, its envelope, is lived as ‘‘compromised.’’ This entitles us to conclude that the beating fantasies reported and analyzed in ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten’’ are also sexual fantasies. (Freud, 146 percussion

after all, draws on them to illuminate the domain of sexual perversion.) Or, somewhat more rigorously formulated, they are fantasies of sexuality. Laplanche and Pontalis underscore this in their reading of Freud’s essay. The second decisive aspect of ‘‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,’’ though less comprehensive in its implications (and therefore easier to summarize quickly), is perhaps even more crucial to the project of bringing this discussion of beating and subject formation to bear on the analysis of music. It concerns the priority given to hearing in Laplanche and Pontalis’s elaboration of the structure of fantasy. Their discussion invites one to consider the possibility that fantasy is a vital component of what Adorno has called ‘‘the structure of listening’’ (Adorno 1980). In directing our attention to the emphasis Freud placed on the link between paranoid fantasy and ‘‘aural perception’’ in ‘‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytical Theory of the Disease’’ (Freud 1974, 97–106), Laplanche and Pontalis find themselves obliged to account for the importance that Freud attached to the relation between fantasy and hearing. The whole passage is worth quoting: We suggest that there are two reasons (motifs). One relates to the sensorium in question: hearing, when it occurs, (breaks)(rompt) the continuity of an undifferentiated perceptual field and at the same time is a sign (the noise waited for and heard in the night) which puts the subject in the position of having to answer something (mettant le sujet en position d’interpellé). To this extent the prototype of the signifier lies in the aural sphere, even if there are correspondences in the perceptual registers. But hearing is also—and this is the second reason (motif ) to which Freud alludes explicitly in the passage—a history of the legends of parents, grandparents and the ancestors: the family sounds or sayings, this spoken or secret discourse, going on prior to the subject’s arrival, within which he must find his way (où il doit advenir et se repérer). In so far as it can serve retroactively to summon up the discourse, the noise—or any other discrete sensorial element that has meaning—can acquire this value. (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, 18–19; italics in original)

The opening gambit of the passage—aside from reiterating what Eisler and Adorno have already taught us about the specificity of hearing— attempts to ground the link between fantasy and hearing in the character of hearing itself. Significantly, this link is sought in the fact that sound breaks in on the hearer, differentiating a previously undifferentiated sonic environment. Although it makes sense to stress that this gives sound a privileged relation to the signifier, given that, in postsound of the city

147

Saussurean linguistics, the signifier is understood to arise out of a differentiating matrix, it is equally important to stress, as do Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, that ‘‘the human ear offers not just another hole in the body, but a hole in the head’’ (Kahn and Whitehead 1994, ix). Why? Because if the break in constitutes the juncture between fantasy and hearing, then it is crucial that the link between the signifier and subject be preserved. It is not enough to locate the break in the sonic environment. Particularly if, as I have argued, the notion of a beating fantasy is in a certain sense redundant, then it is important to discover in the link between hearing and fantasy the perforation of the body, the beating, that the acoustic signifier at once perpetrates and presupposes. Moreover, this helps us appreciate the significance of the second reason offered by Laplanche and Pontalis for Freud’s insistence on the link between aural perception and fantasy. There they stress what Lacanians refer to as the ‘‘first entry into language’’—that is, the sounds and sayings that constitute the sonic environment, the signifying matrix, out of which the speaking subject arises. In associating this environment with the family and its history, they introduce much needed psychosocial detail into what is otherwise a structural abstraction. Aside from capturing here how hearing figures centrally in the question ‘‘Where do I come from?’’ this discussion allows to see how the theatrical character of fantasy—in effect, the staging of the family romance— is also decisively mediated by hearing. Of course, fantasy, particularly in its strictly scenic character, strikes us as eminently more visual than sonoric, but for precisely this reason the originality and boldness of Laplanche and Pontalis’s claim is all the more intriguing. For what the emphasis on hearing does is underscore the fact that, with regard to what is specifically fantasmatic, how we conceptualize the subject’s status as a sensorium is vital to our understanding of the structure through which fantasy and the subject are implicated in each other. By reintroducing the claims of hearing, Laplanche and Pontalis in effect authorize one to think about fantasy and its structure by explicitly appealing to the ‘‘conflict of interpellations’’ addressed in Chapter Two. This again emphasizes, though from a somewhat different direction, the way beating fantasies belong properly to those practices that make up the percussive field that I have deemed psychoanalytical. Let us return to the accounts of beating that dominate the early pages of Berry’s autobiography. What renders them fantasmatic—aside from the fact that they are reconstructions—are the details they foreground.

148 percussion

Consider here the elaborate scenarios (Berry crawling into the Victrola and being startled by his mother’s sudden return), the centrality of sound (the ‘‘source of music,’’ the ‘‘jumpy rhythm,’’ mother’s sneeze, the ‘‘whack’’), the voyeurism the reader is asked to identify with, the way the beatings are presented as instances of his self-formation, and, most important, the way ‘‘mother’’ (a term of respect) is used to screen ‘‘Daddy’’ (a term of re-infantilization) from implicit rebuke. What is important about these episodes is the way their status as fantasies invites us to recognize how ‘‘the other name for Rock-and-Roll’’ came to his identity as a musician through beating—beating that, by virtue of its fantasmatic character, linked that identity with the origins of sexuality, the ‘‘break in/out.’’ As established in Chapter One, Berry’s characterization in ‘‘Rock ’n’ Roll Music’’ of the backbeat as somehow impervious to loss suggests, in this context, that in his musical construction of rockand-roll, Berry understood the way his own identity was at stake there. This formulation implies that rock-and-roll is not about sexuality, much less simply a metaphor for fucking (or for that matter, ‘‘automatic fire’’); rather, rock-and-roll is caught up in the struggle to make sense of, to negotiate with, the break in/out of sexuality. So as not to be misunderstood, let me emphasize that I do not read Berry’s desire to enter the ‘‘source of music’’ as flatly incestuous. Such a reading derives from a psychoanalysis that has little desire to grasp its own genealogical entanglement in the history of capitalist modernity. Instead, by invoking the concept of fantasy, I am trying to underscore how the effort to make sense of musical beating needs to take stock of how intricately beating reaches into the formation of the subject, both as a member of a family and as a member of a class of migrants—that is, ‘‘country’’ people who went to find their ‘‘dreams’’ in the ‘‘big city.’’ There is nothing advantageous about complicating the musicological field by reinvesting in the various contextualisms whose partisans either reduce subject formation to the process within which ‘‘interests’’ are defined (much of what flies under the flag of identity politics restricts itself to such a strategy) or ignore it altogether. By the same token, accounts of subject formation that settle for delineating the many avatars of its constitutive impossibility often provide musicology with precisely the alibi it needs to avoid confronting the labor of contextualization. Such precautions may seem prudent in the end, but on a first hearing they appear to bear on musicological issues only indirectly. Is there a way to avoid this? Is there a way to make beating matter to music not in an autobiographical—however complicated—register,

sound of the city

149

but at the level of musical practice ‘‘itself,’’ and do so without breaking the link between beating and the body? This, to my mind, is one of the signal achievements of Roland Barthes’s writings on music. ‘‘This Body That Beats’’ Barthes’s writings on music dot his corpus, obliging one to respond to his amateurism (in the ‘‘strong’’ amorous sense) with the passionate detachment of the connoisseur. The piece that recommends itself here is ‘‘Rasch’’ (Barthes 1985, 299–312). It does so not primarily because of the brilliant things it has to say about Robert Schumann (Rasch, it turns out, is a ‘‘Schumannian’’ word), but because of the way it invites us to think about the body of music both as a cultural practice and as a theoretical object. Not surprisingly, beating figures here prominently. In fact, beating is the concept through which Barthes makes music and theory answerable to each other. Given their centrality, beating and the body enter the essay in its opening paragraph. However, what Barthes means by beating only comes later. He writes, It is not a matter of beating fists (taper les poings) against a door, in the presumed manner of fate. What is required is that it beats (ça batte) [presumably ‘‘music,’’ but certainly also ‘‘it,’’ or Freud’s Es] inside the body, against the temple, in the sex, in the belly, against the skin from inside, at that level of that whole sensuous emotivity which we call, by metonymy and antiphrasis, the ‘‘heart.’’ ‘‘To beat’’ (Battre) is the very action of the heart (there is no ‘‘beating’’ except the heart’s), which occurs at this paradoxical site of the body: central and decentered, liquid and contractile, pulsional and moral; but it is also the emblematic word of two languages: linguistics (in the grammatical example ‘‘Peter beats Paul’’) and psychoanalysis (‘‘A child is being beaten’’). (Barthes 1985 302; italics in the original)

Though the quote opens by calling up—no doubt ‘‘accidentally’’—the Althusserian scene of interpellation (the friend at the door), it quickly moves to ‘‘internalize’’ beating, to situate it in the heart (a matter I will revisit at length in the final chapter). And yet, as if to acknowledge the ‘‘rashness’’ of this all-too-familiar move, Barthes, in dividing the beat between linguistics and psychoanalysis, likewise divides the heart, revealing its status as a trope and, in effect, eviscerating the body. Beating becomes the body’s paradoxical center—that is, the place where that which is most intimate and that which is most foreign correspond. It takes on musicological importance by suggesting that rhythmic nota150 percussion

tion is to be indexed to an organ suspended somewhere between nature and culture, thus challenging romanticism and formalism at the same time. To this extent, Barthes makes the beating heart matter to musical practice by pressuring the limit of what academic musicology might subsume under that heading. The various manifestations of this pressure are worth delineating. Consider, for example, the scores Barthes introduces as evidence supporting his reading of the various variations. As Barthes himself fully acknowledges, there is something personal, almost eccentric or fetishistic, about his invocation of the body’s beating as something audible in the pieces. Is this simply about idiosyncrasy? I think not. To appreciate why, one needs first to note Barthes’s fascination with expression markings (for example, andante or quasi parlando), then speculate on why they hold such analytical value for him. It has to do with performance. Barthes approaches the Kreisleriana variations as someone who has tried to play them, someone who in thinking through the execution of the score has had to imagine for himself the various harmonic episodes of the compositional narrative. Hence, a melody might be said to ‘‘curl up’’ in a chord. Why? Because this is the way an amateur (but not necessarily only an amateur) might project his fingers, the extremities of his body, into the notation. Such projections are certainly ‘‘eccentric’’ (in the sense of being distinctive to Barthes), but what also makes them fetishistic is the way they link with the body and its desire. Barthes might be said to be putting a slightly different spin on Small’s concept of ‘‘musicking’’ by entwining sexual desire and the obsessive routines of composition, on the one hand, and performance, on the other. Thus, one needs to consider carefully the interplay between Barthes’s performing body (parceled out to the demands of dexterity, extension, and touch) and Schumann’s body as it—to use another Barthesean figure—‘‘throws itself’’ across the score. The homotextuality of this encounter is unmistakable. Although it might encourage us to narrow the beating body to a rather specific musicological tryst, the paradoxical interplay between the same and the other that animates both homosexuality and fetishism, in fact, underscores from yet another angle the connection between beating and ‘‘body-building.’’ To be sure, Barthes’s rendition of the body of and in music puts considerable pressure on the analytical resources of academic musicology. This is perhaps made clearest of all in the essay’s closing paragraphs, where Barthes draws on the beating body to articulate precisely what is inadequate about the traditional semiotics of music. Supplementing Emile Benveniste’s characterization of music as a ‘‘semantics’’ sound of the city

151

(rather than a ‘‘semiotics’’—the decisive matter resting on the claim that ‘‘sounds are not signs’’), Barthes calls for, a second semiology, that of the body in a state of music; let the first semiology manage, if it can, with the system of notes, scales, tones, chords, and rhythms, what we want to perceive and to follow is the effervescence of the beats (les fourmillements des coups). (Barthes 1985, 312)

This is more than just a call to pay attention to a particular sonoric object: beats. It is an appeal to beating that marks the limit of a particular kind of musicological formalism. Beating and its irreducible relation to—or, as I prefer to say, its articulation of—the body represents a way to situate what lies outside the disciplinary object known by academic musicology, thus drawing attention to a calculated ‘‘hearing loss’’ that nevertheless continues to organize our perception of the domain of music. The point, of course, is not to abandon the category altogether— music would thereby simply revert to its former ‘‘owners’’—but to use a critique such as Barthes’s to amplify the range of interpretive statements that can be brought to bear on the quarrels that constitute the contemporary struggle over music. When Barthes insists on linking beats to ‘‘the body in a state of music,’’ not only does he underscore the way the body marks its presence in music, but he reminds us that, to acquire significance for musical practice, beating perforce transforms what such practice is understood to comprehend. Music becomes the uncanny locus of the full array of shocks, jolts, ‘‘whoopins,’’ fantasies/fantasies (one might think here of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke), and so on that, in outlining the body, weave it into the erratically segmented and unevenly developed quilt of material life. Black Skins, White Drums To conclude this chapter, we must take up directly the question of the black body in urban space. If it makes sense to link rock-and-roll to the itineraries of musicians such as Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry (and the several other African American artists who would more than qualify here), then it is crucial to articulate the specific relationship between the ‘‘fact of blackness’’ and both urban shock and ‘‘whoopin’ ’’—even if Bo Diddley remains unclear about whether he was picked on for being black or for being ‘‘country.’’ Earlier, drawing on the work of Barbara Duden, I sketched a genealogy of the modern body that situated it on a trajectory stretched between ‘‘openness’’ and ‘‘closedness.’’ Although Duden’s account em152 percussion

phasizes the role of medical discourse in constructing a sealed body, her characterization of hygiene (the plainly epidemiological frame within which threats to the body are identified or conceived and studied) is such that one is invited to consider ‘‘living’’ within a given biopolitical regime a health risk. In light of this, it seems important to think about how the embodied subject perceived the presence of what Simmel has called ‘‘strangers’’ (die Fremden)—or, to put a slightly catachrestic spin on a medical figure, ‘‘foreign bodies.’’ My reasons for reintroducing Simmel’s work here are twofold. First, I want to stress that, within a context in which the body is increasingly perceived as the frontier separating the ‘‘inside’’ from the ‘‘outside’’ of the subject, ‘‘outsiders,’’ precisely to the extent that they embody the enigma of the frontier, its partition, assume a particular importance. In effect, the outsider, the stranger, stands out. And second, Simmel’s stranger (particularly in its more recent avatar as Robert Parks’s ‘‘marginal man’’ ) figures centrally in ‘‘Who Set You Flowin’?’’ (1995), Farah Jasmine Griffin’s ambitious study of ‘‘migration narratives.’’ Because Griffin’s analysis provides key material through which one can theoretically situate the black body in urban space, a brief elaboration of its conclusions is in order. Drawing on the work of figures such as Houston Baker, Amiri Baraka, and Hazel Carby, Griffin sets out to articulate the structure and history of the migration narrative, a genre of cultural expression (her key sources are literary and musical) that takes the migration of Southern blacks to the urban centers of the North as its central organizing event. The figure of the black migrant is what prompts her appeal to Simmel, who defined the stranger as someone we expect to encounter in the context of the urban metropolis.∞∞ In laying out what she designates as the four structural moments of migration narratives, Griffin establishes what is of interest to me about her study. Beginning with an answer to Jean Toomer’s question, ‘‘Who sets you flowin’?’’ Griffin characterizes the first moment as that in which the cause for one’s migration is narrated. Through a provocative reading in which lynching becomes a metaphor for all acts of violence perpetrated on black bodies, she makes it clear that ‘‘what sets one flowin’ ’’ is precisely what I have been considering under the heading of beating—that is, corporal punishment. Although this might lead one to assume that violence is less prominent in the second moment—the moment of the migrant’s ‘‘confrontation’’ with the urban setting—violence in fact returns. Or, as Baraka put it in his chapter on the city in Blues People, ‘‘The South was home. . . . [T]he North was to be beaten’’ (Baraka 1963, 105). It is in this context, in her theorizing of the shift involved from the first to the sound of the city

153

second moment, that Griffin introduces an organizing thematic that one could take further than she does. ‘‘Power is negative, it is dismembering, it seeks constantly to repress us, and when it is white on black, it comes with spectacle and torture’’ (Griffin 1995, 47). With this formulation Griffin makes clear that she is drawing on Foucault to frame her account of black migration. Although at one level she is reminding Foucault (and those influenced by his work) that the spectacle of power in its bluntly coercive, or negative, mode by no means disappeared with the prison—in particular, it did not disappear for Southern blacks—at another level she is directly appropriating his discussion of the body in order to characterize the distinctive impact of the city on black subjectivity. In effect, she renders Foucault’s discussion of the ‘‘birth of the prison’’ synchronic. She situates the spectacle of the scaffold in the South and the capillary circuits of disciplinary power in the North, arguing that precisely to the extent that the city reconstructed black subjectivity, it did so by replacing the body with the soul as the object of punishment. Obviously aware of the implications of her criticism of Foucault, Griffin insists that corporal punishment, in the guise not only of police brutality and domestic abuse but also of simply confronting ‘‘the din of the city,’’ continued in the North. Though this complicates her ‘‘synchronization’’ of Foucault, Griffin persists throughout her analysis in arguing that the more ‘‘sophisticated power’’ (read, ‘‘productive power’’) migrants found in the Northern cities had its impact primarily on the souls of black folks. This suggests, albeit implicitly, that ‘‘lynch culture’’ did not, as Fanon might have said, produce the black soul as a ‘‘White artifact.’’ Clearly, there is a difference between lynching and brutality, but it is not a difference that can be easily mapped on the distinction between the body and the soul as respective targets of punishment. This anomaly in Griffin’s otherwise compelling analysis has consequences for what I regard as its other enormously appealing component: her effort to situate the musical idiom of the blues within her account of the black-migration narrative. What she brings to the otherwise similar projects of Baraka, Carby, and Baker is a sharp focus on the narrativity of musical performance, and, in the case of Carby, broader attention to the social division of gender. Although one might expect a focus on narrative to push Griffin toward an exclusively ‘‘lyrical’’ treatment of music, to her credit it does not. Reiterating portions of the story told by Michael Ventura (see Chapter Three), Griffin traces how the blues underwent the effects of migration. In charting its formal modulations, she underscores the importance of new instruments (spe154 percussion

cifically, electric guitars and microphones), new venues (clubs, rent parties, and theaters), and new media (in particular, the recording of what Baraka calls ‘‘race records’’), all of which increased the tendency toward Adorno’s nemesis, ‘‘standardization’’ (less improvisation, fewer deviations).The result, at the lyrical level, accelerated the tendency toward narrativity—that is, telling a story rather than, as Keil has argued, merely ‘‘stringing together phrases’’ linked by a mood. Apart from the important historical insight that this discussion conveys, it also serves to frame Griffin’s ‘‘theory’’ of the blues—a theory that seeks the fundamental character of the idiom in the ‘‘blue note.’’ After speciously defining the ‘‘blue note’’ as ‘‘the lowered third, fifth and seventh degrees of a key’’ (Griffin 1995, 56), she speculates that, at the level of content, the ‘‘falling pitch’’ constitutes a space that contains the memory of, among other things, fear and terror.∞≤ Although her evocation of space here has been given fuller expression in the earlier discussion of ‘‘safe spaces’’ (for example, the black church)—an evocation that invites us to think somewhat differently about what Chess Studios might have represented for migrants such as Chuck Berry—her decision to privilege tonality in theorizing the blues suggests that her inclination to downplay the phenomenon of urban corporal punishment—in a word, beating—has found expression in her reading of music. She is concerned with conceptualizing the ‘‘initial confrontation’’ in a manner that is consistent with the following ‘‘autobiographical’’ formulation by Richard Wright: My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed like an unreal city whose mythic houses were built on slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of grey smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly in the dank prairie. Flashes of steam showed intermittently on the wide horizon, gleaming translucently in the winter sun. The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come. (Wright 1945, 1)

She also treats the urban blues as a vital source for both rock-and-roll and rap. Given these two factors, I find it odd that Griffin does not pay more attention to what Paul Gilroy (among others) has called ‘‘the blue beat.’’ It seems to me that precisely to understand the blues as the ‘‘impact’’ black migrants had on cities that had so deeply ‘‘impacted’’ them—in effect, the ‘‘response’’ to the ‘‘call’’ of the pavement and racism—one needs to keep the percussive character of the city’s ‘‘din’’ in the foreground of one’s reading of urban musics. This is especially true if one wants to start making sense of rock-and-roll, a musical sound of the city

155

idiom that, as I have argued, is grounded in ‘‘the beat.’’ Without this, one is again left with mere ‘‘senseless beating.’’ Although it could hardly be construed as her aim, Griffin’s discussion of the social division of gender within the migrant community helps one formulate a crucial point about rock-and-roll as an urban music—namely, that it may be inextricably involved in the construction of masculinity. (I will discuss this point at length in the next chapter.) Like her mentor Carby, Griffin insists on the priority of women in the blues tradition. Both of them take Baraka and Keil to task for failing to recognize this. Setting aside the validity of this claim for the moment (and I think it is overstated), what this sets up is Griffin’s suggestive analysis of the role of gender in the emergence of the socalled urban blues. By situating the blues in the tension between the church and the juke joint or club (both ambiguous ‘‘safe spaces’’), and noting that the beating inflicted by the pavement gave the kitchenette (a specifically domestic, and increasingly feminized, safe space) a special attraction for black women, Griffin argues that, as a result, the urban blues came to be appropriated by the likes of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. This is a tendency that becomes even more pronounced in the development of rock-and-roll during the ’50s, which is perhaps why the first cut Frith and McRobbie made into the nexus of rock and sexuality is subtitled, ‘‘Masculinity and Rock’’ (in Frith and McRobbie 1978–79, 5–8). The point here is not that women are uninvolved with rock-androll, or that rock-and-roll articulates only half of the social division of gender. It is that in rock-and-roll ‘‘musicking,’’ the subjects bearing the identities of men and women engage in a cultural war of position on a terrain where the campaigns—here as elsewhere—have ‘‘spoiled’’ socalled femininity. No one knows this better than the Grrrls. However, as we shall see, no one appears to know this less well than those drumming up the new masculinity in the men’s movement. Griffin’s study clearly establishes, in historical terms, not simply the warrant for thinking about Ellas McDaniel and Chuck Berry as subjects positioned within and by the ‘‘Great Migration.’’ It also establishes the warrant for theorizing their encounter with, in their cases, Chicago under the heading of beating. We are nevertheless left with something of a conundrum: Do migrant blacks simply constitute a special class within the broad category of strangers, or do they in some sense represent a ‘‘new’’ embodiment of the category, one that could be construed by whites as provoking a particularly violent form of skin contact? Put another way: How exactly are we to theorize the position 156 percussion

of the black body in an urban space organized by the discourses of racism? ‘‘Look, a Negro!’’ With these words Fanon opens his chapter ‘‘The Fact of Blackness’’ (‘‘L’expérience vécue du Noir’’) (Fanon 1967, 109– 140). As the subsequent reiterations of this sentence make clear, it is uttered in—of all places—a train by the daughter of a white—or, certainly, European—woman.∞≥ What Fanon goes on to detail is a displacement—the displacement of a ‘‘corporeal schema’’ by what he calls a ‘‘racial epidermal schema’’ (Fanon 1967, 112). Among the consequences of this displacement is a triple positioning of the black subject, an effect Fanon contrasts with the more classically philosophical notion of perceiving oneself from the perspective of a ‘‘third person.’’ Characterizing this multiple positioning of the black subject is a perspective on one’s capacity to engage ‘‘the other’’ that subsumes the black body under the heading of a ‘‘corporeal malediction.’’ To voice the implied logic at work here: As I see the recognition of my body in the other’s gaze, I live that body as a curse. To the extent that such an experience characterizes the displacement of the body by the skin, then we might say that one of the features of the triple positioning of the black subject is that the skin is peeled from the body, and—precisely to the extent that the black subject is thereby deprived of an other (she or he becomes, embodies, the other)—this skin is made to serve as the envelope, the ‘‘body bag,’’ into which the multiple positions of the black subject are gathered. It is striking, I find, that when summarizing the impact of his encounter with the white girl and her mother, Fanon writes, I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, and my ancestors. I subjected myself to ( je promenai sur moi) an objective examination (un regard). I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms (et me défoncérent le tympan), cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, slave-ships and above all else, above all: ‘‘Sho’ good eatin’.’’ (Fanon 1967, 112)

After indexing his three subject positions to correlative responsibilities, Fanon articulates the dialectic of the gaze with a figural force that clearly baffles his otherwise reliable translator. The details here are worth specifying, even if, in the end, no better translation of the passage can be provided. The formulation ‘‘je promenai sur moi un regard objectif’’ might better be rendered as, ‘‘I turned an objective gaze on myself,’’ though even this loses the richly urban evocation of promener (to stroll) or perhaps even flâner, an evocation that gives a rather parsound of the city

157

ticular resonance to the experience of averting one’s gaze. In effect, the white gaze provokes a gaze that traverses, or perhaps even ‘‘cruises,’’ the black body. Not only is the white gaze unreturned, but it deflects the answering gaze onto a surface where it then promenades—where, as it were, the black gaze ‘‘detours.’’ On its travels, the gaze discovers Fanon’s blackness, his ethnic characteristics, and, in addition or as a result (the punctuation, a dash rather than a semicolon, leaves the matter significantly undecidable), me défoncérent le tympan. Again, a better way to render this phrase might be, ‘‘my eardrum was punctured.’’ However, as we now know from Derrida’s ‘‘performance’’ on the tympan (see Chapter One), this is a remarkably rich French term, and the translator is certainly correct to hear in ‘‘tympan’’ the ‘‘tamtam’’ that indeed sounds in the text only a few pages later. For my purposes, it is important to stress here the remarkable way Fanon condenses the gaze, the encounter with the racial other, and a traversal of the body that ‘‘breaks in’’ a membrane, or skin, literally staging the catachresis that joins the body and the drum. As a result, ‘‘blackness’’ returns to Fanon as a pelt woven of melanin and two-tone visuality. Significantly, this return perforates—and, why not? ‘‘batters’’—a drum head. I stress the double character of this figure because in it we discern not only the cohabitation of drumming and beating, but also the explicitness with which Fanon links the urban experience of blacks with the lived experience of beating, although now, it is true, the beating captures in its violence the racial contact zone where the skin forms. I would argue that it is precisely this indissociability of the black body and the skin—that is, the pelt formed through pelting—that constitutes the black migrant not simply as a member of the general class of strangers, but also as one who decisively reconstitutes the stranger as a ‘‘foreign body.’’ What is it, though, that produces such an intimate suture between blackness and the body? This can be understood, at least in Fanon’s terms, by appealing to the work of two figures who loomed large on his theoretical and political horizon: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Specifically, in Sartre’s discussion of the body and otherness, many pertinent themes emerge. In Being and Nothingness (1956), for example, Sartre breaks up the body into three ontological dimensions: the body as the means by which the subject exists, the body as it is used and known by the Other, and the body as the means by which the Other appears as a subject for me. This link between the body of the Other and its subjectivity is vital. Nevertheless, when Sartre later lists all the ways in which the body lives its necessary contingency, its subjectivity, 158 percussion

he includes virtually everything but gender. Race, class, nationality, and so on, but not gender. Missing from existential otherness is thus precisely what later dominates the introduction to de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1974). There, de Beauvoir moves effectively to establish what, I argue, was to become vital to Fanon’s reading of Sartre: the fact that the ontological account of the Other (with the capital O) realized, in the register of philosophical discourse, the condition of what Sartre had once called hatred—that is, the fact that ‘‘hate is the hate of all Others in one Other’’ (Sartre 1956, 411). In other words, by predicating the existentialist derivation of the category of the Other on the absence of woman, Sartre, as far as de Beauvoir was concerned, was failing to theorize that feature of the Other that was most distinctive to it— namely, what differentiated it most pervasively from himself. Or, put differently, what de Beauvoir found dissatisfying about Sartre’s Other was his hatred of it—that is, his refusal to recognize the link between alterity and multiciplicity that defined the Other’s ontological structure. De Beauvoir’s way of elaborating this argument bears directly on the problem of the body and is therefore immediately relevant. Much, if not everything, hangs on the distinction between what Sartre and de Beauvoir call transcendence and immanence. How is this binary mobilized in the exchange between them? Arguing that human consciousness is radically free, Sartre construed transcendence as the drive to overcome all the means by which immanence impinged on, or otherwise sought to condition, consciousness. The model is not simply hierarchical; it is also geometric. Immanence designates a continuous plane above, which leaps or soars transcendence. Indeed, transcendence designates all that strives to clear the plane of immanence. Although he was reluctant to place the body in its classically Platonic position (‘‘the prison of the soul’’), Sartre nevertheless saw the body’s utter contingency (its radical proximity to death) as a decisive, because unavoidable, encroachment on the subject’s transcendental projects—projects that thus were associated with the freedom of consciousness. By establishing through an existential account of woman’s essential relationship to the world-historical task of reproduction (and, therefore, her rootedness in the body), de Beauvoir turned Sartre’s discussion on its feet. Indeed, the philosophical arguments that open The Second Sex demonstrate that transcendence, as the existential avatar of human destiny, depends deeply, if not fundamentally, on the entrapment of woman within immanence. It is in this sense, of course, that woman is not born but, rather, becomes man’s Other. True, de Beauvoir’s formulations risk assuming a certain sound of the city

159

‘‘non-strategic’’ essentialism, but by interrupting the auto-affection of fundamental ontology with contingency personified, she nevertheless established the urgency behind refusing to think the heterogenous multiplicity of others under the homogeneous heading of the Other. Put perhaps too bluntly, this strikes me as precisely what Fanon is doing with his discussion of the black body and the white gaze. As he makes clear in his opening discussion of ‘‘the Negro’’ and language (a discussion framed perhaps too restrictively within a colonial context), blacks lack the means of transcendence in lacking an Other through which their projects might be realized. Blacks lack the Other because they are trapped in otherness. They are the Other for those in a position to discern its structure—hence, Fanon’s inability to return the child’s gaze, an inability that seals him not simply in immanence, but also in the epidermal schema, or in effect in his blackness. Here, the blackness that foregrounds the body delivers the black body to immanence. This urges one to consider that Fanon is attempting to account for the ‘‘lived experience’’ of racism by drawing on de Beauvoir’s understanding of the link between the body and immanence, though, tellingly, he does so without underscoring the importance of the reproductive body. Recognizing that the displacement of the corporeal schema by the epidermal one produced his skin as a pelted pelt, Fanon suggests that it is precisely through the skin—not simply as an envelope, but as the frontier between an otherwise undifferentiated inside and outside— that blacks accede to the condition of immanence. As the bearers of the ‘‘signifier of discrimination,’’ blacks—by virtue of the lived experience of blackness—embody the body. Their bodies become an emblem of The Body in a white world. Shifting the accent from ‘‘man’’ to ‘‘Europeans’’ or ‘‘whites’’ (and being, as yet, unprepared to accept the theoretical consequences of doing so), Fanon then rewrites the politics of transcendence by arguing that, to the extent that black skin delimits the body as such, it represents, within the white gaze, the limit of transcendence. In fact, it undermines the very viability of such a project. Sartre, in recasting the distinction between the spiritual and material as one between transcendence and immanence, sought to outflank the moralism that attended the former distinction, but Fanon—ever ready to ‘‘call a spade a spade’’—insists on grounding the very conceptualization of immanence within a frame of intelligibility wherein racial discrimination and colonialism became and remained thinkable. Although such a perspective might lead one to assume that Fanon himself comprehends racism too philosophically (as if the embodiment of the body alone operated as a transhistorical memento mori), it is im160 percussion

portant to recall that Fanon is keenly aware of the economics of colonial domination, where the black laboring body is vitally involved in producing the material conditions for the pursuit of European (and even ‘‘native’’ middle-class) transcendence. Thus, the epidermal schema, which produces black skin as the ‘‘foreign body,’’ does so not simply by bodying forth the stigmata of the flesh, but also by shielding whites from a sustained encounter with the violent exploitation that their transcendence has long presupposed. As Marx might have said, the historical shift from practical to abstract (what Sartre would call ‘‘transcendental’’) consciousness presupposes the accumulation of a surplus—that is, the resources that allow some to think about thought while others think about survival. Fanon reads blackness as that which condemned certain minds and bodies to the latter fate. This is the other limit, the end, of transcendence. What light does this then shed on Simmel’s concept of the stranger? Obviously, a great deal can be said here, but I will settle for the crucial point: If the ‘‘foreignness’’ of the stranger is linked to the ‘‘foreign body,’’ or the body as that which is foreign to the subject, and if the subject is constructed as that which is apprehended in interiority, the body—as an envelope—models then the black body, precisely to the extent that it is perceived as the site of the frontier, the skin, comes to embody for the white gaze the familiar strangeness that those who have the means to do so seek to isolate and beat down. As Elias would have argued, the more modernization tightens the webs of interdependence—a development that is perhaps nowhere more evident than in a city, where separation itself depends on a grid of activities that virtually runs by itself—the more the status of the stranger comes to matter for those who encounter him or her. When large numbers of black migrants began to appear in Chicago after World War I, they were met with precisely the sort of epidemiological hysteria one would expect, given the framework sketched here. (‘‘Half a Million Darkies Swarm to the North,’’ screamed one headline [Griffin 1995].) Griffin (among others) documents this most convincingly. However, the particular accent I want to add is one that approaches this data from the perspective of Fanon’s ‘‘tom-toms.’’ In other words, if the white gaze produces black skin as a drum that in turn beats down the black body, and if the pelted pelt is where those who aspire to the status of subjects are menaced by unrelenting immanence, then there is an important sense in which the black body is the site at which the beating in or of the city is taking place. Not only are the bodies of black migrants beat in the city, but the beating of the body that embodies sound of the city

161

metropolitan shock is—in fantasy and elsewhere—represented as a fact of blackness, because beating is where the skin comes to be. In sealing the fate of the black body, whites deploy the epidermal schema as a means to seal up—or, as Duden might say, ‘‘close’’—their own bodies in two senses: first, in the sense that, if the black body can be absolutely trapped within its own skin, then it cannot enter what is an equally sealed-off white skin (an epidemiological and finally eugenic fantasy); and second, if one’s own body is locked away, then, most important of all, the subject is not open to it (a philosophical and finally political fantasy). Interpellation cannot be conflicted.∞∂ The blues, certainly—but even more so rock-and-roll—thus deserve to be seen as what de Certeau called ‘‘blows,’’ or moves. They are not simply musics about the urban experience. They are the ‘‘beating back’’ that arises as black bodies are cast off against white bodies as pelted pelts. Rock-and-roll in particular is forged from the effervescence of the beat, and ‘‘in’’ it one hears not simply the tom-tom beaten down, but also the report, or the beaten body beating back. If what Sara Cohen has written about Liverpool gang culture is accurate, this is precisely what attracted working-class whites like Lennon and Sutcliffe to its sound, for in rock-and-roll one could stumble on a heritage of revolt, a virtual memory theater of moves—or what, in a slightly more dated rhetoric, might be called ‘‘blows against the empire’’ (Cohen 1991, 13). These are certainly not ways of coping; nor do they represent the practice of what could be called ‘‘conceptual blackface.’’ These ‘‘blows’’ are ways into particular dimensions of the subjection of human agency that are not as readily available elsewhere. As such, they define the substance of a modest, but tenacious, pedagogy of the oppressed. Even if the power of such moves is deeply circumscribed by all that makes contemporary capitalism so perversely resilient, there is still here something of what Nietzsche once termed ‘‘the body’s knowledge.’’ Like all other knowledge, it will not set us, or anyone else, free. It will, however, get you up on your feet. The genealogy of subjection articulated within rock-and-roll will remain inaudible for those who are not on the dance floor or in the marches unless some effort is made to change the way we listen to, and think about, drumming. This is clearly what is at stake in the concept of the percussive field. Although the discussion thus far has stirred many as yet unthematized problems—notably, the ‘‘musical’’ scoring of masculinity and the problem of thinking the multiplicity of the other (it is telling that Fanon both exploits and forgets de Beauvoir’s critique of Sartre)—it has, one hopes, indicated the range of readings, or the inter162 percussion

pretive contexts, that might be brought to bear on making sense of what is taking place in the percussive register of a ‘‘piece’’ of music, regardless of whether the piece is recognized as what we have come to call a ‘‘hit.’’∞∑ To conclude, I will knot some loose threads and return to musicking; the white donning of black skins; and, yes, Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Specifically, I will turn my attention to one of the signature ‘‘beats’’ of rock-and-roll—the so-called Bo Diddley beat—and to a crucial aspect of what I have called lactification: the white covering of a black tune. First released on the posthumous Reminiscing (1963), Holly’s cover of ‘‘Bo Diddley’’ was initially recorded in 1956. Although what Philip Norman, one of Holly’s several biographers, has called the song’s ‘‘shuffling start–stop beat’’ (Norman 1996, 120) is also the rhythmic backbone of the early Crickets hit ‘‘Not Fade Away’’ (covered in turn by the Rolling Stones), what makes ‘‘Bo Diddley’’ so important here is its performance history, and, as we will see, the differences between the cover and the ‘‘original.’’ In the summer of 1957, Holly and the Crickets, as part of one of the ‘‘package tours’’ popular at the time, played the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They were the only white act in the lineup, a fact that only further complicated their reception by what many non-conservatory musicians regard as the most discerning audience in the West. Although ‘‘That’ll Be the Day’’ was just breaking onto the Billboard charts, the Crickets’ music was virtually unknown to the Apollo audiences, who, predictably, heckled and booed the band. Four days before the end of the disastrous engagement, Holly came up with the idea of playing ‘‘Bo Diddley’’ to open the set. The tune was not part of the Crickets’ repertoire, and the band performed it unrehearsed. But it worked. It was as though the Crickets had, at last, given the audience its ‘‘propers,’’ not simply by playing a black and therefore recognizable hit (Bo Diddley had, of course, played the Apollo), but by acknowledging, through the discreet homage of the cover, the sounds folded into their own. A cover can always be ‘‘ripped off,’’ of course, and indeed the lactification of rock-and-roll has crucially depended on the phenomenon of covering, but it is important to stress how this particular beat was deployed to save the professional skins of a white act. Perhaps not surprisingly, the work of lactification is audible in the difference between the two recorded performances: that of Bo Diddley (on Chess) and that of the Crickets (on Coral). In a fascinating discussion with Bo Diddley, Charles Keil draws out important points about the Bo Diddley beat (Keil and Feld 1994). Keil sound of the city

163

begins by reminding us that the beat is based on ‘‘hamboning’’ rhythms (patting juba is another incarnation) that derive from the period in which slaves were obliged to use their own bodies as drums. The rhythm is further enriched by the use of the mechanical reverberation available through the electric guitar and amplifier. Significantly, Bo Diddley repudiated this suggestion, though in the course of the exchange his resistance softened, culminating in the following important claim about the connection between ‘‘his’’ rhythm and the ‘‘wobbly’’ character of the sound: ‘‘No, not to sync it up [the wobbly singing and the wobbly rhythm of the guitar], it’s to learn to sing with that. Because it’s an offset beat. I call it offset. It ain’t directly right on’’ (Keil and Feld 1994, 105). In the interview, Bo Diddley went on to reveal as the ‘‘trick’’ of the song the fact that it expresses what he would have played on drums had he become the drummer he wanted to be. Keil, who uses this exchange, paradoxically, to ‘‘nail down’’ what Keil means by a participatory discrepancy (briefly, the looseness that all musical performance uses to produce its groove, its effect), recognizes that this revelatory feint is precisely the way Bo Diddley seeks to protect his ‘‘moves,’’ his ‘‘making do,’’ from white appropriation. And while I certainly think it wise to show respect here, one does wonder what is at stake in Keil’s immediate invocation of the ‘‘Spanish tinge’’ (Jelly Roll Morton’s formulation) of this offset beat, as though the clave beat for which it is the metaphor was not itself part of an African–Caribbean encounter that Bo Diddley could hardly be characterized as either disavowing or disrespecting. Is this musicological ‘‘covering?’’ But let us turn to the two performances. Where is lactification audible? Consider the decisive differences between the two tunes: Holly’s is slightly shorter; it ends on the fourth beat of the last measure (Bo Diddley resorts to a slow reverberating fade); it rearranges verses and changes the lyrics (notably, rendering the invocation of ‘‘mojo’’ in the third verse indecipherable); it uses different orchestration; it strongly emphasizes the instrumental break by simulating a tempo change (in fact, the whole combo pounds out the quarter-note beats of each bar); and, perhaps most important, it ‘‘skips’’ the Bo Diddley beat. If Keil is right about participatory discrepancies, then, strictly speaking, the beat cannot be skipped. (Bo Diddley himself performs it differently from gig to gig.) However, there is something fundamentally antithetical about Holly’s rendition: Throughout the tune, Jerry Allison plays the drum part so as to accentuate the upbeat. That is, he places a stress on the 4 ‘‘and’’ beat of each bar, drawing our attention to the downbeat that kicks off the subsequent 4 beat bar. Holly collaborates in this strategy 164 percussion

by accenting the same moment on his guitar not with vibrato or tremolo, but with reverberation and a decrescendo slide. This is not to say that Holly’s part is uninteresting. On the contrary, he produces fabulous polyrhythms in the transitions between lines and verses. However, the net effect is to ‘‘accentuate the positive,’’ to render the tune upbeat rather than offset by inscribing within it a percussive beacon that keeps our acoustic bodies tethered to the 4 beat bar. In the Bo Diddley version, what Keil calls the wobble penetrates so deeply into the mix that it even erodes the clarity of the bar lines, an effect that is metonymized in Jerome Green’s maraca track, where the flicking whirl of the pellets threatens to dissipate every accent. In addition, in the Chess Box Set version of ‘‘Bo Diddley,’’ the track includes Bo’s count, which to my mind is enormously important. Why? Because what it reveals—by inserting a quarter-note rest between ‘‘2’’ and ‘‘3–4’’—is that the clavelike stumble of beating 3 against 2 is crucial to the groove that grips the tune. This is important because in this stumble rattles the African American contact zone that rock-and-roll also figured in the backbeat. Indeed, if Earl Palmer is right—that the backbeat resulted from an overdriving of the shuffle beat—then this other misstep, this stumble, may indeed be a crucial part of its transcultural genealogy. The issue is not ultimately about ownership (except, of course, in strictly economic terms). As Robert Palmer observes, ‘‘What became the ‘Bo Diddley’ beat; must have been an environmental presence, booming from Pentecostal storefront churches, popped out with a shoeshine rag, implicit in speech rhythms and in the spring of people’s walks’’ (Palmer 1995: 74) In other words, the beat was drummed into the subject, who came to share with it its name. It is not his. It is not ‘‘not Holly’s.’’ It cannot be taken from either musician (though it would be nice if Bo Diddley were paid the royalties owed him). What the Crickets—named, after all, for an insect that made a ‘‘happy noise with its legs’’—doubtless heard in ‘‘the spring of people’s walks’’ was precisely a form of ‘‘making do,’’ of ‘‘beating back’’ that made donning the black skin of ‘‘Bo Diddley’’ desirable. That the hide fits differently cannot be hidden—unless, of course, we refuse to listen or we confuse hearing with a certain musicological construction of it (which amounts to the same thing). There is, obviously, no absolute hearing. What I have argued here is a provocation—one that, through the construct of the percussive field, seeks to mic the otherwise quiet work of construction going on everywhere, even in a town like yours.

sound of the city

165

555555555555555555555555555555

a drum of one’s own

It is one thing to trace some of the relations between an idiom of popular music and the engendering of the body. It is quite another to examine a political appropriation of music, and percussive music at that, that is explicitly aimed not at delineating the construction of the gendered body, but at its active, and presumably effective, reconstruction. Thus, my concluding chapter will examine what can be at once confirmed and further elaborated about the percussive field by looking—beyond, or perhaps through, rock-and-roll—at the link between drumming and masculinity forged within the men’s movement of the late 1980s and early ’90s. I will resume my earlier dialogue with the problem of the personal. About 55 kilometers northeast of Peterborough, Ontario, along Highway 28 there is a park. The Canadian state in Ottawa refers to it as ‘‘Petroglyphs Provincial Park.’’ The local tribe of Ojibwe Abishnabe calls it ‘‘Kinomagewapkong,’’ or ‘‘rocks that teach.’’ As this difference suggests, the park is a contested terrain. It also happens to be the last place I played drums in public. The circumstances of this performance bear elaborating because they vividly frame the ensuing discussion of drumming and masculinity. The petroglyphs that literally function as the ‘‘pretext’’ for this park were inscribed by prehistoric Algonkians 500 to 1,000 years ago. Whites first came upon them in 1924, when Charles Kingham of the

Peterborough Historical Society stumbled upon them while surveying the area. In 1976, as part of the burgeoning heritage movement, the petroglyph site was converted into a provincial park, and in 1984 a controversial and much contested ‘‘protective building’’ was erected over the site. As the name ‘‘Kinomagewapkong’’ implies, the site has ritual value for indigenous people in central Ontario. Indeed, the site would appear to have functioned as a locus of instruction effected either in the form of epiphanic encounters (a burbling underground stream courses under the rock face on which the petroglyphs are inscribed) or through rites of initiation. When in the name of preserving Canada’s heritage the petroglyphs were ‘‘protected,’’ they were also put off-limits to the local tribes who wanted to continue to use the site for traditional purposes. Here, in accordance with the torturous logic of inheritance, lies the seed of the controversy. When I arrived at ‘‘Kinomagewapkong’’ in August 1997, I was delighted to realize that one of the ways through which this contested terrain was contested was drumming. As our party wound its way along the path to the petroglyph site, I could hear the steady quarternote pulse of a song being performed on a ceremonial drum located within the resonating chamber of the ‘‘protective building.’’ Recklessly, I thought of the floor of the black rural church being ‘‘wigged’’ by African ring shouters. Having read a portion of this chapter at an academic conference earlier that weekend, my ears were, as we say, pricked. Not long after we reached the circle of drummers, the drummers took a break. Because one of the drummers was a student of one of the faculty members in our party (Professor Jonathan Bordo of Trent University), we were introduced to the members of the Medicine Sky Voices, all of whom belonged to the Curve Lake Abishnabe tribe. Our conversation centered on the looks being directed our way by the park rangers and the other ‘‘visitors.’’ To my astonishment, when the drummers turned back to the drums to resume their intervention/performance, they invited me to sit in. This was an offer I could not refuse. Before I actually joined the circle, two moments of what I took to be ritual transpired. First, one of the drummers lit a short length of braided rope and invited me to fan its smoke over my face as I was told, ‘‘It clears the head’’ (purgation); and second, I was instructed to select a beater from the sheath containing an assortment. Perhaps because this was a decision they watched with some attentiveness (fearing the damage a novice might do with the wrong instrument?), or because I was processing the entire episode through the various mythic narratives I a drum of one’s own

167

cannot leave home without, this selection felt significant. I picked what most resembled the timpani mallet with which I was distantly familiar, joined the circle, and ‘‘laid back’’ during the first song. As was plain even on a first hearing, the key to this drumming was performing as a collective—that is, playing so that each beater struck the drum head at the same time. In effect, the sociality of trap-set drumming was here replayed in inverted form as the singular motion of the arms wielding the beaters. Toward the end of the first song, I began to understand the cues that moved the pulse from a steady quarter-note groove to a syncopated backbeat, with everyone beating just as steadily but with strong accents on 2 and 4. I made several gaffs, but in the end I did not entirely embarrass myself. When the singing stopped, I thanked the members of the group warmly and helped pack up their gear. Needless to say, I did not understand the ‘‘lyrics’’ of these songs, nor did I have a chance to inquire about them, but I recognized—particularly because it all took place in English—the banter of a rehearsal. It was here, in fact, that a small morsel of what sense this intervention/performance had for the drummers became evident. Most immediately, they were working on their chops and arrangements. Although no song was interrupted for the sake of refinement, each song was followed either by commentary about things to think about ‘‘next time’’ or an evaluative comment suggesting that the just concluded performance was the ‘‘next time’’ for certain pieces that apparently had been discussed at a preceding performance. Throughout, each drummer’s eyes would glance from time to time at the mostly white onlookers, especially the park personnel, as if to gauge the effect of their sonoric presence. My earlier rash assumption was confirmed as it became clear that the ‘‘protective building’’ was indeed being wigged in the sense that it was being used for rehearsal space, and that this use was expressly devoted to parasitizing the heritage industry from within. As the drumbeats echoed off the metal and glass, a definite ‘‘beating back’’ could be discerned as one body of beliefs, embodied in the popular memory registered in the material of this practice, delimited itself through defiant contact with another. This is, indeed, ‘‘teaching that rocks.’’ Significantly, these protest drummers are at odds with those who—in a gesture of apparent solidarity—are calling for the ‘‘protective building’’ to be removed. I would be the first to admit that this is a form of drumming very far removed from the one with which I am familiar. I make no claim as to precisely what sense was being made through it. At best, perhaps, I have identified some of the terms of debate. However, the issue I will 168 percussion

pursue in what follows is that this form of drumming is also far removed from one with which, at least on the surface, it shares a great deal—namely, the drumming of the men’s movement. After all, we are dealing in both cases with men who have retreated into the woods with their drums in order to reclaim something like a heritage. This chapter thus will argue that what separates these percussive practices has much to do with the way their partisans situate themselves within particular constellations of race, gender, and beating. Once More, with Feeling A great deal has been written about the new (perhaps even ‘‘second’’) men’s movement, and most of this literature concentrates on situating it in relation to feminism and the women’s movement. The best of this work also engages the problematic that flies under the flag of queer theory. Perhaps this is why, when Newsweek (an organ of cultural commentary not typically known either for its insight or its prescience) covered the movement, its layout staff went out of its way to underscore the link between feminism and the men’s movement.∞ Although I suspect we are all growing weary of clever, yet ultimately predictable, semiotic analyses of commodity advertising, allow me to draw attention to a few signs circulating on Newsweek’s cover from June 1991 (see Figure 3). I will set aside the Churchillean allusion (or is that David Clayton Thomas’s quintet?), the phallic ‘‘power tie,’’ the facial evocation of Mel Gibson, the ‘‘pre-washed’’ jeans, the paronomasic color scheme (‘‘black, white, and red/read all over’’), and concentrate instead on four things: the question, the child, the drum, and the ring. The question, ‘‘What do men really want?’’ is a rather transparent allusion to the oft-repeated query, ‘‘What does a woman want?’’ that Freud posed once in a letter to Marie Bonaparte. It could also be read as a quoting of Robert Bly’s 1982 interview with Keith Thompson titled, ‘‘What Men Really Want,’’ were it not for the decisive shift from the declarative to the interrogative and the fact that Bly’s text, in addition to being a decade old at that time, probably was not known to anyone outside the readership of New Age magazine, where it appeared. Thus, I agree with those who insist that one misses a crucial aspect of such an allusion if she or he overlooks the extent to which First World feminism has come to be identified with what is at stake in Freud’s question.≤ In other words, the allusion is at least as much to the women’s movement as it is to the wants of men, implying not only that feminism and the women’s movement are to be seen as having constructed the wants of a drum of one’s own

169

fig. 3 Cover of Newsweek June 24, 1991.

women, but also, as the rhetoric of the ‘‘backlash’’ intimates, that men’s wants have themselves been constructed merely in reaction to the gains of feminism; as though, to put it more provocatively, penis envy has now been displaced by castration envy on the contested terrain of gender politics.≥ The image proper appears to answer the question posed to its left: ‘‘What do men really want?’’ Men really want, among other things, children and drums. The child, at least within the orbit of the orthodox Freudian paradigm called up by the question, continues the latter’s forced parallelism by presumably embodying the wished-for penis of the heterosexual woman. The drum (it appears to be a Ghanaian ‘‘signal drum,’’ or Odono), on the other hand, is truly anomalous. Semiotically, it is cast as ‘‘burden,’’ or ‘‘thing carried’’ and thus enters into a virtually homologous relationship with the child. In light of the discussion of beating fantasies in Chapter Four, the depiction of this relationship could be said to reach beyond an expression of simple want, beyond a merely itemized response to the question posed on the cover, to the trauma of abuse, as if disclosing through the perverse paradigm of ‘‘things to be beaten’’ what men secretly, and therefore really, want. But for the Newsweek subscriber or the unsuspecting magazine-rack browser, the drum functions primarily as bait. It is what prompts those of us who notice to turn to the ‘‘Lifestyles’’ section and read on. There we learn that the drum, and the activity of drumming it metonymically calls up, is central to the new men’s movement. Though this information would appear to render the previously anomalous sign of the drum less so, it does not, and it will be the aim of these remarks, through an examination of the percussive articulation of the masculine body, to tease out what I take to be the multiply conflicted politics of the new men’s movement.∂ To effect this teasing out, I suggest we turn to the ring: a musical allusion of considerable subtlety. I am thinking not of ring per se but of ‘‘band,’’ as in wedding band but also, of course, musical band. If we persist in reading the image as an answer to the question posed at the left, then it would appear that, along with children and drums, men want marriage. But what might this have to do with band, in the sense of a group of musicians? We could cheat, I suppose, and recall that British rock musicians in the ’60s routinely referred to those in their bands as ‘‘mates’’ (derived presumably from ‘‘playmates’’), but this would obscure much of the cultural work accomplished through the ring’s joining of men’s wants and their reactive movement (in the sense of responding to feminism). To avoid this, it is necessary to situate the a drum of one’s own

171

new men’s movement within its own history—that is, in relation to the first men’s movement. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s germinal, and recently reprinted, study The Hearts of Men (1984), she argues that in response to an economically driven rearrangement of heterosexual monogamy, men, beginning in the 1950s, fled from commitment into their ‘‘pads.’’ Beats (and the term is suggestive) such as Jack Kerouac and Bob Kaufman, in their nomadic quest for intensity, began a process that culminated in Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, and Herbert Goldberg—in effect, the men’s movement of the 1970s. As Ehrenreich makes clear, even then the men’s movement and the women’s movement were entangled, because the masculinist repudiation of the role of ‘‘sole breadwinner’’ (complete with a medically legitimated anxiety about stress-induced heart disease) dovetailed perfectly with Betty Friedan’s contemporaneous call for the economic independence of women. Although Ehrenreich is careful not to conceptualize the women’s movement entirely from within the frame of economism, she does insist on the need to conceive the political articulation of sexual difference against a backdrop that both conditioned and complicated it. This enables her to delineate the structure of the sexual antagonism in a manner that captures some of its specifically emotional vicissitudes. Because it helps me explicate with some efficiency the sign of the ring, I will observe that Ehrenreich unpacks her subtitular concept of ‘‘commitment’’ by identifying as the hallmark of the first men’s movement its emotional disinvestment of heterosexual monogamy and marriage in the name of ‘‘personal growth.’’ Needless to say, the ‘‘care for the self’’ that prompted men to reassert what they took to be their ‘‘interests’’ garnered the criticism of heartlessness from those women who still cared. By politicizing the personal, feminism succeeded in constituting men’s disaffection as a power problem—in effect, as the ‘‘war of the sexes’’ conducted by other, chiefly psychological means. The sign of the ring, or wedding band, as a characterization of what men really (still) want might therefore be read as a semiotic condensation wherein a repudiation of ‘‘heartlessness’’ is joined with, or filtered through, a commitment to other men that is still, in spite of groups such as the Go-Go’s, Hole, Luscious Jackson, and others, consummately figured in the band or musical combo. I think one need only recall how Yoko Ono was constructed (by fans and band members alike) as the destroyer of the Fab Four to test such an assertion. The wedding band, in conjunction with the apparently anomalous drum, together signal not a reinvestment in marriage per se (after all, divorce rates continue 172 percussion

to climb), but perhaps an investment in the affect that the first men’s movement withdrew from the institution of heterosexual monogamy.∑ This affect—what Ehrenreich calls ‘‘commitment,’’ or the profound emotional entwinement of two people—now expresses itself in the social bond of the band of men. As if in acknowledgment of the defining influence of the other in the dynamics of identity formation, the new men’s movement treats autoaffection as the enabling condition for a genuine commitment to the other—namely (from the vantage point of heterosexual men), women. Thus, beyond the men’s movement’s engagement with feminism lies a preoccupation with the possibility of organized self-relating. I would be inclined to follow Luce Irigaray and Eve Sedgwick in characterizing this bond as ‘‘homosocial,’’ were it not for the fact that many men in the movement are explicit about the emotional or affective character of their bonding. In addition, in certain cases they accept the feminist credo that, to its shame, patriarchy is founded on the repression of homosexuality and the exclusion of women from the social bond. The women’s movement had discovered the importance of sociality in the production of affect or feeling. Contrary to much contemporary doxa, consciousness-raising groups functioned not primarily as sites for the enshrinement of feeling, but as dialogic fields in which, as Naomi Scheman (1994) has argued, feeling could be produced at the very moment in which it acquired political meaning. In other words, undifferentiated suffering or hurt could be given the identity of anger when analytically reframed as a product of patriarchal social relations. As the Newsweek cover makes plain, the men’s movement of the ’90s was compelled to respond to feminism’s critique of male disaffection and insensitivity. After all, the new ‘‘sensitive man’’ is virtually rooted in a certain receptivity to tearing, if not exactly commitment, while the ‘‘wild man’’ or ‘‘warrior’’ appears to have passed directly through preor non-intellectual feeling to the pre-human. The movement has therefore expressed its ‘‘castration envy’’ in the elaboration of rituals of heterosexual sociality in which the feeling of being a man can be called up and named. These feelings speak with, as George Parks says, ‘‘the voice of the drum’’ (Harding, 206–212). Perhaps this is why the drum rather than the child must be carried in the left arm and, as the old slogan had it, next to the heart. Setting Newsweek aside, let us turn to the obvious questions, the ones posed by the stereotypical European on safari—namely, what are the drums saying, and why is the articulation of properly male affect quintessentially channeled through percussive signifying? On the face of it, a drum of one’s own

173

there would appear to be a predictable, though nevertheless significant, link being drawn between feeling and non-linguistic signifying within the new men’s movement. But if drumming signifies non-linguistically, in what sense can it communicate or produce something that is so otherwise marked by the linguistic binary of masculinity and femininity, namely, masculinity? In other words, how is it that drumming produces both affect and masculinity, since the latter presupposes the psychosocial distinctions that a certain undifferentiated affect would appear to exceed in principle? As soon as one formulates the problem thus, she or he realizes that another question, perhaps the question, solicits our attention: What is the derivation of the beating that resonates through masculine auto-affection? Striking Out for the Territories In his introduction to Wingspan: Inside the Men’s Movement (1992), Christopher Harding frames his presentation of the movement in relation to a particular event: a retreat held in Massachusetts called ‘‘Opening the Heart for Men.’’∏ As is now fairly typical of such retreats, the beating of drums figured prominently in the participants’ activities. In fact, later in Wingspan, Bill Kauth, who is described as something of an organizational sage, characterizes the ‘‘typical’’ meeting or retreat as one in which drumming figures as one of eight decisive rituals, a selection he justifies by linking drumming to the creation of a ‘‘desired sacred space’’ in which men can work on getting ‘‘in touch’’ with themselves. Later I will associate this work with Benjamin’s concept of ‘‘counsel’’ (Rat)—that is, the social work of collective refashioning. As he moves to set a context for the Parks piece cited earlier, Harding fleshes out the sacred character of this space by stressing how ‘‘slapping those skins is a wonderful community builder, . . . an inhibition loosener and blood-rouser that gets all our hearts beating in synch’’ (Harding 1992, 206). Or, as Parks himself puts it, ‘‘The drum takes us out of the cultural trance and connects us with the earth, our communities and our own hearts and souls’’ (in Harding 1992, 207). Parks’s piece in particular bears further scrutiny if indeed we are to grasp the link between drumming and masculinity as forged within the movement itself. Although we must ultimately come to terms with the trope of the beating heart, it is worth taking up Parks’s evocation of language first. To that end, we need to separate and address two issues: what the drum is saying, and how the speaking of the drum is conceived within the movement. 174 percussion

Though Parks is far from being a semiologically informed musicologist, the title of his chapter does underscore the link between music and speech: ‘‘The Voice of the Drum.’’ This is certainly no innovation, because, as we have heard, the drum’s message-making capacity has long been conceptualized within a framework dominated by the figure of catachresis. There, like shoes with tongues, drums have heads, ribs, bodies, and voices. Although this might render the title rather banal, Parks closes his essay by reciting his title and linking it explicitly to language. He writes, ‘‘The voice of the drum is a universal language that we in this culture are just learning to speak and to hear’’ (in Harding 1992, 212). This is a significant formulation in more ways than one. To be sure, it makes clear that the reference to speech is by no means accidental. But more than that, it calls up the troubling musicological cliché of music as a universal language, where, presumably due to the mathematically grounded accessibility of the sonic signifier, the task and problem of translation never arises. Nevertheless, the phrase also holds a tension between the universal language of the drum and a particular, and clearly emergent, capacity to hear it, which prompts one to glance back over the essay and reconsider some of the other moments in which the language problem appears. In other words, what the drum is saying may be perfectly clear, but our relation to how its speaking is produced may make its message impossible for us to decipher. I think we are thus compelled to turn our attention to the model of speaking that drumming exemplifies. Parks writes, oddly unselfconsciously, within the genre of autobiography. His piece is tinctured with equal parts of testimony and reportage. Thus, it begins by recounting Parks’s first, spontaneous encounter with drumming and moves us through to the acquisition of a drum of his own. The pivotal event is Parks’s account of a retreat presided over by Robert Bly and Michael Meade. What made this encounter with drumming so telling was the fact that it involved storytelling. In fact, Parks claims that the fusion between drumming and the evocative images of the story produced a state of collective consciousness in which ‘‘the boundary between imagination and reality began to melt’’ (in Harding 1992, 208). This meltdown was, to a significant extent, prefigured in the drum itself, because Parks, following his mentor, Brad Davis, calls it a ‘‘tacked head storytelling drum.’’ The point, I think, is that through the invocation of storytelling, a special claim about language use is being made—one that resonates deeply with the figure of the drum’s voice. Indeed, Parks’s story, which appears to be about the percussive infans’ coming-to-speech—is provocatively implia drum of one’s own

175

cated in its own contents. To clarify this, and what might be at stake in the how of percussive speaking (if not, in fact, in percussive pedagogy), it is helpful to turn to another account of storytelling that draws out more forcefully the political character of its signifying practices, even as it suppresses the question of masculinity. Though typically read as a nostalgic, and perhaps even melancholic, reverie on the fading art of storytelling, Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’’ (discussed in Chapter Four) lays out what in many ways deserves to be read as a Brechtian analysis of the storyteller’s cultural politics. The broad contours of Benjamin’s discussion are as follows. Storytelling, which Benjamin refuses to equate with the oral tradition, has suffered at the hands of modernity. It is dying out as a cultural practice because modern life has become shocking, and the effect of this shock is that we are no longer capable of communicating Erfahrung, Benjamin’s notion of collectively mediated experience that is rich with significance. Sounding the Frankfurt School theme of the link between mass culture and fascism, Benjamin designates both modern warfare and the newspaper as the enemies of Erfahrung. What implicates the newspaper in the shock of modernity is the way it participates in the formation of what Sartre once called ‘‘seriality’’— that is, communities formed through the utterly contingent sharing of what separates its members. Significantly, Benjamin articulates this insight by appealing to the concept of information that has the effect of situating the experience of shared separation within the subject’s connection to language. Benjamin’s point is not that prior to modernity the subject was somehow unalienated in language, but that this alienation took on the specific form of interpretive passivity with the emergence of the newspaper and the novel as dominant, linguistically organized cultural forms. The fateful condition of interpretive passivity is called up in the claim that information saturates experience with explanation (Erklärung)—the point being, I take it, that information is designed to render experience significant without the mediation of interpretation, in effect, immediately. The Brechtian turn of the essay occurs when Benjamin links what is threatened in storytelling to counsel (Rat), which distinguishes itself from mere advice by functioning to empower readers–listeners as coproducers of what then becomes an open-ended story. In other words, counsel—as opposed to information (Information)—facilitates the communication of Erfahrung because it underscores and foregrounds the link between the story and its producers, a link that makes explicit 176 percussion

and tangible the collective conditions of even the most individuated acts. Erlebnis, or mere lived moments, is endured in isolation, but counsel, precisely because it situates the production of significance within social relations, designates the tactical domain of cultural politics that modernity seeks to foreclose. Thus, to invoke the rhetoric of ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’ storytelling has risen up at a moment of danger, and its loss—its imminent appearance within the wreckage of history—must be made worthwhile. This call to arms—in effect, this call for a revolutionary intervention in the history of the present—is provided its aesthetic warrant: the Brechtian image of the Handgriff (the grasp or handle). It is here that we begin our turn back to drumming. Benjamin evokes the Handgriff when he associates counsel with ‘‘the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’’ (in Benjamin 1967, 92). In other words, by seeing in one’s distracted reception of the story (Benjamin associates deep listening with doing something else—typically, work) a sign of its production, one has an Erfahrung, a telling experience of one’s social identity as a cultural producer. Because this is precisely what modernity seeks to efface, both by locating value in exchange or price and by displacing labor power with machines, Benjamin sees storytelling as revolutionary and, for that very reason, historically menaced. Because Benjamin himself later links storytelling with modernist writing (his example in ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’’ is A la recherche du temps perdu), thereby decisively complicating, though by no means contradicting, his attack on the novel, is there really that much of a leap—whether in the ‘‘open air’’ of history or not—from Erzählung to Lehrstück? But what does this detour really help us to recognize? This is a fair question. In his characterization of what the drums are saying in the men’s movement, Parks stresses the way drumming functions within the context of storytelling to intensify the effectiveness of the spoken words. The association thereby made between storytelling and drumming invites us to consider the way the latter functions as an especially potent form of language practice, one presumably designed to overcome the fact that we are otherwise unprepared to receive the universal message of the drum. Because it is clear that the point of storytelling within the movement is to give men ‘‘counsel’’ about their new masculinity, and to do so in a way that is politically empowering, then the pertinence of Benjamin’s discussion lies in the way it sharpens our sensitivity to the conditions, and ultimately the politics, of counsel. My argument is that drumming understood as storytelling assumes all the theoretical burdens of ‘‘refashioning male affect,’’ and in doing so disa drum of one’s own

177

plays, symptomatically, the contradictions of the men’s movement as such. Perhaps surprisingly, the key issue here is not that of the muchbelabored ‘‘limits of representation’’ (where feelings overwhelm our capacity to express them). Rather, it has to do with how the men’s movement attempts to ground masculinity in a particular way of effecting affect, of expressing one’s capacity to affect, or fold over and act on, one’s self. Because drumming situates the capacity for such expression in a language capable of communicating universally, one is entitled to wonder whether it is a blessing or a curse that such language is characterized as pre-linguistic—that is, as having nothing to say. Also striking in Parks’s characterization of storytelling is storytelling’s presentation as a preliminary. As he describes it, storytelling set the stage for a discussion that, while interpretive, was set off from the voice of the drum. Earlier in the meeting, many men were drumming, but in an undisciplined and ultimately ecstatic way; when drumming assumes its special potency, presumably its capacity to impart counsel, only the tack-headed storytelling drum is heard. Most men are then positioned as listeners—and undistracted listeners, at that. They are doing one thing, and one thing only: concentrating on the story.π Interpretation and productive interaction begin once the storyteller has finished, a moment realized when he identifies the topic to be explored. In the case narrated by Parks, this is the conflict of loyalties between one’s father and the king. This scenario oddly resembles the popular ‘‘Coffee Talk’’ skit from nbc’s Saturday Night Live in which the host, Linda Richman (Mike Meyers), after succumbing to an overload of emotion and becoming, as ‘‘she’’ says, ‘‘ferklemt,’’ identifies a discussion topic— ‘‘The Jewish comic Jerry Lewis is neither Jewish nor a comic, discuss!’’—which her audience putatively takes up while she collects herself. I am exaggerating, but the point is that in the event described by Parks, just as counsel wells up in the drum’s throat, its enabling conditions give way. In effect, counsel transmutes into the council without, as Marx might have said, passing through the hands of its members. In this context, more can now be said about the specific importance of drumming within the men’s movement. Consider, for example, the difference between a ceramic pot and a drum. Although drums are certainly made with clay resonating chambers, what makes these instruments drums is the skin, a membrane designed to withstand beating.∫ Drums are not piñatas. In fact, without their skins, such drums would have no voices. My point is that, whereas in Benjamin’s trope of the pot marked by the potter’s fingers the ‘‘marked’’ pot serves to index counsel as an exchange of productivities, the drum as storyteller func178 percussion

tions precisely because its skin meets the drummer’s hand, but ideally that hand leaves little or no trace. Like speech itself, the voice of the drum dissipates the moment it is produced, absorbing the act of its production in the sound produced. Although drum skins certainly do become discolored, gouged, and battered, these are all instances of decay, all effects of the very wear and tear that may well indeed be part of producing a ‘‘sweet sound’’ but that ultimately fall under the general heading of menacing contingencies that in the long run compromise the productivity of the drum. Ideally, the only bruising left by percussive beating is on the drummer’s hands—or, to reinvoke a figure from Chapter One, the ego of the incompetent percussionist. This general point can also be put in terms of a distinction between making and using an instrument. Counsel exploits this difference by associating use and making. In effect, the trace of the potter’s hand is an index of the productivity that founds counsel. Once storytelling is linked exclusively to playing (rather than making) drums, the relevant moment of their use is the act of making them speak. Abusing the drum, marring either it or the performance, thus becomes precisely what is to be avoided, and as a consequence, counsel—which takes its value from the sign of productive use—and percussive speaking part company. I argue, then, that drums—as deployed at men’s meetings—do not counsel in Benjamin’s sense. Further, this is paradoxically why they are so vital to the men’s movement. Participants believe that they are counseling one another through drumming. In spite of the critical implications of this assertion, I think we should respect this belief and try to take it as far as we can. In doing so, we will circle back on our earlier concern with what the drums are saying. The Rhythm Method As I have continually suggested, the men’s movement sees gender as a construct. This is precisely why it promotes such a wide variety of activities designed to encourage men to engage in protected selfcriticism with an eye toward refashioning their identities. Not to put too fine a point on it: You cannot rebuild an identity that is not conceived first as a construct. To this limited degree, the men’s movement stands squarely on the ‘‘materialist’’ side of the hoary materialist– essentialist divide. But the newly emergent men are not anatomically correct, for the heart of the men’s movement is not ‘‘on the left,’’ as the old slogan had it. The reasons for this are far more complex than can be resolved, much less fully addressed, in the space of this chapter. Neva drum of one’s own

179

ertheless, if I have claimed both that drumming does not counsel (ultimately, ‘‘collectivize’’) and that men do indeed see their identities as constructs, as productions, then we need to specify how ‘‘counseling’’ fails. On the face of things, this would seem unlikely or impossible. As I have indicated, this will involve taking the belief in counsel on the part of men seriously. It will also involve returning to Ehrenreich’s discussion of the hearts of men. The heart and counsel (or, at least, advice) join in chapter six of The Hearts of Men, where Ehrenreich traces how, as she tellingly puts it, ‘‘cardiology [rewrote] the masculine script.’’ Her point is important in that what she details is the way in which work-related stress was at once linked to heart disease and to the flight from commitment. Menidentified-men of the ’70s forged their identities in a discursive context in which the emotional commitment required to make the institution of heterosexual monogamy work was seen as part of an epidemiological formation, one in which marriage was—at a certain level—tantamount to heart dis-ease. In order for men to grow personally, they not only had to ‘‘take better care of themselves.’’ They also had to disinvest emotionally from the monogamous economy of heterosexual romance. Commitment, like overtime, was a necessary evil, and one whose necessity needed to be revisited. Ehrenreich does not imply that only men suffered heart disease. Her point is that cardiology entered into a discursive configuration in which its typical masculinist preoccupations could acquire extra-medical resonance. For this very reason, Ehrenreich would no doubt be among the first to suspect that behind the recent ‘‘discovery’’ of heart disease among women (the reality of its danger notwithstanding) there is more than meets the eye. When my own father died of the ‘‘severe coronary infarction’’ that appeared on his death certificate, it was because his heart had stopped beating. In the context I am elaborating, this is crucial. As Barthes insisted, the heart is the locus in the body that beats both literally, as the valves flap, and figuratively, as the blood pounds. Because the new men’s movement—particularly in its addiction-and-recovery branch— remains committed to men’s hygiene and personal growth, it is not surprising that in its reclamation of the heart, in its reaffirmation of feeling and sensitivity, it has concentrated its attention on the organ that beats. Consider the following formulation, again from the pages of Wingspan: ‘‘We men often begin drumming somewhat reluctantly, and then only because all the other guys are doing it, but soon we discover how slapping those skins is a wonderful community builder, a form of prayer and poetry, and inhibition-loosener and blood-rouser that gets 180 percussion

all our hearts beating in sync’’ (Harding 1992, 206). Or again, in Eric Pierson’s poignant account of an improvised men’s ‘‘advance’’ (the antonym of ‘‘retreat’’): ‘‘Our drumming that night was different from our first night’s. Maybe it was the afterglow of the sweat ceremony, or perhaps it was the brief instruction in drumming technique that transformed the first night’s wild pounding into subdued, empathetic playing. At one point, at least a dozen drums pulsed quietly as one, never overpowering the faintest whisper of a woodland flute’’ (in Harding 1992, 113). Many telling connections are made here, so I will move to sound them in sequence. Most immediately, it is important to note the persistent attempt made by both writers to associate the heart and drumming. The figural clichés are striking precisely because the ostensible aim of such pieces is to break through the linguistic alienation of affect or feeling. In the first quote, it is the rousing of the blood that transports us from slapping skins to beating hearts. And in the second quote, the figurative use of ‘‘pulsed’’ achieves the same effect. In both cases, one is dealing with the figural logic of catachresis delineated earlier, only here, unlike before, the ‘‘abuse’’ serves to fuse language and things more so than different words, a decisive semiotic simulation of the expression of affect and one that is particularly fitting in a context dominated by the persistent verbal evocations of excitement. This theme modulates predictably toward an ancillary preoccupation with unity. In the first quote, drumming does more than stir feeling. It produces the groove within which it becomes possible for the group to come together, to unify. The figure for this is the heart but now conceived as the locus for a beating that is ‘‘in sync.’’ I assume that the point is not to call up the fascistic theme evoked by the flip-side of the expression, ‘‘marching to the beat of a different drummer’’ but, rather, to organize drumming around the active–passive binary. It is active in the sense of stirring the heart to beat, but it is passive in that it is also taking its cue from the heart. In other words, drumming brings the group together by synchronizing watches—that is ‘‘tickers’’—where the formation of a community is unified around an activity that reconciles, with the innocence of biology, the tension between the intimate and the public. The preoccupation with the male heart is thus explicitly presented here not only as a site of affect or feeling, but as the very locus of male community. At bottom, this is what grounds the sign of the band that signals from the cover of Newsweek. The heart houses the fold of men’s auto-affection. In the second quote, Pierson appeals to the notion of the unified a drum of one’s own

181

community through the figure of drumming that ‘‘pulsed quietly as one.’’ This repeats the content of the earlier passage, though it takes the notion of a synchronized beating (everyone making sounds at the same time and doing so ‘‘in time’’ with the heart), and extends it by invoking the numismatic state of e pluribis unum. Again, the community of drummers comes together through the beat, around which its members converge. However, what appears here is a third element of this configuration that deservedly claims our attention: musical performance, or ‘‘musicking,’’ a surprisingly (and, as I will soon argue, decisively) neglected aspect of the men’s movement’s appropriation of drumming. Pierson introduces music by trying to account for why the men’s drumming improved on the second day of the ‘‘advance.’’ Apparently, between day one and day two, someone—presumably a musician or, at least, a drummer with some prior experience—offered the men lessons in drumming technique. This enabled the men to play together, with, as Pierson says, ‘‘empathy.’’ Although one could argue that this is hardly music, I suggest that such a view expresses a prejudice that obscures rather than clarifies the issue. Furthermore, the specific transformation mapped by Pierson calls up Adorno’s dialectical zinger: ‘‘Music represents at once the immediate manifestation of impulse and the locus of its taming’’ (in Arato and Gebhart 1978, 270). By stressing how the drumming responded to instruction by becoming empathic, Pierson presents musical training as the means by which ‘‘wild pounding’’ becomes tame, and presumably expressive, pulsations. What is noteworthy here is not that music is conceptualized in this manner, but that drumming—especially the sort of drumming that might be capable of telling stories—is cast as something like a musical heart (the source of a pulse), perhaps even the heart of music. For the coronary figure of the pulse comes to apply to the drumming only once the latter has been rendered musical—in effect, once drumming can be orchestrated with the woodland flute that it no longer drowns out. Is it, then, this musical dialectic between taming and expression that underscores the tension between collectivization or empowerment and construction that this section is probing? Yes, but only partially. To get at more, a prior matter requires clarification: What precisely is it about the link between drumming and the heart that makes it significant for men—especially for men who are ‘‘under construction’’? To proceed, I find it useful to take what may well strike some as an odd detour, drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s hard-hitting meditation on the philosophical construction of the heart. I am motivated by two things. First, if we are to take seriously the men’s movement’s commit182 percussion

ment to counsel, then at some point we need to grant its convictions the rigor of philosophical discourse. Bly would certainly demand nothing less than that. Second, Nancy’s refusal to broach the theme of masculinity registers itself—shall we say, instructively?—in his otherwise compelling analysis of the heart as the ontological site of affection. When he is speaking about everyone in general, is he actually talking about men? Although it will be necessary to think about, and therefore attempt to take some responsibility for, the connection between masculinity and philosophy, I will first take advantage of Nancy’s explicit thematization of the beat in his examination of the heart. From there, one can more fully evaluate the politics of the new male heart as rendered audible in the voice of the drum. As we will see, the constraints of the politics of the new men’s movement derive in significant ways from the way philosophy polices the beat of the heart. Nancy’s coronary meditations open, to my knowledge, with his discussion from 1986 titled, ‘‘Shattered Love’’ (L’amour en éclats; in Nancy 1991, 82–109). In this piece, thinking itself is at issue. In particular, Nancy is concerned about rendering explicit the love that animates and conditions thought as such. As he makes explicit, philosophers inherit this project from the very name of their discipline—a theme sounded in slightly different ways in Deleuze and Guatarri’s What Is Philosophy? (1994) and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship (1997). Nancy situates his intervention in a cultural context, where, on the one hand, what is meant by the love of knowledge has faded into the disciplinary common sense of professional philosophers, and, on the other, where popular melodrama has displaced poetry as the public locus of amorous discourse. Nancy does not bemoan this encroachment on the hallowed halls of elite culture. (Adorno, whom he otherwise admires, he is not.) Instead, he exploits such border infringements as a way to thematize the enabling limits of philosophical discourse. In other words, ‘‘Shattered Love’’ openly addresses how philosophy thinks beyond its petty disciplinary preoccupations in the very thinking of love. Those familiar with Nancy’s work will recognize the affiliation between this essay and the general project of deconstructive philosophy as practiced in France since the 1960s. It is crucial that we consider the beyond of philosophy carefully. Why? Because Nancy’s approach to philosophy’s beyond is precisely what prompts him to join love and thinking in a beating heart. As we know, intellectual habit encourages us to situate love—or, perhaps, affect more generally—in the place where philosophy is not. In fact, one of the hallmarks of feminist philosophy—from de Beauvoir and a drum of one’s own

183

Michelle Le Doeuff to Nancy Fraser and Scheman—is the way it has politicized the habitual philosophical distinction between the head and the heart. Nancy, who like his mentor, Jacques Derrida, has read enough feminist scholarship to be well aware of this option, nevertheless resists it, choosing instead to seek an opening for philosophy’s beyond within Heidegger’s meditation on thinking. The detour required to explicate Heidegger’s approach to thinking—as worthy of one’s exertions as it may be—would be out of place here. Suffice it to say that Heidegger confronts us with the stunning possibility that ‘‘we are still not thinking,’’ as he puts it in What Is Called Thinking? (1968, 4). What prevents the counterintuitive outlandishness of this claim from collapsing in on itself is the special way that Heidegger links thought and being—or, in effect, the subject and object—in his formulation. Refusing the venerable philosophical polarity between epistemology and ontology, Heidegger moves to grasp the connection, or essential juncture, between thinking and being, outmaneuvering the problem of representation at a fundamental level. In attempting to explain why the West has not yet been able to think the meaning of being, Heidegger discovers in the thought of being a relation between thinking and being that illuminates something fundamental about the nature of being as such. Although thinkable, being has not yet been thought, and this state of affairs is the surest sign that being has never ceased to weigh on thinking. Depending on the text one reads, this dynamic, which Heidegger casts as fundamental and irreducible, is presented as evidence that being appears through withdrawal, that it nihilates Nothing—in short, that being’s mode of selfpresentation is that of unconcealment, a retracing of an ‘‘aboriginal’’ evacuation or withdrawal. Significantly, Nancy detects what he calls a ‘‘rhythm’’ in this dialectical syncopation between being and thinking. He argues persuasively that the point where being exceeds thought, and thought becomes what it is, is best conceptualized as a process, as an event with extension and duration, rather than as a psychical or physical entity. In ‘‘Shattered Love,’’ this event is located in the beating heart of being: Perhaps being, in its essence, is affected by the dialectic that annihilates its simple position in order to reveal this contradiction in the becoming of reality (or of reason, of the Idea, of history)—and in this sense one might say that being beats, that it essentially is in the beating, indeed, in the e-motion of its own heart: being–nothingness–becoming, as an infinite pulsation. (Nancy 1991, 88; emphasis in the original)

184 percussion

What affiliates this claim with the problem of thinking the beyond of philosophy is Nancy’s conviction that the heart—as the amorous organ par excellence—is, through its beating, what philosophy cannot reduce to thinking. The beating, as the rhythmic articulation of being and thinking, falls outside philosophy not because of philosophy’s inveterate rationalism, but because loving knowledge cannot countenance the tremble or flutter that unsettles the space where philosophy encounters what is. In effect, what Nancy has done is recast Heidegger’s meditation on thinking as an amorous discourse, placing love in being’s position (vis-à-vis thinking) and once again drawing our attention to the reciprocally compromising articulation of the two. Although Nancy does not put this quite so bluntly, it is precisely due to love’s relation to this articulation that it is ‘‘shattered’’—or, as Elvis Presley said long before Nancy, ‘‘All shook up.’’ Obviously, this does not yet elucidate, much less pose, the question of masculinity. As yet another sign of the fecundity of his writing, Nancy provides guidance in a more recent essay: ‘‘The Heart of Things’’ (Nancy 1993). The argument in this piece literally and figuratively beats against the position taken in ‘‘Shattered Love.’’ If such a formulation evokes a ‘‘polyrhythmic’’ essayistic practice, rest assured that it is not by accident. In ‘‘The Heart of Things,’’ Nancy sets out to shed light on what is meant when we speak colloquially of ‘‘getting to the heart of things.’’ What and where is this heart? Posed clearly in the wake of his earlier discussion, this question leads Nancy to yet another troubled connection—the one that joins thinking and things. At one level, he is proceeding so as to stay in dialogue with common sense (a term about which he nevertheless has his doubts). When people speak of the heart of things, they are often talking about truth, what is vital, central, fundamental. The heart becomes crucial as a way to conceptualize where the truth takes place. At another level, Nancy is concerned about grounding the quotidian and the colloquial in a philosophical account of what makes them possible. In other words, what is it in the structure of human being/being human that prompts us to seek a heart in things? Immediately, one senses the tension between the deep structure of anthropomorphism (where objects are given attributes of the subject in order to assure their intelligibility) and objectivity (where subjects and objects shine forth in their immediacy, free of partisan projection, however pure). Are we therefore to conclude that we must lie about things in order to get to their hearts? Is our love of knowledge faithful to either love or knowledge when we do? Nancy probes this tension by teasing out the tangled border between a drum of one’s own

185

thinking and things, showing how this conjunction is complicated by the presence of the heart. In this context, the heart is where things enter or become thought, and thought becomes a thing through the enigmatic fold of reflection. The heart of things is associated with truth because, on this account, it literally embodies the conflicted conjunction between thought and things. It is the organ where the truth of this connection takes place. Within this general context, Nancy advances two propositions whose pertinence is striking, to say the least. I will puzzle over them briefly in sequence. The first proposition he puts best in the following aphoristic sentence: ‘‘That is why, here at the heart of things, one must not seek the living beat of a universal animation’’ (Nancy 1993, 169). In light of the conclusions of ‘‘Shattered Love,’’ one cannot help but be struck by the way this formulation, which again links the heart and its beat, nevertheless institutes a profound cleft between things and being. The ‘‘infinite pulsation’’ of being appears to have been displaced by what, in this context, is presented as an unequivocally misguided quest for the ‘‘universal animation’’ of things. I take it that the point is not that things lack being but, rather, that the truth about things (even a thinking thing) requires that no beat complicate or disturb the space of the encounter between thinking and things. Does this space, or interval, therefore lack being? It would appear to, but rather than conclude that Nancy is contradicting his earlier position, note that as he examines the figure of the heart more intimately, his critical aim shifts accordingly. That is, the more explicitly the heart is situated within the subject’s relation to itself, the more the ‘‘infinite pulsation’’ of the heart of being is drowned out by the stony heart of things, where, in truth, no pulse is to be found. That the stone cannot rock is precisely why—in terms of the heart—the men’s movement cannot counsel. Nancy’s segue from the stony heart to the problem of affect or feeling helps us discern in what sense the stone cannot rock. He writes: A heart of stone, so to speak. But instead of being without affect, the stone of this heart [the heart of things] would be an extreme concentration, withheld in itself and as such exposed, a concentration of all motion, tender or violent, joyous or anguished, tender and violent, joyous and anguished. The heart of stone, far more originarily than ambivalence, would be the indetermination of affect insofar as this indetermination is affect itself. (Nancy 1993, 171; emphasis in the original)

Several important issues emerge here. In both French and English, Un coeur de pierre denotes coldness more immediately than it does a piece 186 percussion

of Christian bric-a-brac. Obviously, Nancy senses that in denying the heart of things access to the ‘‘universal animation’’ he has wandered onto the antiphrastic territory of the emotions. As a consequence, he moves quickly to specify the affective implications of this heart. Instead of rendering the stony heart affectless—which is what convention might have required (the cold heart is an unfeeling heart; it does not even feel coldness, just like a stone)—Nancy sees it as a site of implosion, or involution. So much so that emotional ambivalence is characterized as only a dim echo of the concentrated motility and fissuring (affects are blended and polarized) of the heart of stone. In characteristic deconstructive fashion, the unfeeling heart is thus revealed to be stunned, in effect, by an unmanageable surfeit of affect or feeling. Moreover, the stony heart is not simply in retreat. It is ‘‘exposed’’ (a key category in ‘‘Shattered Love’’) in its very withholding. Modeled on the logic of the unconcealedness of being, this formulation presents the heart of things as open to affection to the precise extent that its closure, its immanent concentration, allows affect to achieve the state of mobile indeterminacy that defines it as such. Moreover, the deconstructive inversion of lack and surfeit heralds a displacement in which affect refers not to a charged state or content but to mutability itself. The heart comes to embody the site where change, self-moving—or, as I prefer, auto-affection—is housed. Thus, in the folded muscle of the heart one finds the means by which ‘‘tough love’’ can be first offered to oneself. Because Nancy later states that ‘‘at the heart of things, there is no language,’’ one is entitled to suspect his characterization of affect or feeling as yet another formulation of the pre-critical romanticism that recent thought in a variety of fields has thoroughly discredited. The chief difference between Nancy’s perspective and the one signaled in that stirring cliché of masculine protest, ‘‘But I just can’t put it into words,’’ however, is his disinvestment of the ontology of expression. The point is not that the subject is unable to find the words to say it, but that in the heart of things there is no expressive subject, no subject capable of organizing the indeterminacy of affect into a communicable utterance. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we must therefore repudiate any attempt to gain insight into the subject by appealing to the heart of stone. On the contrary, Nancy is inviting us to consider the possibility that the subject’s relation to affect or feeling, precisely to the extent that it can be illuminated through the heart of stone, is one in which expressivity is overwhelmed by exposure (the concentration of all motion), where not only is there too much to say, but where saying a drum of one’s own

187

moves within the unrestrained field of ‘‘e-motion’’ that the subject struggles to channel toward the fold, organizing self-reflection and expression. Though this fold is not etched in stone, so to speak, it lodges in the subject like a stone by marking the point at which the subject can take itself—gravely, to be sure—as its own object. To anticipate my return to Ehrenreich’s discussion, Nancy’s treatment of the heart might well lead one to conclude that if the (male) subject no longer sees himself as incapable of commitment, this has ocurred because he is in the grip of what the heart of philosophy tells him is a surfeit of commitment. The question is, commitment to what? Before attempting to resolve this, we need to know why there is no beat in le coeur de pierre. I put this in French in order to reinvoke Barthes’s discussion of beating. There, our attention was drawn to the instructive grammatical example, Paul batte Pierre. There is no need here to reanimate the swarm of issues I have derived from Barthes’s discussion, but it is important to realize that Nancy’s formulation calls up the broad thematics of beating, even without naming them as such.Ω In effect, Nancy offers us two hearts. Both are vital organs of Western philosophy. There is the heart of being (which beats) and the heart of things (which does not). Convention would urge us to conclude that being is alive (hence, the beating heart), and things are not. However, this is clearly not what Nancy has in mind. Instead, one senses in his reading of philosophy the operation of a distinction between truth and being. In other words, what the heart of things evokes is a condition that requires something like placidity. It is as though Nancy thinks of adequation or correspondence (two long-standing ways to refer to the moment of truth) as taking place within a region of experience that could be destabilized or unsettled by motion, by flux. To inject a bit of local color: Only when the lake is perfectly still is it possible for the trees and shore to be reflected with such fidelity that reality and representation correspond. The slightest ripple, wave, rhythmic pulsation suffices to shatter the correspondence. On the other hand, the heart of being, precisely because it embodies the rhythmic syncopation of thinking and being itself—a syncopation that falls outside the love of knowledge, or philosophy—articulates a beating that Nancy, following Heidegger, associates with the event of existence as such. The ‘‘thereness’’ of existence strikes us, it sweeps us up off our feet like the most irresistible ‘‘groove,’’ but it does so with infinite stealth. However, consistency requires that the truth of this beating be unthinkable. For to approach being by seeking to correspond with it is, by definition, to fall behind it, to skip the beat. This, in 188 percussion

a truly perplexing sense, is to be on it—or, at least, open to it—but precisely in a way that cannot be thought within a philosophical project preoccupied with truth at the expense of being. To be sure, the thinking of things takes place within the event of existence, and to that extent even the heart of stone must beat. But one might reasonably conclude from the contrapuntal pattern of Nancy’s discussion that when we seek to know the truth about the thinking of things, we double the heart, or project a ‘‘heart of hearts,’’ in which the truth of who we are and what we feel is necessarily unperturbed by the ‘‘infinite pulsation.’’∞≠ Thus, in effect, the heart of stone comes to muffle the resonating chamber of the heart of being. Although Nancy’s aim is to grasp the emergence of ‘‘who comes after the subject,’’ it is not difficult to discern the immediate preoccupations of the men’s movement in philosophical guise. Almost predictably, from behind the coronary stone emerges the resurrected man, the man who presumably knows what he really wants and who asks for it with the voice of the drum. The synchrony, emphasized by Pierson, that arises between the beating of the heart and the drum is thus a temporal avatar of the mute, undifferentiated space in which all (new) men come together in unity. The aim of this rhythm method, this resting of or in the heart, is obviously not contraception. Rather, it is conception in the sense of an exertion that bears the truth of the new man. One has here the best of both worlds: the truth about oneself and a grounding of that self in the event of existence. Worlds collide, and these two sweep the men’s movement into two different gravitational fields: one in which men—through counsel—are empowered or collectivized to become other than who they are; and another in which this becoming is sanctified by a truth that is not subject to the process of its own unfolding. The importance of Nancy’s meditation on the heart is that it allows us to see these worlds approaching and repelling each other through the trope of the beating heart, though perhaps for this very reason he is closer to the discourse of popular melodrama than he thinks. Nowhere does Nancy say that he is talking about men. Even when his argument creates the opportunity for doing so, he cleaves to the subject. To be sure, it is important not to engender one’s problematic too soon, and much can be learned from reading how the social division of gender is written into the unspoken—and, at times, unspeakable—assumptions that both found and founder basic democratic principles. Nevertheless, feminism has taught us to regard with suspicion general formulations about the essence of being that never manage to clarify how the divisions that structure our lived experience arise a drum of one’s own

189

there. Suspicion deepens when one realizes that Nancy shares it. He and his colleagues (particularly Derrida, who has written at length about the category of sexual difference in Heidegger) have written for years in an intermittent dialogue with feminism, recognizing the common ground between its problematization of the subject as an engendered construct and their preoccupation with what Derrida once called ‘‘the ends of Man.’’ If we recall, however, that Nancy situates his own treatment of the heart in a context where popular melodrama has adopted the love left unthought within philosophy, then our suspicions begin to feel less like mere projections. For if we plot this development along Ehrenreich’s historical trajectory, then not only do we recognize women’s lives in Nancy’s testy evocation of ‘‘popular romance,’’ but we recognize something akin to the men’s movement in deconstructive philosophy.∞∞ Rather than pursue this by deepening and extending my reading of Nancy, I will instead turn back to the North American men’s movement and tease out there echoes of his coronary meditations. In particular, let us turn to the movement’s explicit thematization of the heart, setting aside for a moment the theme of its beating. Doing so takes one directly to The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (1992), the influential anthology edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade whose title comes from the closing line of Yeats’s ‘‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion.’’ In a section of the anthology titled ‘‘The Cultivated Heart,’’ one finds a reprise of themes that figured centrally in Bly’s interview (Bly et al. 1982). The heart is modeled on a house—or, more particularly, a hortus inclusus—protected by walls and insulation that allow what Bly, allegedly following Dante, calls amor (to sleep undisturbed). It is a place of tenderness—in other words, precisely what was molted or peeled off when men ‘‘peeled out’’ from commitment. Such founding formulations have been given a decidedly Heideggerian spin by Joseph Jastrab, who, in his influential personal journal, relates an episode that occurred while on one of the Men’s Quests he organized in the early 1980s. While hiking alone in a desert canyon, Jastrab apparently experienced something like an annunciation. As he recounts it, his bellowed query, ‘‘How might I better serve the planet?’’ was answered by the echoing words, ‘‘The world needs a man’s heart’’—words that dropped ‘‘like so many pebbles into the quiet pools of my evening meditation.’’ He continues: At the time such counsel seemed out of place, as I was expecting an initiation of another sort. Like many wounded and searching men of my generation, I

190 percussion

believed that my personal and planetary salvation lay entirely within the cultivation of the inner feminine. The Earth in her compassionate wisdom, threw me back on myself that night. ‘‘If you wish to serve me, forgive . . . forgive your heart to me . . . your man’s heart. It all starts with forgiveness. (In Harding 1992, 177)

Pebbles, wounding, cultivation, counsel, and the heart. A series of associations that, in the context of this chapter, is fast becoming overdetermined. However, what I find particularly striking about Jastrab’s epiphany is the way he sets up a complex coronary exchange between the world, which is quoted as saying that it needs a man’s heart (an ambiguous formulation if there ever was one), and a man (Jastrab) who is instructed to serve the world by for-giving (and the allusion to the protocols of organ donation is faint but unmistakable) his own wounded heart. As a psychotherapist influenced by Native American cosmologies, Jastrab would, within the discourses available to him, appear to be setting up a structure identical to the one deployed by Nancy, in that he too sees being (here the Earth) as organized around, and dependent on, a heart. Moreover, this heart is double, belonging both to being and to (a) man. Like Nancy’s ‘‘heart of things,’’ the heart of (a) man is still. The allusion to cultivation rhymes with Bly’s presentation of the heart as a site of tenderness, a chamber wherein amor lies sleeping. As if to further emphasize the stillness of the heart, Jastrab’s entry goes on to lay out his characterization of the ‘‘warrior’’—a notion that is modeled specifically on the ‘‘wild man’’ Bly teased out of ‘‘Iron Hans.’’ Although one might certainly debate the wisdom behind Jastrab’s selection of these particular terms, the point here is actually to undercut the association between masculinity and violence and thereby prepare the way for a reclamation of disciplined auto-affection—in effect, the prior commitment that conditions all commitments. Here, too, the heart appears as a folded, or pocketed, chamber, produced by having one’s solicitation of the Earth’s counsel rebound on oneself, as though the mother has responded to the son’s demand that she be his super-ego by saying, ‘‘Do it (to) yourself.’’ In Hayden White’s provocative discussion of the ‘‘wild man,’’ he draws attention to the historical trajectory from myth, to fiction, to remythification, that inflects the contemporary sense of this figure.∞≤ His aim is to underscore the way the ‘‘wild man’’ has come to lose its socially constructed texture (something made evident in its fictive avatar [Latin: fictio, a making]), devolving merely into the psychological

a drum of one’s own

191

potential for antisocial behavior of the sort pastiched in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. However, rather than play out the figure of the ‘‘wild man,’’ I will deploy it as a way to revisit beating and counsel. It is not hard to recognize in the quote from Jastrab’s journal the shift from counsel to the council. The Earth gives him advice, and he acts on it, setting out to find the needed male heart. Although the information imparted is not exactly ‘‘shot through with explanation’’ (it is, one might say, ‘‘deep’’), it nevertheless does not meet the conditions of counsel. This is because its fictive—that is, fabricated or made—status is not exchanged. Jastrab is told to forgive his own heart, in effect to be his own donor. In taking this advice, he folds himself back into himself, expelling the quested feminine from this autoaffective loop. Instead of forming new habits in a state of distraction, Jastrab discovers that he was distracted by feminism. Earlier, in discussing Benjamin’s presentation of counsel, I emphasized the figure of the ‘‘potter’s hand,’’ contrasting this with Parks’s preoccupation with the slapping of skins, or beating, that left little or no trace other than that of the sweetness carved into the immediately dissipating sounds themselves. This discussion can now be set in the context generated by my reference to White, where the ‘‘wild man,’’ as a mode of subjection (the modeling of an agent) now conditioned by the general dynamics of re-mythification, stands forth as a post- (or, non-) fictive construct. This oxymoronic structure—the post-fictive construct—organizes the men’s movement’s preoccupation with the synchronicity of the beating heart and the beating of the drums of masculine community. What is asserted there is something like a percussive synthesis of the universal and the particular. That is, in discovering the beat of the male heart and beating in sync with it, men take up the materialist task of refashioning their identities, of affecting their selves. Add to this the corollary notion that the Earth needs a male heart, and what we have is a delusional materialism that presumes to redeem reality itself. If we consider that beating by definition orders the interplay of difference and repetition, then the synthetic synchronicity envisioned by the men’s movement can, without the slightest exaggeration, be construed as a beating without a trace, in effect as the absence of beating. Stated in the rhetoric of a beat cosmology: If everything (being itself) is happening in the exact same groove, there is no discernible pulse. To this extent, what I characterized earlier as the men’s movement’s inability to counsel is to be understood not only in terms of what White called ‘‘re-mythification,’’ but also in terms of what Nancy referred to as ‘‘the heart of things’’—that is, the truth (about men). The relation 192 percussion

becomes less obscure if we think about fiction as a practice—in particular, as a practice in which the irreducibility of making is on display— while also rethinking practice as the performance of identity. To have and to hold an identity, especially an emergent, or ‘‘new’’ identity, is an event that to some significant degree is unsettled, challenged, by the making that puts it in play. The strategy (alibi?) of re-mythification thus becomes important as a way to finesse the dilemma that arises when the effort to make a new man tries to conceal its own fictive edge behind a disclosure that discovers in the new man the transhistorical unfolding of the old. This is clearly not what was meant by ‘‘the ends of Man,’’ but nor, as I suggested earlier, can the sense of this phrase be strictly detached from the historical conjuncture of the men’s movements here and abroad.∞≥ The fundamental political problem here has nothing to do with a failure of nerve, or any such thing. It is strictly a matter of the failure of analysis: The men’s movement seeks to found its gender politics on a misrecognition of that which has antagonized it. To put it bluntly, the problem has to do not with what the women’s movements have been able to eke out of capitalist social relations but, rather, with those very relations themselves insofar as they mediate all identities, empowered or disempowered. To my mind, these issues have for the most part been provocatively broached in Fred Pfeil’s White Guys (1995). But rather than embark on yet another detour, let us cut back directly to the beating of the tell-tale heart. In my conclusion, I will give these preliminary remarks their due. Echo Homo As I have argued, the percussive field ranges well beyond the musicologically delimited domain of music, and the preceding discussion of the male heart is meant to elaborate this rather basic point in yet another direction. Nevertheless, it remains important to come to terms with what is traditionally designated as musical practice, not merely because its character is tied up with the way a certain academic musicology disciplines its object by separating it from what then lies beyond it in principle, but because drumming in the men’s movement—even as storytelling—affiliates itself with what participants call ‘‘music.’’ By exploring this affiliation more systematically, it will be possible to tie a political critique of the movement (of the sort evoked earlier) to the various themes touched on in the course of this chapter. Let us resume our reading of Parks’s essay from Wingspan. I have a drum of one’s own

193

already noted some of the ways in which musical preoccupations obtrude within the piece. What I want to concentrate on here is his lengthy discussion of the samba, which makes up the spatial and thematic center of his piece. His discussion starts from the same place as Pierson’s— namely, with musical instruction. Noting that prior to such instruction, most retreat drumming began randomly and then fell into steady synchronization (an otherwise coveted state, as we have seen), Parks again underscores the importance of Michael Meade (the storyteller) by crediting him with having taught the men the samba. The samba is characterized as composed of three beats: the ‘‘grandfather beat’’ (two slow, almost lumbering strokes on a low-pitched drum); the ‘‘mature’’ beat (several strikes on a conga, or medium-pitched drum); and the ‘‘youth’’ or ‘‘lead’’ beat (more and faster strikes on a high-pitched drum). As Parks says, ‘‘In the samba, each group of men plays a specific beat and when you combine these beats on time, the result is music’’ (in Harding 1992, 209). What his description lacks in musicological or notational precision it compensates for in semiotic thickness. For on his characterization, we have three groups of men, each performing a beat that is itself representative of a group of men (in effect, generations with, predictably, youth in the lead) creating a relationship that Parks dubs ‘‘harmonious’’ (rather than synchronous) and therefore, properly speaking, musical. Although he acknowledges that these beats are to come together in the celebration of ‘‘carnival,’’ he, in characteristic formalist fashion, distinguishes this performative dimension from what makes the beating musical. Needless to say, the way he sets up the domain of what is distinctly musical in men’s drumming is suggestive indeed. Through the figure of Meade, this discussion of the samba revisits the discussion of storytelling. For this reason, should we not expect to find here an echo of the failure or displacement of counsel? We do, and it is an intriguing one. Although Parks—presumably through Meade— is aware of the Latin American derivation of the samba, this awareness does not manifest itself as a reconsideration of the cultural delimitation of music as such. To have done so—even without engaging Bakhtin’s influential treatment of carnivalesque practice as a micropolitics from ‘‘below’’—might have led him to consider the way current commentators on the samba (among numerous other forms of popular dance in Latin America and the Caribbean) have characterized its musical significance in terms of the way it plays with bodies in a space that, while authorized by power, is never fully administered by power. Alma Guillermoprieto (1990), for example, has emphasized that samba is the encounter among players, dancers, and revelers that takes place during 194 percussion

Carnival season, thus reiterating Chernoff’s point that non-Western drumming, in particular, must be seen as interactive, where drummers and dancers are beating back and forth, fully scrambling the prepositional simplicity of accompaniment and warranting, if not actually soliciting, Small’s term ‘‘musicking.’’ In insisting on treating dancing as something that accompanies the music of the samba (however ‘‘wild’’ or ‘‘cultivated’’), not only does Parks belie his putative respect for a Latin American cultural practice; he also repeats the move made in relation to storytelling, where drumming gave way to the counsel that it then undercut by refusing to locate the exchange of stories under the sign of production. Dancing and discussion assume homologous structural functions: They follow. There is more here than incidental ethnocentrism. What is equally striking is the way musicology is summoned, albeit implicitly, to bolster the displacement of counsel. Parks—although I suspect that Meade is the real culprit here—appeals in his characterization of the music of the samba to a time-honored approach to the musical analysis of African drumming. Already in the 1950s, A. M. Jones (and let there be no mistake, his work is of fundamental importance) had begun dividing up analyses of African drumming ensembles into three rhythmic strata, each characterized by the pitch of the drums used (high, middle, low) as much as by the note values making up the percussive patterns themselves (Jones 1954). This was encouraged by the fact that many West African drumming pieces are named after the drums that establish their rhythmic profile, and Jones can hardly be faulted for respecting local practices. By the same token, in seeking to convey these practices to those who would value the knowledge produced out of and about them, Jones naturalized a formalist procedure that, for all its descriptive power, obscured a limit that Chernoff, among many others, has sensed the need to criticize. Although one might certainly prefer Jones’s description of a samba (he would, for example, actually enable one to perform the drumming in it), he and Parks concur that the beating relevant to its percussive texture is all happening on what are clearly designated as musical instruments—despite Parks’s persistent and provocative invocations of dancing and, of course, the heart. Although Jones does pay attention to the clapping produced by dancers (in fact, his first examples are clap patterns that accompany children’s songs), he does so by treating the hands as disembodied instruments. It would appear, then, that Jones’s methodological rigor is predicated on an enabling tautology: African music is what is made by African musical instruments, or, put more pointedly, music is what a drum of one’s own

195

musical instruments produce. Because ‘‘ethnomusicology’’ has come a long way since the 1950s, as I made clear in Chapter Two, I have no particular desire to make more of Jones’s essay than is warranted under the circumstances. Nevertheless, the distant resonances of Jones’s approach in Parks’s discussion do authorize the following observation: that the premature delimitation of what constitutes the domain of the musical (the instruction that disciplined their drumming) weighs on the discussion of drumming and masculinity in a manner that bears scrutiny. Wary of repeating the oversight I have imputed to Parks, I do not want to correct his delimitation of the musical by determining what are then presented as its true limits. Instead, I will consider the men’s movement—especially the phenomenon of its ‘‘newness’’—in the context of the drumming, beating and striking that has been forging identities in North America for quite some time. My aim here is to suggest how a symptomatic misreading of the domain and history of musical practice haunts the new men’s movement, at once providing it with some of its most highly charged fantasies while also spoiling its reclamation of unmediated masculine affect. In fact, one might reasonably argue that it is the composting of this spoilage that significantly fuels the movement. In 1957, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, what the authors of The Sex Revolts (among others) have characterized as ‘‘the seminal text of rock rebellion’’ (Reynolds and Press 1995, 8). Two years earlier, Lester Davenport, Henry Gray, Jerome Green, Frank Kirkland, and Ellas McDaniel (Bo Diddley) had recorded their first record for the Chess label in Chicago. On the A side was a tune called, sensibly enough (especially given that it was driven by the signature Bo Diddley beat) ‘‘Bo Diddley.’’ On the B side was a quite different piece, ‘‘I’m a Man.’’∞∂ The lyrics are as follows: [Verse] Now when I was a little boy, at the age of five. I had something in my pocket, kept a lot of folks alive. Now I’m a man, Made twenty-one. You know baby we can have a lot of fun. [Chorus] I’m a man. I spell M-A-N, man. [Verse] All you pretty women, stand in line. I can make love to you baby, in an hour’s time.

196 percussion

[Chorus] [Harp solo] [Verse] I’m going back down, to Kansas soon. Bring back a second cousin, little John the Conqueroo. [Chorus] [Verse] The line I shoot, will never miss. The way I make love to them, they can’t resist. [Chorus]

There is much here of considerable interest: the macho posturing, the oblique allusion to voodoo (‘‘John the Conqueroo’’ should be read ‘‘conqueror root,’’ precisely what one might have sought at Congo Square), not to mention the adumbration of one of Bo Diddley’s later personae, the ‘‘gunslinger.’’ Nevertheless, it is the musical setting of the lyrics, their performance, as it were, that deserves extended commentary. Although the execution of the words and the various moans and cries that punctuate them (notably in the chorus), including the way the harp solo picks up on, and ‘‘instrumentalizes,’’ these vocal gestures, is crucial to the sense produced by the piece, I will begin by concentrating on the spelling out of ‘‘man,’’ which virtually stitches the lyrics to the musical setting. By this I mean that in the chorus, M-A-N is executed so that each letter is virtually given its own measure. Thus, each alphabetical sign takes up the same time as a whole phrase in the verses. In addition to underscoring the way the song teaches the lesson of masculinity (the word spelled M-A-N means what the song depicts), this condensation draws attention to the musical structure it defines. At one level, I am simply referring to the fact that the chorus—by definition— is repeated (indeed, Leonard Chess was so adamant about its details he rehearsed and recorded it repeatedly before the final cut). It serves to separate the verses and effect the closure of the piece. At another level, the measured spelling of M-A-N grounds these signs in the beating that repeatedly defines every measure in ‘‘I’m a Man.’’ This can be clarified by coming back to the beginning. The piece opens with a guitar riff that, in addition to setting up the chord pattern of the entire song, sets up one of the beats that defines its rhythmic pulse. ‘‘Pattern’’ is a bit of an exaggeration, for in the space of half a measure (and significantly it anticipates or jumps the downbeat) the riff moves from the I to the IV to the iii and back to I. Tonally, it institutes

a drum of one’s own

197

an arc that establishes itself and collapses, only to leap and fail again, over and over. To see it performed (whether by Bo Diddley or Jeff Beck) makes it clear that this riff is to be read as a sign of strident tenacity. The guitar, the harp, the bass, and the piano all participate in its execution. In Palmer’s Rock and Roll (1995, 46), Bo Diddley is quoted as saying, ‘‘I play guitar as though I were drumming,’’ and as tonally important as this riff is, it must also be examined as a beat. Like the ‘‘Bo Diddley beat’’ discussed in Chapter Three, this beat, too, appears to harbor the secret of an unrealized professional desire. What one can see here is that the riff establishes a sixteenth-note ‘‘trot’’ that sets the groove for the snare drum. In the recording, the snare (and bass drum) enters as the opening riff concludes, sustaining the trot throughout and setting up a slow roll (five sixteenth notes) that then creates a percussive arc that beats against the tonal arc: 3–1, 3–1, 3–1, 3–1–2–3–1 (repeat). Because I locate the very ‘‘heart’’ of this piece, the place where it folds back to act on itself, at this juncture, I will revisit it. First, however, the delivery of the lyrics deserves comment. Bo Diddley does not really sing this song. The melody, such as it is, is extremely constrained, almost monotonous. What is interesting about it—aside from the way its ‘‘straight-shooting’’ swagger vocally stages the coming of age it announces—is the way it also functions percussively. In this sense, Bo Diddley sings the way he plays guitar. I have already drawn attention to the way the chorus operates in this capacity, but the ‘‘singing’’ in the verses also works to diversify the rhythmic texture. Specifically, because of the syllabic requirements of the lines—now-when-I-wasa-lit-tle-boy—the verses (especially in the first two) tend to reverse the percussive arc, situating something like a fill before, or in front of, the trot. Although this produces interesting polyrhythms, its general effect is to set up a broad percussive pulse in which there are two kinds of measures: those in which there is a comparative flurry of activity (drum roll, many syllables, return from the iii to the I) and those in which the lull that sets up the flurry prevails. One can, I believe, think about this as a diachronic or horizontal articulation of the synchronic arcs that characterize the activity of the instruments. Seen harmonically, ‘‘I’m a Man’’ tells little or no story, which is no doubt one of the reasons that its end—like that of ‘‘Get Off of My Cloud’’—is produced by the reproductive technology itself. The piece simply fades out. Nevertheless, heard percussively, what one finds is a reiterated event, something I am inclined to call an ‘‘outburst.’’ Whether writ large or writ small, the piece ebbs and flows as if its 198 percussion

fig. 4 ‘‘I’m a Man’’

proclamation requires a phatic subtext in which outbursts and subsequent retreats are staged over and over again. Though I am loathe to read this strictly in terms of the lyrical cues, it is nevertheless hard to avoid the ‘‘pistolary’’ and plainly phallic gesturing that articulates this proclamation of manhood. While I share Reynold and Press’s desire to differentiate such gestures—when executed by an urban black in white America—from garden-variety misogyny, one can find here what Farah Jasmine Griffin and Michelle Wallace (among several others) have clearly diagnosed as a disturbing link, especially for black men, between identity and heterosexual performance. As we shall see, however, I think there is another way to get at the necessary discriminations here. But let us return now to drumming and the men’s movement. More than simply contemporaneous with the Beats, whom—as we have seen—Ehrenreich situates at the origin of the movement, ‘‘I’m a Man’’ forges an explicit link between beating and man. Precisely the way it tends to render every performer a percussionist while calling out its spelling lesson reminds us yet again how profoundly the percussive practices of rock-and-roll are deeply and persistently marked by the displaced traditions of African drumming.∞∑ Given that the samba derives from the encounter between Africa and the Americas, as Guillermoprieto and Barbara Browning (1995) have shown, it is surprising— in fact, even troubling—that Parks is so eager to associate the musical character of men’s drumming with a tradition that all but obscures the musical idiom whose obvious pertinence (given the lyrical theme and cultural derivation) is undeniable. Would ‘‘I’m a Man’’ threaten, among other things, the ‘‘newness,’’ the difference, of the new men’s movement? Perhaps, although the macho stridency of the piece might well constitute the affective profile from which the new man is seeking to distance himself. What one sees here might be characterized as a repetition of the a drum of one’s own

199

premature delimitation of what constitutes the musical domain but now articulated historically—that is, along the axis that would allow one to recognize how drumming conducted within what we typically call musical compositions participates in the hailing at stake in the men’s movement, whether new or old. My point is not just that Parks indulges in a characteristic gesture of white supremacy—finding a more recherché other to respect (here Native Americans—in spite of their cultural commitment to drumming—might fall even behind African Americans, whose musical practices whites actually support)—but that this appears to be motivated primarily by a need to establish the specifically new men’s movement’s return to affect, to commitment. To effect this distinction, music must not only be constituted in a particular way—the sort of thing produced by performing on musical instruments. The music relevant to the current conjuncture must also be disconnected from any and all compromising precedents, however pertinent these might otherwise be to the project of refashioning masculinity.∞∏ White skins would again appear to be closing in on themselves by placing black skin in, as it were, the holes. Indeed, the suspicion that scholars such as Edward Said have cast on the West’s ‘‘errand in the wilderness’’ might well be directed toward all those groups of, predominantly white, men running around and secretly meeting in the woods. The question arises as to what might be audible if a piece such as ‘‘I’m a Man’’ were approached less preemptively? To resolve this, we need to return to what I earlier characterized as the heart of the tune: the beating of the drums against the other instruments—notably, the guitar, piano, and harp. If it makes sense to suggest that the fade that closes the song serves to index the episodic rather than narrative character of ‘‘I’m a Man,’’ then equal stress might well be placed on the beginning of the track, where the guitar riff anticipates the entry of the drums. Specifically, once the piece is under way, we realize that what the opening displaces is the fill that otherwise surrounds the riff. This has the effect, simply at the level of the compositional syntax, of making the fill seem like a response, as though it had been provoked by the riff. In fact, in the unfolding of the song, the last note of the fill actually falls on the downbeat, setting up the broad syncopation that keeps the piece falling forward. Under such circumstances—the fact that the snare, in particular, dominates the percussion track—invites us to hear a confrontation between an Anglo-American marching style and what is essentially a blues-based, or African American, riff. Thus, as I argued in the preced200 percussion

ing chapters, there is a skin, a beating surface, on which a distinctly racial scenario is unfolded at the heart of this piece. The sexual fantasy that overdetermines the lyrics is consequently staged in a context wherein a racialized history of skin contact dictates its terms. Although this supports the reading of ‘‘I’m a Man’’ proffered by Reynolds and Press, it does so at a level that permits a somewhat less flattering strategic assessment of the interpenetrating sexual and racial economies. For even if the ineffectual revolt proclaimed and taunted by the vocalist is understood as the triumphant cry of David, it certainly cannot be deemed progressive that Goliath’s vulnerability is unequivocally eroticized and feminized.∞π Insofar as the new masculinity locates its musical heart well outside the range of such political concerns, it premises its own conditions of possibility on an enabling misrecognition. There are several aspects of this misrecognition. The theme I have been insistently underscoring is that of historical amnesia, where the drumming relevant to the contemporary movement is precipitously disconnected from prior contexts in which some of its organizing codes were hammered out. However, more needs to be said here. At stake is not simply the matter of historical accuracy, or even awareness. Beyond that, there is the vexing problem of figuring alterity. In my reading of the Newsweek cover, I stressed the importance of the men’s movement’s covetous relation to feminism and the women’s movement. While this is undeniably important, what my examination of Parks’s discussion of drumming and music strongly suggests is that it may well obscure what is perceived to be a supplemental and perhaps even more menacing alterity: the presence of African American men and women in North America, especially those who drum, beat, and strike.∞∫ Obviously, this complicates my earlier discussion, but it does not mean that the men’s movement’s relationship to feminism is simply a superficial illusion. There is more to it than that. In fact, the complexity acknowledged here will help me draw out an aspect of the discussion in greater detail. My point about the heart was not just that it linked beating and affect or feeling—a decisive enabling connection for the new men’s movement—but also that, through the folding together of one’s status as both subject and object, being and stone, the heart internalized an alterity that could then ground what amounts to a risk-free return to commitment. By being capable of committing oneself to one’s self (auto-affection), men could present themselves as again capable of precisely those feelings the women’s movement had ‘‘accused’’ them of abandoning. In effect, the new man, by rededicating himself to a drum of one’s own

201

the Nietzschean characterization of humanity—animals bred to keep promises (in a phrase, ‘‘promise keepers’’)—could find the other within himself, not in the unconscious, but in the heart, a more pointedly corporeal topos. Crucial to this achievement, however, is a reduction of the other, because the other’s diversity, its heterogeneity, is precisely what must be managed so that auto-affection will not breach. The subject’s relation to alterity—seen from the perspective monogrammed ‘‘his’’—is apparently to be mirrored in its own structure. One to (the other) one. Thus, feminism, or the women’s movement more broadly, becomes a strategically deployed designator for an overdetermined field of alterities that the beating of the heart synchronizes or, in a word, reduces. If the efficacy of such a reduction requires that drumming be historically situated in a manner that denies its relationship to other struggles to constitute or reconstitute masculinity—especially if such struggles involve the open articulation of multiple divisions and antagonisms—then this apparently is simply the price to be paid. What this reduction removes from the broad domain of percussive practices is of immeasurable importance, despite the explicit way that men’s drumming engages the crucial historical problem of gendered embodiment. What it offers to the new man, however, is nothing short of the enabling contradiction of his same-old-newness. The Slow Fade of the Subject Earlier, I characterized the conflicted politics of the new men’s movement in terms of a tension between its materialist methodology (altering consciousness through transformations of practice) and its essentialist ontology (the indexing of practical transformations in relation to an experience obscured by false consciousness). In the preceding section, I tried to show how this conflict arises in the way the men’s movement appropriates the practice of drumming, emphasizing how the resuscitation of the heart engages a past that is subsequently stripped of what might well be regarded as all the requisite specificities. The dialogic monologue with musical performance states this blatantly. Because my point here is to engage a perspective with which I disagree, I will conclude by at least identifying what I take to be the path not yet taken by the men’s movement, thereby resuming my oblique dialogue with White Guys—or, perhaps even more particularly, with ‘‘A White Boy Is Being Beaten,’’ Lisa Frank’s contribution to Boys (Smith 1996, 293–308). As I observed in the discussion of ‘‘castration envy,’’ Lacanians— 202 percussion

especially those eager to shelter Lacan’s teachings from a certain feminism—insist that ‘‘woman is man’s symptom.’’ This maxim is designed to acknowledge that, indeed, woman’s identity is largely constituted— at least within the field of the signifier—by the significance she has for man. At a certain level—call it the level of tact—it is meant to heal what might otherwise be regarded as a wound to her narcissism: her status as Lack, or, in alternative rhetoric, the not-all. However, if woman is the bearer of the Lack, it is not because man is Lackless. On the contrary, if woman is the bearer of Lack, it is because man has the power to displace and, in effect, project his own. He, too, therefore, is a Lackee. The specifically symptomatic character of this has been given a ˇ zek’s analysis of Lacan’s claim that Marx (rather significant twist in Ziˇ than Freud) invented the symptom. ˇ zek’s work know, it has long As those who have been following Ziˇ concerned itself with a systematic rethinking of ideology. It is in relation to this project that he first broached the theme of the symptom. ‘‘How Did Marx Invent the Symptom’’ opens by revisiting some of the enigmatic chestnuts of Marx’s account of ideology: How can a consciousness that is false truly arise in the social process? How can real men lead unreal lives? And so on. Pointing out that all such enigmas presuppose that ideology operates within the relation between consciousness and things—that is, that ideology is essentially an epistemoˇ zek, in a characteristic coup de theatre argues that, logical affair— Ziˇ in fact, ideology arises in action. He derives this insight from a Lacanian inspired re-reading of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s brilliant and sadly neglected discussion of commodity fetishism (Sohn-Rethel 1978), a discussion initiated by Marx in Capital (1977). At the risk of betraying my own commitment to the diversity of ˇ zek’s move—the very one that makes alterity, I will observe that Ziˇ sense of Lacan’s potentially gratuitous allusion—rests on the theoretical category of the ‘‘real abstraction.’’ As is well known, Marx linked fetishism to the experience, lived by everyone involved in the exchange of commodities, wherein the social relations among human beings appears as the world created by the things they exchange. The question is: From whence does this appearance arise? Drawing on the example of ˇ zek responds by arguing that money (Marx’s ‘‘general equivalent’’), Ziˇ the appearance we call ‘‘commodification’’ (‘‘reification’’ for Lukács) is not to be situated in the domain of knowledge at all. As people actually use money in order to effect vital exchanges among themselves, the social framework within which money has been constituted as a materialized symbol of value does not figure in the knowledge they bring to a drum of one’s own

203

such exchanges. Contrary to what public sentiment would have us believe about gambling, in effect all money is essentially a ‘‘marker.’’ Knowing this is not prohibited by, and thus barred from, the circulation of currency. Rather, knowing this is ‘‘repressed,’’ because our knowledge in no way affects the act of using money. We do it just the same. ˇ zek means by the ‘‘real abstraction’’ is precisely this Thus, what Ziˇ social framework propping up the value of money, a framework that figures as an absence present in the very activity of exchange. This utterly collapses the typical distinction between the abstract and the concrete in that, from such a vantage point, the reality of the concrete is riven by an abstraction that structurally conditions its concreteness. Drawing on Marx’s formulation, ‘‘They do not know it, but they are ˇ zek proceeds to doing it’’ (translation modified) (1977, 166–67), Ziˇ tease out the implications of his reading of fetishism for the notion of subjectivity. It is here that he most dramatically parts company with Sohn-Rethel. If human beings (in the context of commodity exchange) appear to one another as things, and if this appearance is to be situated in the domain of action—that is, where ‘‘they are doing it’’ as opposed to where ‘‘they are thinking it’’—then there must be some equivalent of ˇ zek the real abstraction operating in the domain of subjectivity. Here Ziˇ wants to situate the Lacanian unconscious. In other words, like the social framework in which money assumes its value, the social ‘‘inmixing’’ of human beings that is structured like a language (‘‘the subject is a signifier for another signifier’’) functions as an absence present in all specifically human intercourse. We may know that we are incapable of ultimate self-determination (economic or otherwise), but we interact as if we are, just the same. Without this ‘‘as if,’’ there is no subject of psychoanalysis. ˇ zek surely overstates the non-epistemological character Although Ziˇ of this state of affairs, it is clear that he has indeed illuminated something vital about the Marxian dynamics of fetishism. Because he comprehends the symptom as ‘‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject,’’ or, slightly later, ‘‘a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation’’ ˇ zek 1989, 21), he feels authorized to endorse Lacan’s contention (Ziˇ that Marx invented the symptom. In effect, the real abstraction whose absence conditions the presence of the subjects in exchange is the symptom. Through the attendant concept of ‘‘ideological fantasy,’’ he is able to provide some content for what is otherwise advanced as a strictly formal category. I will return at this juncture to the analytic maxim with which I 204 percussion

ˇ zek takes it up in the context of began: ‘‘Woman is man’s symptom.’’ Ziˇ an observation he makes about the tendency in Lacan’s writings of the 1980s to ‘‘universalize’’ the symptom—to, in effect, map it onto the ˇ zek to sharpen the distincentirety of being. Although this prompts Ziˇ tion drawn by Lacan between the symptom and the sinthome (the sign saturated with enjoyment that organizes our investment in the symptom), I will leave him to his taxonomical labors and wrench the discussion back around to the men’s movement. If woman is man’s symptom, then presumably this is because—in the context of a particular ideological fantasy (let’s call it ‘‘patriarchy’’)—she designates the real abstraction, in effect the sociality that mediates the identities of human beings. ˇ zek, because we think this, but This is not, according to Marx and Ziˇ because we do this—that is, because heterosexuals engage one another as partners (trading, sexual, etc.) as if the distinctly social aspect of our subjectivities was somehow embodied, realized, in what our languages designate as ‘‘woman.’’ Her status as ‘‘second,’’ or dependent, designates the open secret of the kinship system on which heteronormativity is propped up. Perhaps this is precisely why women and their movement—whether as constraints or examples—figure so prominently in the men’s movement. Once subjectivity itself is taken up as a project, its ˇ zek intricate social mediation threatens to appear. Without what Ziˇ calls a ‘‘fantasy’’ to reorganize the formal collapse semantically, considerably more than the sex–gender system is at stake. This is the point, however, at which I feel compelled to part comˇ zek. To put the matter bluntly: If Lacan concedes that pany with Ziˇ Marx invented the symptom, might it not also follow that capitalism invented psychoanalysis? In this sense, capitalism also invented Marxism, but the issue here touches on something otherwise obscured by ˇ zek’s emphasis on the hermeneutic ‘‘homology’’ between Marxism Ziˇ and psychoanalysis—namely, something like the enabling conditions for the real abstraction. Depending on how one construes such conditions, the specifically critical character of one’s hermeneutic will be determined. For Marx, the critical moment is, indeed, the moment of truth—that is, at least as it is characterized in the second thesis on Feuerbach, the moment in which the long-deferred promise of transcendental philosophy is realized in the revolutionary action of the proletariat. Here the real abstraction of capitalist exchange is made absent through its radical transformation. This represents the end of a particular way of living the fact that we know not what we do. And even if the proletariat does not know what it is doing when it revolts against capital (precisely what communist parties everywhere are dea drum of one’s own

205

signed to prevent), its action still deeply reorganizes the domain of the symptom. To this extent, it potentially relieves the subject not of its Lack, but of the state of affairs in which its Lack is indexed to the absence of sociality in human relating. ˇ zek does acknowledge the historical specificity of capiAlthough Ziˇ talism—his whole account of fetishism hinges on a distinction between feudalism and capitalism—the homological orientation of his discussion leads one to assume either that psychoanalysis is essentially a derivative hermeneutic or that it is foundational in a way that makes its commitment to historicity quite difficult to assess. If, as he says, ‘‘overrapid historicization makes us blind to the real kernel that returns as the same through diverse historicizations,’’ then there is something misleading about the very notion of invention that organizes his discussion. To avoid ‘‘to discover’’ by opting for ‘‘to invent’’ (as in ‘‘Marx invents the symptom’’) is to endorse the notion that the symptom was, in some sense, produced by Marx in his analysis of capitalism. If, in fact, Marx merely discovered a form (a real kernel) as it was deftly returning once again as the same, then why this talk of invention? What is going on? Putting perhaps the work of historicization in slow-motion, one is prompted to speculate about the symptom at work in the invention or discovery of the symptom. Is Marx’s ‘‘invention’’ of the symptom only a dialectical negation of its universal foundation, one to be ˇ zek apprehend what in the negated in turn as Freud, Lacan, and Ziˇ symptom properly calls out for ‘‘discovery’’? If so, then in spite of Lacan’s indulgence of Marx, one finds here a clear repudiation of something like the method of historical materialism as a way to get at the affiliation between capitalism and psychoanalysis. Only a certain ideology of science makes this seem necessary. The notion of the symptom as that which eternally subverts its own universal foundation directs us back to the enigma of the drum’s voice—the voice that speaks a universal language but that we, for whatever reasons, are unprepared to hear. When I stressed in my opening remarks that the men’s movement’s relation to feminism is a vital one, I did not do so because I want to concede its self-perception on this ˇ zek’s reading of fetishism, it seems clear matter. For in light of Ziˇ that what the men’s movement is doing (and to some extent, thinking) can be described by invoking, for the last time, the Lacanian maxim: Woman is man’s symptom. Although it is a matter of some political urgency that men involve themselves in the material labor of identity reconstruction, it is equally urgent that this labor not mistake woman for the real abstraction of which she is primarily the symptom. If so206 percussion

ciality, as an absent field of structured relations and antagonisms by virtue of its very abstractness, leaves the subject voided, and if this very state is what drives men back into the woods, then perhaps both movements, men’s and women’s, need to recommit themselves to the protracted struggle for sociality, or what I have also called ‘‘collectivization.’’ This means, among other things, embracing the diversity of alterity in ‘‘what they are doing.’’ If the drums are not saying this, then perhaps it is just as well that ‘‘we’’ cannot hear them. For this is the left fork to the heart. Coda Where does this leave us? I will suggest that, no doubt without our knowing, we have returned to Small’s concept of musicking. Developed expressly for charting the difficult frontier between music and social practice, musicking helps one understand how, as I argued in the Introduction, the analysis of music is at one and the same time the analysis of society. Indeed, the latter cannot be done without the former, a point underscored recently by, for example, Neil Lazarus, whose study of the ‘‘postcolonial world’’ has necessary recourse to a study—at once subtle and sophisticated—of ‘‘Afro-pop’’ in South Africa (Lazarus 1999). Numerous other examples can be cited. What I have attempted in my reading of the men’s movement is to establish how the analytical construct of the percussive field facilitates movement between sounds and symptoms, between the analysis of pieces and the oblique strategies of cultural politics. Although Small might object, the percussive field is flatly designed to supplement the concept of musicking. In order to come together, the percussive field depends on a theoretical rehabilitation of Althusser’s concept of interpellation, a rehabilitation that must rise both to the challenge mounted by the identity politics of psychoanalysis and to the damaged lives capitalism continues to oblige us to live. Some of the required steps of this rehabilitation have been essayed here. Personally, I see no way around the body, the problem of the skin—the ‘‘new frontier’’—as we strike out for who comes after the subject. In placing this call, I have tried to explain why. Will it have reached the party with whom I am speaking? Will it play? Beats me.

a drum of one’s own

207

notes

Introduction: (Re)percussions 1 ‘‘Middle passage’’ is a phrase that has emerged in African American cultural and literary criticism to designate the space and time of separation produced when Africans were, as a result of the slave trade, transported predominantly from the western coast of Africa to North America. It is famously figured in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987, pt. 2, sec. 4), where even the inscription of English syntax, the very medium of what Morrison calls ‘‘re-memory,’’ is not spared the ravages of the slave vessel. 2 Throughout this study I will have recourse to a number of terms, perhaps even concepts, that have acquired a certain philosophical ambiguity. ‘‘Sense’’ is one such term. ‘‘Feeling’’ is another. Even lexicographically, ‘‘sense’’ admits of conflicting senses. It refers, as a noun, to any one of the five senses, to the faculty of perception, to a perception, to judgment, and to meaning or import itself. Equal diversity exists in its verbal form. Precisely because this profusion swarms within a philosophical tendency to separate meaning from being, I am drawn to the concept. Bypassing the rationalist quandary posed by the senses, it enables one to link the cultural production of meaning to the social construction of the subject, thereby deeply complicating the distinction between the cultural and the social. In elaborating ‘‘sense’’ in this way, I have found much to ponder in Jean-Luc Nancy’s chapter on music in The Sense of the World (Nancy 1997, 84–87). 3 New musicology is also referred to as ‘‘critical musicology’’ or even ‘‘popular musicology.’’ Oddly, what now passes as ‘‘new’’ in the field of musicol-

4

5

6

7

ogy actually dates back to the 1930s, when Theodor Adorno began developing his sociohistorical critique of the classical musical repertory (in his mind, predominantly German). This belatedness is itself interesting in that it registers the tenacity of the Western approach to music—an approach that has long pivoted around the principle of ineffability. Music was either the unmediated communication of pure affect (the unspeakable sublimity of feeling) or uniquely subject to a mathematical formalism obliged to describe what was otherwise devoid of representational content. The so-called new musicology, no doubt recognizing that by the late 1950s music— especially ‘‘popular’’ music in the West—already mattered enormously to huge audiences of consumers, struggled to find a way to bind together formalism and sociocultural analysis. The point was not to abandon ‘‘ineffability’’ but to show that it, too, had a sense; that it, too, was produced. There are many varieties of percussion instruments; indeed, there are many varieties of drums. Within the broad binary distinction between instruments of definite and those of indefinite pitch, those drums that have beating surfaces or skins stretched over a resonating chamber are called membranophonic drums. Because of the centrality of the drum set in rock-androll ensembles, where membranophonic drums preponderate, my study foregrounds these instruments in its analysis. Catachresis (or, as an adjective, catachrestic), is a classical rhetorical figure that has been much theorized of late. I will revisit it time and again in the following chapters, drawing attention to what I regard as particularly productive theoretical formulations. For now, I will simply observe that catachresis typically designates an ‘‘abusive’’ or ‘‘excessive’’ use of language in which substance appears sacrificed to form, although over time abuse can shade almost indiscernably into use. This occurs, for example, when a speaker of English refers to the ‘‘tongue of a shoe’’ or the ‘‘leg of a table.’’ Interpellation is the concept used by Louis Althusser to explain how human beings come to regard themselves as individuals. Framed in the context of a reexamination of ideology, interpellation allows Althusser to show that ideology is not primarily a matter of beliefs (true or false) but, rather that it is about the formation of the holder of beliefs. The point is not that there are no human beings prior to interpellation—a process administered by various state institutions that address themselves to a given population— but that through interpellation human beings come to experience themselves as what, the ‘‘who,’’ is at stake in the holding of certain beliefs. In Flowers in the Dustbin (1999), James Miller reminds us of the importance of Norman Mailer’s essay ‘‘The White Negro’’ for the early history of rock-and-roll. Strictly speaking, Mailer worked out what I refer to in this study under the heading ‘‘ebonfication,’’ but it is crucial to draw attention to the fact that the miscegenational identification at the heart of his essay massively anticipates a ‘‘lactification’’ whose brutality Mailer does not con-

210 notes to introduction

sistently denounce. Nevertheless, Miller is surely right when he insists on the link between rock-and-roll and the intricate vicissitudes of racial politics. Whether he can be forgiven for insisting, as Steven Waksman does in Instruments of Desire (1999), that rock-and-roll is fundamentally based on the electric guitar is another matter entirely. 8 The concept of ‘‘musicking’’ is elaborated in the opening pages of Music of the Common Tongue (Small 1987). Essentially, ‘‘musicking’’ is a pragmatic concept. That is, it attempts to ground musical meaning not in sound, but in performance, in the act of doing a piece. This allows Small to place music in a context where many more things than the logic of tonality or the life of a composer can be brought to bear on musical meaning. Obviously, the point is not to abandon notation but to supplement it. 9 Look at virtually any rock-and-roll act on stage, and somewhere toward the back and center—sometimes even raised—you will find the drum set (or drum kit, as the British prefer). This is the ‘‘trap set’’ or ‘‘traps’’ to which I refer. The trap set typically consists of at least four drums: a bass, or kick, drum (the large cylinder on whose front ‘‘head’’ the ensemble’s name often appears); a snare (the small, often metal, drum straddled by the drummer’s legs), a tom-tom (the deeper though smaller drum typically mounted on the bass drum), and a floor tom-tom (the drum, usually mounted on legs or a stand, that resembles the bass drum in size but is played vertically). The trap set also typically includes at least three cymbals: a ride (the large cymbal that is at times mounted on the bass drum); a crash (the slightly smaller cymbal usually mounted on a stand set opposite the ride cymbal), and a highhat (the two small cymbals mounted, face to face, on a stand with a foot pedal that allows them to touch and beat against each other. As we shall see, the nature of the trap set is that it lends itself to virtually infinite variation not only in ‘‘set up,’’ but in accessorization. This character of the trap set reached a certain apex with the arrival of electronic or synthesized drums in the 1970s, but what has persisted is the interplay between the snare and the bass. This persistence guides my thinking. 10 The expression ‘‘wigging’’ (from the French, la perruque), along with ‘‘poaching’’ and ‘‘making do,’’ derives from the English translation of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). In this study, which has now been completely translated, de Certeau uses such expressions to designate how cultural politics—specifically, the act of resistance—manifests itself in the micro-practices of use and consumption. ‘‘Making do’’ refers to the ways in which people turn commodities or routines to alternative ends by violating their normative functions. ‘‘Wigging’’ refers to the process of employee ‘‘theft,’’ whereby workers ‘‘liberate’’ production materials and labor power through the creation of objects stripped of surplus value and destined for private (familial) or collective (communal) use. De Certeau’s use of the French word coups (blows) to refer to this general class

notes to introduction

211

of practices is what makes his study so relevant to my own. Nowhere does he address the ‘‘percussive’’ character of this figure, but that, to my mind, compromises its value. 11 Even those familiar with the concept of ‘‘immanent critique’’ (from the German, Werkimmanent Betrachtung) know how vexing the task of explaining it is. Nevertheless, a few explanatory remarks are in order. In the hands of Theodor Adorno, ‘‘immanent critique’’ becomes a sublation of formalism. That is, it mimics the philologist’s attention to textual detail, but proceeds in accordance with the philosophical proposition that the truth content of a work is precisely what transcends it, not as context, but as the world contemporary barbarism cannot abide. In ‘‘The Essay as Form’’ (1991), Adorno implies that ‘‘immanent critique’’ imposes formal demands on the writer. But through the formal innovation of the Denkbild (the ‘‘thought image’’), Adorno’s mentor, Walter Benjamin, established the principle on which I am trying to follow through.

Chapter 1 The End of Senseless Beating 1 See Duden (1991), particularly ‘‘Toward a History of the Body,’’ the marvelous opening chapter in which she lays out the key points of reference— historical and theoretical—for her analysis and does so in a style that recalls the oddly confessional genre of the annotated bibliography. As is often the case in such studies, Duden’s is in many ways blind to those from whom the author she claims to have received insight. I am thinking here of Duden’s ‘‘homage’’ to Leo Steinberg, whose work bears a closer resemblance to Lowe’s than it does to her own. 2 In the appendix to the 1978 edition of The Civilizing Process, Elias explicitly situates the human skin in his account by considering its function as the ‘‘frontier’’ or ‘‘wall’’ (p. 249), differentiating the inside and the outside of homo clausus. His study thus supports the historical claim advanced by Duden—namely, that even at the level of proprioception, the body undergoes a profound reorganization with the advent of modern, increasingly ‘‘urbanocentric,’’ social relations. As we shall see, it is not insignificant that the metaphor of ‘‘dance’’ emerges as Elias’s way to grasp theoretically the sociohistorical field of the subject of civilization. Such work underscores one of the deficiencies of Mikhail Bakhtin’s otherwise prescient discussion of the body in ‘‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,’’ where a resourceful reworking of the relation between literature and experience nevertheless casts the relation between the inner and outer body as ‘‘given’’ (in Bakhtin 1990, 93–97). 3 Although this theme is not sounded directly in Michel Foucault’s ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ (1969), it is clear that the critique of historiography (whether positivist or Marxist) initiated there derives from Foucault’s

212 notes to chapter one

effort to draw the consequences of Nietzsche’s pre-phenomenological fascination with the human body. The most interesting challenges to this critique have been advanced from the left—one thinks here of everyone from Jürgen Habermas to Rosemary Hennessy. Although I am persuaded by the general call not to foreclose the problem of ideology, my own project represents an effort to sustain the genealogical project in spite of such a call. An elaboration of some of the implications for the critique of ideology represented by the genealogical project is contained in Chapter Two. 4 I draw here on the discussion of catachresis in Derrida’s ‘‘White Mythology’’ (1982). In particular, I want to underscore the significance of his radicalization of Fontanier’s treatment, wherein catachresis—as an abuse or misuse of language—becomes a general characterization of the relation between thought and language. In other words, ‘‘tongue’’ in the expression ‘‘tongue of the shoe’’ is abusive in that it metaphorically displaces an idea before that idea acquires its own linguistic sign, leaving us with a trope in the place of a proper name. Instead of seeing this as a rare occurrence, Derrida proposes that it be regarded as the very condition of language—a condition that Western metaphysics seeks to control. In addition, his observation that within the orbit of this tradition the living body serves as the ‘‘vehicle,’’ the ‘‘bearer’’ of all the forced metaphors that apply to thought, invites us to consider how the historicity of the body—such as that proposed by Duden, Lowe, Bakhtin, and countless others—invites this particular catachrestic fate. Somewhat more recently, of course, Gayatri Spivak has been working out the politics of catachresis in ways that have help to sharpen the terms of my argument (Spivak 1999). Derrida looms large in her discussion, as well. 5 Charlie Gillett and Christopher Small have both drawn attention to the significance of precisely how one spells ‘‘rock-and-roll.’’ According to Small, when Freed generated and attempted to copyright ‘‘rock ’n’ roll’’ (first without, but later with, the apostrophes), he was deliberately attempting to avoid using the term ‘‘rhythm and blues,’’ which, in the ’50s, was understood to denote ‘‘black music.’’ ‘‘Rock and roll’’ (no apostrophes) came to displace the prior displacement of ‘‘rock ’n’ roll’’ once the link between this popular dance music and African Americans was severed. In fact, ‘‘rock and roll’’ came to refer to all popular music enjoyed by ‘‘youth,’’ regardless of its relation to rhythm and blues or so-called country music. The consummation of this tendency is embodied in the emergence of ‘‘rock’’ during the 1960s, which reflects less the racial politics of the postwar period than its generic status. My own spelling—and I would be the first to admit its idiosyncratic character (though I have seen it elsewhere)—is designed to underline, through the use of hyphens, the displaced apostrophes while at the same time reintroducing ‘‘the bar’’ (of the sign, of color, etc.) within the very heart of the name. Although I understand, and support, the effort to

notes to chapter one

213

‘‘erase the hyphen’’ (as, for example, in the expression ‘‘Afro-American’’), in the case of rock-and-roll, I think that there are good strategic reasons for postponing, if not ultimately refusing, such a gesture. 6 Though Derrida does not invite the comparison (it is authorized in his extended treatment of Nietzsche’s formulation ‘‘to philosophize with a hammer’’), his concentration on the unsettling character of striking (tapping, typing, and, of course, playing the tympani) shares interesting features with Heidegger’s discussion of the ‘‘thrust’’ (Stoß) in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ (Heidegger 1971). For Heidegger, the ‘‘thrust’’ helps us conceptualize the way the work of art establishes its presence in Being, and while this constitutes an effort to think the irreducible particularity of art that Derrida rejects, it shares with him a fascination for the rich undecidability of percussive signifying. The special way this links the ear and striking is elaborated in ‘‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology’’ (1993, 163– 218), Derrida’s contribution to the Loyola University conference commemorating Heidegger’s birth. 7 It is vital to acknowledge here the important work on rhythm that has been performed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In ‘‘1837: Of the Refrain,’’ chapter eleven of A Thousand Plateaus (1987), one finds a discussion that draws on the concept of the ‘‘refrain’’ in order to comprehend what the songs of wrens share with the logic of motivic composition. Pointedly distancing itself from the ‘‘romanticism’’ Deleuze and Guattari are routinely accused of embracing, their analysis develops a hybrid analytical rhetoric that nevertheless allows one to think about how musical rhythms—ritornellos, in particular—come to engage the geopolitics of territorial accumulation. Although I am sympathetic to their critique of ethnology (in favor of a radical ethology), I restrict my appropriation of their project to a recognition of the urgency they bring to the task of situating musical performance in what the North American poet Charles Olson would have called an ‘‘open field.’’ In particular, their sense that rhythmic organization is impossible to punctuate at the borders of ‘‘a tune’’ strikes me as an insight with vital repercussions. See Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and two essays by Guattari: ‘‘Les ritournelles du temps perdu’’ in Guattari (1979) and ‘‘Ritornellos and Existential Affects’’ (1990). Within the paradigm called up by ‘‘the tympan,’’ it is also important to draw attention to an unsigned discussion, ‘‘De l’objet musical dans le champ de la psychanalyse’’ (1976), in which the ‘‘metonymic sexualization of the epithelium of the basal membrane’’ is theorized as the locus of ‘‘listening pleasure’’ ( jouissance auditive). 8 Chuck Connors, the drummer of Little Richard’s touring band, the Upsetters, addressed the issues raised here in an interesting way when he wrote: ‘‘To watch the guys playing on the stage was amazing. You couldn’t miss a beat because those bodies were always moving in time’’ (as quoted in White 1984, 73). This is a formulation that underscores how intimately the drum-

214 notes to chapter one

ming and the dancing (here by the musicians themselves) collude in producing the beat that can’t be lost. 9 Earlier I alluded to two recordings of this song, and this is perhaps the proper context for clarifying why. Though the Chess recording has the virtue of being ‘‘the original,’’ it does not feature Berry’s characteristic sidemen—notably, Ebby Hardy on drums. Instead, it has various musicians (including, let it be said, the amazing Willie Dixon) playing all the parts except Berry’s. When Berry later recorded the tune for Mercury, he brought in an electric bassist (Forrest Frierson) and a ‘‘wailin’ ’’ sax player (Cary Enlow), the one instrument invoked directly in the lyrics but absent from the original ensemble. To my mind, the Mercury recording is far inferior precisely because ‘‘Sir John’s Trio’’ (the earliest configuration of Berry’s band) is buried underneath the pyrotechnics of Frierson and Enlow. Nevertheless, Berry made this recording precisely to showcase the level of virtuosity he and other black musicians had attained since 1957. Thus, it is worth observing that the song opens and closes differently (gone is the final ‘‘cha-cha-cha’’); the order of the verses is shifted; and, in what I am treating as the crucial fourth verse, ‘‘Tango’’ is replaced by ‘‘Samba,’’ and ‘‘Congo’’ is replaced by ‘‘conga’’ (‘‘piano’’ is accordingly modified to ‘‘piana’’). In addition, the chorus that immediately follows quotes ‘‘Johnny B. Goode,’’ replacing, ‘‘Just gimme some of that rock ’n’ roll music,’’ with ‘‘Go, Go, Go.’’ Why these changes are pertinent will be established in the reading of the fourth verse that follows, but suffice it to say that it is not without interest that a specific African drum (the conga), one that was of crucial rhythmic importance to Latin and Caribbean percussionists, finds its way into the lyrics of the Mercury recording.

Chapter 2 Knocking the Subject: Music and Interpellation 1 The first stirrings of post-Marxism (so called) can be detected in Ernesto Laclau’s essay ‘‘Fascism and Ideology’’ (in Laclau 1977). In an audacious rereading of the category of interpellation, he revisits the venerable theme of Marxism’s putative failure to comprehend fascism practically and theoretically. As the reader will soon surmise, I share many of the convictions argued for there. Although Laclau and Chantal Mouffe adopt a rhetoric of defiance in ‘‘Post-Marxism without Apologies’’ (in Laclau 1990, 97– 132)—their much read response to the criticisms in Norman Geras—it is striking that, in subsequent debates, the theme of ‘‘radical democracy’’ appears to have displaced, at least terminologically, the notion of postˇ zek, one of Laclau’s most Marxism. Equally striking is the fact that Slavoj Ziˇ significant interlocutors, rarely invokes the term. Consider in this regard the ˇ zek, Mapping Ideology (1994). comparatively recent volume edited by Ziˇ There, one might well expect to hear the themes of post-Marxism sounded by name, but the term is in fact thoroughly suppressed. Another, equally

notes to chapter two

215

important figure here is Stuart Hall, particularly because his Marxism ‘‘without guarantees’’ shares much with the politicization of contingency to be found in Laclau, Mouffe, and Judith Butler. Although Hall’s engagement with the legacy of Marxism is considerably more passionate than Butler’s, his immediate concerns have led him away from post-Marxism and toward the politics of ethnicity and the postcolonial problematic. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000), ‘‘postmodernism’’ is the problem set on the ˇ zek, not post-Marxism. agenda by Ziˇ 2 With the publication of Althusser’s The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts (1993), we now have—especially in The Facts—his own account of the massage-cum-strangulation that, through a tragically demented circuit, took the life of his wife, Hélène. There is much in this account that invites our condemnation of the ‘‘culture of insecurity’’ that was roundly criticized by the participants at the penultimate United Nations-sponsored conference on women convened in Beijing. There is also much that stirs our pity. Although I have no wish to indulge in the absurd (and when advanced from the left, contradictory) reductionism that led people to conclude that Nietzsche’s texts ‘‘caused’’ the Third Reich, or that because Paul de Man wrote anti-Semitic texts something called ‘‘deconstruction’’ was ipso facto fascistic, passing over in silence the grim irony of the role of interpellation in Althusser’s life and career seems equally unforgivable. Isn’t the point rather to make this loss worthwhile—to redeem it, in effect, by projecting what can be gleaned there toward a future where what led to his tragedy will have become inconceivable? 3 I refer here to the glossary that was prepared to accompany the English translation of For Marx (1970, 249–57) and that was reprinted, with some additions, in the virtually simultaneous British publication of Reading Capital (Althusser with Balibar 1979, 309–23). Brewster’s work, its limitations notwithstanding, was deemed sufficiently important to require comment by Althusser himself: See not only Althusser’s ‘‘A Letter to the Translator’’ (which contains his famous distancing of himself from Foucault) but also his ‘‘To My English Readers’’ (Althusser 1970, 7–15). I invoke these bibliographic details only to underscore the fact that not even the author ‘‘himself’’ noted the absence of what has emerged as an Althusserian ‘‘keyword.’’ Of course, in true Althusserian fashion, I read this symptomatically. But, then, given my argument, I have few other options. 4 The list of figures who have critically engaged the Althusserian corpus— Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Laclau, Michel Pecheux, Gayatri Spivak, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and on and on—is a most distinguished one indeed. Because it matters crucially to contemporary debates about music culture, I want to underscore that aspect of the tradition of critical commentary that stresses how Althusser’s analysis of the production of the subject proceeds at a level of abstraction inimical to the current preoccupations of race, gender, and sexuality. Although Al-

216 notes to chapter two

5

6

7

8 9

10

thusser’s subject is never addressed in these terms, it is my aim to argue that: 1) such issues are not theoretically foreclosed on within his analysis; and 2) the specifically theoretical construction of the sexualized, racialized, and gendered subject-qua-subject, is often—within the discourse of identity politics—taken for granted. As I will argue later in relation to the theme of agency, this substitution of identity for the subject strikes me as penny-wise and pound-foolish. This is also the appropriate context in which to acknowledge that I am by no means the first to bring interpellation, or ‘‘hailing,’’ to bear on so-called popular music. Though hailing is not theorized in great detail in Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil (1993b), Walser makes sustained and inspired use of the concept throughout his analysis. I find it remarkable that even in a text explicitly influenced by Althusser’s essay on ideology—Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar’s ‘‘On Literature as an Ideological Form,’’ the introduction to Renée Balibar’s Les français fictifs—the appeal to interpellation is perfunctory, at best. In Macherey’s more recent The Object of Literature (1995), the category figures as the decidedly ‘‘unspoken.’’ For ‘‘On Literature,’’ see Young (1981). For the ‘‘pathbreakers,’’ see Harvey (1980, esp. chap. 3: ‘‘Ideology and the ‘Impression of Reality’ ’’). For Baudry’s germinal essays, see Cha (1981, 25–84). I am again referring to the deployment of ‘‘le coup’’ in de Certeau (1984), where this term designates the gestural or specifically practical element of an art of doing. Because I will have repeated recourse to this figure throughout my analysis—in effect, making up something of an expository blow or move—I will add nothing to my earlier note except to point out that in French, un coup de téléphone—perhaps the quintessential technologically mediated hail—is a phone call. Perhaps the definitive articulation of this problem appears in Copjec (1994). See, in particular, ‘‘The Orthopsychic Subject.’’ See Gorbman (1987, esp. chaps. 2 and 3) and, perhaps even more decisively, Silverman (1988, passim). Although more recent works, such as Flinn (1992), are less invested in the specular paradigm per se, they remain in intimate dialogue with it. Michel Chion’s struggle with ‘‘the point of audition’’ (modeled directly on the much debated concept of ‘‘point of view’’) takes place in Chion (1994, chap. 4). This perspective on theory is given its fullest articulation in Wlad Godzich’s introduction to de Man (1986). Equally striking, given my point about Althusser’s ocularcentrism, is that his work figures so minimally in Martin Jay’s otherwise comprehensive Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought (1993). Were it not for the fact that the subtitle generally overstates the book’s argument, one could suspect Jay of avoiding figures whose work might otherwise be seen as complicating his analysis.

notes to chapter two

217

11 Dolar’s essay was originally given as a talk in 1991. It appeared in English in the journal Qui Parle (Dolar 1993), and I am grateful to him for having ˇ zek’s essay, also originally a talk, appears sent me an offprint on request. Ziˇ in Laclau (1990). This short piece has the virtue of being an acerbic distillaˇ zek (1989) and Ziˇ ˇ zek (1988). Although tion of arguments made in both Ziˇ ˇ zek implicitly align his work with the discourse many of my criticisms of Ziˇ of identity politics, it is vital to acknowledge that he has developed his own ˇ zek 1998, 988–1009). hard-hitting critique of that discourse (Ziˇ 12 See, in addition to the text itself, the summary of the discussion following Miller’s paper at the conference ‘‘Michel Foucault philosophe,’’ convened in 1988 at the Centre Michel Foucault in Paris. This material is now available in Armstrong (1992). 13 For a more thorough elaboration of the argument I am advancing here, see Mowitt (1987). 14 One thinks here of such people as Christopher Small, John Blacking, Joseph Kerman, and certainly Charles Keil, but also of a somewhat younger generation of new musicologists. That generation is given perhaps its clearest intellectual profile in the work of Rose Subotnik, Susan McClary, Robert Walser, Lawrence Kramer, Barry Shank, and David Brackett, to name a few. 15 To some extent, I am merely reiterating theoretical positions taken by John Cage during the 1930s. Once the decision was made to regard both sounds and silence as the constitutive elements of musical composition, the boundaries of music underwent a profound transformation. Of the typical parameters of musical expression—pitch, dynamics, timber, and duration— only duration could be said to be shared, strictly speaking, by both sound and silence. As a consequence, duration came to predominate in Cage’s musical practice and his fascination with durational structures. Beyond the emphasis that the interest in duration placed on percussion music (where pitch is constrained), it also prompted a reconceptualization of rhythm. As Cage argued, ‘‘Rhythm is not at all something periodic and repetitive. It is the fact that something happens, something unexpected something irrelevant’’ (Cage 1993, 64). I extend this notion to apply to the very parameters of music as such. From a perspective in which sounds, in general, define the compositional rudiments of music, the difficulty one has in punctuating a particular piece rebounds back on the entirety of music as a domain of cultural practice. Anything that one might then be prepared to designate as a piece can be seen as a rhythmic event, or blow, that acquires its value in the sequence and distribution of other such events. This is as valid for aleatory composition (à la Cage or Boulez) as it is for the formulaic structures assailed by Adorno in ‘‘The Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Hearing’’ (1978). I should also note here that, according to Lacoue-Labarthe (1994, esp. 107), the concept of the sign available to Greek composers was one modeled on the tupos, or the blow. In the psychoanalytical literature, the link I am forging between sound and beating,

218 notes to chapter two

or music and percussion, is provocatively discussed in Niederland (1958). Through a judicious use of Richard Onian’s now reprinted study, The Origins of European Thought (1951), Niederland demonstrates how speech, especially a parental oath or curse, constitutes for the infant a ‘‘contact experience.’’ I will revisit this material in Chapter Four.

Chapter 3 Different Strokes for Different Folks 1 Freud, who had remarkably little to say about music, was nevertheless among the first to articulate the specifically unconscious symbolism of the image called up by Blades. In ‘‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,’’ from 1926, one finds the following: As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube on to a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading [des Stampfens; stamping or perhaps even pounding, if not beating] upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act. (Freud 1963, 15) In Chapter Four, I will examine the link forged here between beating and sexuality more systematically, but for now let us recall that, for Freud, walking can be displaced by beating on the mother’s body because walking and beating touch somewhere. It is also worth recalling that one of the rudiments of percussion—the so-called double-stroke roll—is also commonly referred to as the Mommy–Daddy roll. No doubt, this is due to the convenient match between the number of syllables and the number of strokes in the roll, although the English language is populated with countless other possibilities, thus giving the association between parents and beating a strictly overdetermined quality. In looking for precedents for such associations, one might usefully consult Deren (1976), in which she draws attention to the engendering that links certain tones (hence, sizes) and the dramatis personae of the family romance: mother drum, father drum, baby drum. 2 Elsewhere I have attempted to construct the ‘‘structure of listening’’ that exists in the post-phonographic era—the era to which rock-and-roll, as a recorded and broadcast music, belongs. In general, I argue that the moment of late modern music (regardless of idiom) in the West is one in which reception (temporally and logically) precedes production. This situation obliges us to emphasize rock-and-roll’s relation to recording technology rather than to the ‘‘live’’ performance, whose specious character has been unintentionally disclosed of late by the odd fetish of recordings of ‘‘unplugged’’ performances (Leppert and McClary 1987). As confirmation of this, consider the following anecdote, reported in Szatmary (1996, 106): When the Beatles toured with Carl Perkins in 1964, Lennon is reputed to

notes to chapter three

219

have told Perkins on meeting him, ‘‘We’ve got all your records. We slowed ’em down from 45 to 33 [to learn them].’’ If, as many have argued, rockabilly was a formative idiomatic current of rock-and-roll, and if composers such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney learned to play by copying records, then the very technology of reception (the multispeed ‘‘record player’’) has reached well into the act of rock-and-roll production. For a full-blown and philosophically rigorous presentation of rock-and-roll as a recorded music, see Gracyk (1996). 3 I am not here attempting either to undercut the importance of ethnographic fieldwork or to take the figure of ‘‘traveling theory’’ literally. Instead, especially in light of the work of people such as Cliffords, Rosaldo, and Minhha, I aim merely to underscore that—as Lacan and Derrida taught us in their reading of Poe’s ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’—what one is looking for must be carefully theorized before it can be found, no matter how diligently it is sought. 4 Although they do not speak directly to Abdulai’s concerns, the following remarks by Chuck Connors (again, Little Richard’s drummer) acquire an interesting resonance in the present context. Discussing how he was instructed to play the drum part in the hit ‘‘Tutti Frutti,’’ Connors says the following: He made me change so it was more heavy on the bass drum. When I think of it now, it sounded almost like what’s known as the disco beat. A whole lot of other bands had started to play ‘‘Tutti Frutti,’’ they cottoned on to Richard’s record, but they never played it like we did. They always used the single back-beat, never the beat we used [strong quarter-note bass-drum beats in every measure instead of the simple call to the snare on 1 and 3]. That’s too much trouble for the drummer. Playing it like that with the hand and the arm up there you get tired. But I’m from the old school. I was taught relaxing. I can play ‘‘Tutti Frutti’’ for five hours like that and never get tired. (as quoted in White 1984, 65) 5 Though a tad too indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty for my taste, Harris Berger’s essay ‘‘The Practice of Perception: Multifunctionality and Time in the Musical Experiences of a Heavy Metal Drummer’’ (1997) is an excellent discussion of the issues I raise here. Through participant interviewing, Berger provides a subtle account of how a particular drummer lives the music performed by his band, clarifying in particular how the body variously distributes itself across a given drum part. 6 These issues have been discussed with much lucidity and in considerable detail by Gilbret and Pearson (1999). There they take up some of the more recent ‘‘beat-centered idioms,’’ such as techno, jungle, and house (where synthesized drumming can perform fills whose drum stokes are counted in numbers per second), arguing that the body is at stake in such idioms in

220 notes to chapter three

7

8 9

10

11

12

ways that make traditional preoccupations with ‘‘listening’’ seem quite beside the point. Rock-and-roll is clearly one musical idiom that deserves its own chapter in any serious history of electricity. Sadly, Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s otherwise remarkable Disenchanted Night (1995) leaves us at the opera. A semiological study of this material is available in Sebeok and UlmikerSebeok (1976). Russo and Warner (1987–88) explores some of the connections between the practices analyzed by Thompson and Zemon Davis (among others) and aspects of the European avant-garde. Though interested in theorizing noise, Russo and Warner construct it literally enough that rock-and-roll does not appear to qualify, presumably because, by comparison, it is not as noisy as, say, Throbbing Gristle. Although the links they establish between various European and American musical idioms are indispensable to the effort to understand what Jacques Attali calls the era of ‘‘composing,’’ they leave several stones unturned. Although my colleague Jack Zipes has assured me that Jakob Grimm’s ‘‘The Bremen Town Musicians’’ does not derive from a Medieval source in which an episode of rough music figures, the centrality of the donkey, ‘‘Greyhorse,’’ in the tale (who, by the way, conscripts the cat by complimenting him on his talent for ‘‘Nachtmusik’’) and the event of the ‘‘musicians’ ’’ earsplitting assault on the thieves’ hideout (as we shall see, rough music always bore some relation to popular justice) makes it hard to dismiss such a correlation—however subterranean—altogether. The term Kladderadatsch is glossed in a note by Luxemburg’s translator, Patrick Lavin, as ‘‘a great noise.’’ Although Lavin acknowledges the existence of the daily, he does not pick up on what is emphasized in Taylor Allen’s translation of Kladderadatsch as ‘‘kerboom’’—namely, the percussively onomatopoetic character of the word. Etymologically, the German word shares associative values with Krach (crash; even row, in familiar usage) and Kladde or Kladdebuch (rough copy book). In any case, the term calls up precisely the kind of unsolicited, even crude, earsplitting that virtually defines rough music. In The Rhythms of Society (1988), Michael Young and Tom Sculler advance a problematic that they designate as that of ‘‘chronosociology.’’ Though at no point do they reflect on the musicological resonance of their disciplinary figure, their contributors do indeed concern themselves with issues of social change and crisis. Elias, in an earlier and more profoundly interdisciplinary meditation on sociology, actually worked out a model of the social process that conceived it in terms of dance. Here, too, an investment in choreography pushes the discussion toward a preoccupation with the coordination of acts in time, but Elias draws attention to the important way that dance exemplifies what he calls ‘‘figuration’’—that is, the process whereby the distinction between the individual and society breaks down as

notes to chapter three

221

both become subject to the unfolding of the social structure in which they thrive: see Elias (1978, 262). Of course, Nietzsche is Elias’s critical precursor here. 13 Wyatt-Brown (1986) draws attention to a crucial bit of etymological history that complicates this characterization of the objects of shivaree. Apparently, tar and feathering harks back to a Greek practice—discussed by K. J. Dover in Greek Homosexuality (1978)—in which tar was applied to men deemed ‘‘effeminate’’ (presumably queer) as a depilation device. These men were then run out of the city in raucous processions. They were called kinaidoi pepittokopemenoi (bepitched pathics). Tarring would thus appear to impose a sign on the male body (the absence of body hair) that is already deemed visible, or otherwise evident, within it. Insofar as this genealogical thread remains snarled in the practices of those who tar and feather, it would seem that a piece of every transgression so punished included a violation of gender codes, as if all victims were somehow failing to be all that they were supposed to be. Of course, for my purposes it is not insignificant that, again, the skin and its putative signs figure centrally in this practice of boundary policing. For ‘‘statistics’’ on lynching, see WyattBrown (1986, 436). 14 An important earlier discussion of this episode can be found in the chapter ‘‘Hitting the Streets’’ in Ronell (1992). In biographical terms, if they indeed apply, this collapse is thought to have precipitated the onset of Nietzsche’s ‘‘madness,’’ or what Dr. Wille (!), the attending physician, called his state of ‘‘mental degeneration,’’ a state in which Nietzsche passed the last eleven years of his life. This episode allows Ronell in her reading to theorize the ‘‘rumor’’ to which Nietzsche’s critique of the West ultimately succumbed, noting in passing that the episode also served to bring Nietzsche to the attention of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, where on April 1, 1908, Freud, Alfred Adler, Theodor Rank, and Wilhelm Stekel, among others, discussed Nietzsche’s writings and offered conjectures about the causes of his ‘‘illness.’’ The writings they discussed included The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo from the late 1880s. The causes they theorized included the death of Nietzsche’s father at an early age, having been raised by women, and syphillis (according to Carl Jung, contracted at a homosexual brothel): see Nunberg and Federn (1963). I concur with Ronell that Ronald Hayman’s biography of Nietzsche (Hayman 1980) contains one of the more level-headed accounts of this episode.

Chapter 4 Sound of the City: A Musician Is Being Beaten 1 Much of Adorno’s criticism of popular music in ‘‘On Popular Music’’ centers on the figure of the music fan or jitterbug. As is made clear in Adorno (1973), where this figure also appears, Adorno’s concern is with the structural impact on human agency of this particular cultural practice.

222 notes to chapter four

2

3

4

5

However, in contrast to much received opinion, Adorno’s analysis in ‘‘On Popular Music’’ remains dialectical—that is, open to the principle and possibility of negation. This is nowhere more clear than in the formulation that concludes the piece: ‘‘To become transformed into an insect, man [sic] needs that energy which might possibly transform him into a man’’ (Adorno 1978, 48). Although this is not the place to do so, it would be worth examining more carefully the extent to which Holly and Lennon were indeed responding to the cultural logic articulated by Adorno, a logic that, if stated in a less dated idiom, might read ‘‘Kafka rocks.’’ In Martin and Seagrave (1993), one finds formulations in which drumming is explicitly isolated as the cause of a regressive fusion between primitivism and nihilism—for example, ‘‘The heavy pulsing beat of this latest derivation of Negro [sic] music’’ (p. 50). To my mind, the best summary critique of this perspective is still Walser (1993b, esp. chap. 6). Although Freud’s texts are never systematically commented on by Benjamin, one finds references to them throughout the latter’s corpus. Because the references almost always prompt one to think differently about some of Freud’s key formulations, they suggest that behind the dearth of commentary was, in fact, a surfeit of reflection. Though demonstrating the point would take me far afield, one might argue that Freud was every bit as vital to Benjamin’s rethinking of Marxism in the 1930s as was Messianic Judaism. Indeed, the point has been made by Rainer Nägle among others (Naugle 1988). Specifically, what Freud brought to the table was a materialism of the psyche that, through the concept of the unconscious, outdistanced all mechanistic ontologies of reflection. In ‘‘On Some Motifs,’’ Freud is set off against both Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust, but precisely in order to cook up a theory of the subject consistent with Benjamin’s account of the political significance of lyric poetry. It is impossible to ignore the tremendous influence that Adorno had on the argument in this chapter of Benjamin’s Baudelaire. The cynically minded often read the chapter, in fact, as little more than evidence of Benjamin’s— albeit desperate—pandering to his junior, but comparatively well-placed, colleague. Although I have observed that Benjamin was not his own best reader here (in effect, conceding points whose flaws are by no means obvious), it is clear that he is struggling to live up to the dialectical demands of his own thought rather than sinking into an aporetic stupor or indulging some contextually motivated tendency toward obsequiousness. The gist of this exchange is available in Taylor (1977) and also (Adorno and Benjamin 1999). The concept of ‘‘aura’’ has been around for quite some time. According to Onians (1951, pt. 1), the term figured in early Greek theories of the senses, referring to temperature-sensitive vapors or, in other accounts, breath through which sensory information traveled. No doubt it is this heritage that placed the concept in the hands of surgeons, from whom Benjamin

notes to chapter four

223

inherited the term. In his hands, ‘‘aura’’ becomes a pivotal concept in aesthetic theory, first appearing in ‘‘Dostoevsky’s The Idiot’’ from 1917 (in Benjamin 1996, 78–81), where it oscillates between a designation for the Russian spirit and the emanation that isolates Dostoevsky from that spirit. The concept resurfaces in ‘‘A Little History of Photography’’ (Benjamin 1999, 507–530), where it is tightly associated with the aesthetic crisis provoked by the new medium, and later operates decisively in several of Benjamin’s well-known essays from the 1930s. Because this chapter seeks to examine some of the twists and turns taken by the concept during this period, a more summary formulation of its importance might be of greater immediate use. If it makes sense to refer to Benjamin as an aesthetician, then it also makes sense to place his aesthetic preoccupations within the romantically inflected post-Kantian tradition that he shared with many of his mentors (Lukács, for example) and his colleagues. From within this tendency, ‘‘aura’’ designates the relation between the subject and object of aesthetic experience, a relation that infects the subject with the distance the object maintains from it. This distance points toward an ‘‘aesthetic dimension’’ that, within the West, is believed to house the cultural tradition itself. Although Benjamin never articulated the link between aura and music, Adorno—especially in ‘‘On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’’ his scathing reply to ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction’’—sought to do so. In my contribution to Music and Society, I have pondered whether sound complicates the aesthetic status of aura in a distinctive way (in Leppert and McClary 1987). 6 The concept of ‘‘dead labor’’ surfaces most consistently in Marx when he is discussing the role of machines, or technology in general, in the production process. His aim is to contradict the claim that machines are a ‘‘laborsaving device’’ by showing that, as with surplus value, dead labor comes to stand opposite the industrial proletariat, thus alienating it from itself. The point is that every machine is the embodiment—perhaps even the incarnation—of the labor that produced it and the capital that financed its production. In recognizing this, the proletariat has what amounts to an object lesson in the labor theory of value. In emphasizing the importance of the trace left by the worker, Benjamin is drawing our attention to a semiotic mechanism that alerts the worker to the presence of dead labor. By associating this with involuntary memory, he is drawing a parallel between the machines devoted to recording cultural experience (for example, photography) and a productive technology such as that of the steam-powered loom. He is also—to Adorno’s perhaps hypocritical dismay—undercutting the need for the deliberate theoretical organization of political consciousness—that is, party leadership of the sort called for by Lukács (1971), chap. 3). 7 In The Railway Journey (1986), Schivelbusch works through Freud’s discussion of the Reizschutz in considerable detail, arguing that the design of

224 notes to chapter four

railway-car furnishings, among other things, effectively stitched the emergent modern traveler into the apparatus of industrial locomotion. Though he does not follow it up, in stressing the importance of avoiding the unnerving gaze of traveling companions by looking out the window at the passing scenery, Schivelbusch stumbles on a fragment of the genealogy of psychoanalysis—that is, Freud’s remark in ‘‘Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis’’ (in Freud 1963, 135–156) explaining the therapeutic value of free association: ‘‘So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as if you were sitting at the window of a railway train and describing to someone behind you the changing views you see outside’’ (in Freud 1963, 147). That Freud would characterize this arrangement (thoughts as framed vision related orally to an invisible interlocutor) as a way to explain psychoanalytic technique to the uninitiated suggests strongly that the processes described by Schivelbusch were already organizing the clinical encounter at 19 Bergasse. In this connection, it is also worth emphasizing the importance placed by Lacan on the rails (a materialization of ‘‘the bar in the Saussurean algorithm’’) in his well-known account of sexual and national difference in ‘‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’’ (in Lacan 1977, 146–178). My point is that these are more than passing allusions. I read them as inscriptions of modernity in the theorization of the subject. Although Schivelbusch might be faulted for failing to recognize them, he nevertheless allows one to see clearly what is left unexamined in Sennett’s account of urbanity. 8 Here I am appealing to Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). Although she deploys it chiefly as a corrective to analyses that examine either the colonial or the imperial encounter, typically from the dominant perspective, I am invoking it here as a way to draw attention to the distinctly percussive character of this encounter. Moreover, as will become more pronounced in what follows, if we treat urban space as a site of persistent interpellation where all subjects—regardless of whether they are being directly hailed by the police or not—are being solicited by a complex array of tactile, sonoric, olfactory and visual ‘‘utterances,’’ then, as we move to consider how the social divisions of race, gender, and class inscribed themselves in the identities of urban subjects, it will be important to think about the contrapuntal dynamics that operate between and among these interpellative instances. 9 The literature embroiled—directly and indirectly—in this controversy is vast. Nevertheless, at its core lies the heated exchange between Jeffrey Masson and Janet Malcolm. In The Assault on Truth (1984), Masson, who had been doing archival research on Freud, discovered evidence that Freud had actually suppressed information on child abuse suffered by his patients in order to sustain the infamous ‘‘seduction theory.’’ Quite apart from what this might imply for the notion of fantasy that supported the seduction theory, there was the rather serious matter of Freud’s veracity—on which

notes to chapter four

225

he prided himself—not to mention that of the profession of psychoanalysis. In In the Freud Archives (1984), Malcolm rose to defend Freud not simply by disputing Masson’s reading of the ‘‘evidence,’’ but by impugning his motives. This may well have remained an East Coast and deeply personal scandal had it not been for the fact that the work of the German analyst Alice Miller—long interested in the problem of child abuse—was at the time just being translated into English. In fact, her most important analytical statements on the topic, For Your Own Good and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware appeared in 1983 and 1984, respectively. Quite apart from what this coincidence may tell us about the relation between Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, the publisher of Miller’s books, and psychoanalysis, there is the provocative theoretical rigor of Miller’s work, which is not to be overlooked. My aim in what follows is not to agitate the controversy further, but to explore the psychoanalytical construction of the link among sexuality, fantasy, and violence as a way to elaborate the percussive field within the subject’s relation to the site of the sexual encounter. In fact, although elaborating this point would take me far afield, one could argue that the entirety of Laplanche’s considerable oeuvre is devoted to detailing how the oscillation registered in Freud’s thinking about the seduction theory represents the precondition for the Freudian breakthrough. See, in particular, Laplanche (1987). For another, and I think compelling, perspective on this controversy, Rand and Torok (1993). As a further indication of the potential fecundity of ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten,’’ in particular, see Spivak’s reading of the title sentence in ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ (in Nelson and Grossberg 1988) and Darian Leader’s ‘‘Beating Fantasies and Sexuality’’ (Leader 2000, 106–130). 10 One of the remarkable things about Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie’s dated, but still trenchant, essay ‘‘Rock and Sexuality’’ (1978–79) is its insistence on the link between sexuality and the ‘‘sounds and rhythms’’ of rock-and-roll. Although they acknowledge the importance of song lyrics (in particular, the way lyrics tend to conform to the discourse of popular romance), their study tries to prod debates in popular musicology toward the sonoric impact of various musical idioms. In this respect, their essay sets a standard that the considerably more recent study by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts (1995)—a text to which I will return in my final chapter—does not consistently meet. It is also significant, to my mind, that Frith and McRobbie appeal intermittently to the notion of fantasy, and although they do not attempt to theorize its relation to the dynamics of subject formation—in spite of their principled insistence on treating sexuality as a ‘‘construction’’—they do associate it with the musical encounter as such. In what follows, I will attempt to supplement their account of rock-and-roll’s construction of sexuality with an account of the status of fantasy as a constitutive element of beating. 11 The stranger that Simmel was attempting to comprehend as uncanny—

226 notes to chapter four

that is, at once strange and familiar, was, as Griffin points out, the European Jew. Though he never made the link between ‘‘Metropolis and Modern Life’’ and ‘‘The Stranger’’ explicit, his preoccupation in the former with the tension between the rural and the urban, and his characterization in the latter of the city as a site of perpetual exchange, makes it clear that the stranger is to be subsumed under the general category of metropolitans. Clearly, strangers existed long before modernity, but whether they can be conceptualized independently of urban centers is another matter. Parks’s concept of the ‘‘marginal’’ subject adds little of theoretical value here, concentrating as it does on the issue of perspective, though his emphasis on the U.S. context is obviously pertinent. It is worth noting that the migration of McDaniels and Berry (among others), and their eventual encounter with Leonard and Phil Chess—prominent Jewish entrepreneurs on Chicago’s South Side—traces in historical terms the theoretical appropriation of Simmel by Griffin, thus suggesting yet another way of thinking about the ofttwinned dynamics of racism and anti-Semitism. 12 There is a far more satisfying account of the ‘‘blue note’’ in Chanan (1994, esp. 184–87). His discussion by no means contradicts Griffin’s, but it does suggest that ‘‘falling’’ is not only too unidirectional, but that ‘‘blueness’’ is better comprehended by thinking about the conflict between the diatonic and pentatonic scales—in effect, the contact zone between Western and African musics. 13 I emphasize the location of this encounter for two reasons. First, in Griffin’s study of migration narratives, she, following Carby, stresses that the train represents different things for black women and for black men. (The train serves as a decisive migratory sign—namely, as the means of transportation.) For men, the train is a sign of deliverance; for women, it is a sign of abandonment. In either case, though, the train, precisely to the extent that it effects the transition from the rural to the urban, the South to the North, is crucial to the very experience of migration. It is important that Fanon’s example—without, of course, any explicit reference to the theme of migration—stresses the alienation of ‘‘deliverance.’’ However, it is equally important to recognize, as Baraka has, that the Great Migration is itself a repetition of what we have come to call the Middle Passage. Thus, the train, as a mode of transportation—particularly in light of the figural resonance of the Underground Railroad—must be seen as a conflicted response to the call of the slave ship. And second, Schivelbusch’s discussion of railway travel, with its emphasis on the ‘‘industrialization of experience’’ and shock, acquires new pertinence here. On the one hand, Fanon’s example invites us to consider that the awkwardness felt by passengers who are forced to stare at one another (and, needless to say, the prominence of the gaze here is not insignificant) for long periods of time would certainly be inflected in distinctive ways when the passengers involved are not exclusively white Europeans. On the other hand, Schivelbusch’s insistence on the

notes to chapter four

227

train’s production of urban shock reminds us not only that Fanon’s encounter with the young girl’s gaze falls within a space orbiting around or near the urban but, further, that this encounter instances what I have been calling corporal punishment—that is, beating. Moreover, Schivelbusch reminds us that Freud, in the ‘‘Infantile Sexuality’’ section of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud 1965, 66–106), saw the train as a uniquely intense source of bodily excitation—excitation that ‘‘colored’’ the sexual fantasies of boys quite directly. (Freud himself claims to have encountered sexual difference, through the body of his mother, on a train). In doing so, Schivelbusch encourages us to recognize the issues circulating in ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’’ All of which is to say that Fanon’s representation of his encounter is distinctly overdetermined. 14 I am aware that this analysis walks a fine line. Certainly, one needs to guard against reproducing the racist reduction of non-whites to sheer corporeality in analyzing some of the practices and institutions involved in effecting this very reduction. Even a study as sensitive to this dilemma as Goldberg (1990) permits itself formulations such as, ‘‘The aim of Anatomy of Racism is to lay bare and lay out the discursive body of racist discourse,’’ where the body reestablishes its centrality in the figural register of an analysis bent on dislodging, or perhaps even subletting, it (xiii). By the same token, even if one refuses to take either the body in general or the black body in particular as given prior to the latter’s ‘‘problematization’’ within the struggle against racism, some account must be given of how the body comes to matter (as Judith Butler might say) in this struggle. In other words, even if the fact of blackness is merely a ‘‘rigid designator’’ or ‘‘regulative fiction,’’ the body remains an important way to illuminate the process through which blackness comes to inhere in what is then regarded as a substance. On this theme, one might usefully consult the discussion of the body and blackness in Eldridge Cleaver’s now dated but still inflammatory Soul on Ice. Obviously, the claim advanced here is that the percussive field is one of the cultural infrastructures through which race ‘‘writes’’ bodies. 15 The current use ‘‘hit’’ to refer to visits to Internet sites recovers some of the original connotations of the term. ‘‘Hit’’ was first applied to musical tunes by the editors of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, where it appeared in the section devoted to sheet music as a way to ‘‘flag’’ popular pieces. Clearly, this usage embeds the physicality of the term within the punctual rhetoric of commodity advertising.

Chapter 5 A Drum of One’s Own 1 As was made clear in the fracas prompted by the depictions of O. J. Simpson on the covers of Time and Newsweek, these organs of popular journalism engage in a form of non-antagonistic competition that functions primarily to assure readers that the U.S. public sphere still tolerates differences

228 notes to chapter five

of opinion. In the end, this does little more than promote the illusion that coverage has indeed been achieved. It is instructive to note that, on the cover of Time during the same week in June 1990, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon appeared dressed as the characters they played in Ridley Scott’s controversial film Thelma and Louise and flanked by the suggestive teaser: ‘‘Why Thelma and Louise Strikes a Nerve.’’ As is well known, this film prompted a lively debate about the status of its ‘‘feminist’’ credentials, as well as about the state of contemporary feminism. One of the key events in the film centers on the shooting of a male rapist, which prompts both the flight and the bonding of Thelma and Louise. What I am suggesting here is that, within the U.S. public sphere, the issue of gender politics is structured so as to link the contemporary men’s movement with a feminism that is seen as moving to a passage à l’acte of its critique of patriarchy. Two genders (?), two sides of every issue (??); everything is covered. 2 Freud’s epistolary formulation per se has not received the same attention as have his various lectures and essays on ‘‘female sexuality’’ and ‘‘femininity.’’ But the semantic content of his exasperated query has been teased out of all of his writing on women by many first-line feminist scholars. I am thinking, of course, of Luce Irigaray, Shoshana Felman, Naomi Schor, Gayatri Spivak, Hélène Cixous, and Catherine Clément, to name just a few of the better-known figures. In every case, the query is seen to involve the problem of woman, as such, in her identity, a preoccupation that—against all odds—has retained its pertinence for feminism. Witness, for example, the vexed status of ‘‘constructivism’’ in current debates about identity politics. It is also worth noting that Freud’s formulation was explicitly appropriated by a mainstream feminist scholar (and colleague), Gayle Graham Yates, in What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement (1975). This suggests that even those who are unfamiliar with the source of the allusion could be counted on to think about feminism in its terms. More recently, Shoshana Felman, who cites the very letter from which the line derives, published a collection of her essays under the title, What Does a Woman Want? (1993). Although her relationship to Freud is contentious, Felman’s study makes it clear that feminism has difficulty proceeding without him. 3 I am invoking here what I deem to be a characteristic feature of our moment—namely, ‘‘trauma envy,’’ by which I mean the strategic appropriation of victimage for the purpose of self-exoneration or moral (and even legal) entitlement. More particularly, of course, I am raising the issue of how this general dynamic articulates itself in the ‘‘sex–gender system.’’ I realize that the notion of ‘‘castration envy’’ is contentious in a variety of ways, but what I want to draw attention to here is something that can be illuminated by appealing to Lacan’s re-conceptualization of castration as the wound in the subject’s identity that is produced by its relation to the signifier. Although this tends to ‘‘disengender’’ identity (Freud, by linking castration to the Oedipal drama of the son, kept the penis–phallus link on

notes to chapter five

229

life support), two things are important about Lacan’s perspective: 1) he links identity to wounding; and 2) he links wounding to symbolization, or what we might more generally call the cultural field as mediated through semiosis. To envy castration as a man can therefore be seen as a desire to reencounter the signifier, as if to re-enact the symbolic appropriation of identity. There is an element of masochism here, and at a later point, consideration of the theme of ‘‘toughness’’—or, as I prefer, one’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking—will be necessary. At a more sociological level, this envy can also be interpreted as a desire for a movement for men in which they have the opportunity to discover what they imagine women to have discovered in theirs: presumably, the empowering identities that men feel they have lost. I should say that Adorno’s aphoristic reading of Freud’s account of castration is also instructive in this context. In ‘‘Since I set eyes on him’’ (Adorno 1974, 95–96) Adorno anticipates Lacan’s characterization of woman as man’s symptom by reading castration—insofar as it functions as a rationalization for the physical constitution of women—as a wound inflicted on women by those seeking confirmation of their own integrity. In a startling evocation of Nietzsche’s quip, ‘‘If you are going among women, don’t forget the whip,’’ Adorno links castration and striking to underscore the sense in which ‘‘femininity itself is already the effect of the whip.’’ Although this articulation of ‘‘feminism’’ is designed to level (and some would contend, ‘‘neutralize’’) the critical efficacy of men and women (depriving the latter of their emancipatory link to ‘‘nature’’), it does not, at least, let gender politics slip altogether. I invoke the aphorism because it reminds us that castration envy arises within what I earlier called a ‘‘beating fantasy,’’ and one that centers on the motif of identity being forged through blows administered by men. 4 It is important here to introduce a specification. Typically, what is referred to as the men’s movement is differentiated internally by those in the know. In Wingspan (1992), Harding distinguishes among four ‘‘branches’’: the mythopoetic branch, the profeminist–gay-affirmative branch, the men’s rights–fathers’ rights branch, and the addiction–recovery branch. Drumming is chiefly important to the mythopoetic branch (although Harry Hays’s ‘‘radical fairies’’ are an important exception here). For this reason, I will typically be referring to this branch when I discuss the contemporary men’s movement, even though one is actually likely to find more professional musicians in the meetings of the addiction–recovery branch. This specification notwithstanding, I am prepared to argue that the conflicted politics of the mythopoetic branch organizes the movement as a whole, although it does so more deeply in some branches (say, the fathers’ rights branch) than in others (say, the gay-affirmative branch). 5 Earlier, I drew attention to the richness—at once lexical and conceptual— of the term ‘‘sense.’’ In this chapter, I will do much the same thing with

230 notes to chapter five

‘‘affect,’’ exploiting its verbal and nominal resonances to cast the subject of affect, the one affected, as an effect of the capacity to be affected and to affect others. Deleuze has long been interested in these matters, addressing them both in the comparatively early Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962)— where his concern is with Nietzsche’s conception of ‘‘affectivity’’—and in the demanding chapter ‘‘Percept, Affect, Concept’’ in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 163–199). Although Deleuze’s contribution prompts one to think that emotion and affect are quite different, my aim is to stress their points of contact. To do so, I will use the formulation ‘‘feeling or affect,’’ where the conjunctive ambiguity of ‘‘or’’ works to sustain the pertinence of ‘‘sentiment’’ in my discussion and to link sentiment to the theme of subjection and the entire structure of auto-affection. Needless to say, I am not the first to bring affect to bear on the analysis of popular music. For an important, though quite different, earlier formulation, see Grossberg (1992). 6 Although I could be accused of overemphasizing the significance of Harding’s publication, I think this itself would be an exaggeration. Begun in 1986, Wingspan is an international quarterly that circulates in editions of 150,000 copies. Though it emerges out of and addresses primarily the mythopoetic branch of the movement (predominantly white middle- and working-class men), it is clearly representative of the masculinist discourse generated within the movement. The anthology that I am working culls from numerous tabloids that had been in circulation prior to its preparation in 1992. The title, coined by Joseph Jastrab, a leading intellectual of the movement, denotes the state of transcendence achieved when one endures a requisite battery of initiatory tests—or what, in another context, might be called hazing. Although this notion is said to derive from unspecified Native American traditions, one wonders whether anyone other than white men would see a connection between communicating with one another in print (presumably the point of titling the journal ‘‘Wingspan’’) and achieving a state of transcendence. 7 In an interview with the editors of Inroads, another prominent men’s magazine, Michael Meade—the storyteller in question—confirmed this when he responded to the question, ‘‘What is going on in the psyche with the drums?’’ by saying, ‘‘The idea of stories is that they are intended to unify, to bring us into the same imaginal [sic] space for the purpose of working. . . . Story is like a terrain, so the drum, by putting a rhythm in there, puts everybody in the same rhythm’’ (in Harding 1992, 144). Meade goes on to associate this with preparing for war, making the telos of this unity uncomfortably, though I suppose refreshingly, explicit. 8 This quality of the skin was made abundantly clear as Ludwig and Slingerland (leading American drum manufacturers) began experimenting with plastic heads during the 1950s. Though mylar was not quite as tough as calfskin in absorbing the impact of repeated beating, it withstood changes

notes to chapter five

231

in the weather (that is, it held its tuning) much better. As a consequence of its ability to resist both cultural and natural change, plastic soon replaced calfskin as the membrane of preference. 9 Because Nancy openly examines the heart as a site of beating, my insistence can hardly be seen as an exaggeration. In addition, the phrase le coeur de pierre, through a certain homonymic resonance, plainly evokes the body (le corps) of Pierre, perhaps the very one beaten by Paul, which, as the French language would have it, is made of stone. He can take it. In the context generated by ‘‘The Heart of Things,’’ Pierre emerges as something like a condensation of its thematics—namely, he or it is a thinking thing. Although no signal is given here by Nancy himself, it is clear that his discussion of the stony heart leans heavily on Derrida’s reading of Ponge (Derrida 1984, 92–93). Ponge himself appears to have anticipated both Derrida and Nancy toward the end of Le parti pris des choses, where one finds remarkable pages devoted to the heart. The following line strikes me as particularly germane: ‘‘Vibration: Les intermittences du coeur, celles de la mort et de la vie, de la veille et du sommeil, de l’hérédité et de la personalité (originalité),’’ (Ponge 1977, 216). Derrida also makes valuable use of ‘‘the stone’’ in Glas (1990). Does it matter that Pierre is also the name of his son? In the same vein, does it matter that Nancy continues to struggle with heart disease? Perhaps, but what matters most is that he survives. 10 John Cage is clearly Nancy’s precursor here, when, in his critique of the category of silence, he invoked his experience in an anechoic chamber, insisting that even there—where one is technically isolated from all sound— she or he hears the pumping of blood (i.e., the heart) and the background hum of the body’s neuroelectrical activity. Cage exploited this point in order to ‘‘authorize’’ the use of all sound for the production of music; music which was percussively innovative in numerous ways. See his lecture ‘‘Experimental Music’’ (Cage 1973, 8). 11 Obviously, one needs to be prudent here. France is not the United States, even as its official contempt for us shades into envy and emulation. Men in France did not follow the path blazed by ‘‘the Beats’’ and the personalgrowth movement, although, as Benjamin noted, bohemia was never far away. Nevertheless, the philosophical turn of late to the ‘‘sentimental’’ themes of love, friendship, and so on must at some level be seen as an attempt to register the feminist critique of culture not to appropriate it, but to engage it by working within the framework of traditional problems while acknowledging that, in the wake of feminism, everything has changed. Note, for example, the recent explicit preoccupation with friendship among theorists such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault—Deleuze and Guattari (1994) and Derrida (1997) has even gone so far as to define philosophy in terms of male friendship, without, one should add, embracing Foucault’s queer inflection of this insight. Although it articulates itself at a rather different intellectual level, much in this perspective squares

232 notes to chapter five

with those in the men’s movement who are committed to the labor of mythopoiesis. 12 White’s discussion appears in ‘‘The Forms of Wildness: The Archaeology of an Idea’’ (White 1978) and derives from work that appeared earlier in a collectively edited volume titled The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to the Middle Ages (Dudley and Novak 1972). It is important to stress that White’s essay is essentially a commentary on, and elaboration of, Richard Bernheimer’s Wild Men in the Middle Ages (1952), not because credit must be given where credit is due (White acknowledges his debt to Bernheimer), but because Bernheimer’s book turns out to be Bly’s source, as well. Although this might suggest that White, too, must be seen as collaborating in the production of the discursive conditions for the new men’s movement, I think that Bly’s work in particular would have benefited from a sustained encounter with White’s essay, because White’s strong emphasis on the socio-epistemological aspects of the figure might have spared Bly his unreflective plunge into ‘‘reactive’’ identity politics. As was implicit in the discussion of Elias in Chapter One, the same could be said about the first volume of The Civilizing Process (1978), where through the category of homo clausus, Elias articulates a social history of individuality that might have given Bly pause before calling up the hortus inclusus as a figure for the specifically ‘‘cultivated’’ heart. As I will go on to argue, the key problem is that the men’s movement wants to fuse something resembling a materialist methodology with an essentialist ontology. 13 This is not the place to tease out all that may be at stake in the notion of the ‘‘end (or death) of man.’’ Suffice it to say that even those who might be deemed partisans in the critical project designated by this phrase nevertheless disagree. Derrida pluralizes (‘‘ends’’) what Foucault tended to treat in the singular. For an elegant and concise formulation of the general issues involved here, see Deleuze’s appendix to Foucault, ‘‘On the Death of Man, and Superman’’ (Deleuze 1988, 124–132). This discussion is particularly pertinent here because, while concentrating exclusively on Foucault, Deleuze manages to clarify the extent to which neither Nietzsche nor Foucault were nihilists, as is often charged. His point is that the ‘‘superman’’ was a dated metaphor for a new configuration of the forms and forces that now constitute human beings (in my terms, a new mode of subjection). In effect, Foucault’s critique of man, at least on Deleuze’s reading, was premised on a conviction about the historical possibility of a ‘‘new’’ post-human entity. As I suggested earlier, this only sounds as if it is talking about everybody. In that sense, Foucault’s analysis is marked by its location in the discourses that were also activated and deployed by the men’s movement. Margaret Cohen, in ‘‘The Nouveau Père’’ (1993), has rightly drawn attention to how the French preoccupation with masculinity in the wake of feminism (at least as exemplified in the popular media) has centered on the problem of

notes to chapter five

233

the father—a preoccupation that rhymes in provocative ways with the socalled poststructuralist critique of phallogocentrism. Indeed, her colleague Kristin Ross (1995) has argued similarly. Although this certainly puts a different spin on things, it breathes new life into the thesis advanced in Alice Jardine’s groundbreaking Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (1985). 14 The year 1955 was also the one in which Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Willie Dixon, and Francis Clay recorded ‘‘Mannish Boy’’ at Chess Studios. Dave Marsh and Peter Guralnick both claim that the song is a ‘‘response’’ to ‘‘I’m a Man.’’ But because Bo Diddley is listed (along with Mel London) as one of the composers of ‘‘Mannish Boy,’’ and because on the celebrated album Electric Mud ‘‘Mannish Boy’’ is listed as alternative title for ‘‘I’m a Man,’’ the matter of origins is obscured by thick fog, as is so often the case. Although one can find many different recordings of ‘‘Mannish Boy’’ (I like the one used in Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Waltz), the following comments are based on the Chess recording from 1955. In Waters’s version, the song opens with a ‘‘field holler’’ that sets up a call and response between his voice and Rogers’s guitar. The band enters once the guitar has initiated the lick that forms the melodic–harmonic core of the song. In many respects ‘‘Mannish Boy’’ and ‘‘I’m a Man’’ are musical twins; however, the drum track laid down by Clay deserves specific comment. Though Clay and Kirkland do similar snare work, Clay’s kick drum is recorded so that it pounds out 1–2–3–4-and-a-1. In this sense it drives the call-and-response relation between the foot and the hand deeper into the percussive texture of the song, setting the martial stroking of the snare further off against the rest of the rhythmic and harmonic activity of the song. Marching is ‘‘stamped out,’’ an effect adumbrated by Clay’s use of rim strokes in sync with the kick drum in the first verse. In addition, Clay’s work on the highhat is recorded with a touch of reverb or echo, as if to simulate the acoustic decay of maracas. This produces a key bit of percussive texture that creates a polyrhythm drawing the acoustic space of the studio into the mix. As a result, when the song fades out at the end, it appears to recapitulate—writ large, as it were—the racing decay of the reverberating highhat cymbals. A percussive detail reframes the whole. There are, of course, other differences. The call and response of the music is reiterated vocally (many enthusiastic voices ‘‘sanctify’’ the spelling lesson of the chorus), and the lyrics center on different articulations of sexual prowess. (Bo Diddley, whose song fades less precipitously, clocks himself at one hour; Waters at two.) This musical version of ‘‘the dozens’’ may be the only clear indication of whose composition came first. However, at bottom, the difference between the two songs is also one of idiom— that is, the difference between urban blues and rock-and-roll. Indeed, one might hear in ‘‘Mannish Boy’’ and ‘‘I’m a Man’’ the very sundering and colliding of these two idioms. If I give pride of place here to Bo Diddley, it

234 notes to chapter five

has less to do with the man than with the idiom. Despite the enormous debt owed to the blues, rock-and-roll came to eclipse it as a cultural, and distinctly musical, practice through which identities were produced and consumed in the United States. 15 As observed in Chapter Four, there are more accounts of the derivation of Ellas McDaniel’s stage name than one can shake a stick at. One that bears repeating in this context is derived from David Evans’s essay ‘‘AfroAmerican One-Stringed Instruments,’’ where it is suggested that the name Bo Diddley comes from the ‘‘diddley bow,’’ an instrument played in southern Mississippi both before and after 1863. The diddley bow is essentially a string nailed to a board, with a stone bridge, played by striking on the string with a type of slider or bow. I mention this because, as I stressed earlier in my reading of Ventura (1985), it is precisely this kind of bricolage, necessitated by the Middle Passage, that marks the legacy of African drumming in North America. Although, strictly speaking, ‘‘I’m a Man’’ does not exemplify the classic ‘‘Bo Diddley beat’’ (contrary to the assertions of the otherwise reliable Dave Marsh), it is significant that Evans identifies a version of that beat, the so-called hambone beat, as the characteristic utilization of the diddley bow. Thus, given the insistently autobiographical tenor of Bo Diddley’s first two releases, one is warranted in perceiving here a blatant, if not exactly deliberate, African American echo. 16 If I were to pursue the historical point I am developing here beyond the bounds of this chapter, it would be useful to recall Attali’s characterization of music as ‘‘heraldic.’’ In this vein, it would also be worth detailing the recording history of ‘‘I’m a Man,’’ paying particular attention to its lactification. During the British Invasion, when Bo Diddley, along with Little Richard and Chuck Berry, first toured the United Kingdom, the song was covered and recorded by the Yardbirds. Left basically intact, the piece nevertheless was used to showcase some of the virtuosic pyrotechnics of the group’s lineup (which included Jeff Beck and, for a time, Eric Clapton). Already, the expressive convention of instrumental soloing (specifically ‘‘guitar soloing,’’ as Steve Waksman would insist ) was beginning to rewrite the autobiographic posturing of the tune in broadly existential terms. Not long after the Yardbirds’ version, Steve Winwood—who was then performing with the influential but short-lived Spencer Davis Group—wrote (with Jimmy Miller, an early Motown producer) a tune titled, ‘‘I’m a Man,’’ which he acknowledged was directly ‘‘inspired’’ by Bo Diddley. This version was later covered by Chicago—and, for that matter, probably by every garage band that ever played a frat party. What is striking about Winwood and Miller’s piece is that it opens with a bass line that feels tonally and rhythmically like the Bo Diddley riff played backward. This line is battered into 4/4 time in the third measure by the entry of Peter York on drums. A good dozen bars of percussive buildup follow before we get to the chord sequence that defines the chorus, in which

notes to chapter five

235

‘‘I’m a man, yes I am, and I can’t help but love you so’’ is sung. I characterize this history as heraldic because, as ‘‘I’m a Man’’ traveled from the 1950s to the ’60s, it actually moved more toward the Latin percussive traditions that fire Parks’s imagination. In fact, in the Chicago cover of the tune, both in its instrumentation and its idioms of syncopation, the percussive setting of the proclamation, ‘‘I’m a Man,’’ begins to feel very much like the kind of Carnival performance that one might more immediately associate with a vigorous samba. Significantly, as is evident in the chorus, the locus of ineffectual resistance is shifted from the woman (in Bo Diddley’s version) to the man—a man who, in the third verse, confesses to being so victimized by ‘‘his image’’ that he is driven to insist, ‘‘I don’t have no heart of stone.’’ Ehrenreich’s thesis could not be more tellingly confirmed. 17 Quite apart from the issues already addressed that bear on the racial inscription of rock-and-roll, there is the wildly suggestive discussion of the Beatles in a key sequence from Tom Gries’s film Helter Skelter (1976). There, as the prosecuting attorney is desperately searching for a motive, we witness an interview in which Charles Manson’s apocalyptic vision is detailed by a male commune member. This vision, which Manson produced through an anagogic fusion of the Bible and The Beatles (a.k.a. the White Album, specifically the cut ‘‘Revolution’’), centers on a race war (now the fetish event of militia groups influenced by The Turner Diaries) in which blacks rise up and wipe out white society, leaving only the commune at the Spahn ranch. This race war was called, again alluding to a track on the White Album, ‘‘Helter Skelter.’’ Later, due to the essential inability of blacks to lead, the white male survivors (including, of course, Manson) would be called on to rule the world. Although I by no means want to equate the men’s movement with the activities at the Spahn ranch in any simple way, a provocative link is made here between rock-and-roll music and a violent racial confrontation—a confrontation that, by the way, first manifested itself in the enigmatically paradoxical slaying of, among others, the pregnant, white starlet Sharon Tate. Moreover, it is a connection made in the context of a commune’s self-definition. What is remarkable about the film—and, for that matter, the book on which it is based—is that this vision, twisted though it may be, does actually provide the attorney with what he perceives as a ‘‘rational’’ motive. As if the substance of the vision might actually resonate with a presumably rational jury of Manson’s peers. As if, in other words, a jury could imagine hearing a call to genocide in a rock-and-roll song. Although an association such as the one made here might well be dismissed as ‘‘fear-mongering,’’ I am not convinced that the men’s movement has done enough to distance itself from these ‘‘white guys.’’ 18 Another fundamental issue is at play here: the drumming traditions and practices of ‘‘First Nation,’’ or ‘‘Native American,’’ peoples. As the account that opens this chapter makes clear, although the men’s movement engages

236 notes to chapter five

these traditions—at least as concerns specific instruments and rituals—it does not, to my knowledge, deal forthrightly with the associations made there among teaching, drumming, and state-sanctioned racism. It does thematize the question of masculinity with comparative, perhaps even enviable, directness, but much that should matter as a result does not. On the issue of drumming and gender within First Nation cultures, much can be learned from Arlene Bowman’s film Song Journey (1994).

notes to chapter five

237

works cited

Adorno, Theodor. 1941. ‘‘On Popular Music.’’ Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9: 17–48. ———. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review. ———. 1974. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. London: New Left Books. ———. 1978. ‘‘On The Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening.’’ In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhart. New York: Urizen. ———. 1980. The Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Wesley Blomster and Anne Mitchell. New York: Seabury. ———. 1991. ‘‘Essay as Form.’’ In Notes to Literature, vol. 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedeman. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Complete Correpondence 1928–1940. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Adorno, Theodor, and Hanns Eisler. 1994. Composing for the Films. London: Athalone. Agawu, Kofi. 1992. ‘‘Representing African Music.’’ Critical Inquiry 18 (winter): 245–66. Allen, Ann Taylor. 1984. Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Althusser, Louis. 1970. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review. ———. 1993. The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts. Ed. Olivier Carpet and Yann Moulier Boutang. Trans. Richard Vlasey. London: Chatto and Windus. Althusser, Louis, with Etienne Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books. ———. 1979. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London and New York: Verso. Anzieu, Didier. 1989. The Skin Ego. Trans. Chris Turner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Apollon, Willy. 1976. Le Vaudou: Un espace pour le ‘‘Voix.’’ Paris: Editions Galilée. Armstrong, Timothy, ed. 1992. Michel Foucault Philosopher: Essays. Trans. Timothy Armstrong. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1990. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Balfour, Ian. 1991. ‘‘Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History).’’ Modern Language Notes 106: 622–47. Baraka, Amiri. 1963. Blues People. New York: Apollo. Barthes, Roland. 1985. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken. ———. 1983. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso. ———. 1996. Selected Writings, vol. 1. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Selected Writings, vol. 2. Ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berger, Harris. 1997. ‘‘The Practice of Perception: Multifunctionality and Time in the Musical Experiences of a Heavy Metal Drummer.’’ Ethnomusicology 41:3 (fall): 464–87. Bernheimer, Richard. 1952. Wild Men in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berry, Chuck. 1987. Chuck Berry: The Autobiography. New York: Fireside. Bhabha, Homi K. 1987. ‘‘What Does the Black Man Want?’’ New Formations 1 (spring): 118–24. ———. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.

240 works cited

Blades, James. 1992. Percussion Instruments and Their History. Westport, CT: Bold Strummer. Bloom, Alan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster. Bly, Robert et al. 1982. ‘‘What Men Really Want.’’ New Age (May): 30–51. Bly, Robert, James Hillman, and Michael Meade, eds. 1992. The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. New York: HarperCollins. Brackett, David. 1995. Interpreting Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Browning, Barbara. 1995. Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Butler, Judith, and Joan Scott. 1992. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Essays in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ˇ zek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Ziˇ and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. Cage, John. 1973. Silence. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, ed. 1981. Apparatus. New York: Tanam. Chanan, Michael. 1994. Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism. London: Verso. Chernoff, John. 1979. African Rhythm, African Sensibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chernoff, John, with Hafiz Shabaz Farel Johnson. 1991. ‘‘Basic Conga Drum Rhythms in African American Musical Styles.’’ Black Music Research Journal 11:1 (spring): 55–73. Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio/Vision: Sound on Screen. Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Cleaver, Eldridge. 1968. Soul on Ice. New York: McGraw-Hill. Clément, Catherine. 1994. Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Trans. Sally O’Driscoll and Deirdre Mahoney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, Margaret. 1993. ‘‘The Nouveau Père.’’ Social Text 34: 85–93. Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock Culture in Liverpool. Oxford: Clarendon. Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crook, Wilfred Harris. 1931. The General Strike: A Study of Labor’s Tragic Weapon in Theory and Practice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dayan, Joan. 1998. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 1974. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage.

works cited

241

de Certeau, Michel. ‘‘De l’objet musical dans le champ de la psychanalyse.’’ 1976. Scilicet 6–7: 329–36. ———. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. oNew York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1988. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. de Man, Paul. 1986. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deren, Maya. 1976. ‘‘Drums and Dance.’’ Salmagundi 33–34 (spring– summer): 193–209. Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1984. Signéponge/Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1990. Glas. Trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ———. 1993. ‘‘Heidegger’s Ear, Philopolemology.’’ In Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Ed. John Sallis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1997. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso. Dolar, Mladen. 1993. ‘‘Beyond Interpellation.’’ Qui Parle 6:2 (spring– summer): 75–96. Dover, Kenneth J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duden, Barbara. 1991. The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany. Trans. Thomas Dunlop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dudley, Edward and Maximillian Novak, eds. 1972. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1984. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Anchor. Elias, Norbert. 1978. The Civilizing Process, vol. 1. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen. ———. 1992. Time: An Essay. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell. Ettinger, Elizbieta. 1979. Comrade and Lover: Rosa Luxemburg’s Letters to Leo Jogiches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

242 works cited

Evan, David. 1970. ‘‘Afro-American One-Stringed Instruments.’’ Western Folklore 23. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Markham. New York: Grove. Felman, Shoshana. 1993. What Does a Woman Want? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Flinn, Caryl. 1992. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1980. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ———. 1984. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. ———. 1962. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. ———. 1963a. Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. ———. 1963b. ‘‘Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.’’ In Therapy and Technique. Ed. Philip Reiff. New York: Collier. ———. 1965. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Avon. ———. 1972. Three Case Histories. Ed. Philip Reiff. New York: Collier. ———. 1974. ‘‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’’ In Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Ed. Philip Reiff. Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. 1978–79. ‘‘Rock and Sexuality.’’ Screen Education 29 (winter): 3–19. Gilbret, Jeremy, and Ewan Pearson. 1999. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. New York: Routledge. Gillett, Charlie. 1970. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New York: Pantheon. Goldberg, David, ed. 1990. The Anatomy of Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gorbman, Claudia. 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. 1995. ‘‘Who Set You Flowin’?’’: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Guattari, Félix. 1979. L’inconscient machinique. Paris: Recherche.

works cited

243

———. 1990. ‘‘Ritornellos and Existential Affects.’’ Trans. Juliana Schiesari and George Van Den Abbeele. Discourse 12:2 (spring–summer). Guillermoprieto, Alma. 1990. Samba. New York: Knopf. Harding, Christopher, ed. 1992. Wingspan: Inside the Men’s Movement. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hart, Mickey. 1990. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion. San Francisco: Harper and Row. ———. 1991 Planet Drum: A Celebration of Percussion and Rhythm. New York: Harper and Row. Harvey, Sylvia. 1980. May ’68 and Film Culture. London: British Film Institute. Hayman, Ronald. 1980. Nietzsche: A Critical Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hazzard-Gordon, Katarina. 1990. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What Is Called Thinking? New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1975. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadler. New York: Harper and Row. Hughes, Langston. 1954. First Book of Rhythms. New York: Franklin Watts. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jardine, Alice. 1985. Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jones, A. M. 1954. ‘‘African Rhythm.’’ Africa 24:1: 26–47. Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead. 1994. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kane, Harnett. 1949. Queen New Orleans: City by the River. New York: William Morrow. Kaufman, Walter. 1968. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (third edition). New York: Vintage. Keil, Charles. 1991. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. ‘‘The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report.’’ Ethnomusicology 39:1 (winter): 1–19. Keil, Charles, with Steve Feld. 1994. Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kramer, Lawrence. 1995. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Lacan. 1987. Paris: Bordas.

244 works cited

Laclau, Ernesto. 1977. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: New Left Books. ———. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time. London: Verso. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1994. Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner. Trans. Felicia McCarren. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lagache, Daniel. 1963. ‘‘Symposium on Fantasy.’’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 45:2–3, 180–89. Laplanche, Jean. 1989. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Trans. David Macey. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1999. Essays on Otherness. Ed. John Fetcher. London: Routledge. Laplanche, Jean, with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. 1989. ‘‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.’’ In Formations of Fantasy. Ed. Victor Burgin and Cora Kaplan. London: Methuen, 1986. Lazarus, Neil. 1999. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Leader, Darian. 2000. ‘‘Beating Fantasies and Sexuality.’’ In Sexuation. Ed. Renata Salecl. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leiris, Michel. 1997. Scratches. Trans. Lydia Davis. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leppert, Richard. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Leppert, Richard, and Susan McClary, ed. 1987. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Donald. 1995. The Body in Late-Capitalist USA. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1971. The Mass Strike: The Political Party and The Trade Unions. Trans. none given. New York: Harper and Row. Macherey, Pierre. 1995. The Object of Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malcolm, Janet. 1984. In the Freud Archives. New York: Knopf. Malone, Jacqui. 1996. Steppin’ On the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Martin, Linda, and Kelly Segrave. 1993. Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock’n’Roll. New York: Da Capo. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1973. The German Ideology. Ed. C. J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers. Masson, Jeffrey. 1984. The Assault on Truth. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

works cited

245

McClary, Susan, with Rob Walser. 1994. ‘‘Theorizing the Body in AfricanAmerican Music.’’ Black Music Review Journal 14:1: 75–84. McGuinn, Roger. 1965. Mr. Tambourine Man, liner notes. Columbia Records. CL 2372. McNeil, William. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1984. ‘‘Dance and Social Fantasy.’’ In Gender and Generation. Ed. Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava. London: Macmillan. ———. 1991. Feminism and Youth Culture. Boston: Unwin and Hyman. Miller, Alice. 1983. For Your Own Good. Trans. H. Hannum. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Miller, James. 1999. Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll 1947– 1977. New York: Simon and Schuster. Miller, Nancy K. 1991. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge. Milner, Jean-Claude. 1995. L’Oeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Plume. Mowitt, John. 1987. ‘‘The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Reproducibility.’’ In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. ‘‘The Resistance in Theory: an Introduction.’’ In Discerning the Subject by Paul Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1992. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2000. ‘‘Trauma Envy.’’ Cultural Critique 46 (fall): 272–97. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Murray, Albert. 1976. Stomping the Blues. New York: McGraw-Hill. Nägele, Rainer, ed. 1988. Benjamin’s Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. ‘‘Shattered Love.’’ In The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1993. ‘‘The Heart of Things.’’ In The Birth to Presence. Trans. Brian Holmes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1997. The Sense of the World. Trans. Jeffrey Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Niederland, William. 1958. ‘‘Early Auditory Experiences, Beating Fantasies and Primal Scene.’’ Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 13: 471–504. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage.

246 works cited

Norman, Philip. 1996. Rave On: the Biography of Buddy Holly. New York: Simon and Schuster. Nunberg, Herman, and Ernest Federn. 1963. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 1. Trans. M. Nunberg. New York: International Humanities Press. Onians, Richard B. 1951. The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, Robert. 1979. A Tale of Two Cities: Memphis Rock and New Orleans Roll. Brooklyn, NY: Institute for Studies in American Music Monographs. ———. 1995. Rock and Roll: An Unruly History. New York: Harmony. Park, Robert. 1950, ‘‘The Marginal Man.’’ In Race and Culture. London: The Free Press of Glencoe. Pfeil, Fred. 1995. White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference. London: Verso. Ponge, Francis. 1977. Le parti pris des choses. Paris: Gallimard. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel, Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Raschke, Carl. 1990. Painted Black: From Drug Killings to Heavy Metal—The Alarming True Story of How Satanism Is Terrorizing Our Communities. New York: Harper and Row. Rand, Nicholas, and Maria Torok. 1993. ‘‘Questions to Psychoanalysis.’’ Critical Inquiry 19 (spring): 567–94. Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press. 1995. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ’n’ Roll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ronell, Avital. 1994. ‘‘Hitting the Streets.’’ In Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rosolato, Guy. 1974. ‘‘La Voix: Entre corps et langage.’’ Revue française de psychanalyse 38:1 (January): 75–94. Ross, Kristin. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1986. On the Origin of Language. Trans. John Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Russo, Mary, and Daniel Warner. 1987–88. ‘‘Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands.’’ Discourse 10:1: 55–76. Sachs, Curt. 1940. The History of Musical Instruments. New York: Norton. ———. 1953. Rhythm and Tempo: A Study in Music History. New York: Norton. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Scheman, Naomi. 1993. Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Power and Privilege. New York: Routledge. Scherman, Tony. 1999. Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

works cited

247

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1995. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Angela Davies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sebeok, Thomas, and Donna Jean Ulmiker-Sebeok. 1976. Speech Surrogates: Drum and Whistle Systems. The Hague: Mouton. Sennett, Richard. 1978. The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Vintage. ———. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: Norton. Shank, Barry. 1994. Dissonant Identities: The Rock ’n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free Press. Small, Christopher. 1987. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music. London: Calder. ———. 1996. Music, Society, Education. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Paul. 1996. Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1983. Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology. Trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty. 1999. The Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steinberg, Leo. 1983. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion. New York: Pantheon. Szatmary, David P. 1996. Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Taylor, Ronald, ed. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics. London: New Left Books. Thompson, E. P. 1991. Customs in Common. London: Merlin. ———. 1992. ‘‘Rough Music Reconsidered.’’ Folklore 103:1: 3–26. Ventura, Michael. 1985. Shadow Dancing in the USA. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher. Waksman, Steven. 1999. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walser, Robert. 1993a. ‘‘The Body in Music: Epistemology and Musical Semiotics.’’ College Music Symposium 31:1: 343–65.

248 works cited

———. 1993b. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1995. ‘‘Rhythm, Rhyme and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy.’’ Ethnomusicology 39:2 (spring–summer): 193–217. White, Charles. 1984. The Life and Times of Little Richard. New York: Harmony. White, Hayden. 1978. The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, Alan. 1980. ‘‘Is Sound Recording Like a Language?’’ Yale French Studies 60: 51–66. Wright, Richard. 1945. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper Bros. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 1986. ‘‘Charivari and Lynch Law.’’ In Southern Honor: Honor and Violence in the Old South. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yates, Gayle Graham. 1975. What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young, Michael, and Tom Schuller. 1988. The Rhythms of Society. New York: Routledge. Young, Robert. 1981. Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ˇ zek, Slavoj, ed. 1988. ‘‘The Object as a Limit of Discourse: Approaches to the Ziˇ Lacanian Real.’’ Prose Studies 11:3: 94–120. ———. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ———. 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso. 1994. ———. 1998. ‘‘A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’.’’ Critical Inquiry 24: 998– 1009.

works cited

249

index

Abdulai, Ibrahim, 73–75, 76, 84, 220 n.4 Adorno, Theodor, 3, 4, 40, 57, 65, 119, 147, 183, 210 n.3, 212 n.11, 218 n.15, 222–23 n.1, 230 n.3; and Hanns Eisler, 48–50, 54, 55, 57, 147 Affect, 173, 177, 181, 183, 186, 187, 201, 210 n.3, 231 n.5 Agawu, Kofi, 71–72 Allison, Jerry, 73, 164 Althusser, Louis, 7, 42–58, 84, 150, 207, 210 n.6, 216–17 n.4 Anzieu, Didier, 7, 18–20, 21, 113, 122 Apollon, Willy, 84–85 Attali, Jacques, 221 n.9, 235 n.16 Aura, 123–24, 223–24 n.5 Backbeat, 7, 25–26, 30–36, 77, 81, 85, 98, 118, 149 Baker, Ginger, 91 Baker, Houston, 153

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 29, 100, 101, 194, 212 n.2, 213 n.4 Balibar, Etienne, 54, 217 n.5 Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones), 153, 155, 227 n.13 Barthes, Roland, 150–52, 180, 188 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 45, 217 Beatles, the, 116–18, 132, 219 n.2, 236 n.17 Beauvoir, Simone de, 158–160, 162, 183 Benjamin, Walter, 43, 47, 120, 121, 123–28, 129, 133, 134, 174, 176– 77, 178, 179, 192, 212 n.11, 223– 24 n.5, 232 n.11 Berger, Harris, 220 n.5 Berry, Chuck, 27–36, 81, 135–38, 140, 141, 148–50, 152, 155, 215 n.9 Bhabha, Homi, 37, 115 Blacking, John, 16, 218 n.14 Blades, James, 70–71, 78, 91–92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 103, 108, 219 n.1

Blaine, Hal, 68 Bloom, Alan, 119 Bly, Robert, 169, 175, 183, 190, 233 n.12 Bo Diddley (Ellas McDaniel), 39, 131–34, 135, 138, 152, 163–64, 196–201, 234 n.14, 235 n.15, 236 n.16 Bowman, Arlene, 237 n.18 Brackett, David, 218 n.14 Brown, James, 77 Browning, Barbara, 199 Brecht, Bertolt, 176–77 Butler, Judith, 216 n.1, 228 n.14 Cage, John, 218 n.15, 232 n.10 Carby, Hazel, 153, 154, 156 Catachresis, 6, 11, 20, 21, 69, 70, 130, 158, 175, 181, 210 n.5 Chernoff, John, 73–77, 83, 101, 107, 195 Chion, Michel, 217 n.9 Cleaver, Eldridge, 228 n.14 Clément, Catherine, 32–34, 38, 229 n.2 Cohen, Margaret, 233 n.13 Cohen, Sarah, 162 Connors, Chuck, 214–15 n.8, 220 n.4 Copjec, Joan, 217 n.8 Crook, Wilfred Harris, 99–100 Dayan, Joan, 85 de Certeau, Michel, 45, 58, 76, 133, 162, 211 n.10, 217 n.7 Deleuze, Gilles, 233 n.13; and Félix Guattari, 183, 214 n.7, 230–31 n.5, 232 n.11 de Man, Paul, 216 n.2, 217 n.10 Deren, Maya, 84, 219 n.1 Derrida, Jacques, 23–24, 121, 158, 183, 184, 190, 213 n.4, 214 n.6, 220 n.3, 232 nn.9, 11, 233 n.13 Dolar, Mladen, 51–55, 218 n.11

252 index

Duden, Barbara, 7, 8, 15–20, 21, 38, 82, 90, 114, 152, 162, 212 n.1, 213 n.4 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 172–73, 180, 188, 190, 199, 236 n.16 Elias, Norbert, 17, 130, 161, 212 n.2, 221–22 n.12, 233 n.12 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 10, 38, 39, 95, 154, 157–62, 227–28 n.13 Fantasy, 86–89, 139–48, 162, 205, 225 n.9, 226 n.10, 230 n.3 Felman, Shoshana, 229 n.2 Flinn, Caryl, 217 n.9 Fontana, D. J., 68 Foucault, Michel, 11, 15, 55, 92–94, 98, 99, 102, 111, 113, 120, 142, 154, 212–13 n.3, 218 n.12, 232 n.11, 233 n.13 Freed, Alan, 22, 24, 213 n.5 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 9, 24, 38, 46, 47, 71, 80, 85–86, 87, 120–23, 124, 128, 138, 139–48, 169, 170, 203, 206, 219 n.1, 223 n.3, 225–26 n.7, 229 nn.2, 3 Gates, Henry Louis, 138 Geras, Norman, 101, 215 n.1 Gillett, Charlie, 27, 117, 213 n.5 Gilroy, Paul, 155 Godzich, Wlad, 217 n.10 Gorbman, Claudia, 46, 217 n.9 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 153–56, 161, 199, 227 nn.12, 13 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 194, 199 Haley, Bill, 23, 27, 30 Hall, Stuart, 216 n.4 Harding, Christopher, 174, 230 n.4, 231 n.6 Hardy, Ebby, 81 Hart, Mickey, 21, 82 Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina, 88

Heart, the, 172, 174, 180–93, 201– 2, 207 Heidegger, Martin, 184–85, 188, 190, 214 n.6 Holly, Buddy, 116, 163–65, 223 n.1 Immanent critique, 13, 212 n.11 Interpellation, 7, 36, 42–58, 61, 64, 65, 69–70, 78, 83, 84, 88, 99, 120, 207, 210 n.6, 216–17 n.4, 225 n.8 Irigaray, Luce, 173 James, Clifton, 68 Jameson, Fredric, 54 Jardine, Alice, 234 n.13 Jastrab, Joseph, 190–92, 231 n.6 Jay, Martin, 217 n.10 Jones, A. M., 75, 195–96 Kane, Harnett, 106–8 Keil, Charlie, 6, 40, 72, 155, 156, 218 n.14; and Steve Feld, 72, 163– 64 Kerman, Joseph, 218 n.14 Kerouac, Jack, 172, 196 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 39 King, Rodney, 114–15 Kinomagewopkong, 166–69 Kramer, Lawrence, 218 n.14 Krupa, Gene, 1, 79 Lacan, Jacques, 32, 34, 143, 203–6, 225 n.7, 229 n.3 Laclau, Ernesto, 49, 215 n.1, 218 n.11; and Chantal Mouffe, 49 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 218 n.15 Lactification, 8, 38–39, 114, 163– 164, 210 n.7, 235 n.16 Laplanche, Jean, 9, 139, 226 n.9; and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, 141– 48 Lazarus, Neil, 207

Leiris, Michel, 23 Lennon, John, 116–18, 134, 162, 220 n.2, 223 n.1 Leppert, Richard, 20 Life magazine, 22–23 Little Richard, 26, 109–11, 113, 214 n.8, 220 n.4 Love, Courtney, 119 Lowe, Donald, 15, 213 n.4 Lukács, Georg, 44, 224 n.6 Luxemburg, Rosa, 100–102, 221 n.11 Macherey, Pierre, 217 n.5 Mailer, Norman, 38, 210 Malcolm, Janet, 225–26 n.9 Malone, Jacqui, 88, 90 Marx, Karl, 42, 44, 56, 71, 126, 161, 178, 203–6, 224 n.6 Masculinity, 12, 29, 156, 166, 169, 174, 177, 178, 180, 183, 185, 197, 233 n.13, 237 n.18 Masson, Jeffrey, 225–26 n.9 McClary, Susan, 218 n.14 McGuinn, Roger, 117 McRobbie, Angela, 86–89; and Simon Frith, 156, 226 n.10 Meade, Michael, 175, 190, 194, 231 n.7 Medicine Sky Voices, vii, 167 Men’s movement, the, 12, 166, 169– 76, 186, 189, 196, 199, 200, 202, 205, 206, 233 n.12, 236 n.18 Middle Passage, 2, 10, 72, 78, 79, 82, 84, 90, 106, 209 n.1, 227 n.13, 235 n.15 Miller, Alice, 226 n.9 Miller, James, 210 n.7 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1–3 Moon, Keith, 91 Morrison, Toni, 95, 209 n.1 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 182–90, 191, 192, 209 n.2, 232 n.9

index

253

New musicology, 3, 13, 36, 57, 209– 10 n.3 Niederland, William, 219 n.6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111–12, 162, 202, 213 n.3, 216 n.2, 222 n.14, 230 n.3, 233 n.13 Northern migration, the, 4, 8, 153– 54 Olson, Charles, 214 n.7 Onians, Richard, 219 n.15, 223 n.5 Palmer, Earl, 26, 68, 73, 81, 88, 107, 109, 135, 165 Palmer, Robert, 77, 79, 83, 107, 117, 130–31, 165, 198 Parks, George, 173–76, 178, 192– 96, 199–201 Percussive field, the, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 15, 18, 21, 39, 43, 50, 54, 66, 82, 96, 108, 115, 130, 141, 162, 165, 166, 193, 207 Percussive signifying, 3, 4, 6, 16, 130, 173 Perkins, Carl, 90, 219 n.2 Pierson, Eric, 181–82, 189, 194 Ponge, Francis, 232 n.9 Possession, 83–87 Potter, Henry, 91–93 Pratt, Mary Louise, 225 n.8 Presley, Elvis, 8, 38, 73 Raschke, Carl, 120 Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press, 196, 199, 201, 226 n.10 Rich, Buddy, 1, 88 Roach, Max, 88 Rock-and-roll, 4, 5, 21, 118–21, 123, 129, 130–31, 133, 138, 141, 149, 155–56, 162, 213–14 n.5, 219 n.2, 226 n.10, 236 n.17 Rolling Stones, the, 42, 59–66 Ronell, Avital, 222 n.14 Rosolato, Guy, 47

254 index

Ross, Kristin, 119, 234 n.13 Rough music, 11, 96–99, 104–9, 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 21, 92 Sachs, Curt, 24 Said, Edward, 200 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 158–60, 162, 176 Scheman, Naomi, 173, 184 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 134, 221 n.7, 224–25 n.7, 227–28 n.13 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 173 Sennett, Richard, 18, 128–29, 134, 225 n.7 Sense, 2, 4, 21, 40, 209 n.2, 230 n.5 Shank, Barry, 37, 218 n.14 Silverman, Kaja, 46, 217 n.9 Simmel, Georg, 120, 121–22, 124, 126, 134, 153, 161, 226–27 n.11 Skin, 7, 14, 37, 48, 66, 82, 87, 88, 93, 113, 114, 119, 130, 141, 144, 145, 157, 160, 201, 207, 231 n.8 Small, Christopher, 6, 10, 40, 48–71, 73, 83, 87, 89–90, 93, 97, 151, 195, 207, 211 n.8, 213 n.5 Softley, Ian, 117 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 203–5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty, 213 n.4, 226 n.9, 229 n.2 Starr, Ringo, 2 Strikes, 99–103 Subotnik, Rose, 218 n.14 Szatmary, David, 95, 96, 219 n.2 Thompson, Edward P., 11, 90, 96– 99, 102, 104, 111 Toomer, Jean, 153 Trap set, 10, 26, 67–68, 78–82, 85, 91, 103, 114, 211 n.9 Ventura, Michael, 78, 79, 83, 154, 235 n.15

Waksman, Steven, 211 n.7, 235 n.16 Wallace, Michelle, 199 Walser, Robert, 217 n.4, 218 n.14, 223 n.2 Waters, Muddy, 4, 156, 234–35 n.14 Watts, Charlie, 61–62 White, Hayden, 191–92, 233 n.12 Williams, Alan, 45

Wright, Larry, 75 Wright, Richard, 155 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 104–6, 222 n.13 Zipes, Jack, 221 n.10 ˇ zek, Slavoj, 51, 203–7, 215–16 Ziˇ n.1, 218 n.11

index

255

John Mowitt is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Text: The Geneology of an Antidisciplinary Object (Duke University Press, 1992). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mowitt, John. Percussion : drumming, beating, striking / John Mowitt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-2904-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-2919-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Musical meter and rhythm. 2. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 3. Rock music—History and criticism. I. Title. ml3850 .m68 2002 786.8%1224–dc21

2001008563