The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s 9780520955059

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The Persistence of Sentiment

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The Persistence of Sentiment Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s

Mitchell Morris

University of California Press Berkeley

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Los Angeles

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London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morris, Mitchell, 1961– The persistence of sentiment : display and feeling in popular music of the 1970s / Mitchell Morris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-24285-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-27599-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Popular music—United States—1971–1980— History and criticism. 2. Singers—United States. I. Title. ML3477.M68 2013 781.640973'09047—dc23 2012041528 Manufactured in the United States of America 22 10

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ansi/niso (z 39.48) requirements.

For my parents, whose memory also persists.

There is a strong and very ancient emotion that is rarely mentioned or recognized: it is the anguish we feel for the absence of idols. —Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1. Introduction

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2. Black Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth Barry White in the Early 1970s

34

3. Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul

59

4. The Audience and Barry Manilow

88

5. The Voice of Karen Carpenter

118

6. Cher’s “Dark Ladies” Showbiz Liberation

143

7. Crossing Over with Dolly Parton

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Notes Works Cited Index

209 231 241

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Acknowledgments

A book such as this, with a long and idiosyncratic genesis, puts an author in a dilemma: to thank too much or too little. On the theory that perhaps less sometimes really is more, I will thank those whose support has been constant and crucial. First and foremost, let me thank Susan McClary and Robert Walser whose support has been unceasing—as is my gratitude. Raymond Knapp is, as always, the most exemplary of interlocutors. Elizabeth Upton’s diverting and illuminating discussions of songs and what they mean has informed vast stretches of this book. My old co-conspirators Paul Attinello, Judith Peraino, and Robynn Stilwell know how vast is the range of things I owe to them—many things in this book, not least. Among the many wonderful graduate students whose conversations have enriched this book, I must list Ross Fenimore, Olivia Mather, Louis Niebur, and Holley Replogle-Wong. Stephan Pennington and Desmond Harmon have not only informed and delighted by their conversation—they took on the task of assisting me with technical and clerical matters, a task much much worse than herding the most irascible of cats. Our departmental staff and counselor Barbara Van Nostrand was equally heroic and endlessly patient with my tendency to yowl and hiss at perplexities. Last but certainly not least, I thank Mary Francis, who has displayed superhuman patience and perspicacity. I am grateful to you all.

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chapter 1

Introduction

I first began looking for ways to write about the artists discussed in this book in the mid-to-late 1990s. The timing matters for a several reasons— a vaguely discernible twenty-year cycle of rubbishing and rehabilitation in much postwar popular culture, for instance; the generational and technological shifts that enabled the appearance of a broader range of values and investments among critics, whether professional, amateur, or somewhere in between; or for that matter, a gradual shift in academic writing about popular music from a largely defensive, morally and aesthetically engagé style of scholarship to one more willing to give itself up to enjoyment. All these shifts in critical taste were present in writings about music, but they also covered a lot more ground. The art critic Dave Hickey, for instance, begins his brilliant little book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty with a description of the ills of the academic art world and the potential balm to be found in pleasure and beauty: For more than four centuries, the idea of “making it beautiful” has been the keystone of our cultural vernacular—the lover’s machine-gun and the prisoner’s joy—the last redoubt of the disenfranchised and the single direct route from the image to the individual without a detour through church or state. Now, it seems, that lost generosity, like Banquo’s ghost, is doomed to haunt our discourse about contemporary art—no longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them into the vernacular—and no longer even welcome to try. The route from the image to the beholder now detours through an alternate institution ostensibly distinct from church 1

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and state . . . The priests of the new church are not so generous. Beauty, in their domain, is altogether elsewhere, and we are left counting the beads and muttering the texts of academic sincerity.1

For Hickey, writing near the beginning of the nineties, only a full-blooded acknowledgment of the pleasure and sociality that intersect in disputatious experiences of beauty could rescue the academic art world from its arid purism. And it is worth noting that, whatever the reservations that greeted his admittedly extravagant claims, his insistence on the recovery of the beautiful gained increasing attention into the first decade of the 2000s. The situation has been arguably better and worse with respect to music. I have often noted a disparity between the songs and styles many people seem to love to listen to—those they play in the privacy of their own homes, the ones that send them into paroxysms of delighted recollection, those they remember in remarkably detailed fashion—and the songs and styles that tend to get written about in vigorous, critically engaged terms. Even though popular music has acquired a significant measure of scholarly respectability, it has often seemed that this measure is extremely selective. An extensive section of the pop music repertory still seems resistant to the praise of critics and intellectuals. At best, we may refer to it as “bad” (a kind of scare-quote cowardice), but at the risk of falling into condescension toward the music and its admirers: falling into a serious slough of very bad faith. Among demotic listeners— the folks who haunt the Internet discussion groups, call up radio stations to hear favorites, and populate my university courses—much of this untalked-about music occasions violent reactions both for and against. I find many of the songs of this type to be among the most satisfying and intellectually stimulating I have ever spent time on, but I have often felt myself, when making such claims, to be in a very marginal position— with respect to the common grounds of discussion, not those of listenership. The music I have in mind is in a sense too popular to be impressive. But what happens if we are impressed, and we begin to say why? The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s focuses on a group of songs in styles still significantly discounted by critics and scholars, by artists who have been as often execrated by would-be tastemakers as they have been exalted by adoring audiences. When I have mentioned writing about Barry Manilow or Cher, for instance, the most striking reactions I have received from many people have been bursts of laughter in which delight and embarrassment are equally mixed. These people then proceed to demonstrate an

Introduction | 3

astounding (and tender) recollection for the songs I am interested in, but with an insistence that their knowledge and enthusiasm be taken as funny. I think it is funny, too, but I want to know more about what all this laughter defends against. A good part of this protective frivolity comes from our uncertainty about these songs’ historical and cultural embeddedness. We try to talk about them, but our only languages are those of autobiography and personal response. And who among us wants to be seen so nakedly in public? Although I think the critical usefulness of such nakedness is mostly worth the risks, I also think that we are wrong to leave these songs with no context other than our personal ones. In this introduction, I want to point out a few historical and critical issues that are relevant to my considerations in later chapters. My approach is necessarily somewhat loose-jointed; before any coherent general account of this music can be constructed—before it can have a history—a great deal of conceptual brush clearing must occur.

on the generations of objects In 1998, Rhino Records released a compilation of seventies hits entitled Have a Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box. This box set was the culmination of a series of 1970s recycling projects that the record label had begun early in the decade, with the release of successful retro collections such as Have a Nice Day: Super Hits of the ’70s and Didn’t It Blow Your Mind: Soul Hits of the ’70s. Avoiding self-conscious canon making and fine critical distinctions, The ’70s Pop Culture Box set sought to represent as wide a range of musical styles, social constituencies, and degrees of “seriousness” as possible as an exercise in nostalgic amusement. From country to disco, from teenage rebellion to second-wave feminism, from “timeless classics” to the most fleeting of novelties (anyone remember Ray Stevens’s “The Streak”?), everything could be included on the seven CDs hidden behind the shag-carpet surface emblazoned with happy faces. Although most of the songs had been successful singles, simple chart position was not the only criterion for inclusion. Rather, the box set was designed to evoke memories of the decade as they had been constructed through the mass media, especially television and radio. An additional fillip of realism came from occasional snatches of broadcast sound inserted between the tracks of the singles, detailing such resonant events as the Patty Hearst saga, Watergate, or the gasoline rationing that followed the OPEC oil embargo.

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Now imagine yourself in that year, a person in your late thirties or perhaps forties, purchasing the collection and taking it off to your CD player to listen. Music you might have heard anywhere between the ages of two and twenty-two, the years when our most stubborn aesthetic tastes are significantly formed, when music often seems to be most tenacious in the memory—it is all here, the lush glories of Gladys Knight and the Pips singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” followed only five tracks later by Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun.” The compilers have made no differentiations of taste, so the experience of the Have a Nice Decade box set approaches your recollections of the life you experienced as you began to become an adult. You hear a stream of material that addresses you in a multitude of ways, summoning recollection and feeling to the stage as surely as that cookie of Marcel Proust’s. Why are you so happy? Do this lack of discrimination and your pleasure in it compromise your aesthetic self-respect? You are safe from embarrassment because the sheen of frivolity that coats the project allows you to present yourself as much more sophisticated than your low listening habits would indicate. You are looking back with irony (ironically—imagine a mise en abyme of unserious seriousness). You can have your cake (or your cookie) and eat it too. I imagine a listener in his or her thirties because the return of the 1970s entails the operations of generational consciousness in American culture. Perhaps the first signs of a seventies revival in pop culture came at the very beginning of the nineties. Take a mass-market book from 1990, The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs, which scattered a huge assortment of factoids, snapshots, and politico-sociological vignettes across more than two hundred pages in an attempt at “revisionist history.” Presenting their work as primarily a collection of fun trivia, the authors nevertheless found ample occasion, amid the stories of earth shoes, pet rocks, and rolfing, to make connections between seeming ephemera and the larger stakes of individuals and society.2 This return of the repressed was in full flower that year, and the news media soon found themselves bemused by the spectacle of “young people” (under thirty) traipsing around in the most baroque polyester wares to be found at thrift stores, playing old vinyl records, and speaking warmly about the “excesses” of style long since left behind. By the middle of 1991, Newsweek (always a reliable indicator of mid-cult awareness) had begun to offer up little profiles of the seventies revival. Fashion and music were the most reliable indicators of this new taste, but what seemed to trouble journalists was an ambiguity of tone in the appreciation of ar-

Introduction | 5

dent revivalists. Was it, as they asked, “ironic or perilously beyond ironic?”3 The question’s structure pointed to part of the problem because the “either/or” could only be answered by “both/and.” Another question was left largely implicit: “why now?” It is a commonplace to note that in the post-WWII era pop culture revivals have usually occurred after a space of a decade-and-a-half or so. The early 1970s saw the first blooming of a mainstream pop culture preoccupation with an imaginary 1950s (the 1960s career of a retro group like Sha Na Na was something of an anomaly at the time). The return of the 1950s was not only a matter of recycled music on radio’s “oldies programs” and nostalgia stories on television or in the movie house—a great deal of new wave from the late 1970s, for instance, depends on complexly mediated tropes from 1950s pop culture. The imaginary 1960s began to achieve full force in the 1980s, sparking its own series of newly referential pop cultural styles. And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a 1980s revival was successfully launched: in 2002, Rhino followed its Have a Nice Decade box set with Like, Omigod! The ’80s Pop Culture Box.4 (The accelerated recycling has continued since then, though the vast transformations wrought by the Internet seems to have made the process more sporadic and murky.) But it was the 1970s revival that has often seemed to the mainstream media to be the most culturally fraught. As the cultural recycling proceeded in the 1990s, a relevant pop culture discussion about generational politics began to emerge. In Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, novelist Douglas Coupland imagined a label for the underemployed and perhaps oversophisticated people who were just turning thirty.5 The oft-hyped economic booms of the 1980s had trickled down to very few people under that age, and in Coupland’s world, their future was likely to see more of the same: inadequate jobs; the wastage that came from the misfortunate parts of the sexual revolution; permanent political impotence; and, above all, the oppressive self-righteousness of earlier generations. The idealistic self-portraits of the “baby boom” generation— peace rallies, the counterculture, and extravagant proclamations of freedom—seemed to evoke derision (often mixed with sub-rosa envy).6 And the link between this generational identity and the 1970s revival seemed secure, as is apparent in such images as the character of Vickie Miner, the retro-obsessive character played by Janeane Garofalo in the exceedingly X-ish 1994 film Reality Bites. The title of Coupland’s novel provided one of the most common rubrics under which discussions of this “new” generational difference

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entered the mass media. Another important point of view came from a series of widely read books by public policy writers William Strauss and Neil Howe that sought to analyze all of American history in terms of generational periods lasting approximately twenty years each.7 (Adjustments may be made for large-scale political events; the argument is based on a notion of a quadripartite life cycle indirectly related to the life-cycle theories of Erik Erikson.) In the vision of Strauss and Howe, the “Boomers,” born between 1943 and 1960, were at last confronting the difficult positions of the “Thirteenth generation,” born between 1961 and 1981, and beginning to worry about the condition of the emerging “Millennial generation” born after 1982.8 The resentments and rebellions of the rising generation were the inevitable concomitants of their attempts to differentiate their culture from that of their elders. Such arguments have been important, not because they are necessarily accurate, but because they have shown themselves to have a great deal of power to shape the terms of public perception. It is intuitively true that such a thing as a generational consciousness can be said to exist. Especially in a mass-media culture where large numbers of (young people) receive the impact of reportage on major historical events as well as ephemera, the common points of reference establish what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called “generational objects.” These shared things gradually emerge in childhood and especially in the violent self-fashionings of adolescence to become crucial tokens of temporal consciousness in young adulthood.9 Bollas suggests that Although each generation passes through, interprets, and signifies the life span in its own way, its fundamental character is fashioned in the twenties. It will continue to experience and interpret new objects, but strictly speaking they are not generational ones, as they are not essential to the defining character of consciousness. Such objects are not so much mental representations as screen memories that express the nature of the generation’s psychic life. Each generational object . . . gives rise to a complex character of experiences peculiar to that time. They sit inside us even when we aren’t thinking of them, within our unconscious in an internal world where each object serves as a generating link to the people of our time.10

In one’s thirties, observes Bollas, generational objects begin to be mulled over in comparison to those of older and younger generations. Obviously, a given generation’s objects have significance to others—it’s just that they won’t have the same significance. For example, the sexual revolution of the seventies was an important event for the Gen-Xers, the Thirteeners of Strauss and Howe, but its

Introduction | 7

importance is shaped by epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases that were taking place at the time that generation was in a position to participate fully. Then, there was the Pill, and there were antibiotics to cure any minor infection one might pick up. But since the eighties, the idea of casual sex as a harmless diversion has become impossible thanks to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and HPV (human papillomavirus). Of course casual sex occurs now. But the stakes are quite different. As a result, the fantasy of sexual liberation probably has a more mythological cast to the minds of Xers than it would to their elders. What are the effects of this difference on the ways that disco, one of the most sexually fraught musics created in the 1970s, can be said to enter the body of its would-be devotees? Or take the case of marijuana; by the 1990s, it was the most contested drug in America. Its use seemed almost an idiosyncrasy to many in the 1970s. A presidential commission recommended its decriminalization in 1972, and throughout the rest of the decade, it seemed no more dangerous than booze or cigarettes—maybe even less. I recently screened the 1980 film 9 to 5, and was stunned to see a scene I had forgotten, in which the three protagonists (played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton) smoke a joint in the midst of female bonding.11 Between that scene and contemporary reality falls any number of crucial material changes—the horrifyingly excessive sentences frequently handed out to offenders, the extraordinary developments in marijuana cultivation in the wake of the War on Drugs (even everyday modern strains are enormously more potent than anything that would have been available in the 1960s and 1970s), and the continuing controversy over medical marijuana laws, to name a few. As of November 2012, public attitudes have turned strongly back towards the calmer ones of the 1970s—but the weight of nearly three decades of neo-Prohibition still lies heavy. A scene like the one in 9 to 5 requires explicit contextualization if it is to have the impact on current teenagers that it was designed to have on audiences at the end of the 1970s. The changing status of marijuana affects its position as a potential generational object. To put it rather crudely, the Boomer’s pot is different from that of the Thirteener. They both differ from the cannabis that that is now experienced by the Millennial generation identified by Howe and Strauss. Differences in generational location go a long way to explain the ambivalence with which popular music of the 1970s was often regarded during its period of rehabilitation. One brief example from the tradebook press can stand for many. In her well-intentioned but severely

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limited Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, Martha Bayles demonstrated a hopeless incomprehension of music in the 1970s. Speaking of disco, for instance, Bayles imagined it as having a unidimensional groove that became (aesthetically and morally) worse when the groove was produced through the rigid algorithms of a drum machine. Her beef with electronics encompassed synthesized orchestrations as well. For Bayles, irregularities (participatory discrepancies, to invoke Charles Keil) were the primary loci of musical values; the perfect regularity of electronic sound production automatically put these values in danger.12 She also claimed that disco disdained the vocal skills traditionally associated with soul and gospel, styles that carry high value for her. Throughout her account, words like “mechanical” and “cold” expressed her displeasure at the unholy triumph of the machine over the human being. At the same time, Bayles deplored the hedonistic environments in which disco flourished.13 The defenders of the bathhouses and the backroom bars might celebrate promiscuity as the means to a new form of community, but Bayles would have none of it—it was just cheap sex, dehumanized from the get-go. Her section heading, Disco: Invasion of the Sex Robots, married the values that ground her musical disapproval to those supporting her sense of sexual restraint.14 This section was perhaps the most overtly neoconservative of the book, but the entire project carried the resonances of an assortment of unresolved boomer bitternesses carried like gallstones in the cultural tract. The greatest problem with disco in Bayles’s account arises because disco could not be anything like a generational object to her. The style’s values are too different from those of the objects she treasures, and its consequent remoteness leads her to refuse to look closely at the values it does carry. Early in her book, she offers a mild defense against the likely accusation that she is “an aging flower child longing for the music of her youth” by claiming that it was a full tradition she defends rather than merely the music of her cohort.15 But much of the energy that drives her argument is derived exactly from the position of longing for the continuation of her generational objects as current rather than increasingly part of the past. Following Bollas, we might suggest that if a set of generational objects (such as music) seems to be endangered, then the form of community it constitutes is also at risk. Bayles is genuinely concerned about the loss of “beauty and meaning,” not least because its disappearance betokens her community’s relocation from actuality into history.

Introduction | 9

It is popular music’s astonishing power to mediate community that gives it such a central role among generational objects. Bollas points out that considered more abstractly, generational objects may be said to collect within an actual object (or event) the new generation’s interpretation of its identity. It is a curious mix of the fashioned and the imposed, as the musical choices and lingual inventions rub shoulders with events beyond control: a war, and economic crisis, and so on. Yet generational objects are pop art objects, fashions, precisely because they weave into historic time. It is adolescence that is curiously true to the dialectic in human life between the personal and the social, the responsible and the irrational, the premeditated and the accidental. The reality of our world and the complexity of its events are not fathomable; their simple chaos is always somewhat beyond our organization. It is the adolescent who somehow most intensely lives this tension to its fullest, and who—upon recovery in the twenties—can form ideas of culture and society that identify the group’s experience of life.16

Generational objects are thus always powerfully copular when not actually transitive. Linking choice and compulsion, mental time and mental space, they offer intersubjective spaces that balance our individual status with our membership in a particular group. To think of a piece of music as a generational object leads us to seek the complex fabric of significances that surrounds it for a particular listenership. In each of these cases, the generational object in question entails elaborate, sometimes elusive issues of politics, aesthetics, and most importantly, morality, insofar as these things can be disentangled from one another. Put another way, a generational object helps define a space of values understood as characteristic of a temporal cohort. A particular object is susceptible by its very structure to carrying some values more easily than others, of course, but it is never a simple matter of deciding whether the object can have been prior to the values it is held to carry. What matters most, I think, is how we attempt to unpack the generational objects—our own as well as those of others—so that we can be clear not only about the values they hold but also about the location from which our interests proceed.17 This never exhausts the meaning of a piece of music, of course. Music’s evasive relationship to words allows it to be reinflected in the minds of multiple social worlds and time periods, not to mention individual listeners. Bollas’s account sees generational objects as consolidated in early adulthood, when their working through of historical raw material creates a more or less coherent sense of temporal affiliation between contemporaries. We all have these objects, and when we are young and

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wrapped in “generational narcissism” we are apt to think of them as permanent; but the approach of midlife finds our objects displaced by those of our successors. We become history along with the things we have chosen to love. We are lucky when we have the chance to get old in this way before we die; we can see the objects of our (former) choice metamorphosed so that they fit into other fields of passion, serving other interests. When we encounter them thus, they show us more about the objects themselves as well as the nature of desire in self and other. It may seem as if thinking about generational objects has taken us rather far from Rhino Records and its canny rehabilitations of what might have been (and might still be) ephemera. But the Have a Nice Decade box set is interesting precisely to the degree that it appears so “undigested.” Historical narrative and canon making are among the activities that translate generational objects out of their temporally bound constituencies and allow them to circulate in altered forms in our metagenerational culture. Those of us for whom the 1970s were crucial with respect to generational identity want to find a set of commonly agreedupon songs along with a story into which they will fit. Rhino’s collection does not serve this purpose. It is too random. The problem of licensing may have been partly at fault: anyone who teaches surveys of rock and soul, for instance, is aware of the difficulty of gaining permissions to include music by an assortment of groups in pop music surveys. But I think that the commercial inaccessibility of major groups is less widespread with respect to music of the 1970s than is the case with the music of any other decade in pop music history. The problem is more one of historiography. Any survey of standard rock music texts will show that when the 1970s are considered, the customary narratives fall apart. This is a musical narrative that is, a decade after Rhino’s box set, still up for negotiation and construction. As long as they are unnarratable, the popular songs of the 1970s are trapped. They cannot pass beyond the state of generational objects until they begin to lose their power to identify for listeners a particular temporal location connected with individual memory, until they can be fitted into more general stories. This does not mean that the songs float free of their surroundings; if anything, the cultural contexts of the songs become more important for discussion because so much that was tacitly assumed as interpretive background is no longer shared by other audiences. The songs must begin to die to generational use so that they can live as other kinds of objects.18 The Rhino box set may signal the need for this, but at most it provides raw material. The stories into which the

Introduction | 11

songs may fit remain to be told. What goes for the music also goes for other aspects of the culture of the time. The Have a Nice Decade collection points to a persistent difficulty with making sense of the period as a historical narrative.

the “problem” of the 1970s The decade of the 1970s invariably seems historically opaque and confusing. Our techniques of representing the recent past as well as the media we choose to do so encourage us to assume that the 1970s have a distinctive identity. We can allow the eight-year success of the popular television sitcom That Seventies Show (1998–2006) to stand in for the assortment of books, articles, and other kinds of commentary that combined with personal reminiscences from the end of the 1990s into the present to create our shorthand image of the decade. With excesses of material style, dopey New Age ideas and practices, weak politicians, and the omnipresence of drugs and sex (both approached with little fear)— the 1970s seem innocent or witless, depending on our point of view. But when we look at all closely, the appearance of unity in the decade shatters. This is not news—it is close to a commonplace for some time to note the difficulties of maintaining a decade-based scheme of periodization for a time bounded by the social shifts that marked “the long 1960s” and the 1980s. On one end, there are any number of mythologized events—potential generational objects—filling out the year 1970 that we might treat as “the end of the 1960s.” The Beatles broke up, the trial of the Chicago Seven ended in a guilty verdict, students were shot by the National Guard at Kent State, Midnight Cowboy won a Best Picture Oscar despite its X rating, the Manson family murdered Sharon Tate and her guests, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died . . . and so on. Just past the end of the decade, the events of 1980 include John Lennon’s murder; the collapse of disco as a mainstream interest; the U. S. boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the resolution of the Iranian hostage crisis; and, above all, the landslide electoral victory of Ronald Reagan, which brought in its wake a number of traditional-values attempts to “just say no” to the social changes of the previous years. Although it may seem that most of these symbolically resonant events mattered primarily with respect to social and aesthetic values, many of them had significant political and economic consequences as well. But there are just as many objects and occasions that we could cite to prove that the 1960s lingered

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far into the 1970s, to such an extent that we could argue that the two decades form a microhistorical whole; and at the same time, we could show that fundamental aspects of the 1980s began to appear as nascent critiques of the doubled decade it would eventually try to replace.19 The 1970s can be regarded as the period in which crucial cultural ideals formulated in the 1960s were amplified and extended throughout American society. At the same time, however, the decade contained a strenuous impulse toward cultural retrospectivism (bolstering the significant appearance of the conservative cultural movements that marked the 1980s), inasmuch as the materials of earlier moments in popular culture either persisted at the margins or were deliberately revived. In television, for instance, Norman Lear’s epochal sitcom All in the Family premiered opposite the classic 1960s domestic fantasy Bewitched in January 1972. Instead of a camp parody of witches in the suburbs (a mainstreamed and thinly disguised allegory about the place of women and queer folk in Cold War America), Lear offered a lower-middle-class family fighting uninhibitedly about vexing current social issues. It is worth noting that before the first episode of All in the Family, CBS attached a warning notice for potential family audiences: this new show was for mature audiences only. The 1971–72 season proved to be the final one for Bewitched. It was the last of the great surreal sitcoms that had dotted the television screen during the 1960s, only to be replaced by shows that wanted to manufacture a style of realism. In place of jinn in bottles, pigs who painted, hapless castaways who never could get off that tropical island, the successful sitcoms of the 1970s presented vociferous arguments about pressing political issues such as the Vietnam War, abortion, changes in gender roles, or the position of sexual minorities. The history of the 1970s sitcom points to the value of realism on television. Politics and history were especially prized during prime-time hours, often at the expense of frank entertainment. Another major occurrence in prime-time programming might be described as “The Great Variety Show Die-Off.” In 1971, a given week of prime-time programming would have offered no less than ten variety shows, most of them lasting an hour. Four years later, the number available was only five.20 By 1980, there were only two, and those were short-lived. In 1982, there were no prime-time variety shows at all on the three major networks. Of the variety shows on the prime-time schedule near the end of the decade, only one of them, The Carol Burnett Show, had lasted longer than five years. And the longevity of Burnett’s program arguably had

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much more to do with the comedic brilliance of Burnett and her co-stars Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, and Vicki Lawrence, than it did with the appeal of the format. The sensibility of the 1970s was clearly detrimental to the artifice inherent in the variety show; when Burnett broadcast her farewell, she frankly stated that she thought it classier to leave the air before she was asked to do so. But although forms of realism were the rule in 1970s TV programming, the shows they helped to make obsolete did not disappear entirely. Thanks to syndication, television programs from the 1960s began to appear as reruns alongside those from the 1950s. In 1970, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had established the Financial Interest Syndication Rules, which took effect in 1971 and reduced network control over local stations by loosening restrictions on the rebroadcast of former prime-time material and narrowing prime time to three hours per night. As a result, we could suggest that although the social values of a seeming liberal consensus dominated the sets during prime time, syndication made available several pictures of rival social values. In a given day, a family might be able to watch Father Knows Best, followed by Bewitched, both in reruns; and after the evening news with Walter Cronkite, it might be time to watch Maude. Three competing visions of the suburbs, in incommensurate styles, preaching irreconcilable values— and yet they all made themselves available in the space framed by the buttons of the set, behind the glowing glass. And the sitcom was only one television genre among many. Local stations were just as happy to recycle cartoons, westerns, a few dramas, and hundreds of movies from Hollywood’s studio era. Syndication also offered an important venue for the fading variety show, allowing programs such as Hee-Haw to continue their vaudevillainy uninterrupted. The American population was already close to saturated with TV sets, so the images, plots, and music of all these performances were close to inescapable and offered a newly enriched repertory of possible worlds in which viewers could locate themselves imaginatively, with wildly various results extending into everyday life. This is one important source of what many critics have described as the “irony” infecting the generational consciousness of the Thirteeners. Television’s recycling processes resulted in an endless set of lessons about the uses of convention. Perhaps children and teenagers, if they tried hard, could imagine Archie Bunker or Mary Richards as figures that incarnated important aspects of contemporary reality; but their juxtaposition with Gilligan, Arnold Ziffle (the pig), Wally and the Beav, made the artifice of all shows equally clear.

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In music as well, the question of convention became pressing in popular music. It is probable that the notion of a common youth culture grounded in rock’n’roll always lay at a substantial distance from everyday reality. Nevertheless, the reminiscences of an awful lot of people in the 1950s and 1960s suggest that such a fiction did enjoy a certain compelling glamour. This vision of unity could not be sustained in the 1970s, for two reasons. First, massive changes in the recording industry at the beginning of the decade allowed the fragmentation of the seemingly cohesive audience of the 1960s into niche markets and grounded an explosion of genres and subgenres. There was no simple “rock” by the beginning of the decade, there were a multitude of rock and pop styles. These places were hard to stand in for long. Either the style changed or you did. Second, the youth culture that seemed stable as long as it belonged to a single generational cohort began to fracture as a newer cohort with different values began to coalesce as an audience. This expansion shattered the illusion of a common taste. Some critics were resentful. P. J. O’Rourke, in a parodic critical account of whale song recordings for the Boomer magazine Crawdaddy, begins his observations with a glance at the decade’s complex ecology of music genres: “One of the most important trends in popular music of the 1970s has been the disappearance of any single dominant sound. In place of one current pop fashion we have, now, dozens of individual styles, each appreciated on its own terms. Some AM and FM radio stations mix these genres so freely that in an hour of air time you can hear country-western singers, heavy-metal rock groups, folk artists, reggae bands, whales, dolphins, and porpoises.”21 Although it would be tempting to read this statement as at least neutral, if not approving, the rest of O’Rourke’s column makes clear his distaste for this state of affairs. When he compares genres that he despises to whale songs, it is clear he means no kindness to any of them. Disco, new wave, and punk all sit within O’Rourke’s baleful sights, and his deadpan wrath extends to encompass the music industry that has made their flourishing possible, along with the cetaceans whose sounds offer him his pretext for the display of contempt.22 The rest of his review makes clear that his fundamental objections arise not only from his ideas about musical artistry (especially technical ability), but from his vision of the public taste for “good” popular music being corrupted by the forces of the market. (His musical-moral values tally closely with those that Martha Bayles would express two decades later.) I think that at its root, O’Rourke’s distress here comes less with particular musical

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genres than the profit motive that allows them to circulate freely, to be picked up by whoever wants to claim them. That is, his trouble comes from the threat posed by a particular mercantile process to the hierarchy of musico-social values he esteems. This anxiety about the disruptive effect of rival musical genres and the values they embody continues to the present. The concern over explicit representations of violence and sexual behavior have usually drawn the most attention, of course, since long before the invention of rock’n’roll. An equally vexed but less politicized debate has centered around the question suggested by O’Rourke’s animadversions: “authenticity” and “commercialism.” Dozens of historical accounts that appear in books and television documentaries trace a line of musical descent from the country and R&B (rhythm and blues) fusions of the middle 1950s to a hazily delimited collection of 1960s musics called “rock,” which then fragments in the 1970s, leaving various successor styles and genres that claim to be the true heirs of this earlier tradition. This narrative is not one of musical style alone because it entails arguments about the shape of the music industry through which the music appeared and about the audiences who made the music matter. Among the most crucial features of this tradition was its perceived commitment to authentic expression, seen especially in the ways that the music’s refusal of normative expressive decorum caused disquiet among “the establishment.” It is important to recognize this commitment to authenticity as a claim to “realism.” To be authentic was to resist fictions always, in favor of truth. By doing so, rock could be taken as a mode of rebellious utopianism, underwriting the attempts of its partisans to resist and critique the oppressive conventions of their society. This myth is a strong one. It promulgates any number of luminous goods whose power to attract us has not faded, nor should it. But rock’s requirement for authenticity and realism required that many popular styles that depended on fantasy and convention be rejected, and that even within rock, the music’s inherent propensity to fictions—its love of conventions—be watched carefully.23 The burst of conflicting styles and genres that began the 1970s made it impossible for listeners to imagine a unified generational audience hearing a naturalized music that spoke truth to power. Popular music subsided into its bad old ways, hustling its multiple audiences for a buck. Where had its antinomian potential gone? Rock was always a jealous god. There had been any number of pop styles left out of its narrative accounting, and they had proceeded in

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their own ways despite the true believers. In the shattering of the social fabric in the 1970s, it seemed that any number of marginalized communities could make a play to renegotiate the representational contracts that had held them captive in American popular culture. Shows like All in the Family, after all, demonstrated the processes of social negotiation in all their vulgar and ambiguous splendor. The confusion of the airwaves meant that the same process could happen musically, too. As it happens, the styles that seemed most alluring to many of these minority communities were those that had been unsuitable for inclusion in the rock myth. It was not that this other music had ever gone away; it was that with the fantasy of consensus shattered, it was suddenly more free to make its presence felt. The bemusing shifts of the top-forty charts mirror the intricate social negotiations whose uncertainty made up the “problem of the 1970s.” By beginning to unpack some of the musical and social issues at stake, we may find better ways into the larger history of that decade.

writing as a musicologist While working on this book, I became acutely aware that my approach differs considerably from those found in most other scholarly books on popular music. My idea of what is analytically and interpretively meaningful, my strategies for placing music into resonant configurations with historical and sociological data, my taste for philosophical questions (treated in a relatively casual way, I admit), my choice of citations, even my prose style, all diverge from the usual generic complex expected in pop music criticism or scholarly writing. In an important sense, this book is not limited to popular music studies; although I write from the viewpoint of a musicologist, I am strongly influenced by some currents in other fields of the humanities. (My citations in the book will reveal my loyalties.) My training has been grounded in the specific traditions of an academic field that grew up in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to comment on the works of the Western tradition of written music. Although I grew up surrounded by popular music, I first learned how to discuss music formally by paying attention to Guillaume Dufay and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to Guillaume de Machaut and Claude Debussy. Before I had ever attempted to write about disco or progressive rock, I had written about operas or piano sonatas. I was always somewhat resistant to some disciplinary strictures of my field, however. Although I spent a good deal of time in rehearsals and

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concerts, I never could muster the obsessive devotion to practice (of the canon) through which many performers incorporate the normative musical responses that most musicologists would expect. In music theory classes, I was uncooperative about internalizing “common-practice tonality” as the normative language of music because I liked the “ends” of music history—the Middle Ages and the twentieth century—better. When it came to critical or interpretive discussion, I always found it as interesting to discuss Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” as it was to discuss Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig.” I suspect that my tendency to forget to distinguish between the musicological canon and American popular music is somewhat generational. Born in 1961, I came after most hierarchies of prestige and value in music had begun to crumble. Although the collapse of such musical orders may have seemed terrifying to many scholars, I honestly did not know any better than to talk about what I liked. I think that this is important, because in the discourse of popular music that has developed somewhere between the university world and demotic conversations, musicology qua musicology has been relatively absent. Even most musicologists and ethnomusicologists who have acted as pioneers have necessarily spoken to scholars in other disciplines rather than to their own closest associates. Part of the reason for the distance is our forbiddingly specialized lingo for discussing the particulars of musical sound; this language grew up over centuries of practical experience in music making as well as thinking about the results of our activities as musicians, and it is an astonishingly subtle resource. Another part of the reason comes from the ascetic commitment, in musicology at least, to a canon whose transhistorical value has rarely been questioned until fairly recently. For all our historical fastidiousness, musicologists have often wished to let “the music itself” occupy a rather ideal realm. And this music, by being liberated from the distresses of everyday existence, thereby acquired a power to comfort that should not be underestimated. Musicology’s passion for its canon and its canons has frequently acted as a “hedge around the Torah,” keeping the transcendental effects of music from too much contact with the contingencies of reality at the cost of keeping the laity at arm’s length. This is disadvantageous for everyone who works on popular music, regardless of field. Many scholars who have come to this music from sociology or cultural studies have been reticent to discuss the structural and affective details of individual songs. But a song is always more than its means of creating, transmission, and reception. Its particulars—as I

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have already suggested, and as I will continue to suggest—have the capacity to exceed their immediate bounds in complex ways. Thanks to their training, musicologists are especially well placed to pay attention to these aspects of popular song. And we can find it possible to do so by refusing to restrict our sense of canon.24 I hope that my discussions in this book, to the extent that they are musicologically centered, will encourage the further development of a genuinely multidisciplinary conversation.

everyday listening and modest songs The songs I care about in this book are all songs that were performed and recorded with the knowledge (the hope!) that they would be listened to over and over, or rehearsed to ourselves in the mind, or to others in one kind of sing-along or another, in innumerable ordinary situations: on the radio or record player, on the TV, in the mind while taking a bath, driving a car, sweeping the floor, washing the dishes—the list is infinitely extensible. At the same time, these songs would be performed in the distinctly unordinary spaces of concerts as well. If there is anything that defines popular songs, surely it is their capacity to circulate in all these ways. They must have something intrinsic to themselves that allows them to sustain reiteration without surrendering the listener’s desirous attention, but they must also refrain from claiming too much of that attention. They must have the capacity to become background or foreground, depending on our willingness at given moments to bring ourselves to them in greater or lesser degree. I raise this issue because finding an approach to modest songs presents musicologists, at least, with something of a problem. The methods that music scholars usually learn for parsing musical structures and unpacking their effects were all designed for music in the grand style. We can scrutinize the smallest details of a musical score or a recording and make astonishingly precise formal arguments, upon which we can base many compelling interpretations. But our most powerful insights have quite naturally come at the price of necessary blindnesses. We have rarely known how to account for music that loves the quotidian because our methods have been based on aesthetic and moral preferences for the extraordinary, the original, and the convention-breaking inspiration. Our commitments as music scholars have been strongest, historically, to music that was never meant to be heard every day. (Listeners with strong constitutions may test this observation for themselves by trying to listen to something like the St. Matthew Passion or Götterdämmerung every

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morning, but I predict their endurance will fade rather quickly.) The heroic gestures that fill out most of the “great works” in virtually any kind of canon are the ones that modest songs usually refuse—they must forgo too much “greatness” if they are to accomplish their principal goal of living with us instead of living against us in moral-aesthetic agon.25 But that is not to say that a modest song cannot have its challenging aspects. I think that this music gets interesting precisely at the point that our own subjective worlds reach out to merge with the sounds that we hear. This is a slippery, ambiguous place, a liminal world where the greatest danger comes in our permanent vulnerability to a simple question: When you make claims about a modest song, are you making statements about the song or about yourself? A Wildean answer would be that it does not make a difference; but as Oscar Wilde would also have acknowledged, that is no answer at all. Criticism, as the record of one’s soul, is truly an inexhaustible delight for some, but it can strike just as many others as an especially dishonest form of banal self-regard. We face additional difficulties because of the proliferation of recording. The sheer number of musical presences we have on hand in our own everydays tends to overwhelm us, and keeps us from noticing, or helps us to keep forgetting, just how historically remarkable a phenomenon it is. Before the rise of recording, almost no people were in a position to hear “extraordinary” music whenever they wished. No grand marshalling of forces or superhuman feats of performance technique in the everyday for most people. They only had access to modest songs in ordinary time, most often performed by and for ordinary people. We could argue that the marriage of music with new technologies of production and reproduction created greater democratization through commerce because music increasingly became available to anyone who had an interest in it, depending on their budget. Even for those who had no budget to speak of, there rapidly came to be occasions where music could spill over into a kind of gratuitous common space. The story of the music industry, with its sometimes near-inconceivable predatory attempts to manage music as if it were tangible property, speaks both to the commercial liveliness of music as well as its tendency to escape profitable management. But naturally, there are also downsides to music’s bargain with recording. I will leave aside for now the ubiquitous gripes about “commercialism” ruining genuine musical expressiveness or authenticity; often enough this kind of complaint arises from an ill-considered, left-over form of romanticism whose incoherencies are only slightly more amusing than its

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hypocrisies. More interesting is the accusation that by allowing music to play constantly “as background,” by in effect hearing it too often, we damage our ability to notice it. The underlying analogies seem to be with addictive drugs, or exciting erotic twists, or even elaborately spicy dinners. If we do it too often, maybe we will begin to enjoy it less. Maybe we will be spoiled for simpler or more ethereal pleasures. Maybe we will need increasingly bigger and more dangerous jolts to give us the old thrill again. The fear that music will be spoiled by overindulgence, and spoil us in turn, has a long and distinguished tradition. Philosophers in the ancient world exercised themselves over the need to manage music’s power, but by the nineteenth century, it was not clear whether the danger lay within ourselves or within the music itself. In the 1800s, music could be reinterpreted as a species of religion, and it was a cult with sacred scriptures (symphonies, string quartets), prophetic figures (especially German ones), rites (the concert), and an eccentric clergy (the performers, and even the critics). The religion of music assumed that pieces were potentially lethal, precisely because they were so very holy. Another form of protest took off from Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. To put it simply, in the Kantian-influenced moral world, we are never to treat a person as a means to an end, but rather as an end in him/herself. That is a really good rule in Kant’s frames of reference. And many musicians and scholars of all levels, from the most arid of academics to the autodidacts whose song lists and data compilations flood many Internet websites, would all agree to expand this imperative to include music. It is a long-standing implicit assumption of many devoted listeners that music (or at least “good” music, “great” music) ought to be given the same consideration as people. If you treated the products of the human mind so cavalierly, after all, might you not do the same to actual humans? Such a train of thought easily leads us right back to claims about the holiness of music, perhaps with a secularly humanist inflection. From either point of view, the proliferation of music into everyday space creates serious dangers. We are harmed because we grow coarsened or ungrateful. We come to think of music as something trivial and commonplace. As a result, we disrespect the music and we disrespect our powers as listeners. Now we sin not only by flaunting our own narcissism, but also by brutalizing music (and the memories of its creators) for our shallow pleasures. But such excessive scrupulosity ends up by damaging the very music that it sought to protect. It recalls those legends about ladies who cover their furniture with vinyl so the fabric will not be ruined or keep their good china locked away forever; men whose

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baseball cards are locked up in plastic sheaths instead of being handed around and traded to remind us of the pleasures brought to us by the players of the game. Museums do serve a purpose, but that does not mean that we should want to live in them. By contrast, consider an everyday object to which we may be greatly attached, such as an old sweater or a favorite pair of shoes. We probably do not treat it very well. It has lost shape, gotten stained or burned. It has been patched. Its shapes have been distorted by intimate contact with our bodies and customs. In being knocked around, it has absorbed qualities of ourselves into its materials. Maybe we have absorbed some of its qualities as well. Is a thing like this even an object in the usual sense anymore? I do not want to throw out those favorite shoes, even though I never wear them, and not because I plan to put them on again in the near future. Instead, I just want to keep them because they have to do with how I keep myself. Recall that the commonplace word habit has been used to refer to clothes, outward appearance, and repeated actions that signal an inner state of being. (The range of the word was already fairly well developed in Latin before it came into Old French and on into English.) Is a habit internal or external? Is it an object, an action, or a state of mind? Is it something that we put on, or something we cannot get rid of? Something to break or something to acquire? Maybe modest songs are like habits. They are things that surround us in the most unremarkable of manners. And yet, if we stop and examine them, we can find them to be enormously interesting. In teasing out the possibilities that lie within modest songs, we constantly find ourselves coming to terms with varieties of repetition. The fundamental stakes with respect to various kinds of repetition might come from how musical qualities are imagined to embody various forms of simplicity and complexity. We care about both of these abstractions in a multitude of ways, of course, and are apt to praise and blame music for both conditions, depending on our sense of what is valuable in a given context. For instance, if I laud Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1 for its “simplicity,” then I must intend to point out such features as its spare texture, consisting mostly of melody with light chordal support, and its relatively “white note” palette, enabling even an incompetent pianist like myself to get through it without too much humiliation. On the other hand, I could just as easily say that I prize the piece for its nuanced emotional ambience—I think it is some species of melancholy, but I could not be more specific without explaining at length—which

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suggests “complexities” of situation (I mean the peculiar interactions between poetic stance and listener address) that seem to ironize the directness of the musical surface. The reverse situation, between a “complex” surface and a “simple” situation, might be argued in the case of a piece such as Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel. With respect to modest songs, our only purchase on these questions comes from a consideration of how they are situated; and those locations, as I have already suggested, are endlessly mutable. We are implicated in those modest songs in such a way that we can afford ourselves little cover. To be sure, such vulnerability must be the rule in any interpretive moment. The critic George Steiner movingly asserts that “all understanding, and the demonstrative statement of understanding which is translation, starts with an act of trust.”26 But trust is a difficult critical place from which to begin in the modern university world (the mainstream rock critical world, for that matter), where the hermeneutics of suspicion is the rule. Determined not to get fooled again, we try to take refuge in tough-mindedness. Although we may acknowledge the pleasures of our culture’s pretty lies, we try to be realists, moving quickly past the fun to get at those abstract values that sit under the brightly sensuous surfaces. Such austerity is death to modest songs, where pleasure is the major point. If we are to have any hope of understanding their power to matter, we must trust ourselves to risk the banal. We must trust that our accounts, always incomplete and so rendering the world piecemeal, can nevertheless congeal into some form of significance to the interlocutors we desire.

kitsch, or the eco nom ical ly abject I will be talking about songs that many listeners, whether devotees of rock or “classical” music, would immediately label kitsch. The inexhaustible power of that epithet deserves a little unpacking. The painters and art dealers of Munich during the 1860s and 1870s seem to have been the first to use the term (originally meaning trash) in a way that directed it toward its modern meaning: for them, kitsch referred to inexpensive souvenir art, possibly mere sketches of dubious aesthetic and therefore financial value, sold especially to Anglo-American tourists (more on this point later).27 Its entry into English took place in the twentieth century. One of the earliest uses of kitsch comes from the 1930s in The Partisan Review, which gives us some idea of the high seriousness that made the word so attractive to a certain mind-set.

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Strictness about questions of art and value is what gives the term its charge. The accusation of kitschiness is one of those places where morals merge with aesthetics, since the badness of kitsch almost always has to do with the problem of truth and lies. We think of the kitsch artifact as “too pretty”; it has been described as “beauty with the ugly taken out.” The world it portrays has only positive moments, and the glib idealizations of the content represented through the object allow those of us who appreciate the object to pretend that everything is, simply, “nice.” If such an object evokes the specter of “high art,” as kitsch often does, nevertheless its formal and expressive solecisms inevitably remove the ascetic challenge that “high art” is supposed to produce. It is this excess of flattery, in which the narcissism of the kitsch-lover expands unimpeded, that so offends critics of kitsch. Thus, any accusation of kitschiness carries with it a whole set of disturbances about categories such as “imitation, forgery, counterfeit, and what we may call the aesthetics of deception and self-deception.”28 An example from pop music of the sort of relationship that might fall under the label of kitsch comes from a concert review of a performance by Barry Manilow in 1980: “Basically, Manilow offered his audience music with absolutely safe feelings. When he sang about heartbreak, there was no pain, only a sadness that one could safely wallow in. When he sang about excitement, there was no danger that things would get out of hand. When he sang about the past, there was no sense of aging or loss, only safe nostalgia.”29 The reviewer is devoted to pop music ideals of high seriousness, so he cannot entertain the possibility that “safe” might be a worthwhile musical quality in some situations, for some audiences. Manilow’s audience is filled with lazy listeners, it seems, who want only stunted art that isolates them from emotional truth. Though the reviewer does not use the term, the implication is obvious: Manilow’s listeners want kitsch. It is to Manilow’s discredit, we are to believe, that he offers kitsch to them. We will take up the question of who these listeners are, and what Manilow knows about their desires, in chapter 4; for now, I want only to note that although “safety” and “challenge” might have reasonable claims to our attention as significant musical values, they are likely to be irreconcilable. I return to the problem of kitsch-attribution: if we encounter a kitschvulnerable object with an austere morality of art firmly in place, we will be likely to judge that it fails; the structural and expressive faults that we find will be continuous with our ethical disgust. Furthermore, as I

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have suggested, the kitsch object brings its audience and performers alike into disrepute. Either the badness of the object reveals the aesthetic and moral inadequacies of its creators/appreciators, or it actively infects them with its own inferior qualities. It is worth noting that the frameworks within which these notions of kitsch can function are profoundly structured by the specific problems of modernity, especially the troublesome centrality of mass production and conventionality. If we suppose that “high art” is that which is one-of-a-kind and embodies some kind of extraordinary labor (such as talent) that is to be apprehended in an aesthetically fastidious manner, then the proliferation of inexpensive copies of such high art is kitsch. Michelangelo’s David is not kitsch (we hope)—but all of its copies are because they negate the work required to produce the object and make its experience commonplace and potentially undiscriminating. Why would someone buy a copy, though? The blindingly obvious answer would be that they like the object but cannot afford the original. The modernist detestation of kitsch depends upon an enormous investment in the concepts of originality, difficulty, and truth, to be sure. But since not everyone can afford the same kinds or degrees of investment, questions of class cannot be disentangled from these values. Those tourists in Munich were probably upper-middle-class visitors, loathed by aristocrats and bohemians alike; with the advent of mass production, however, kitsch is affordable by the lower strata of the middle class and even by the upward-aspiring proletariat. Critiques of kitsch aimed at a presumably hegemonic social group thus take on a different trajectory in later historical moments. (We might think of Adolf Loos’s fascinating 1910 essay “Ornament and Crime”—its complicated critique of mass production, however productive with respect to fin de siècle Vienna, later seems to be compromised by its reliance on racist concepts of primitivism and hereditary criminality, not to mention its potential for misogyny and class hostility.)30 With music, the problem of original versus copy is also articulated through technological developments of modernism. Obviously, there are important differences between the effect of mechanical reproduction on statues and the effect on songs. But in both cases, a significant aspect of the threat comes from the possibility of a relentlessly leveling superabundance. Not only does such proliferation unsettle the relationship between a thing and its imitations, it also obliterates the distinction between ones-of-a-kind that have been reproduced and things meant for reproduction from their point of origin. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Sup-

Introduction | 25

per can saturate the visual field in innumerable guises: prints, lithographs, paint-by-numbers renditions, silk screens, and so on. The same may be said of those paintings of poker-playing dogs.31 We may find ourselves surrounded by innumerable versions of Beethoven’s Fifth, not just the whole symphony as rendered by whomever, but in excerpts, arrangements, and takeoffs from Muzak to disco. The same may be said of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” or of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally).” This threat has meant that in everyday criticism and the discussions between ordinary listeners, oppositions such as live versus recorded, complex versus simple (a notable unstable opposition), and especially “authentic” versus “commercial” have had tremendous disputatory power. Though the term kitsch entered English through intellectual circles, it rapidly became domesticated for widespread use by writers who were less interested in condemning popular culture wholesale than in making qualitative distinctions among its materials. In these demotic contexts, the term’s connotations of emotional sloth and self-deception remained more important than its parasitic relationship to “high culture,” which can easily be replaced by an adherence either to “the folk” or to a romanticist notion of individual artistic autonomy—the “vision thing.” Perhaps this set of values works well enough when dealing with rock musicians and their audiences. But what of artists and audiences for whom music serves other purposes? Most of the artists I discuss came from or performed on behalf of audiences who occupied marginal social positions before the 1970s: African Americans; women; gay men and lesbians; poor, mostly rural (and especially Southern) white people. The rock paradigm has rarely served such groups well because they historically have found authenticity too expensive to maintain and, in any case, lived lives in which there was perhaps greater need of consolation.32 But it is the peculiar property of the 1970s as a historical decade that such groups began to think of themselves as able to insist that their social positions be renegotiated. The readjustments of the 1970s were legal, economic, political, and those more vaguely defined as “cultural.” Musical style mattered to these audiences not least because its power to represent them allegorized (and more than allegorized) their selfconstitution as well as their relocation partially out of the margins. The transformation of these groups succeeded to different extents, of course. African Americans ultimately fared least well—the gains in prosperity and increased social dignity were most notable at the beginning of the decade but were immediately undermined by economic downturns

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and policies of (only occasionally) benign neglect. (An assortment of negative responses, often federally sponsored as if a cruel parody of the civil rights movement, continue to the present day.) For gay men and lesbians as well as women, the changes of the 1970s, while at times costly, were genuinely revolutionary. The retrenchments of the 1980s and 1990s have never completely turned back the clock. Poor Southern white folks perhaps saw the greatest cultural benefits, but at the cost of a significant number of their original communitarian virtues. (All of these historical vicissitudes make a mark in this book because they affected the shape of the 1970s revival.) What matters in the context of kitsch is that all these groups favored music that was not a part of rock. They liked older styles. Softer styles. More sentimental styles. And in the 1970s, their tastes were suddenly much more visible in the landscape of popular music. Because of this historical position, the modest songs I discuss in this book find themselves implicated in social position of the arriviste.33 That is, they are unquestionably demotic products, but they palpably yearn to be more. The social worlds they represent most fully are those of the working classes (proletarians or peasants) or at best the lower middle class as seeking to move on up to a place of wealth, luxury, and by extension, imaginative freedom. The songs and their listeners are thus caught between the authenticity of “the folk” or its stand-ins and the technical and aesthetic prowess of the high cultivated traditions. Before the invention of recording and radio, these songs might have circulated primarily by means of sheet music. Even after the airwaves have become saturated, many of them still appear in sheet music format. As sheet music, these songs typically offer themselves as occasions for rumination, if performed in solitude; or they might support atmospheres of domestic conviviality (“play a song for grandma, dear”); or again they could serve as the object realized in one of the more transient forms of public display—incidental music at a wedding, part of the program for a kids’ recital, perhaps a winning entry in a local talent show. Modest occasions for modest songs: we can have our feelings while we watch our budget. Such works might be defended, in the case of sheet music, by observers who wanted to point out the crafty abilities required to make the songs succeed. A song in sheet music form still requires a modicum of skill on the piano or the guitar and a singer who can carry off the tune in a way that will please listeners. No matter how exigent our standards, such a performance is nothing to sneer at. But what of listening

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to the radio or a recording? If there is a skill to listening to a modest song, we might have trouble discerning it. There are no proofs of performance that can be pointed out and discussed so that we all have a fair chance of agreeing or even a fair chance of disputing it in interesting ways. It is not that listening is altogether private. Listeners often try to share their emotional reactions and their thoughts with one another, and we can learn fascinating things about them even when they do not speak at all, if we simply observe the play of facial expression and body language that responds to the music as it addresses a listener’s body. But the ambiguities of listening are so great and our interior states so elusive that we might have no way of making ourselves adequately understood. The inaccessibility of our listening skills brings into play any number of questions about competency. It also causes us to wonder about sentimentality, that troublesome rubric under which notions of excess in the service of deception (of self, of others) has clustered in the wake of modernism’s austere fastidiousness about affect. Without the justification of difficulty, anything too moving will tumble us back into the realm of kitsch. So far, the problems of defining kitsch may seem to make the term useless for discussions of popular music. It condemns while pretending to describe. Maybe we would be better off doing without it. But some of the points raised by Theodor Adorno in a series of nuanced accounts of kitsch can bring up significant points for consideration. In a brief essay from around 1932, Adorno, departing from the observation that one possible etymology of the term traces it from the English word “sketch,” emphasizes the incompleteness inherent in the idea as central to its paradoxical strength: “In music, at any rate, all real kitsch has the character of a model. . . . Kitsch is the precipitate of devalued forms and empty ornaments from a formal world that has become remote from its immediate context. . . . Kitsch is a kind of receptacle of mythic basic materials of music, as they appear only in it, transformed, as the most advanced results of music’s dialectic, but are otherwise lost. Hence kitsch is to be preferred to all music of the juste milieu.”34 For Adorno, the emptying out of musical structures that had carried genuine meaning is perhaps a melancholy inevitability of historical failure. In conserving those structures musical kitsch might be thought to act as a kind of sonic-affective museum and to have genuine conservational value. The pastness of such artifacts is left only as background, however: kitsch wishes to depend upon them for the sake of their lusciousness and prestige, but can only do so by pretending that they are

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not in fact lost at all. As Richard Leppert emphasizes, Adorno thus sees kitsch as a betrayal of historical situation. It “invokes a past that is nostalgically misremembered; as such kitsch is a means to forget—but less to forget the past than the present. Kitsch offers consolation, not so as to change anything but to make the anything of the here and now slightly more tolerable.”35 Kitsch is thus a superlative vehicle of false consciousness.36 Given Adorno’s determination to hold out for musical truth, kitsch can never be fully acceptable. Kitsch is good to the extent that it lies openly. But Adorno also admits that the problem of feigning is endemic to all art. In his late work, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno notes: Kitsch is not, as those believers in erudite culture would like to imagine, the mere refuse of art, originating in disloyal accommodation to the enemy; rather, it lurks in art, awaiting ever recurring opportunities to spring forth. Although kitsch escapes, implike, from even a historical definition, one of its most tenacious characteristics is the prevarication of feelings, fictional feelings in which no one is actually participating, and thus the neutralization of these feelings. Kitsch parodies catharsis. Ambitious art, however, produces the same fiction of feelings; indeed, this was essential to it: The documentation of actually existing feelings, the recapitulation of psychical raw material, is foreign to it. It is vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch’s emotional plunder.37

The great problem with kitsch continues to be that of false consciousness: but Adorno knows better than anyone that this concept is irremediably slippery. And not only because the line between kitsch and art is so blurry. After all, the one thing we can always say about false consciousness is that its diagnosis is always external, the result of a conceptual reality check. (This is true even in solo cases because a realization of false consciousness depends upon an internalized objectification of the “self.”) But false consciousness entails more than a few isolated incidents about which intersubjective agreement can be reached. As a result, it cannot be convincingly diagnosed without an adequate understanding of the internal point of view from which the situation is regarded as true, in addition to the careful marshalling of exterior arguments that would seem to contradict this point of view. And its diagnosis should always be taken dialogically as a beginning rather than a conclusion. In keeping with this dialogic imperative, we should note that Adorno’s observation about kitsch’s use of “devalued forms and empty ornaments” is extremely interesting because it raises the question of whence the value and fullness come in the first place. Working against interpre-

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tive custom, we might assume that the investments of listeners could be most fruitful precisely where composers and performers have left the most space. Yes, this is a fetishistic maneuver. Is such an aesthetic perversion always a bad thing? Is it not more often a compromise solution (and one that can work for a lot of people)? Only from an insistently normativizing point of view can we flatly declare such listener investments to be altogether wrong. Yes, such actions can also be taken as lacking respect for the creators of the music as well as the work itself; but if a modest song is meant to be a thing rather than a quasi-person, such exquisitely appropriative attitudes might be taken as gestures of respect for the song’s actual purpose. Maybe modest songs are not music (nor were ever meant to be) in Adorno’s strict sense. In the same way, the question of “misremembering” encourages us to ask who is deciding what the correct memory is, as well as why consolation is altogether a bad thing. From Adorno’s point of view, our awareness of human suffering must be kept in focus. Surely Adorno thought that it is necessary to insist upon such an ascetic goal, however, because musical pleasure seems, if not self-evident, at least more immediate. But if you occupy a social position in which the shape and the very nature of pleasure (in consequence, desire—and in consequence, agency) are precisely what is in question, then the particulars of your pleasure and your consolation are not trivial at all. Finally, there is the question of the emplacement of kitsch within historical narrative. The bad morality of kitsch objects also makes them unsuited for plots that privilege the heroic, largely because the concept of kitsch blurs so quickly into the concept of the everyday or the trivial. Many of the most influential accounts of art of literature have taken a Hegelian slant, with great figures or advances in technique gain hegemony over a historical moment, to be surpassed dialectically in succeeding generations.38 However suspicious we might be about the assumptions required to tell such stories, we must recognize them as compelling. If our taste is for titans, however, then an art of everydayness is likely to seem at least insipid if not actually dangerous. The ordinary becomes kitschified because the “OK” is the enemy of the “great.” I have already mentioned the exceptional liking for stories of greatness in music history: the same taste holds true in the realm of pop music as well, as any quick scan of popular histories of rock will show. Lots of popular music, it seems, can have no history. I hope that the discussions that follow will offer some historical possibilities.

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domains of identity Patti LaBelle’s 1978 disco song “Music Is My Way of Life” presents a first person who has nothing in the way of resistance. In this hopelessly abject position, there is one refuge, the dance floor. “When I dance they look at me / That’s one thing you can’t take from me.” This insistence on selfhood is characteristic of the 1970s, the decade that saw the promulgation of what came to be known as “identity politics.” Nowadays the notion of identity politics has come into a significant degree of disrepute. The “culture wars” of 1980s America tended to reduce to rather blunt choices between passionately held versions of relativism (“identity politics”) and universalism (no “special treatment”): only each position was so filled with internal contradictions and obvious spots of willful blindness that the justifiable larger points they each might have made were lost in acrimony over particulars. At the same time, within relativist camps there was a constant process of fissure. (I think of this as the result of a buried radical Protestant imperative still lurking in secular academic culture—there is no end to the making of smaller and more specific denominations.) The demonization of “political correctness” as the enemy of free thought completed the rubbishing of identity politics.39 What the denigration of identity politics during the 1980s and 1990s surrendered is the sense of possibility that such notions created during the 1970s. There was no reason to suppose that the rise of one or another form of “power” always meant the decline of others. It was hoped during much of the 1970s that social negotiation was not a matter of “either/ or” but rather a matter of “both/and.” As a result, I see the musical representations of the songs in this book as fundamentally optimistic. Even at their most melancholy, they hope for something better. I take one of my most important tasks to be articulating the nature of those hopes. Chapter 2 marks my first attempt to explore the connections between economic improvement and the authoring of subjectivity. In “Black Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth: Barry White in the Early 1970s,” I link the opulent sound world of White’s proto-disco with important shifts in the public representation of black male power. The social gains of the 1960s, particularly connected with the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, briefly enabled a significant degree of embourgeoisement among some segments of the African American population during the early 1970s. In popular culture (especially in media such as film, television, and music, where money is most crucial), an imaginative space opened up in which it was possible to explore alternative ways of

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constructing a specifically black masculine presence. White’s music projected a sonic vision of male authority predicated on female pleasure; his skill at evoking such erotic satisfaction furthermore depended on a lushness of material circumstance that is metaphorically present in numerous details of the arrangements of his recordings. The purpose of my discussion is to show how the specifics of White’s music can be heard as inflecting a complicated dialogue about black masculinity that was developing during the 1960s and 1970s. I expand on questions of money and black subjectivities in chapter 3, “Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul.” Unlike the other chapters in this book, this discussion does not center on a single artist, but rather a sonic ethos: music of a lifestyle rather than that of an exemplary life. And the shift away from the irresistible glamour of stardom is connected to important aspects of the way this music was created. There were crucial changes in the ethos of production and the sound ideal at Motown and Stax in the late 1960s; these were directly connected to the changes in money flow that came with the restructuring of the record industry. The aural mix of the early 1970s “public soundtrack” was further complicated by the addition of the “Philadelphia sound” of Philadelphia International Records, enormously important in the early 1970s with respect both to listenership and to influence. This kind of music was often called “soft soul”; though its descent from the spare and vigorous music of early Motown and Stax was apparent, the music had acquired expensive tastes and luxurious habits: complex habits of harmony, classicizing orchestrations, and a characteristic focus on fervid eroticism. Chapter 3 presents studies of several hit songs from the genre of soft soul in order to develop my notions of situation as they apply to modest songs. In each case, tricky problems of audience relationship, when taken into account, complicate our sense of the songs’ meanings in fascinating ways; I see these ambiguities as central to the songs’ construction of the subjectivities of African American embourgeoisement in the 1970s. With chapter 4, “The Audience and Barry Manilow,” I again look at masculinity, but from a different point of view. This is “white” music. That is, in the 1970s, it appears detached from any foregrounded racial specificity. But its connections to class and gender are anything but subdued. Manilow’s musical connections to commerce and “showbiz,” the lessons learned from his early experience with urban gay audiences, and his unending appeal to women are all decisive features in a “problem” that his music has had with masculinity. The African American artists discussed in chapters 2 and 3 had an easier time among rock critics and

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other gender-panicked listeners because their racial difference allowed their interest in commerce and the pleasure of the audience to be disattended. With Manilow, no such strategy was available, and the questions of kitsch and effeminacy come to the fore. But analyzing the discomfort that led to critical disrepute and outright hatred is less interesting than the question of audience. What is it about Barry Manilow that won the devotion of so many fans, most of them “women of a certain age”? I think that part of the answer has to do with the kinds of disadvantagement felt most strongly by women whose economic positions were strong enough that they had time to become aware of their psychic impoverishment. Accordingly, I explicate the characteristic moves of Manilow’s music and his performance style as they seem to offer an answer to the concerns of women. The question of feminism is equally important to chapter 5, “The Voice of Karen Carpenter,” but I address it by examining the emblematic figure of the singer, whose death from complications of anorexia in 1983 set off a process of popular canonization. In Carpenter’s mythologization, the melancholy she so ably projected as a vocalist has been bound up with the difficulties of control and nurture that probably lay at the root of her anorexia. Not surprisingly, girls, who make up the majority of teenagers who suffer from eating disorders, have found Karen Carpenter especially attractive; but young gay men, as well, have been persuaded by her formulation of an identity that seeks out the pleasures of abjection. The formulation of abject identities was of course of major importance in teen culture of the 1980s, culminating in the success of alternative rock at the beginning of the 1990s; but rather than focusing on the historical situation of Carpenter’s music, I will spend the majority of the chapter articulating what I take to be the central features of the musical identity she developed so persuasively. The last two chapters of the book take up the questions of gender examined in the essays on Manilow and Carpenter and juxtapose them with additional considerations of race and class. Chapter 6, “Cher’s ‘Dark Ladies’: Showbiz Liberation,” follows the career of Cher during the 1970s and beyond to the near perfect abstraction of her complicated “farewell tours” and other moments of quasi-retirement. Cher’s solo career in the 1970s was marked by uncertainty about her racial and class location. This uncertainty did not result in her assumption of a specific identity, but rather in a revival of the older Vegas-cum-Hollywood styles of ethnic drag as pure spectacle. Race and class tended to be folded together as a kind of biographical ornament to her struggle as a woman—

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the real point for Cher’s audiences was her triumph over stigmatized origins. As such, she represents an unusually powerful incarnation of the diva figure (known from opera and then Hollywood cinema) in 1970s pop music, and her plot of liberation allegorizes the increasing social freedoms experienced by many of her fans. In the book’s final chapter, “Crossing Over with Dolly Parton,” I take up the issue of country music and abjection—the susceptibility to humiliation visited upon impoverished rural Southerners—together with gender as the point of origin for a career that shows some resemblance to that of Cher. The particularities of country music and its focal audience, however, have demanded a different set of musical and performative strategies that have led Parton to a more ambiguous and still-evolving career. In each of these essays, I want to show something of the imaginative power of this music, not only in its ways of negotiating pressing cultural concerns in 1970s America, but also in its skillfulness and the sheer beauty with which presentations of subjectivity are managed. As music for commerce, the songs I will discuss are carefully crafted, immensely appealing in their musical details. But they are indeed of limited relevance at best to listeners who seek unambiguous effects of authenticity—they are demonstrably vague and elusive with respect to authorship in the larger senses of that word. This very slipperiness is the ground of their broader circulation during the 1970s and into the present.

chapter 2

Black Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth Barry White in the Early 1970s

One early beneficiary of the 1970s revival was the magnificent songwriter, producer, and singer, the late Barry White. A gigantically imposing figure with resonant bass voice to match, White had been absolutely central in the development of disco, one of the 1970s’ hallmark styles, and his music flourished during its years of popularization. With the arrival of the Reagan years, disco was widely reported to have died, and its artists were carried along to mainstream oblivion. But disco never really died, of course, and neither did Barry White (until 2003, that is). The unmistakable sign of White’s crossover revival was his early 1990s cameo on The Simpsons as an Orpheus of Soul; ample confirmation continued to arrive in the form of successful tours and TV commercials focusing on the grand spectacle of Barry White in performance, seemingly unchanged since his days of disco glory. But his newly vital presence in the world of crossover popular culture depended equally on his continuing presence in the domain of hip-hop. The rapper Big Daddy Kane created part of his own image as a super-black super-player by summoning his chief precursor back to the stage.1 Such evocations of Barry White might well sound like a barefaced recovery of 1970s sexism, but the case was not so simple, as was shown in the 1993 collaboration between Salt-n-Pepa and En Vogue, “Whatta Man,” describing a black masculine ideal: “My man’s cool like Barry and his voice got bass. . . .”

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In the wake of his early 1990s recuperation, Barry White became an icon, along with his proto-disco counterpart the late Isaac Hayes, who also returned effectively in cartoon form as the voice of Chef on Comedy Central’s South Park.2 (In fact, White was reportedly the first choice to provide Chef with an oleaginously sensuous voice. It is not clear why this did not work out.) By the later 1990s, White’s image, his bedroom voice, and snatches of his most famous songs were everywhere in television commercials and evoked in new pop songs, if anyone knew to listen for them. Barry White eventually emerged as the tutelary spirit of passion for the quirky character John Cage on the popular television show Ally McBeal (1997–2002); a characterological joke on the show concerned Cage’s inability to behave seductively unless he imagined a Barry White song as his personal soundtrack. This personal soundtrack, however, showed a tendency to leak out of Cage’s head, spilling over onto other members of his law office and pulling them into White’s love-centric disco world. The gesture, which encouraged the audience to love Cage in the way that he loved Barry White—a curious mixture of emotions maybe best described as fondly serious dismissal—was so attractive that the show resorted to it repeatedly. By the series finale, it was surely a foregone conclusion that White would make a final appearance by way of insouciant benediction. And he did appear, and it was memorable. The apotheosis of White’s music as the very sound of love, however, had come a few months earlier in 2002 at (of all places) the shark tank of National Sea Life Center (NSLC) in Birmingham, England. A CNN broadcast on Valentine’s Day reported a moment of inspired silliness among scientists: because it is generally challenging to breed sharks in captivity, and because the center’s denizens had been reluctant to get it on, researchers decided to broadcast tunes by Barry White into the tank to see if it would put the sharks in the mood. The news item included this bit of dialogue between the CNN correspondent Marga Ortigas, NSLC representative Josie Sutherland, and an unidentified woman: Sutherland: They seem to be swimming around. They’re following the females a bit more. Ortigas: And with any luck, catch them hook, line and sinker. Unidentified Female: It worked for me! It might help.

CNN could not resist (who could?) contacting White for commentary. Though clearly bemused, he played along and offered a charming

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anecdote in return. No, he hadn’t known about experiments of this nature with his music: White: But something very strange in my home—I have saltwater fish too. And when I would come home from the studio and I played my music— when I walk in the room, the fish would be swimming frantically. And as soon as I started playing the music that I had recorded that day in the studio, I would notice that they start swimming in a very relaxed mode. I just thought it was me. I didn’t know that they could actually hear, even.

Obviously, we have no clear idea what a fish hears in these cases, and what—if—it thinks about the music that is played for it. But it matters immensely that we want to think the fish respond the way we do. This story, as all the participants tacitly acknowledged, is really about our own desires as they move to the music.3 This was a long way from the antidisco backlash at the end of the 1970s. Then, brandishing the slogan “disco sucks,” rabid rock fans burned disco records and dissed every aspect of the subculture in which Barry White had figured so prominently. All the world knows by now that “disco sucks” was a response of thinly disguised homophobia: disco’s ostentatious focus on promiscuity and the appurtenances of a luxurious lifestyle, plus its rejections of the values usually read in a rock context as “authentic expression,” made it the bane of those who feared and despised the sexual revolution. Disco’s luscious arrangements betokened lots of money and little sense of restraint in its use. Its lyrics glorified sexual desires of the most undiscriminating kind. It offered visibility to sultry vamps, foreigners, and men in whom there was always an edge of effeteness. It ignored teenagers and favored hustling a slightly older, more moneyed crowd. Especially as it made its way out of the gay ghettos, disco took up the spun-sugar illusions of celebrity culture à la Studio 54. It was, all of it, just too gay. But less frequently noted in discussions of the music is the way that the rejection of disco registered an unease with ways of representing the agency of black men that had their roots in cultural developments in the 1960s and 1970s. These constructions of black masculinity, finding their widest representation and distribution through film and music, were new and potentially dangerous, especially to white audiences for whom their economic strength was as frighteningly disreputable as their sexual vigor. The force of such portrayals was all the more alarming because these new black masculinities emanated from Hollywood,

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at the heart of the American image machine. There were two sides to this unease. On one side were those for whom the very idea of sexualized portrayals of black men were frightening or distasteful, probably as much for the autonomy the men were shown to possess as for the blunt steaminess of their images. On the other side were those for whom the question of the kind of man allowed erotic authority was most important. And not very far from this second damning crowd were pop music critics and listeners uncritically wedded to the notion that the only “true” music arose from the authenticity communicated in the expression of insight gained through poverty, suffering, and oppression, and that the only “true” music that preserved its value was that which most resolutely resisted commercial pressures. Barry White was unquestionably black, and presented himself as just as unquestionably gifted with incomparable musical and sexual prowess. He and his music alike were thus too black, too strong. But at the same time, this performer, this music, could never be black enough, strong enough. All this disco-laden nouveau richesse? Where was the struggle? Where the evidence of masculine autonomy? Where was the turbulent record of genius? Surely not under all that velvet, those spangles and sequins! White, who had long been part of the complex ecosystem of the Los Angeles entertainment business, operated under different terms. Though born in Houston, he moved to California with his mother when he was a young child. He had already worked for most of a decade as a session player, arranger, producer, and head of A&R (artists and repertoire) in various LA companies, and had even composed the music for the Banana Splits’ TV cartoons, when in 1969 he became the impresario for a female vocal group he christened Love Unlimited. By the time he signed himself and Love Unlimited to 20th Century Records in 1973, however, he had been talked into recording his own versions of some of the songs he had been writing for others.4 The result of these sessions was his debut album, I’ve Got So Much to Give (1973), which rapidly went gold, beginning a long stream of hits that enabled a number of related projects. As of 1994, when White released his platinum album The Icon Is Love, he had been involved as a solo artist, conductor, or impresario in far over thirty albums, most of them very successful.5 And the smell of money—new money, the kind most dramatically visible in the entertainment business—always hung about his music. When he was talked about, it was in admiring Billboard magazine terms: “the multi-digit figures beside . . . [the titles in White’s] royalty statements emphatically show it’s the producer who’s the creative controller, and therefore the

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dollar earner, of modern-day soul.”6 His performances were famous for their lavishness, with the man himself draped in yards of expensive material, backed up by extravagances such as an orchestra composed of eighty women selling out Radio City Music Hall in a Liberacean maneuver.7 And even for those who did not know these things, there was the opulence of the music: “Love’s Theme,” composed and conducted by Barry White with the Love Unlimited Orchestra, was one of the first hits to come out of the disco underground and achieve popular success. It was everywhere in 1973, alerting mainstream audiences to the possibilities of glamour and sensual enjoyment within a newly empowered subculture. More than anything, this was signaled by the combination of soul grooves with rich orchestration and classicizing musical figuration, carefully modulated by shifts in the character of the mixing. Since “Love’s Theme” emblematizes important aspects of the appeal of Barry White as a musical icon, it will repay a little reflection.

love for sale “Love’s Theme” opens with a swirling run up the D major scale in the violins, along a dominant seventh chord, from a1 to a3. There are no rhythm tracks present yet, so although we already know that we are in a metrical frame, what stands out more strongly than the background ordering of strong and weak beats is the headlong forward motion, made more pronounced by hints of rhythmic disarray, of the strings’ glittering ascent. Brief but extravagant introductions such as this one are useful formal devices for disco songs in general, and the string run in “Love’s Theme” is no exception: utterly recognizable, it signals listeners that a song they love is about to play and gives them a moment to grab a partner and head out to the dance floor. An additional frisson comes from its recollection of an endless series of similar gestures in cinematic music—upon first hearing, we might be excused for thinking that we had happened upon the overture to a film by RKO Pictures or 20th Century Fox. But there’s more to this intro than its aspect of fanfare, and its larger purposes begin to become clear when the strings reach their high a3 and hold it as an arrested gesture, allowing the rhythm tracks and accompanimental figures to take the stage. The moment the strings reach a3 is the moment that the groove begins to materialize. Its first clarification takes place in the lower strings, accentuated and echoed by electric guitar, which establishes a primary unit of organization (2 + 2 bars as the norm) and sets out rhythmic and

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example 1. Introduction to “Love’s Theme.”

metrical tensions to be resolved by the body of the song. The underlying harmonic progression of this opening is four bars long, from a D major triad enriched by appoggiaturas from A major, through a brief and plain version of A major onto a minor seventh chord on B, with the same pattern of appoggiaturas. In the conventions of tonal harmony, this might seem to be nothing more than a simple move from the tonic through the dominant to a slightly enriched submediant, but the both the weak metrical placement of the whole A major chord and the progression’s clear goal of the b7 chord attenuate our sense of D major as the key of the song. Furthermore, the melodic and rhythmic details of the piece will shape the harmonic progression in such a way that A major seems not to pull toward D major; the reduced connection between dominant and tonic, taken with the metrical power of the song’s subdominant harmonies, tends to override the importance of D major. We are not so much in a key as in a key signature. In any case, at the opening of the piece any functional understandings of harmony matter less than the rhythmic effect created by the lower strings’ ornamental tones. The “dissonant” notes in the accompaniment at m.3 of “Love’s Theme” fall ever so slightly at variance with the primary structure of beats; in a transcription of the rhythm, we would probably write it as syncopated sixteenth notes, as in example 1, but the rhythm as heard does not quite feel like that, but rather something a little looser, a little bit closer to triplets urging themselves forward. The hint of raggedness in this rhythm gains additional heaviness from the voluptuous dissonance between the appoggiaturas and the bass, such that the beats that prepare the resolution begin to feel as important as their ostensible goal. Imagine an anapest in which the weak beats also feel something like spondees (thus, short/short/long), and you have another auditory image that matches this effect. The halting effect of the rhythm in this case threatens to disrupt the flurrying continuity of the violin opening and poses the problem of how these are to be reconciled to allow the song proper to begin.

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If the opening swirl of violins has captured the foreground of our attention, the ponderous motions of the lower strings with their guitar highlighting sound like an attentional middle ground—not the Schenkerian kind familiar to music scholars—mapping out a musical space at once below and, thanks to the modulations of the mix, moving forward and backward around what we might have imagined as the nucleus of a forthcoming melody.8 At m.5, a hi-hat cymbal, marking out every beat, begins to emerge from the back of the mix in a steady crescendo over the next three two-bar units. (It may be that part of the excitement conveyed in this regular cymbal marking comes from our retrospective hearing; after our initial hearing of the song, we may be aware upon subsequent listenings that the hi-hat will be marking sixteenth notes for the rest of the song, some unconscious memory of its normative tempo probably remains with us and adds an anticipatory excitement to what we hear.) In any case, the hi-hat’s strict timekeeping signals the basic pulse to listeners and dancers at the same time that it adds the rhythmic drive that will propel the song into an actual tune. The last materials that kick the introduction into the body of the song, a glissando on the piano and a quick drum riff, appear on the second half of beat three in m.10, at the very end of the fourth two-bar phrase. The contrast between the abrupt end-stopping of the drum riff and the liquidity of the glissando duplicates at a more immediate perceptual level the tension between the forwardness of the violins and high-hat and the thick anapests of the lower strings and guitar figure. Perhaps the most memorable feature of “Love’s Theme,” however, is the melody that begins in m.11 and falls into regular units of 2 + 2 bars grouped so that the whole contains an expository phrase, its heightened variation, an intensificatory segment, and a closing. (The absolutely conventional nature of this structure is important because it frees up the attention of listeners and dancers to focus on other musical domains.) The distinctive aspects of the tune come from the way its luxuriant long tones, each one framed by derivations of the opening groove, sail over the rhythmic impulses of the accompaniment until they arc downward, fold into the full anapests of the groove at their primary rhythmic level, recharge, and vault upward again to pick up the primary pitches (C# and D) of the middle register’s figuration and carry them to a closing set of downward appoggiaturas (see example 2). This action occurs over the seductive churnings of the groove, which scatters the opening figure of the groove into multiple rhythmic planes; the anapest and its variations appear at the quarter-, eighth-, and sixteenth-note levels, at some

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example 2. Main melody of “Love’s Theme.”

moments almost moving toward the shagginess of funk. By gradually incorporating the groove’s anapests, the melody thus effects a reconciliation of the tensions in the introduction, which allows it to rise to its exultant climax; and because the melody is, beyond this synthesis, nondevelopmental, listeners and dancers will have the pleasure of hearing this climax repeatedly. Sixteen-bar blocks comprise most of the song’s body and all of its melody, but an important passage, formally close to a genuine B section and followed by a variation on the intro, moves away from the melody to allow its refreshed return. This B section begins with a French horn fanfare bursting out of the orchestral texture, playing on the important pitches of C#/D/A, immediately followed by an intense pulsation in the orchestra that repeatedly ratchets the melody from D to E through the intervening half-step, moving the harmony from D major to the e minor seventh chord that strongly marks the melody’s third phrase. Each repetition of this thrust up to E calls forth a flute lick that swaggers a little bit more on each occurrence, and dialogically summons the strings to dance in place between B and A on the closing rhythm of the melody before delicately leaping up to a C# as the swirling violins of the opening reappear, further adorned by harp glissandi in a paroxysm of fanciness. After the melody emerges for one more round, the song launches into a proto-break: the orchestra drops out to leave only guitars (lead, rhythm using the wah-wah pedal, and bass) and hi-hat cymbal. The harmonic motion of the counterpoint between lead and bass guitars tells us that this breaklike passage is built out of the last phrase of the melody, a perfectly reasonable strategy for breaks in later disco songs. What keeps it from being fully realized as a break, however, is White’s continuation. Instead of an accretionary reintroduction of the various instruments in the orchestra, he brings back the full orchestra together on the final phrase

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of the melody, and repeats it as an outro. The song exits the dance floor on its exultant high point, fading to clear the way for the next song. Although this description of “Love’s Theme” has emphasized the intricacy of the arrangement as an occasion for listening and dancing, this elaborate staging of rhythms, pitches, and timbres nevertheless falls on the ear with a great deal of ease. There is nothing difficult to hear in this song. It would be contrary to its designs to offer up anything a listener must work for. Rather, the point is to display a welter of glittering musical baubles for delectation, and the direct qualities of the melodic structure, the harmonic language, and the rhythmic character of the song stay simple to expedite the pleasure of shifting our attentions freely among pretty things. Each musical object therefore assumes a status something like that of an individual record in a record store, and that commodificatory ease is exactly what troubled listeners committed to more strenuous pleasures. Would-be pop music ascetics might well have asked how it was possible to value something that they—that anyone—could so easily buy, missing the listening drama of cognitive anxiety mastered that would underwrite their favorite kinds of meaning. But the sparkling musical bibelots that enliven “Love’s Theme” were absolutely central to White’s intentions. Remembering his live performances during the 1970s, he has said, “There’s no sound with four violins. I was using twenty or thirty. Rich. Five french horns, but it sounded like angels blowing on them.”9 It seems to me that White’s comments emerge from a sense of security in the simple pleasures of opulence generously made free for any listener who might happen along. Too much of anything is wonderful, and it sells well, too. Such attitudes could not help but lead to purist charges of “commercialism.” And it was so. But commercialism in the hands of a black artist at the beginning of the 1970s meant something rather different from what it would have meant to the average reader of Rolling Stone. I want to show something of this difference in this chapter, but I must do so by sketching out three related areas of historical development during the 1960s, then turning to their intersections in music and film: first, the institutional and economic transformations that led to the promulgation of “black capitalism” in the first Nixon administration; second, the changes in the record industry that helped bring about a positive response to this ideology; and third, the images of black masculinity that developed in conjunction with the Black Power movement.

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black capitalism and the business of black music The concept of black capitalism was introduced into American political discourse to shore up the responses—weak from the beginning and rapidly deteriorating—of the federal government to the economic demands of the civil rights movement. Although the Great Society programs approved by the Johnson administration aimed to extend the franchise of the New Deal across racial lines, the financial demands of the Vietnam War and conflicts between different levels of bureaucracy began to damage them as soon as they were begun.10 A number of alternatives to the Johnson administration’s proposals came from within the black community, dissatisfied by the weakness of the Great Society, but the Democratic administration was in no position to discard its model programs. The weakness of the Great Society programs, coupled with the Democratic Party’s necessary commitment to them, left Republican challengers free to offer counterproposals. In April and May 1968, a two-part speech by Richard Nixon entitled “Bridges to Human Dignity” touted increasing black ownership of the means of production as a solution to the difficulties (economic, social, and political) of minorities in general, black folks in particular. Nixon reinterpreted various points of view within the Black Power movement as a summons to greater capitalist endeavor. In retrospect, Nixon’s endorsement of black capitalism was less about empowerment than about his larger ideological goals; at the same time that he advocated black private enterprise, he systematically famished Johnson’s programs by reducing budgets for the Office of Economic Development.11 And contemporary bipartisan legislation designed to facilitate black economic enterprise eventually failed as the result of combined opposition from the established (and conservative) business interests of the black bourgeoisie and organized labor. Nevertheless, the government’s rhetorical involvement had ensured that black capitalism would be taken seriously as a political proposal.12 In part, this new interest in black capitalism occurred during the 1960s because the numbers of middle-class blacks increased dramatically, exceeding in one decade the total increase in numbers of the fifty years preceding.13 This growth in the middle class can certainly be attributed to the combined effects of the civil rights movement’s moral suasion manifested in new equal employment laws and the continuing general prosperity of the U.S. economy.14 Though the Great Society programs were aging badly (until they were smothered on the sickbed), the

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U.S. economy was strong enough to supply increasingly large numbers of black folks not only with substantial improvements in financial security but a greater number of life choices. Even through the economic dislocations of the early 1970s, the size of the black middle class continued to increase—particularly in pop music. If black capitalism worked anywhere already in the late 1960s, it was in the record industry. Heavily courted by the Republican Party in those years before its Reaganification and attracted by its notions, even a figure as emblematic as James Brown had endorsed Nixon in 1972!15 But on all levels, the business responded enthusiastically to the call for black entrepreneurship and greater participation; the industry was happy to entertain speeches on behalf of black capitalism from political figures and executives and to endorse fuller integration within its own ranks.16 Of course, an unusually high level of integration in commercial music already existed because it was one of the few occupations addressing a general public that had been accessible to blacks. Motown had long been the largest black-owned and black-operated company in America, and other companies as well as studios both great and small depended on heavy black involvement (some were even fully integrated). The attention paid off; by 1972, black artists occupied 44 percent of the singles charts and moved toward 20 percent of the album charts.17 This efflorescence went hand in hand with a tremendous explosion of style and genre at the very beginning of the 1970s in all forms of soul. In an intensive restructuring of the record industry at the end of the 1960s, the major producers of black music lost part of their market dominance, creating room for new independent labels to flourish. These 1970s labels lost no time in emulating their predecessors in creating a luxuriant sound world to accompany and even to help direct the dreams of their newly empowered clientele.18 Motown had always been upwardly mobile and mainstreaming in practice, with Berry Gordy’s ambitions pushing the company’s image and the role of its artists ever closer to a Hollywood– Las Vegas aesthetic. At the same time, largely through the influence of the talented producer Norman Whitfield on the sound of the Temptations, Motown had pioneered elaborate, increasingly orchestral productions. These served as the template for the early 1970s fusions of soul with various breeds of more “classical” music. As went the sound, so went the self-portrayals of the artists and producers. Booker T. Jones, leader of the house band at Stax, had been a music major at Indiana University, but his formal training never figured prominently in his public image as a performer. By contrast, Thom Bell,

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the most influential of the producers at Philly International Records, by his own account was raised on the “classical” repertory and did not hear any popular music until he was fourteen years old.19 Bell advanced this claim as proof of his musical seriousness and of his aspirations to musical comprehensiveness. This attitude toward the merger of popular and classical elements perhaps reached a peak in the case of Barry White, who has described his own history with beguiling boastfulness: “By the time I got grown and decided to go in the record business, I had a knowledge of Gospel music that was incredibly broad. I had an intellect of symphonic music that was incredibly broad. What did Barry White do with his music? He fused them both together.”20 Part of the mystique of Barry White’s earliest records was tied to his claim that this fusion was unprecedented; the various styles he was conversant with had always been, one might say, “segregated.” Under the aegis of black capitalism, this segregation was to be no more, and now the musical style could show it.

black masculinity transformed In the development of black culture during the 1960s, masculinity was an important issue of discussion and debate. Black Power, particularly as formulated within the Nation of Islam, included an emphasis on the careful maintenance of traditional gender roles and the concentration of power within male hands. As Malcolm X would have it: “The true nature of a man is to be strong, and a woman’s true nature is to be weak, and while a man must at all times respect his woman, at the same time he needs to understand that he must control her if he expects to get her respect.”21 The sexism of Malcolm X’s ideal was of course still resolutely patriarchal in the 1960s; the most distinctive features of sexual politics in the Nation of Islam arose from its determination to link ideals of masculinity and femininity to a general revolutionary austerity. The proper relations between men and women were of a piece with sobriety and lawfulness. Black Muslims were separatists, but they were not exactly freethinkers. The increasing celebrity of Cassius Clay (soon to be Muhammad Ali) offered a way for the Nation of Islam to have its notions of black masculinity affect the general public. As Cassius Clay, he had won his first title in 1964 in a celebrated match against Sonny Liston in Miami Beach and defeated him again in the following year. Almost as important as his superlative athletic ability was his virtuosity in “signifying,” making those

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rhyming boasts about his skill and handsomeness that were the verbal equivalent with his boxing skill.22 It is also worth remembering the resolutely embodied quality of these chants of triumph—Clay’s body, proud sexuality included, was always center stage as the ground of his confidence. The intense controversy around Clay’s refusal of the draft in 1967, which led to a court conviction and a prison sentence, heightened public awareness of the personal costs of racism in an enormously productive way; his conversion to Islam and assumption of the name Muhammad Ali during this period only added to his symbolic weight. By the time the Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction, he was on his way back to championship in boxing. The legendary 1974 fight between Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (since 1997, The Democratic Republic of the Congo)—“The Rumble in the Jungle”—was a visible sign of the pride fostered by the Black Power movement, as Ali’s other slogan for the fight, “From the Slave Ship to the Championship,” showed. Ali’s impact on rising black power consciousness was thus enormous. Boxing seemed the quintessentially masculine sport, as Eldridge Cleaver observed, all the more in the 1960s because it offered a way to refocus the traditional image of masculine aggression, keeping it from being transvalued into nothingness.23 But to have a “free” black champion like Ali—that is, one who proclaimed his allegiance to a totally whiteless organization and who maintained a conspicuous detachment from boxing’s usual engines of celebrity—this dramatically opened the possibilities for representing black men as autonomous agents with “dangerous” sexuality intact.24 (Consider a later example in the 1975 pop song “Black Superman [Muhammad Ali],” by Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band, which was released soon after “The Rumble.” Using a strongly reggaeinflected style well before reggae had acquired a demographically lucrative listenership in the United States, Wakelin and his band celebrate Ali’s career in Ali’s own signifying language as a Black Power apotheosis. For a one-hit wonder that peaked at number twenty-five on the charts, it achieved a lot of important work.) When detached from the conservative moral positions of the Black Muslims, Ali’s image could help reinforce the ideas of masculinity circulating among groups such as the Black Panthers. Of course, Ali’s strict adherence to the sober lawfulness of the Nation of Islam limited his usefulness to more rebellious groups; his physical presence and his courageous defiance of the draft board, though, were so powerful that they circulate far and wide. In fact, a crucial difference between the Nation of Islam and the Panthers came from their contrasting attitudes toward law and negotiations

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with white power structures, with inevitable consequences for representations of black sexuality. The Panthers, interested in using violent language and symbolic action to set the conventional power dynamics of American race relations into disequilibrium, found it helpful to imagine possible links between criminality and the empowerment of black men. Because anxiety over masculine privilege and concomitant misogyny was at least as intense among the Panthers as among their white counterparts (on the left) and adversaries (on the right), the rhetorics of criminality more often than not acquired a strongly sexual character.25 In effect, the Panthers sometimes deliberately incited the racist panic about the untrammeled sexuality of black men that had partly grounded the white rationalizations for Jim Crow. They did this as part of a general assertion of patriarchal privilege, with the added excitement of upsetting the white majority. To the extent that the image of racialized sexual violence at least raised the larger question of individual sexual autonomy as shaped by the pressures of racial categorization, the Panthers performed a service for many people, white as well as black.26 But the symbolic terrors of black male sexuality ran much too deep to be played with in this way without backlash. The fate of the Panthers in the mass media is instructively shaped around the issue of black male sexuality, and the strategies by which journalists shaped public opinion by calling the Panther’s sexual imagery into question resonate strongly and dishearteningly with the “Disco sucks” campaign. Although most newspapers and magazines had treated the Panthers with relative neutrality during the late 1960s, the increased animosity of the federal government in 1969, especially by means of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), sparked an intense burst of media representation in the service of creating a moral panic.27 Charges by the Panthers that they were targets of government persecution were received with sympathy by some well-known liberal white public figures, sending some journalists into a frenzy of character assassination. The most well-known attack came in Tom Wolfe’s famous article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” which appeared in New York magazine on June 8, 1970, and was later reprinted in book form.28 In a masterpiece of barely veiled bigotry—racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, and class hatred—Wolfe explicitly links the Panthers’ unruly black masculinity with their politics and portrays Leonard Bernstein and his guests alike as hot with desire at the very thought of proximity to such primal virility. And in Wolfe’s terms, to imagine a politics driven by eros is to trivialize that politics automatically. In frameworks such as Wolfe’s, “Too

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black, too strong” suddenly means “too attractive, too frivolous.” Disco sucks. The verb says it all. And yet the ground of this condemnation can be turned back upon the condemners.

the hollywood model Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, released in 1971, condenses some of the issues I have been sketching. The title character is a heavily exploited sex worker in the LA ghetto who, witnessing the especially brutal beating of a black militant by two LA cops (imagine that!), suddenly rises up out of his abject state to take on the police. In doing so, he becomes the special target of the LAPD: the rest of the movie revolves around Sweetback’s escape from a vicious police chase. While getting out of LA and safely across the Mexican border, Sweetback finds several occasions to display his sexual and combative prowess. (These episodes make him very different from the figures played by Sidney Poitier, the only other black leading man that mainstream white American filmgoers of the time were likely to have seen.) Accompanying all this action is a brilliantly dissonant, difficult score by the early lineup of Earth, Wind and Fire. Their music is situated within a dense soundscape that often approaches musique concrète; in this context it is worth remembering Van Peebles’ strong connections to the European Art cinema. Although essentially an avant-garde film, Sweet Sweetback was an enormous success within the black community and alerted Hollywood to the large amounts of money that could be made by designing films with black audiences in mind. Sweet Sweetback was the progenitor of the entire black action film genre commonly known in its 1970s phase as “blaxploitation.” Usually set in or near the ghetto, these films follow a black protagonist (either male or female, interestingly enough) through an adventure in which white people usually appear only in a subsidiary role: as cops good and bad, as assorted other villains, or as attractive women available to the black male hero. The greatest crossover success of the blaxploitation films was Shaft, also released in 1971. It has been observed that the script was originally written with a white actor in mind, then darkened up to take advantage of the attention following Sweetback.29 The submerged racial crossover behind the genesis of Shaft could seem to damage the film’s projection of an iconic black masculinity because from one essentialist point of view it could be said that this blackness was merely a cloaked whiteness. On the other hand, the implicit equation of black

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and white masculinities could as well be regarded as allowing black men representational access to the fantasy images of autonomy that had previously been reserved for white men alone. For whatever reasons, Shaft improved the status of its hero, turning him from a Van Peebles’ oppressed-victim-turned-revolutionary into an autonomous but more conventional masculine type. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a black private detective in New York City; he has an expensive wardrobe in the highest early 1970s style, a luxuriouslyappointed apartment in the Village (it has two stories and lots of expensive furnishings), a beautiful girlfriend as well as the occasional pickup, and an unequaled command of sex and violence. We know all this about him almost as soon as the movie begins and Isaac Hayes’s famous title track begins to run. Both the visuals and Hayes’s music tell us so.30 The first shots of the film show Times Square back in its vibrantly sleazy days. When the hi-hat cymbal enters to begin the song, Shaft is shown emerging from one of the 42nd Street/Broadway subway entrances. The phrase structure and some details of the groove on the soundtrack obviously match the camera shots and the action—the result of editing to the music rather than shaping the music to follow the film. During postproduction, Gordon Parks would receive tapes of Hayes’s soundtrack and then look for material to fit the score: “I sometimes cut something to fit his music . . . And there were times when I said, ‘Wow, I wish I had something here to fit this in—how can we use this.’ ”31 But on vinyl, even without the accompaniment of the film, Hayes creates a notably cinematic quality in his music by establishing and maintaining an “irregular,” desultory quality in his layering of motives and components of the groove.32 Furthermore, the lavish instrumental sound serves double duty by evoking not only the exciting hubbub of the street but also the lush way of life of the title character. In this connection, it is especially worth noticing the unusual proportions of the song’s structure. As it was released on record, the 94 bars of the song break up thusly: introduction, 54 bars; body of the song, 28 bars; closing and outro, 12 bars. The expansive nature of the introduction might be taken as a direct consequence of the song’s location in the film’s opening credit sequence, if it were not for Hayes’s previous success in inventing the extended soul song a few years earlier.33 In any case, the extended introduction of Shaft was influential because of its accretionary procedure of filling up the groove as well as its clever play with the song’s metrical structure. When the body of the song finally begins, Hayes and his backup singers tell us about the dominant characteristics of our hero. The playful

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call and response of Hayes and his backup is mirrored in the diagrammatic structure of the violin countermelody, which repeats a single phrase with alternating endings: Isaac Hayes

Backup Singers

Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks? Shaft! You’re damn right! Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother, man? Shaft! Can you dig it? Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? Shaft! Right on! They say this cat Shaft is a bad motherShut your mouth! But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft! Then we can dig it! He’s a complicated man, but no one understands him but his woman. John Shaft!

The hypersexism of the portrayal is utterly faithful to the mores of the period: not only is Shaft by nature a Black Power übermensch, he has also taken on some of the characteristics of Hugh Hefner’s ideal playboy as well. This is especially apparent in the film’s two love scenes. The first takes place between Shaft and his woman, at her place, to the accompaniment of a kind of easy-listening jazz sweetened up with a few more “classical” instruments. The second is between Shaft and a white woman he has picked up in a bar, at his bachelor pad (and it really does look like something out of Playboy in the 1960s).34 The representation of Shaft’s rich single existence not only fits well with Playboy style, it also resonates strongly with pre-civil rights black styles that emphasized consumption of luxury items all the more because more durable goods were out of reach by segregationist law and custom.35 A final twist on black masculinity as represented in the “Theme from Shaft” came from the physical presence of Isaac Hayes himself. His facial

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hair and phallic shaved head matched his resonant bass voice perfectly, and because his image was foregrounded on his albums, anyone interested in his music would have had ample opportunity to know what he looked like.36 Appearing on the 1972 Academy Awards show barechested but for a thick gold chain, Hayes visually epitomized the intense black sexuality that his award-winning song had enacted. But even as Hayes embodied this particular strain of masculinity, the radio’s top-forty list showed that there were critiques and alternatives available as models for black male subjectivity.

alternative black masculinities The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” was released a year after Shaft and represents an implicit critique to the archetype that the film and its theme song were updating: the paragon of manhood who is irresistible to women, but who in the end walks alone. Such an exemplar of American masculinity might work well in the noirish space of a black action film, but translated into the instances of everyday life, it rapidly comes close to the model of the sweet-talking player who inevitably abandons his wife and children. The song executes a remarkable balance between extreme bitterness and a clear-sightedness that almost verges on acceptance through its dramatic scenario of children who never really knew their father; gathered around their mother at his funeral, they ask her to deny the disapproval of the neighbors and receive nothing but the reply of the song’s chorus. And what is most extraordinary about the song is the way that the performers, guided by Norman Whitfield, are able to construct such an uncanny frame for the song’s bleak memorial. The extended introduction to the song presents an accretionary process much like the one heard in the “Theme from Shaft.” Undergirding the process is the obsessive bass riff, always defined against the equally obsessive tick of the hi-hat cymbal that recurs throughout the song. This bass riff is made enigmatic by a blurring of pitch from occurrence to occurrence. It is often unclear whether the lower boundary of the bass guitar’s musical space is Ab or A because the pitch as heard is frequently in between and because the scale step in question is functionally the seventh degree; thus its ambiguation tends to evacuate the dominant as a productive harmony. The song rides atop a continuous and desolate Bb minor triad. Nevertheless, within this space the bass riff supports a variety of musical figures, including the manic jazzy trumpet with its echo effects, the violent pulse of the guitar’s wah-wah pedal, the

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uncanny violin clusters that almost evoke the sound of the shoˉ in gagaku, and the alternately drooping and muttering violin tunes that sporadically emerge from the mix. As the introduction wends its way toward the body of the song, these figures, though relatively undefined in emotional content, acquire tremendous weight through a gradual increase in textural density and dynamics. When they suddenly vanish, the effect is like that of a sudden lapse away from feeling into a pure anticipation of dread. Papa’s children are waiting for an answer that they already know will give no one any joy. Equally crucial to the dark effect of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” is the ambiguous location of the beat; the music seems to move below the level of a primary beat that has been suppressed. Moreover, the activity that occurs at the level of the sixteenth-note (or eighth-note, if we place the primary beat one unit lower) is often quite sloppy, which thickens the sound as if it is a metaphor for the difficulty of the conversation between mother and children. All in all, the rhythmic language of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” taken with the near-cinematic collage of its despairing musical gestures and set against the “Theme from Shaft,” suggests that we hear the Temptations’ song as an account of one kind of masculinity and its costs. On the other side of Shaft belong notions of masculinity that preserved the hedonism of the player lifestyle but replaced the macho toughness with the stances of a soul-inflected “sensitive New Age guy.” As I will discuss more specifically in chapter 3, groups such as the Chi-Lites and especially Gamble and Huff’s Stylistics projected a late version of doo-wop that adapted itself especially well to emotional and material opulence. The transformative quality of the love evoked in the songs is meant to resonate with the abundance of the music. Trappings of wealth—wealth as understood on as many figurative levels as possible—afford the space for love in the dialect of soft soul doo-wop. In these cases, understandings of a black-centered masculinity were in conflict with the influential model represented in the “Theme from Shaft.” Yet all these notions of masculine authority enabled representations that emphasized depth and complexity of character. In the context of their time, they spoke to the broadening possibilities for representing black men in the mass media.

regarding barry To show the way in which Barry White’s music participates in constructions of black masculinity developed in the early 1970s, we need only

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focus on his first solo album, I’ve Got So Much to Give.37 The first feature worth noting is the album cover, available through any fivesecond Internet image search: Barry White stands facing the camera; his hair is conked and done up in the style of James Brown, but he also has a closely trimmed beard; he is a very large man, and dark-skinned; he is cupping his hands to hold up four miniature women, three black and one white. Who are these women, and why are they so small? It could very well be, of course, that they are supposed to be recognized as the members of Love Unlimited—their visual presentation shows them to be in a special relationship to Barry White—but nothing on the album identifies them as the backup group. Certainly, it would be easy to read this image in a conventionally sexist way: these are all Barry’s girls, and his abundant manliness can satisfy all of them. But the album’s songs, when taken into account, suggest a different interpretation. The opening song on side one of the album is a Holland-DozierHolland tune originally performed by the Four Tops, “Standing in the Shadows of Love.” White’s cover begins with a lengthy instrumental introduction structured by the gradual addition of instruments and licks that eventually move into a double time to create the groove. No surprise, there: this device is the same as in “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and the “Theme from Shaft,” something of a common coin in early 1970s soul. And yet the musical imagery is quite different. The introduction begins with a brief tap on the cymbals that is left hanging unconnected to the piano chords that follow after a pause. We are dislocated in time, captured by a state of anticipatory unknowing. What is the meaning of this space that comes between the cymbals and the piano? It will only begin to make sense when the first verse of the song arrives. The orchestration of the introduction, while enriched by classical instruments just as in the case of Hayes’s or Whitfield’s Temptations, is nevertheless atypical: an oboe, an electric guitar altered to sound like a sitar, a heavy string complement, including cello and bass as well as violins often playing pizzicato, vibraphone, and electric harpsichord. Continuous hi-hat licks like those in the songs previously discussed do not appear; instead the end-weighted cymbal figure that opened the track continues to repeat, punctuating the end of each bar of the first twelve and then moving on to steady impulses on each quarter until the doubletime section that begins at m.28. The instrumental figures are “classicistic” in their melodic shapes and in their frequent quasi-imitative relationships with one another, and have little to do with the characteristic turns of soul styles. Through most of the introduction’s slow section, the

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harmony consists of an oscillation between C# minor and B major, each decorated with weighty suspensions. There are twenty-four repetitions of this progression, so when the twenty-fifth C# minor chord suddenly turns and leads down through E major and an A major seventh to head toward G# major (the dominant, at last), the music’s harmonic activity and its metrical modulation seem sparked off one another. The influx of musical energy leads to the entrance of the backup voices (the women of Love Unlimited elles-mêmes) to strike up an emblematic rendition of the song’s chorus. Since the women sing in a fairly unmodulated unison, the instrumental glitz that drapes their unsubtle vocals might lead us to imagine we are in the presence of an inexperienced Supremes knockoff newly arrived in Vegas. But Love Unlimited has merely prepared the way for the real event—over an enormous vamp (twenty-two measures!) on the dominant seventh chord, Barry White begins his work. For the first stretch of the dominant vamp we hear White intoning sensually on the leading tone as the syncopated strings reach continually stretch upward in register along the chord. As the vamp heads toward its close, White gives up his moans for a deep spoken “Lord have mercy” as more and more the instruments begin to drop out to leave the bass portion of the groove exposed. As White enters with the first verse of the song, there is a moment of metrical confusion: the downbeat simply disappears in the arrangement, and the syncopations of the vocal line override any metrical inertia that might simplify the moment. The expectation might recall the mysterious space between the cymbals and the piano at the beginning, but now the sheer push of harmonic direction coupled with the confused but steady continuity of impulses lets us know that we are heading in a direction, whatever disarray may characterize the journey. It is hard to listen to this chorus plus vamp section of the song in any public space other than on a dance floor, where bodily motion has at least a chance to take away part of our self-consciousness—just as hard as it would be to watch even an intense soft-core love scene in public. The music makes demands on our attention and physical response that would be indecorous to concede to in front of others. This sudden outbursts of Love Unlimited and especially of Barry White are meant to shock, to force us to think almost exclusively about sex. The music only fixes our attention on the act for a moment before going on to place the energy summoned up at the service of something else. We can think about this in another way by noting the disjunction between the rigidly

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organized, even obsessive vamp, and the seemingly spasmodic vocals. The common word for such inarticulate yet affect-laden outbursts is of course the term “ejaculations”—in this case, almost hilariously appropriate to the substance of the music. But what makes us prone to shame when we listen to it is the very thing that attracts us to it: its physical rigidity coupled with its affective disorganization, as if it were the sonic equivalent of someone being shattered into pieces by ecstasy. And to be so shattered is to be vulnerable in the face of others. Barry White’s persona on this album is in fact occupied with ringing the changes on vulnerability: pleading, loneliness, desire, gratitude, comforting tenderness. Furthermore, all of the songs are first person, and aimed at an unspecified “you.” The openness of the pronouns make it possible for listeners to assume either position in the conversation, identifying with Barry, the person he addresses, or alternating between them. White’s sensitivity, however, is expressed through the means of his fantastically resonant bass voice, suggesting the intense masculinity being channeled into such soft expressions. Given such an emotional soundscape, perhaps it would be better to read the women in Barry’s hands as his past loves, to whom he is singing as he documents his relationships. He is not displaying them as members of a harem; rather, they are all the girls he’s loved before. And perhaps he loves them still, and perhaps he will continue to do so. Why would this cluster of musical and visual themes have been appropriate for Barry White’s mode of crossover, for his appeal to an eclectic mixture of races, genders, classes, and orientations united only by an interest in this kind of sexual hedonism? Much of the answer lies in the domain of timbre. Barry White’s orchestrational choices and favorite licks on this album certainly scream “classical,” but it is doubtful that they are meant to do so directly. The indirection is made more clear when we note how the introduction and first lyrics of “Bring Back My Yesterday,” the song that follows “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” evoke two kinds of music from the 1960s. First, in melodic contour and rhythmic shape, the initial word of the body of the song, “Yesterday,” is an obvious gesture toward the Beatles. Rather than summoning up a song from the group in their teen idol or hippie aspects, however, White’s music refers to a classicizing-folkish strain perhaps more appropriate for adult listeners. Second, we can make connections between White’s orchestration and another grown-up style. At the forefront of the instruments in the opening of “Bring Back My Yesterday” are the electric

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harpsichord and the oboe playing gentle figures in a moderate triple meter as the harmony sways between Eb and Bb major. Supporting the solo instruments are the gentle cymbal taps and echoing guitar chords. This combination of instruments evokes a particular tradition of easy-listening music popular during the 1950s and 1960s.38 Take, for instance, the hit record “Love Is Blue” (L’Amour est Bleu) by Paul Mauriat, which occupied number one on the Billboard charts for five weeks in 1968.39 Mauriat’s arrangement takes much of its character from the emblematic timbres of electric harpsichord and oboe, poised somewhere among classical and folk idioms. The song was sold explicitly as a kind of crossover music: the corny-hip prose of the album cover blurb, for instance, delights in noting that in “Love Is Blue,” “rock-beat [sic] is combined with chamber music styles.”40 These specific intersections of musical genres and styles in 1968 point to the primary social location of Mauriat’s music among single adults who are mostly likely out of college but still young—or at least wish to appear so. In the context of “Bring Back My Yesterday,” this music ironically supports a series of White’s piteous spoken confessions of failure in a relationship and pleas not to break up. The lachrymose sensitivity atop the elevated orchestration suggests that this vulnerability arises because emotionally and materially (if these can be musically distinguished) the singer can sustain the cost. Furthermore, it places White’s song within the hedonistic imaginative world that was by this time associated with the image of the bachelor, yet connects these comfortable circumstances to an understanding of masculinity more focused on the particularities of a love relationship than on homosocial solidarity. There is no other man on this record anywhere; no one but “you,” regarding Barry. The music of I’ve Got So Much to Give concentrates on vulnerability and eros as a key to masculinity and reaches its peak in the final cut on the album, “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby.” This is the first song in the series of what might be called Barry White’s bedroom raps, in which the emotional and physical dynamics of sex and jouissance govern the shape of the song, most notoriously perhaps its accretionary introduction. If this song is noticeably less classicistic than the songs on the album’s A-side, it may be because in “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby,” the music’s interest lies in representing a more focused progress of desire. The steamy G-minor bass lick that initiates the musical intimacy after the drum kit’s opening two measures is given to the harpsichord (see example 3). Earlier on the album, the harpsichord’s timbre might well have been heard as a sign of money and the

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example 3. Opening bass line of “I’m Gonna Love Just a Little More, Baby.”

upward aspirations that might be apparent in Barry White’s accessories. Here, however, it seems like a veritable musical alter ego, its contours a metaphor for his voice and his hands as they bespeak his desire. The piano figure that grows out of the harpsichord’s bass figure centers our attention, so that the other materials as they are introduced begin to give the impression of things that had already been present before we noticed them. After it enters at m.13, this piano suspension is present through the overwhelming majority of the song, disappearing only during a brief bridge at mm.97–104 and the six-bar choruses that appear at mm.51–56, 77–82, and 125–130. During all the passages in which the piano provides this structural armature, the harmony is relatively static in a fashion familiar from passages in the rest of the album; in this case, an ornamented suspension from A to G that ceaselessly repeats, with a G minor eleventh chord as the evolving background. The spoken lyrics are a direct imitation of bedroom talk, with White describing his actions and asking for feedback from his partner. The close miking creates a muffled intimacy in White’s spoken voice, as if heard through pillows, sheets, and a nurturing fierce dark. When the song finally turns toward the sung voice, the arrangement builds toward the threefold chant of the chorus, where White, in declaring his intention to “love,” “need,” and “want you” in amorous descending phrases that enact the intimacy they describe. And it all goes on for so long! The stretches of music dominated by the piano suspensions, since they repeat their two-bar units so inexorably, are quick to baffle analytical ears. The G minor eleventh chord does not need to resolve; it would rather glory in its thickness and in how its multifarious components can take on new connotations by simple shifts in voicing, instrumentation, and rhythmic articulation. An explicit token of this condition might be the soaring violin melody that drifts along for the twenty measures between the song’s bridge and the final appearance of the chorus. Its long tones and separation from the rest of the mix might be reminiscent of the violins in “Love’s Theme,” but this

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tune meanders; we never have a sense that the melody is heading anyplace special. This melody seeks neither climax nor cadence. It simply enjoys being. Considered broadly, then, this song is about the time it takes for pleasure and the will to have more of it. Would such a mode of consciousness been representable in soul before the beginning of the 1970s? In some of the work of James Brown, perhaps: otherwise, it is doubtful. Barry White’s evocation of gratified desire pays the kind of attention to the complexities of interior experience that would not have been heard by the record industry before the end of the 1960s, at least not in soul. And his appeal to individualistic luxury could not have found a hold in an audience not able to afford it. In the early 1990s, whenever he was asked his opinion of the disco era, Barry White remembered it as the most glamorous of our time. Guys was wearing jeans with studs, two hundred dollars a pair. Bleached-out with different colors, two, three hundred dollars . . . That was the only time when you could go into clubs and couldn’t tell the star from the consumer buyer. They both was dressed alike. It was the only era that allowed the consumer to pretend that he was an entertainer. They dressed in that era. . . . Then came the Eighties. The era of greed. That’s when I started hearing more songs that was written for money than I ever heard in my life.41

Such Dionysian habits could propel star and fan into a vertiginous, blissful identity. This identification was one of the crucial reasons for disco’s appeal; it pulled listeners and dancers into a complex fantasy world where desires worked themselves out through material objects all the more attractive because they seemed to be instruments of the search for love rather than (or in addition to) things wonderful in themselves. As times grew colder and illusions of abundance were dispelled in energy crises and inflation, Barry White’s image came to seem ridiculous, out of touch with the anxieties of his audience. But recycling triumphs over all: those costly 1970s clothes are now sometimes available at any good thrift store, along with the old vinyl that gave soundtracks to the fashion show—if they haven’t already been snapped up by another dreamer. If we buy them now, it is because they represent an abundance to be measured in our dreams rather than in our realities. Barry White’s style of black masculinity can still matter because even when it spoke to us of wealth, what it meant to promise was expressive freedom and desire.

chapter 3

Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul

Early on in her prickly, brilliant film Without You I’m Nothing (1990), the comedienne Sandra Bernhard adopts the persona of a black wouldbe diva thoroughly at home with the players and other ubiquitous habitués of inexpensive cocktail lounges and party clubs. Although there are African American venues that are high-falutin’ and expensively appointed, Bernhard’s imaginary venue is not one of them. We might think of the fictional audience for Bernhard’s fictional performer as consisting of Barry White’s lower-class cousins, lazily applauding Bernhard’s smalltime song-stylist in the small hours of the evening. Lots of the typical markers of that social world are in evidence in Bernhard’s monologue: mentions of cognac (Rémy Martin), astrology, and smooth jazz, swept up by an overriding desire to “mellow out” in an incoherent frappé of luxury.1 The humor of Bernhard’s character is difficult to read because her deliberately rebarbative vocal blackface (call it blackvoice?) puts the audience in an uncertain position. Are we supposed to be laughing at the tastelessness and lack of skill of the character? At our own judgments about her? At Bernhard’s vertiginous play, with the difficulty of distinguishing between the performer playing a second-order character and the performer Sandra Bernhard who is always already a fiction? How far does this regression of images go, and where and how are we supposed to direct our laughter? These carefully troubling awkwardnesses set the stage for the song Bernhard’s lounge singer is aiming toward—a cover of the 1972 hit “Me 59

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and Mrs. Jones,” first recorded by the Philadelphia-based jazz and soul singer Billy Paul.2 This song is a typically canny choice for Bernhard, who in most of her performances has liked to push questions of representation (like the ones I have asked in the previous paragraph) into politically and culturally fraught terrain by invoking early 1970s moments. Bernhard is not white in the mass media’s archetypal Protestantblondes-of-the-suburbs manner. The lips and hair that usually read “Jewish” according to ethnic stereotypes suddenly acquire an Africanesque quality in this scene of Without You I’m Nothing, recalling that only in the recent historical past did Jews (not to mention the Irish or the Italians) begin to count as “white” in America’s racial system.3 We might also recall the complex historical relationship within popular music between black folks and Jewish folks—coon songs and blackface merging into vaudeville and the Yiddish theater, the symbiosis of Tin Pan Alley and jazz, the vagaries of Jews and blacks in the record business as a business.4 Bernhard sings a song that, if identifiably “black” to listeners who know the style, is nevertheless vulnerable to the charge of being so heavily produced and ornamented, so audibly oriented toward the success of mass commerce (that is, so Brill Building), that it seems “white”aspiring. But the whiteness that it fixes upon can also seem disreputably lumpen proletarian. It is easy enough, in our high-minded moments, to sneer at entertainment that flaunts its commercial designs ostentatiously; but our lips may often curl in contempt even more quickly when we turn our attentions to the people who appreciate this kind of entertainment. This whiteness is vulgar. Its Vegas-like, frugal yet hedonistic materialism calls into question all terms of racial and ethnic rapprochement. In the spectacle of a blackness that seems so close to lower-class whiteness, there are troubling questions of “ownership” and the right to control representation; they cannot be answered, however, without first considering the roles of performer and audience. If we are white, and maybe middle class, how do we relate to the ambivalences of the black people within the frame of the film? To what extent are attitudes about black and white (and Jewish) the point of the spectacle, and to what extent do these questions mask less racially specific troubles about class status and economics? Given the troubling problems of race, ethnicity, and class as they have appeared in American showbiz, are we supposed to laugh at “Sandra Bernhard” or her character at all? Even if we are, should we be doing so? The history of the representations of black sexual desire in America shows that the authority these images can claim is frequently impossible

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to disentangle from their availability to sentimental or prurient use. The internal dramatic situation of “Me and Mrs. Jones” is an excellent match for the contradictions of Bernhard’s own performance; her entire routine resonates with the song’s description of an illicit relationship unable to resolve itself, doomed to blissful-agonizing continuation. “Me and Mrs. Jones” stands in Bernhard’s film as a parable of the libidinal and cultural enmeshment of black and white in America, whose positive achievements have come at such a high moral cost. But rather than tally the social balance sheet, Bernhard’s film ultimately seems more interested in exploring the ways that a certain margin of joyousness remains available to ratify our assorted self-fashionings, while keeping an edge of abjection in the foreground. Metaphors of taste for a culinary art: anyone who has spent much time in the kitchen knows that a little salt makes sweetness more intense, or that a hint of bitterness can give a sturdiness to the bright glints of pure sugar. It is a similar internal division that keeps Bernhard’s work from palling immediately. But her performance suggests that maybe such a division was present in the song all the time. In this chapter, I address a few features of the forging of subjectivity in the genre of soft soul, those exquisite, opulent ballads that filled the charts in the 1970s and remain the inescapable precursors of more recent R&B songs and “adult contemporary” formats.5 The social and economic history that supports the style, mentioned in chapter 2, are central to our understanding of its function, but have to be placed next to detailed attention to matters of formal and thematic working within specific songs. The original version of Bernhard’s chosen tune offers a good point of entry. Me and Mrs. Jones, we got a thing goin’ on. We both know that it’s wrong, but it’s much too strong to let it go now.

Much of this song devotes itself to the particulars of the affair divulged in Paul’s first words: where and when the couple secretly meet, their unwillingness to surrender their other “obligations,” and the singer’s joyous despair that the situation will continue. It is an oddly chivalrous yet realistic account of the scene; songs about adultery that spend this much time on functional specifics are less common that one might predict in rock and soul genres (though not in country and western), and

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when the original song was released, its iniquitous topic caused some radio stations to resist playing it. But the concrete details of the adulterous affair repeatedly fall away in the song’s chorus, in which the singer returns to his initial words, now shaped into a potential cry of remorse that is nevertheless so overwhelmed by the lusters of passion that each pole of feeling seems to act as the ground of the other. This typology of love has a distinguished historical lineage and wide cultural distribution— Tristan und Isolde, anyone? Or how about a few Renaissance madrigals?— but neither its antiquity nor its familiarity seem to lessen its effectiveness. Depending upon our susceptibilities, we may simply think to ourselves “Ah yes! Love is really like that.” And yet there are neither lofty metaphysical statements nor the forgiving distance of vanished cultural codes to cloak the prosaic aspects of the adulterous situation in “Me and Mrs. Jones.” If love is really like that, then it might seem awfully cheap. Crucial to the tension between shame and bliss in “Me and Mrs. Jones” is the opulence of the song’s arrangement, not surprisingly: along with the jazzy combo of the arrangement, there are plentiful violins enriching the mix as well as the flushes of a soft but roughened saxophone. The timbres and melodic details of both strings and sax bear the marks of the singer’s equivocally mixed desires. Even more important to the song’s evocation of ambivalent passion, however, is a characteristic “violation” of the song’s periodic construction. The opening eight bars establish a normative quadratic phrase structure (4 bars of 4 beats), which begins to be compromised very early, in Paul’s initial vocal entrance. Mrs. Jones’s very surname takes a long time to get over—Paul lingers on it for two measures before blurting out the news of their liaison. The melody continues on after this entrance in little spasms, from thrill to thrill. If we spend a moment’s fantasy on what it would mean for someone to proceed in spoken language in this way, then we have a clear picture of the singer’s unbalanced emotions. Not only does Paul feel too many conflicting things about his situation, he also feels too many conflicting things about confessing it. We might even ask whether he is really telling us the story; perhaps we are merely the pretext for a confession that serves to provoke his passion further. Halfway through bar four, the violins arrive with poignant sighingshivering figures that throb with voluptuous misgiving up and down three octaves. Their arrival weakens the metrical authority of the previous downbeat and their hemiola-like further rhythm muddies the periodic structure by fusing an extra measure into the material of the fourth bar. The moment of dubiety passes in the consequent phrase with Paul,

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back in control, asserting the couple’s guilt and their inability to stop. As he moves into his description of the couple’s private arrangements, his excitement mounts until he comes back to his opening words, now in the guise of a chorus. His full-on cry “Me and Mrs. Jones” begins at the third beat of the phrase’s fourth bar and pushes it into another extra bar, its stresses again overriding the primary meter to create the impression of a “super-bar” of eight beats. The super-bar falls back to normal with the return of Mrs. Jones’s name to allow the song to move forward again. Both metrical extensions will reappear. They must return for formal reasons because “Me and Mrs. Jones” is a strophic song. But they must return for thematic reasons as well—the song is about being stuck in conflicts between mutually dependent pains and pleasures. The metrical infractions are a metaphor for the relationship that seems at once chosen and compelled.

uncommitted sins Equivocations about determining the shifting roles of form and content, like those that haunt our attempts to locate the shift in power between performers and listeners, are surely the norm, at least in vocal music. The kinds of questions just asked about “Me and Mrs. Jones” could apply to a variety of musical styles and traditions, and a vast number of individual tunes. In this case, the spectacle of Sandra Bernhard’s—or Billy Paul’s—performance leaves us in the audience with an exciting sense of perilous unaccountability. We may have whatever feelings we wish, and it seems up to us alone to decide whether to admit to them at all or not, whether to mask them somehow or to try to present them unalloyed. Even when we do resolve such questions in one way or another, we must consider what it might mean for us to feel in particular ways about whatever it is that we may have thought we had just witnessed. The song is a fiction, after all; even if Billy Paul had written the song, and we could be certain that it recounted a real affair with a real Mrs. Jones, the simple fact of his transforming his story into a song would obviously abstract it very far from whatever we might take reality to be. Furthermore, we can never escape the dreadful possibility that this fiction has somehow fictionalized our own interior senses of selfhood. How can we discriminate between our “genuine” feelings and those that have been poured into us by means of the performance? Worse yet, it may be that we have no way to reach even provisional decisions about our positions with respect to the song and our interior economies without talking among

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ourselves. We need others so that we can make sense of the song for ourselves. Are we then free? Who, precisely, might be our captors? A huge amount of overtly representational music thus falls under the same suspicions that have long attended theater. From Plato to the Puritans, the position of actors as seductive liars has seemed worrisome to critics for whom naturalized versions of honesty and individual autonomy are supreme values. Or more recently, take Antonin Artaud’s famous “theater of cruelty,” where unpleasantness acts as an antidote to dishonest aesthetic delight, allowing our playwright-director to forge us into “better” people; the performance is meant to be the last word in spiritual vitamin pills. But there’s really no need to venture into such lofty territory; the writings of a horde of average rock critics, not to mention the comments of strenuous fans, shows the same troubles driving contempt for songs like “Me and Mrs. Jones.” These resistant listeners are not at all wrong to fix upon the evasions of responsibility that baldly mark such music. It is just that there is no way to get beyond this slipperiness. In the end, we do not face a choice between “honest” and “dishonest” music as far as its representational effects go but rather a choice between greater or lesser orders of fiction. In Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” a character asserts that music “creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.” The source of Wilde’s provocative dictum, and much of what distresses us about overtly fictional music, comes from the way such music reminds us that the insidious persuasiveness of sound is the rule rather than the exception. “Untruth” is probably the ground of music, as indeed it must be of language. As George Steiner has noted, “The human capacity to utter falsehood, to lie, to negate what is the case, stands at the heart of speech and of the reciprocities between words and world. It may be that ‘truth’ is the more limited, the more special of the two conditions. We are a mammal who can bear false witness.”6 And as our confessors and psychoanalysts continually show us, we constantly bear false witness “by accident” against ourselves as well as others. These internal discontinuities in our promiscuous representations of self are often revealed in “musical” qualities—an unexpected rise in speech melody, an abrupt hitch in the voice, all of the other connotative sounds that enrobe grammar, syntax, and semantics. The position of music, as we usually define it, within the problematics of truth and fiction is both simpler and harder: simpler because musical gestures are so good at immediacy effects that

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we are tempted to “believe” them unquestioningly without staying for an answer; harder because music “feels” meaningful in a quasi-linguistic way but usually requires elaborate situating in convention and discourse before our senses of its meanings, much less any truth claims we are able to assert, can make much sense.7 Again, this should not be news to anyone. Nevertheless, in the context of so seductive a genre as soft soul, such abstract observations bear much repeating, lest the sway of the music tempt us into the choice between heedless self-indulgence and an equally unrigorous austerity. When we take up discussions of songs such as “Me and Mrs. Jones,” we are making trial explorations in a complex of internal and external relationships that seem infectiously unstable. We are normally taught to prefer consistency and continuity. The Oxford English Dictionary defines integrity in one of its primary meanings as an “undivided or unbroken state,” and in the moral sense as “the character of uncorrupted virtue, esp. in relation to truth and fair dealing; uprightness, honesty, sincerity.” We will return to the question of sincerity in later chapters; for now, what is worth noting is the distinct theological and sexual aura around the word. Integrity seems to require that we are in either concrete or abstract terms “intact.” In this conceptual neighborhood, erotic appeal lures us out of an originating wholeness that stands as the truth that is prior to all the lies, or it prevents us from finding and reforming that lost completeness. We are fallen, but strive to be otherwise; our attempts to be saved (or to remain saved) are ultimately quests for unitary being. A song like “Me and Mrs. Jones” tempts us away from cohesion. Like all affairs of the everyday body, especially sexual activity, the music of genres like soft soul pulls us into confusing realms of partial objects in chaotic mergers. Our “first persons” become plural, whether we like it or not. But what if, instead of seeing the unchaste euphoria of soft soul as damaging to the desire and pursuit of the whole, we reverse our terms? Maybe our search to know our ends demands that we spend our energies in uncommitted imaginings, the trial and error of hypotheticals and counterfactuals. Surely a crucial realm of musical effect and affect— perhaps the crucial realm—comes in the number of “as ifs” that may be posited in as little as a single phrase. If this is so, the interpretive frenzies that surround virtually any piece of music (if not carefully controlled) make a mockery of our pretentions to stability and put enormous pressure on our fantasies of truth in music. There can be no solid ground.

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Once we give up or at least bracket our passion for standing still, however, we might see where our interpretive walks can take us. I think that this attitude, this favoring of blissful possibility, forms an essential part of the background of soft soul. The music’s overripe qualities were pleasurable in themselves because such pleasure could inflect old models of musical interiority and potentially create new ones as well.

entrepreneurial sound in the black studio These newly accented senses of self make little sense detached from the changes in the institutions of black music that brought it into being. In chapter 2, I touched on the probability that the tremendous explosion of style and genre at the very beginning of the 1970s in all forms of rock and soul was reciprocally connected to the development of more effective ways of creating and exploiting markets by performers and by their labels. In the case of black genres, especially, the musical and commercial domains received a valuable lift from political arrangements that for at least a few years offered black artists and entrepreneurs a working life in which there were more possibilities for economic justice and even significant prosperity. The shift in music and its conditions, though it immediately led to complaints of “commercialism” by some listeners and critics, was connected to the evolving social situations of black musicians in which access to money and leisure could be valued for the freedom and autonomy it entailed. The production of black music in the 1960s—the music I will call “soul” for our purposes in this chapter—had been dominated by the work of three labels: Stax, along with its major distributor and artistic collaborators at Atlantic, and Motown. A preponderance of successful hits came from them, defining one kind of stylistic center in black popular music. (There were other stylistic centers in jazz and gospel, and their mutual overlappings did not weaken their relative independence.) But toward the end of the 1960s, a series of changes in the internal structures of the primary producers of black music and in their relationships with one another allowed new stylistic possibilities that were exploited intensively by musicians interested in exploring musical domains previously under strong limitations. The crucial period of transition took place situation between 1968 and 1972, and a closer look at the particulars can lead us toward a better appreciation of soft soul.8 The first significant changes were felt at Motown. Berry Gordy had always run the label he had founded in a direct, paternalistic style that

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passed far beyond defining the sound and structure of Motown’s music to the point of taking charge of as many aspects of his employees’ lives as he could manage. Perhaps the defining instance of Gordy’s control can be seen in his insistence that his artists be taught style and etiquette in what Marvin Gaye used to refer to as Motown’s “charm school.” Though lessons in deportment might seem oppressively genteel to a would-be primitivist, or pusillanimous in the terms of many a black nationalist, it is important to keep in mind how Gordy’s attentions were thus directed at the long-term flourishing of his artists. He meant them to have substantial assimilationist careers that would benefit them as well as his record label. One major model for this campaign was the progress toward respectability that had occurred for Italian American singers earlier in the century.9 By the mid-1960s, Gordy’s ambitions were pushing the company’s image and the role of its artists on the path taken by the Italians, ever closer to a kind of Hollywood/Las Vegas mainstream— classic showbiz. In this quest, Motown artists were apparently to follow the career trajectory of performers such as Elvis, who was himself emulating Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, in moving out of a rather specialized market (white teenagers and black folks not differentiated by age) to reach richer, older, whiter audiences. Such an expansion of audience was all the more possible because the original teen audiences for rock and soul were moving into their twenties; the likely market for Motown and similar studios could expand if the labels could retain older listeners while acquiring new young listeners. The changes in soul during the early 1970s might thus be seen as striving for a careful stylistic and thematic balance to keep the interests of multiple age groups and lifeworlds in play. Unfortunately, Gordy’s push toward Hollywood precipitated an extended crisis. Although the Motown studios remained in Detroit until 1971 (the official date of the move was 1972), Gordy was frequently absent from the home office in order to work in LA, and the carefully structured system of songwriting and producing he had fostered began to break down because of personal, financial, and aesthetic differences among Motown personnel. The crucial songwriting-production team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, responsible for an enormous number of earlier hits, left the label during this transition; Smokey Robinson was considerably less active as a producer and performer.10 In their absence, Norman Whitfield, who had been working at Motown since 1962,11 played an increasingly important role as a producer, collaborating above all with the Temptations to create a stream of important hits beginning

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in 1968: “Cloud Nine” (1968), “Psychedelic Shack” (1970), “Ball of Confusion” (1970), and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” (1972).12 In these productions, Whitfield persuasively redefined Motown’s sound and helped create the basis of 1970s post-soul genres. This sound is audible in the extended instrumental introduction to “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” discussed in chapter 2. The expansiveness of the song’s backing—the timbral and motivic detailing that filled out the groove—was of major importance in disco, where multifarious hooks provided the variety that helped propel the groove along to its multiple climaxes, but its abundant sound world also quickly found a place in the slower, more reflective ballads of soft soul. In the music of Marvin Gaye’s classic 1972 album What’s Going On, the overdubbing and rich detail of the arrangement serve to inflect the lyrics’ extended meditations upon contemporary social ills. Berry Gordy was dubious about the album, possibly because of the complex interrelationships of the recorded songs or those songs’ rather abstract preoccupation with sociopolitical ills. The nine tracks of What’s Going On range through such assorted topics as ecological destruction (the first Earth Day had been celebrated on April 22, 1970) and the Vietnam War to a number of melancholy reflections on racism, frequently tied together by recurring melodic and verbal motifs and shared tonal areas. Although attention to social ills was not unknown in a Motown song (think of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” or the Supremes’ “Love Child” in 1968), their concentration and interweaving on What’s Going On was in this context avant-garde. Moreover, a number of the songs especially on the B side of the album are strikingly sectional within themselves. What’s Going On was unquestionably a concept album, from the aura of intimate social concern fostered by the mock house party that begins the first track to the network of thematic concerns that weave through the whole. It was an unusual product for Motown, but a huge critical and commercial success. The entire album reached number six on the charts, and three of its songs—“What’s Going On,” “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” and “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)”— reached the top ten. The moving and elegant critiques in the lyrics of What’s Going On contributed substantially to its popular success, but only in symbiosis with the album’s music. Marvin Gaye’s endlessly subtle vocal performance was the central locus of listeners’ investment, but almost as important was the timbral palette available in the arrangements. The opening track, for instance, establishes its sense of conviviality with spoken

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words of welcome, heard over the warm hum of happy conversation in the background. Although it is dimly possible that the greetings are directed to Marvin Gaye himself, it is more likely that they are meant for an implied member of the on-stage audience who stands in for us. We are quite deliberately hailed into music being made among friends. The song played for us, however, is unusually luxurious for a house party and, in fact, could not exist without the studio. As with so much of Motown at its best, the song is equivalent to its record. The song begins with a small jazz-tinted combo—most noticeable are the bass and lead guitars, percussion including bongos, a broodily wistful sax, and delicate silver-leaf touches from bells and vibraphone— but rapidly moves into its virtual reality with Gaye’s voice overdubbed against itself and a soaring violin section. The intensity of the instrumental parts tends to build throughout the song, increasing the affective intensity of Gaye’s visionary pleas. The arrangement fills out important connotations of the lyrics’ thinking, creating a sense of rhetorical continuity against which Gaye’s fore- and background vocals can surge and retreat in spontaneity. (This strategy probably derives ultimately from gospel, as heard in many songs where the chorus functions to hold a line of communitarian devotional thought that will support the exemplary first-person ecstasies of a soloist.) Throughout this song and the entire album, timbral largesse not only helps establish the density required for the music’s rhetorical continuity, it also offers listeners a multitude of aspects for their edification. Most of the increased orchestrations in soul songs during this period behave similarly to the arrangements on What’s Going On, amplifying and extending the affective positions implicit in the lyrics. Even if it were possible to regard the words of soul songs on their own as presenting an essentially uncomplicated state of thought and feeling, the music’s elaboration suggests the reverse. In addition, the particularity of the accompaniment marks the song as a species of personal statement: on Marvin Gaye’s album, the sentiments expressed are understood as those of Gaye himself and the music taken to be a reflection of his nuanced attitude toward what he is singing. (This way of representing interiority is also reflected in the famous album cover of What’s Going On. Earlier Motown album covers, when they actually showed the performers, typically showed them in some kind of “performance” space, in carefully stagey poses. The cover of Gaye’s album, however, shows him in a raincoat, outdoors, gazing poetically off into the middle distance.)13

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In earlier soul, individuality was unquestionably prized, but it tended to be located in a singer’s specific characteristics as seen in dialogic relationship with the band. The ability of the instruments to comment on the interior qualities of the lyrics or the singer in a song from Stax, for instance, had been structured during most of the 1960s by the premise that the song as a whole documented a genuine communitarian activity. This ideology was communicated to listeners so effectively that it was often believed that all Stax songs were full takes released with no studio adjustment whatsoever. This was not true, but it mattered greatly that it was held to be true.14 It was also an important feature of the label’s profile that listeners wished as well to believe in the myth of the pure, integral track. The technology of song production at Motown made projections of this kind of performative wholeness unsuitable from early on and probably influenced the studio’s iconophile tastes. Because the Motown song was so obviously an artifact, its human grounding was most easily placed in the figure of the singer (or the singer plus backup) rather than the musical group as a whole (the dissolution of the Supremes as well as personnel problems with groups like the Temptations shows the power of the soloistic impulse). And a final twist in the shift toward Motown’s greater investment in singerly authority came at just this time. Although Gaye had at first shown no interest in making What’s Going On, as the project developed he became fascinated by the possibilities of studio manipulation. According to one of Gaye’s descriptions of the process: “I do something and I listen to it and say ‘Wow, this will sound good on this’ . . . And I listen to that and say, ‘Wait, here I can put behind that, this’ and then when I do that, I say, ‘Wow, a couple of bells, ding ding, here,’ and that’s the way you do it. You build. Like an artist paints a picture.”15 Gaye’s moving delight at this new ability to control the sound of his music is matched by other accounts at about the same time and provides the best explanation for such events as Stevie Wonder’s period of phenomenal creativity when he at last reached his majority and gained a measure of independence from Gordy’s tastes and directives.16 But Gaye’s interest in the sensuous immediacy of timbres and their layering was by this account as important as the autonomy such uses betokened; his enfiguring musical experimentation in the studio cannot be separated fully from the more discursive side of his creative impulses. They are the same thing in different aspects. The spaciousness of Motown’s new style was matched at the studios of other important record labels, which also began to take an interest in

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developing lavish song arrangements. The classic sound of Stax records during the ‘60s, while founded on the solid work of the house band Booker T. and the MGs, was relatively spare. But this austerity vanished in the music of Isaac Hayes, who had begun working at Stax in the mid‘60s as a keyboard player, arranger, and producer. His work in this period kept him out of the spotlight. In 1967, however, Stax decided to break its ties with Atlantic Records (itself about to be incorporated into Warner Brothers-Seven Arts) and lost control of its catalog since its 1965 deal because of contractual details. Suddenly there was a serious shortfall of music, and Stax was in danger of failing altogether. In a bind, the studio eventually gave Hayes license to experiment, and Hayes was able to develop a complex and influential second album, Hot Buttered Soul.17 By 1972, with the release of his soundtrack to Shaft, Hayes had helped further develop audiences’ taste for opulence. As music critic Nelson George summarizes it, the songs were “longer, more orchestrated, more introspective—some black albums had the continuity and cohesion of soundtracks even when they weren’t. Latin percussion, in the form of cow bells, congas, and bongos, suddenly became rhythmic requirements, adding a new layer of polyrhythmic fire to the grooves. Minor chords, frowned on during the soul years, began appearing in the work of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the proliferating black bands, such as Earth, Wind, and Fire, Kool and the Gang, and Mandrill.”18 To be sure, many of the elements that George notes were not altogether foreign to black musical styles. The most notable home for lush strings or Latin percussion had been doo-wop in the late 1950s and the earlier 1960s. Songs such as the Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (1958) or the Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” (1960) exhibited an exultant timbral profusion that matches the soft soul tastes of the early 1970s. The biggest differences in sound probably come from the increased importance of overdubbing and subtle adjustments in the mix that were managed with exquisite care in soft soul. Such attention to the details of the recording as self-conscious formal relationships within a musical object made soft soul the perfect vehicle for reflective sensibility (the Great Attractor that brought minor chords into such wide use) because even the residual staginess, the extroverted theatricality, of a doo-wop song could be converted into part of the song’s affective landscape. George is right to fall back on the word “cinematic” because the changes in soft soul’s production iconically signify greater interiority, a more “noumenal” state in which music, rather than carrying the mark of deeds, forsakes mere action in order to speak Being

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itself; and Hollywood music, like its operatic ancestors, had long depended on its listeners’ skill in listening to/for the noumenon.19 This sound ideal was promulgated beyond the confines of Motown and Stax as the result of a restructuring of the record industry that opened up space for new labels. The early 1970s witnessed a period of corporate consolidation, with the four largest companies—Columbia/CBS, Warner Brothers, Capitol, and Motown—attempting to diversify their holdings by merging or collaborating with previously independent labels as well as exploiting new segments of the market on their own.20 In this shuffle, the three major producers of black music in the 1960s lost part of their market dominance, creating room for new independent labels to flourish. Motown completed its move to Hollywood in 1972, but this move cost the label much of its traditional concentration on the meticulous cultivation of black artists with almost certain crossover appeal. By 1975, it seemed to have become an average record company, in competition with a host of others very much like it; many of its artists achieved only sporadic success, and the studio completely lost its strongly marked stylistic profile.21 Atlantic, which had profited from its partnership with Stax, had been absorbed into a larger commercial configuration and, perhaps in partial consequence, had begun to expand from its specialized focus on black genres in the late 1960s by signing white rock groups with considerable sales power—Cream, the first incarnation of the Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin, and eventually winning over the Rolling Stones.22 Stax, increasingly troubled, chose to sign a contract with CBS. (CBS was at this time concerned to improve its reputation after a study it commissioned from the Harvard Business School indicated that black audiences found the company racially insensitive.)23 This deal proved catastrophic; Stax overextended itself so badly that it was forced into bankruptcy.24 But this period of corporate consolidation was not a disaster for everyone. On the contrary, an arrangement with CBS could be, if managed with prudence, a boon to small labels. A good example was Philadelphia International Records (PIR), which proved to be the central producer of soft soul in the early 1970s.25 Established in 1968 by the songwriting team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, PIR from its establishment favored florid, hook-filled arrangements of broad appeal to listeners whose ears had been prepared by the new work from Motown and Stax. The addition of songwriter-arranger-conductor Thom Bell at the head of the studios only augmented PIR’s commitment to sonic opulence. (Bell’s musical taste was, if anything, even more high-calorie

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than that of Gamble and Huff.) PIR’s deal with CBS ensured that the indie label had a terrific distribution potential (including the network’s successful show Soul Train) and better funding than it had access to alone: “The Sound of Philadelphia” thus took a position of command in the soul market of the early 1970s. By 1975, the only black-owned company in America larger than PIR was Motown itself.26 Elton John’s 1975 hit “Philadelphia Freedom,” with its sonic tribute to the style of PIR’s house band MFSB (Mother/Father/Sister/Brother) is only the most explicit tribute to the glossy magnetism of the soft soul pouring out of Gamble and Huff’s studio. The triumph of PIR ensured the persistence and made likely the success of heavily decorative ballads, produced on many labels, throughout the 1970s. Even when the studio collapsed in financial difficulties, besieged with charges of payola, its musical tastes remained authoritative.27 Although complicated productions were not essential to the success of slow soul music, artists and producers continued to find them fruitful.

the lyrical subject as artifice A large percentage of soul songs coming out of Philadelphia were grounded in the sentiments of private life and were particularly interested in creating and exploring variegated models of individual erotic life as it might be framed by greater material well-being. The ornamental style favored in productions by Gamble, Huff, and Bell literally signaled prosperity. Philadelphia was a studio that, like Motown and other producers of black music, could afford to hire extra instrumentalists, playing the more prestigious instruments associated with the “classical” repertory. If these instruments had nearer referents in some kinds of jazz and adult-oriented genres, so much the better—a PIR recording could pick up any and all associations that might signal an elevation of the standards of living. The luscious attention to detail in the songs’ arrangements and mixing also embodied financial comfort in the form of sheer time that could be taken on craft. The mediations of artifice tended to become things valuable in and of themselves. The high stylizations that were the norm in PIR hits set out small but perfect moments of intensely individualized feeling painstakingly encased in easeful convention, spangled with little details of richness. Some of the greatest achievements in this modest confectionary art come in the work of the Stylistics, who were, along with the Chi-Lites, one of the crucial soft soul vocal groups of the early 1970s. Formed in

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1968 out of two separate groups in Philadelphia, the five-voice ensemble quickly found itself under the mentorship of PIR’s Thom Bell, who produced a string of hits in the space of four years. “You Make Me Feel Brand New” was the Stylistics’ greatest and last hit during PIR’s productive period, reaching number two in 1974. The song was written by Thom Bell and perhaps his favorite lyricist, Linda Creed, a white woman from the Philadelphia suburbs who specialized in artful, extravagant sentiments that the Stylistics, above all, were able to carry off with unmatched finesse.28 In fact, the sticky lyrics turn out to give the song a distinct advantage, since their lack of depth directs attention to the setting. The song is deliberately overladen from its beginning, which offers up the music of the emblematic chorus in ornamental guise. The opening four-bar phrase carries two timbres—the piano and a guitar modified to sound like a sitar—that stand in a kind of metaphorical opposition. On the one hand, the firm piano chords might at this point in the history of popular music suggest genuineness of feeling, a sign of authenticity in the song’s sentiment. The piano solo had come to stand for this above all in the music of singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, though it could also carry the memory of the brilliant technocrats who had created the Brill Building repertory. Carole King, after all, had already moved from neo–Tin Pan Alley to the world of singer-songwriters with the release of her enormously successful album Tapestry in 1971. (Since Philly soul always had the model of the Brill Building in mind—Huff had actually worked with Phil Spector in the latter’s more functional days, as well as with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and remembered his experiences appreciatively29—a tension between individual expression and objective craft was probably always present in PIR productions.) On the other hand, the exotic presence of the sitar analogue seems to function no longer as an orientalesque trope but in a more generalized way as a sign of transport or wonder. This sound is supposed to be semidomesticated, adapted to the home market but still prized for its out of the way qualities; and its liminal position is inherent in the peculiar way that it sounds at once brittle and rubbery: brittle because of the fuzz that surrounds the attack of each piece, rubbery because of the fluctuations in pitch and timbral noise that characterize each pitch’s decay. Recollections of the Beatles or the Byrds, who had used sitars and their simulacra, would probably have been fine with Thom Bell, but these intertextual resonances of the sitar timbre in “You Make Me Feel Brand New” matter less than the sound’s general otherworldliness and its formal

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example 4. Melody of verse from “You Make Me Feel Brand New.”

or poetic functions within the song itself. The timbral worlds of the piano and the pseudo-sitar might be heard, given their associations, as embodying the contrast between the everyday and the numinous. This polarity finds parallels in several harmonic oscillations, including that between the subdominant seventh chord and the curiously stable dominant of E major that provides the harmonic grounding of the introduction, between the presumptive tonic E major triad and its flat VI chord in the first section of the verse, between a tonicized G major triad and its flat VI chord in the second section of the verse, or more globally between the contrast between E major and G major (see example 4). Which of these keys has priority is not entirely clear, and it might be best to hear the song as Wagnerianly dual. A quick recollection of the lyrics makes their dualistic cast of thought clear; the poetic terms of “You Make Me Feel Brand New” are set up as if they were meant to describe the experience of conversion and spiritual regeneration—with the difference that the “born again” experience is to be attributed to the primary agency of a love human rather than divine. (Try substituting the words “My Lord” for “My Love” in the verses and the point is instantly clear. Of course, the chorus forecloses this potential idolatry by speaking of God in traditional terms in the line “God bless you.” This drawing back from equating the human and the divine again follows the traditions of gospel music.)30 Evoking the feelings of transport is a principal aim of the song, which becomes all the clearer in the second phrase of the introduction, where a bright cymbal roll introduces sweetly tremulous strings, building to enough intensity

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to provoke the entrance of more percussion. This in turn spurs the first resolution, to E major and an extravagant run upwards in the strings. Even within the context of the emergent soft soul genre, this opening is terribly overdone. It begins in too much rapture and must find some way to go on. If the song is to succeed, there must be a way of understanding its gigantic presentation of potential hooks as important to the poetic stance of “You Make Me Feel Brand New.” The song proceeds by an expressive pulling back. The first verse opens with the first lead singer, the aptly named baritone Arrion Love. Supported mostly by electric piano and a few discreet rim shots, Love’s solo begins with him considering the difficulty of speaking—“mere words could not explain.” In fact, mere words are barely present. Even if the lyrics were not deliberately bleached by their reliance on formula, their semantic content would be preempted by musical features: the suaveness of timbre in the accompaniment, the expressivity of Love’s vibrato, and perhaps a “hangover” of intensity from the introduction. The steady oscillation between E major and A minor keeps the first phrase of the verse suspended and then settles onto the dominant. Although after five bars the music moves past the repetition of these two chords to settle onto the dominant, there is no reason to expect anything other than more oscillations between two chords. We might circle from dominant back to I-iv, and so on continuously. Love’s melody reinforces this impression, being concerned mostly to outline the prominent flat-VI to V motion that governs the succession of chords. Finally, the phrase structure of the section is a little unbalanced compared to the strict four-bar groupings of the introduction: Love’s solo seems more prosey, less likely to be able to move forward on the momentum of a solid scheme of meter and rhyme. Given the apparent impasse—words have been made to be inadequate—how is the song to continue now? In a sudden transfiguration, Love moves from F sharp to G, and on up past A to B; the accompaniment goes with him, shifting to a deceptive cadence that becomes the subdominant of the new key. In retrospect, G major must have been prefigured by the thrice-repeated minor subdominant in the first strain. Nevertheless, the change comes as an interruption and a translation to an even more spiritualized state of the soul. The use of third-relations to signal the greater intrusion of the transcendental is meant to be heard, I think, as a direct borrowing from musical practice of the romantic era. Translated to the new tonal plane, the melody of Love’s solo continues to repeat itself. The lyrics leave their preoccupation with the impossibility of speaking, however, and begin to list specifics. In these new

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contexts, the music begins to suggest expectation, to want something new for itself, and finally the song seems to invent a way to continue. The further progress of the verse first of all requires an important shift of timbre. Arrion Love falls silent, his place taken by the Stylistics’ male alto, Russell Thompkins Jr., whose timbre is reinforced by the reappearance of the sitar, his instrumental double by reason of their similarity of sound and register. And in analogy to the sitar, which occupies a relatively otherworldly position among the instrumental group, Thompkins’s ambiguously gendered voice tends to dephysicalize the song, turning Love’s earthier sound into a more spiritual force. But it also raises the question: Are these men meant to be understood as individuals, or as aspects of a single complex subject? Taking “You Make Me Feel Brand New” as, among other things, a serious attempt to model a particular kind of subjectivity is absolutely necessary to understanding the song’s potential effect. Making the reasonable assumption that lip-synching is an important way of participating in the song, it is more likely than not that an individual listener will try to cover all parts if at all possible.31 Maybe one of the effects of this piece is to recast individuality, making it “feel brand new” by offering multiple modes of feeling and relation to some beloved Other. In this case, Thompkins’s entry acts as an important moment of transfiguration, and this next step brings forth new melodic and harmonic resources to guide the song into greater movement. The rate at which Tompkins’s words appear is faster than Love’s, pressing forward as he continues to explore the upper registers of the song’s vocal space. His sudden bound into triple meter summons the rest of the group for a moment in strikingly bare octaves, providing that last bit of energy that allows him to pull the music onto the dominant; these moments also contain the greatest amount of potential verbal action. With the dominant’s resolution to a subdominant seventh chord, the chorus returns again, now in G major. Now the full vocal ensemble enters. The tessitura and timbre of Thompkins’s voice tends to focus our attention on him such that the other singers mostly add support by increasing the complexity and density of the sound as a whole. One cycle through the materials of transport is not enough to justify the opening, however, and in an extension at the end of the chorus, the song quickly shifts back to E major. The singers, their roles already assigned, move through the new text, which acts as a lyrical intensification of the sentiments presented in the first verse. But it is important to remember that words have already been firmly subordinated to music as the privileged medium of emotional expression. The accompaniment

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confirms this by adding details both to the previously spare sections of music as well as to those more heavily decorated. Together, lyrics and music begin to approach the sentiment of the introduction. A short way into the second verse, though, the song’s affective exaltation has reached its height; there is no harmonic novelty or fresh melodic turn to increase the sense of transport further. Instead, the chorus returns more as a sign of emotional stasis, and it is in this frame of mind that the voices begin to fall silent. The accompaniment assumes the burden of the piece as it begins to fade to silence. It doesn’t matter that much of the formal action of “You Make Me Feel Brand New” can be understood as quasigrammatical, demanded by the protocols of a particular strophic routine: even as we hear the recurrence of verses and choruses as “ideally” or extrinsically motivated, we also hear them as arising from the textual or musical sentiments within the psychological movement of the song. When listeners hear the conventions of the music as inextricable from its sentiments, the implicit argument that it is impossible to establish any priority of feeling over artifice is precisely what provokes anxiety in those listeners who wish the illusions of the natural; music, despite its rapacious immediacy, suddenly appears less “true” (because more arbitrary) than language—and its fictions are what give it power. The opulence of “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” then, might be heard on one level as a representation of erotic and romantic transport; it also implies that this experience is something that is the proper domain of music—the words cannot in fact express, but only outline, the excitement and enjoyment that brings the speaker(s) so close to a sublime experience, and this all-important expression is incommunicable without the formal workmanship that gives the song its quasi-tangible state of being. A similar focus on music objects as the locus of transport seems to be at work in innumerable songs both in and out of the PIR studios. Taking an example further away from Gamble, Huff, and Bell offers a useful comparison. In Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You,” the point of view is female, and the construction of gender becomes an important subtext of the song. To begin, the physical location of the sound moves from PIR’s Philadelphia, with its strong connections to one strand of jazz and the major commercializations of rock’n’roll at the end of the 1950s, to the studios and the intricate professional scenes of Los Angeles. However we might try to differentiate between the dominant soul styles of Philly and LA, we would not choose degree of artifice as one of our criteria. Though Riperton had begun her career as a singer at Chicago’s Chess Records,

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she was a member of a black psychedelic group called Rotary Connection in the 1960s and moved on to become a solo artist in the 1970s. (Riperton’s career, like that of Linda Creed, was cut short by terminal breast cancer, and a significant part of her memory on the Internet emphasizes women’s health in general and breast cancer in particular.)32 Her brief success as a solo artist was facilitated through her close ties with Stevie Wonder, whom she met when Wonder attended the Chicago Black Expo in 1971; by all accounts, he was already impressed with her work as soloist in Rotary Connection and hired her to be part of his backup group Wonderlove in the following year. Riperton left Chicago for LA, touring as part of Wonderlove for two years, and was featured on Wonder’s 1974 release Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Of course, Wonder was constantly in a fever of musical development during the early 1970s; the artistic control he gained on his twenty-first birthday had meant that his relationship with Motown now took shape according to his interests, and those led him into a set of extraordinary experiments with multiple musical instruments and genres.33 Besides his own career as a composer and songwriter, he also sought avenues as a producer, and despite Motown’s resistance, found a way to co-produce and perform under the pseudonym “El Toro Negro” on part of Riperton’s 1974 album Perfect Angel; during the 1970s, he would emphasize his astrological sign of Taurus by way of self-characterization. Perfect Angel was Riperton’s most successful album in terms of sales and contained not only the title track, but also her most famous song, “Loving You.”34 Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the song as a whole is its layering of three semi-separate sonic planes in the accompaniment, the voice of the singer, and the taped birdsong. The differentiation of materials comes by a combination of timbre and register. Taking up the largest space within the song to provide the song’s background as well as details of its middle ground (once again, not in the Schenkerian sense), the accompaniment leans heavily on electric piano and synthesized strings, tending to blend into a hazy pan-diatonic stasis. Although there is a bass line, it is extremely simple; in the majority of the song the lowest instrumental voice articulates a simple descending diatonic tetrachord, from scale degree 4 down to the tonic in A major; the only element of contrast is the slightly longer bass line in the transitions, moving up from the supertonic twice to arrive at a deceptive cadence. The musical construction provides a grounding of carefully minimalized interest, and it is not surprising that the more heavily scored middle and upper registers tend to be the focus of attention. Riperton’s five-octave voice, the most famous

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feature of the song, is set off from the accompaniment by its position in the mix and its individuality as a human voice to constitute the second sonic plane of “Loving You.” The final layer of the song is the taped bird calls, present throughout. The degree of artifice in the other layers of the song might tempt us to imagine the bird song as mechanically produced, but what we hear contains enough internal variation to be taken as “real.” Its realness is second-order, however, the result of manipulating the natural sound source in the interests of musicalizing continuity. The failure of any real contrast between artifice and “the real world” is one central point of the song. Four decades or so later it is hard to recover an accurate sense of how strongly “Loving You” might be taken to disrupt important assumptions about the opposition between nature and culture that were terribly alive during the 1960s and 1970s. A fuller discussion of this topic would take a separate chapter, if not an entire book; for the purposes of this chapter, I want to suggest that the idea of nature and culture as ontologically separate domains was mostly foreign to black musicians, and when such contrasts appeared in soft soul, they were usually undermined to allow more subtle musico-poetic points to emerge. Although black musicians’ tendency to take nature and culture as a whole may have been in part because their primary audiences were only recently out of agriculture and so unpersuaded that the two were all that separate, it also may have arisen out of a more general sense of recreation, of release from constant politico-social struggle and its dualisms so that playfulness might enliven and complicate the subjectivities of listeners. What’s Going On, while centering itself around an attitude of political and social questioning, cautiously refrained from offering any solutions other than recommending a nonspecific spiritual intensity. Such reticence is not simply a way to avoid controversy, it also offers an interesting field for subjective exploration. In the case of “Loving You,” the problem with nature and culture creates a space and a set of conditions within which a certain form of human autonomy—call them music-language games—can be played. On the one hand, the song makes clear the priority of artifice as nature’s only mediator: the instruments are mostly synthesized and sound that way, so obviously bound up with an aesthetic of slick production values that they acquire a layer of expressive artificiality beyond themselves as part of the ornate whole; the bird is “opposed” to the accompaniment as the locus of natural expression. On the other hand, the song’s process of production calls these apparent conditions of meaning into disrepute: the synthesized instruments are probably present in the

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example 5. Conclusion of chorus from “Loving You.”

studio while Riperton is recording—they are “live”—while the bird is present in the studio only through the artifice of the tape recording. The tension between the two poles is the basis of Riperton’s freedom. Acting both as a singer in the proper sense of the term and as a producer of sheer sonority, she is able to hold technique and expression in a careful tension in which the distance between them gives her a field of movement whose exploration constitutes the subjective sense of the song. The most dramatic instance of Riperton’s productive in-between status comes at the end of the chorus, when she suddenly throws her voice upward in a legendary moment of coloratura, almost seeming to merge with the bird song (see example 5). Her voice, both nature and culture, is exactly what holds the opposed parts of the song together. This is a different kind of natural woman. At the same time that “Loving You” represents human subjectivity as balanced between expression and technique, it suggests that the proper medium through which to express this is music rather than words. Sheer sound takes the foreground of our ears. Words offer no competition. The content of the text, severely limited from the beginning of the song, has mostly to reinforce the minimal notion that “loving you is a very good thing.” The text’s cow-eyed rhyming impoverishes any verbal claims to interest even more; in Hallmarking the lyrics as content-free, Riperton has forced attention away from their semantics and toward their musical potentiality. The rhymes and textual mise-en-scène work with the music’s ground bass to construct a condition of otiose satisfaction with no past and little future. Verbs, for instance, stay in the present tense but for a minor dip into the future in the transition sections of the piece—“Stay with me while we grow old / And we will live each day in springtime”—that seems to come more as a response to the ascent of the bass line up to make a deceptive cadence than it does to any line of thought in the text. The steady dissolving of words into sonority in the chorus follows this process as a logical development. Only at the climaxes of register that close off the chorus, when words have fallen

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away completely, does Riperton’s vocal line forsake its teasing play between tonic and leading tone to rest firmly upon a cadence. The singer by implication claims that her present state is so powerful that its continuation only requires the continued presence of “you.” But her claim can only lead to the questions: What is this state, and what do “you” have to do with it? Starting with the obvious, this state is one of hyper-orgasmic bliss. The stasis of the song portrays Riperton’s continuous jouissance, enlivened now and then by brief spasms of extra intensity. Invoking Aretha Franklin again provides a helpful contrast. If “You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman)” reads like the description of a first satisfactory experience of orgasm, and it surely does, it nevertheless matters that the description is being offered as a tribute from the speaker to her lover. “Oh, Baby, what you done to me!” is an exclamation that leaves us intensely aware that some concrete activity occurred in the recent past; its ecstatic recollection moves Aretha Franklin so terrifically that it is easy to imagine her reaching out as if to her lover in the middle of the performance, carrying the song back into the all-encompassing physical joy whence it arose. By contrast, Riperton’s song, for all its apostrophes to “you,” is relatively unconcerned with the specifics of sexual transport and can exist whether the ostensible object of address is present or not. There is something curiously solipsistic, not to mention masturbatory, in “Loving You,” with its exalted drift just above quiescence. This inward intensity may need no sustenance other than its contemplation of itself; there’s no simple way to know. “You Make Me Feel Brand New” and “Loving You,” for all their obvious differences of construction and position, are united most fully in their assumption that ramifying subjectivity through individualized sensuousness is not only an acceptable activity but a positive good. What there is of a social world in each case matters only to the extent that it supports the interior quest; any of its injustices and disappointments must, at least for the time being, take second place to delighted explorations of the half-shades and hues of the self newly beflecked with and empowered by material fortune. It is an attitude very close to that found in the music of Barry White and reminds us that disco and soft soul might profitably be thought of as simply faster and slower versions of the same musical ethos. I have suggested that the intense fictionality of such songs might be taken as an implicit acknowledgment, internal to the repertory, of the music’s own limitations. It insists upon its fictional status in a

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sonic version of the liar’s paradox. Like all modest arts, however, it automatically becomes vulnerable to charges of triviality. The question of soft soul listenership, if we do not take the Jacobin answer that would simply dismiss all of the music as “kitsch” (whatever that word means), is how to create a complex space of audition within which this genre can be one of a larger ecology of genres. To conclude this discussion, I return to the cinematic, to the later soft soul hit “Theme from Mahogany.”

tailoring moralities Mahogany (1975) was supposed to be a huge hit. It was designed as a celebrity vehicle for Diana Ross, who had already won tremendous acclaim for her portrayal of Billie Holiday in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues.35 In Mahogany, Ross plays Tracy, an aspiring fashion designer discovered by international photographer Sean (Anthony Perkins in one of his signature crypto-queer psycho roles), turned into a model (the eponymous “Mahogany”), and taken off to la dolce vita (yes, we always choose the Hollywood-obvious) in Italy. Billy Dee Williams, who had enjoyed excellent on-screen chemistry with Ross in Lady, was cast as the earnestly aspiring politician Brian, whose steadfastness finally wins Tracy back to a life of rectitude and married stability in Chicago. What a story! Everything but the hounds snapping at her rear end. The sappy plot and the bewildering costumes (designed by Miss Ross, a testament to her inexperience in this field as well as to the general overexcitability of 1970s fashions) were only the largest of the defects that doomed the film.36 Motown had somehow lost its sure grip on American taste. In a sad reflection on the label during its floundering years, a couple of years after Mahogany had sunk in contumely, Gordy allowed the release of a scary single called “I’ve Never Been to Me” (1977), which purveys the same line of “OhI’ve-had-such-a-luxurious-life-but-I-hate-myself-for-missing-the-simplepleasures” ideology as the film, making it the delight of drag queen parodists everywhere.37 But even though it is easy to deride this kind of story line, whose timelessness was so obviously past, it was meant to speak to a real tension still alive within the black community, which had been newly enriched for a moment but already in 1975 could see its gains begin to vanish in the malign neglect of the government. The difficulty of reconciling a newly endangered collective future with that of individual aspiration is front and center in the film’s dialogue. Take this scene,

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soon after Tracy and Brian meet, where they stroll through a housing project: Brian: (Gesturing to empty buildings) My constituency. Tracy: But there’s no one here. Brian: Not anymore. It wasn’t much, but it was a neighborhood. I grew up here. Tracy: So, what happened to it? Brian: The same thing that’s happening to yours, it got all its guts sucked out of it. Something’s happening down here, something’s happening everywhere. A couple of years back, it looked like things were gonna change, but not only just for black people, but for everybody in, in the world that’s been ripped off, pushed around, or just born unlucky. Something’s gone, something . . . some kind of feeling for each other. Tracy: It’s hard to feel for each other when you can barely keep yourself up. Brian: Up? or out? That’s what you really want to do, isn’t it? Get out? Tracy: Out of here? You’re damn right I do. And I’m gonna do it, too. Is there anything wrong with that? I been around and I can see there’s a much better life than this. And I want it. Don’t you? Brian: Of course I do, Tracy, and I can understand your wanting to split. But most of these people don’t stand a chance in hell of going with you. Somebody’s got to stay and do the marching and the politicking, and the fighting to make this a better place of live. Tracy: And that’s you. Brian: That’s me.

Listening back to such commentary after the human costs that have come from the failure of the Great Society programs and the evil consequences of the ludicrous shadow-Prohibition called the “War on Drugs” is painful. Mahogany knows, perhaps better than most of its audience did in 1975, that the conditions that made its lifeworlds, that even made the film itself possible, are imperiled, but can see no way to rescue them. The changes that ended Brian’s old neighborhood began positively, in the hopes for prosperity that scattered the old collectivity into individual self-realization; when those hopes failed, the old structures that had provided for the tenacious sociability of that neighborhood were gone, and the ungrounded individualism of bounteous times suddenly looked dangerous. At the same time that Mahogany shows a powerful nostalgia for the interior stability of a pre–civil rights past, it also shows implicitly that its current situation is in some ways a necessary improvement. Tracy is

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the primary exponent of this position in the film, and it is clear that her feeling of satisfaction in her autonomy depends on her emancipation from sexism no less than from racism. Slightly later in the film, Brian accuses her of forgetting her race in her quest for material success, and she indignantly replies in terms that carry weight with respect to class and gender as well as to race: “One thing I can’t forget, and that’s how many times I’ve been told what I can’t do, where I can’t go, or why I can’t be different from anybody else. ’Cause that’s all I’ve had to keep track of all my life, from everybody. And I’m hopin’ that just this once I can forget that I heard it comin’ from you.” Individual aspiration and collective responsibility just won’t mix easily in Mahogany. But the film, true to its conservative narrative tastes, must make a judgment, and this is where poor Sean, the evil crypto-gay photographer, comes in. His interest in Tracy is unwholesomely sexual as well as aesthetic, and his mode of courtship is to appeal to her narcissism as well as her desire for the unknown. Italy becomes Tracy’s Oz, and even its decadent, sterile inhabitants (except for the mad Sean) are ultimately benign. It is after Tracy samples the luxuries of the fashion world, and after Sean shows her the potential prices that she may pay if she remains, that she can return to Brian and his dream of collective salvation. She does not seem sorry to have been on her adventure, fortunately, but the film wishes to reassure us that at least she can place it in a larger, more sober context. I have spent a fair amount of time discussing this problematic film because its theme song, lying somewhere between soft soul and the regular Hollywood style, incarnates the troubles the film’s plot makes so explicit. The song has excellent credentials for this kind of LA-soul blend, with lyrics by Gerry Goffin (the old Brill Building connection that mattered to PIR) and music by the important film musician (and later on music producer) Michael Masser.38 The question of the song’s first line— “Do you know where you’re going to?”—is arguably the question that was always up for consideration in soft soul; if the genre was much too strong to let go of, its luxuriousness still needed managing. No one could live by bonbons alone. But the song, perhaps making up for the crude closures of the film, posed a more delicate, thoughtful point of view in the ambiguating way that I would suggest always matters in the strongest soft soul songs. Consider the brittle gleams of the orchestration as read at this point: like the soft soul I have already discussed, the “Theme from Mahogany” is chock-full of technically charming sonic ornaments. After the pleasures of the timbral surface, the most distinctive qualities of the song come

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example 6. Postlude of “Theme from Mahogany.”

from the tug between its almost baroque reliance on the circle of fifths and the abrupt shifts by third that always frame those antiqued progressions. The initial gesture is a light bass note of Gb on the electric piano, over which glides an etiolated melody with sparkling inflections of bell tones. The bass notes progress steadily on the first beat of each measure in a faint reminiscence of basso continuo, in a pattern we easily hear as III/VI/iv7/V/I (a picardy third) in Eb minor/major.39 This phrase is simply doubled to form the chorus sections of the song, with occasional graceful hops as an extra short bar is added or the number of beats per measure shortens in a kind of metrical ornament. The introductory occurrence of the phrase acts mostly to establish the archetypal tonal motion for the song. But note that it is an odd place tonally for a pop song, especially because by the end of the phrase and the entrance of Diana Ross with the chorus proper, the picardy third becomes III of the song’s primary key, C minor/major. We know that this is the “real” key of the song because of the hard cross-relation that occurs when the music drops its C major triad to climb back onto Eb major, but also because when we reach the curiously unimpressive verses—“Once we were standing still . . .” and “Now, looking back at all . . .”—they distinctly tonicize G major, strengthening a dominant that would otherwise be lost in the drifts of third relations. These verses, we should note, are important as the temporally fixed sections of the song, counterposed to the tenseless but implicitly futuric questioning of the chorus; their tonal motion is considerably more direct—but less attractive. The more intuitive sounding third-relations parse the ruly circle of fifth motions into sections in ways ideally suited to the melody’s wispy, curvilinear path, and to the rhetorical effects of the lyrics as a series of questions that always end unanswered. The most important effect of the song, how-

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ever, is saved for the very end, a long postlude that works itself through three cycles of the chorus theme, progressing through picardy thirds or major mediants so that the melody can move through a minor third cycle to end as it began in Eb minor/major (see example 6). Wherever we are going, we are back where we started, with a sense of triumph that may be less deserved than it feels. It is not clear what kind of exploration this song means to articulate. That is its trouble, just as surely as it is the trouble of the film it is meant to emblematize. Recall Sandra Bernhard, whose trashy lounge singer may represent the kind of person Tracy/Mahogany could have become if her talent had been less, if her luck had been poor, if there had been no Brian, and most important, no screenwriter to save her. What changed for soft soul was neither goal nor technique, but ecosystem. Soft soul as a style made sense in a musical world of generic divisions directed to more specialized uses, themselves underwritten by a particular set of morally inflected economic relations. Though the world changed, the genre did not at first, perhaps because it had spent so much effort on making itself perfect within its frame. It had become the ideal vehicle for the exploration of a congeries of selfhood only as long as conditions could allow that selfhood to operate with minimal impedance. By the 1980s, soft soul found only limited places to tell its fictions. And yet there were and are still places. “Quiet storm” radio formats, parodic appropriations in comedy and commerce, ghostly echoes and full-out hauntings in modern R&B— like the disco of Barry White, soft soul keeps itself out of the grave by decanting itself into whatever genres wish to conjure up the potential richnesses of self-experience to be had in the variegations of pleasure.

chapter 4

The Audience and Barry Manilow

On February 5, 2002, Arista Records released Ultimate Manilow, a substantial retrospective album containing Barry Manilow’s greatest hits, mostly from the 1970s.1 Although a number of similar collections had been released during the 1980s and early 1990s, this latest production nevertheless debuted at number three on Billboard’s 200 chart and remained in the top 100 through August. To promote Ultimate Manilow as well as his 2001 multistyle concept album Here at the Mayflower, a tour drawing huge crowds ensued and led in turn to an intense burst of publicity in newspapers, magazines, and television. Press coverage of the albums and the concert appearances often emphasized the astonishing achievements of Manilow’s career thus far: a string of twenty-five topforty charting singles released consecutively during the middle 1970s and early 1980s; numerous professional awards, including three American Music Awards, two Grammy Awards, an Emmy, and a Tony (leaving aside the greater number of mere nominations); impressive working ties to renowned figures in the worlds of jazz and Broadway; well over fifty million records sold in total. This list could go on. By the turn of the new millennium, the weight of all this achievement was enough to stun an ox, not to mention a pasture full of journalists. But although stunned into near-reverence by such overwhelming evidence of Manilow’s preternatural durability at the box office, the journalists’ story seemed incomplete on its face. Barry Manilow has continued to be an enormous presence in the world of popular music: since 88

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the 2002 tour, there have been two albums in collaboration with his old friend Bette Midler, multiple television appearances and specials, several more solo albums, extended engagements in Las Vegas—a career that still, as they used to say in showbiz, “has legs.” So where did Barry Manilow get those legs? In seeking explanations, writers frequently find themselves speculating on a specific relationship to the audience that depended on an urgent desire to please. Every pitch, every gesture, every corny gag directed at the fans has usually seemed to show Manilow asking his fans, “Do you like this?” And maybe even, “Do you like me?”2 Asking such questions is a distinctly uncool thing to do, at least since the transmutation of image management in the entertainment business during the 1970s and early 1980s. When Sally Field won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1985 for Places in the Heart, she blurted out, “You really like me!” and became an object of mockery that persists to the present. Hollywood always lags behind the music industry; the neoromantic passions of much mid-1960s rock and soul had already turned the desire to please into a problematic stance for musicians at least ten years earlier. So when it came to coolness, Barry Manilow simply did not have it. He seemed never to have had it—and that was exactly why he was so successful. His permanent hokiness, by journalists’ implication, was the key to his enduring popularity. And apparently this still is the case. Such an account may seem like awfully faint praise, but nevertheless there is something bemusing but largely forgiving in the way this explanation is offered in recent press commentary. The largest difference between Manilow’s press reviews in the first decade of this century and in the 1970s comes from this change in tone. Any random survey of record and concert reviews from the 1970s is likely show a remarkable viciousness at work in the prose of many critics. Accusations of sentimentality and self-aggrandizement, a constant underlying condemnation of Manilow’s showbiz style, and denigrations of his abilities as a performer—all of these bespoke an intense contempt for him and his audiences alike. By contrast, journalists responding to the fervor that greeted Ultimate Manilow seemed willing to accept the loyalties of the audience at face value. But even so, they have spent less time than they might have in wondering about the specifics of that loyalty. What are the musical details that account for the fervor of Manilow’s fans? And who are these people, anyway? In this chapter, I explore some features that can help to account for the tenacious bond between Barry Manilow and his most loyal audiences.

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Central to this question is a dialectic between self-acknowledged fiction and an abiding sincerity that comes directly from Manilow’s affiliation with showbiz and his skills in negotiating the ambiguous world of the advertising industry. The sentimental style that he favored in his hugely successful 1970s ballads ensured Manilow an important fan base among women, but at the same time it brought perceptions of “unmanliness” to the fore among resistant listeners and critics. Necessarily entangled in Manilow’s soft image were questions of commercialism, musical integrity, and the shifts in gender relationships being negotiated throughout the 1970s.

commerce and barry manilow Barry Alan Pincus was born in Brooklyn in 1943. His mother’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants; his biological father was half Irish and half Jewish. Manilow’s first surname was in fact his paternal grandmother’s; his father took the name to lessen the objections of Manilow’s maternal grandmother to a mixed marriage. Manilow’s parents soon divorced and were severely estranged, and so he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents. (His mother changed his surname to hers a few months before his bar mitzvah.)3 His first instrument was the accordion, and he began his career by playing the borscht-belt standards that might have been expected of a Jewish kid in his place and time. According to his own recollection, the most important impetus toward Manilow’s later musical interests came from his mother’s second husband. William Murphy was an Irish American truck driver who had a passion for jazz and Broadway recordings, and he brought his stepson to this music with unfailing generosity. Manilow especially took to jazz standards quickly, as a real amateur: he loved the music so much that he was determined to learn how to write and to play it. Manilow has remembered learning Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” by ear because he was too poor to afford sheet music. Another particularly vivid anecdote concerns his enthusiasm for Judy Garland’s performance of “Carolina in the Morning”; he was so taken with the arrangement that he adapted several of its timbral and musical-dramatic aspects wholesale in many of his 1970s ballads. Henry Mancini and Nelson Riddle were also favorites. By contrast, Manilow has claimed virtually no interest in early rock’n’roll; when asked about later popular music, he has usually mentioned only artists like Laura Nyro (another songwriter influenced by standards) or the Beatles. While studying for an un-

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specified time at New York City College (night school), then at the Juilliard School, Manilow found a job at the CBS mailroom. While there, he also sought out accompanying work with singers, which led to commissions to write jingles for television commercials.4 Manilow’s experience as a jingle writer was clearly invaluable to his later career because the practical problems of jingle writing are not all that different from any number of thematically functioning musical gestures. A jingle often consists of a tag or motto from either the climax or the cadential material of an entire pop song, though in many cases the jingle is prior to its frame; during the 1960s and 1970s, this song was almost always in the style of Tin Pan Alley or one of its Brill Building descendents. Nevertheless, the jingle itself enjoys a relative autonomy from the rest of the song, since it is the only portion likely to be fully audible in the commercial. It must be instantly recognizable and memorable. It must also wed itself as firmly as possible to the product it is evoking. Emotional and musical complexity as well as potential narrative significance must be condensed or elided—but not discarded entirely, or the jingle would probably fail. So far, the task is nearly identical to that of inventing any number of musical fragments: a pop song hook, a really good symphonic theme, an important film cue, a leitmotif. The primary difference between a jingle and these other musical subgenres is the autonomy required for commercial efficacy. Manilow has noted that “you have twenty-eight seconds to get the message across . . . I usually write about ten jingles, and the one I remember the easiest is the one I hand over to the company that wants it.”5 He proved to be an excellent jingle writer, as two examples will show. The old television theme for State Farm Insurance is instantly familiar to anyone who watched TV during the 1970s. For that matter, it has become so identified with the company that it has been reused in different musical contexts in later State Farm commercials; most recently, it appears in TV spots as a kind of summoning spell, where people in trouble recite the opening phrase and an agent suddenly pops into the frame like a jinni out of a bottle (see example 7). The lyrics offer up the fiction of old-fashioned small-town relationships to persuade us that State Farm is at heart a bunch of regular folks who can be counted on at all times.6 (This is perhaps implausible to many subsequent listeners, but the words explicitly promise only the company’s presence, not its help!) Manilow’s tune takes the potentially rustic imagery of the lyrics and offers something more urbanely poignant, which is a matter of significant musical craft. The tune falls into

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example 7. “State Farm” jingle.

two primary phrases with an antecedent-consequent relationship. The consequent phrase can easily be extended to make an acceptable cadence, or it can simply repeat in the manner of a pop-song outro. The initial phrase of the melody ascends up through an octave, with a crucial appoggiatura on the leading tone, over a heart-tugging set of soft jazzy chords. An additional luscious dissonance is created by the G that is suspended over this dominant, and its energy allows the melody to vault into its yearning cadential turn around B, repeated as often as desired. The underlying harmony then shifts between B minor seventh and C major seventh in an endless bittersweet rocking. Although we never have a tonic sonority, we know where it is—we project it into a future, when our present troubles have been eased. In its scrupulous attention to text setting, Manilow’s jingle works to establish a sense of refuge from trouble. The triplet that sets the opening syllables of the verbal formula is well matched to the normal pronunciation time in standard American English; the stressed syllables of “neighbor” both anchor the simile and provide it with enough delay to excite our desire to hear its completion. The cadential phrase is again a combination of three lazier syllables followed by a long word, which confirms the primary rhythmic shape of the slogan while again fitting its characteristic diction.7 In the entire jingle, then, our attention is focused on the image of the State Farm as a company that is also our friend. If Manilow’s State Farm tune persuades us by its self-evidently imaginary nostalgia (as opposed to the familiar naturalized kind), his equally immortal Band-Aid jingle goes the other way (see example 8). It seeks to amuse us with a witty regression to childliness (not childishness). Again, the words summon the tune immediately: “I am stuck on BandAid, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me.” It is likely that the retro imagination will remember more of this tune because it was usually played and sung through most of the time allotted to the television spot. Some of the characteristics that made Manilow’s State Farm music so memorable also apply in this case: the detailed observance of natural speech rhythms, which makes the childlike bluntness of the brand name and the “Scotch snap” of the second “stuck on” so charming; and the way that the rhythms of the first consequent

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example 8. “Band Aid” jingle.

phrase echoes and amplifies the pattern of its antecedent. The memorability of the entire melody and its daffy juvenility depends on Manilow’s repeated use of the rhythmic model of the first antecedent-consequent pair in the rest of the song and on the clarity of his melodic and tonal goals. (Most of these features are common in American children’s songs.) In the State Farm music, we were not necessarily clear about our location; we recognized a secure goal, but it was deferred beyond the bounds of the song. In the Band-Aid tune, we always know where we are: stuck in place. A happy place! It is important to be clear, however, that we are not dealing with a children’s song as such, but rather with a deliberately jokey fantasy of childhood. The Band-Aid song works hard to proclaim itself as trivial artifice even while clutching our musical memories in a death grip. If it were not at once transparently ephemeral and ineradicable, it would have less chance of getting us to buy Band-Aids. Neither Manilow nor his employers wish to make us believe that we have actually returned to the state of children. Instead, they wish us to recreate mentally what it must have been like to experience a feeling of reparation through the distancing abstraction of goofy humor. We had been hurt, we are now on the mend, and most importantly, we have no fear that our past injury will suddenly haunt us anew. It is an awful lot to ask of a sticky strip of plastic with a little bit of gauze attached, but there it is. The jingle succeeds because persuades us musically not to forget it even while we avoid taking it (or ourselves) too seriously. Manilow’s success as a jingle writer and performer led to a perennial hit in his live shows entitled “Very Strange Medley.” This is a commercial quodlibet, a compilation of advertising songs that Manilow either composed or sang in their original broadcast versions. Besides the two

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jingles I have just discussed, other memorable tunes in the medley include those for McDonald’s (“you deserve a break today”), Stridex acne medications (“give your face something to smile about”), Kentucky Fried Chicken (“get a bucket of chicken”), and Pepsi (“join the Pepsi people / Feelin’ free, feelin’ free”). The medley appeared on the 1977 album Manilow Live!, and the accolades of the crowd are audible throughout. The very existence of “Very Strange Medley” raises interesting questions about commercialism. It is not entirely clear how we should interpret the significance of the various products in the quodlibet. Obviously, Manilow is not trying to use “Very Strange Medley” to increase the sales of the products to which the jingles had originally been attached. It may be that Manilow counts on the music’s ability to summon the ingratiating visual images that originally accompanied it. If this is the case, then part of the pleasure of the listener comes from identifying (with) the virtues of the brand name being extolled so vigorously. This would perhaps recover the mercantile purpose of the jingles through the back door. But detached from the context of televisual flow, the jingles float free of their original purpose. Thus unmoored, they are available for a much campier kind of display. The joyousness of “Very Strange Medley” seems to arise from a kind of musical perversity. This was use-music par excellence, but in the quodlibet it has been wrenched out of its useful locations and turned to the purpose of allowing Manilow, with a certain amount of implicit ambivalence, to show off his achievements as a jingle writer, his power to transvalue his own music. The change in purpose is all the more plain to listeners because of the hints of self-parody and eagerness to please in Manilow’s performance. The original jingles sought to seduce potential customers with the implicit promise that consumption would bolster self-esteem. Now resituated in the medley, the glorious products take a back seat to the even more glorious salesman who has made them so attractive. We identify with—or do we desire? is there a difference?—his power to make us want what he wants us to want. The florid narcissism that ricochets back and forth in this triangular relationship will never be stable; the play of identification and desire necessarily shifts around in the headiest of manners. The intensities of our engagements may have the problematic effect of sending us all to the store after the album is ended to load up on snack foods and personal care products. But just maybe the incoherent bliss that comes from the confusion of seductions gives us a chance to win a space for less determinate desires. Often

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enough in life we have no choice but to be seduced; sometimes we have the freedom to choose our seducers.

practices of the epicene Even though Manilow enjoyed significant success in television commercials at the beginning of the 1970s, he still sought work as an arranger and accompanist. He worked as a musical director in New York area stage shows as well as television productions, and continued taking engagements at clubs and other spaces for cabaret performance. The Continental Baths was one of the most influential of these venues.8 Opened in 1967 by opera singer and businessman Steve Ostrow in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel at Broadway and 75th Street, the Continental Baths was among the most dramatic institutions to flourish in Manhattan in the initial phase of gay liberation that followed the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969. As the New York Police Department became increasingly unable to continue its long-standing tradition of harassing sexual minorities, bars and bathhouses alike moved out of the underground economy in which they had been trapped. Although the Continental Baths’ primary purpose was to allow gay men to meet sexual partners in a space relatively free from fear of arrest, it rapidly became famous because Ostrow had created an establishment on a much more generous scale. There were certainly locations in which to have sex, but there were also saunas, an Olympic-sized pool, a disco, a VD (venereal disease) clinic, and a cabaret. The Baths could hold upward of one thousand patrons and was open 24/7. Ostrow decided that live entertainment could become an important part of the draw, so he worked hard to secure performers that he thought would appeal to his urban gay male clientele. Musicians such as Melba Moore, Cab Calloway, and even the American soprano Eleanor Steber agreed to give concerts to groups of enthusiastic men who were usually clad only in white towels. (Steber’s performance was billed as a “black towel” event.) Ostrow’s ploy was a triumph: the Continental Baths became a celebrity and tourist site (and surely one of the models for Studio 54 later in the decade). Bloomingdale’s even sold souvenirs in the form of “Continental Baths” towels! So many straight onlookers came for the frisson of cabaret-enveloped-in-a-haze-of-promiscuity, however, that they began to interfere with the serious business of the main patrons: cruising. By 1974, most of the gay clientele had left in exasperation. The Continental Baths closed the following year.

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Manilow had found work at the Continental Baths as a piano player in 1970. A modest (not to say geeky) young man, he found the heady sexual atmosphere of the Baths at first disconcerting, but then intensely liberating. In the era of AIDS, sometimes it is hard to recall the insouciance with which many people greeted the sexual revolution in its first serious days. The advent of the Pill as well as the insignificance of STDs—antibiotics made them no more than an inconvenience—made all forms of sexual activity available for exploration and personal development. Sex could be at once more and less serious. This carried over into attitudes about related forms of physical and emotional openness, regardless of sexual attachments or desires.9 The liberatory ethos of the Continental Baths thus created a space in which a hyper-expressive style of performance could be welcomed as part of this general exploration of individual world making. Enter Bette Midler, recently departed from her three-year gig on Broadway as Tzeitel in Fiddler on the Roof and back from playing Mrs. Walker and the Acid Queen in a Seattle production of Tommy. Midler was interested in creating a cabaret act and began to work at the Continental Baths in 1971. She was soon directed to Manilow and arranged to meet him for rehearsal. Manilow remembered the occasion as fraught: “She was my mother, my grandmother, and all of my female relatives rolled into one, with my high school biology teacher, Mrs. Wurzel, thrown in for good measure. She was every Jewish boy’s nightmare come to life.”10 Given his background, it is not surprising that he soon adored her. Midler’s astonishingly frenetic, campy, gutter-minded performance style, built out of Sophie Tucker impersonations and bawdy gay humor, fascinated Manilow. He was spellbound by her repertoire, an assortment of renovatory takes on girl-group songs, standards, and other largely discarded music, along with wild histrionics.11 The coruscating play of highly artificial emotions was one of the chief delights of these performances.12 Consider Midler’s complex covers of girl-group songs. The girl groups of the early 1960s most often sang about idealized constructions of teenage emotional life, especially love for “the boy.” The singers were usually presented in highly elaborate trappings of “niceness,” with exquisite attention to visual details like hair, makeup, and dress that supported the sonic details of timbre, arrangement, and accent. Such an image was necessary since so many girl groups were African American and thus automatically lower in the American class hierarchy. They required extra audible and visual social support to get a hearing from the early 1960s mainstream.13 In addition, however, the implicit mismatch

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between a girl group’s glossy, well-mannered exterior and what was to be assumed about the girls themselves because of the usual stereotypes of class and race added an intensity to their performances that was safe because it was always deniable. One only saw the tension between decorum and unruliness that one wanted to. The 1964 song “Leader of the Pack,” for instance, was originally performed by the Shangri-Las. The unstable class image of the Shangri-Las was much closer to the surface than that of most other girl groups because of their whiteness; the Shangri-Las’ proletarian origins were more legible to mainstream audiences. Even more important than their visual aspect was their unadjusted working-class New York speech. Moreover, the song itself dramatizes the problems of “badness” and female independence. The song’s primary narrator, “Betty,” submits to the wishes of her parents and breaks up with the “Leader,” but her liaison with him and his accidental death because of her has won her freedom of thought and a special distinction among her peers. The story of the lyrics, already a clever play on the sensationalistic discourse of juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, is taken to the camp sublime by the over-the-top arrangement, with its hokey opening melodrama (we want to believe that the ShangriLas’ unpersuasive acting is intentional) and the hilarious literalism of its motorcycle noises. The disjunction between ostensible fluffiness and serious questions about autonomy for teenage girls gave the song an impact all the more potent because it was sub rosa. These layers of interpretive potential are still present in Midler’s cover—since she relies on our memories of the Shangri-Las’ original— but they are not actually audible. In the manifest content of her performance Midler creates an “uncover” version. The anger and desperate sexual frustration that was carefully submerged behind the ShangriLas’ arrangement is on the surface of La Midler’s performance, most notably through the introduction of a stronger rock idiom. The ornamental features of the original mostly disappear, replaced with new material that heightens the song’s obsessive potential. Still, Midler’s revelation of subtext is ostentatiously calculated. However “real” we may want to make it feel, we always remember that it is still another performance. And even if we did not realize that fact while we were caught up in the individual number, the song’s presence in the larger complexities of the entire performance would ensure that in retrospect; we would recognize it as a supreme fiction (or even a fiction of the Supremes). The emotional mise en abyme that can result is one of the most powerful

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effects of the kind of camp Midler derived from her gay audience— perhaps its visceral point. Midler’s taste for reworking older musical numbers matched Manilow’s musical interests and skills perfectly. By musical upbringing, he preferred pre-rock pop music in any case, and he was especially attracted to the craft of arranging. His time with Midler allowed him to understand the nuances of her cabaret manner so deeply that he was her ideal accompanist. Then, too, Midler’s extroverted delivery gave the extremely shy Manilow further crucial lessons in how to revamp older aesthetic modes for 1970s audiences. He signed on as her pianist, arranger, and music director for her early national tours and persuaded her to allow him time in her act to perform some of his own songs.14 One might think that the sophisticated gay men who delighted in the Divine Miss M would have hooted Manilow’s overwhelming sincerity off the stage. But this was an audience that could easily appreciate the earnest fictions that his music favored. The wild proto-constructionism of campy artifice always has an essentialist belief in deep and true feeling as the reverse side of the medal.15 It was precisely because of their awareness of the subjunctive quality—the “as if”—of images on stage that the gay men at the Continental Baths were in a perfect position to commit themselves to believing in them anyway. As an example, consider one of the songs Manilow played at the Baths and on Midler’s tours. “Could It Be Magic?” was released on the album Barry Manilow (1972) and then adjusted for release again as part of Barry Manilow I (1975).16 Although I will discuss the song’s dramatic structure in more detail later in this chapter, now I want to call attention to the way that it participates in a stylistic hybridization parallel to those of Bette Midler, even while it constructs singerly sincerity. “Could It Be Magic?” is most famous for its reworking of Frédéric Chopin’s grandly sonorous C-minor Prelude, Opus 28, No. 20. Unlike similar songs such as Eric Carmen’s 1975 hits “All By Myself” and “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” (both based on popular concert works by Sergei Rachmaninoff), Manilow’s arrangement makes its connection to its classical model into an important part of the song’s field of potential meaning.17 Chopin’s Prelude No. 20 is the easiest one in the entire twenty-four prelude set; even a pianist of limited skill can march through it with at least superficially satisfactory results. Although the melody is actually quite intricate in its dependence on the piece’s contrapuntal fabric, its reliance on blockily regular phrasing and the decorous control of har-

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mony nevertheless creates an impression of immediacy that makes it a favorite of those who seek expensive effects at a reasonable cost. And yet those enriched harmonies and ceremonious octaves continue to thrill the ear. There is a stagey balance between accessibility and craft that makes this little piece the epitome of salonisme. It is a canny little gem, and we like it all the more because we all relish its self-consciousness. The energy of Chopin’s involuted directness appears at the opening of “Could It Be Magic?” because Manilow begins with a quotation of the opening eight bars of the prelude. He ends the song in the same way, with a short return to Chopin’s music. If we had piano lessons (as accomplished little girls or as effete little boys in danger of being called sissies), we probably remember the prelude, a staple of what Joseph Kerman once called “the piano teacher’s rabbit hutch.” Manilow’s use of Chopin is meant to mobilize just those energies that Kerman swatted at with such genial contempt: the reverence characteristic of middlebrows thirsty for high culture, people who call Shakespeare “The Bard,” and mean it. They are all the descendents of T. S. Eliot’s Lady who thought Chopin “so intimate . . . that I think his soul / Should be resurrected only among friends / Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom / That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.” After the opening eight bars’ quotation, Manilow is ready to rub. In public. By proceeding into a lush pop song built out of the Chopin prelude, Manilow executes an uncovering that is structurally similar to Midler’s deconstructions of girl-group songs. By implication, Manilow’s song excavates what Chopin “really” meant. It articulates an affective complex composed of equal parts yearning desire and melancholy, laying bare Chopin’s subtext in an updated orchestration and form. Manilow’s voice in all of his performances is not audibly “trained”: his vibrato is always minimal, and inconsistently present at that; his vowels are not uniform; sometimes he strains a bit and has a little crackle in his tone when singing softly in his upper register; when singing loudly, he tends to shout. These are all exceedingly good features for his purposes because they instantly signal sincerity and encourage us to identify the singer with the matter of his songs. Many details of the lyrics are available to support this identification. In “Could It Be Magic?,” for instance, the mention of “sweet Melissa” is the sort of unmoored particular that encourages biographical interpretation (it has been said that the name refers specifically to Melissa Manchester, one of Midler’s backup singers in the early 1970s. It really does not matter whether Manchester is the correct reference, only that we

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have the interpretive room to imagine that she is). This personalization, intense but nonspecific, allows us to luxuriate in a pleasurable delirium of overtly artificial sincerity. To return to the epicene precincts of the Continental Baths: lots of audiences are aware of the contingencies of representation, but believe in those representations all the same. There is nothing so unusual in the position of gay men, is there? Perhaps only to the extent that as spectators on the margin, they have often been interested in noticing and spelling out the arbitrariness and internal incoherence of what we could call, to borrow a phrase, the dominant fiction of gender roles in the modern West.18 Most minority groups are in a position to see ideological details invisible to their culture’s majority, of course; the assumptions and habits (institutions, laws, customs, certainly representations) that keep the marginal ones in their places can be disentangled or unpacked for critique’s sake. But revealing the artifice does not necessarily detract from its power to shape our sensibilities. We often continue to love, hopelessly, the things that harm us. And so we will often keep the things we love in ambivalence, treasuring them while seeking to neutralize their power to wound. This equivocacy was a central value in Bette Midler’s extravagant stylizations of glamorously faded femininity. And I think this elaborate play of visual and sonic images reinforced the lessons in theatricality that Manilow had already absorbed from the highly cultivated jazz and Broadway traditions as well as from the protean flickers in advertising’s fables of consumer desire. Such elaborations of style are transparent fictions, but often in our demotic listening habits we adopt them as keys to our own apparently deep feelings. And maybe they even help our feelings become what we want them to be. “This song is my life.” I cannot count the number of times someone has said this to me, usually in choke-voiced earnestness, when we have been listening together to the radio. I believe them. Of course, a nearinfinite number of underlying contradictions and qualifications are behind such an assertion—I have gestured toward some of them already, and I think that we always know the provisional status of our claims to identification. In our more severe moods, we condemn these attitudes as mere wish fulfillment. Although false consciousness, to use the old Marxist term, certainly exists, it has never been all that easy to sort out its positive and negative moments. We now come back to the problems of music’s truth and falsity addressed briefly in chapter 3. If a song “is my life,” how do I (or does anyone) know the large-scale moral effects of

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my identification? We may wish to be suspicious of the manifest hyperbole with which such cries come from the heart. However, we lose the greater part of our ability to account for the desire that inheres in a song when we forget to keep passion’s surface in mind. In examining such passionate surfaces, we come back to issues of gender and sexuality. Everyone knows that musical histrionics feel different depending on whether they are performed by a woman or a man. According to Western traditions (and not exclusively them), women are supposed to be creatures of artifice; Greek philosophers, church fathers, and the poets have endlessly put forward images of femininity as that which is by definition constructed. Explicating this tradition in her essay “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” psychoanalyst Joan Riviere attempted to show how artifice could constitute both the interior and exterior senses of femininity.19 One of the corollaries drawn from Riviere’s explanation is that masculinity works by seeming unmarked—to perform masculinity in any noticeable way immediately casts doubt upon its genuineness. Male performers are thus automatically suspect unless they arm themselves with strategies that neutralize the gender trouble that arises merely from being on stage. Turning more specifically to popular music, as long as the assumptions of showbiz endured, masculinity was unlikely to be threatened by the contingencies of femininity—if a sudden disturbance in the gender equilibrium occurred, it could nevertheless be neutralized. For Frank Sinatra to perform a standard was relatively safe because it was, after all, “only entertainment.” Furthermore, Sinatra’s remarkable gifts as a singer allowed him to create just enough illusion of artlessness that audiences could avoid noticing the care that he took in crafting his performances. And finally, potentially anxious audience members could use the details of Sinatra’s manly biography to shore up their identification with Frank as a “real man.” What of Barry Manilow? By the early 1970s, Sinatra’s strategies were unavailable. The musical ecosystem had altered drastically, and the advent of rock as created by the counterculture placed enormous weight on the notion of authenticity. Therefore, among other things, masculinity needed to appear unmarked more than ever; stylistic and performance conventions had to seem to arise spontaneously from inner depths as well. This already presented a problem for the aging Sinatra and his descendents, but to make matters worse for Manilow, his skills were closer to Midler’s than to Sinatra’s. His masculinity could only appear as marked, and his conventionality was everywhere apparent. In the eyes and ears of the stern tastemaker cadres in the rock audience, Manilow could only

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seem inauthentic and unmasculine. The practices of listening that I have described as right for Manilow or Midler could only be marginal to them. Among more intemperate writers, the position was clear: Barry Manilow needed to be dismissed, and violently. The connection between Midler and Manilow points to the persistent, complex relationship that has prevailed between women and the troublesome figure of the “sensitive man.” Although such men have often been gay, they have not always been. Effeminacy in its various incarnations is a problematic category in the West because it has signified contradictory things: you are a “womanish” man because you desire either to “have” women or to “be” them. But effeminacy is usually discussed with an eye to disentangling the male identities that fall under its rubric. What if we turn it around to consider not the “soft” man, but the women who love him?

women of a certain age Early in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a journalist at a Barry Manilow concert observed a distinctive demographic profile in the audience. “It’s mostly women, in the 40-to-55 range. Manilow arrives in a restrained-for-him blue three-piece suit, and starts the night with a message to the husbands who’ve been herded here by their wives.” And lest we imagine that the ambience is genteel or even staid, he further observes that “there’s an air of lusty delirium in the audience, and [Manilow’s] shticky banter is designed in part to goose the pheromones out there. ‘I’ve done this 5,000 times with 5,000 women,’ he says after inviting a lady onstage to duet on ‘Can’t Smile without You.’ ”20 A casual survey of such things as Internet lists will reveal the same sort of demographic. In a quick glance through several discussion groups, I determined that among Barry Manilow fans, women seem to outnumber men at a ratio of at least four to one. And a large number of these women are securely ensconced in middle age. Although they are not the only audience Barry Manilow has, these women are surely the most important. What is it about women of a certain age that makes Barry Manilow such a potent figure? Imagine the archetypal character of this older generation as one that somehow seems especially typical of the later 1960s and 1970s. She was at that time in her later thirties, forties, possibly her fifties; her children were at least adolescents, if not grown and gone; her husband was at best an oaf, at worst a monster—or perhaps she had been divorced from

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him and he somehow landed on his feet; she either continued to work as a housewife with insufficient resources or was stuck in a miserable lowprestige job and still had to do the housework as well. When this woman was younger, she often depended on radio romance to get by, as if she were one of Karen Carpenter’s shadows; she might still have wished for refuge in the images of warmth and caring offered by easy listening pop songs. Her mother might have loved Liberace. For the same reasons, she would love Barry Manilow or other equally romantic male singers. Her daughter might end up loving more recent versions of the same kind of performer, including later incarnations of Barry Manilow himself. For instance, take the mother of one of my old friends, a divorced woman who left her marriage with nothing, but nevertheless put herself through college (and graduate school) while she was in her late forties. She once drove her daughter nearly to murder one drunken evening by spending about six hours (beginning around 9 p.m.) repeatedly and loudly playing Kenny Rogers’s 1980 hit “Lady” (written by Lionel Richie) in order to copy out the lyrics and commit them to memory. What is funny about the story is of course the thought of such massive selfabsorption and obsessiveness as it is passed on to everyone else within auditory range. It is often hilarious to tell stories about a time when someone’s craziness made the people around them equally crazy. But these things move us when we recognize the brute importance of such music as a promise (at least in fantasy) of the comfort and understanding altogether absent in the day to day. And, I repeat, if these women might seem on one level to be investing these “trivial” songs with an absurd degree of value, their behavior is no different from what everyone else does with other equally ordinary parts of our worlds. The difference in this case is that the women in question are stuck in a place of supreme social disadvantage, disempowered from all sides by those who look for an authenticity that seems to come from alienation expressed with maximum theater. Women like my friend’s mother comprised one of the main audiences for the “second wave feminism” of the 1960s, and one of the signal events of that movement’s inception was the late Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, Friedan’s polemic riveted a generation of suburban women who had been carefully schooled in the profoundly damaging protocols of post-WWII American femininity. Friedan began her study by defining a “problem with no name”: among the upwardly mobile white population that made up her core audience, depression, anxiety, and various consequent addictions had been skyrocketing during

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the 1950s. The observation was not Friedan’s alone: in 1959 and 1960, major news magazines and women’s journals published frequent articles discussing this crisis in the ideology of femininity. The women that everyone wanted to sell to just weren’t buying. They were too depressed to spend. The malaise of these women increased whenever they measured their own dissatisfactions against the rosy image of feminine perfection propagated by popular culture and the state, both of whom lauded the archetype of the suburban homemaker as one who “had it all.” Friedan’s description of this perfect world took on the middlebrow 1950s rhetoric of American prosperity in deadpan viciousness: “The American housewife— freed by science and labor-saving appliances from drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of.”21 Some fifty years after Friedan’s attack on such descriptions of feminine identity as it was so dreamily presented in America, it is easy to see their weak points. A freedom that so quickly reduces to consumerism is already impoverished. But it is offered as the only acceptable form of subjective agency for these women, trying to make up for the hopeless task of matching real life to the fiction of perfect domestic femininity. Its inadequacy is patent. Hollywood melodramas might have offered at least an illustration of the woman’s plight, but when the films ended, women still had to go home. Doctors prescribed pills, women added liquor, but drugs didn’t work. Marriage counseling (including sex therapy) and volunteer activities around the community and the schools, even when available as options, turned out to be little better. The American psychiatric establishment of these years, frequently harmful to women, nevertheless offered some palliative therapy and an occasional useful diagnosis. Friedan quotes one writer who points up the failure of idealized marital sexuality as a solution to the wounds inflicted on women in their attempts to conform to an impossible identity: “We have made woman a sex creature . . . She has no identity except as a wife and mother. She does not know who she is herself. She waits all day for her husband to come home at night to make her feel alive. And now it is the husband who is not interested. It is terrible for the women, to lie there night after night, waiting for her husband to make her feel alive.”22

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What this psychiatrist points to is perhaps an inevitable result of the United States’ postwar experiment in social engineering. Through careful use of economic advantages and ideological persuasion, the American government and its allies in the business world helped to manufacture a new social entity. The white suburban nuclear family lived in their detached single-family dwelling, free of excessive multigenerational entanglements and regional loyalties, blind to class, increasingly heedless of creed other than a denatured patriotism, ready to move upward and outward to follow an expanding dream of commerce and the American Way. The psychological costs to men were great. For women, the costs were even greater, and by the early 1960s they were increasingly too much to bear. If family is reduced to the husband and kids, if work outside the house is to be avoided, if community entanglements are to be controlled, then can sexual bliss perhaps anchor a woman’s identity, securing a sense of self through fusion with her husband? From Friedan’s point of view, the attempt to solve the problem through marriage and sex was damning. The marriage age was an average of 20 for women by the end of the 1950s, and still dropping; educational authorities were urging high schools to introduce “preparation for marriage” classes as part of the standard curriculum; the birthrate was high; three out of ten women in this population persistently dyed their hair blonde! After Friedan’s initial presentation of “the problem with no name,” she moves on to her real task in The Feminine Mystique: to show the origin of this identity crisis as well as its metastasis throughout American culture. In a brilliantly simple approach, Friedan examined issues of the major women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and the Women’s Home Companion, noticing changes in advertising and story content. In the 1930s, these journals were apt to carry stories (mostly written by women) about women who worked as well as articles of general intellectual interest. In the crucial year of 1949, an enormous shift of content remade women’s periodicals. Suddenly, reams of essays appeared about the joys of motherhood and staying home, “beauty tips” that promulgated a narrow and strenuous vision of female attractiveness, articles that proclaimed women’s inability to manage the complexities of the public world, and almost no articles that brought substantive matters of thought to wider attention.23 From the concrete examples furnished in its survey of women’s magazines, The Feminine Mystique moves on to offer alternative models from the history of struggles for women’s rights in America and Europe before sketching a grim gender history of the United States after World

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War I. The book critiques orthodox Freudian views on femininity (mostly as they were understood within the mainstreaming psychological institutions of Cold War America) and argues that Freudianism’s presence in American social sciences has been deleterious in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and, most of all, education. Friedan accurately connects the appeal of this model to the collective traumata of the Great Depression and World War II (as well as the economic dysfunctions that spurred the development of consumerist ideologies).24 Abundant anecdotes demonstrate the housewifely anomie that results from this history, focusing on the idea that this suburban population had mostly chosen (or been compelled to choose) the possibility of sexual fulfillment as the locus of its sense of subjectivity. Certainly, the popular romance novel as it emerged from the “gothic” paperback line during the 1960s offered itself as a partial remedy to the sexual dissatisfaction of Friedan’s women.25 For Friedan, the satiation of the libido was not likely to resolve the problems of the feminine mystique. She was more hopeful about educational programs (including “a new GI Bill”) and significant work outside the home, along with organized struggle to reshape the ideology of femininity. The genuine improvements that second wave feminism eventually did make in many women’s economic and educational situations did not necessarily sort out the links between subjectivity and sexual desire. Since a crucial aspect of women’s rights hinged on reproductive control, the question of sexual experience remained central to female identity. The work of the women’s movement, along with the full emergence of gay and lesbian activism, inevitably highlighted the perceived value of erotic liberation. Commerce adapted to this new dispensation. David Reuben’s 1969 bestseller Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask initiated a cascade of sexual self-help books that reached the top ten on annual booksellers’ lists.26 (These lists also included an assortment of treatises on open marriage, the latest thing in “with it” 1970s lifestyles.) The flood of sex manuals was not just a liberal or secular phenomenon. The self-consciously “progressive” ideals of the sexual revolution could easily be interpreted in self-consciously “conservative” terms, most obviously in the ephemerally notorious book The Total Woman, the number one best-selling nonfiction book in 1974.27 The erotically overheated atmosphere of popular culture in the early 1970s hints at a central problem facing Friedan’s principal audience; although it was clearly necessary for women to gain greater autonomy, most of the women dedicated to “having it all,” in

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Helen Gurley Brown’s immortal phrase, did not want to go without a primary heterosexual commitment. A satisfactory relationship with a man that entailed full sexual and emotional satisfaction seemed to be an essential source of the self-esteem and therefore a woman’s sense of subjective autonomy. (The women’s movement struggled mightily with the question of lesbianism on these grounds.) Attempts to direct male self-perceptions toward a closer alliance with second wave feminism became significant by the mid-1970s. Books such as Warren Farrell’s The Liberated Man: Beyond Masculinity—Freeing Men and Their Relationships with Women (1974) and Herb Goldberg’s The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege (1976) actively sought to reinvent masculinity on the grounds that traditional American gender roles were harmful to men as well as to women.28 The male feminism of such celebrities as Phil Donohue and Alan Alda was not far behind. Manifestos and public figures were partially successful at best, however. Men who were heavily invested in older standards of masculinity found most of the 1970s models variously threatening or laughable, while women were quick to notice that men’s new claims to greater emotional freedom did not automatically make them less exploitative or sexist. Attempts to address this issue can be found in the magazine rack of virtually any supermarket checkout line to this day, not to mention the ceaseless round of web pages. (It is worth remembering that the market for the romance novel, which spends considerable energy on representing such difficulties, exploded in the wake of Rosemary Rogers’s 1974 ur-“bodice-ripper,” Sweet Savage Love. And though the popular romance line Harlequin dates from the beginning of the 1950s, business was exceptionally strong after 1970.) If men who were genuinely sensitive to women’s concerns remained uncommon in everyday life and if the romance novels eventually palled, there was always music. Frank Sinatra may be said to represent one performance strategy: he appealed to women on the strength of his striking good looks and his romantic ballads, while remaining possible for men to admire because of his swinger persona and sometimes rather edgy songs. Liberace represents another: a floridly effeminate mama’s boy, he surrendered any claim to male respect, counting on female adoration and the glamour of a rhinestone closet to protect him from adverse consequences.29 From early on Barry Manilow fell somewhere between these two poles. On the one hand, he avoided flamboyant sexual eccentricity; his performances, although showy, never resorted to gender-bending or

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sexual transgression. On the other, he avoided staking claim to a heavyduty manliness and demonstrated an attentiveness to women that perhaps bespoke crypto-mama’s boy status to uneasy critics. In fact, Manilow’s own accounts of his childhood indicate that his mother and grandmother were the dominant figures of the household; likewise, his description of his initial rehearsal with Midler indicates a deeply familiar (if ambivalent) acquaintance with powerful female figures. His musical performances gave ample demonstration of his constant solicitude for his female fans. Manilow’s ability to project utter sincerity in serenading little girls and women of a certain age might have caused him enough trouble among the critics. But the matter was made worse by the lack of realism (the rock version) in his musical style.

“annoyingly pop u lar” In an interview, Manilow used this phrase to suggest that one of the main reasons for the intense critical hostility directed at him during the 1970s was simply his omnipresence on the radio. But that explanation only addresses the term “popular”; a more interesting question is raised by Manilow’s choice of adverb. What was so annoying about Barry Manilow? His image as a sensitive guy certainly was the thing that drew women to him and was likely to send the largely male world of rock critics into conniptions of endangered manliness. The “showbizziness” (and commercialism) of his performances and recordings threatened the cult of authenticity so prized among rock listeners. Both of these problems flow together musically in a dramatic principle—what we might call “irresistible continuity”—that is characteristic of many of Manilow’s biggest hits. In an intelligent scholarly article published in 1979, Jon Finson made several observations about Manilow’s 1975 hit “Could It Be Magic?”30 Most important, he notes that the song’s large-scale shape is a single great crescendo. (The brief return to the Chopin prelude at the end of “Could It Be Magic?” does not change this structure too significantly because it reminds us of the uncovering process previously discussed; in a way it is a “pre-text” rather than part of the song proper.) As Finson notes, the dynamics increase is supported by a process of continuous accumulation in other musical domains: “a striking effect accomplished by orchestration (adding instruments progressively), production (electronic manipulation of balance, overdubbing, and reverberation), and performance (steady accretion of ornaments).”31 Finson also points out

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that the single-crescendo shape is a convention for pop songs of this time. Regardless, the structure is “particularly fortunate” in this case because it responds so well to the poetic content of the text, with its barely cloaked coital longings that concentrate themselves toward the end of the song in reiterated choruses. (The basic shape is more or less the same in both LP and single formats.) The parallelism between erotic desire and the music’s dramatic arc was uppermost in Manilow’s mind when he was arranging it for recording. He recalls talking over his strategy with a friend and co-arranger: “Tony,” I said, “I hear this song like ‘Hey Jude.’ It should build and build until you think you can’t take it any more. It should be a musical orgasm.”32 This refreshingly blunt statement confirms Finson’s observation about the song’s basic frame of erotic transport. But all orgasms are not alike, of course. For Manilow’s audience, the journey may well be more important than the destination. A quick pass through the lyrics shows that the first person’s erotic satisfaction is closely tied to a somewhat disembodied exaltation at the presence of the desired second person. For instance, the opening verse is distinctly disembodied, with talk of spirits, storms, and metaphysics. With the arrival of the chorus, we hear a reference to a physical act—but it is an embrace first and foremost. The sexual yearning, however urgent it may be, ultimately takes a back seat to tenderness. What we remember is “come into my arms,” a romantic image if there ever were one. The second verse gives the second person, addressed in a courtly manner as “Lady,” a significant amount of agency. Barry Manilow is not singing about what he might do for you the listener, he is singing about what you might do for him, and how much he depends on you for his happiness. But “Could It Be Magic?” inevitably assumes the form of an open question. We might understand Manilow’s title as rhetorical—his performance persuades us that he believes that it could be magic—but that does not change the fact that a listener may answer in any way she chooses. Such concessions to the imaginative participation of the audience, plus the way that the lyrics’ abstractions couple with the music’s formal-expressive scheme, turn the song into an archetype of femininedirected romantic desire. The specifics of the romantic relationship are left open, so the presumptively female audience acquires a kind of agency in parallel with the second-person object of the song. They may fill in the blanks however they like. Nevertheless, this agency is only granted on the assumption that listeners will also be willing to succumb to the song’s sweep. Although there is a choice about how to appropriate the

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song’s picture of desire, it must eventually be accepted or the song will fail. The layering of generalized abstraction over specific insistence that gives “Could It Be Magic?” its situational flexibility also prevents it from seeming natural or spontaneous, however. Such entreating relationships are the rule rather than the exception in music, of course: even when a particular performer or musical style affects to be unconcerned with the listeners’ reactions, this indifference is merely another form of engagement. But in the ethos of 1970s rock and pop, Manilow’s overt concern with the agency of his audience could often seem inauthentic or calculated, “too commercial.” Like advertising jingles, Manilow’s romantic ballads carelessly leave their seductive designs on the surface and make few claims to speak of “deeper” (psychological, spiritual, political) matters. Perhaps ceding these interpretive depths to the audience made songs like “Could It Be Magic?” perfect for women of a certain age in the 1970s. From long exposure to the rhetoric of advertising and the romance novel, they were probably the ideal audience to sort through the layers of fiction wrapped around the will to persuade, in search of their own moments of pleasure. Manilow’s persona and his music thus conform to one powerful type of feminine romantic imagination. He is available for fantasy as an idealized figure, a perfect erotic product whose commercial accessibility to his listeners’ desires can be taken as a sign of his own desire for them. Moreover, listeners can manipulate Manilow’s careful dependence on artifice and self-conscious musical retrospectivity to mobilize its latent sexual power. It is obvious that the observance of convention and its violation in his songs work in a sadomasochistic manner that is a near neighbor to the bodice-ripper side of the romance novel. The point, surely, is that the erotics of control and containment guarantee that both ruliness and transgression will provide a libidinal payoff. A beautiful example of this interplay occurs in a cassette tape that has circulated at times among Manilow’s most ardent fans. The tape is composed of fragmentary stretches of Manilow’s voice (from recordings and outtakes) that emphasize his romantic and sexual desire for the second person of his songs. These Barry-bits pile on one after another, forming what the transcribers call “a continuous Manigasm.” I will just quote a few lines: “[Sung] And here we go again . . . Ahhhh, ahhhh . . . [Spoken] Oh, God! . . . Uh! uh! uh! uh! . . . [Sung] It’s dark, it’s hot . . . Ohh, ohh, ohh . . . I want to get it . . . uh, uh, uh, uh . . . urh! urh! urh! huh! huh! . . . ah! ah! ah! . . . Work it out.”33 With a disco

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musical setting, these lyrics would be perfectly at home in the steamy soft core of a Barry White bedroom rap. But it matters that this erotic wallowing originates in an audience of female fans. In any case, such narratives of erotic desire never spoke directly to masculinity. It is worth noting that the fans have to build a narrative White-like number (in which maleness is very much in play) for themselves. The irresistible continuity in “Never Ever Gonna Give You Up” is miles away from the one in “Could It Be Magic?” White is intensely concerned with female pleasure, but in his catalogues of the physical and affective specifics of lovemaking, he is also consolidating his own identity as a man in a strikingly concrete manner. Furthermore, the diffuse structure of a typical Barry White song tends to obscure its artifactual quality. Although there usually are discrete formal units embedded within the whole song, the plateaus of its intros, bridges, and outros act to naturalize the song, making it seem more like a complex overheard experience than a self-standing unit. In a song such as “Could It Be Magic?,” Barry Manilow by contrast seems unconcerned with establishing any solid sense of masculine presence. For all the intense sensation available through the song’s dramatic crescendo and its marvelous decoration, masculine desire is attenuated to allow a clearer projection of romance. Manilow’s commitment to conventional song structures and arrangements further leaves the song’s fictional status apparent. I think that as a result, listeners tend to ground their responses to the song in the physical presence of the singer himself. It is noteworthy that whatever status Barry White may have had as a sex symbol, his concerts were rarely attended with the same intense sexual frenzy that has often marked Barry Manilow’s appearances. Surely the difference arises less from the physical specifics of the performers than from the way that their bodies are related to the bodies of their songs in the perceptions of the audience. If this speculation is correct, then it follows that radio play of his songs will create a severe disjunction in the minds of listeners who prefer an aesthetic of authenticity. Manilow is audible, but he is not visible; his body is not available to ground the abstractions of his romantic ballads. As templates of desire and often nostalgia, the songs remain distinctly “made” objects. If taking them as spontaneous utterances is difficult in concert, it is simply impossible over the radio. The musical strategies employed in “Could It Be Magic?” and their attendant audience relationships appear in the majority of Manilow’s romantic ballad hits of the 1970s. From 1974’s “Mandy,” the first major

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example 9. Piano introduction to “Weekend in New England.”

success, through 1979’s “Somewhere in the Night,” the songs tend toward a continuous-crescendo structure. They display rich production values and lush orchestration; they favor romantic texts that give significant autonomy to listeners, especially women; and they offer ample space for the performance of sincerity. That is, they are unambiguously fictions of desire. Though almost all of these ballads repay close examination, a look at one more of them will suffice. Manilow has said he was surprised by the success of his 1977 hit “Weekend in New England” because it was a waltz, and the song’s full title is never mentioned in the body of the song.34 His comment on this point is interesting because of what it assumes about ordinary listenership. Manilow seems to expect that waltzes will not play, a reasonable idea because the pop charts since 1955 had seen almost none of them. His concern about the divergence between title and lyrics speaks to his concern with hooks: given his training in commercial music, he would naturally expect that the title signals one of the song’s most memorable phrases. But the song’s effectiveness depends in part on the suppression of these regular listening habits because it is so centered around the evocation of romantic lack. “Weekend in New England” begins with a spare solo piano playing the opening four bars in the upper-middle registers from C1 to E3, a moderate range of two octaves and a third (see example 9). This melody wistfully alternates between upward leaps and lapses into resignation, its accompaniment moving in simple arpeggios over a clinging pedal C. The total effect is intimate, tinged with retrospection in the manner of a music box, but this affective close-up shot soon broadens out. Spurred on by a soft glissando in the harp, the right hand of the piano part thickens slightly with Brahmsian sixths and moves down into the middle of the keyboard, while the gentle arpeggios of the left hand are enwrapped in a shimmer of soft strings. The harmony pulls away from the pedal of the first four measures in order to carry us through flawlessly conventional harmonies in C major: iii/vi/IV/V. The verse begins with the

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arrival on the tonic. From the first words, “Last night I waved goodbye,” the sense of the instrumental intro is confirmed—pastness is the song’s primary topic. And by the end of the verse, we know that the lyrics are focused on memory in order to generate romantic expectation. The verse is constructed as three phrases in a mini-bar form of aab that points toward the future: the two a phrases move from tonic to dominant, and the b phrase moves from subdominant to dominant seventh, setting up a tonic downbeat at the beginning of the chorus. It begins with the simplest of orchestrations, voice, and piano, though by the end of the first phrase a solo oboe has appeared to carry the emotional plangency of the verses. Melodically, the verse plays on the piano intro’s music box figure, allowing its upper register tags to float unfinished, as if waiting for the answer of the chorus. The chorus simply intensifies these processes. Instead of four-bar units, it tends to move in groups of two, swinging repeatedly from tonic to dominant preparations, and then, after the delicate piquancy of a halfdiminished seventh chord, onto a satisfactory dominant that will give us a tonic yet more secure. The soothing blanket of strings returns from the intro along with flickers of the harp glissando. The words in this passage are a series of questions that increase in intensity to the end: “And when will I hold you again?” (The high degree of repetition in the song mirrors the romantic obsession summarized in the chorus’s questions.) One extra bar at the end of the chorus gives enough repose on the tonic to set up the song’s second verse-chorus unit, which duplicates the characteristics of the first with expanded orchestration until the end of the chorus. At this point, the song’s emotional crisis arrives. Coincident with the final tonic of the chorus, the song abruptly shifts into a bridge, dropping the first chorus’s final eight bars. This compression of the hypermeter is extremely important, since in a song so interested in strict convention, even slight departures from regularity carry immense weight. There is no repose for the second chorus; instead, reflectiveness gives way to a kind of metrical desperation that sparks one of Manilow’s dramatic crescendos. Although much of the musical material in the bridge is familiar from the verse-chorus pairs, the orchestration and production are newly amplified. A series of powerful rim shots from the drum set, additional reverb in all tracks, the sudden appearance of blue notes in the vocal line, a substantially thickened bass line, and exuberant flute glissandi added to the harp mark the singer’s interior paroxysms. The dominant seventh that arrives for the final bars of the bridge is the most

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urgent in the piece, and the song must find a way to answer it. The response is a Manilow specialty: without warning, the song abruptly shifts up a half-step to C# major for a full-out final chorus, written-in ritardando included. But we must remember that like “Could It Be Magic?,” “Weekend in New England” is also a question song. Audience expectations probably require that we end on blissful uncertainty. The song finally relaxes onto its last tonic with a yearning fall, giving space for a short instrumental postlude that brings back part of the introductory arrangement but reverses the importance of keyboard and strings. Maybe this change in orchestration is meant as a comfort: the precise delineations of the piano, with its clear attacks and “black-and-white” tone, give way to the more vocal shimmer of the strings. Maybe, too, it is a kind of postcoital tristesse. In either case, it is meant to be irresistible.

melodrama as ornament Film theorist Linda Williams has suggested that a number of disreputable film genres—melodrama, horror, and porn—are linked by their common interest in inciting powerful physical reaction.35 We endure lumps in the throat, even spasms of weeping, as Jane Wyman suffers bereavement and blindness before finding love with Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession. We shriek with terror as Michael Meyers sits up that last time (well, not really) behind Jamie Lee Curtis, the very pattern of “the final girl,” in Halloween. Maybe, in the privacy of our own homes, we even shudder in various ways while watching The Opening of Misty Beethoven or These Bases Are Loaded. Williams points out that our inescapable awareness of the films’ designs upon our bodies makes these genres troublesome, often worthy of dismissal for many. Without stretching the point too much, it is possible to see a similar feature at work in music of all types—one of the main reasons it has troubled minds bent on decorum throughout history. I have already mentioned the anxiety of such austere figures as Plato or St. Augustine over music’s ability to deceive us with fables of desire. Besides the question of truth and falsity, the physical engagement by which it could do so was central to their concern as well. In worrying over the human willingness to be deceived by or for pleasure, they established a basic critique of artistic representation that still holds, as Williams demonstrates. With respect to musics that evince a special affinity for kinaesthetic response, the question of reception often depends on the cognitive value

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assigned to our bodily responses. If, by words or contextual setting, the music appears to reinforce a culturally significant value or to support the dispositions of a respectable constituency, then strong physical reactions can be forgiven or even approved. Examining Manilow’s romantic ballads, we have seen the problem presented by the bodily appeal of irresistible continuity that is so stylized and seems to be directed at a population whose desires appeared richly dismissible as the product of false consciousness. The ambiguous commerce conducted in the songs brings them close to the film genre of melodrama, particularly. They are “women’s music” of a very particular kind. Perhaps the most distilled version of melodrama to appear among Manilow’s 1970s hits was “Copacabana (At the Copa),” released on Manilow’s 1978 album Even Now. Begun while Manilow was on vacation in Rio de Janeiro and co-written with Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman, the song takes up an archetypal melodramatic plot, the kind that populated sentimental ballads and operas during the nineteenth century and continues in pop songs and films to the present. At its core, it is one of those hoary romantic triangles between an ingenue, a male romantic lead, and an older male villain. In this variation, the romance ends tragically. Rico-the-gangster shoots Tony-the-bartender in a dispute over Lola-the-showgirl; Lola appears years later in Miss Havisham (or Norma Desmond) guise, an alcoholic madwoman-who-never-gotover-it. We know this story so well that we are likely to be somewhat unmoved by it. I think that this excessive familiarity is crucial to the song’s goals. Let us keep in mind that the song is in the third person. We do not learn of the characters’ internal states, only their accessories (yellow feathers, Latin dances, a diamond) and actions (punches, “a single gunshot”). Even these details appear fleetingly. Each event of the song’s plot is related minimally, allowing the song to leave its melodrama on the surface. The way that the music takes up the lyrics does everything possible to minimize our attachment to the actors in the drama. In “Copacabana,” Manilow’s Brill Building–songwriting idiom appears embedded within a disco number. (This was a simple matter with respect to technique, since disco’s normative form can be interpreted as a verse-chorus pop song with significant instrumental expansions.) Although disco songs often interested themselves in structures of interiority, in these cases they usually required the presence of a first-person female narrator (indicatively black) like Gloria Gaynor, Thelma Houston, Donna Summer, among others. Without such a lyrical subject, disco tended toward

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a more corporate, “objective” interests, including the actions of dance and music (witness Vicki Sue Robinson’s 1976 hit “Turn the Beat Around,” with its thematizing of percussion as an end in itself). Similarly, “Copacabana” is more interested in ambiance than in subjectivity. As the telling repeated line in the lyrics would have it, “music and passion were always the fashion.” I will focus on the disco mix of “Copacabana,” the long version that was released along with a shorter AM-radio version in 1978, because it shows most clearly how the plot’s abstraction is related to a quasicinematic intention.36 The song begins with a twelve-bar introduction: four bars to set the groove, four bars to introduce and fix the song’s signature cowbell figure, and four bars to establish the harmonic atmosphere. That atmosphere consists of a juicy version of G minor; lush chords with sevenths and ninths, plus various added tones; and frequent parallel motion along sinuous chromatic ascents and descents. Strong root motion at important formal joints gives the harmony a chance to join in with the groove’s forward thrust. Like the introduction, the verse falls into three groups of four in a conventional aa’b verse structure, filled with Latin dance rhythms to match the groove. The chorus continues working through the material of the verse, slightly condensing it to add extra punch before subsiding back into an oscillation between parallel enriched minor seventh chords. The propulsive qualities of the music submerge the pathos of the story in dancing, making the potentially lurid spectacle of Lola, Tony, and Rico into a “sight-track” for the imagination. The most cinematic effect, however, comes with the break—the extended middle of a disco song, like the ones discussed in chapter 2. In this case, the break gives the backup singers an opportunity to ratchet up through the chromatic scale for an octave. Supporting the singers, the harmony grows more chromatic, moving from the enriched minor triads of the verse and chorus into intense half-diminished sonorities. At its peak, the percussion begins to intervene more strongly. This spurs a collapse back to the starting point—but with a difference. For when the next verse appears, it must make sure that we know the story of the first two verses was “thirty years ago.” The break is a metaphor for the time passed. It dissolves to the G minor of the beginning, because the wretched Lola is trapped in time. She sits in the disco, hallucinating that it is still the Copacabana nightclub. The moral of the story? “Don’t fall in love.” But in the long run, the song really cares more about persuading us to dance. No one in the disco cares about Lola’s faded glamour, and we

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are supposed to be interested in her only in the most aestheticized way. The melodrama of the story is an affective bauble that sets off the attractions of the dance tune. Such abstraction seems to demand embodiment, whether by a passel of exuberant dancers or even by scenery and spectacle.37 It made “Copacabana” an inevitable choice for little girls and budding drama queens looking for fun scripts to perform; I know of at least three occasions in the late 1970s when high school girls earnestly implored their proto-gay male friends to plan a routine based on “Copacabana” for local talent shows. And in such demotic venues as amusement parks and other sub-Vegas showplaces, exactly that kind of performance proved irresistible. It is no wonder that Dick Clark approached Manilow about turning the song into a TV movie musical; or that the TV special became a casino show; or that by 1994, a full-fledged stage musical version opened in the United Kingdom to huge audiences and complicated press. The revised version of the show began touring in the US in 2000. Is it a surprise that the current television show Glee, so obviously appreciative of exactly this kind of contrivance, planned a Manilow-centric episode for January 2012? The widespread appeal of “Copacabana” returns us to the question of Barry Manilow’s “annoying” popularity, but also the question of his endurance and continuing success. It may be that the stigmata of commerce—the memorability of his hooks, the schematic nature of his romanticism, his commitment of a kind of sincerity that nevertheless always reminded listeners of its status as fiction—while appealing especially to women, have offered enough openness to other constituencies that can find resonance in the Manilow’s songs. In the end, we might wonder about the pitfalls of selling and buying as a cure for our damaged identities and disheartened desires for agency. But our scruples must not lead us to overlook even the slight possibilities for reimagining ourselves that can persist unexpectedly in the most everyday places and in the most discreditable emotional styles. Our attention to such things offers us a chance to experience an important kind of generosity; maybe the possibility of giving—however partial and compromised—lies at the heart of the devotion between the audience and Barry Manilow.

chapter 5

The Voice of Karen Carpenter

In the years of its greatest popularity, the brother-sister duo of Richard and Karen Carpenter never lacked disparagers. The Carpenters and their music brought out nearly as much hostility as attraction among American audiences, whether attributable to the glossy sentimentality that listeners often found in their music, to the unnaturally wholesome family values they seemed to present (like the Bradys or the Partridge Family, but in real life, like Donny and Marie), or to their untroubled willingness to play the White House even while the Watergate scandal intensified. But the complicated way in which the Carpenters embodied a politically tinged vision of family harmony is not where audiences since the 1990s have begun their listening. When in more recent years we listen to the Carpenters in order to reflect on their music, the first thing we confront is a martyrology. Let us imitate the irresponsible, somber accents of a celebrity profile as we limn our saint. Karen Carpenter died on February 4, 1983, of heart failure brought on by anorexia nervosa. She had been in serious trouble since the mid1970s at least, when she collapsed onstage at a concert in Las Vegas (during the chirrupy song “Top of the World”). At that point, Carpenter weighed somewhere between eighty and ninety pounds—dreadfully thin for a strongly built woman standing five feet, four inches tall. She had fallen into such reduced circumstances, if we can pardon the phrase, because of a steady round of diets that had begun as early as 1967, including a water diet prescribed by her family doctor. A passing refer118

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ence to her in a magazine profile as “Richard’s chubby sister,” plus the inevitable shock of seeing herself in photographs and television broadcasts, brought on additional weight controls in the form of emetics, laxatives, and an endless series of thyroid pills. She died weighing 108 pounds. Although she was still quite thin for her frame, her doctors and family had believed that she was recovering from her eating disorder. Before Karen Carpenter’s death, knowledge about anorexia had mostly been confined to the medical and psychological establishments, but the extensive media coverage of Carpenter’s case led to a dramatic increase in public awareness of eating disorders. Other celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Lynne Redgrave began to acknowledge in print their own difficulties with eating, body image, and control. “Anorexia” became a genuinely commonplace term—not a cliché, but a word that carried the weight of a host of widely shared social fears and desires especially seen as surrounding the vicissitudes of adolescence in girls and young women.1 By the late 1980s, anorexia was yet another illness turned metaphor in American culture, especially as it concerned girls and young women, and Karen Carpenter’s remains were the place where the resonances of the disorder first condensed. Even now, a quick Internet search will reveal ample testaments to the importance of Carpenter’s figure (in every sense) in both public and private attempts to make sense of the internally directed astigmatisms and passions for control that lead to the deadly joys of self-willed starvation. Perhaps the most effective document of Karen Carpenter’s place in  the discourse on anorexia—and possibly a significant part of her canonization—came with the director Todd Haynes. His 1987 film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story owed as much to films like Valley of the Dolls and innumerable stories of victimized stars (Marilyn? Judy?) as it did to reverent TV hagiographies of famous entertainers. This point is made clear from the very first lines of the mock-portentous voice-over (the model for the one used in the second paragraph of this chapter) that opens the campy biopic: “What happened? Why, at the age of thirty-two, was this smooth-voiced girl from Downey, California, who led a raucous nation smoothly into the 1970s, found dead in her parents’ home? Let’s go back, back to Southern California . . . [music, dissolve]”2 The film abounds in tabloid muck-raking, especially delighting in unattractive representations of Richard (as a quasi-junkie and potential homosexual) and Mrs. Carpenter (a jovial nightmare of a stage mother). The splendid trashiness of these points alone should have won Haynes’s film the cult status of its models, but Richard Carpenter won a legal battle to have

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the film pulled from distribution because Haynes had used Carpenters recordings without permission. The film lives on to this day mostly by anecdote and the occasional bootleg copy uploaded to YouTube. The fairy tale of success, decline, and fall in Haynes’s Superstar is an obvious parody from the very beginning of the film because the main characters are portrayed by Barbie dolls. After initial bursts of hilarity subside, however, and Haynes introduces preachy but effective commentary about American politics in the early 1970s, details of the Carpenters’ own careers, and medical and sociological information about anorexia, the tale as a whole becomes strangely touching. The unreality of the film, from its crudely animated toys to their makeshift setting (as if made by little girls rehearsing for their own imitatio Karen), does not detract from the impact of the tale. Instead, it intensifies the action by offering us much more room for vicarious emotional investment. This, we are often inclined to feel, is the real point of Karen Carpenter’s story: that she worked so hard to project an unruffled image of clean-cut niceness at the same time that she was tormented by the gross and painful progress of her illness. Since we tend to understand anorexia as entailing the internalization of social pathologies disproportionately borne by women, Karen Carpenter’s struggles to seem well even as she was declining tally with any number of legendary constructions of femininity, subject to permanently mixed interpretations. At the point that Karen Carpenter became a myth, more and more of her listeners began to hear the songs of the Carpenters as metaphors for the nature of the singer herself. The songs seemed to embody a split between a virtuosically smooth exterior—Richard’s brilliant arrangements and the expert sidemen in the band, including Karen on drums— and an abject interiority just under the sheen of that voice. But for everyone who would find this way of listening to the Carpenters rewarding, surely a larger number would recoil in disgust. It seems prurient to spend so much attention listening for proof of someone else’s suffering for our own pleasures. It seems detestably cheap to wallow (only the most immediate word will do) in easy thoughts of someone else’s courage—easy because that bravery is spectacle, and we are thereby excused from any response we might not care to make. It seems immodest to claim importance for music so desperately eager to please. This is true of any sentimental style, since its self-consciousness about effects, its constant awareness that it has an audience, solicits our projections so promiscuously. We worry because the music’s ability to accommodate us gives us nothing to brace our morals against, and we know that we could

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be listening with dishonest ears while congratulating ourselves on our compassion. Nevertheless, I want to claim that placing ourselves in such a disreputable position is probably the best way to hear the voice of Karen Carpenter. She sang in a musical style that always favored the sentimental investments of her audiences over any other mode of engagement, after all. Richard’s musical arrangements maintained a transparency and skillful ease so at variance with Karen’s dark voice that it created that disjunction between vocal and instrumental personae into which our complex subjective responses tend to rush. The de- (and then re-) mythologizing she underwent after her death increased the ambivalence of this space inside the music, ensuring that it could remain a place where our feelings—envy and gratitude, for instance—appear thoroughly mixed. And so, to see how our anxious pleasures of not-knowing might help make richer sense of the Carpenters, we can borrow from films like Haynes’s Superstar and dissolve into a flashback.

“working together day to day— together” When Richard and Karen Carpenter released their first album, Ticket to Ride, on A&M Records in 1969, they became figures in a musical ecosystem worth recalling in some detail. The Carpenter siblings had been striving for a record contract since winning a Battle of the Bands competition at the Hollywood Bowl in 1966 (with a performance of Richard Carpenter’s song “Iced Tea,” a cover version of “The Girl from Ipanema.”)3 Written in 1962 by Brazilian composers Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, “The Girl” had appeared the following year on Stan Getz’s collaborative album with João Gilberto. That recording began a flurry of covers during the mid-1960s by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole to Arthur Lyman, Pat Boone, and the minor British pop duo Chad and Jeremy. This list of artists points up the stylistic and social location of “The Girl” as music designed for entertainment. It is easy to hear the sturdiest versions of the song as a kind of “smooth jazz” before the term was invented, its gently extended harmonies and bossa nova rhythmic undergirding meant to appeal to adult listeners who wanted a sophisticated yet relatively unassuming music. The tropical ambience of the tune places it within the sonic compass of “exotica,” that quirky genre that constituted a major form of American musical orientalism after World War II.4 Exotica often balanced itself between strangeness and charm, with avant-garde effects and the latest technical

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devices brought in to decorate melodies of easy-listening virtue, all for the sake of evoking the Gauguinesque as seen from Main Street. Exotica, for all its technical sophistication, was less interested in urbanity than in its simulacrum. Think about the evocations of sultry climates at an amusement park like Disneyland—no one at a Tiki Bird show actually thinks that this kind of tropical landscape bears any resemblance to genuine places: Disney’s Polynesia or Latin America are self-evidently figments of American imagination.5 If there were a “real place” that acted as the signified to the complex signifiers of exotica, that place would be the California of Cold War legends. The free play of tropical fantasy in this tune was undoubtedly one reason for the Carpenters to choose it for their performance at the Hollywood Bowl contest, but just as important to their purposes was surely its perfect adaptability as “easy listening.” If tunes like this were willing to place themselves in the front of listeners’ attentions, they were also equally willing to relinquish that attention and offer themselves as background, a kind of culinary art in sound. And relaxed (in less friendly eyes, complacent) hedonism, as so abundantly seen in the specific cases of exotica, seemed to be the attitude that music of this style solicited. In covering “The Girl from Ipanema,” the Richard Carpenter Trio had implicitly pledged its allegiance not to some abstract concept of music, nor to the antinomian musical and social practices of American popular music’s countercultures, but rather to music as it was created in “the industry”—the tangled business whose spiritual centers were Broadway, Hollywood, and Vegas. (You know, showbiz.) The Carpenters assented to the industry’s picture of its audience: mostly white, mostly middle class or aspiring to that position, more often located in cities or in the rapidly expanding world of the suburbs. This audience was imagined to be orderly, conformist, and conventional, willing to invest itself in the images of stylized prosperity that had become central to ideal America as represented in the post–World War II mass media. In this context, “The Girl from Ipanema” was more than a good song; it was a promise of faithfulness to the styles and values of America’s dominant social fiction of the time. That promise was not quite enough, at least not at first. Although the Richard Carpenter Trio did receive a contract from RCA on the strength of their appearance at the Bowl, the eleven tracks they cut were never released and the contract soon dissolved. Karen Carpenter had signed individually to Magic Lamp Records in 1965 and released one single, but

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because of bad distribution, her song had no opportunity to make an impression on the charts. The Carpenters persisted, reconstituting themselves as a duo plus overdubbing in order to make a demo recording that eventually found its way to Herb Alpert, co-owner of A&M Records. Alpert was best known at the time as a trumpet player and leader of the Tijuana Brass, who established the sub-subgenre of “Ameriachi”—an obvious spinoff of exotica—in such successful tunes as “The Lonely Bull” (1962) and “The Mexican Shuffle” (1964). The eclecticism of Alpert’s music was integral to its goal of the broadest possible appeal to commercial audiences, as was its glossy studio aesthetic. The Tijuana Brass was dependent on extremely rigorous craft in the service of pleasure and a rather direct (perhaps incautious) affirmation of American luxury. Alpert must have recognized an affinity between his tastes and those of the Carpenters. Moreover, the image Richard and Karen Carpenter projected meshed perfectly with a central model of fictional family life in the American mass media during the 1960s and early 1970s. Television models are most immediately brought to mind now, thanks to Nick at Nite and TVLand. Like the indestructible Brady Bunch, the Carpenters seemed surreally white, middle class, and positive. Anodyne beyond all hope of cure. Even their attempts to be groovy were always ruined by the dorkiness of their evident (indeed, manic) desire to be “nice.”6 Wholesomeness plus exceptional musical ability was too good for a label to pass up. A&M Records released its first Carpenters album, Offering—notice the religioso timbre of the title as well as its ostentatious modesty—in November 1969, which included a striking cover version of the Beatles’ song “Ticket to Ride” from the album Help! (1965). In its own way, the cover of “Ticket to Ride” is an inspired reinterpretation. The most ingratiating feature of the original version of the song was its rough joyousness; even though the song is about the departure of a lover, the excitement of the song as sung by the Beatles overrides its potential sadness. In addition, the wonderful homosocial energy of the Beatles as they perform together allows us to neglect the incipient melancholy of the song’s situation by focusing on the pleasure that the boys take in playing and singing with one another. We might suppose that the fact that “she don’t care” represents freedom rather than loss. All of this vigor is exactly what the Carpenters do not want. The Carpenters’ de-Beatled version opens with a classicizing piano solo, but to very different ends than the classicizing discussed in Manilow’s “Could It Be Magic?” in chapter 4. The Carpenters’ evocation

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of the classical is apparent not only in the figuration in the piano, but also in the way that the supporting symphonic instruments are scored; the introduction sounds like faux-Mozart, dressed up for modern times with a little studio percussion. The tempo is moderate, as if we are listening to the slow movement of a concerto. But then Karen Carpenter enters this classicized space. Appropriately enough, she begins on a low F—her chest voice was the richest part of her range—and throughout the song, she occupies the middle to low tessitura that was one of the central elements of her vocal signature. The slackening of the tempo helps establish the music’s particular sense of interiority, since the opposition fast/slow so often maps onto the notions exterior/interior in our customary listening practices. The Carpenters’ choice of tempo also allows the individual pitches of the vocal line to blossom, so that we want to hear the melody’s inflections as signs of the singer’s nuances of feeling. Similarly, the extensions of phrase in the chorus—always on the word “ride”—further amplifies the deliberate artifice of the arrangement at the same time that it oxymoronically heightens our attention to the emotions of leave-taking. In this configuration, the backup vocals signal a thickening of Karen Carpenter’s own subjective state rather than the bliss of performing together that eases the anticipated departure and the arrival of loss. For it was loss and loneliness, nostalgia and melancholy, that Karen Carpenter’s voice seemed best suited to evoke from the very beginning of her career. We can take a small sample of titles from the Carpenters’ greatest hits by way of a reminder: “Yesterday Once More,” “Close to You,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Goodbye to Love.” Or we can note the presence of so many oldies in the duo’s repertoire—and the intensely retrospective tastes of Richard Carpenter’s arrangements. Their covers of songs of an older generation (even songs less than a decade old) inevitably pointed up artifice, for the conventions of these songs were already decayed, their sentiments outmoded. If listeners were old enough to remember the songs as elements of their own experience, that experience was nevertheless framed and then reshaped by the luminous fictions of the music’s bogus recollections. If listeners did not actually recall the oldies that the Carpenters liked to cover, the high gloss of the covers could nevertheless persuade them that this airbrushed yearning was the appropriate way to remake the past. In each case, the distance between the Carpenters and their cover versions was just enough to allow them to serve up the oldies in a luscious flavor of bittersweet. This well-mannered despondency was enormously popular.

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Although “Ticket to Ride” enjoyed only modest sales, these were enough to move A&M to retitle the album and re-release it in 1970. More important, the songwriter Burt Bacharach heard the Beatles cover and asked the Carpenters to perform a medley of his songs at a benefit concert. Alpert soon persuaded the Carpenters to record a version of Bacharach’s “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” which, when released as a single, became a number-one hit in the space of six weeks. The beginning of the 1970s was the best time for the Carpenters, with five Grammy nominations in the first two years of their careers (and they won two of the awards) among other signs of industry recognition. They met this acclaim with characteristic modesty and industry, mostly sticking close to their parents and working on projects to “give back to the community,” even while in a whirl of recording sessions and public performances. Even though the Carpenters were so frequently on tour and played constantly to huge audiences, the most successful of their songs were always the intimate ones: those best designed to be heard among a few people, or perhaps ideally, alone. And sung to oneself. Perhaps it reflects the discontinuity between Karen Carpenter’s own public image and private reality that music of such high artifice should be the most gratifying when it seems most interior (subjective) to us as hearers. In this respect, it is crucial that Karen Carpenter is remarkably good to sing along with—but to explain how this is so, I will discuss first singing and listening as parts of a single act.

“don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear” As far as I can tell, writers about music have rarely if ever given much discussion in their texts to what is going on when a listener sings along with the radio or the recording. Is singing along with a recording a mode of listening? Absolutely yes, but to make this claim requires us to think a little more about what we usually assume it means to listen to music. In everyday terms we tend to treat listening as a matter of a single sense— ears only, please. Never mind that people who listen to music often sing or hum, that they tap their fingers or toes, that they wriggle and jostle and sometimes break into dance outright: none of these responses is the actual listening, we think, but rather a physical accompaniment that takes something important away from the experience of listening as such. Movement of any sort while listening to music is a distraction. It is childlike, indecorous. In earlier chapters I have already addressed some

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aspects of our trouble over music’s kinaesthetic persuasiveness. Our control over movement while listening is continuous with our concern that physical response be tied to the most praiseworthy domains of thinking and feeling. In every case, the ideal must surely be to make our attentions and responses to the music that moves us into a state that can be taken as completely internal. Although I don’t believe for a second that listening to music is or should be a “purely” internal matter, I think that there are a number of things in our musical cultures working to persuade us that this is the case. First, there is the question of decorum. We are educated into restraint for practical reasons, and a few minutes spent watching young kids listening to music will probably show why: they’re noisy and disruptive as hell, especially if they really like the song. If we participate by singing along, by moving, by commenting on the music as it moves through us, our passions pour out of us in gesture and noise, impinging on the experiences of others to make it take up the colors of our own. The music and our responses to it combine to amplify our affects and transmit them without any special regard for the reactions of others around us. We thus risk becoming spectacles, narcissistically seizing for ourselves the attention that was supposed to be given to the music. So learning to listen unobtrusively is a fine thing indeed. This is part of what counts as good manners in our culture. We cover our mouths when we cough, we excuse ourselves when we sneeze, and in innumerable ways we try to keep our bodies to ourselves. Second, there is the question of a respect toward music that grows out of the respect toward people, which grounds the concept of politeness. Music ought to be attended to in the way that we attend to the speech of other people. To do less is an insult toward the composer(s) and the performer(s) as well as the audience around us. In some sense, anything other than respectful audition is an insult to the music itself, as well. In treating music as a means rather than an end in itself, it dehumanizes pieces that we wish to take for people. These directives of politeness converge so that we often make distinctions between serious and frivolous listening based on the amount of silence and physical restraint we bring to a particular occasion. And these distinctions often translate into the ways that we judge the intrinsic value of particular pieces or styles. In our normative listening hierarchies, music that seems to solicit overt participation is inherently inferior to music that seems to suppress it. There is no more painful (if amusing) illustration of this than the sight of a classroom of earnest students trying hard to listen respectfully to a piece of “classical” music.

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Ramrod stiff, or hunched over in cramped contemplation, congealed into anxious attentiveness they listen, faces creased with the will to understand. (And, alas, we their instructors let them do this.) In most of the formal university courses on popular music that I have taught or heard about, students constantly fight their impulses to talk and to move around. Although their noisiness is the result of their carrying over their everyday listening habits into the classroom, they understand (or they are told) that they must control themselves in this new venue, where it seems they are supposed to learn rather than enjoy. But in listening to the music they assume sits on higher steps of the cultural ziggurat, most university students do not move a muscle because they “know” they are not supposed to. A huge body of writing and teaching that dates back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century will tell them why they are correct to “know” this. The history of music audiences often contradicts our insistence on quiet—the atmosphere in an eighteenth-century Italian opera house was often a lot like a Lady Gaga concert—but nevertheless there is a historical trend toward audience restraint in this musical tradition. If we remember Norbert Elias’s pioneering studies of “the civilizing process,” we can see this increasing control of concert behavior as contributing to a particular idealization of the relationships between people.7 This discipline is in fact necessary for the purposes of the classroom and maybe even our concert halls. But it does not do to imagine such a discipline as anything other than historically specific. And it does not do to imagine that silent listening is the only, or even the primary, mode of listening for music. We could distinguish between various full-out public modes of contemplation and enthusiasm, Trappists and Charismatics each seeking their own music and form of audience. Heading toward the domestic sphere, we could also mark out a kind of convivial listening, in which a few listeners surround a performance or a recording with small-scale conversation and rites of sociability. In the most seemingly private space, there are assorted ways of listening alone. These intimate modes of listening are as individualized (and often as embarrassingly concrete) as erotic responses, and we might often find it as awkward to describe or discuss them as we would the finer points of our own sexual interests. Where does singing along with the song fit into this continuum of musical listening? In its more performative aspect, singing along is a near cousin of lip-synching, the singer’s version of air guitar. The art critic Dave Hickey has memorably described air guitar as “flurries of silent, sympathetic gestures with nothing at their heart but the memory of the

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music. It produces no knowledge, states no facts, and never stands alone. It neither saves the things we love (as we would wish them saved) nor ruins the things we hate.”8 Hickey’s focus on the vicariousness of air guitar, hanging on for dear life to the music by means of memory’s uncertain hooks, is to the point. Air guitar is potentially ridiculous because it is so obviously subservient to its music and because when we perform it we also reveal that our performance cannot stand alone. This is true, perhaps, even if we have bought a copy of Guitar Hero to indulge ourselves in a commercially justified form. We find ourselves in the position of being parasites to the music, and what we display is our abject need for the music to give us the things that we lack, for we have no power to acquire them for ourselves. It is true that we neither ruin nor save the objects of our desire. But is the knowledge we produce only about ourselves? Have we really stated no facts about the music? Musical performance, whether air guitar or the “real thing,” is always framed by a tense interweaving of shame and the desire for selfrevelation.9 Air guitar itself usually takes on an attitude of defiant good humor, pretending to frivolity to cover up its real investments in the music. Raucous silliness and broad parodies of masculinity cloak the nakedness of the air guitarist’s love. Lip-synching represents an attempt to slice through this conflict by fiat, to overwhelm the embarrassment by sheer force of will. “Look at me!” a drag queen lip-syncher implicitly says. “I am the incarnation of fabulousness, all the more because my performance is part fiction and part reality, and the real parts are those that seem most peripheral. Look upon my moves, ye glamorous, and despair!” Karaoke attempts to head off chagrin by suppressing or deleting the voice of the original artist so that a new singer can occupy the space in the arrangement with a new voice, but all the while it borrows the luminous halo of the music and our memories of the song’s primary singer, to shore up our everyday voices. The egalitarian community of karaokists in the audience, meanwhile, buoys up the imperfect singer as surely as if the karaoke bar were a twelve-step meeting. But singing along with the regular recording is the most abject position of listening since it cannot hide, from itself or its potential onlookers, its flawed delights and its stubborn yearnings. Perhaps this is why we frequently sing along in a car, with a close friend or two, everyone singing as loudly and lustily as possible to let the thrill of such close bonding sweep our abashedness away. But also, perhaps, this is why we sing along most often when we are alone.

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“when they played, I’d sing along— it made me smile” Chief among the pleasures of singing along is the choreography of muscles, our internal sense of how the disposition of gestures great and small bonds itself to the sounds we hear. Some interesting writing in musicology has explored in detail the sensuous bodily dimension of music making and listening. For Suzanne Cusick, the physicalities of playing at a keyboard mesh with those of making love, particularly as the emplotments of lovemaking entail the passing of power and initiative from one subject to another. The transient qualities of weight and balance, the subtle gestures of articulation, the quickness and slowness of movement, the breath, all form a complex bodily way of being in the world with respect to multiple physical pleasures. Music is a matter of the flesh, however much our musical cultures have wished to forget this. If nowadays we want to recollect the embodiedness of music, we require what Elisabeth Le Guin has so memorably called a “carnal musicology.”10 Re(-)membering, we must start with the particularities of instruments and the postures and gestures they solicit. About playing an especially compelling work by Bach, Cusick rhapsodically declares, I love using my body to enable the existence in the air of a model of independent intimacy. I love feeling like I’m on top, controlling with skillful hands the articulation of snippets of the chorale in the uncanonic melody, and I especially love the climax because it is at that moment that the music gets away from me, at that moment that she is on top in the sense that because of my hands’ work she has all the power, and I am reduced to rapture by that power’s release. I love using my brain and hands and feet to create for people I know (and in some cases love) the possibility that they might hear all the complex relationships which lead those melodies to their simultaneous but independent climaxes—even though I know from my own experience as a listener that a person cannot hear all the relationships at any one time.11

In this passage, Cusick describes one part of the erotics of the keyboard, more specifically the organ. The limbs of the player combine in an intricate dance made audible. Depending on the piece, another organist might go into detail about the sensuousness of a particular passage—perhaps the grasping full-hands richness of thick chords, or the rippling throwaway extravagance of a good run. They might ponder the subtleties of making connections between the keys, a matter of greater or lesser orders of infinitesimality.

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By contrast, Le Guin has taken up the question of the physical idiom of playing the cello in an attempt to locate elusive musical qualities in the work of the late eighteenth century composer Luigi Boccherini.12 In her subtle thinking about the ways that musical meaning and expressivity can be grounded in the body of the performer, she pays attention to hands as well, but Le Guin’s hand is a markedly different instrument from Cusick’s. To give a short list, we might consider the location of the hands and arms with respect to the rest of the body as well as to the instrument itself, the degree of functional differentiation between right and left (and even between the tasks of various fingers on each hand), the actual location the sound’s source, and the unique way that a given instrument acts on and with the body of the performer. All of these specifics have a sensual appeal, but as a quick comparison of Cusick’s and Le Guin’s accounts shows, each form of sensuality has a distinctive profile. We might go further and argue that each instrument therefore communicates a particular erotics, a characteristic suite of intertwined physical and emotional pleasures. Both Cusick and Le Guin imply, furthermore, that although their speaking from the experience of performing allows them the most direct entry into this aspect of music, the unique body (the performer’s body) is always present and available, if only vicariously, to any listener. In this light, the erotics of vocal production are a substantial part of what pleases us when we sing along with a record. Probably most people have at least a subliminal awareness of the ways that voice is grounded in body. Take the question of accent, for instance. The qualities of speech that might identify our places of origin can include the placement of particular vowels and consonants in the mouth, the part of our vocal range we habitually use for speaking, the rate at which words appear, characteristic rhythms and pauses, dialectical substitutions of one phoneme for another, and so on. The habits of articulation in speech carry over fairly directly into singing, and are one of the primary targets of singing teachers; we identify “trained” voices by their idealized versions of particular languages as easily as we do by their other vocal qualities. Our characteristic ways of speaking are integral to our identities, as all good impressionists can demonstrate in a single phrase. Listening carefully to a singer requires us to register, however vaguely, such identifying features of her voice, and we intuitively understand that what we hear has a direct if intricate relationship to the material characteristics of her body—her lungs, her diaphragm, her larynx and throat, her oral and nasal cavities in their entirety, tongue, teeth, palate,

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and lips. We hear sound as the trace of the timbre-producing body, what Roland Barthes famously called “the grain of the voice.” (He insisted that he didn’t mean timbre, but you know that he really did.) Probably our own muscles respond to what we hear; even before reports about the recent research on mirror neurons, many of us have suspected that when we listen to singers our bodies twinge with tiny unconscious movements of sympathy. But when we listen in the mode of “singing along,” something more intense occurs. I doubt that people who sing along tend to find much joy in singing along as themselves, within their own vocal personae. In my own experience with singing along, as well as occasionally listening to others sing along, I find an irresistible impulse to match the vocal habits of the original singer as closely as possible. In effect, this turns out to be a way of becoming that singer. We might also think about listening (orally, as it were) to a singer by recalling another peculiar action that we perform with our mouths— kissing. Marcel Proust, to take a writer whose memory often seemed to be in his mouth, reflected subtly about kissing as a form of knowledge in his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu.13 (Remember, after all, that in the novel Proust’s emblematic childhood drama centers on the struggle for his mother’s goodnight kiss.) When recalling his first serious kiss of Albertine, his love interest for most of the novel, Proust’s narrator Marcel ruefully notes that his desire to have that kiss reveals the deepest secrets of the beloved other—and to incorporate the other within himself—failed. Perhaps it was because the mouth was inadequate; the older Marcel rather perversely suggests that people would need a special bodily organ for kissing to allow such knowing to occur. The kiss as it existed for him could only tantalize with the prospect of a complete union that it could never reach.14 Part of the rich irony that surrounds this account comes from Proust’s arranging the entire novel to depend on a steady succession of such overestimations: time and time again, Marcel imagines that a particular thing, or person, or event, will tell him everything, and turns from it in disappointment, only to find at the end that “not everything” is not equivalent to “nothing.” A kiss can indeed never tell us everything about the other. But it tells us something. In a brief but evocative essay, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has noted several crucial features about kissing that can shed light on its peculiar mixture of satisfactions and disappointments, and his observations suggest ways to think about what we do when we match a singer’s idiosyncrasies. Phillips starts with the liminal placement of kissing among the mouth’s suite of potential activities. The kiss shifts embarrassingly

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between private and public intensities. One incarnation may be stirring or shocking, the next may be moving, the one that follows after may simply be banal. The status of the kiss as an erotic act is irregular, depending on the context not only of the participants but also of any viewers who happen to be around. (The hubbub that until recently greeted same-sex kisses on American TV, while structurally identical kisses between men and women littered the screen, gestured toward this instability.) It is perhaps not so much that the kiss itself gains or loses an erotic charge as much as that its precise trajectory is always an issue. Or perhaps it is that we are often able to overlook the erotic charge that envelops the act. Pointing up that kisses have a trajectory emphasizes their temporal structure. This matters because, as Phillips points out, kissing is an act that narrates a specific kind of desire: “The way a person kisses and likes to be kissed shows in condensed form something about that person’s character . . . It is integral to the individual’s ongoing project of working out what mouths are for.”15 At the same time that kissing is a way for people to learn about themselves, it is also a way for them to learn about others. No one who has spent any time around infants can fail to notice the role of a baby’s mouth in learning about any object that happens to appear. A watch? An ink pen? Into the tiny mouth it goes, to be explored with the tongue, to be felt and tasted. Kissing embarrasses at least partly because it throws us back to pleasures no less potent for being so riskily puerile. But another mouth is not really like a watch or a pen because it responds. As Phillips notes, “When we kiss we devour the object by caressing it; we eat it, in a sense, but sustain its presence. Kissing on the mouth can have a mutuality that blurs the distinctions between giving and taking (‘In kissing do you render or receive?’ Cressida asks in Troilus and Cressida).”16 To join with another in such an intimate way requires a negotiation of timings and gestures. When we kiss in passion, our mouths reshape themselves in mutual accommodation. And the other is truly necessary; except in the most disappointing of makeshifts, we cannot kiss ourselves. To make the obvious shark-spanning leap: Does not the way that we adapt our mouths to the mouth of another, when we learn to sing like her, carry some of the qualities of the kiss? The singer does not shape her mouth to meet ours, except in our imaginations, of course. When we kiss, our mouths shape themselves in complementarity, part and counterpart moving like dancers so that we know the shape of the other by where we end. When we take on the shape of the singer’s mouth, this

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play of motion is absent, replaced by a more oblique structure in which we know the other mimetically (also memetically). We can think of both acts as mirroring. Their difference shows us something about the fertile confusion that can surround mirror images in general, about the difficulty of separating identity from desire. In a strange way, the incorporative yearnings that summon our desires to kiss, that find their ephemeral satisfactions in the touchings of flesh that taste of intimacy, find another odd parallel in the peculiar circumstances of how we hear ourselves internally. Pause for a moment to think about the first time you might ever have heard yourself recorded on tape. An unsettling experience, probably. Pedagogical experts who use recordings of teachers to help them improve their lecture styles are always cautious about the first time their clients see and hear themselves, because the shock of that first exterior presentation is often so alienating that the clients simply shut down. Do I look like that? Do I sound like that? Most of us have been objects to ourselves for much of  our lives, whether we think of this in terms of pronouns—in your mother’s arms, “you” became a “me” on the way to becoming an “I”—or the ornate mythologies of mirror stages. But even when we look in that mirror, our senses of internal and external are so closely matched that we can quickly find our way to (mis?)recognition of ourselves. Photographs, mercifully, are still, and confront us with our own self-alienation in a much milder form. But a video moves, and it moves independently of us. We see ourselves as someone else, and until we get used to it, most of us do not like it. (Some of us never do.) What goes for vision goes both more and less intensely for sound: less because our status as vocal self-objects is less defined by our surrounding technologies (we cannot see ourselves whole unassisted); more because for that very reason sound is more interior, and our acceptance of its recognition more easily evaded. We do not sound like our taped voices, in fact, because of this powerful interiority. When we sing, we hear ourselves through our bodies. Sound vibrates from diaphragm up to the sinuses of the face, it seeps from the larynx through the tissues and air of the oral cavity into bone and thence to the middle and inner ears; there it meets the manifested sounds coming into the middle and inner ears from outside. This creates a process of internalization only available through the linked senses of sound and touch, so powerful that our internal sense of our own voices always trumps any externalization. What we hear is how we really sound. And when we imitate the voice of another, we have brought her into ourselves in such a way that she is tangibly inside our bodies, in the

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nurturant vibrations that travel through the flesh by which we breathe and speak and sing. This is how she really sounds, when she is with us. As we sing with Karen Carpenter, we want to match the idiosyncrasies of her style. She scooped. A lot. Her vowels were sometimes strange, especially the “oo” in words such as “you,” which tends to be placed so far forward in the mouth and so tensed that it sounds close to a French “u” or a German “ü.” The texture of Karen Carpenter’s vowels is rather chewy in general; there is a lot of fun work for the mouth when we try to imitate her singing. Her phrasing is always interesting, and since she stayed so close to the microphone, it is possible to hear fine-grained articulations of consonants and breath. (Film theorists have long observed the strong feelings of subjective identification that occur when the camera suddenly moves in for a close-up. Isn’t it because with the face of the performer so intensely visible, the emotions they display become more infectious? Does something similar occur in a sonic closeup?) And there is the impossible glory of her range. Karen Carpenter was a true alto, and her lower register is extraordinarily rich and dark. It was simply too good a vocal space not to be used constantly; yet its timbral qualities make it so ideally suited for the evocation of melancholy that it is almost impossible for us to allow it to call forth anything else. When the power of this register is married to partial shadings of vowels and consonants and constant decorative departures by scoop and portamento from the center of the melody’s pitches, the combination is apt to overwhelm us with blissful-sad contingency. The beautiful short song “For All We Know” gives us a terrific epitome of this vocal style. The Carpenters recorded the tune after they had been sent to see the 1970 film Lovers and Other Strangers and decided that the theme song would make an excellent cover. (The tune, written by Hollywood artists Fred Karlin, Robb Royer, and James Griffin, won the Academy Award for Best Song in 1971.) A little account of details shows how the vocal inflections shape the possibilities of the song’s meaning. Karen Carpenter enters after a short four-bar introduction that features a solo oboe (plangent timbres were perennial favorites in Carpenters arrangements) playing a wistful falling figure that recurs immediately as an oboe duo in thirds. Her first word, “Love,” is on the song’s tonic, a low G, but she scoops into it from the lower neighbor F-sharp. This ornamental pitch acquires a certain pathos from the way that it compromises the underlying harmony ever so slightly at the same time that it adds a tentative quality to the singer’s apostrophe to Love personified. She cannot speak to (of?) Love with absolute confidence because the

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point of view of the song is directed toward the future. No sooner does this contingency appear, however, than it is temporarily brushed aside. The first syllable ends with a “v,” a voiced phoneme that can easily be sung through. The “v” spins out and merges with the next consonant, “l,” equally satisfying to sing. The modulation from “v” to “l” combines with the increase in rhythmic activity in the triplet setting of the words “look at the” to move our attention away from hint of uncertainty that clouded the word “Love” at its inception. By the next bar, we reach the phrase “two of us,” and arrive at the end of the antecedent phrase of the opening period (itself an antecedent period of an antecedent period). Carpenter scoops again on the word “two,” intensifying the appoggiatura that falls from the low B back down a step to A. Although it would be instructive to continue this microscopic level of description, this brief account of the first phrase is enough to point out the level of detail in the kind of hearing that arises, unconsciously for us most of the time, when we sing along with the record. The effects we can discern in the first phrase carry on through the song. Scoops and appoggiaturas appear at any of the most important words in the lyrics, and most often on strong beats; words are connected or separated with an ear toward limning the incertitude of the song’s lyrical subject as she looks to the future. The details of Karen Carpenter’s singing reinforce the ambiguity of the textual situation: “Love may grow / For all we know.” The agnosticism of the final phrase is to the point. We don’t know. We only hope. This vocal style is virtuosic, to be sure, but the nature of its virtuosity lies in the realm of finely honed distinctions of mood and thought rather than in vocal athleticism. It is therefore perfect for ordinary people, untrained singers, and amateurs in the original sense of the word. We are encouraged toward an imitation of Karen because her vocal style persuades us that we can do so in ways that reward us. There is nothing agonistic about our relationship with her, but rather the reverse. Even so, the matter is not simple. If I sing along with Karen Carpenter, then I am merging with her, yet the terms of my identification seem to presuppose a prior loss of unity—it isn’t her, it never was. Even when she was alive, I only heard her recordings. But it is the nature of the recordings themselves that solicit just this type of engagement with the music.

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“but you’re not really here— it’s just the radio” All recordings are documents of absence, but until the 1960s, persistent efforts were made to reduce the distinction between the live performance and its ghostly written form. Concert albums included audience noise to help improve the illusion of music making made present. Spector’s “wall of sound” attempted the same thing. In this model of the relationship between recording and performance, the written version is clearly supposed to be understood as parasitic on the originating event. But record labels such as Motown began to take advantage of the studio’s enabling fictions, supplementing rhythm tracks with whatever noise lay at hand, miking instruments for the sake of the mix without worrying that the result was impossible to duplicate in live performance. (It has been observed that on some Supremes recordings, you would need to find a tambourine as big as a house.) As recordings became more and more unlike live performance, their peculiar state of existence seems to have moved in two directions. On the one hand, it became increasingly possible to create musical objects that had no real relationship to physical presence, and for which listeners sought no equivalent. On the other hand, many live performers found themselves under pressure to recreate the qualities of the recording in person, such that the roles of host and parasite were completely reversed. (The problems that arise from this shift have obvious parallels to those of lip-synching, karaoke, and singing along.) For my purposes, I want to focus on only one thing. Karen Carpenter was miked extremely closely, so that many subtle details of her diction and tone production are immediately audible. To get the equivalent in live performance is again impossible; the listener’s ear would have to be within two or three feet of the singer’s mouth, and there would be no way to balance this vocal foregrounding with the fore-to-middle-ground location of the arrangement. But it is just this miking that accounts for the powerful effect of intimacy in the most successful Carpenters songs. The productions perform a closeness whose nearest equivalent is nurturance or eroticism, the most common states, after all, in which people find themselves in such close proximity to their objects of desire. Kisses such as the ones Proust recalls for us are not so far away. Maybe . . . I think the question of such absences is the primary burden of the Carpenters cover of “Superstar.”17 They had decided to record it after

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Richard heard a performance of the tune by Bette Midler on the Tonight Show and thought that it would work well in Karen’s voice. This was the raw early Midler of the Continental Baths period: her recorded version of “Superstar” is overtly histrionic, as you would expect; most of the expressive work of the song is carried in her dramatic articulation of the text, and it is difficult to recall much about the instruments supporting her. In the Carpenters version, however, the arrangement plays a much larger role. Their “Superstar” opens with a troubled introduction: a glissando upsweep from the harp sparks a forlorn descent in the solo oboe (this melody begins on the second degree of the scale, clouding the tonic minor chord under it), supported with gentle rim shots, a soft blanket of strings in the middle registers, and a forebodingly heavy bass. The descent ends in bar five on a subdominant seventh chord. A chorus of French horns in close enriched harmony pick up the line of musical thought and carry it again downwards to subside onto the tonic of F minor, itself undermined by the absence of any leading tone. There is a heavy, fated quality about this opening that finds immediate response in the vocal part. From the first words the song is focused on evoking a presence that was illusory from its inception. The lyrical subject is singing a love song to a figure she knows through concerts and radio, but she insists on the reality of their relationship. Against the chill glitter of a perfect arrangement, the details of Karen Carpenter’s vocal performance insist on the humanity of imperfect emotions. An eloquent frailty is clear in her first entrance, with its yearning scoop upward from the root pitch of the verse’s opening F minor triad to G, a poignant major second above. By itself, the G would perhaps register in our ears as a protest against the gloom of the tonic minor, a refusal all the more painful because we would already know that in this world of well-mannered voice leading, the dissonant pitch would have to subside, to give in to the tonal gravity. But to scoop into it from the F below undermines it even before it has had its moment of illusory defiance. The game is over before it has even begun. And every scoop and creamy melding of pitches that follows in the line of Karen Carpenter’s voice reinforces this lesson. The beautiful shape that such instability gives to the melody’s pitches also leave it strangely weak. It is as if the arrangement insists on a reality the voice can only counter in ephemeral fantasy. Though backup voices will eventually enrich the music’s texture, they do nothing to strengthen the melody’s dying fall. Rather, they reinforce its fatalistic side: in the song’s final verse, Richard Carpenter’s voice is audible first, trailing Karen’s

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words in a manner taken from string lines earlier in the song, but the full backup comes only in the form of helpless, broken endearments— “ooh baby . . . baby.” This way of proceeding musically matches the stance of the lyrical subject. It is an utterly abject position to be in, loving an image because when all is said and done, we must find something to love, and the music’s qualities of solicitude offer us at least the fantasy that it is responding to us as individuals. The nakedness of the need captured in the dramatic situation of “Superstar” would be unbearable without the distance established in the opulent arrangement; but the power of music is clearly responsible for inciting the desire that it can only pretend to fulfill. “Come back to me again and play your sad guitar.” As another unrequited lover once famously said, “They say that love hath a bitter taste.” Although “Superstar” is sung to a male object, I think that the song is haunted by the fantasmic figure of a woman as well. As I have suggested, Karen Carpenter’s close miking creates a sense of proximity that we mostly find in eroticism and nurturance. She sings in a low register, and we hear the details of her vocal production so finely that the sound of the words as such often overrides their semantic content. I think that when we listen to Karen Carpenter, the matrix of love and loss which she evokes finds its most common source in any vague recollections we may have of our infancies. Numerous psychoanalytic writers have noticed the intense musicality of the first months of our lives. I quote a representative remark from the work of Hans Loewald rather than other, equally relevant passages, for the sake of the elegant tension between the sober abstractions of the words and the feeling that suffuses the scene it describes: “The mother’s flow of words does not convey meaning to or symbolize “things” for the infant—but the sounds, tone of voice, and rhythm of speech are fused within the apprehended global event. One might say that, while the mother utters words, the infant does not perceive words but is bathed in sound, rhythm, etc., as accentuating ingredients of a uniform experience.”18 It must follow from Loewald’s observations that what any infant hears first in her mother’s arms is music. It is true that verbal and musical logics and systems of signification are incommensurate. But babies do not know that. What they hear is patterned sound. Pitch (however indeterminate), timbre, and rhythm form a wash over children before they have begun to piece together their verbal universes. Moreover, this original music is continuous with the body that produces it; the sound of a mother’s voice is unified with the sounds of the rest of her body as

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it breathes and digests, as the blood moves through the heart. But of course, we inevitably grow up (away, apart) and permanently mislay that full sonic nurture. It may be that for all music one of the things we listen for is whatever echo we may find of a lost maternal sonic presence. It may be that all musicians are melancholy.

“but for now this is my song” In Karen Carpenter’s case, the notion of music as the record of a particular lost maternal sonic presence brings into conjunction any number of details of performance, career, image, and reception. The Carpenters’ interest in “oldies” could stand as a metaphor for their ostentatiously close relationship to their parents inasmuch as the musical interest seemed to entail submission to the aseptic familial cheer of a 1950s sitcom. Even in the early 1970s, a multifarious development of the retro was already under way in fringe areas of pop culture. Arguably, many of the New York avant-garde artists in the wake of figures such as Jack Smith or Andy Warhol had consistently played with the cultural detritus of the 1950s because the stuff was first “outmoded,” and the invention of punk and new wave would carry such recycling to complicatedly attenuated heights. The proto-punks and new wavers, however, could not exactly be praised for their love of mom and apple pie. By the 1970s, hoods and hippies were as one with respect to compulsory suburbia. (And the sufferings of those women of a certain age at Barry Manilow’s concerts remind us that they had a point.) On their music’s surfaces, the Carpenters refused to acknowledge the “dark side” of the 1950s and remained deaf to critiques of Cold War America’s majoritarian vision of “the good life.” They obstinately preferred Disneyland to Allen Ginsberg’s Beat landscapes, Anaheim to San Francisco. Their loyalty to a strain of optimism that was hopelessly discredited in vast stretches of the youth culture damned them to uncoolness. And yet we can always find more hints of troublous internal reservations in the music. Consider one more instance of Panglossian corn that proves to have an unexpected aftertaste: the sweetly countrified song “Top of the World,” released on the album A Song for You in 1972. A jaunty intro flavored with slide guitar spins itself through a condensed variation of what will become the chorus to settle into a two-bar lick on the electric piano that prepares the entrance of the first verse. The melody of the verse bounces through everyday diatonic harmonies in simple scale patterns and outlined triads—a flawless portrait of ingenuous reliance on old-fashioned

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directness. Adding to the cheery bounce of the song is Karen Carpenter’s graceful way of managing rhythm; slight anticipations and delays of the beat create a kind of easy-listening carelessness ultimately derived from swing. In the context of the Carpenters’ style, the hickface of the slide guitar sounds charmingly goofy. And yet, the song’s melody continually falls down to a low E (at the bottom of Karen’s voice) in such a way that the pitch’s constant reiteration begins to feel like a halfconscious expectation or wish for something else, something more. The desired goal evoked by these descents is ostensibly the melody’s final destination of the tonic pitch a perfect fourth above, achieved at the cadence of the chorus. But there has been so much of that low E in the verse—we have heard it repeatedly, and in Karen Carpenter’s most luxuriant register, it is the one we will always remember. Thus do sonority and melodic construction make common cause to undermine the song’s manifest message. Even at the end of the song, when the last return of the electric piano’s lick seems to bring the song to a serene close, we may wonder about the low E. Why is it that it matters so much more in memory than the actual cadences? I think that as in so many of the Carpenters’ hits, our doubts about the perfect world projected in the music have fastened upon the telling sign, the beautifully poisoned apple on the tree in the middle of Eden. And we like the fairy tale all the more because we think we have proof that it is not true. A single pitch betrays the song to all our benefit. The melody enacts a fortunate fall. Consider one last image of the Carpenters. The 1994 tribute album entitled If I Were a Carpenter contains many of their most famous tunes in cover versions by a group of alternative and alternative-leaning bands and artists. The cover of the compact disc shows cartoon renderings of Richard and Karen in the famous style of the Keanes kids—those saucereyed orphan children, stray kittens, and lost puppies that were created by the naïve painters Walter and Margaret Keane and which were nearomnipresent in the 1970s. The affective charge of the Keane style, only slightly exaggerated on the album cover, is made poignant and creepy at the same time—not all that far away from the music of the Carpenters as we are encouraged to hear it on the newer cover versions. Abjection made audible was arguably at the heart of the alternative aesthetic, and the ambivalence surrounding Karen Carpenter’s voice made her an ideal tutelary figure for the morning after in America. A brief accounting of two of the album’s covers shows this rehearing at work.

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The New York avant-garde rock group Sonic Youth chose to cover “Superstar,” and their interpretation of the song makes manifest the despair at the song’s core. The rich sheen of the Carpenters arrangement is gone, appearing only in dusty tape fragments of the opulent horn chorus that occasionally surface within the new sound world of spare post-punk instrumentation, dysfunctional noise, and electronic hiss. Some of the harmonies (when they appear fully) shift in mode from major to minor, a maneuver that begins to destabilize the tonality. In his vocals, Thurston Moore contents himself with a ravaged half-whisper that frequently falls out of certain pitch. The old arrangement, with its instrumental glow framing Karen’s gorgeous singing, rises all the more prominently to the mind. Against that recollection (nostalgia for nostalgia?), we hear Sonic Youth’s cover of “Superstar” as an eloquent portrayal of depletion. The Japanese girl garage band Shonen Knife takes a radically different approach by treating “Top of the World” as an occasion for cuteness. A crucial term for understanding this cover is kawaii—cuteness of the kind we associate with Disneyland à la Japonaise, “Hello Kitty” paraphernalia, and some aspects of anime. Kawaii makes up a potent strand of Japanese popular culture, perhaps especially as it relates to the domestication of American pop, and when retransmitted to the United States it can create extraordinary bemusement. For post-boomer American tastes, kawaii poses an intense moral-aesthetic problem, since it creates ambiguous audience positions like the ones we associate with “abject art.” We think it to be bad art, but we do not know whether it is bad on purpose. When we experience kawaii art and laugh, are we laughing with its creators or at them? In delight or in mockery? Consider that Shonen Knife performs “Top of the World” straight: there is no indication that the group is searching for dark undertones in the song at all. The pitches of the melody are almost clumsily on the beat, with none of Karen Carpenter’s playful rhythmic teasing; it is in garage-band style, with all the abandon (and missing technique) that this description implies; and last and most important, the band’s English is strongly accented. That is, the whole performance is brilliantly defective. Who knows how much of it is deliberate? Instead of the good life as seen from Downey, California, we listen to a defamiliarized portrait of America the prosperous. And we don’t know what to make of it. To be caught between competing points of audition, black and white reversing vertiginously: this position seems to be the only way to make sense of the rival covers of the Carpenters that we find on this album.

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We must find a way to have our cakes and eat them; although we might see the performances on If I Were a Carpenter as demystifying, uncovering the secret miseries that lay underneath the sleek respectable image of two nice kids from conservative Republican Downey, California, the attractiveness of the legend does not diminish. We might in our less tough-minded moments wish that the world could be ordered in such an untroubled way. The best strategy we have refuses the choice between adulation and rubbishing. We must come to praise and to bury at the same time. In listening with appreciative but uncertain ears, we make more interesting sense of the voice of Karen Carpenter.

chapter 6

Cher’s “Dark Ladies” Showbiz Liberation

In June 2002, Cher seemed to be beginning a long adieu to her career as a pop music performer. It was long since time to depart, she thought; as she exclaimed to one audience that protested loudly when she announced her plans, “Give me a frigging break. I’ve been a diva for 40 frigging years. This is the last time I’m going to do this.”1 Her fans refused to let her go quickly. Living Proof—The Farewell Tour was originally planned to move through fifty cities in the United States and Canada in the space of four or five months. As soon as it was announced, however, ticket sales dictated otherwise. By early September, the tour had grossed over $44 million and Cher decided to extend her run, saying: “So many cities sold out right away that it seemed we should have done more shows . . . We originally did just two Madison Square Gardens, and now we’re doing two more. It’s the same in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I’m only doing one farewell tour, and nobody said it had to be brief.”2 Even while the second leg of the tour was in its planning stages, there was talk of yet another addition. Cher was not destined for the largest North American cities alone. Such smaller venues as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Lubbock, Texas, clamored to be on the waiting list should she continue the tour. In between North American jaunts, Cher managed a trip to the United Kingdom as well. By the beginning of 2003, the schedule for a third U.S. leg was set to continue until June, and plans for European and Australian segments had been announced. And as if this were 143

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not enough, amid the frenzy of press coverage and ticket sales, there were additional sources of . . . Cherness? Cheritude? Perhaps Cherity . . . to be found. She made appearances on awards shows (for instance, to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from Billboard magazine in December 2002) and agreed to allow one of the Living Proof concerts (taped in Miami on November 8, 2002) to be broadcast on NBC in late spring 2003. In fact, the farewell tour lasted until April 2005, when it closed with a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Quite a long goodbye. And profitable, too. But of course, Living Proof was not the actual end of Cher’s life in performance; since 2005, she has worked on more studio recordings, made appearances on television, and a return to film, and her series of Las Vegas performances only ended in 2011 (for now!). But the Living Proof tour still marks an important moment in Cher’s extraordinary career because it was self-consciously designed to be a summation of Cher’s history as a pop diva. It is no surprise that retrospectivity was at a premium. Who could design costumes better than Bob Mackie, whose creations had defined Cher’s 1970s look? By his own account, he planned a riotous set of costumes to move decade-by-decade through Cher’s looks. His favorite, he asserted, was an elaborate number to be worn for the performance of “Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” It was a combination of tattered red leather coat, tattooed bodysuit, and feather headdress which he described as “The Matrix meets Maori meets Mohawk . . . It’s not your usual go-to-tea outfit.” The tour logo and tour book by successful LA designer Margo Chase also reflected an attitude of memory distilled into excess. In a moment of demotic exegesis for the press, Chase observed: “The logo . . . is in the form of a cross with wings, constructed with the letters in her name. The wings symbolize the enduring spirit of Cher’s music, while the cross refers to the religious symbols used in the stage production . . . The cross also nods to the gothic, Cher’s most recognizable style.”3 Chase set up the tour book dualistically. The front cover, all blue and platinum blonde to represent the “angel” Cher, contrasted with the red and green “devil” Cher of the back; inside, the materials fell into a series of recent/current photos of the diva as well as an assortment of historic shots from each of the singer’s four decades of celebrity with period-style graphic accents. One advance review of the album, whose release in early 2002 had perhaps set the tour plans in motion, was rather skeptical of the quality of some of the songs. Nevertheless, it concluded with one of the most

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important (if obvious) explanations of both the passion surrounding Cher’s incipient retirement and the likely success of the album as a triumph of persona: “ It’s the mythology surrounding the incomparable Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere that puffs these songs up into fluffy, airy bits of pop, into songs that continue to soothe and inspire us, not because of the music, but because of who is singing it.”4 The cult of Cherness is about much more than the lavish goddessworship that surrounds Living Proof as surely as it did the hugely successful Believe tour of 1999–2000. Before Believe, Cher had been only occasionally successful on the 1980s and 1990s pop charts; her career had veered from the sublime (powerful performances as an actress in a range of films) to the somewhat less so (exercise videos, endorsements for products like Equal, or the notorious infomercials of the 1990s). It was her sheer endurance that grounded the delirious hail and farewell of the Living Proof tour. But this raises the question of what it was, amid all the feathers, the spangles, and the wigs that was supposed to be doing the enduring. If the spectacular persona—in this case, “CHER” as opposed to “Cher”—whose transmogrification is the delight of fans, it is worth searching for a few more details concerning its core of resonance. If we could turn back time just a few years before Living Proof, back into the 1990s, I will show what I think constitutes that core. The following three illustrations point the way: 1. The 1995 Canadian film Dance Me Outside recounts, among other things, a complicated incident involving a young First Nations woman who has left the reservation and married a white man. Because her husband is infertile, she decides to deceive him in order to become pregnant by an ex-boyfriend, and she recruits her brother to keep the husband busy for the length of the night. The brother and his friends decide to hold a mock tribal adoption or initiation ceremony, but as it transpires on the screen it is clear to the audience that the guys are simply making up rituals out of what they think the white man will recognize as authentically Indian. On the way home at dawn, everyone is exhausted, still probably drunk, and they begin singing Cher’s old pop hit “Half-Breed.” There is a spiky little knot of ironies in this: the white husband is singing about his child-to-be, who will not actually be of mixed race; though he does not know this, his companions, and we in the audience, certainly do. On top of that, the use of the song and its evocation of Cher reconfirm the bemusing fraudulence that has just

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characterized a night of “deep Indianness” courtesy of American popular culture. To judge from the situation in the film, no one minds this fakery; instead, the faux-“skin” aspects of the song fall away because its artifice nevertheless allows genuine sentiments to emerge for consideration. (People who like this sort of thing might recall the punch line of Eco’s famous parable from his “Postscript” to The Name of the Rose: “As Barbara Cartland might say, ‘I love you madly.’ ”) At this moment in the plot, the appearance of “HalfBreed” emblematizes a version of the pervasive irony that Native writer Sherman Alexie has described as the condition of the postmodern Indian. 2. During the 1998–99 television season, The X-Files produced a wondrous episode entitled “The Post-Modern Prometheus.” A parody of the classic James Whale films Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, the episode features a two-mouthed monster, the product of failed genetic experimentation, with a stereotypically gentle soul but a striking fascination with the oeuvre (no other word is possible) of Cher. During the episode, we hear the dramatic strains of songs like “Walking in Memphis” and “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” displayed prominently for our delectation. The gaudiness of these arrangements seems part and parcel of the episode’s delight in the culture of trash TV; it is filmed in the black and white of a television re-run, deliberately evokes the portentous moralizing of B-movie science fiction or horror films, and features a town full of people whose thirst to appear on the video-tabloid Jerry Springer is completely plausible. But that is not all: at the episode’s denouement, the only expression of justice, the only happy ending that Scully and Mulder can find sends them both to Vegas, monster in tow, to attend a Cher concert. On stage is a performer who is clearly not Cher elle-même, but a female impersonator (a professional illusionist named Tracey Bell). The unreality of this figure, a veritable hall of mirrors when it comes to imitativeness, summarizes the play of fictions and serious frivolity that has marked the episode. 3. The popular sitcom Will and Grace, which ran between 1998 and 2006, developed a running joke around celebrity obsessions, which were most dramatically the property of the “real” gay character, Jack McFarland, or as he habitually billed himself, “Just Jack!” An exclusive concern with appearances rather than essences defined

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much about Jack’s character, especially everything that had to do with his being gay. It does not surprise, therefore, when in one well-known episode, Will, to lure Jack to a particular location, tells Jack that Cher will be present. In this emblematic scene, Jack rushes in looking madly for his ultimate diva, unable to restrain himself from imitating her distinctive singerly poses. Everyone laughs. In another episode of the show, the running joke is further extended when Jack actually meets the real Cher, but immediately assumes that she is actually a Cher-impersonator whose drag needs serious critique. Even when Cher slaps him, quoting the most famous line from Moonstruck—“Snap out of it!”—Jack remains invincibly ignorant that he is actually talking to his idol in person. We were—still are, in syndication—supposed to find it hilarious that Jack, who actually owns a Cher doll, cannot even recognize his idol. Or are we supposed to laugh because, in effect, he prefers the imitation over the real thing? For the moment, I will retreat from this central question of imitations and originals in order to approach it another way. Note that in my first two examples, the songs that almost select themselves as representations of “Cher-ness” are solo numbers from the early 1970s, both constructed around intensely sentimental accounts of the oppressed childhoods of outsiders by virtue of race and class prejudice. (Added to this mix, of course, is the extra abjection of the feminine first person.) I think that any consideration of the overheated mythology that accompanies the CHER of the Living Proof tour is first condensed in these instances. “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” (1971), “Half-Breed” (1973), and “Dark Lady” (1974) were all number-one hits from the beginning of the decade. This famous trilogy attempted to count the subjective cost of early 1970s social anxieties about racial mixing, class conflict, and sexual irregularity. At the same time, the songs’ obvious and embarrassing wish to be entertaining was marked by an excess that served as the springboard for Cher’s ascent to diva status. But aren’t the goals of enlightenment and entertainment almost always contradictory? It is awfully hard to offer critique in the form of “a travellin’ show”; diversion and education (in this case, the 1970s subspecies of education that we know as “consciousness raising”) do not often go hand in hand. Perhaps the most common place for them to remain allies is in autobiographical narrative. “Human interest”—to borrow the journalistic term that covers all the charges rung on compassion

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and prurience—is always more palatable than statistics or political analysis. Whether you are, say, an evangelical Christian listening to a tale of conversion or a lesbian hearing a coming-out story, you are on tenterhooks, eager to hear another variation on a theme of personal experience. Now, regarding imitations, an alluring fiction of “human interest” is exactly what is on offer in Cher’s “dark lady” songs. Upon any serious reflection it is implausible that these songs could be genuinely autobiographical, and yet any one of us could assemble anecdotal evidence that listeners often deeply wish to take the songs as pages from a diary. Celebrity and interpretive slipperiness (though not necessarily insincerity) appear to go hand in hand. In other words, a persistent problem with “realness” is at the root of Cher’s glorious manifestation of divahood and the attractions of her and her songs. The questions circulating around the play of appearance and essence in Cher’s performances have provided her with powerful ways of connecting to a huge cluster of issues circulating in American culture and beyond, precisely to the degree that they cannot be permanently resolved. She is faking, we know that she is faking, but we are not sure how much she is faking because although she knows we know that she is faking, she keeps us uncertain about the precise degree to which she is faking. Or does she? When authenticity—or rather the illusion of authenticity—is held in abeyance for such a long time, its rewards begin to seem paltry compared to the energy coming from the juicy sense of permanent masquerade. But to offer such an abstract formulation is insufficient. Cher’s diva status and the ambiguities that ground it are the result of a long history of performance and reception among particular communities of listeners within American culture. We must turn back time a little further before we touch on the “dark lady” songs of the 1970s.

becoming cher (with sonny) Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere was born in El Centro, California, in 1946. Both the spelling of Cher’s surnames and their ordering vary in published accounts. This uncertainty may be partially connected to the instability of Cher’s family: her mother, born in Arkansas, had moved to California in the wake of the Okie migration stream (she was hoping for a movie career). Once in Southern California, Cher’s mother married an Angeleno of Armenian extraction—hence the Sarkisian as well as the exotic “un-white” cast of Cher’s features—but the two were so

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estranged that Cher never remembered her father. By her own recollections, she only met him when she was eleven years old. Biographical accounts from early on also emphasize the poverty and social difficulty of her childhood. The ethnic complexity of Cher’s actual background is significantly tied into her family’s economic disadvantages; taken together they place her in a liminal place. She counts as white—but not that white. (It is a spot in the American social system where class and race blur together, as I will explore in more detail in chapter 7.) From such a marginal position, Cher improved herself dramatically when she met Sonny Bono and immediately became attached to him. Bono’s background was a bit luckier than Cher’s. His was a family of working-class Italians—Sonny’s parent were second-generation immigrants—who had moved to LA from Detroit just after World War II, settling in the blue-collar suburb of Hawthorne. From his teenage years, at least, Bono had his heart set on work in the music industry. After graduating from high school in 1952, he tried his hand at songwriting and anything else he could manage in the LA music business. (He was especially interested in R&B; his first demo, though unsuccessful, was made for Johnny Otis in 1955.)5 During this period, ethnically marked whiteness played an important role in mediating between black musicians and white mainstream audiences. Consider the way that doo-wop groups, when not black, were usually visibly ethnic-white (often Italian) and bluecollar. Incompletely assimilated, ethnic white minorities could perform quasi-blackness without raising too many mainstream fears about miscegenation.6 Both Otis (born Veliotes, of Greek ancestry) and Bono fit neatly into this paradigm.7 (Black entrepreneurs such as Berry Gordy or Kenny Gamble also noticed and tried to make use of this flexible spot in the American race and class hierarchy.) When Bono met the sixteen-year old Cher in 1960, he was an A&R (artists and repertoire department) man who dabbled in songwriting and backup singing, as well as an aspiring producer. He quickly imagined Cher as a potential “girl singer” and began working with Phil Spector, aiming both to learn the art of production himself and to place Cher in the position to show her talents as a singer.8 In his quest, he constantly urged Cher, usually content with singing backup, to take center stage. But according to Cher’s own account, her chronic stage fright forced Sonny to give up his plans to play Phil to her Ronnie.9 He came onto the stage with her. Although Sonny was not vocally gifted, the two sounded good together, appealing to producers and listeners alike. Originally Sonny and

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Cher billed themselves as “Caesar and Cleo” in an exoticizing maneuver, but they soon reverted to their given names. Once signed to Atco Records (a subdivision of Atlantic) in 1965, they began to find commercial success with a string of hit singles. “I Got You Babe” (1965), which reached number one on the charts, points up the conventional-witha-slightly-hippy-twist image that the two cultivated at this time. The simple music of the song supports the plain “just-folks” qualities of the duo’s voices; the lyrics sketch the touching picture of a poor young couple optimistic about their prospects in the world because of their romance. (This image is also one of those undergirding the imagery of the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun.”) In such an atmosphere, their gentle image—“with it” hair and clothes, but staunch supporters of the married life and traditional gender roles—could be folded seamlessly back into their music. Between 1965 and 1967, they were tremendously popular—so much that members of the Rolling Stones could do a parody of the couple on the British TV comedy show Ready, Steady, Go. In emulation of the Beatles, Sonny and Cher even tried their hand at several films. None of these were commercially successful, however, and the changes in audience taste and music-business structure that marked the end of the 1960s threatened to leave the duo stranded. By the beginning of the 1970s, Sonny and Cher were deeply in debt and not selling any records. Hitting the circuit of clubs and other minor performance venues, they quickly worked themselves up to the Vegas casinos and their equivalents in major U.S. cities. They received significant support from Johnny Musso, an Atlantic Records executive who had become the head of Kapp Records (a Decca subsidiary) and had brought Sonny and Cher along with him. Musso was interested in reviving the duo’s career and exploring further solo possibilities, and he set to work looking for the right producers and materials. But the crucial stroke of luck came from a club date. Sonny and Cher were playing the Americana Hotel in New York when Fred Silverman, then the head of programming at CBS, saw their show and was impressed enough to arrange a try-out. Sonny and Cher guest-hosted on the Merv Griffin Show so successfully that Silverman was able to give them a summer replacement spot in 1971. When that pulled strong ratings, Silverman offered them a television show of their own. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was a variety hour of the type discussed in my introductory chapter; it premiered in December 1971 and quickly became a terrific success because of its flashy musical numbers, the sharp banter between the performers (they came across like an edgy, 1970s-ethnic Burns and

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Allen), and a series of recurring skits that amplified the interactions between the hapless Sonny and his smart-ass sexpot wife. 10 Only a sketch of the rest of the decade is necessary at this point. The Sonny and Cher Show came apart in 1974 because of personal conflicts that led to divorce in 1975. Both Sonny and Cher as individuals, however, seemed popular enough that the networks tried them out on solo shows. These were not well received; Cher’s program, the more appealing to audiences, only lasted for a season and a half before it was killed off by dismal ratings. Sonny and Cher tried to regroup as a TV duo one last time in 1976–77, but personal differences and changes in the TV ecosystem were too great, and the show limped along for a season and a half before it was cancelled. By the later 1970s both performers were commonly treated as a joke in the press. Sonny’s marginal talents as a singer and his buffoonish image made him TV poison, while Cher’s tabloid marriage-and-dating habits (David Geffen, Gregg Allman, Gene Simmons) seemed frivolous and embarrassing. Nevertheless, by the beginning of the decade, Cher had been able to go solo, partially on the strength of the “dark lady” songs. She had released them as singles and on albums; she sang them again on the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour; and on the very first episode of her solo show, she strung all three of them into a medley that she continued to do afterwards in concert. These songs arguably form the imagistic core out of which her later reputation grew. Even when the pickings were lean, she was still able to generate a few hits as a recording artist. Cher’s background is key to understanding her survival as a pop singer. She began as part of a duo, with a partner who had already been intensely involved in the music industry. Cher’s connections demonstrate an attachment of musicians and styles that were not central to the burgeoning ideology of rock; indeed, more often than not, the culture that Sonny and Cher derived their own styles from was treated as rock’s Demon Other by such would-be tastemakers as the writers at Rolling Stone magazine. It has been said, for instance, that Sonny and Cher’s routine on the first TV show was modeled on the husband and wife act of Louis Prima (another “blackened” Italian) and Keely Smith, whose popular long-running Las Vegas show depended on mock(?)-hostile banter. And there is this trenchant later observation from a journalist: “Cher-sing is an interesting concoction, the foundation of which is actually soul, believe it or not. Sonny’s keen interest in R&B informed his days at Specialty Records, his involvement with Harold Battiste and the Soul Station studio and the musical direction of the Sonny and Cher

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shows which consistently showcased R&B acts like the Jackson 5, Honeycomb, and the Ike and Tina Turner Review. Because a young Cher imitated everything Sonny, right down to the whoop, you might say Chersing is actually a genetic Armenian contralto imitation of an Italian interpretation of Soul.”11 Once again the spectacle of 1960s soul, with its attachment to showbiz display, underwrites an intertwining of imitation between ethnicities. The farrago of styles and strategies points up a joyous musical promiscuity common to this region of the industry. What matters is what entertains, what diverts, and it is worth noting how much closer Sonny and Cher’s aesthetic was to performers such as Elvis Presley and especially producers like Berry Gordy Jr. It was from this milieu that Cher’s “dark lady” songs emerged.

of human vagabondage Cher came to record “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” when Johnny Musso decided to team her with the famed LA producer Tommy “Snuff” Garrett to give her more effective solo opportunities.12 Garrett thought that Cher needed to record something along the lines of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” a top-ten hit from the 1969 album Dusty in Memphis. He discussed his plans with a Kapp songwriter named Bob Stone, who returned the next day with a song entitled “Gypsys [sic] and White Trash,” revised to become “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.” Already many of the crucial mythologems are in place. First, there is the artist herself: a power-alto with mysteriously cross-racial affinities, fond enough of costume to keep us aware at all times that she is projecting an image while still tempting us to believe in it.13 (Cher’s own background continued to figure prominently in publicity about her. The feature story that accompanied her appearance on the cover of Time in March 1975, for instance, made sure to emphasize her childhood poverty and familial instability.) Then there is the potent combination of a southern setting, class and race consciousness, and illicit sex-and-pregnancy, along with a hint of blasphemy to titillate the listener. All of this spells abjection, though a different variety from the ultra-white Karen Carpenter in her lonely room. Instead, we pick up the resonances of the star-crossed figure that cultural critics have labeled “the tragic mulatto,” translated into terms of caste.14 In terms of music and plot, “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” is a wonderfully extravagant number. Though the tale is simple, its presupposi-

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tions are worth spelling out. The song’s first-person narrator is born into a nomadic family, part of “a travellin’ show.” They are about as outcast as it is possible to be in this social milieu—the southern location of the song operates most obviously to signal class consciousness at work. As most people born and raised in the pre–civil rights South would know, and as other audiences outside the South might suspect, even black folks (though they bore the brunt of southern white hostility from Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras onwards) were not as contemptible as the poor white trash of the song’s original title. If it comes to that, the family in “Gypsies” is not even poor white trash because they are rootless, without even a shack to call their own or fields to sharecrop at starvation wages. The tenuousness of the family’s status is amply present in the lyrics’ description of working at whatever comes to hand. Maybe the hatred expressed toward the family by the song’s sedentaries comes from a narcissism of minor differences. The material things that divide the abject family of the song from the townspeople are subject to chance. (Agricultural societies, after all, exist at nature’s whim, as many Americans would subliminally recall from the Okie migrations of the Great Depression.) But the hostility reported in the song also serves as a way of picking up the stereotypes that have surrounded gypsies— Rom, as they are properly known—in the Western imagination: theft, rootlessness, baby-stealing, sexual license, superstition, music, violence, fraud. Though the Rom were sometimes forcibly deported from the United Kingdom and Germany to North America from the seventeenth century onwards, the largest Rom migrations came after 1880. These were met with an incredible series of legal restrictions and persecutions all over the United States: compulsory registration (with attendant fees), restrictions on both permanent and temporary settlement, interference with work and commerce, and organized persecution by local health departments. (Some of these punitive laws were on the books into the 1980s.)15 The title of the song is thus redundant, a series of synonyms in the minds of a huge number of Americans, even in the 1970s. Returning to the plot, we learn other disreputable things about the family. The narrator’s father divides his time between evangelism and faulty patent medicines, and her mother is a stripper. Even if this is the only kind of work they can get, by taking it on they are permanently lost to respectability. The show people are not without kindness, however, and they take in a handsome young man. He repays their charity by seducing the sixteen-year-old narrator, impregnating her, and deserting her. Although she laments his disappearance (while her languorous

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wails suggest that she is still captivated by his sexual skills), there is nothing to do but stay with her family. Her bastard daughter will be brought up in the same manner she has been. In the background of the story are always the self-righteous townsfolk who despise the narrator but nevertheless depend on her family for their kicks. In tone and action, “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” is not far removed from the “fallen woman” pieces that fill the repertory of popular songs from the turn of the century. (She’s more to be pitied than censured, as they say.) And the sensationalistic accents that work best in gay nineties tunes are intensified here. Much of the melodramatic effect in “Gypsies” comes from the exquisitely detailed arrangement. Underneath the song is an ominous, obsessive vamp built out of a repeated appoggiatura—B falling to A over A minor, with V-i motion in the bass. In the chorus, this figure expands to ground an oscillation between two triads a whole step apart (Dmin-C); in the song’s bridge, the oscillation changes to Fmaj7 and C chords. Perhaps there is a dim affinity with the “sigh” figure of classical tradition in the metrical character of this dissonance and its resolution, but the figure carries a desperate charge in its quick repetition of pitches in the melody and accompaniment alike. The orchestration of the vamp emphasizes the sharp attacks by using an electric piano plus mandolin, pushing the primary beat’s subdivisions into prominence. It is as if our attention has focused on rapid breaths or pounding heartbeats. That same emphasis on subdivisions appears in a pair of glittering motives that mark off formal boundaries of the song. The first of these, which I will label A1, appears in the opening measures to set up the underlying vamp (see example 10A). Motive A1 retains this function throughout the song, returning at the end of each chorus with the initial vamp in its wake. (Short stretches of the vamp can occur without A1, however.) Although motive A1 is primarily an elaboration of an almostcomplete descending A-minor scale, its specific pitch content matters less to the effect of the song than its frantic reiterations below the primary beat (a trace of violin figuration that thus connotes “gypsyness”?) and the high metallic klang its of mandolin and bells. Taken together with the melody’s descending contour and the imagery of the text, it might be understood as the instantiation of flaunting of despair. The other motive (call it A2) is a clear variation of the first with respect to contour and orchestration (see example 10B). A2 has the function of introducing the chorus, and it also appears inexorably throughout the narrative. An additional frisson comes from its iconic reference to a

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example 10. Motives of “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.”

midway calliope, perhaps the one that plays for the merry-go-round; the irony created by juxtaposing the ostensibly happy qualities of a circus with the narrator’s despair is essential to the song’s emotional showmanship. The combination of motives A1 and A2 with the recurring vamp perhaps signals the rigidity of life circumstances within which the narrator is trapped, inasmuch as they always seem to close off the any potential root motion in the song. Each verse, for instance, begins promisingly by moving from i in A minor to set up the relative major of C; this is closed off when the music suddenly jumps to minor V then back to the tonic. The vamp makes its presence felt like a fateful omen, but the verse regroups and breaks through to C major. It is at this point that the mock-happy A2 motive materializes, sending the song careening into the chorus’ recollections of the vituperation and hypocrisy of the townspeople. The pathos in the narrator’s memory of the townspeople’s insults gains additional support from a fervent, quasi-improvisatory countermelody in the acoustic guitar, heard below the level of the arrangement that attracts our primary attention. This is a canny maneuver because it plays upon our assumptions about where the sincerity of the song is to be located. However deeply felt it may be, the surface of the song—the sparkling orchestration in particular—is the “onstage” part of the arrangement. To put something that seems more “free” further back in the mix gives us an opportunity as listeners to uncover proof of deep feeling. The allegorical opposition between the subject’s exterior reputation and interior feeling found in the orchestration of “Gypsies” also appears in its metrical structure. The song deploys irregular measures to show that the narrator, simply by speaking, is constantly attempting to escape her fate—but failing. The opening of “Gypsies” suggests nothing unexpected: four beats to a bar, grouped into two- and four-bar units. Soon after Cher begins to narrate, however, her voice seems to spark a real

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struggle for control. The phrase “Papa would do whatever he could” breaks off short by two beats, only to be slammed back into metrical regularity by the vamp. When Papa’s activities become more specific and the music drops another two beats from the phrase, motive A2 appears to restore control. The metrical irregularity becomes most important at the end of the chorus, where the men of the town gather to exploit the narrator’s mother in a bar of three plus a bar of two, sparking off another recurrence of motive A1. The cycle begins again. To a correctly sentimental listener, the music’s struggle between rigid determinism and failed visions of freedom is quite poignant. This feeling is made even greater by Cher’s vocal inflections. The blue-noting of the melody when the narrator marks the fatal boy’s first appearance carries special appeal. The bridge of the song, however, contains the only music that suggests any real possibility of change. Here, the key suddenly shifts up to the relative major on the vamp as Cher ironically relates her seduction; when she reaches her pregnancy, the song seems to lose the clarity of its downbeats for the first time. For about ten beats, we as listeners do not know quite where we are. It is possible to hear this, in the terms of Romanticism, as a moment when transcendental desire trumps hard circumstance. But no: the boy is gone, and words fail Cher because nothing can offer respite to her longing. As she repetitively laments her lover’s disappearance, both she and the music give up. The music falls back into its gloomy story as the carousel takes another turn. In this context, the repeated choruses of the outro simply confirm the song’s picture of an eternal wheel of abject femininity. The music and lyrics of “Gypsies” thus set up a potent echo chamber of shaming—for our delectation. We enjoy the spectacle all the more because we are to some extent at risk ourselves. Despite the humiliated position of the narrator, she is, after all, morally superior to those who despise her. The account in the song then becomes a consciousness-raising maneuver. I think that the song genuinely wants to activate our sense that its social world is actual, if somewhere else. But the vicariousness of our identification also suggests that the song is simply flattering our narcissism while allowing us to indulge in a voyeuristic thrill. This possibility is always a problem with a sentimental style, one of the main reasons it carries such a squirm-making charge for the more scrupulous-minded. Such a morally uncomfortable position has to be given deniability; surely, in our compassion we are more like her than we are like them. Our identification with the narrator or our recognition of her plight may be the only thing really separating us from the men who “laid their money

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down.” The song’s setting is essential to giving us an out because the longstanding brutality of race and class arrangements in the South makes it an ideal location for archetypes of injustice. “Gypsies” would not pack the same punch if set in a differently mythologized region. But although scapegoating of any sort is perhaps a dubious maneuver, it seems necessary to charging the circuit of emotions in the song’s payoff. Ultimately, the real point of a song such as this one is not to allow us to grieve in truth for the narrator, nor to luxuriate in feelings of moral superiority while contemplating the town’s hypocrites. Do we sympathize with the narrator? Yes, but we would rather grieve for ourselves. And we need the alibi of showbiz: however we may really feel, it is reassuring that we can do as we like by claiming that we’ve been hijacked by the opulent fun of the arrangement and its too-muchness. We are supposed to mime the act of grieving, all the while enjoying the emotional extravagance of identifying with an especially mouthy outcast. Since we are “just playing,” we cannot be held accountable for any bad behavior—it is the song that is behaving indecorously; we are simply enacting it as part of a performance. No wonder it hit number one in 1971.

a melodrama of mésalliance Soon after the success of “Gypsies,” the relationship between Cher and Garrett grew strained, largely because Sonny had strong opinions about the kind of material Cher ought to sing. When Sonny rejected “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” despite Garrett’s certainty that it would be a hit, because he thought it offensive to Southerners (he was right, it is), Garrett withdrew in irritation.16 But a lyricist named Mary Dean, unaware of the split, approached Garrett with a song text she had written with Cher specifically in mind. After holding it for a few months, Garrett went to Cher with the song. “Half-Breed,” whose music was written by the Hollywood composer and arranger Al Capps, tells close to the same story as “Gypsies,” but this variation is more ostentatiously ethnicized. I will start with the title because its consequences would have come across as much more severe than we might realize from forty-odd years later. Again, there is a specific trouble in the song that is grounded in politics as well as everyday life. Before “Half-Breed” even begins, we already know the song is about the painful consequences of racial mixing. So much dread has attached to the obscuring of racial divisions in American history that miscegenation laws (some of which dated back to colonial ordinances)

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were widespread in the United States far into the twentieth century.17 Though statutes were most often directed at marriages between “black” and “white” partners, there were nevertheless prohibitions against intermarriage (on rare occasions, sexual contact of any sort) between white folks and other racially defined groups in as many as forty-one states. (Besides the constantly targeted African Americans, Native Americans and Asians were also sometimes included this legislation; the racial classification of Latinos fluctuated enough to make miscegenation laws including them less common.) Although lawsuits occasionally appeared objecting to individual instances of a particular racial classification, the miscegenation laws themselves were unchallenged from Reconstruction until the 1920s. Two crucial legal decisions led to the overturning of these laws. In the 1948 case Perez v. Lippold, the California Supreme Court declared the state’s miscegenation statute unconstitutional—the first time any such law had been overturned in American legal history.18 And most important, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared all miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional. This decision was handed down in 1967!19 Even in the early 1970s, “Half-Breed” was an epithet that could carry serious consequences. But the song is not speaking of mixed-race people in general; this song focuses on Indians. The long and disgraceful history of forced exile, genocide, and fraudulent treaties that reduced the various Native American nations (who were recognized as sovereign in theory but betrayed in practice) to mistreated federal wards by the beginning of the century make for a set of concerns different from those of other ethnic and racial minorities. To begin with, there is the question of what sociologists would call hypodescent: how much “blood” does it take to make an Indian? American racial classifications might resort to the “one drop” argument when locating someone as “Black,” but such an argument was uncommon with respect to Native Americans. Then there is the question of culture, especially in the form of competence in a mother tongue. Finally, there is the question of government relationships and registration as “Indian” with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington, D.C. All of these criteria can be used to demonstrate Indian identity, but none of them necessarily trumps the others.20 Furthermore, the history of European-Native relations guarantees a different range of attitudes about miscegenation. In American political discourse and literature, a small but persistent yearning for EuropeanIndian ethnic merger subsists alongside the vicious customs of Indian hating. On the one hand, whiteness could gain additional Americanness

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without compromising its racial supremacy if a distant ancestor were proudly claimed to be an Indian. Pocahontas is the obvious model here; the descendents of her marriage to John Rolfe included prominent members of the upper class in Virginia, and set the pattern for the occasional white liking for a great-grandmother who was “an Indian princess.”21 On the other, to have a Native ancestor too close to the present more often than not negated any claims to whiteness that a person might make. In any case, identifying as white would be more socially advantageous, and much awareness of partial Indian descent was kept sub rosa. This situation began to change dramatically during the 1960s, thanks in large measure to the rise of activism among Native American groups.22 In an effort to revise the institutional arrangements of the BIA, settle long-standing Native land claims, and reduce populations on reservations, federal authorities had embarked on a process of “termination” to eliminate their responsibilities to Native nations. As a part of this process, the federal government resettled huge numbers of individuals from (mostly rural) tribal lands in urban areas. By 1970, about one half of the Native American population of the United States lived in cities. One important result of these policies was the formation of an intensified “pan-Indian” identity in what were originally distinct nations. In the context of 1960s theorizing about ethnic identity and politics, the idea of an Indian nationality seemed to offer real possibilities of cultural-political agency, and a significant cultural movement emerged. The 1960s saw some small-scale political action in parts of the United States, such as the series of “fish-ins” that dramatized issues affecting Indians in the Pacific Northwest. The first event to register strongly at the national level, however, was the establishment of the Red Power movement with the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969–71 by a group of Native American students from San Francisco State University calling themselves “Indians of All Nations.” The symbolic value of this action was enormous; anecdotal evidence suggests that it had a resonance comparable to the Montgomery Bus Boycott for African Americans or the Stonewall Riots for gay men and lesbians.23 Alcatraz helped spark the formation of organizations like AIM (American Indian Movement) and the National Indian Youth Council. It also provided the impetus for additional protests such as 1972’s Trail of Broken Promises caravan to Washington, D.C. (which ended in a week-long occupation of the BIA headquarters), or the seventy-one-day federal siege of protesters at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973.

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The political effects of Red Power included a dramatic increase in the number of people who wished to claim an Indian identity. (Such claims may most often have been by reason of hypodescent rather than cultural background, but it is impossible to determine for certain.) As one person has recalled: “When Alcatraz came, suddenly they all bloomed—all the Metis said they were French, now suddenly they said they were Indian. Those with Indian blood hid it, saying they were Turks or Mexicans or Armenians . Now Indians were coming out of the woodwork.”24According to the self-reportage that began with the 1960 census, the number of Indians in the United States more than tripled between 1960 and 1990, well in excess of the birth rate. In 1980, the year of the largest increase, it could be estimated that upwards of 350,000 people had switched to a self-identification of “Indian” from “black” or (especially) “white.” A large number of “new” Indians in 1980 identified their tribal affiliation as Cherokee for several reasons. The Cherokee nation has had a long history of significant exogamy—already in the 1830s fully one quarter of the nation was of mixed ancestry.25 Relatedly, the Cherokee nation successfully met the pressures of European settlement by selective cultural adaptation. Most famously, Sequoyah created a Cherokee syllabary in 1821 which led to a level of Cherokee literacy that surpassed their white neighbors. Along with the other “civilized” tribes of the southeastern United States—the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, and the Seminole—the Cherokee were especially effective at delaying European incursions into their territories. Their resistance took on an especially important symbolic dimension during the Georgia gold rush of 1828. This event placed enormous pressure on the federal government to forcibly relocate the Cherokee. Despite two Supreme Court decisions in favor of the Cherokee nation, Andrew Jackson (bursting with unconstitutional animosity) enabled thousands of people to be forcibly deported to the Western territories in 1838–39. The Trail of Tears, as it became known, took on enormous weight in subsequent historical writing as a synecdoche of American injustice toward Indians.26 This lengthy digression may seem somewhat excessive for a simple pop song; but in fact, the details of the historical record sat very high in the demotic consciousness at the beginning of the 1970s. A powerful example of this was the 1971 film Billy Jack, which detailed the heroic exploits of an ex-Green Beret half-breed mystic kung fu warrior.27 The character of Billy Jack, played by the white actor Tom Laughlin, had first appeared in a 1967 “biker Nazi” film called The Born Losers, where his actions were typical of the lone vigilante hero in action films of the time.

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Like the protagonists of films such as Dirty Harry (1971) or Death Wish (1974), Billy Jack, although possessed of amazing capacities for violence, only whomped on criminals.28 The eponymous film laid great stress on his Indian identity as superior to the crassly exploitative worldviews of the white villains in a way that married the tastes of the counterculture to traditionalist machismo. One promotional tag, devoted to having it both ways, proclaimed: “You’ve got due process, Mother’s Day, supermarkets, the FBI, Medicare, air conditioning, AT&T, country clubs, Congress, a 2-car garage, state troopers, the Constitution, color television and democracy. They’ve got BILLY JACK.” The equivalence of legality and material prosperity in this list is notable—a pointed reminder of the injustices most keenly felt by the movie’s target audiences—and flows seamlessly into the promise of some superior ass-kickin’ action. The combination was so attractive that it overrode the film’s technical flaws, stilted dialogue, and stiff acting; audiences (especially Indians) flocked to it multiple times.29 Two more sequels followed during the 1970s: The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), and the ecoCapra-esque Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977). And while Billy Jack was grossing its millions, the airwaves were filled with a hit single entitled “Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian).” Written by country-western artist John D. Loudermilk but derived from a poem written by a Lakota Vietnam veteran, the song was an effectively lugubrious epitome of the Indians’ fate, ending with a faint hope of cultural and political resurgence. It had been a hit for the British recording artist Don Fardon in 1968 before it was covered by Paul Revere and the Raiders in late 1970; this second version reached number one in the United States during July 1971. In such a cultural climate, it was probably inevitable that Mary Dean’s lyrics for “Half-Breed” should have fastened on the word “Cherokee” as a specifier. This background raises another problem. I think the history that I have recounted is relevant. It surely sat just behind the song in the minds of many listeners, if only because it had saturated the news media and popular culture of the early 1970s. But the song itself is determined to construct a picture of Indian identity that never deviates from the stereotypes of the century before. The lyrics to “Half-Breed” do not spend time recalling the historical injustices experienced by the Indians, but rather focuses on the “here and now” problem of prejudice against people of mixed race without letting any desires for accuracy get in the way. The song’s first person is the daughter of a white man and “a pure Cherokee,” whose people are ashamed of the alliance, which makes

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the girl “white by law.” The song’s white people, however, reject her as an “Indian squaw.” The likelihood of this thoroughgoing dual rejection is exaggerated, as my preceding discussion suggests. In the scope of the song, however, this doesn’t matter; we believe the narrator’s story, not least because the terms of disaffiliation in the lyrics make such an inevitable rhyme. The condemnation on all sides makes it inevitable that the miscegenated family falls into crypto-“gypsy” status. They become wanderers who meet with contumely everywhere they go. The narrator leaves her parents when she comes of age, but her homelessness has already become a defining part of her identity. Although she loses herself in promiscuity, she still cannot escape. As in “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves,” there seems to be no solution to her dilemma, only opportunities to perform the despair of a spoiled identity. Musically, “Half-Breed” unworriedly promulgates stereotypes of Indian music within standard 1970s tonal and formal structures: the scotch snaps in the song’s instrumental interludes and commentaries, the drum patterns and bell or tambourine riffs of the rhythm track, and the deep male vocalizations—those “heyas” sitting just under the surface of the mix during the chorus—belong to the Hollywood Indianist strain. The strict song structure of alternating verses and chorus framed by intro and vamp, the a minor with lots of flat-VI, and especially the proto-disco countermelodies, all place the song firmly on the commercially sensitive side of early 1970s pop. Cher’s vocal style, abundantly filled with yelps, catches, and other vocal lachrymosities, sits somewhere between Indianist ornament, bargain-counter verismo, and a countrywestern larmes aux voix. It picks up the spectacular elements of the arrangement perfectly. As the music, so the performance: one of the most famous images of Cher from the 1970s placed her in an elaborate stage-Indian outfit of long breechclout, war bonnet, and heels. The fantastic nature of the getup is apparent even to the most casual viewer. For those who are acquainted with actual Indian traditions, the spectacle is even more disorienting— most of Cher’s apparel is male—a kind of double-drag—and the effectiveness of the costume depends on the history of Wild West Shows and Indian Princess pageants rather than the kinds of pow-wow regalia to which it ostensibly refers.30 As such, it continues a tradition of ethnic drag most strongly associated with minstrelsy, and it bears some of the complex interweaving of contempt, envy, and identification by which the American racial system’s ferocious antinomies have been marked since the nineteenth century.31 Could it be any other way? The kind of identifi-

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cation that the song means to foster is sentimental in the best traditions of melodrama. There is no place for the complexities of authenticity in this tale. Hence the music, like the clothing, must be unreal. The song is not about actual Indians; it is not even really about actual white persecutors. It is about those of us who sympathize with the narrator’s plight. But as my discussion of “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” indicated, the shiftiness of the “us” in this sentimentality is apt to make audiences nervous once they are freed from the spellbinding presence of the song. Our sense of accountability in listening demands that some kind of authenticity be found to make the song “true.” People who heard “HalfBreed” when it was first released may remember discussions between listeners about Cher’s ethnic background. Cher’s last name was not generally known at the time, and her Armenian features and coloration could easily seem Indian to mainstream audiences in the wake of the Red Power movement. But although Cher might technically be able to claim some Indian ancestors from her Arkansas-born, Oklahoma-raised mother, by her own account the presence or absence of Indian blood never mattered to her own sense of herself.32 Until the success of “HalfBreed,” that is. An enigmatic moment in Cher’s reception as Indian came in 1973, when a new press item, claiming that Cher was “part Indian,” noted that she and Sonny Bono had filmed six public service announcements for television to alert potential claimants of the conditions of the Alaskan Native Land Claims Settlement Act that had been signed into law the previous year.33 Were these PSAs a skilled public relations maneuver, or a gesture of genuine solidarity with a group of people who had been unjustly treated by the federal government? It must have been both. Such impulses to social justice and consciousness-raising, however, were less central to the reception of “Half-Breed” than the magnificent spectacle that the song enabled. Was Cher serious about being an Indian? Obviously, not in a way we might expect. The musical characteristics of the songs, particularly their glitzy orchestrations and exotic motifs, reinforced their portrayals of racial and ethnic difference. But the songs’ ornamental excess and intense conventionality might betray a “socially reprehensible” lack of authenticity, and this potential criticism could easily find support in the spectacle of a Cher performance. Political impotence from excessive entertainment value could seem like an ineradicable taint—ornament as crime. But the sparkling ballyhoo of the song was nevertheless appealing because its very emptiness made it available for refashioning into something that a marginal listener could make into her own.

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“she was a v-a- m-p . . .” One of the most popular recurring sketches on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour was known as the “vamp” segment. It was structured as a series of three short comedy skits about famous historical or fictional women, framed by a musical number that set out the scenarios in advance and tied them together with a little refrain parodically reflecting on the “badness” of the woman in question. The term “vamp” comes from one of the most famous “dark ladies” of the silent film era, Theda Bara. Although Theodosia Goodman was a smart and soft-spoken tailor’s daughter from Cincinnati, once she got to Hollywood, her studio transmogrified her into Theda Bara, the epitome of the femme fatale. Her performances in such excitingly lurid pictures as A Fool There Was, The Devil’s Daughter, Carmen (all three in 1915), Cleopatra (1917), and even Salome (1918) had a sensational effect. The studio added to her mystique by putting forth brimstone fables about her origins: the love child of a French “artiste” and his Egyptian concubine, her name was shown to be an anagram for “Arab Death,” and she was said to possess supernatural powers of the most perilous and attractive kind. This is a durable set of associations borrowed from opera and the stage, of course: orientalism and diabolism flowed seamlessly into a picture of monstrous (and therefore attractive) female sexual power. Theda Bara as the original vamp was in the background of this segment of The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, but the third of the sketches in the routine always concerned the literary figure of Sadie Thompson, a raucous femme fatale–hooker who was never “quite” reformed. The character originally appeared as the protagonist in a short story by W. Somerset Maugham, where a South Seas missionary attempts to reform her, falls in love, and commits suicide. The story was turned into a popular stage play entitled Rain, which was then adapted three times for use in Hollywood. Sadie Thompson was played first and most famously by Gloria Swanson in the 1928 silent film of the same title. Joan Crawford tried her hand at the role in the 1932 picture Rain, and Rita Hayworth followed with Miss Sadie Thompson in 1953. Cher’s performance of Sadie Thompson recalled all of these famous appearances, but in a way that emptied them of their danger while trying to preserve their erotic appeal. She would bump and grind in a stylized stripperstreetwalker fashion; her comic exaggerations suggested that although she could vamp seriously if she wanted to, she was “just playing” for the moment. Cher’s Sadie Thompson, moreover, was marked as strongly by

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her smart mouth as she was by her gestural come-ons. That is, the persona of Sadie Thompson in the sketches was continuous with that of Cher herself. This construction of Cher’s image might have seemed inevitable from the moment Sonny has first thought of giving Cher the stage name of “Cleo” so many years earlier. The power of parody always depends on our underlying respect for the thing it mocks; blasphemers need a god as much as the faithful. And in many cases, lampooning ironically reinstates its object as a source of strength. By making such a joke of her sexual power as Sadie Thompson, Cher reinforced her erotic glamour. There are always limits to this process; if a performer wants to use self-deprecation most successfully, it is well to be sure that there are also times when everything is taken seriously—while preserving the values of blatant artifice, of course. (The off- and on-stage manners of performers such as Barry Manilow or Dolly Parton support this claim strongly.) The serious side of Cher’s vamping is most clear in her song “Dark Lady,” released in 1974. The last of Cher’s trio of number-one singles in the decade, it represents a different approach to the problems of racial mixing and illicit sexuality by taking the point of view of a woman whose husband has been seduced by a classic vamp. We recognize this plot as one that had figured in the repertories of American vaudeville houses and minstrel shows since the nineteenth century. The Dark Lady of the song is a rich gypsy fortune-teller and man-eater who lives in New Orleans (where else?); the song’s narrator, irresistibly drawn by the Dark Lady’s glamour, pays a visit to have her fortune read. In a synaesthetic whirl of dance, magic ritual, music, and eldritch potions, the Dark Lady tells the narrator that her “man” is faithful to someone else—but a recollection of the Dark Lady’s “strange perfume” sends her back to find her man and the Dark Lady in flagrante delicto. Our narrator has a gun. The showbiz inevitable occurs. We end, however, with the chorus and its vision of the Dark Lady’s spellbinding ritual presence. The tension between the relentless progress of the plot in the verses and the fixed image of the Dark Lady as occult gypsy temptress is crucial to the sensational qualities of the song, and it is embodied with special intensity in the musical arrangement. To begin with, there is the perspectivizing effect of the song’s opening, a languorous rubato violin solo that adumbrates the slithery chromaticism of the melody we will hear in the chorus (see examples 11A and 11C). The violin tune is bedizened with glittery accents from the bells and supported by soft chords

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example 11. “Dark Lady” violin introduction (A), opening bass line (B), and melody of chorus (C).

and flourishes in the accordion. This intro primarily serves to conjure up the stereotypes of the gypsy for our ears, but its tempo and instrumentation contrast with the body of the song in such a way as to signal a temporal shift. The song is in the past tense, and the distance of the lyrics is already encapsulated in the intro. The slow section ends appropriately enough in a fermata, after which the body of the song lurches into its fast tempo with a chromatic bass figure that again adumbrates the head motive of the chorus (see example 11B). The most important element of contrast in “Dark Lady” comes in the differing phrase structures of verse and chorus. The verses depict the narrator’s anxiety and confusion by setting up phrase lengths outside the normative four-bar frame of this kind of pop song. An antecedent unit of five bars is followed by one of six; the five-bar phrase returns, but its next consequent phrase covers seven bars. This violation of the expected four-bar protocol has two manifestations: the applied dominant (V/iv) that always appears in the third bar of the phrase to create the primary five-bar unit, and cadential extensions that intensify (by delay) the music’s forward momentum. Is this supposed to be a kind of metrical equivalent to the introduction’s rubato? If so, then maybe it reinforces the unpredictable power of the Dark Lady’s persona. We might also hear the irregularities as articulating the narrator’s inner turmoil: like not wanting to look at something she knows she must

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see. (The sudden shift of key halfway through the song reinforces this idea, increasing the urgency of the narrator’s story by increasing tonal instability as well as the stress in Cher’s tessitura.) In either case, the metrical irregularity speaks to ambivalence. In the chorus, the narrator’s resistance falters thanks to the glamorous spectacle of the Dark Lady’s ritual. Here the phrase structure becomes perfectly regular, with four four-bar phrases in the predictable pattern abab. The problems of identification I have discussed in “Gypsies” and “Half-Breed” might seem somewhat less pressing in “Dark Lady” because of its dependence on a hoary tale of infidelity and murder. We know how betrayed-spouse songs work because we have heard them in a million versions. They are so archetypal that their power to comment directly on worldly situations is somewhat neutralized. The three figures of such a tale could be of any race, class, gender, or sexual identity. Besides, we are further outside this song than in the first two examples because there is no collective figure whose identificatory possibilities can make us uneasy. In this case, the complication comes from the lyrics’ wish to label the temptress as a gypsy, and the arrangement’s ability to pick up the usual figures to represent her. How much is the Dark Lady’s ethnic identity supposed to matter? I think that it is not clear in this song. By 1974, Cher’s hits had moved away from the “social problem” genre and toward something more abstract in the Hollywood mode. The lady’s darkness was a way of keeping Cher’s off- and on-stage personae in mind, but more abstract than it was in “Gypsies” and “Half-Breed.” This step was crucial, for it exapted her for later celebrity.

becoming trop cher (without sonny) After her divorce from Sonny, Cher lost a considerable amount of her public for a while. She recorded albums aplenty, but had no more numberone hits during the 1970s. Her infamous relationships with Gregg Allman and Gene Simmons had made her a figure of fun in the mainstream press; her career as an actress of exceptional skill was unforeseen. A significant part of her reduced fan base, however, continued to adore her. They were mostly gay men, and what they seem to have admired most was Cher’s trend toward unreality. This was most apparent in the reception of her great disco album Take Me Home (1979). A celebrity news column that offered a passing review of the album continued on about Cher herself in distinctly gay-sounding swooning terms:

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Cher has become the glistening bastion of contemporary glamour. To find comparisons, one must hearken back to the glory days of the Hollywood Dream Factory, the Tierneys, the Hayworths and the Monroes. Glamour is style taken to the nth power, and although stunning and evocative, it is never really meant to be taken seriously. An important ingredient is always fantasy and Cher fully admits this. “I’m out there to entertain,” she says. “I’m not supposed to be a cure for cancer. I really love the glamorous part of my work. I’ve always been into clothes but it’s really amazing how some people can magnify it, carrying on about manicure bills and stuff like that. I have a whole bunch of sides to my character. I can easily go from a beaded gown to a pair of jeans. I’d be bored if I was just one kind of person all the time.”34

Cher’s image was in a distinctly retro style at this point, which was a crucial element of her success as far as her gay public was concerned. Many details of this passage could be read directly back to the strategies of unreality that were so central to the effect of her early 1970s hits: the alibi of “frivolity”; the obscured lines between reality and spectacle; the value of fluctuating subjectivity. These became the basis for Cher’s real celebrity life because in casting her as an abject, marginal figure, her self-presentation had made it possible to enact a narrative of progressive emancipation and self-ownership. This kind of autonomy was not exactly like that imagined by the 1970s women’s liberation mainstream, of course. Cher’s dependence on Hollywood/Vegas archetypes violated the restrictions on bodily display that seemed necessary at the time in order to neutralize sexism. Consider the notorious cover of Take Me Home, a breathtaking outfit that intensifies the quasi-cheesecake of Cher’s “Half-Breed” costume to an unendurable degree. The dragon-wing headdress and gauntlets, the bikini-bottom that almost suggests a chastity belt, and the coiled serpent bra that shows a tempting amount of flesh—all the details come from the Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo school of illustration familiar to people who like comic books and the sword-and-sorcery genre. They resonate with any number of temptresses from classic B-movies, especially exotic figures like She Who Must Be Obeyed or the Queen of the Cobra People, and perhaps most importantly, they recall the regalia of the Los Vegas showgirl. This last model is particularly interesting because the notion of immodesty as aggression is so central to the showgirl’s appeal. In a brilliantly contentious, Baudelairean essay, art historian Libby Lumpkin has suggested that the showgirl’s power comes from the combination of her nudity (not simple nakedness—a showgirl’s costumes are necessary to heighten the effect of all that bare flesh) and her direct glance at us: “At once, our visual privileges as members of the audience

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are reconstituted: The invisible ‘fourth wall’ that in the modern era separates the audience from the image, and that is critical to the mechanics of voyeurism, is relinquished in favor of reciprocal confrontation. Theater is transformed into ritual. We enter an older discourse in which we are participants rather than simple observers, responding to the showgirl’s gaze as well as her display.”35 In Lumpkin’s view, this dislocation of the gaze often has the curious effect of placing initiative in the showgirl’s hands: the audience fantasizes being chosen rather than choosing. Although this shift of agency is conducted exclusively through sight in this case—showgirls tend toward stillness, moving only to stride forward in fantastic display—it does not seem implausible to wonder if the intricate effects of sound might do just as much to shape our sense of “who is in charge” in a pop song. We can hear the song “Take Me Home” as enacting just such a shift. Ostensibly a plea to be chosen, the song relies on the musical force of the arrangement combined with Cher’s vocal presence to turn this plea into an irresistible demand, the auditory equivalent of the showgirl’s direct gaze. With the construction of the image in “Take Me Home,” Cher finally approached showbiz perfection, the existence as pure illusion she seemed to be advocating in her public comments to the press. But realities and illusions are slippery things. Though Cher’s “Take Me Home” persona was notably abstract, it still depended on the accretions of all those earlier “dark ladies” and the situations that they represented. Consider what it takes to make a diva, in the pre-1990s sense of the word. Many of the term’s distinctive features descend from the prima donna of nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera. Most important is the performer’s own force of personality, which is frequently seen in her narcissistic displays on stage, her legendary shenanigans and eccentricities off-stage, and her superhuman ability to return after catastrophic failures and personal tragedies. This history of disaster and triumph is often incarnated in archetypes of female abjection or defiance.36 Frequently, these narratives are condensed into the body of the performer herself. There is usually something defective about a diva: she may be fat; her race may be subordinate; she may deviate from the conventions of beauty by some feature or other; she may have technical “problems” as an actress, a singer, or both. Sticking with opera for a moment, we might remember Maria Callas’s famed struggles with her weight, or her tendency to go extremely sharp, or that terrible wobble in the late recordings; Montserrat Caballé’s legendary rotundity and her inability to move convincingly on any stage at all; Joan Sutherland’s lantern jaw;

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Jessye Norman’s race and her astonishing grandness of body. What matters in each case is the performer’s ability to overcome such obstacles. The same dynamic often pertains to screen idols and pop singers as well. Bette Davis, whose bulging eyes always seemed to match her uncontrollably mannered acting; Joan Crawford, with shoulders like a linebacker and the most mannish of eyebrows; and poor Judy Garland, the Callas of Hollywood. . . . A diva is a woman who struggles to overcome ineradicable marks of a stigmatized identity.37 It does not matter that she occasionally fails; in fact, she might not be a true diva without the catastrophes; her audiences love her most for her ability to keep going. Furthermore, the stigmata of a diva are crucial to her appeal, for they are the points at which the investments of an audience at the margins (almost certainly the most passionate part of the public) can be most easily attached. Stigmata can be translated into one another. The stigmatic is an exemplar. It is easy to note the play of opposition between nature and culture in a diva’s stigmata. The offending feature, for instance, must seem intrinsic to her being. It must be inborn, essential, so that its abjection by the social world can occur in the face of the diva’s innocence. To become a goddess, she must first appear as a victim. Increasingly in the twentieth century, the stigmata of the diva began to exist in a funny tension with the possibilities of a more radical constructedness. From the precincts of Hollywood/Broadway, where it was treated as an occupational accompaniment, plastic surgery gradually took on more complex burdens of signification and desire. Consider the emblematic case of Barbra Streisand’s unaltered features. The nose job was almost an ordinary rite of passage for Jewish girls of a certain station in the 1950s and 1960s. Though it seems plausible that Streisand’s primary objection would have had to do with the likelihood that it would alter her resonance as a singer, there was no way that Streisand’s refusal to have her nose altered in the early 1960s would not be read as a defiance of the protocols of standardized white femininity. In addition, her rejection of surgery automatically called attention to it as an instrument of volition. In a sense, Streisand was all nose. A glorious nose. If in Streisand’s case a refusal of plastic surgery could be understood as a defense of the naturalness of diva-esque stigma, in Cher’s case during the 1980s, surgery became an instrument of her deliberate quest for unreality. Those notorious Bob Mackie outfits had always emphasized the artifice of embodiment, and Cher’s face-lifts and the increasing hardness of her exercised body began to appear as an intensification of

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her clothes.38 But while such self-construction was ongoing, Cher’s career took a crucial turn into film, and she won great attention and respect as an actress. Most of her memorable roles were frequently characters of distinctly low-class mien and compromised whiteness: the trashy slut Sissy in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982); the even trashier Okie lesbian Dolly Pelliker in Silkwood (1983); a biker-chick mom in Mask (1985); or the Oscar-winning Loretta Castorini in Moonstruck (1987). Dark ladies all. A significant aspect of these roles came from the complex layering of identity and class position they fostered. It was as if the glamour that had cloaked Cher’s originary abjection as an individual suddenly came undone, adding to the reality effect of her performance on film. Was she acting when she portrayed such characters, or merely uncovering some prior truth about her interior self? How could we separate fictions of fictions from fictions of realities? By the 1980s, the details of Cher’s overall career thus duplicated the interpretive instabilities already put into place in the “dark lady” songs. And so what? Fiction-versus-reality conundrums are surely dimea-dozen in the careers of overtly theatrical artists like Cher. The previous chapters of this book have examined such vertiginous moments repeatedly. It is useful to discuss them as a way of reminding ourselves to be suspicious about claims to truth and reality in musical performance, but if we simply take refuge in radical skepticism we do a disservice to the music and the musicians, as well as ourselves as listeners. What really matters in such unfixed conditions is the imaginative room offered us to assimilate the musical experiences offered into our own frameworks. Cher’s excesses were ungrounded in a way that allowed her to represent her listeners to themselves. In a book from 1982, sociologist Dennis Altman noted the profound cultural influence exerted by the newly emergent gay and lesbian communities in America. From mass-media representations to shifts in urban lifeways, attitudes especially associated with gay men had begun to permeate everyday life to such an extent that Altman titled his study The Homosexualization of America.39 Subsequent developments in popular culture support Altman’s account of its significant shaping by sexual minorities. Since Cher’s durability and persistence as a diva depended so strongly on her gay fans, it matters that to them the 1970s were the most emancipatory decade to date in the United States. The filiation of Cher’s songs was part of the culture of spectacle that operated with great power during the 1970s, never fully superseded by rock traditions,

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especially among gay men. By their appeal to highly mediated representations of ethnicity, Cher’s “Dark Lady” songs sought to put questions and attitudes into play in a way that turned out to be especially important to the politics of gay liberation. The stigmata of mixed race and class disadvantage were translatable into those of sexual marginality. Cher’s enactment of triumph over her initial abjection could be taken as an allegory for the successes of the gay and lesbian rights movement, as well as for the general project of sexual liberation in late twentiethcentury North America. At this point, what is at stake in the moments described in Dance Me Outside, the X-Files, and Will and Grace become more clear. In each case, the use of Cher’s music and image carries an emotional charge of sexual freedom (always entangled in questions of role-playing and the making of fictions) that structures a complex layering of truth and fantasy in which participants are forgiven for their desires. However foolish or pitiable the characters in each vignette may be, we are apt to feel compassion rather than disdain for them. Surely the model for this feeling depends on the sentimentality so carefully developed in ethic of sentimental uplift that was featured in Cher’s “dark lady” songs and transferred to the rest of her spectacular career. The residue of that longdeparted optimism may be at least part of what makes us smile with delight when we hear the songs return to us, and part of what has persuaded Cher, despite Living Proof—The Farewell Tour, to keep herself from a final cadence.

chapter 7

Crossing Over with Dolly Parton

The 1990s and first decade of this century were an unquiet time for Dolly Parton. She had been a celebrated star, an icon, ever since she moved from the world of country music into mainstream pop in the 1970s, and on into film, television, and related showbiz endeavors in the 1980s; but by the early 1990s Parton’s ground seemed to be shifting beneath her. She stopped having hit songs, even on the country charts. By 1993, she believed that the problem was not simply hers, but one suffered by all country singers whose careers had begun before the 1970s. It was hard, she told TV Guide, for anyone over the age of thirty-five to gain airtime on country radio. (By 1995, she had lowered the perceived age limit on the radio to thirty.) Parton eventually claimed that she was having troubles with major labels because she was “too old for them. They didn’t think they could get me played on country radio, and they weren’t excited about me.”1 Parton’s troubles occurred during a period when country music had become a gigantic and confusing business. In 1991, Garth Brooks had seen his album Ropin’ the Wind debut at number one on the country and pop charts simultaneously. Brooks’s 1992 Christmas album Beyond the Season debuted on both charts at number two; his 1993 album In Pieces managed another double number one. Brooks was the greatest figure in this massive surge of popularity, but artists like Billy Ray Cyrus, Trisha Yearwood, and Shania Twain participated in the new country boom as well. But the bust followed quickly. Sales of country began to flag in the 173

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American market by 1997, and labels began to concerns themselves with international appeal even as they began to search for a way to revive a style that was perceived to have become stale. A cycle of blame circulating between radio and the production side of the industry in Nashville highlighted a number of structural weaknesses that contributed to the problems of country music. The celebrated venality of the record industry was as it had always been, though in the course of the 1980s and 1990s a few of the biggest fish had gobbled up most of the small fry; but the deregulation of radio that began in the Reagan administration and reached its peak with the 1996 Telecommunications Act (a piece of work dear to the hearts of Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries) was disastrous.2 In the wake of a massive restructuring of music industry, retrenchment came mostly at the expense of artists. Parton’s moment of crisis finally came in 1999, when a business merger between Universal (the parent company of MCA-Nashville) and Polygram brought about the closing of MCA’s subsidiary label Decca. Parton’s contract was dropped, and she was without major label representation. By this time, however, Parton, a canny businesswoman as well as a brilliant songwriter and performer, had made several important moves.3 In 1994, she had established a label of her own, Blue Eye Records, which co-released her albums first with Columbia, then with the Universal subsidiary Rising Tide. In 1996, she recorded a brilliantly idiosyncratic album of cover versions, Treasures, which included collaborations with artists from Alison Krauss to Ladysmith Black Mambazo. To prepare the 1998 album Hungry Again, Parton went on a retreat in the Tennessee mountains. In a gesture whose unquestionable sincerity is only equaled by its stagey magnificence, she fasted, prayed, and wrote songs for the album. She, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt finally resolved the difficulties that had prevented their collaborative album Trio II from appearing in 1994, and it was released in 1999. That same year, Parton also recorded Precious Memories, an old-fashioned gospel album of almost unendurable purity, and The Grass Is Blue, an exploration of bluegrass that has since led to two more albums, Little Sparrow (2001) and Halos & Horns (2002). 2003 saw the appearance of a tribute album entitled Just Because I’m a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton, with covers by such artists as Alison Krauss, Melissa Etheridge, Sinéad O’Connor, and Me’Shell NdegéOchello.4 And, most controversial, in 2003 Parton also released For God and Country, a solo album of patriotic and spiritual songs that was inevitably interpreted in light of 9/11. (Parton insisted in

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press interviews that she had long wanted to do a patriotic album in any case.) The bluegrass albums were recorded under the auspices of Blue Eye, and distributed through Sugar Hill Records, itself founded in 1978 to foster “contemporary music with traditional roots.” (Parton’s albums are bluegrass with respect to their primary sonic orientation, but that does not mean that the materials that appear are not eclectic. One of the most powerful performances on Halos & Horns, for instance, is an astonishing cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”) Most of the bluegrass albums were intense critical favorites, but wide listenership was another story—none reached higher than number fifty-eight on the mainstream charts. And although both Trio II and Halos & Horns broke the top ten on the country charts, Parton’s voice was conspicuous by its continuing absence on current radio play lists. From her bluegrass retrenchment, Parton has gradually moved back into greater mainstream consciousness. Those Were the Days, released in 2005, was an album of covers with a cavalcade of collaborators singing folk and pop songs from the 1960s and 1970s. The 2008 album Backwoods Barbie marked a return to mainstream country style; it was released under Parton’s own imprint and performed very well (number two on the country charts). Connected to Backwoods Barbie was the premiere of 9 to 5: The Musical, for which Parton wrote the music and lyrics; though it met with mixed critical reception, the musical nevertheless garnered a set of awards nominations and multiple productions. (Also in 2008 was Parton’s tribute evening on American Idol.) The album Better Day, which appeared in June 2011, performed well. And January 2012 marked Parton’s return to a major role in film, co-starring with Queen Latifah in Joyful Noise (a choir-heavy inspirational film). A real diva’s recovery. Parton’s recourse to neo-traditionalism, a response to the diminishing returns of her crossover style in the 1990s, highlights a polarity in country music that has been important since its recording began. Richard A. Peterson describes it as a dialectic between the rawer, more austere styles of “hard-core” and the glossy sweetness of “soft-shell.” Details of accent, singing style, lyrical situations, musical arrangement, biography, and stage performance all play a role in placing a particular instance of country music on the “hard-core/soft-shell” continuum of images from “jes’ plain folks” to professionals to stars. Peterson points out that softshell styles were popular in recorded country music before producers

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had learned that hard-core styles appealed to their public; the country recording industry has always moved back and forth between these poles in response to the historical shifts in the social worlds it inhabits.5 Moreover, the line between the poles constantly shifts: is a Nudie suit, spangled and ostentatious, hard-core because of its indelible country associations, or soft-core because of its urban aspirations? By moving back toward a hard-core style in the late 1990s, Parton was seeking a solution to her perceived lack of fit with the particular softshell model that was ascendant in the 1990s. The crossover aesthetic of the Garth era was quite different from the one that had worked so powerfully for Parton in the 1970s; but her work was so closely tied to her original soft-shell model that there was no way to forsake it and be true to the persona of “Dolly” she had constructed so carefully for her audience. The move toward hard-core gave Parton the musical space to preserve her old-fashioned soft-shell style while developing new songs that could speak to a newly constituted audience. The audience available to her is worth a brief look. In the summer of 2002, for instance, she commenced a tour to promote Halos & Horns. Reviews of the show in major newspapers praised Parton’s skills and those of her newly constituted backup band, The Blueniques. They also frequently mentioned that in addition to traditionally minded members of the country music audience, there was a striking presence of gay men, especially drag queens. Some especially conservative commentators have objected loudly to this, but Parton’s response has always been a statement of tolerance wrapped in deliberately saccharine rhetoric—“God loves everybody”—followed by a careful positioning of her own image in a nexus of identities. Consider this statement: “Although I look like a drag queen’s Christmas tree on the outside, I am at heart a simple country woman.”6 I will pursue more implications of this statement later; for now, what is worth noting is the amplitude of identifications Parton’s rhetoric allows. To be fair, the uneasiness with which Parton’s critics view her tolerance may also have to do with the fact that she loves to play to drag queens in her concerts. When she appeared in early August 2002 at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, for instance, there were at least five drag queens (good ones, too) standing close to the stage. Just before Parton launched into her classic hit “Jolene,” she bantered with her devoted imitators and then repeatedly sang “drag queen” instead of “Jolene” in the song, to uproarious approval by the audience. Maybe Dolly, like the Almighty, loves everybody, but at times some of her fans tickle her fancy

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more than others. The affinity comes, I think, from the same historical circumstances that created the extravagant devotion of some segments of the gay male population to Cher. Both artists have embodied a kind of crossover history that resonates strongly with subject positions of many of their marginalized fans. The differences are equally instructive, however. If Cher’s career may be seen as one that has sought increasing abstraction from the limitations of ethnic or class specificity, Parton’s career demonstrates the tricky maneuvering required of those who wish to move away from “home” without leaving it behind entirely. Parton’s history as an icon, including the musical substances of her songwriting and performing, provides numerous occasions to examine the negotiations of an ineradicable dual allegiance that is characteristic of her audience as well. These difficulties clarify what was at stake, moreover, in the late 1970s when Dolly Parton first crossed over.

“miss dolly’s” entrance Peterson’s hard-core/soft-shell dialectic is a useful framework for considering the state of affairs in which Parton began. Although she had made attempts to record as beginning in the late 1950s, Parton’s first significant success came in 1967. Monument Records, which had signed her in 1965, had decided that their decision to promote her as a pop singer had been misguided, so they were willing to allow her to record as a country artist. The single “Dumb Blonde,” a defiant rejoinder to the stereotypes Parton was already playing with, performed well on the country charts, peaking at number twenty-four. Among the listeners impressed by the song was Porter Wagoner, looking for a “girl singer” to replace the popular favorite Norma Jean, who was leaving his syndicated television show.7 Wagoner was an exemplary performer in the powerfully soft-shell paradigm of the Nashville Sound, an aesthetic that can be regarded as a response of country musicians to the pressures of other popular genres, especially big band jazz and swing on one side and rockabilly on the other. Often attributed to the guitarist-producer Chet Atkins (1924– 2001), the sonic paradigm centered on smoothed-out vocal productions framed against the sweetening of strings and backup choruses, with careful attention to studio effects such as reverb and echo. Its representative artists, such as Jim Reeves (1923–64), Patsy Cline (1932–63), and Eddy Arnold (1918–2008) had an immense influence on their contemporaries and even more on their successors. (The premature deaths of

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both Reeves and Cline in plane crashes only heightened their legendary status.) In his role as a producer for RCA beginning in 1957, Atkins worked hard to establish his sound ideal at the center of country music recording.8 Other producers, such as Owen Bradley at MCA and Ken Nelson at Capitol, played important roles in the development of the Nashville Sound as well. This shift in production values and aesthetic stance was immensely important during the 1950s, when country music seemed to many of its practitioners to be under threat. Attendance at the Grand Ole Opry, for instance, had slumped considerably, and only began to improve at the very end of the decade. But by the beginning of the 1960s, there seemed to be an upturn in the market for country music, and the industry began to find new ways of building its audience. Television was crucial to country’s new strategies for gaining popularity. During the 1950s, the major networks had tried out the Grand Ole Opry. Both NBC and ABC offered specials in 1955, and the ABC version worked well enough that it led to a thirteen-week series appearing once a month. In 1959, National Life Insurance Company decided to sponsor a country music program to be broadcast in twelve of its major markets; this series became the basis for the syndicated show That Good Old Nashville Music, which ran for twenty years. The king of country television in the 1960s, however, was Porter Wagoner, whose syndicated show premiered in 1961 and rapidly became a major force in country music broadcasting. From eighteen stations in its first year of production, The Porter Wagoner Show had expanded to at least 100 stations by the early 1970s. Wagoner’s hiring Parton was a major break, then, placing her squarely in the center of the Nashville industry. Audiences were at first somewhat cool to “Miss Dolly,” as she was called, partly out of loyalty to Norma Jean, but the exceptional skill of Wagoner and Parton as duet partners quickly won them an enormous joint following. Wagoner was so taken with Parton’s voice and songwriting skills that soon after she joined his television show, he persuaded his own label, RCA, to sign her. In the first years of the “Miss Dolly” era, the duets she sang with Porter caught the greatest audience attention. The thirteen duo album the two released between 1968 and 1975 (the year following Parton’s departure from Wagoner’s show) all made the top twenty on the country charts, and eleven of these broke the top ten. In the same period, Parton released twenty-one solo albums (mostly produced by Porter), but only six of these broke the top ten.

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A careful mix of hard-core and soft-shell elements was crucial to the success of Wagoner and Parton as a duo. As one of Parton’s unofficial biographers has observed in comments written at the moment of Parton’s crossover, these songs “were a combination of traditional and contemporary country, the folk structures of some of Dolly’s tunes resting comfortably next to one of her blues-tinged numbers, or even next to one of Porter’s hokey story songs [not that Parton herself does not love a good story song!]. What held the divergent styles together were the singers’ personalities and the basic instrumentation, sometimes blatantly hillbilly, with the background filled with dancing fiddles and whiny steel guitars, later subtly experimental, while still retaining a country feel.”9 The musical specificity of hard-core and soft-shell elements also extended, crucially, to vocal style. The stylistic center of Wagoner’s and Parton’s vocal manners might have been the relatively relaxed production of the Nashville Sound, but both artists were more than capable of sudden shifts back to the uncompromising sound of Appalachian church traditions. In a detailed study of the “old way” of vocal production and ornamentation in “dissenting Protestant” denominations, Sammie Ann Wickes has documented not only the persistence of an old, distinctive, and highly valued aesthetic of voice, but also its presence in commercial country music. One of her examples was an incident on The Porter Wagoner Show in which both Wagoner and Parton suddenly transformed the glitzy set into the audible recollection of a camp meeting, thrilling their down-home audience.10 The music in this case might suddenly seem to speak of an authenticity belied by the ornate showbiz of the studio, Nudie suits, big hair, and all. Was hard-core more real than soft-shell? The reverse? I do not think that in situations like this moment of lush archaism it would be possible to make a definitive choice—and that was the strength of the gesture. As Parton’s career developed on The Porter Wagoner Show, so did her appearance. When she first joined the broadcasts, her hair was visibly teased, but her clothes were mostly plain, and her makeup was fairly subdued. Her style put her in line with any number of traditional southern women’s styles.11 But over the years, Parton’s clothes became tighter, spangles appeared, and the bosom that was initially somewhat suppressed began to move to the foreground. Parton’s first steps toward a more extroverted appearance were in keeping with the stylistic devices that had been a part of the country music scene for many years, but Parton kept pushing toward a much trashier look.12 The more she

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looked like a Jezebel, the more she was noticed. (Was this the country equivalent of the transgressive gender manipulations of mainstreamed rock?) Musically, she gained more prominence as well. Parton’s increasing ability to hold an audience on her own was the result of her developing sense of songwriting and performing as well as audiences’ increasing skill at listening to her particular style, and it meant that by the last few years of her connection with Wagoner, she was finally able to produce solo albums that consistently performed well (most of her top-ten albums from the Wagoner years date from after 1973). During Parton’s years on The Porter Wagoner Show, the country music industry continued to expand. The increase in sales and attendance at concerts, usually understood in “soft-shell” terms as a rapprochement with pop, spurred increasing expansions of country music’s material means. An important symbolic moment in Nashville’s progress toward mainstreaming, for instance, came with a major shift in venue for the industry’s flagship show. The Grand Ole Opry, which had been broadcasting live from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium since 1941, made plans to relocate to another space that would accommodate larger audiences and more on-stage equipment.13 Opryland, which first opened in 1972, was planned to include an appropriate venue. Designed along the theme park lines that had been successfully established by institutions such as Disneyland and Six Flags Over Texas, Opryland had made country music the inevitable context for its kiddies’ amusements and tourist activity. There was no better location, then, for the industry’s emblematic program. (Even after the theme park closed in 1997 to make way for a mall, the Grand Ole Opry House has remained the performance home of the show.) The commercial acumen shown by Opryland’s developers was impressive—attendance at the theme park reached 1.4 million guests in its first year. So in 1974, the Grand Ole Opry relocated to its new house at Opryland, in state-of-the art music industry surroundings. Against the undeniable benefits of slick production and modern comfort, however, the Opry’s vaudevillian ethos began to come somewhat unmoored from its traditional allegiances of class and region. Ventriloquizing the discontent, popular historian Laurence Leamer has claimed that instead of trying to create a larger audience for the [sic] country music, Nashville had displayed its insecurities by trying to cloak its music in a garish pop wardrobe. As much as this desire to move into the pop world was one of the great temptations of Nashville’s musical life, it was also considered the ultimate betrayal. It was moving into a better neighborhood and getting rid of your hillbilly friends. It was a better section in the record stores, a classier

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place on the dial. It was the same journey that thousands had made who had grown up with country music and, as they became affluent, had discarded it like dirty overalls and work boots.14

I worry that this line of criticism can come close to insisting that the poor remain poor so that they don’t damage their authenticity; but it matters who is doing the criticizing. Leamer’s description helps point out that class ascent, to the extent that it requires aspirants to discard the unassimilable and therefore discreditable, leaves the upwardly mobile vulnerable to charges of disloyalty. “Leaving home” is a great rite of passage only for some segments of American society. Returning again to that moment when the “old way” of vocalizing appeared on The Porter Wagoner Show, I would suggest that another strength of such a gesture would be its tacit reassurance to the audience that their beloved performers remained “country” at heart. But the audience wanted their heroes to retain a modern sheen as well, and the performers were happy to oblige. In any case, Nashville’s increased soft-shelling would automatically make it more hospitable terrain for musicians and industry figures whose agenda did not match well with those of country music’s primary audience. (A wonderful example of this can be seen in the case of Robert Altman’s film 1976 film Nashville, which satirically read “Music City” as a synecdoche for the United States. Altman would never have chosen a comparison between the city and the nation if it had not seemed plausible to him. But participants in the country music business were exceedingly angry about his vision of their lives, even when they were forced to concede a few of his points.) In this situation, the implicit contract between audience and industry might be endangered. Partial answers within country music included the increasing identification of the style as the quintessence of the American way of life: elevation of trad vals in an evangelical Protestant context that made accounts of sinning OK as long as they were followed by suffering and/or reform; explicit patriotism (though as always in the South, with libertarian loopholes to keep excessive law abiding at bay); a general rhetoric that looked rosily at post-WWII prosperity as the proof of America’s exceptionalist nature. Opryland, with its careful modeling after Disney, is a perfect exemplar of this approach, as was the music it purveyed.15 An important dissident approach was the “outlaw” movement headed by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, which sought to push toward a hard-core aesthetic of hard luck and hard times in lyrics, performer image, and sonic ideal. In neither of these responses was mainstreaming completely separate

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from cultural particularism, of course. The outlaws wanted to sell records, and Opryland depended on its down-home evocations to secure a substantial part of its audience. And each move between hard-core and soft-shell poles in whatever context always risked the audience connection without which the music would fail. Since crossover in the country music world was such a perilous endeavor, Parton’s path was exceedingly careful. By 1974, when she left Wagoner’s show, her appeal had clearly begun to broaden to areas outside the traditional country music markets. This development was not especially visible in her sales as a performer, however, but in her strength as a songwriter. Although “Jolene,” enormously successful among country audiences, was also a minor hit on the pop charts in 1974, the best proof of crossover potential came from three important covers of songs written and recorded first by Parton: “I Will Always Love You” by Linda Ronstadt, “Coat of Many Colors” by Emmylou Harris, and “My Tennessee Mountain Home” by Maria Muldaur. Parton has candidly admitted that her reasons for trying to mainstream herself were strongly financial: Before I crossed over, when I was being so totally true to country music, I wasn’t making a dime. I couldn’t even buy panty hose hardly. . . . People thought I was just rolling in dough, because I was having all these chart records, Number One records, “Coat of Many Colors,” “I Will Always Love You,” and “Jolene.” You know what? “I Will Always Love You” sold 100,000 copies, and “Jolene” sold 60,000 copies. “Coat of Many Colors” didn’t even sell that. . . . So I thought, I’m going to broaden my appeal. I’m going to have to cross over — try to get into bigger television, stuff like that. I made that choice . . . and I got crucified . . . at the time. People thought I’d made a major mistake. But if I hadn’t of done that, I wouldn’t have any money now.16

The question about crossover is, how to do it? These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell. Leaving Porter Wagoner and seeking financial and professional independence from him was an important first step. (It left Wagoner with seriously bruised feelings, despite Parton’s writing “I Will Always Love You” as a gesture of reconciliation.) The crux of the matter, however, was finding a way to make Parton’s music and image work with respect to Hollywood. RCA sent her to Los Angeles to work with an experienced producer named Sandy Gallin, and the two of them developed a crossover persona that took Parton’s already stylized self-presentation from the Wagoner years to an even greater degree of intensity.17

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Parton’s self-cartooning—confecting an image of the ultimate glamourpuss as seen by a naïve farm girl—was one part of the ideal solution to her crossover problem. It allowed her to neutralize potential problems in the audience by making what might have seemed unwilled (her legendary bustiness, for instance) into something deliberately chosen; and it gave her access to the widest possible range of pre-existent images whose artificiality ensured that they could be taken as irony on a multitude of levels simultaneously. While flaunting this asymptotically vulgar image, however, Parton insisted repeatedly on her rural authenticity in a multitude of ways. The governing distinction in her image was that of inside versus outside. (This distinction was not always equivalent to true versus false, as we will see.) Parton thus had a way of playing with questions of appearance and essence that appealed greatly to her audiences, whether country or pop. At the same time, Parton’s choices prevented her from evacuating her performer’s image to the extent that Cher was able to accomplish during the 1990s. In committing herself to the proposition of a reality within an appearance, Parton made a longstanding split in her audience a certainty. The possibilities and limits of Parton’s crossover strategy are apparent in her first major mainstream album, 1977’s Here You Come Again. I want to look closely at this album and several of its songs because I think that they demonstrate the state of affairs I have just outlined. But it is worth beginning with a brief history of the hillbilly images that Parton was best placed to toy with—those constructed in the popular media since the Great Depression. Given Parton’s oft-proclaimed status as a deliberate cartoon, there is only one good place to begin.

funny papers In 1933, the prizefighter hero of the popular newspaper comic strip Joe Palooka (1919–45, in comic book format until 1961) went up against a hulking hillbilly antagonist named Big Leviticus. This sequence of the strip was ghostwritten because Ham Fisher, the creator of Joe Palooka, was an indifferent artist at best. The ghostwriter in question, Alfred Caplin (later Al Capp), was interested in the hillbilly motif, and developed a satirical strip based in a mythicized Ozark community, which he offered to United Features Syndicate. Li’l Abner premiered in only 8 newspapers, but within three years that number had grown to 253; by the end of the 1930s, Li’l Abner, among the most popular comic strips in the

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American press, was carried in nearly all major markets. It ran until 1977, when the aged (and increasingly conservative) Capp retired it. Capp’s goal in the strip was to use the most exaggerated hillbilly stereotypes imaginable to give himself room for sly commentary on American mores. In addition to the white trash denizens in his town of Dogpatch, Capp created subsidiary characters such as the cold, quasiShavian industrialist General Bullmoose, the corrupt and bombastic Senator Phogbound, and the cowardly Civil War hero Jubilation T. Cornpone, whose commemorative statue is a major sight in Dogpatch. Even while Capp used his comic strip to poke fun at life in post-WWII America, he managed to contrast its troubles with the greater suffering sustained in the country of Lower Slobbovia, a thinnestly veiled parody of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Capp’s most inspired creation was not a human being at all, but the very personification of perfect commodification: the Shmoo, a homely creature which lived to be consumed. Most of Capp’s sly jabs at American life took place “behind the scenes” because readers were much more likely to retain comic images such as Li’l Abner’s highwater pants and generally dumb-as-a-post handsomeness, or Daisy Mae’s enormous, intelligence-destroying breasts, than they were to retain the arguments such characters embodied. The favoring of hick humor over politics is clear in the stage and screen adaptations of the comic strip. The first adaptation was the film Li’l Abner in 1940, and it focused prominently on the institution of Sadie Hawkins’ Day, when according to Dogpatch tradition any woman could force any man into marriage—if she could catch him. Although the film included many of Capp’s satirical characters, their machinations ultimately took at backseat to the central values of romantic comedy: the permanent hitching of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae. When Li’l Abner was turned into a Broadway musical in 1956, with music by Gene De Paul and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, there was a little more satirical resonance in the opening gambit of threatening the elimination of Dogpatch to make room for an atomic testing site; but the complications of the plot and its deus-ex-machina solution come at the expense of the hillbillies. We end up laughing at them rather than with them. (This is true as well of the 1959 musical film adapted from the Broadway show.) Li’l Abner was not the only hillbilly strip to gain popularity in the newspapers. In the same year that Capp sold his comic to United Features Syndicate, the artist Billy De Beck took his character Barney Google (appearing since 1919) to the North Carolina mountains, where he had a run in with a squat moonshiner named Snuffy Smith. This encounter

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was so popular that De Beck decided to keep the strip in the mountains. Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, while not as wildly popular as Li’l Abner, nevertheless gained a wide circulation. When De Beck died in 1942, his assistant Fred Lasswell took over the work, which increasingly turned Google into a minor character. (Since 1954, Smith and his family and neighbors in Hootin’ Holler, NC, have been the focus of the strip.) Upon Lasswell’s death in 2001, his own assistant John Rose began to write the comic, which continues in reduced circulation to the present. As in Li’l Abner, the hillbilly stereotypes in Snuffy Smith are abundant and predictable. The major difference between the two comics, during the years when they were in direct competition, lay in the amount of political commentary each was willing to sustain. Li’l Abner set itself up as something of an intellectual vehicle. Like Pogo, or more recent strips such as Doonesbury, Boondocks, or Mallard Fillmore, it wanted to be taken as commentary on American politics, and it designed its plots and visual decorum to accommodate these goals in some measure. Snuffy Smith by contrast comes across to this day as more vaudevillian. It favors short comedy jokes about things that its readers are believed to consider aspects of “everydayness” and so timeless: bureaucracy, gender relations, and the ordinary vices of ordinary people. Although the actual geographical circulation of either strip is unclear, I cannot imagine that Snuffy Smith would ever have been as popular in urban markets as it was in small towns. Its humor to this day continues to be surprisingly close to that of Hee-Haw (discussed later in this chapter). My detailing the history of something as quotidian as daily comic strips might seem to bespeak excessive historical scruples, but I think that the omnipresence of images from Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith matters a great deal. Depending on the papers we took, we might have seen them every single day, year after year, from the early Depression to the mid-1970s. Both have been tremendously popular, not least because of the way they have domesticated hillbilly images for greater commercial circulation. As such, the characters in these comic strips became visual synecdoches of Southernness in general. Only in the South might someone insist on more specificity: maybe Dogpatch and Hootin’ Holler bore no resemblance to the isolated hazes of Tidewater Virginia and the Low Country of the Carolinas, or the manufacturing-heavy Appalachian Piedmont, or even the feudal remnants of the cotton belt, but from outside the region, such distinctions tended to disappear. Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, or Snuffy Smith and Maw, all became exemplarily Southern. As such they form an integral part of the background against which

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Nashville had make itself visible as it sought increasing crossover in the 1960s and especially the 1970s. But this background continues beyond the humble regions of the funny papers, and into the other great regions of commonplace art: the movies and especially television.

“swimmin’ pools, movie stars” In retrospect, one of the most striking phenomena of 1960s TV must surely be the density of hick fantasy comedies in the primetime programming at CBS. There were essentially two streams of the rural sitcom, almost all of which achieved terrific popularity in terms of TV ratings during their runs. The first of these was a North Carolina stream, beginning with The Andy Griffith Show, spun off from The Danny Thomas Show as a result of Griffith’s appealing guest appearance as a Southern lawman whose exasperating if serene rusticity was central to his comic effect.18 (As a side note, this cheerful bumpkinism might well have appealed by its contrast to the grimly bigoted Southern policemen visible in the news media that covered the civil rights struggles.) Premiering in 1960, The Andy Griffith Show surrounded the sheriff with an assortment of stock characters in a lightweight Southern Gothic mode. The show ran until 1968, when Griffith left, and the show continued with a partially altered cast until 1971 as Mayberry RFD. In 1964, Gomer Pyle, USMC took its main character from Griffith’s Mayberry to the Marine Corps base of Camp Pendleton, California.19 The second was an OzarkMissouri stream which began with the spectacularly successful premiere of The Beverly Hillbillies in 1962. Coming in at number one in the ratings during its first two seasons, The Beverly Hillbillies flourished in primetime for nine years. CBS, determined to exploit this comic line further, almost immediately commissioned the related series Petticoat Junction (1963–70) and then Green Acres (1965–71). Although most of these shows had fallen in popularity by the end of the 1960s, their disappearance came with a purge of all rural shows just before the 1971 fall season, as CBS sought to distance itself from this market. Both streams of sitcoms on CBS showed what we might call a montane focus—Mayberry was, after all, in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina rather than on the Outer Banks, and although Hooterville was not a mountain town in the strict sense, it clearly was not far from the Ozarks—and in doing so they participated in the long tradition of hillbilly stereotypes developed in American journalism and literature since the late nineteenth century. The image of the hillbilly figured in several

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currents of popular culture that had played central roles in the construction of these television series; not least of these was the comic book tradition previously discussed. The Blue Ridge mountains of Snuffy Smith and the Ozarks of Li’l Abner remained the locations of choice as far as TV was concerned. And consider the movies in greater detail. It is best to leave aside the impressive tragedies of American film in such works as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) in favor of rural fare such as Tobacco Road (1941); and even Tobacco Road, since it lives in the neighborhood of “serious literature,” is too lofty, too enriched with the aura of Southern literature, to be of much use for television. Instead, we will consider something less grand. In the 1947 film The Egg and I, Bob MacDonald (Fred MacMurray) takes his new bride Betty (Claudette Colbert) from the city to a run-down egg farm in the mountains because he wants to get back to the land. There, the MacDonalds learn about tending chickens while they bemusedly encounter various stock rural characters including the eccentrically shiftless, polyphiloprogenitive Kettles, who have fifteen children or so but almost no way of making ends meet other than freeloading. The rawboned actress Marjorie Main received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her portrayal of the hoydenish slattern Ma Kettle, and the characters she and Percy Kilbride (“Pa”) created were so popular that they appeared in nine films in the following decade.20 The plots of most of the Kettle films were driven by the Kettles’ sudden accession to wealth and their attempts to live up their money. In Ma and Pa Kettle (1949), Pa’s winning a tobacco-slogan contest led the family to modernize their home in the best automated post-WWII fashion. In Ma and Pa Kettle Back on the Farm (1951), prospecting for uranium provided the necessary monetary plot point. Other confrontations with modernity took the form of visits to cities or exotic locales: New York, in Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town (1950); Paris, in Ma and Pa Kettle Take a Vacation (1953), or even Hawaii, in Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955). In two of the films, Ma and Pa Kettle at the Fair (1952) and Ma and Pa Kettle at Home (1954), the couple looked for ways to finance college education for their children. But the series ended with two movies, The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956) and The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm (1957), that idealized aspects of the rural life that had seemed so comically disheveled less than a decade before. Taken as a group, the Kettle films speak rather touchingly to the anxieties of formerly rural Americans who had been urbanized to an astonishing degree by the dislocations of the Second World War and the

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suburbanization that followed it. Ma and Pa are presented as kindly, lazy, disorderly, and naïve; the hillbilly stereotypes are overpowering. But while the characters are meant to be laughed at, they are also presented as admirable in their indomitability and optimism—and the rhetoric of the films leaves open the possibility that audiences can identify with the Kettles in seemingly direct ways. There is probably a parallel to be drawn between the social resonances of the Kettle films and those of the ethnic working-class sitcoms that populated the television screen during the early 1950s. Whatever their ethnic origins, the characters on shows like I Remember Mama, The Life of Riley, The Goldbergs, or The Honeymooners were close to the Kettles, sharing both a recent history of poverty, currently improved circumstances, and aspirations to further material success and comfort. George Lipsitz has pointed out that these sitcoms often dramatized “the clash between the consumer present of the 1950s and collective social memory about the 1930s and 1940s.” In doing so, he has further shown, the sitcoms took pains to explore the tensions entailed in family structures, community relationships and other collective activities, work, and money, as these domains changed in the face of the consumerist imperatives that drove the post-WWII American economy.21 The particularism of ethnic comedy in film and on television presupposed a mode of address to at least two partially separated audiences. On the one hand were the people belonging to the group ostensibly represented: second- or third-generation immigrants from Europe, the American proletariat, or the (Anglo-Celtic, mostly Southern) rural poor. For them it may be supposed that the stylization of certain comic stock devices (accents, characterizations, mise-en-scènes) was clear enough that those devices could be regarded with the necessary irony. The comedy came from exaggeration of things that were true as well as things that were only said to be true. On the other hand were the alreadymainstreamed members of the middle-class audience, melted into the comforts of postwar unspecificity. For them, the danger of mistaking comic representation as discreditable reality was real, but lessened by the likely presence of historical memory. If you were a newly enriched working-class family in a suburb, you still probably had grandparents whose circumstances had been less advantageous. This is especially relevant in the context of class relations among southern white people, where a tricky division between “white trash” and “plain folks” was apt to be an extremely important bit of insider knowledge. One of the most graceful explanations of the distinction

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comes from a cookbook introduction, of all places. In Ernest Matthew Mickler’s celebrated White Trash Cooking, he observes: The first thing you’ve got to understand is that there’s white trash and there’s White Trash. Manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, and no manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anybody or anything. But where I come from in North Florida you never failed to say “yes ma’am” and “no sir,” never sat on a made-up bed (or put your hat on it), never opened someone else’s icebox, never left food on your plate, never left the table without permission, and never forgot to say “thank you” for the teeniest favor. That’s the way the ones before us were raised and that’s the way they raised us in the South.22

Mickler bluntly writes that the stakes of this distinction are dignity and self-esteem. Poverty and proper decorum are not mutually exclusive, and preserving politeness in the face of economic disadvantagement makes this point clearly. But while systems of manners can be viewed as a way for everyone to give and to receive the appropriate gestures of respect and acknowledgment, they can also be viewed more romantically as excrescences of pretension that allow people to fake gentility at the expense of authentic reality. The old tag “too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash” is relevant here. The question of class in the white South was all the more tortured because most people recognized, however dimly, that both the positive and negative moments of etiquette were always in play. On the one hand, upwardly aspiring poor people might go the genteel route, hoping to make themselves indistinguishable from impoverished quasi-gentry.23 On the other hand, the signs of disreputability could be manipulated for carnivalesque purposes. This, after all, was the point of much of the “hillbilly humor” that was a mainstay of the Grand Ole Opry from its beginning. It depended on the implicit recognition of audience members that the line between white trash and White Trash, or indeed the line between trashiness and gentility, was endlessly mutable.24 By the 1960s sitcoms, however, much of the quality of recognition that the Kettles might be supposed to embody had begun to wear off. It may be that the shift in medium-distanced TV audiences, the amount of information available from the early 1960s TV screen, and the rhythms of the broadcast would in themselves have hindered the strong identifications possible in the movies. It may also be that the simple passage of time had established an audience less likely to remember being in a hick subject position. Andy Taylor’s Mayberry still managed to capture a Kettle-ish quality in its characters, but poor Gomer, stuck in Camp

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Pendleton north of San Diego, came off as just plain weird.25 With the Hillbillies’ Clampetts, CBS offered up the spectacle of Li’l Abneresque Poor White Trash newly situated in LA County for the sake of crude comedy. It is sometimes suggested that the clash between the mendacity and greed of the banker Mr. Drysdale and the rural decency of the Clampetts served to critique modern urbanity. Well, maybe so, but what audiences tended to remember were colorful solecisms such as “Ce-ment pond” to refer to the pool or rustic words like “vittles” (actually the correct pronunciation of “victuals”) and “critters.” Other memorable sitcom traits might include Jethro’s obsession with becoming “a real Hollywood playboy,” and Granny’s appalling recipes for possum and gopher. There’s less possibility for identification here than might be wished. In addition to films and television, of course, the activities around country music (called “hillbilly records” until WWII) had long provided a rich array of hillbilly images that could be incorporated into the television paradigms. Southern white folks of many class positions had been uneasy with the term because it was a pejorative (one of a whole string of cruel epithets: “peckerwood,” “cracker,” “redneck,” “clayeater,” “linthead,” “swamprat,” “shitkicker” . . . ); but its quick adoption was ensured by its commercial dominance and tamed somewhat by the minstrelsyinspired clowning of hillbilly characters on the Grand Ole Opry.26 The years after WWII saw the steady incorporation of sound into image in film and television, treating Nashville’s in-house games as a kind of “hickery” farms: a source for materials that could be offered to a national (nonrural) audience to provide the comforts of bucolic nostalgia with the secret relief that it was actually somebody else’s life. Of course, country musicians attempted to negotiate this process because it offered them the only real chance of genuine material prosperity they were likely to get. One of the most important identifying marks of The Beverly Hillbillies was its theme song, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett.” Although the music and lyrics are commonly credited to Paul Henning, the Missouriborn screenwriter and producer who created the show as well as its spinoffs, “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” is most powerfully identified with the celebrated bluegrass musicians Lester Flatt (1914–79) and Earl Scruggs (b.1924), who recorded the theme song for CBS.27 They also released it as a single in 1962, and it reached number one on the country charts and number forty-four on the mainstream charts as well. Flatt and Scruggs even made guest appearances on the show as themselves,

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performing as a kind of authenticating maneuver. I think that from the point of view of Flatt and Scruggs, the financial compensation and the chance to reach their primary audience were worth risking the jibes of outsiders. And their appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies, to the extent that their performances activated the styles of the Grand Ole Opry, adumbrated a kind of rural poor white identity politics that became more visible in the 1970s. Caught in the purge of rural sitcoms at CBS in 1971 was a comparatively new show that was not a sitcom, but was equally devoted to hick humor: Hee-Haw. An old-fashioned variety show, it had an impeccable Grand Ole Opry pedigree, with artists such as Grandpa Jones and Minnie Pearl abundantly in evidence. Such beloved figures were placed in a show hosted by Buck Owens, one of the greatest exponents of the Bakersfield Sound, and the musician and actor Roy Clark, who had made television appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies as well as The Ed Sullivan Show. 28 Hee-Haw originally began as a summer replacement show for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967–69) and imagined as a rural alternative to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–73). When it performed well, Hee-Haw was pulled into main programming at CBS, but lasted only one season on the official roster before it was discarded. It moved into syndicated status without a pause, continuing to tape at the studios of the CBS affiliate WLAC-TV until 1980, then moving to Opryland Complex Studio A until 1993; even after Hee-Haw ended, it continued to be broadcast in reruns until 1997. The situation with Hee-Haw is especially interesting compared to that of the show that replaced the CBS hick sitcoms: The Waltons. In late 1971, CBS had broadcast a TV movie entitled The Homecoming. Written by Earl Hamner Jr., the script recounted a heart-warming family drama set in the Virginia mountains during the Depression. The movie was so successful that the network decided to turn it into a regular series—and they felt so confident about it that they scheduled it directly opposite the popular variety show hosted by black comedian Flip Wilson. Gone was any hint of the South represented by vaudeville: instead, The Waltons offered a carefully constructed realistic drama of poor (but respectable) people who held closely to family relationships despite their tight economic circumstances.29 There were a few characters recognizable as Southern Gothic staples, such as the dotty Baldwin sisters, rich old spinsters who were also bootleggers, producing “Papa’s recipe,” but on the whole the television show worked hard to create more complex characters than had been seen in the hick sitcom of the 1960s. The theme

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music, too, was de-hicked—no twangs, no traditional country ornamentation, only the warm sound of an accordion to stand in the place of the rural. The Waltons was artfully done and tremendously successful. It was also considerably less tied to the cultural peculiarities of the South. And above all, it was heavily nostalgic. Most useful in this respect was Hamner’s own Virginia-accented voice-overs for the episodes, which stressed the pastness of the drama, and thereby his own removal from it. And thereby, the denizens of The Waltons were a matter for poignant reflection rather than unruly humor. By contrast, Hee-Haw seemed to treat its Opry tastes as unremarkably present-tense; and as a syndicated show, it was enormously popular. Comic routines such as “Pffft! You was gone!” “We’re Not Ones to Go ’Round Spreadin’ Rumors,” and “Pickin’ and Grinnin’ ” were endlessly quoted by enthusiastic TV partisans, demonstrating both the continuing appeal of vaudeville (when married to country music) to audiences rural and urban alike, though doubtless for different reasons. Moreover, the show’s corny humor (can there be any other choice of phrase?) pointed to the way this kind of crossover played to audiences on both sides of the aisle who needed a mythologized white South for Arcadian fantasy. As a result of the Okie migrations of the Great Depression, for instance, the Central Valley of California had become heavily Southernized— Bakersfield (Buck Owens’s center of operations) had for a time seemed poised to become a second Nashville. And the humor of Hee-Haw was ideal for such audiences, suggesting as it did an iconic South, representing not a particular remembered place but instead constructing a sense of roots and pride that speaks in dialogue with migrants’ position as Okies in California. At its best, this iconic South serves an important (if deliberately essentializing) purpose in addressing the split consciousness faced by migrants and their children, who now live in the city and likely have no hope or intention of returning to the South, but who cannot fully melt into their new environment because of the marginalization (if not animosity) they face as well as the traditions they value.30

What occurred in the southern white diaspora also began to occur back home. Some writers have referred to the civil rights movement as “America’s Marshall Plan” because the attempts to end Jim Crow intensified the federal investments in the South that had begun during the Great Depression with institutions such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (founded 1933). The mild influx of money began to ameliorate the long-standing poverty that characterized many regions of the South. After WWII versions of “The New South” began to be proclaimed by

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state governors seeking to lure commerce to their areas. And by the 1970s, an influx of people from Northern states became quite noticeable— migration came to the stay-at-homes. (The political results of this shift in population, of course, have stressfully shaped American political discourse ever since.) The split consciousness that arose in the southern white diaspora, like that in the South in the wake of the civil rights movement, is akin to the one established in the hard-core/soft-shell dialectic already established in Nashville. In each case, an increase in material prosperity also entailed a possible estrangement from a set of traditional lifeways. Even if the good and the bad were inextricable in this process, their enmeshment was a fact that had to be put into question by both critics and celebrants. The perceived gap between a past increasingly remote in terms of time and space gave urgency to the everyday negotiation of values. But these questions could also be articulated in mythic visual and sonic embodiments of the hopes and dreads through which versions of community could be imagined. Since commercial performance of any sort automatically brought about the possibility of being overheard by audiences not part of this imagined community, the perceptions of “outsiders” always had to be registered at least to some extent in the process. Although The Beverly Hillbillies worked out the question of poor white migration from the standpoint of an urbanized audience while offering some appeal to rural viewers, Hee-Haw presented itself as “a visit back home” for the rural viewers who had left at the same time that it gave the folks still in rural areas a chance to see themselves as spread out beyond their traditional confines. This was the ground available to Parton as she sought to cross over in the mid-1970s; and its ambivalences are plainly audible in the music she created in collaboration with her producer Sandy Gallin.

two sides of dolly Parton’s first released album of 1977, New Harvest . . . First Gathering, performed fairly well, reaching number one on the country charts (the first of Parton’s albums to do so) and number seventy-one on the pop charts. The only single released from it, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” though it broke the top ten on the country charts, never went above number eighty-seven on the pop charts. This album had been supervised by Parton herself, with the agreement that if it failed to produce significant crossover, she would agree to allow Gallin to supervise the next

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album’s production.31 Gallin brought in the producer Gary Klein, who had worked on such recordings as Barbra Streisand’s 1977 album Superman and Glen Campbell’s 1977 single “Southern Nights.” The executive producer chosen was Charles Koppleman, who had worked for Don Kirschner at the Brill Building in the early 1960s and had since relocated to Los Angeles.32 The resulting album was Here You Come Again, which besides achieving number one on the country charts, also crossed over to number twenty on the pop charts, going gold in less than three months after release, and platinum within six months. That same year, Dolly Parton won the Grammy Award for Best Country Vocal Performance Female (her first win, although she had been nominated several times before). The great crossover hit of this album was the title song, which was released as a single and reached number one and number three on the country and pop charts, respectively. It represents a further extension of the aesthetics of soft-shell country. “Here You Come Again” was written by the husband-and-wife team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who like Koppleman began their careers in Don Kirschner’s employ. Notably successful because of their ability to write in multiple styles, Mann and Weil produced songs like “Blame It on the Bossa Nova,” “On Broadway,” You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and “Walking in the Rain,” to name only a few. By the time the team had relocated from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, their reputation as songwriters was quite powerful. Although Mann and Weil had not created “Here You Come Again” for Parton—Brenda Lee had already considered it before passing it on— Parton’s producer Sandy Gallin saw its potential as an ideal vehicle for her. There are reports that Parton was at first reluctant to record it, because it seemed to her to be “too pop.” As she said to Gallin, “I’m not going to trust you again if the country people don’t like this.”33 (As a compromise for the sake of her country fans, Klein added a pedal steel guitar to the instrumental ensemble.)34 But the crossover imperative of the album required this kind of song, and the combination of skillful songwriting and performance secured mainstream attention. “Here You Come Again” is carefully constructed to grab listener attention. Formally, it breaks into the kind of units that might be expected in a Brill Building song. After a four-measure intro, the song proper opens with a section of eight bars that falls into four balanced phrases (see example 12).35 The first two measures of the melody make up the song’s primary hook of title words plus a distinctive downward leap of a seventh from A#, the third of the tonic, to B, the root of the subdominant.

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example 12. Melody of verse from “Here You Come Again.”

The fourth and fifth measures work from the tonic down a full octave before moving to G to set up an even stronger subdominant in the sixth and seventh measures. (This second phrase sits very low in Parton’s voice—one of the issues at stake in her crossover seems to have been how best to mainstream her high, bubbly soprano.) The third phrase plays on the subdominant root offered up at the end of the first phrase before going on in the fourth phrase to pick up the low G# and carry it back to the leading tone, setting up the second eight-bar unit of the song. Variations of this opening unit—the changes in this section always occur cadentially, ensuring that the repetition of the whole remains firmly in the consciousness of listeners—make up the majority of “Here You Come Again” until the repetition of the opening two bars that will make up the outro; but twice in the song’s 2’56” length there is a contrasting eight-bar unit that serves as a bridge or a B section. This material pulls over further to the flat side adumbrated by the subdominant in the A section’s third phrase; it is always the most harmonically active spot in the song, and inevitably pulls the song into a modulation. As a result, the song ratchets upwards in key, from the F# of the beginning to G major in the middle of the song, then finally to Ab for the last section and the outro. What is not at stake in this process is tonal unity, of course—if Mann and Weil care little about such a notion, Parton and Gallin probably care even less. The modulation occurs for two reasons: to suggest the shock of the song’s first person at succumbing to charm of her ex-lover (the song’s “you”) as soon as s/he comes here again; and to move Parton’s voice, over the course of the song, into a register where it can open out into more full-throated singing. The song aims to project the singer’s joyous acquiescence in her passion for the song’s second person, and in the brightness of the major

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mode and the swaggering 12/8 meter of the song, her ostensible objections to being confused and overturned by looks, charm, and “pretty lies” are obviously meant as praise. Parton’s delight is especially supported by the syncopations in the bass line, which the synthesizer and bass play with clangorous enthusiasm beginning in the intro. The steady keyboard chords pulsing above this bass line provides just enough wellregulated resistance to make its jazzy pull even more appealing. Can it also be read as a metaphor for Parton’s attempts to maintain steadiness in the face of so much temptation? There’s no question that Parton’s first entrance can be heard as uncertain: as I’ve mentioned, the bottom of the phrase is low in her tessitura, and the luminous tremor of her vibrato bespeaks a fragility in keeping with the lyrical situation. By the cadential approach to the second A section, however, the strings begin to creep in to be joined by the drum set, pushing the sentiments of the song over their initial resistance. This increase of energy continues into the first B section, where the strings glitzy run into their upward registers frees them to play a countermelody against Parton; backup vocals take over the strings’ function of providing harmonic continuity. When the modulation to G brings the return of the A section, the lead guitar contributes melodic fragments to the arrangement in preparation for taking the lead in the instrumental interlude that follows. By the time the second B section brings the key to its final destination of Ab, the song is in full cry, and Parton soon relaxes into the jouissance of improvising over the outro. In “Here You Come Again,” the only elements that still bespeak “country” unequivocally are Parton’s vocals and perhaps the timbral presence of the steel guitar. Other elements would be possible in softshell country, but the dominant quality of the song is neo-Brill Building; it is quite possible to imagine this song sung by any number of mid1970s groups with early 1960s affinities, such as the Captain and Tennille or even a performer like Elton John. Other songs on the album followed the crossover line, but none of them moved so far into pop territory. Instead, the songs of “Here You Come Again” mostly persist in a soft-shell country aesthetic. “Two Doors Down” was the other Parton crossover hit from this album, released as a single and reaching number nineteen on the pop charts in 1978. Written by Parton herself, it opens with heavily country inflections at the very beginning of the intro, which turns out to be a statement of the chorus material. But this music is country that has gone to town. We already hear a hint of the urban in the bass line throbs that percolate underneath the soft-shell

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Nashville riffs. Parton enters with the emblematic chorus of the song, supported by white gospel close harmonies from the backup singers; but the wah pedal, that great sign of the 1970s urban, makes its presence felt, along with a nearly funky quality in the groove (and eventually in punctuations from the brass). The verses of the song play with synthesizer swirls that are not especially soul or post-soul, but are not very country, either. Nevertheless, the strongest stylistic affinities of the song remain with white gospel. Not country, maybe, but its near neighbor. The B side of “Two Doors Down” was “It’s All Wrong but It’s All Right,” by contrast a rather pure example of Nashville soft-shell, a honky-tonk pickup song; though it reached number one on the country charts, it never had any crossover impact. Even though I have been focusing on singles because their releases shaped Parton’s chart history most importantly at this time, the internal variety of the album “Here You Come Again” is worth noting. Placing such stylistically different songs in juxtaposition suggests a kind of musical cross-dressing, though the boundary obscured in this case is not that between genders or races, but rather between urban and rural (and by implication, between rich and poor). Even the album cover shows the poles of comparison: on the front is Dolly Parton “gone a-Daisy Mae-ing,” dressed up in a gingham shirt top and jeans, surrounded by glitzy disco lights and flaunting her tremendous breasts, the flashy signature created by the studio as a logo emblazoned above the photos; but inside the gatefold cover is a soft-focus pastoral image of Parton wispily covered with flowers, an effect that might be described as Tennessee pre-Raphaelite. The purpose of these alternative visions seems clear enough: the album stands for Parton herself, image and body, and we are meant to understand that the flashy exterior of Dolly and the traditionalist interior are both necessary components of the whole persona. (Parton has suggested that this cover infuriated Nashville figures much more than the album’s music ever did. Surely Nashville’s anger over the photo was a response governed by feelings that had been bruised by umpteen-million comic strips, films, and sitcom plots. But the omnipresence of the images meant that they could never be wholly discarded, only resented at the same time they were employed.) The “drag queen’s Christmas tree” and the “simple country woman” are already fully in place. At the moment we purchase the album, attracted by the promise of the outside, the inside, or both, Dolly has crossed over.

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pathos à la campagne Nevertheless, Parton’s attempt to reach both audiences at once, though apparently successful in the singles I have discussed, reaches a fascinating impasse in what to my mind is the most interesting song on the entire album, “Me and Little Andy,” also released as the B side to the single of “Here You Come Again.” The simple music of the tune offers a setting for a hair-raising tale whose point of view seems to come right out of the nineteenth century. The song’s first person (we are to assume it is Parton herself), at home on an icy winter night, hears someone at the door: a neglected little girl (Sandy) with a puppy (Little Andy). In a couple of verses that refer repeatedly to nursery rhymes and children’s games, Sandy asks if she and her dog may stay with Dolly overnight. They are all alone because Sandy’s mother has run off, and her father is “drunk again in town.” Dolly, overcome with pity at the girl’s neglect, invites her in. During the night, Sandy and the dog die! No particular cause is given in the song: we might infer malnutrition, or the results of abuse, or simply being unloved. The lesson drawn from the story comes right out of a rhetoric of sentimental piety preserved in the rural South to this day: “God knew little Andy would be lonesome with her gone / Now Sandy and her puppy dog won’t ever be alone.” A first reaction from potential crossover audiences might well be laughter, rising at the spectacular parade of clichés Parton has offered: an abandoned child, a puppy, a howling storm, nursery rhymes, and a pious death made even more saccharine by the moralizing lyrics. The very names of the characters surely constitute a clever half-jest on Parton’s side, summoning up as they do everybody’s favorite Depression-era girl-and-dog duo, Little Orphan Annie and Sandy. The abjection bluntly offered in the lyrics is tough for the emotionally finicky to take as well. Sandy’s matter-of-fact statements about her missing parents and especially her declaration, “If you don’t love us, no one will, / I promise we won’t cry,” offer an appallingly accurate depiction of the honesty we often find in children, but in the song we know that these words are also Parton’s transparent bid for our emotional investment. We might laugh to make sure that the song does not work on us. As one bemused journalist wondered after seeing Parton sing the song on television to a group of children and a dog, “How can anything so maudlin be so good?”36 It’s the music. The solo guitar’s opening four bars lay out a D major chord in utterly simple figuration. Behind this foreground sound is a bit of (fake, one

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hopes) musique concrète, a tape of the icy winter wind howling outside Parton’s window that establishes a pitchless external world against which the guitar’s meditative picking becomes a representation of Parton’s interior world. The first verse, which brings Sandy to the front door, adds only Parton’s voice to the guitar and tape combination. Her melody is strictly laid out in a four-by-four pattern of aabb’. The a phrase falls through the compass of a tenth, from A down to F#, skipping over the leading tone and rocking gently back and forth between F# and a in an iconic cradling gesture. The b phrase begins with a similar descent, but never drops all the way down into the lower register of the melody’s ambitus; its goal is D, the “final” of the tune. (The harmony supporting this tune is utterly simple. The a phrases, for instance, sit still atop a tonic triad of D major. The b phrase mostly works out the subdominant G, and the b’ phrase brings in the dominant to get the music back to its beginning.) A constant sense of falling is important to the melody’s affective resonance. To begin with, the shape of each phrase in the listener’s ear might bring along an implicit rhythmic quality of front-weightedness, a fading out into silence that might point toward the subjective interior. This notion might be supported as well by the registral disconnection of the phrases from one another. Perhaps most important is the way this melody sits in Parton’s voice. She is a soprano, so the ends of the song’s phrases automatically “speak” less fully than their beginnings. This is especially true of the a phrases, which dip down into Karen Carpenter territory—a place you might never have expected Dolly to go. The change in timbre adds additional weight to the perception of “dying fall” that the melodic contour already carries in potential form, the musical embroidering of an exhalation. Delving further into rhythmic structure, we can hear that each of the four-bar phrases making up the entire verse places weight on the half notes of each measure (the bass motion is especially clear about this). The primary feeling of the music is “cut time,” the version of 4/4 in which the accent falls on beats 1 and 3. In this case, the quarter note impetus easily groups into regular pairs that correspond most of the time to the stressed and unstressed syllables of the lyrics. (The occasional “misaccentuation” of syllables, such as “Bèfore I could say a word . . .” conveys a slightly folky feel, like something out of Francis James Child’s famous collection of ballads.) The guitar figuration occupies itself with eighthnote figuration at the metaphorical level of the pulse of blood, or perhaps the ticking of a clock. Time is, after all, running out for Sandy.

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By the second verse, as the other instruments, the strings (especially the violin) take up the task of registering the presence of human feeling, and the higher percussion instruments and keyboards collaborate to establish a sound world that will act as the song’s musical metaphor for poor doomed Sandy, as Parton sees her in retrospect. The warm blanketing of strings that carry the burden of Parton’s interior feelings of pity, the rocking string licks that evoke the nursery song world of the little girl—all of these musical devices are of course established conventions as well. What takes the music over the top, in the end, is surely Parton’s uncanny impersonation of the little girl’s voice, down to its childish lisping and giggling, the unbearable intimacy of its breathy, unsupported tone, its moving occasional failures of pitch. And at the conclusion, when we hear the girl actually breathe her last, as the music box-cum-calliope music goes out of kilter and fades away, the song moves into an affective space that is genuinely creepy and disturbing. As the conventions of sentimentality mount with every verse, so does the potential for humor, and Parton was clearly fully aware of this. When she sang “Me and Little Andy” at a televised concert in London in 1980, Parton introduced it by noting that as her fans knew, she wrote a large number of sad songs, but this one was “absolutely plumb pitiful.” And in a more extended commentary, she has remarked: “I told ya it’s sad. Sometimes when I’m in a sad mood that sucker makes me cry, and I wrote it! It’s based on a true story, but the girl did not die. She married a doctor in Louisville, Kentucky. Now she’s rich and has a big house and a big car. I thought it would make you feel better. It does me.”37 What are we to do with these comments? What is especially at stake for Parton is not the question of whether sentimental reactions are somehow discreditable and to be refused—she clearly places great value on such reactions. Rather, the questions are the following: How we are to understand the relationship of the events of the song and the events of reality, and how we are to hold our varying reactions together as we listen? First of all, notice that on one level Parton disavows the song’s sadness because it is so clearly the result of manipulation. If we have been made to feel sad, we must then ask whether our feelings have been earned or not—if not, then we are embarrassed or angry. We laugh, or our lips curl with contempt, and we may wish to parody the song or at least shut it off. Then there’s the persistent question of what our sentiment is covering. The reception history of all the arts is rife with examples of cheap idealizations serving as alibis for less attractive modes of spectatorship: prurience, schadenfreude, morbidity, an endless series of narcis-

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sisms. Parton’s insistence on the gap between the song as artifact and the “true” conditions which inspired it complicates the question of sentimentality even more in that we are led to question so broadly the fictional status of all of our feelings about the song and its plot; any attempt to disavow the song can make us even more uncomfortable about what it was that we were doing when we listened. And, in the end, we really know very little about what the “true” events were which may or may not have inspired the song. We must simply trust Dolly Parton that yes, there was a real equivalent to Sandy, and that far from dying, she became rich and high class. But what if this is, like the song itself, vulnerable to being understood as merely another fiction? Most of us who would fall into that crossover audience feeling squeamish about “Me and Little Andy” are, in the end, good modernist listeners determined to be nobody’s fools, on the hunt for an authenticity in our music that we can finally trust. And this allegiance can make “Me and Little Andy” tough for us to take. But rather than ponder endlessly the question of what we are to make of this sentimentality in our own context, consider what form of life is being addressed by such a plot, in such a musical setting. Parton herself never tires of telling how she grew up in one of the most dirt-poor parts of the Blue Ridge mountains, in a large tobacco-sharecropping family who had next to nothing. Among the things she would have been deeply familiar with is the specter of infant and child death: from malnutrition, neglect, exposure, disease, misadventure, and less likely circumstances. Such experience extended into her own family of eleven surviving siblings and a brother who died soon after birth. Moreover, one of Parton’s target audiences, far into the 1970s and 1980s, would have had at least secondhand knowledge of child death and firsthand knowledge of the ways of thinking and speaking designed to cope with the omnipresent experience of child death. That is to say, in its deployment of sentimental effects, “Me and Little Andy” presents an aesthetic that we would understand as antiquated. This world is old, passed away from our point of view (at least temporarily) with the rise of antibiotics and vaccination programs, with improved social services, child-labor laws, and compulsory primary education.38 Parton’s language is, as I have mentioned, the language of the nineteenth century. Think of Hans Christian Anderson’s poor little match girl, for instance, or even better, of the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, or Beth’s farewell’s in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Much less well known is a custom that was practiced

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during the early days of photography in the United States, and which cannot but seem bizarre to us, of dressing up deceased young children in formal clothes as soon as they had died and taking them with the rest of the family down to the photography studio for a formal portrait before the funeral. In the realm of nineteenth-century American popular song, too, there are numerous sweetly dying children, too pure to live, taken away by the angels as they murmur honeyed, poignant words of comfort.39 And these are the contexts against which we can understand more of the import of Oscar Wilde’s famous remark about Dickens’s novel, that one would have to have a heart of stone to read of the death of Little Nell without laughing. Wilde was already a good (though unusually self-aware) modernist, and his irony about his own defensiveness showed it. The sentimentality of “Me and Little Andy” constitutes one of the forms of life that attempts to find a way to go on after the death of a child, that helps us make sense of Parton’s song in a way that takes it seriously while acknowledging the distance between its world of speech and feeling and ours. I return once more to the final appearance of Sandy’s voice: Parton’s terrifying imitation weakens into nescience, overlaid with the song’s music-box gesture now gone all dissonant as well as the return of the coldly literalistic sound of wind. In addition to these musical features, the auditory version of a spectacle, we are given a chance to be present at the deathbed scene itself through the agency of that the final solo violin line, ending as it does on its single long-held low pitch (the fifth degree of the tonic, as it happens). Something strange happens to the temporality of the song at this point, as if the held pitch of the violin condenses our affective attention onto the tableau of the little girl’s deathbed. In visual terms, we could imagine a close cinematic shot held only to dissolve into a photographic representation, moving us out of the story time of the song and back into our present circumstances. The song becomes a work of fictional memory, in service of an unspecified grief. Imagine what it is like to be acquainted with this grief, and now imagine what it is like to hear a representation of that grief transformed into an aesthetic shape that seems as if it will hold, if only for a while.

dolly as diva Despite Parton’s fondness for “Me and Little Andy,” the song never made an impression of either the country or the pop charts. Its appeal

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seems to have been restricted to Parton herself and perhaps some of her diehard fans. But its persistence in her performance repertory adds some focus to the question of how she wanted to be understood, both when she attempted to cross over and in her later years to go back and forth across the border. Like Cher, Parton experienced travails soon after her initial period of mainstream solo success. Reactions to her crossover were varied in Nashville, but a large number of them were envious and/or hostile, only gradually subsiding in the face of continued country sales.40 Her response was accurate, if overoptimistic: “I would hear some of the old-timers complain that ‘I was leaving country music.’ I would always reply, ‘I’m not leaving it, I’m taking it to new places.”41 As for her mainstream audience, reactions were also somewhat mixed. After the release of Here You Come Again, there were several pop hits, and Parton rapidly became a media figure of no small repute. In 1978, for instance, she appeared on two television specials, one with Carol Burnett and one with Cher; Parton received an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work with Cher. Her first film performance was in 9 to 5, alongside Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, where she played Doralee Rhodes, a blonde sexpot secretary who proved to be smarter and more self-possessed than she at first appeared. Her performance was well regarded, and she won an Academy Award for writing the film’s theme song. But her giddily trashy persona, trademark breasts and all, was more often foregrounded than her music, testifying to the probable limits of the “Daisy Mae” approach.42 Though her record sales were not bad, she continued to perform better as a musician on the country charts than on the pop charts. After her initial triumphs, Parton’s forays into film and TV became inconsistent. 1982’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was considerably less popular than 9 to 5; and the 1984 film Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone was a flop. The early 1980s were also a time of personal instability for Parton, who faced a series of difficulties she has described ever since rather reticently as including “female trouble,” “heartbreak,” and weight problems. In the publicity surrounding Parton’s crossover, a characteristic pattern of discussions aimed at “different demographic constituencies” began to emerge. As Pamela Wilson has observed, in music and industry publications, Parton’s work as a songwriter and performer gained the most attention. In men’s magazine, well, there were Dolly’s “Partons,” big as life and twice as fun to talk about. Women’s “domestic” magazines carried stories about as much of Parton’s private life as she was willing to reveal as well as her struggles to balance the

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protocols of country womanhood with celebrity life; feminist publications lauded her crafty use of stereotypes for women’s empowerment. Business and general news magazines observed Parton’s ability to develop entertainment interests; the tabloids looked for trashy shock value.43 At the same time that the multitude of available Partons gave potential audience members a fair chance of at least one path of identification, such polysemy also guaranteed that “the real Parton” presumed to lie behind the wigs and makeup would always exceed any single representation. But even in the welter of varying incarnations—Our Dolly of the Farm, Our Dolly of the Theme Park, Our Dolly of the Studio, and all the others—it was clear that the fundamental contrast of glitzy showbiz exterior and country soul was to be maintained. The “rags to riches” emplotment of Parton’s life was too central to the effectiveness of her varied enterprises to be discarded, and the fabulousness of her star image depended crucially on the evocation of rural poverty in which Parton began. Take the opening six chapters of Parton’s 1994 autobiography My Life and Other Unfinished Business, a brilliant étude in nostalgia.44 Although the specifics of Parton’s narrative are quite likely to be factually accurate, cross-checking names and dates would miss the point. What matters in Parton’s reminiscences is the sepia-toned rhetoric through which she constructs a careful treasure map of memory and feeling. “I was born January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. I grew up poor—very poor. In fact, my daddy couldn’t afford to pay Dr. Thomas for delivering me, so he gave him a sack of cornmeal.”45 One of the nicest touches in this opening is the movement from the most specific location to the most general. The effect is very much like a cinematic panning back. The close-up beginning ensures the presence of a distinctive individuality, and in the imaginative expansion or retreat, something of that presence is retained. From this spatial view, we turn back to the specific circumstances of Parton’s family, for whom cash is so out of reach that they must depend on barter. At the same time that this speaks eloquently to the deprivations that will figure in the opening section of the memoir, it also carries a certain kind of comfort. How wonderful to be able to exist in relationships of dependence immemorial, in which something like barter is even possible!46 We might look approvingly on the sight of relatively unalienated things being exchanged for one another. The idealization of rural communitarianism is an integral part of the European pastoral tradition, of course, and one that has always

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operated powerfully in Nashville’s hard-core/soft-shell dichotomy (not to mention any number of other discussions about popular music and authenticity). But the idealization of such a life in Parton’s hands can only occur because she knows, and tries to make sure that we know she knows, that her current prosperity, whatever trade-offs may have been required, has been worth it. Parton’s droll self-portrayals always place the problem of embourgeoisement firmly at the center, accepting its potentially ridiculous aspects in a way that appears to offer an apology for lack of taste— but without really apologizing at all. Describing her first experience of serious income, she notes: “I did act kind of silly at first. The joke is that the hick who strikes it rich always goes out first thing and buys a Cadillac. So did this hick. I guess I’m just a Cadillac kind of girl. I went home and told everybody how much money I was making and they were in awe.” In clannish rural fashion, Parton spread the wealth among her kin. All along, she reports herself as joking about the contrast between former penury and what we might call her new-found flushness. “I joked that I wanted them to have a bed with a ‘canopy’ over it instead of a ‘canopee’ under it. I saw to it that they did.”47 Parton’s determination to present herself as déclassée and glorying in it, endlessly disarming, finally brings us back around to the question of all those drag queens in her audience. What her crossover had brought her to was a species of parodic performance that from the point of view of gay audiences, looked exactly like camp. The practices covered by the term camp are various, and the word is resistant to straightforward definition. It has been the subject of a long and varied tradition of inquiry from Isherwood through Sontag and on into a great deal of interesting recent work; but for the purposes of this chapter, I will highlight those features that are most useful for a consideration of Parton and her music. (The choice of points central to camp is my own, and made especially for the purposes of discussing camp in music; camp in the visual arts or theater or film might well require a different selection.) First and most important, camp is a way of making a relationship between an object or person and what was in historical terms originally a gay audience. It may be, as Eve Sedgwick once said, that “the typifying gesture of camp is really something amazingly simple: the moment at which a consumer of culture makes the wild surmise, ‘What if whoever made this was gay too?’ ”48 An important part of camp reading is located in the interpreter’s attempts to show how an underlying gayness is to be revealed in the camp performance or object. This practice of

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reading makes camp like something awfully close to the old Russian and Soviet tradition of Aesopian language: there is a basic assumption that manifest content must always take a back seat to latent content, and that since interests of a particular group of readers is assumed to govern the text, those interests receive priority in a reading over those of other groups. Such a point of view does not necessarily deny that other readings are there, of course. In fact, the camp reading is always eminently deniable, given enough willingness of noncamp audiences to overlook its possibility. The brilliantly camp can just as easily be the cloying, the twee, the bathetic, the pretentious. But since camp, like Aesopian language, inheres in the relation between artist and audience, the reading that provides the best fit between the subject position of the audience (or segment of audience) and its presumptions about that of the author is the primary reading, and it offers the most useful guidance to interpreting the tone of a work or its constituent parts. Second, as part of this process, there is nearly always an emphasis on performance, on the presentation of a self, in such a way that attention is drawn to the ways a given performance fails. The best camp is nearly always about mistakes or imperfections, about the incongruity between accident and essence, or what is projected and what underlies it. These flaws need not be about ugliness, because the failures of taste and demeanor that constitute social errors are just as effective. The campiest drag is that which treads the fine line between perfect mimicry and giving itself away. If that drag bases itself on the already stylized image of a great movie icon or chanteuse, it may give itself away more extravagantly. This principal underlies the humor in such rarefied spectacles as the Ballet de Trocadero de Monte Carlo, or the drag opera troupe La Gran Scena; and the camp is all the more effective in these cases because the exaggerated drag is coupled with an astonishingly high degree of technical skill (in dancing en pointe and in genuine diva singing, respectively). Third, it follows that aesthetic failures must make the best camp. Although camp is often said to have something to do with the triumph of style over substance, the aesthetic of failure suggests the opposite— that substance, when it breaks the style, is what matters most. Relatedly, consider the attraction of camp aesthetics to seemingly outworn aesthetic objects. Andrew Ross has written that “the camp effect . . . is created not simply by a change in the mode of cultural production (and the contradictions attendant on such a change), but rather when the products of a much earlier mode of production . . . which has lost its

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power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.”49 If something is aesthetically outmoded, its conventions are all the more visible, and if they are just passé enough to seem somewhat embarrassing, the failure they represent can be reinterpreted as the triumph of the essence, of the personality. At the same time, the obviousness of the conventions employed can efficiently hint at the gay subtexts so easily found in the camp work’s latent content. Camp claps its hands loudly to show that it believes in essences. This perspective is one way of understanding the horrific charm of the later Judy Garland. It is also a strong current in Dolly Parton’s comedic portrayal of the triumph of trashiness. It is easy to see that much of what I have outlined can apply to a large number of comic styles that like to play up the points of view of marginalized constituencies. The crucially gay element comes from the question of secrets that give themselves away if you know how to read them. The dynamics around revealed secrets presuppose a contrast between exterior and interior realities, the sort of thing that Parton’s selfpresentation has always depended on. The drag queens love Dolly because her “secret” is one about class and poverty, and her careful affectations of tastelessness give away the game. Her ability to play with appearances in this way, moreover, is the result of a celebrity biography that enacts a liberatory history in much the same way as that of Cher—no wonder Parton could also become a post-Stonewall icon. Furthermore, to the extent that the liberation story of gay men and lesbians lies at the center of the cultural negotiations of the 1970s, that tale, with all its partial successes and failures, is one that resonates powerfully across the narratives of other marginalized communities for whom the decade offered the possibility of a renegotiated space in the world. It is extremely important to keep in mind, however, that Parton’s campiness has always been mostly a matter of visual display rather than of music. The musical jokes that Parton has been willing to play, such as imitating an LP stuck at the speed of a 78, or her mind-bending imitations of Elvis as a woman, contain so much technical facility that attempts to read them as camp are weak. Even a song such as “Me and Little Andy” is meant to be taken seriously, in the end. The music that Parton sings is the best proof of her contention that she is a simple country woman—her bid to claim something that looks very like an essential identity. To be sure, Parton herself would probably acknowledge the tenuousness and contingency of such a sense of permanence. A comment

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such as “I had to get rich to sing like I was poor again” implicitly recognizes the necessary confusions of playing and reality. And in moving toward bluegrass to gain strength for another return to the mainstream, she turns once more around the spiral. If the stakes remain the same—if Dolly Parton is still engaged in crossing over—it is because the dilemmas of particular and general always remain to be negotiated. Like Parton, we in the audience tread between positions, seeking to cross over in our own ways with her.

Notes

chapter 1 1. Dave Hickey, “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty,” in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993), 20–21. 2. Andrew J. Edelstein and Kevin McDonough, The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs (New York: Dutton, 1990). 3. See Ned Zeman, Karen Springen, John Taliaferro, Anthony DuignanCabrera, and Michael Mason, “Seventies Something,” Newsweek, June 10, 1991, 62. 4. Popular culture, however, has shown signs of speeding up. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Clear Channel radio stations began to promote 1990s retrospective weekends on holidays as well as special retro hours in daily broadcasts. The effectiveness of this compression seems to have been somewhat neutralized by the overall restructuring of the music industry and the increasing role of the internet. Will there be a Smells Like the ’90s box set in the near future? No signs as yet. 5. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 6. There is a lot of resentment toward Boomers in this paradigm. “Not that they are necessarily bad people, it’s just that there are so goddam many of ’em,” as I’ve heard it said. It’s something similar to the popular feelings—“like sleeping with an elephant”—many Canadians ( justly!) express toward the United States. 7. Three of Strauss and Howe’s books are Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584–2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991); 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? (New York: Vintage, 1993); and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (New York: Broadway, 1997). These authors have since extended their generational argument back to England, reaching 1433! Their preference for twenty-year blocks runs counter to the recent tendency of some contemporary historians and scholars of popular culture to work in decades. 209

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It’s hard to resist, given the usefulness of decades in commerce and the mass media; the existence of Rhino’s 1970s and 1980s boxes is a simple demonstration of this point. But the serious problems with decade periodization in American cultural history, some of which I discuss later in this chapter, actually lend some support to the scheme of punctuation followed by Strauss and Howe. 8. The periodization that Strauss and Howe use seems to me reasonable; scholars may wish to argue, however, with their reliance on a “four seasons”– cum Jungian archetypal model in which there are recurring group personalities, like the suits of a deck of cards: “prophets,” “nomads,” “heroes,” and “artists.” 9. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 255–58. 10. Ibid., 260–61. 11. In Strauss/Howe terms, this scene is grounded in the social relations between the Boomers and their parents in the “Silent generation.” 12. See Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music,” and Steven Feld, “Grooving on Participation,” in Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, 96–108, 151–80 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 13. Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). The rhetoric of Bayles’s disapproval has a distinct “eyewitness” tint that distinguishes it from objections that express the stance of earlier or later generational points of view. This supports my suggestion of that the events of the sexual revolution form a generational object in Bollas’s terms. 14. Ibid., 277–82. 15. Ibid., 13. 16. Bollas, Being, 266–67. 17. I pursue some of these questions in a slightly different form in “Musical Virtues,” in Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio, 44–69 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 18. I offer a brief consideration of this point in “Three Little Essays on Evanescence,” in Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary, ed. Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick, 179–90 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 19. The two best historical accounts of the 1970s to date are Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) and Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001). 20. It is worth noting that many of the attempts to sustain the variety show in the 1970s were built around pop music groups. Though the obvious models were programs like The Dean Martin Show (1965–73), single artist shows built around Johnny Cash, Julie Andrews, or Glen Campbell proved less popular and enduring than those built around Sonny and Cher, Tony Orlando and Dawn, or Donny and Marie Osmond. 21. P. J. O’Rourke, “New Wave Music,” Crawdaddy (October 1977), repr. in Very Seventies: A Cultural History of the 1970s, from the Pages of Crawdaddy, ed. Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 323.

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22. A minor point for amateur cetologists: although O’Rourke makes much of the taxonomical labeling of whales, he gets it wrong. The order Cetacea includes both toothed (Odontoceti) and baleen whales (Mysticeti), and most of the songs that have been released are from the latter group. 23. For an excellent overview of the “rock” versus “pop” distinction, see Keir Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 109–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 24. For a discussion on musicologists’ reluctance to broaden their sense of canon, see Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “Start Making Sense: Musicology Wrestles with Rock,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 277–92 (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 25. The historical problems our successes have caused have often seemed intractable. The majority of the music of the eighteenth century, for instance, can suddenly seem ever-impermeable when we listen in hopes of hearing “greatness.” 26. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 312. 27. For a discussion on the meaning of kitsch, see Matei Calinescu, Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 232–35. 28. Ibid., 229. 29. Geoffrey Himes, “Barry Manilow,” Washington Post, Style/Performing Arts, Thursday, June 26, 1980, D11. 30. To be sure, Loos is so canny a writer that many of his arguments retain their force even after the social conditions they addressed are long gone. See the discussions in Miriam Gusevich, “Decoration and Decorum, Adolf Loos’s Critique of Kitsch,” New German Critique 43 (Winter 1988): 97–123; and Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2000). 31. The most famous of these reproductions is Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s A Friend in Need. Originally painted in the 1920s (and part of a whole sequence of poker-playing dog paintings by Coolidge), this painting was duplicated on so many calendars and other everyday items that by the 1960s it had become an American archetype, of a sort. Variations on the theme are far too numerous to count. 32. A potent remark by Dolly Parton, repeated in numerous interviews and moments of stage banter, comes to mind: “I had to get rich to sing like I was poor again.” 33. Yet another mean remark about Barry Manilow illustrates relevant class hatred at work: one review of a TV special described the show as having “the warmth, class, and style of dampest Naugahyde.” Tom Shales, “Gilded Sillies; Musical Mediocrities and a Showy ‘Moviola,’ ” Washington Post, Style/TV Previews, Monday, May 19, 1980, B1. 34. Theodor W. Adorno, “Kitsch,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 501. 35. Richard Leppert, “Commentary,” in Adorno, Essays on Music, 361. 36. Adorno, “Kitsch,” 502.

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37. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 239. 38. One of the most successful arguments on behalf of this kind of historical narrative has been mounted by the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto in a number of works. Danto’s approach is especially interesting because he is so rigorous about the consequences of his Hegelian approach; see his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992); and especially After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). An example from literary criticism that holds some interest might be the “strong poet” theory developed by Harold Bloom beginning with The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 39. Since the term is still hurled about from time to time, let me point out that “political correctness” is best understood as at its heart a dispute over etiquette. This view does not lessen its importance—manners have everything to do with the crucial human values of dignity—but thinking of it in this way might go some way to making its stakes more clear.

chapter 2 1. Kane’s first solo album was 1998’s Long Live the Kane. Thanks to rap, Barry White’s recycling time was strikingly short. 2. Chef’s hypersexual persona in South Park plays amusingly on Hayes’s own intensely erotic image during the early 1970s—the crucial moment in this process was Hayes’s dramatic appearance in a chain-mail shirt on the 1972 Academy Awards singing his theme song from the blaxploitation film Shaft. I discuss this at greater length later in this chapter. 3. CNN Live Today 10:00, February 14, 2002, eMediaMillWorks Transcript No. 021422CN.V75. 4. See Gavin Petrie, ed., Black Music (London: Hamlyn, 1974), 61; Barry White, interview by Steven Blush, Seconds 30 (1995), 70. 5. White, interview by Blush, 77. 6. Petrie, Black Music, 59. 7. White, interview by Blush, 74. 8. It is true that to the extent that we connect the opening string run to cinematic fanfares, we would probably expect the melody to appear in another voice; but the longer the violins hold onto the a3 and the more the initial part of the groove repeats, the more we are tempted to want the violins to carry the melody. And, of course, they will. 9. White, interview by Blush, 71. 10. See Arthur I. Blaustein and Geoffrey Faux, The Star-Spangled Hustle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 31; Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1998), 106–9.

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11. For a discussion of Nixon’s policies affecting the Office of Economic Development, see Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 12. Blaustein and Faux, Hustle, 51–58. 13. Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 70. 14. Landry, Black Middle Class, 71–78. 15. Reebee Garofalo, “Crossing Over: 1939–1989,” in Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media, ed. Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1990), 98. All through his work in the 1960s, Brown was heavily invested in musical imagery that linked masculinity to prosperity, and his influence was felt throughout the black music industry. See Gerald Early, One Nation under a Groove: Motown and American Culture (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), 36–65; Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come, 17–18. 16. For instance, the anonymous item “New Black Hope” in Billboard, May 17, 1969, 3. Also see Garofalo, “Crossing Over,” 99–111. 17. Garofalo, “Crossing Over,” 102. 18. See chapter 3 of this volume. 19. Petrie, Black Music, 42. 20. White, interview by Blush, 70. 21. Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Castle Books, 1966), 226. 22. The classic discussion of signifying is still Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 23. Eldridge Cleaver, “Lazarus, Come Forth,” in Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 84–86. 24. Cleaver, “Lazarus,” 90–96. 25. See Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm & Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 369–71. 26. The pathological manifestations of this attitude among figures such as Huey Newton are another story, of course. 27. My discussion follows Michael E. Staub, “Setting up the Seventies: Black Panthers, New Journalism, and the Rewriting of the Sixties,” in The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, ed. Shelton Waldrep, 19–40 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 28. Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970). 29. See Melvin Van Peebles, St. Clair Bourne, Haile Gerima, and Pearl Bowser, “SWEET, [sic] SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG and the Development of Contemporary Black Cinema,” in Black Cinema Aesthetics: Issues in Independent Black Film, ed. Gladstone L. Yearwood (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), 55. 30. For an intricate and subtle reading of Shaft that resonates productively with my discussion here, see Charles Kronengold, “Identity, Value, and the Work of Genre: Black Action Films,” in Waldrep, The Seventies: The Age of Glitter,

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79–123. My entire discussion of Shaft is inspired by and could be read as a dialogue with Kronengold’s wonderful essay. 31. Gordon Parks, quoted in Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): 147–48. 32. The ultimate model for this sort of writing is again James Brown, both in his extended live performances and in such songs as “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” (1965) . 33. See chapter 3 of this volume for a more detailed discussion. 34. In fact, Shaft’s apartment is the ideal bachelor pad. See “Playboy’s Penthouse Apartment,” reprinted in Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 55–67. On the general connection between attitudes toward women and domesticity and revisions of (white) masculine ideals and Playboy, see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996): 254–57. 35. On black employment in the general service market, for instance, see Landry, Black Middle Class, 59–60 and 79–82. 36. The combination of shaved head and beard is especially important, inasmuch as the politics of facial hair constituted a minor but interesting part of Hollywood’s constructions of black masculinity. Gordon Parks, the director of Shaft, struggled to persuade the film’s producers to allow actor Richard Roundtree to keep his mustache for the part, despite Hollywood discomfort with the “excessive” masculinity that the facial hair suggested. See Parks, Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 305–8. 37. Barry White, I’ve Got So Much to Give, 20th Century Records Stereo T-407, 1973. 38. Contemporary Internet references to Paul Mauriat are nearly always connected to categories such as “lounge” or “space-age music.” 39. Paul Mauriat was a French arranger who had worked for performers such as Charles Aznavour and Petula Clark before he began his own pop orchestra. His version of “L’Amour est Bleu,” which had been composed by the French songwriter Andre Popp and had appeared as Luxembourg’s entry in the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest, was released as a single concurrently with the LP Blooming Hits: Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, Phillips PHS600-248, 1968. Thanks to aggressive marketing and the arrangement’s florid if plangent attractiveness, it did quite well in the United States. In chapters 4 and 5, I note that other songs on the album included “(There’s a) Kind of Hush,” later memorably covered by the Carpenters, and “Mama,” by Sonny Bono. 40. Dick Lochte, album cover notes, Blooming Hits. 41. White, interview by Blush, 74.

chapter 3 1. On the topic of cognac’s marketing as a signifier of luxury and sexual freedom, most people familiar with the landscape of largely black neighborhoods in urban America during the 1980s and early 1990s will remember seeing billboards with cognac ads that included central details of the stereotypical player’s world: a lovely black woman, more often than not very light-skinned; fireplaces

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and other furnishings of comfortable bachelor living; and phrases like “I assume you drink Martell” (one of the major alternatives to Rémy Martin). In fact, cognac had been heavily marketed to black consumers at least since the 1970s, when the major black-owned ad agency Burrell McBain Advertising (later Burrell Advertising) had taken the account of the distributors Brown-Forman Distillers Corporation, and black consumers continue to make up an unusually large percentage of cognac market. Many cognac producers subsequently sponsored music festivals and tours, film series, and other cultural events, and contributed monies to black institutions such as the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. But discontent among inner-city activists had emerged in the late 1980s, and by 1994, when Rémy Martin ran an eroticized ad in major black-oriented magazines, it raised a widespread protest among black leaders. For selected examples of this history, see “Burrell Celebrates First Mainstream Accout,” Jet 15 (October 1984): 8; Ursula V. Battle, “Legislation Seeks to Ban Alcohol, Tobacco Ads on Billboards,” Baltimore Afro-American 102, no. 7 (October 2, 1993): B14; and Alvin Peabody, “ ‘Black Only’ Ad with Sexual Overtones Cited: Remy Martin Criticized for Racist Ad,” Washington Informer, June 8, 1994; http:// www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-2250427.html. Fierce cultural negotiations between black communities and tobacco and liquor advertisers continue to the present day. 2. The song is credited to Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Cary Gilbert, arranged by Bobby Martin. 3. The emblematic discussion is found in Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). Also see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 4. For more discussion of representations of race in American popular song in the early twentieth century, see Raymond Knapp and Mitchell Morris, “Tin Pan Alley Songs on Stage and Screen before World War II,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, ed. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf, 81–96 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5. Maybe the most attractive term for one strain of this music was “quiet storm,” with its old-fashioned air of sexual intercourse gently metaphorized for the camera’s eye in 1940s film or 1960s soap opera. The term came from the title of a 1975 Smokey Robinson album central to the style’s shaping. 6. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 224. 7. These questions, mostly excluded from extensive inquiry in musicology’s “high modernist” phase (from the 1950s until the 1980s), returned to center stage in music scholarship at the beginning of the 1990s. The phrase “immediacy effect” is borrowed from Lawrence Kramer, “Musicology of the Future,” repercussions 1, no. 1 (1992): 5–18. For a broad discussion of musical situatedness, see Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 8. On many of the points that follow, see also Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York: Plume, 1998), 165–202.

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9. Gerald Early, One Nation under a Groove: Motown and American Culture (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), 10–28. 10. Nelson George, Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 148–50. See also Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1986): 382–84. 11. George, Where, 42. 12. Ibid., 169–71. 13. I owe this observation on the album cover of Gaye’s What’s Going On to a discussion with Charles Kronengold. For more on this point, see Early, One Nation, 126–27. 14. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm & Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 264. 15. George, Where, 176–77. 16. Ibid., 178–83; Ward, Stokes, and Tucker, Rock, 498–99. 17. See Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 140; Nowhere to Run: the Story of Soul Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 349–55; Ward, Stokes, and Tucker, Rock, 503–04; Ward, Just My Soul, 404–07. 18. George, Death, 124. 19. The classic account of music as an expression of the noumenon is Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), but a central strand of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics is preoccupied with such transcendentalist subjectivities. For a longer discussion, see Mitchell Morris, “Musical Eroticism and the Transcendent Strain: The Work of Alexander Skryabin, 1898–1908,” PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1998, chap. 1. 20. See Richard A. Peterson and David G. Berger, “Cycles in Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 153–55 (New York, 1990). Many telling details of this commercial history are given in Russell Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century, updated by David Sanjek (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996): 507–17. 21. George, Where, 188–89. 22. George, Death, 110–11. 23. Sanjek, Pennies, 555. 24. George, Death, 140–42; see also George, Where, 188. 25. With respect to the following account of PIR and CBS, see also Ward, Just My Soul, 417–22. 26. George, Death, 142–46; Ward, Stokes, and Tucker, Rock, 501. 27. As far as the Justice Department indictments that fatally damaged PIR, it should be noted that the studio’s involvement in payola came about in close connection with the higher executives at CBS, who were offered lesser charges. The racial bias in the pattern of indictments was noticed and widely criticized at the time. See Sanjek, Pennies, 556–57. 28. Creed’s first success as a lyricist came in 1971, when Dusty Springfield recorded Creed’s song “Free Girl,” and ended with her death from breast cancer

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in 1986. During her career, Creed wrote a number of major hits, perhaps most famously “The Greatest Love of All” in collaboration with composer and producer Michael Massner for the Muhammed Ali biographical film The Greatest (1977). As sung by George Benson, the song was fairly successful on the charts, reaching number twenty-six; but it became a huge hit and karaoke juggernaut thanks to Whitney Houston’s cover in her 1993 film The Bodyguard. In 1990, “The Greatest Love of All” received an ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) Award in the appropriate category of Most Performed Film Feature Standards. Houston’s cover received an MTV Movie Award for Best Movie Song in 1993. 29. Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come, 198. 30. Within the realm of gospel, the most immediate connections might be those with the worship styles of the Pentecostal and Holiness traditions, which since their origins early in the twentieth century had emphasized exuberant public expressions of individual religious rapture. The Pentecostal style had a huge effect on 1950s styles, but it continued to shape musical expression for decades afterwards. See Davin Seay and Mary Neely, Stairway to Heaven: The Spiritual Roots of Rock-n-Roll—From the King and Little Richard to Prince and Amy Grant (New York: Ballantine Epiphany, 1986); and more recently, Teresa L. Reed, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), esp. 15–38. 31. I will discuss lip-synching and “singing along” as modes of listening at greater length in chapter 5. 32. Riperton’s death from breast cancer is perhaps more recalled thanks to her work in the late 1970s as a spokesperson for the American Cancer Society; the melancholy that tinges the innumerable short bios all over the Internet suggests the huge importance of her early loss as a context for fans’ listening; see www.discomuseum.com/MinnieRiperton.html for one example. The most intense connections could be found at www.minnieriperton.com (under reconstruction beginning in early 2007, but expired as of December 2012) and at the Minnie Riperton Legacy Preservation Society at www.mrlps.com; the African American Registry also highlights Riperton’s loss from cancer at www.aaregistry .com/african_american_history/1276/A_voice_from_heaven_Minnie_Riperton. 33. Wonder’s compositional arc during the 1970s looks astonishingly New Age in retrospect, culminating as it does in the marvelously weird 1979 double album Journey through the Secret Life of Plants, itself a spinoff from the odd “documentary” film of the same name. 34. Ample testament to the fame of “Loving You” might be seen in the welter of samples and especially parodies of the song that have popped up in other pop culture venues over the years. One especially vivid example from the late 1990s came in an episode of the adult cartoon series South Park. “Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride,” from the show’s first season, included a gag in which a performance of “Loving You,” as sung by “John Stamos’s older brother” during the intermission of a football game, sets off a bomb. Alas, this parody is most interested in the song for the sake of its legendary high notes—but without pushing interpretation to any great length, South Park also clearly wants to aim its characteristically bratty derision at the gender anxiety that the song so often provokes.

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35. The film received multiple Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress nod to Diana Ross (she lost to Liza Minnelli). Miss Ross was also nominated for Best Actress for other awards ceremonies—BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) and the Golden Globes—and won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. 36. I could also mention the directing, which was rashly begun by Berry Gordy Jr. himself. In an attempt to remedy the faults of inexperience, Gordy brought in Tony Richardson to complete the film. (Richardson is uncredited.) It is probably true that the film would have failed on the previously mentioned grounds, anyway. In retrospect, it seems that this film, along with The Wiz, mortally wounded what might otherwise have been Ross’s serious career as an actress. 37. “I’ve Never Been to Me,” by Charlene, was not successful in its initial release, but it returned with a vengeance in the early 1980s as the sonic incarnation of gender role backlash during the first Reagan administration. (An accident? I think not.) Drag queens, who knew a good thing when they heard it, immediately started a tradition of lip-synch parodies; an accessible example (regrettably sans Charlene’s immortal voice-over near the conclusion of the song) can be found in the opening credits of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. One might wonder if the spate of drag films that popped up in the later 1990s could ever have existed without 1970s pop and its exultant frivolity. 38. See Peterson and Berger, “Cycles,” and Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven. 39. As in “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” the internal tonal relationships of the “Theme from Mahogany” suggest a kind of demotic Wagnerism at work.

chapter 4 1. Eighteen of the album’s twenty tracks were chart singles in the period 1975–84. 2. For instance, one reviewer observed: “His trademark, the big sentimental ballad, has made him the closest thing to Muzak in pop, and even he—sticking a pin into his lighter-than-air image—labels one part of his stage show ‘The Oy Vey Segment.’ But the records sell in the millions, and taken one by one they are subconsciously compelling.” Tony Kornheiser, “Manilow: He Sings the Songs: And Buddy, Watch What You Say about Them,” Washington Post, Style, Thursday, July 24, 1980, B1. 3. This information is taken from Barry Manilow, Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 1–15. Although necessarily self-mythologizing as all memoirs inevitably are, the specific facts seem accurate. 4. In taking my discussion in this direction, I merely follow the observation of one newspaper reviewer who noted that “Mr. Manilow’s forte remains the mini-aria arranged like an elaborate jingle.” See Stephen Holden, “Glittery Albums by Diamond and Manilow,” New York Times, March 1, 1981, 31; http:// www.nytimes.com/1981/03/01/arts/glittery-albums-by-diamond-and-manilow. html. 5. Barry Manilow, quoted in George Mair, Bette: An Intimate Biography of Bette Midler (Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1995), 59.

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6. This image is, in fact, fully in keeping with the company’s origins. George J. Mecherle was a retired midwest farmer who founded State Farm in 1922 in order to offer automobile insurance at lowered rates to farmers because he believed that they drove less and thus were involved in fewer accidents. By 1928, the company established decentralized offices and was well on its way to becoming a major part of the American insurance industry. It is not clear that the mission of State Farm remained identical to Mecherle’s intentions, but such departures from original intentions are the way of the world. The most detailed treatment of State Farm’s early days is found in Karl Schriftgiesser, The Man from Merna: A Biography of George J. Mecherle and a History of the State Farm Insurance Companies of Bloomington, Illinois (New York: Random House, 1955). 7. An aside on transcriptions: while the available transcription of this tune gives a straight quarter-note triplet to the words “State Farm is,” in my recollection of the tune, it always seems that the singer alters the last beat into the dotted figure I have given in my transcription (example 7). This variation makes sense to me on the grounds of diction, since the word “Farm” is a little longer because of the combined liquid and nasal consonants at its end. But my transcription may also be my own personal fiction. 8. Manilow, Sweet Life, 94–101. 9. Manilow’s reminiscences especially center on an emblematic moment when, even though highly self-conscious, he nevertheless jumped naked into the pool along with apparently everyone else who was present. This act did not represent any position with respect to sexual activity per se, but rather affirmed the general sense of physical liberation that was prized so highly in this social world at this time. 10. Manilow, Sweet Life, 107. 11. Ample evidence of Midler’s camp bricolage can be found in concert videos such as the 1980 film Divine Madness. Her development of a performance style based on a self-consciously rapacious narcissism was apparent from the beginning of her collaboration with Manilow, as can be seen in some amateur footage from these early days. Taken at the Continental Baths in 1971, it shows Milder refining her persona of “The Divine Miss M,” for which she was chiefly celebrated in the 1970s. (This footage is sometimes erroneously listed as dating from 1969. It has been discussed in Andrew Ingall, “Dirty Girl in a Bathhouse” (lecture, Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Miami, April 27, 2002.) Much of this material, later performed in concert tours throughout the 1970s, appeared on her first release, The Divine Miss M (1972). The Divine Miss M eventually went platinum and won her the Grammy for Best New Artist. More indications of Midler’s performance style at this time can be found in her “comedy” book A View from a Broad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980). 12. The complexities of Midler’s persona and its relation to her gay audience have been subtly analyzed in Paul Attinello, “I Just Bette: Narcissism, Gay Identification, and the Divine Miss M” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Music, Toronto, 2000). 13. See the discussions of money, class, and race in chapter 3 of this volume. A more extensive discussion of the issues surrounding the cultural work of the

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girl groups is found in Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (New York: Routledge, 2007). 14. Manilow’s formidable skills became especially necessary to Midler’s first two albums. Although Atlantic was unwilling to use his arrangements, their difficulties with translating Midler’s energies from the stage eventually led Ahmet Ertegun to intervene in the process and give Manilow much more influence over the production of the recordings. Mair, Bette, 61–62. 15. I discuss the question of camp and artifice at greater length in chapter 7 of this volume. 16. Just an indication about the complexity of materials: the original version of “Could It Be Magic?” on the 1973 Bell release was altered following the success of Barry Manilow II, after Clive Davis at Arista had picked up Manilow’s contract. Barry Manilow I, released in 1975, was the Bell album with additional orchestration and remixing. This version of “Could It Be Magic” has string parts and a slightly shorter timing (6:50 versus 7:01 in 1973). Other than the new instrumentation, the formal layout of the two recordings is substantially the same. In June 1975, Arista released a short version of the song as a single for radio play (3:37). After 1975 there are thus two primary versions of the song, both of which have been released, with slightly varying timings, from the late 1970s to the present. My account of the relationship between “Could It Be Magic?” and the Chopin prelude pertains to the LP versions from both 1973 and 1975; my discussion of the song’s orchestration and dramatic structure will depend upon the expanded 1975 LP version, which I have taken from the 1990 album The Songs, 1975–1990. 17. On a side note, Manilow’s awareness of the Carmen songs may be indicated by his song “If I Should Love Again,” which in many details of melody, harmony, and keyboard work suggest that Manilow was interested in working out a variation on “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” without direct recourse to Rachmaninoff. 18. The term “dominant fiction” is taken from Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). 19. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 1 (1929): 303–13. This article has been reprinted and discussed extensively. Two representative appearances are in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 35–44 (London: Methuen, 1986); The Inner World & Joan Riviere: Collected Papers 1920–1958, ed. Atholl Hughes, 90–101 (London: Karnac, 1991). 20. David Segal, “The Songs Barry Manilow Wishes He Had Written,” Washington Post, Sunday Arts, Sunday, April 7, 2002, G1. 21. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Dell, 1983), 18. 22. Ibid., 29. 23. Ibid., 33–68. 24. As Daniel Horowitz persuasively demonstrates, Friedan’s analysis of the restrictions on her middle-class audience depends upon assumptions and techniques developed in her earlier history of activism as a member of the American left. Friedan’s political ties were largely cloaked in The Feminine Mystique lest

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they distract her Cold War liberal audience from her principal analytical points. See Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 25. See the historical discussion in Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 25–45. 26. Besides David Reuben’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (New York: D. McKay, 1969), the list includes “J.” [Joan Theresa Garrity], The Sensuous Woman; The First How-To Book for the Female Who Yearns to Be All Woman (New York: L. Stuart, 1969); David Reuben, Any Woman Can! Love and Sexual Fulfillment for the Single, Widowed, Divorced . . . and Married (New York: D. McKay, 1971); “M.,” The Sensuous Man: The First How-To Book for the Man Who Wants to Be a Great Lover (New York: L. Stuart, 1971); Alex Comfort, ed., The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking, illus. Charles Raymond and Christopher Ross (New York: Crown, 1974). 27. Marabel Morgan, The Total Woman (Old Tappan, NJ: F. H. Revell, 1973). Morgan’s bright hosannas to the erotic joys of wifely submission created a space within which a sex-manual industry that preserved 1950s gender roles developed to address conservative evangelical Christians. 28. See the discussion on gender roles in Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 132–40. 29. Not that Liberace hesitated to lie where necessary as well (most famously in his notorious slander suit against the British newspaper The Daily Mirror in 1956). He lived in difficult times. 30. Although “Could It Be Magic?” first appeared on Barry Manilow II (1973), it did not become a hit single until 1975, after Manilow’s contract had been picked up by Arista. 31. Jon Finson, “Music and Medium: Two Versions of Manilow’s ‘Could It Be Magic?,’ ” Musical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1979): 269. 32. Manilow, Sweet Life, 85. 33. Manilow, quoted in Fred and Judy Vermorel, “A Glimpse of the Fan Factory,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992): 199. 34. Manilow, quoted in Sarah Rodman, “Barry Manilow Enjoys Success ‘Even Now,’ ” Boston Herald, Arts & Life, July 18, 2002; http://www.barrynethomepage.com/bmnet53g.shtml. 35. Linda Williams, “Body Genres: Melodrama, Horror, and Porn,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13. 36. The timings of these versions are 5:46 and 3:48, respectively. They differ slightly from the version that appeared on Even Now; in each case, the temporal changes are mostly the result of modifications of the song’s instrumental fillings. 37. Consider this review of a Manilow concert in Madison Square Garden: “The show, his first in the Garden, included lighting columns that turned into palm trees, projections on a giant screen, and other theatrical trappings, and songs tended to build to melodramatic climaxes that were apparently intended

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to match the grand scale of the arena itself.” Robert Palmer, “Pop: Manilow at the Garden,” New York Times, October 30, 1980, C15.

chapter 5 Subheadings for this chapter are transcribed from hit songs recorded by the Carpenters. P. 121: “We’ve Only Just Begun,” Roger Nichols and Paul Williams, 1970. P. 125: “Sing,” Joe Raposo, 1972. P. 129: “Yesterday Once More,” Richard Carpenter and John Bettis, 1973. P. 136: “Superstar,” Bonnie Bramlett, Delaney Bramlett, and Leon Russell, 1969. P. 139: “Goodbye to Love,” Richard Carpenter and John Bettis, 1972. All appeared on The Carpenters, The Singles: 1969–1973 (Santa Monica, CA: A&M Records, 1973). 1. It is interesting to compare the cultural work done around anorexia during the 1980s with that done around the contemporaneous syndrome of AIDS, since both diagnoses entail so many hard questions about gender and sexuality, family dynamics, and the difficulties of distinguishing between the public and the private body. The horror of physical wastage as a literalization of both meanings of “abandon” would be an obvious point of departure. 2. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, directed and produced by Todd Haynes (New York: Iced Tea Productions, 1988), VHS. 3. Richard and Karen appeared with another musician, Wes Jacobs, as the Richard Carpenter Trio. 4. See, for instance, Bill Osgerby, “Beach Bound: Exotica, Leisure Style and Popular Culture in Post-war America from South Pacific to Beach Blanket Bingo,” in Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, ed. Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell, 132–40 (Exeter, UK: Intellect Books, 2000); or most of the essays in Widening the Horizon: Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music, ed. Philip Hayward (Sydney, AU: J. Libbey, 1999). 5. The significance of “The Girl from Ipanema” in a Brazilian context is quite different, but a topic for a different project. 6. In this connection, the distinctive strain of post-boomer camp that comes from taking such irritatingly harmless stupidity as if it were holy writ finds ample resonance in Superstar, suggesting that Haynes’s film might have served as an important if indirect precedent—along with the venerable gay tradition of domestic entertainments like all-male readings of plays such as The Women—for the 1990s fashion of producing live staged performances of old TV sitcom scripts. The immortal Bradys were probably the most popular candidates for this kind of recycling, but a number of other shows—for instance, “The Facts of Life” from the early 1980s, with its abundant potential lesbian subtexts located and dramatized—received this royal treatment as well. 7. The most recent edition of Norbert Elias’s 1939 work is The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000). 8. Hickey, “Air Guitar,” in Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 163.

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9. Paul Attinello, “Performance and Shame: A Mosaic of Gay (and Other) Perceptions,” repercussions 4, no. 2 (1995): 97–130. 10. See Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 11. Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 79. 12. See for instance, Elisabeth Le Guin, “Cello and Bow Thinking: Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in Eb Major,” Echo 1, no. 1 (Fall 1999), http://www.echo .ucla.edu/volume1-issue1/leguin/leguin-article.html. 13. This novel, published in eight volumes between 1913 and 1927, was entitled Remembrance of Things Past by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, its first translator into English; most scholars prefer to give the title in a more literal translation as In Search of Lost Time. Either title calls up lovely Carpentersesque associations. 14. We might see the kiss in this case as a synecdoche for Proust’s narrator’s ideal erotic experience, inasmuch as he continually wishes for a transcendentally perfect fusion of self and other. On the kissing passage in question, see Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, vol. 2: The Guermantes Way: Cities of the Plain (New York: Random House, 1982): 377–78. 15. Adam Phillips, “Plotting for Kisses,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 96. 16. Ibid., 97. 17. The song “Superstar” was written by Leon Russell along with Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett; Russell has been described as “one of the first supersessionmen.” See The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, ed. Patricia Romanowski and Holly George-Warren (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1995), 862. 18. Hans Loewald, “Primary Process, Secondary Process, and Language,” in The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs (Hagerstown, MD: University, 2000), 187.

chapter 6 The subheading on p. 164 is transcribed from the jingle that introduced the recurring “vamp” sketch on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, 1971–1974. 1. Cher, quoted in Associated Press, “Cher Delivers Vegas Spectacle, Issues Challenge to Other Divas,” Las Vegas Sun, August 11, 2002. 2. Cher, quoted in “Cher’s Final Tour: ‘Living Proof—the Farewell Tour,’ ” Billboard, September 7, 2002, 17. 3. Margo Chase, quoted in “Cher Selects Margo Chase to Create Identity for Farewell Tour,” Business Wire, August 28, 2002, http://www.thefreelibrary.com, accessed January 5, 2012. 4. Tony Peregrin, “Cher: Living Proof,” http://www.popmatters.com/reviews /c/cher-living.html. Accessed January 5, 2012.

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5. Sonny Bono, And the Beat Goes On (New York: Pocket Books, 1991), 41. 6. A word about vocabulary: in recent scholarly writing the term “miscegenation,” which dates from the 1860s and comes laden with connotations of sexual panic and pseudo-biological theorizing, is often avoided in favor of lesscharged phrases such as “racial mixing.” I think that its avoidance is in many cases a mistake because the anxieties that mark the term were strong players in American consciousness through the 1970s (and arguably remain significant to the present). Besides, an ugly anxiety deserves an ugly word. 7. One set of especially useful reflections on the potential non-whiteness of immigrants from southern Europe can be found in David Roediger, “Guineas, Wiggers, and the Dramas of Racialized Culture,” American Literary History 7, no. 4 (1995): 654–668. 8. Bono, The Beat, 73. 9. That is, Ronnie Spector (née Veronica Bennett), lead singer of the Ronettes, the Trilby to Phil Spector’s Svengali. 10. This is not to say that ample evidence of so-called “patriarchal investment” in the program did not exist. The Bob Mackie gowns designed for Cher flaunted every feature of her body that could be shown on TV at that time; despite her caustic remarks, Cher always had fewer lines than Sonny; and Sonny retained tight control of the production of Cher’s first solo album. This conventionality became especially important in Cher’s later career, for it allowed her to enact a very flashy (and thus powerful) version of women’s emancipation. See Diane Negra, “Stardom, Corporeality and Ethnic Indeterminacy: Cher’s Disrupted/Disruptive Body,” in Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (London: Routledge, 2001), 168–69. 11. MCG-NYC, “The Cher Revival at Madison Square Garden and My Theory of the Modern Liberated Blue-collar Woman,” July 13, 1999, http:// www.apeculture.com/cher.htm. Accessed January 5, 2012. 12. Musso’s decision was an easy one for Cher to accept. Garrett had known the duo since they were all working at Liberty Records in the 1960s, and he had been a neighbor in the expensive Los Angeles district of Bel Air. 13. I have already pointed this effect of Cher’s costumes. With respect to Dusty, her voice was evidently “soulful” enough that even an experienced listener like Martha Reeves at first assumed that Dusty was black—her Irish antecedents, immediately disreputable in England, probably enabled her assumption of quasiblackness as well. Then there was the fact that, to put it bluntly, Dusty often dressed like a drag queen. See Patricia Juliana Smith, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’: The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield,” in Camp Grounds, ed. David Bergman, 185–205 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 14. The scholarly literature on this topic is huge. One useful point of entry is Judith Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978). 15. A number of general histories give sobering overviews of the social animus against the Roma. Two representative instances are Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma, 1987); Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (New York: Vintage, 1995).

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16. The song (“The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”), condescending stereotypes intact, became a 1973 number-one hit for Vicki Lawrence, a regular on the Carol Burnett Show who was married to the songwriter, Bobby Russell. 17. See Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth Century America,” The Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 44–69. Much of my discussion draws from this excellent overview. 18. Ibid., 61–63. 19. Ibid., 64–67. 20. For an excellent overview of these particulars, see Hilary N. Weaver, “Indigenous Identity: What Is It, and Who Really Has It?” American Indian Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2001): 240–55. 21. Pocahontas’s image was predetermined by representations that date back to the first European voyages to the Americas. In her wake, countless popular representations of “Indian princesses” appeared in visual form (cartoons, paintings, engravings), on stage, and in romantic novels. A sense of the complex discussion around this figure can be gained from many sources, including Mary Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Joyce Flynn, “Melting Plots: Patterns of Racial and Ethnic Amalgamation in American Drama before Eugene O’Neill,” American Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1986): 417–38; Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover NH: University Press of New England, 1994); Andrew S. McClure, “Sarah Winnemuca: [Post] Indian Princess and Voice of the Paiutes,” MELUS 24, no. 2 (1999): 29–51. 22. My discussion of Native American activism draws extensively from Joane Nagel, “American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Politics and the Resurgence of Identity,” American Sociological Review 60 (1995): 947–65. 23. For instance, see Vine Deloria Jr., “The Rise of Indian Activism,” in The Social Reality of Ethnic America, ed. R. Gomez, C. Collingham, R. Endo, and K. Jackson (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974). 179–87; Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). In a more popular vein, see Adam Fortunate Eagle, Alcatraz! Alcatraz! The Indian Occupation of 1969–1971 (San Francisco: Heyday Books, 1992). 24. Anonymous speaker, quoted in Nagel, “American Indian Ethnic Renewal,” 959. 25. See Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 948. 26. It is worth mentioning, however, that some determined Cherokee resisters managed to hang on in North Carolina and Alabama, eventually winning legal protections and recognitions for themselves. Once settled in Oklahoma, the Cherokee nation became immensely successful and prosperous in comparison to many other Native nations. Dolly Parton, to be discussed in the next chapter, has claimed a Cherokee great-grandparent on her mother’s side. 27. The film presents its hero as “Western Pueblo,” but carefully deploys fake-Indian trappings to maintain its Hollywood effect. 28. The continuity between this image of heroism and the one used in the Western is obvious.

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29. Thanks to Tara Browner for reminding me of the film and alerting me to the sensation it caused, particularly in Native American circles. 30. See Tara Browner, “Cher as ‘Indian’: Music, Race, and Representation in the 1970s” (paper, Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Detroit, 2001). 31. The literature on minstrelsy is quite rich, and although it is focused on the relations of black and white, many aspects of its dynamics are directly relevant to “playing Indian.” The most useful studies include Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford, 1993); Michael J. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The tradition discussed in these studies is normatively male, but women also participated in blackface performances. See Susan C. Cook, “From the Prehistory of Cher: Gender at the Masquerade: or, White Women Colorized” (paper, Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Detroit, 2001). 32. For another discussion on these points, see Negra, “Stardom,” esp. 167. 33. “Offers Aid to Alaskan Natives,” Oakland Post, July 1, 1973, 3. 34. Vic Partipilo, “On Location,” Oakland Post, February 2, 1979. 35. Libby Lumpkin, “The Showgirl,” in Deep Design: Nine Little Art Histories (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1999), 75. 36. This combination of terms, and the following discussion, depends on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon. See “Divinity: A Dossier,” in Sedgwick, Tendencies, 215–51 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Another important account relevant to the condition of defiant abjection is Paul Attinello, “Performance and/or Shame: A Mosaic of Gay (and Other) Perceptions,” repercussions 4, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 97–130. 37. The classic discussion on stigmatized identity is Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1963). 38. Regarding Cher’s image, see Negra, “Stardom,” 170–78. 39. Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).

chapter 7 The subheading on p. 186 is transcribed from “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” Paul Henning, 1962. 1. Dolly Parton, quoted in Paul Kingsbury, “One-on-one with Dolly Parton,” Journal of Country Music 19, no. 2 (1997–98): 32. 2. Although it is a side issue, the consequences of this dismal legislation are worth noting in more detail. A careful study of the results of the 1996 Telecommunications Act has summarized its findings in fifteen points, eight of which I quote here: “1. Ten parent companies dominate the radio spectrum, radio listenership, and radio revenues. . . . 2. Consolidation is particularly extreme in the case of Clear Channel [a company which at present owns no less than 1,240

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American radio stations!]. . . . 3. Oligopolies control almost every geographic market. . . . 4. Virtually every music format is controlled by an oligopoly. . . . 5. A small number of companies control the news American hear on the radio. . . . 6. Format consolidation leads to fewer gatekeepers. . . . 7. Increased format variety does not ensure increased programming diversity. . . . 8. A “twin bottleneck” limits musicians’ access to radio [the authors refer here to the deleterious results of only five major labels selling to at most ten major radio companies]. . . .” As a result, the radio stations you keep trying to listen to send you into paroxysms of boredom these days because all playlists and news points of view are the same. Also remember that the boredom comes from broadcast frequencies that are by law public property, administered in “trust” by the federal government. It is all so reminiscent of the looting of public lands by timber and oil interests. One wonders if the next idea will be some sort of “airwaves depletion allowance” to reward those broadcast companies for the empty listening space they leave behind them. And by the way, though one may wish to query the statements of the Future of Music Coalition, which commissioned the study (they are, after all, an interested party), their data are horribly precise, and their reasoning seems sound. See Peter Di Cola and Kristen Thomson, Radio Deregulation: Has It Served Citizens and Musicians? A Report on the Effects of Radio Ownership Consolidation following the 1996 Telecommunications Act (Future of Music Coalition, November 18, 2002): 3–4. The recent travails of the record industry, woefully unprepared and consistently shortsighted about the rise of downloading, have only made matters worse for artists. It would not be a bad thing if there were an “Occupy” movement for the airwaves. 3. At this point, I will leave aside Parton’s numerous para-musical activities such as her ownership of the Dollywood theme park, the Dixie Stampede franchise of equestrian dinner-theaters, and her company Sandollar Productions, which releases films and television shows. All these enterprises have been more than respectably profitable and elevate her financial standing to a considerable degree. 4. The tribute album performed respectably on the charts, thanks to the strength of Parton’s songs, the unusual mix of artists performing them, and an intelligent publicity campaign that saw Parton playing well to her core audiences through appearances on venues such as Oprah and The Tonight Show, benefit performances, and a flurry of favorable reviews in print and on line. 5. See Richard A. Peterson, “The Dialectic of Hard-Core and Soft-Shell Country Music,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 273–300. 6. Dolly Parton, My Life and Other Unfinished Business (New York: HarperCollins, 1994): 194. 7. Norma Jean Beasler (b. 1938) was Wagoner’s “girl singer” from 1960 to 1967. 8. For a discussion of the details of studio production in this period, see Morris S. Levy, “Nashville Sound-Era Studio Musicians,” in Country Music Annual 2000, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson, 22–29 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000). 9. Alana Nash, Dolly (Los Angeles: Reed Books, 1978), 103. 10. Sammie Ann Wickes, “A Belated Salute to the ‘Old Way’ of ‘Snaking’ the Voice on Its (ca) 345th Birthday,” Popular Music 8, no. 1 (January 1989): 77.

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11. Among Pentecostal women, for instance, the beehive had become established as a common hairstyle, and the saying “the higher the hair, the closer to heaven” was in keeping with St. Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 11:15 that “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her.” While Pentecostal women’s hair was to be grand, their clothes were to be restrained, their jewelry minimal, and any makeup was forbidden, following St. Paul’s dictum in 1 Timothy 2:9 that women were to “adorn themselves in modest apparel . . . not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array.” The struggle to allow makeup in these religious circles goes a long way to explain the changes in image of the extraordinary Tammy Faye Bakker, who used to come across at times as Dolly’s parodic double. 12. For an overview of women’s apparel in country music, see Mary A. Bufwack, “Girls with Guitars—and Fringe and Sequins and Rhinestones, Silk, Lace, and Leather,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 173–216. 13. Attendance had reached over 400,000 people in 1971, and it was difficult to accommodate them all at Ryman. 14. Laurence Leamer, Three Chords and the Truth: Hope, Heartbreak, and Changing Fortunes in Nashville (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 57. 15. For a discussion of the ideological pleasures developed at Disney, see Steven Watts, “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century,” Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (June 1995): 84–110. 16. Dolly Parton, quoted in Michael Bane, “Hello Dolly, Again,” Country Music (January–February 1997). 17. It is worth noting that Parton has frequently given Gallin the glory for his work in developing her crossover persona. See Parton, My Life, 185. 18. Bucolic funning had been a special skill in Griffith’s repertory, dating back to his comic hillbilly monologue, “What It Was Was Football,” developed while the late actor was a schoolteacher and demotic performer in Goldsboro, NC, nowhere close to the mountains. For a discussion of Griffith’s career as “clown,” see J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 57–61. 19. The saga of Gomer Pyle was obviously modeled on the story of the character played by Griffith in the 1958 film No Time for Sergeants. 20. See the brief discussion of the Kettle films in Williamson, Hillbillyland, 53–57. 21. George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs,” Cultural Anthropology 1, no. 4 (1986): 355–87. 22. Ernest Matthew Mickler, White Trash Cooking (Berkeley: Jargon Society / Ten Speed Press, 1986), 1. This quotation may seem unduly demotic; more academic support for this way of thinking may be found in the discussions of class identity contained in Pamela Grundy, “ ‘We Always Tried to Be Good People’: Respectability, Crazy Water Crystals, and Hillbilly Music on the Air, 1933–1935,” Journal of American History (1995): 1591–1620. 23. In an essay on Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal (who was by family background well-placed to know) once referred unkindly but memorably to a part of this social position as “lower-middle-class WASP, southern-airs-and-graces

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division.” See “Tennesee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” At Home: Essays 1982–1988 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 47. 24. See Williamson, Hillbillyland, 1–20. 25. Admittedly, part of the strangeness in Gomer Pyle, USMC must come from the intensely homoerotic charge in the relationship between Private Pyle and Sargeant Carter. If we pay attention to subtexts, it is quite obvious that Carter’s discomfort stems primarily from Pyle’s open adoration of him; but that is a different discussion. 26. There are a number of useful discussions of hillbilly music that resonate with my account, such as Archie Green, “Hillbilly Music: Source and Symbol,” Journal of American Folklore 78, no. 309 (1965): 204–28. For an interesting study of the emigration of poor Southern whites and the transportation of hillbilly stereotypes, see Lewis M. Killian, “The Adjustment of Southern White Migrants to Northern Urban Norms,” Social Forces 32, no. 1 (1953): 66–69. 27. It is worth noting that the singer on the television theme is not Flatt (the usual singer) but an LA studio musician named Jerry Scoggins; the producers of the show wanted to have the singer available for weekly promotional announcements, and since Flatt lived in the South, he would have been unable to fulfill the regular engagement. 28. Rachel Rubin discusses the musical features of the Bakersfield style associated with Owens and Merle Haggard, among others, in “Sing Me Back Home: Nostalgia, Bakersfield, and Modern Country Music,” in American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, ed. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick (Amherst MA, 2001): 93–4. 29. Note, however, that it seems likely the Waltons own their mountain, and even in the Depression, John-Boy does find his way to the University of Virginia. The Waltons are not sharecroppers, nor are they the uprooted, newly urbanized southern poor. 30. Rachel Rubin, “Sing Me Back Home: Nostalgia, Bakersfield, and Modern Country Music,” in American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, ed. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 101. 31. Nash, Dolly, 179. 32. Parton, My Life, 200; Nash, Dolly, 205–6. 33. Parton, My Life, 206. 34. Nash, Dolly, 206. 35. The transcription (of “Here You Come Again”) is mine; on my recording equipment the song seems to begin in F# major, so my discussion will progress accordingly. 36. Parton, My Life, 155. 37. Dolly Parton, quoted in Curtis W. Ellison, Country Music Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 195. 38. At least in the West, the specter of infant and child mortality has been partially removed; given the infant mortality rates in the rest of the world, however, this aesthetic is probably all too grimly common. 39. John W. Finson surveys the body count in a magnificent overview; see “Familiar Journey: Protocols of Dying in the Nineteenth Century,” in The

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Voices That Are Gone: Themes in 19th-Century American Popular Song, 83– 121 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 40. A series of reactions from this period is reported in Parton, My Life, 143–209; and Nash, Dolly, 182–90, 207–8. 41. Parton, My Life, 188. 42. For one of the most important recent discussions of Parton’s image (and one that parallels my own in some important points), see Christine Holmlund, “Narrating Dolly Dialectics: ‘The Sky Is Green, the Grass Is Blue,” in Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies, 157–70 (London: Routledge, 2002). 43. Pamela Wilson, “Mountains of Contradictions: Gender, Class, and Region in the Star Image of Dolly Parton,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 111. 44. My discussion of Parton’s image is indebted to Pamela Fox, “Recycled ‘Trash’: Gender and Authenticity in Country Music Autobiography,” American Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1998): 234–66. 45. Parton, My Life, 3. 46. For a grim and maladroit use of this same trope, recall poor Sharron Angle, who in her crackpot Tea Party candidacy in 2010 for a Nevada seat in the U.S. Senate, addressed the cost of health care by endorsing barter, recalling that “in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor.” The difference in tone and purpose points up the subtlety of Parton’s approach. 47. Parton, My Life, 168. 48. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 156. There is a great deal of support in scholarly discussion for this emphasis on relationship. See also Jack Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” in Bergman, Camp Grounds, 19–38; Esther Newton, Mother Camp: The Female Impersonator in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 49. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Random House, 1982. Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Reed, Teresa L. The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Reuben, David. Any Woman Can! Love and Sexual Fulfillment for the Single, Widowed, Divorced . . . and Married. New York: D. McKay, 1971. ———. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* but Were Afraid to Ask. New York: D. McKay, 1969. Riviere, Joan. “Womanliness as a Masquerade.” In The Inner World & Joan Riviere: Collected Papers 1920–1958, edited by Atholl Hughes, 90–101. London: Karnac, 1991. Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Rodman, Sarah. “Barry Manilow Enjoys Success ‘Even Now.’ ” Boston Herald, Arts & Life, July 18, 2002. http://www.barrynethomepage.com/bmnet53g .shtml. Roediger, David. “Guineas, Wiggers, and the Dramas of Racialized Culture.” American Literary History 7, no. 4 (1995): 654–68. Rogin, Michael J. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Rubin, Rachel. “Sing Me Back Home: Nostalgia, Bakersfield, and Modern Country Music.” In American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, edited by Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick, 93–110. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Sanders, Joel, ed. Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Sanjek, Russell. Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century. Updated by David Sanjek. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Schriftgiesser, Karl. The Man from Merna: A Biography of George J. Mecherle and a History of the State Farm Insurance Companies of Bloomington, Illinois. New York: Random House, 1955. Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001. Seay, David, and Mary Neely. Stairway to Heaven: The Spiritual Roots of Rockn-Roll: From the King and Little Richard to Prince and Amy Grant. New York: Ballantine Epiphany, 1986. Sedgwick, Eve Ksosfsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Sedgwick, Eve Ksosfsky, and Michael Moon. “Divinity: A Dossier.” In Sedgwick, Tendencies, 215–51. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Segal, David. “The Songs Barry Manilow Wishes He Had Written.” Washington Post, Sunday Arts, April 7, 2002, G1.

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X, Malcolm, with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Castle Books, 1966. Yearwood, Gladstone L., ed. Black Cinema Aesthetics: Issues in Independent Black Film. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982. Zeman, Ned, Karen Springen, John Taliaferro, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, and Michael Mason. “Seventies Something.” Newsweek, June 10, 1991, 62.

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Index

A&M Records, 121, 123, 125 ABC (television network), 178 Adorno, Theodor W., 27–29 Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The (film), 218n37 advertising industry and campaigns, 90, 100, 105, 215n1 African Americans, 25, 30, 31, 59, 96, 158, 159 AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), 96 Alaskan Native Land Claims Settlement Act, 163 Alcott, Louisa May, 201 Alda, Alan, 107 Alexie, Sherman, 146 Ali, Muhammed, 45, 46, 216–17n28 All in the Family (broadcast), 12, 16 Allman, Greg, 151, 167 Ally McBeal (broadcast), 35 Alpert, Herb, 123, 125 Altman, Dennis, 171 Altman, Robert. See Nashville (film) American Idol (broadcast), 175 Anderson, Hans Christian, 201 Andy Griffith Show, The (broadcast), 186, 189 anorexia nervosa, 32, 118–20 anxiety, 15, 42, 47, 78, 103, 114, 217n34, 224n6 Arista Records, 88 Arnold, Eddy, 177

Artaud, Antonin, 64 Atco Records, 150 Atkins, Chet, 177 Atlantic Records, 66, 71–72, 150 Augustine, Saint, 114 authenticity: as effect, 33, 74, 145, 148, 163, 179, 189; as invidious criterion, 19, 25, 26, 36, 37, 102, 110; as moral/ aesthetic value, 15, 25, 37, 103, 108, 111, 179, 181, 183, 201 Bach, J. S., 129; St. Matthew Passion, 18 Bacharach, Burt, 125 Backwoods Barbie (Parton), 175 “Ballad of Jed Clampett, The,” 190 Ballet de Trocadero de Monte Carlo, 206 Band-Aid jingle, 92–93 “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” (Cher), 144 Bara, Theda, 164 Barney Google (cartoon), 184, 185 Barry Manilow (album), 98 Barry Manilow I (album), 98 Barthes, Roland, 131 Bayles, Martha, 8, 14, 210n13 Beatles, 11, 21, 55, 74, 90, 109, 150 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 25 Believe tour (Cher), 145 Bell, Thom, 44–45, 72–74, 78 Bell, Tracey, 146 Benson, George, 216–17n28 Bernhard, Sandra, 59–61, 87

241

242

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Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, The (film), 203 Better Day (Parton), 175 Beverly Hillbillies, The (broadcast), 186, 190, 191, 193 Bewitched (broadcast), 12–13 Billboard (periodical), 37, 56, 88, 144 Billy Jack (film series), 160–61 “black capitalism,” 42–45 Black Panthers, 46–47 blaxploitation, 48 Blue Eye Records, 174–75 Boccherini, Luigi, 130 Bollas, Christopher, 6, 8–10 Bono, Sonny, 148–52, 157, 163–65, 167 Booker T. and the MGs, 44, 71 “Boomers,” 6–8, 14, 209n6 Boondocks (cartoon), 185 Boone, Pat, 121 Bradley, Owen, 178 Brady Bunch, The (broadcast), 118, 123 “Bridges to Human Dignity” (Nixon speech), 43 Brill Building, 60, 74, 85, 91, 115, 194, 196 “Bring Back My Yesterday” (White), 55 Broadway, 88, 90, 100, 122, 170, 184 Brooks, Garth, 173, 176 Brown, Helen Gurley, 107 Brown, James, 44, 53, 58 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 158, 159 Burnette, Carol, 12–13, 203 Caballé, Montserrat, 169 Callas, Maria, 169, 170 Calloway, Cab, 95 camp, 205, 219n11; and Aesopian language, 206; campiness, 12, 94, 97, 119; defining principles, 205–7; in relation to Bette Midler, 96–98 Campbell, Glen, 194 “Can’t Smile Without You” (Manilow), 102 Capitol Records, 72, 178 Capp, Al, 183–84; Li’l Abner (cartoon), 183–85, 187, 190; film and musical versions, 184 Capps, Al (musician), 157 Captain and Tenille, 196 Carmen (film), 174 Carmen, Eric: “All By Myself,” 98; “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” 98 Carol Burnette Show, The (broadcast), 12 Carpenter, Karen, 32, 103, 118–25, 134–38, 140–42, 152, 199 Carpenter, Richard, 118–24, 137, 140

Carpenters, 118–26, 134, 136–37, 139–41, 150 CBS (television network), 12, 72–73, 91, 150, 178, 186, 190–91 Chad and Jeremy, 121 Charlene: “I’ve Never Been to Me,” 83, 218n37 Chase, Margo, 144 Cher, 2, 32–33, 143–52, 155–57, 162–65, 167–72, 177, 183, 203, 207 Cherokee nation, 160–61 Chess Records, 78 Chicago Seven, 11 Chickasaw nation, 160 Child, Francis James, 199 Chi-Lites, 52, 73 Choctaw nation, 160 Chopin, Frédéric: Prelude, Opus 28, No. 20, 98–99, 108 civil rights movement, 26 43, 186, 192, 193; pre–civil rights era, 50, 84, 153 Clark, Dick, 117 classical (super-genre), 22, 44, 45, 123–24, 126, 154; instrumentation, 50, 55–56, 73 Clay, Cassius. See Ali, Muhammed Clear Channel, 209n4, 226n2 Cleaver, Eldridge, 46 Cleopatra (film), 174 Cline, Patsy, 177, 178 CNN (Cable News Network), 35 “Coat of Many Colors” (Parton), 182 cognac: marketing, 59, 214–15n1 Cole, Nat King, 121 Columbia/CBS, 72, 174 coming out stories, 148 commercialism: as pejorative, 15, 19, 25, 42, 66, 90, 94, 108 commercialization, 78 Continental Baths, the, 95–96, 98, 100, 137, 219n11 Conway, Tim, 13 Coolidge, Cassius Marcellus, 211n31; paintings of poker-playing dogs, 25 “Copacabana (At the Copa)” (Manilow), 115–17 “Could It Be Magic?” (Manilow), 98, 99, 108–11, 114, 123, 220n26 country (super-genre), 3, 14–15, 33, 61, 161–62, 190, 192, 202–3; hard-core/ soft-shell dichotomy, 175–77, 179–82, 193–94, 196–97, 204–5; historical outline, 173–83; “outlaw” movement in, 181–82; Ryman Auditorium, 180

Index | 243 Coupland, Douglas: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, 5 Crawdaddy (periodical), 14 Crawford, Joan, 164, 170 Creed, Linda, 74, 79, 216n28 Creek nation, 160 Cronkite, Walter, 13 Curtis, Jamie Lee, 114 Cusick, Suzanne, 129–30 Cyrus, Billy Ray, 173 Dance Me Outside (film), 145, 172 “Dark Lady” (Cher), 147, 165–67 da Vinci, Leonardo: The Last Supper, 24 Davis, Bette, 169 Dean, Mary, 157, 161 Death Wish (film), 161 De Beck, Billy, 184–85 Debussy, Claude, 16 Decca Records, 150, 174 De Paul, Gene, 184 depression, 103, 114. See also melancholy Devil’s Daughter, The (film), 174 Dickens, Charles: The Old Curiosity Shop, 201, 202 Dirty Harry (film), 161 disco (genre), 3, 7, 11, 16, 25, 30, 41, 58, 68, 82, 87, 95, 110, 162, 167, 169, 197; Barry White’s association with, 34–38; disapproval of, 8, 14, 36; “disco sucks,” 36, 47; formal qualities, 36, 115–16; as ironically clichéd sarcasm, 37 Disneyland, 122, 139, 141, 180 divas, 53, 59, 143–44, 147–48, 169–71, 175, 202, 206 Donny and Marie Osmond, 118 Donohue, Phil, 107 Doonesbury (cartoon), 185 Dufay, Guillaume, 16 Dylan, Bob: “Like a Rolling Stone,” 25 Eco, Umberto, 146 Egg and I, The (film), 187 Elias, Norbert, 127 Eliot, T. S., 99 En Vogue, 34 Erikson, Erik, 6 Etheridge, Melissa, 174 evangelical Christianity, 148 exotica (genre), 121–22 Farrell, Warren: The Liberated Man, 107 Father Knows Best (broadcast), 13

Federal Communications Commission (FCC): Financial Interest Syndication Rules, 13 femininity, 45, 100–101, 103–7, 109, 120, 156, 170 feminism, 3, 32, 103, 107, 204, 220n24 Field, Sally, 89 Finson, John, 108–9 Flatt, Lester, and Earl Scruggs, 190, 191 Fonda, Jane, 7, 119, 203 Fool There Was, A (film), 174 “For All We Know” (Carpenters), 134–35 Foreman, George, 46 For God and Country (Parton), 174 Franklin, Aretha: “You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman), 82 Frazetta, Frank. See Take Me Home (Cher) Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique, 103–7 Gallin, Sandy, 182, 193–95 Gamble, Kenny, 52, 72–73, 78, 149 Garland, Judy, 90, 170, 207 Garofalo, Janeane, 5 Garrett, Tommy “Snuff,” 152, 157 Gaye, Marvin: What’s Going On, 67–70, 80 gay men, 25, 32, 36, 100, 102, 146, 147, 217n34; audiences, 31, 98, 167, 168, 172, 176, 177, 205; and camp, 96, 98, 100, 205, 207, 222n6; crypto-gay, 85; gay liberation, 26, 95, 106, 159, 171; proto-gay, 117 Gaynor, Gloria, 115 Geffen, David, 151 gender, 33, 101, 105, 167, 185; conventions, 77, 78, 180; gender panic, 32; roles, 12, 45 100, 107, 150; systems, 31, 55, 85, 90, 197 generational objects, 6–10, 11 George, Nelson, 71 Getz, Stan, 121 Gilberto, João, 121 Gilligan (Gilligan’s Island), 13 Gingrich, Newt, 174 Ginsberg, Alan, 139 Glee (broadcast), 117 Goffin, Jerry, 85 Goldberg, Herb: The Hazards of Being Male, 107 Gomer Pyle, USMC (broadcast), 186, 189–90 “Goodbye To Love” (Carpenters), 124 Gordy, Jr., Berry, 44, 66–68, 70, 82, 149, 152, 218n36

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gospel (super-genre), 8, 45, 66, 69, 75, 174, 197, 217n30 Grand Ole Opry, 178, 180, 189–92; Opryland, 180–82 Grapes of Wrath, The, 187 Grass Is Blue, The (Parton), 174 Great Depression, 106, 153, 183, 185, 191–92 Great Society programs, 30, 43, 84 Green Acres (broadcast), 186 Guitar Hero (video game), 128 Gypsies. See Roma (ethnic group) “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” (Cher), 146–47, 152–57, 162–63, 167 “Half-Breed” (Cher), 145, 147, 157–58, 160–63, 167–68 Halos & Horns (Parton), 174, 175, 176 Hamner, Jr., Earl, 191, 192 Harris, Emmylou, 174, 182 Hayes, Isaac, 35, 49–52, 71, 212n2 Haynes, Todd: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, 119–21, 222n6 Hayworth, Rita, 164 Hearst, Patricia, 3 Hee-Haw (broadcast), 13, 185, 191–93 Hegel, G. F. W., 29 Help! (film), 123 Hendrix, Jimmy, 11 Here at the Mayflower (Manilow), 88 “Here You Come Again” (Parton), 194 Here You Come Again (Parton), 183, 194–97, 203 “Hey Jude” (Beatles), 109 hick. See hillbilly Hickey, Dave, 1–2, 127–28 hillbilly, 140, 179–80, 183–86, 188–92, 205 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), 7 Holiness Christian traditions, 217n30 Holland-Dozier-Holland, 53, 67 Hollywood Bowl, 121, 122, 144 Hollywood: as ironically clichéd sarcasm, 83, 89, 170, 190; studio system and practices, 13, 32–33, 36, 48, 89, 164, 182, 214n36; style, 44, 67, 72, 85, 104, 122, 157, 162, 167, 168 Honeycomb (musical group), 152 Hoover, J. Edgar, 47 Hot Buttered Soul (Hayes), 71 House of Blues (Los Angeles), 176 Houston, Thelma, 115 HPV (human papillomavirus), 7 Hudson, Rock, 114

Huff, Leon, 52, 72–74, 78 Hungry Again (Parton), 174 Icon Is Love, The (White), 37 If I Were a Carpenter (tribute album), 140, 142 “I Got You Babe” (Sonny and Cher), 150 Ike and Tina Turner Review, 152 “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby” (White), 56–57 Indians. See Native Americans/First Nations “It’s All Wrong but It’s All Right” (Parton), 197 I’ve Got So Much To Give, 37, 53 “I Will Always Love You” (Parton), 182 Jacks, Terry: “Seasons in the Sun,” 4 Jackson 5, 152 Jackson, Andrew, 160 jazz (super-genre), 59, 60, 66, 69, 78, 88, 90, 92, 100, 177; smooth jazz, 50, 59, 73, 121 Jennings, Waylon, 181 Jerry Springer (broadcast), 146 Jim Crow laws, 47, 153, 192 Jobim, Antonio Carlos, and Vinicius de Moraes: “The Girl from Ipanema,” 121, 122 John, Elton, 196 Johnson, Lyndon, 30, 43 “Jolene” (Parton), 176 Jones, Booker T., 44, 71 Joplin, Janis, 11 Joyful Noise (film), 175 Juilliard School, 91 Just Because I’m a Woman (tribute album), 174 Kane, Big Daddy, 34 Kant, Immanuel, 20 Kapp Records, 150, 152 kawaii (Japanese term), 141 Keane, Walter and Margaret, 140 Keil, Charles, 8 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 94 Kerman, Joseph, 99 Kettle, Ma and Pa. See Ma and Pa Kettle films King, Carole, 74 Kirschner, Don, 194 kitsch, 22–29, 32, 83 Klein, Gary, 194 Knight, Gladys, and the Pips: “Midnight Train to Georgia,” 4

Index | 245 Koppleman, Charles, 194 Korman, Harvey, 13 Krause, Allison, 174 LaBelle, Patti: “Music Is My Way of Life,” 30 Lady Gaga, 127 Lady Sings the Blues (film), 83 Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 174 La Gran Scena, 206 Las Vegas: as ironically clichéd sarcasm, 54, 117, 122, 146; style, 32, 44, 60, 67, 151, 168; venues, 54, 89, 118, 144, 150 Laswell, Fred, 185 Laughlin, Tom, 160 Lawrence, Vicki, 13 Leamer, Laurence, 180–81 Lear, Norman, 12 Lee, Brenda, 194 Le Guin, Elisabeth, 129–30 Leiber, Jerry, 74 Lennon, John, 11 Leppert, Richard, 28 lesbians, 25, 26, 106, 148, 159, 172, 207 Liberace, 38, 103, 107 “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” (Parton), 193 Li’L Abner (cartoon). See Capp, Al Lipsitz, George, 188 Liston, Sonny, 45 Little Orphan Annie, 198 Living Proof—The Farewell Tour (Cher), 143–44, 147, 172 Loewald, Hans, 138 Loos, Adolf, 24 Loudermilk, John D., 161 Love, Arrion, 76–77 “Love’s Theme” (White), 38–42, 57, 212n8 “Loving You” (Riperton), 79–82, 217n34 Lumpkin, Libby, 168–69 Lyman, Arthur, 121 Ma and Pa Kettle films, 187–89 Machaut, Guillaume de, 16 Mackie, Bob, 144, 170; and Cher’s gowns, 224n10 Magic Lamp Records, 122 Mahogany (film), 83–85, 218n35, n36 Mallard Fillmore (cartoon), 185 Manchester, Melissa, 99 Mancini, Henry, 90 Manilow, Barry, 1, 23, 31–32, 88–99, 101–2, 107, 108–12, 114–15, 117, 139, 165 Manilow Live! (album), 94 Mann, Barry, and Cynthia Weil, 194

Manson family, 11 marijuana, 7 Martin, Dean, 67 masculinity, 49, 51–52, 101, 107, 111, 128; anxieties, 31; black masculinity, 36, 42, 45–46, 48, 50, 52, 55–56, 58, 214n6 Masser, Michael, 85, 216–17n28 Maude (broadcast), 13 Maugham, W. Somerset, 164 Mauriat, Paul: “Love Is Blue” (L’Amour est Bleu), 56, 214n39 Mayberry RFD (broadcast), 186 MCA Records, 174, 178 McDonald’s, 94 “Me and Little Andy” (Parton), 198–202, 207 “Me and Mrs. Jones” (Paul), 60–65 melancholy, 21, 27, 30, 32, 68, 99, 124, 139 melodrama, 97, 104, 114–15, 117, 154, 163 Mercer, Johnny, 184 Merv Griffin Show, The (broadcast), 150 Michelangelo: David, 24 Mickler, Ernest Matthew: White Trash Cooking, 189 Midler, Bette, 89, 95–98, 99, 100–102, 108, 137, 219n11 Midnight Cowboy (film), 11 “Millennial generation,” 6–7 minstrelsy, 160, 162, 190, 226n31 miscegenation laws, US, 157–58, 224n6 Miss Sadie Thompson (film), 164 Mitchell, Joni, 17, 74 Monument Records, 177 Moore, Melba, 95 Moore, Thurston, 141 Morgan, Marabel: The Total Woman, 106 Motown, 31, 44, 66–69, 70, 72–73, 79, 83, 136 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 16, 124 Muldaur, Maria, 182 Musso, Johnny, 150, 152, 224n12 “My Tennessee Mountain Home” (Parton), 182 Nashville, 174, 178, 180, 181, 186, 205 Nashville (film), 170 “Nashville Sound,” 177–79 National Life Insurance Company, 178 National Sea Life Center (Birmingham, England), 35 Nation of Islam, 45 Native Americans/First Nations, 145–46, 158–59, 160–63 NBC (television network), 178

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Index

NdegéOchello, Me’Shell, 174 Nelson, Ken, 178 Nelson, Willie, 181 “Never Ever Gonna Give You Up” (White), 111 New Harvest . . . First Gathering (Parton), 193 Newsweek (periodical), 4 New York City College, 91 Nick at Nite (channel), 123 “Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, The,” 157 9 to 5 (film), 7, 203 9 to 5: The Musical, 175 Nixon, Richard, 42, 43, 44, 46 Norman, Jessye, 170 Nudie suits, 176 Nyro, Laura, 90

Philadelphia International Records, 31, 45, 72–74, 78 Phillips, Adam, 131–32 Plato, 114 Playboy (periodical), 50 pleasure, 1–2, 4, 19–21, 29, 31–32, 41–42, 58, 63–66, 85–87, 94, 110–11, 114, 120–21,123, 129–30, 132 Poitier, Sydney, 48 Polygram, 174 poverty, 25, 26, 37, 90,149, 152–53, 181, 188–89, 190–93, 204, 207 Precious Memories (Parton), 174 Presley, Elvis, 67, 152, 207 Prima, Louis, and Keely Smith, 151 Proust, Marcel, 3, 4,131; À la recherche du temps perdu, 131 psychoanalysis, 6, 9, 101, 131, 138

O’Conner, Sinéad, 174 Offering (Carpenters), 123 Okies, 148, 153, 171, 192 OPEC, 3 Opening of Misty Beethoven, The (film), 114 O’Rourke, P. J., 14, 15 Osmond, Donny. See Donny and Marie Osmond Osmond, Marie. See Donny and Marie Osmond Ostrow, Steve, 95 O’Sullivan, Gilbert: “Alone Again (Naturally),” 25 Otis, Johnny, 149 Owens, Buck, 192

Queen Latifah, 175 Queen of the Cobra People, 168

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” (Temptations), 51–53, 68 Parks, Gordon, 49 Partisan Review (periodical), 22 Parton, Dolly, 1, 7, 33, 165, 173–80, 182–83, 193–205, 207, 209; Blueniques (backup band), 176; My Life and Other Unfinished Business, 204 Partridge Family, The (broadcast), 118 Paul, Billy, 60–63 Paul Revere and the Raiders, 161 Pentecostal Christian traditions, 217n30, 228n11 Pepsi-Cola, 94 Perfect Angel (Riperton), 79 Perkins, Anthony, 83 Peterson, Richard A., 175, 177 Petticoat Junction (broadcast), 186

Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 98 racial classification, U.S., 158–59, 161–63 Rain (film), 164 “Rainy Days and Mondays” (Carpenters), 124 RCA, 122, 178, 182 Ready, Steady, Go (broadcast), 150 Reagan, Ronald, 11, 34, 174 Reality Bites (film), 5 Reconstruction (U.S. politics), 153 Redgrave, Lynne, 119 Red Power movement, 159, 160, 163 Reeves, Jim, 177, 178 Reuben, David, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, 106 Rhinestone (film), 203 Rhino Records, 3, 10, 11; Didn’t It Blow Your Mind: Soul Hits of the ’70s, 3; Have a Nice Day: Super Hits of the ’70s, 3; Have a Nice Decade: The ’70s Pop Culture Box, 3, 10 11; Like, Omigod! The ’80s Pop Culture Box, 5 Riddle, Nelson, 90 Riperton, Minnie, 78–79, 81–82; breast cancer, 217n31; internet memorials, 217n32 Riviere, Joan: “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” 101 Robinson, Smokey, 67 Robinson, Vicki Sue: “Turn the Beat Around,” 116

Index | 247 Rogers, Kenny: “Lady,” 103 Rogers, Rosemary: Sweet Savage Love, 107 Rolling Stone (periodical), 151 Rolling Stones, 150 Roma (ethnic group), 153, 162 Ronstadt, Linda, 174, 182 Rose, John, 185 Ross, Andrew, 206–7 Ross, Diana, 83, 85 Rotary Connection (musical group), 89 Salome (film), 174 Salt-n-Pepa, 34 Sarkisian LaPiere, Cherilyn. See Cher Satie, Erik: Gymnopedie No. 1, 21 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 226n19 Schubert, Franz, 17 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 205 Seminole nation, 160 sentimentality: conventions, 115, 198, 200; and entertainment, 90, 118; spectators’ accountability, 61, 156, 163, 201–2; and uplift, 147, 172. See also melodrama Sequoyah, 170 Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs, The, 4 Sha Na Na, 5 Shaft (film), 48–50 Shangri-Las: “Leader of the Pack,” 97 sharks, 35 She Who Must Be Obeyed, 168 Shonen Knife, 141 showbiz, 31, 60, 67, 89, 90, 101, 169, 173, 179, 204; as ironically clichéd sarcasm, 108, 122, 157, 165 Silverman, Fred, 150 Simmons, Gene, 151, 167 Simpsons, The (cartoon), 34 Sinatra, Frank, 67, 101 singing: along with the record, 125–31; Barry Manilow’s singing, 99; Barry White’s singing, 55, 64, 67; Cher’s singing, 161, 172; Dolly Parton’s singing, 196; Karen Carpenter’s singing, 134–36 Six Flags Over Texas, 180 Smith, Jack, 139 Snuffy Smith (cartoon), 184, 185, 187 “Somewhere in the Night” (Manilow), 112 “Son of a Preacher Man” (Springfield), 152 Song for You, A (Carpenters), 124 Sonic Youth, 141 Sonny and Cher, 150, 151; as “Caesar and Cleo,” 150, 165; Sonny and Cher

Comedy Hour, The, 164; “vamp” segment, 164 soul (super-genre), 52, 66, 71, 73, 197; post-soul, 65, 68; soft soul, 31, 52, 61, 66, 68, 72–73, 76, 80, 82–83, 87 South (predominantly mythical domain), 25, 26, 33, 152–53, 157, 179, 181, 185, 186–94, 224 South Park (cartoon), 35, 217n34 Spector, Phil, 136, 149 Spector, Ronnie, 149 Springfield, Dusty, 152, 216–17n28, 224n13; Dusty in Memphis, 152 Stallone, Sylvester, 203 “Standing in the Shadows of Love” (White), 53–55 State Farm Insurance, 91, 92, 93, 219n6 Stax, 31, 66, 68, 71, 72 Steber, Eleanor, 95 Steiner, George, 64 stereotypes, 97; nineteenth century, 161; ethnic, 60, 153, 162, 166, 184–88; gender, 177, 204 Stevens, Ray: “The Streak,” 3 stigma, 33, 117, 170, 172 stock characters. See stereotypes Stockhausen, Karlheinz: Kreuszpiel, 22 Stoller, Mike, 74 Stonewall Rebellion, 95, 159, 207 Strauss, William, and Neil Howe, 6, 209n7, 210n8 Strayhorn, Billy: “Lush Life,” 90 Streisand, Barbra, 170, 194 Stridex, 94 Stylistics, 73 Sugar Hill Records, 175 Summer, Donna, 115 Superman (Streisand), 194 “Superstar” (Carpenters), 136–38, 141 Supremes, 54, 70 Sutherland Joan, 169 Swanson, Gloria, 164 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (film), 48 Take Me Home (Cher), 167; sword-andsorcery cover art, 168 “Take Me Home” (Cher), 169 Tate, Sharon, 11 Telecommunications Act, 1996, 174, 226–7n2 television, 18, 37, 117, 119, 132, 146, 150, 151, 186–89, 191, 192, 203; advertising/ commercials, 34, 35, 91; syndication, 13, 147

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Index

Temptations, 51, 53–54, 68, 70 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 192 That Good Old Nashville Music (broadcast), 178 That Seventies Show (broadcast), 11 “Theme from Mahogany” (Ross), 85–87 “Theme from Shaft” (Hayes), 49–53 These Bases Are Loaded (film), 114 “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (Carpenters), 124–25 “Thirteenth generation,” 6, 7 Thompkins, Jr., Russell, 77 Thompson, Sadie, 164 Those Were the Days (Parton), 175 “Ticket to Ride” (Beatles), 123; Beatles’ song compared with Carpenter’s cover, 123–25 “Ticket to Ride” (Carpenters), 123–25 Ticket to Ride (Carpenters), 121 Tijuana Brass, 133 Time (periodical), 152 Tin Pan Alley, 60, 74, 91 Tobacco Road (film), 187 Tomlin, Lily, 7, 203 Tonight Show, The (broadcast), 137 “Top of the World” (Carpenters), 118, 139, 141 Trail of Tears, 160 Treasures (Parton), 174 Trio II (Harris/Parton/Ronstadt), 174, 175 Tucker, Sophie, 96 TV. See television TV Guide (periodical), 173 TVLand (channel), 123 Twain, Shania, 173 “Two Doors Down” (Parton), 196, 197 Ultimate Manilow, 88–89 United Features Syndicate, 183 upward mobility, 24, 30–31, 44, 57, 103–5, 181, 189, 205 Vallejo, Boris. See Take Me Home (Cher) Valley of the Dolls, 119 Van Peebles, Melvin, 48, 49

variety show, 210n20 vaudeville, 60, 165, 191 “Very Strange Medley” (Manilow), 93–94 Wagner, Richard, 75, 218n39; Götterdämmerung, 18 Wagoner, Porter, 177–80, 182; Porter Wagoner Show, The, 178–82 “Walking in Memphis” (Cher), 146 Wally and the Beav, 13 Waltons, The (broadcast), 191, 192 War on Drugs, 7, 84 Warhol, Andy, 139 Warner Brothers, 72 Watergate scandal, 3 “Weekend in New England” (Manilow), 112, 114 “We’ve Only Just Begun” (Carpenters), 150 Whale, James: Frankenstein (film), 146; Bride of Frankenstein, The (film), 146 whales and dolphins, 14, 211n22 White, Barry, 30, 34–38, 41–42, 45, 52–58, 82, 87, 111 Whitfield, Norman, 51, 53, 67 Wilde, Oscar, 19, 64, 202 Will and Grace (broadcast), 146, 172 Williams, Billy Dee, 83 Williams, Linda, 114 Wolfe, Tom, 47 Women’s liberation, 168. See also feminism Wonder, Stevie, 70, 71, 79 Wyman, Jane, 114 X, Malcolm, 45 X-Files, The (broadcast), 146, 172 Yearwood, Trisha, 173 “Yesterday Once More” (Carpenters), 124 Yiddish theater, 70 “You Make Me Feel Brand New” (Stylistics), 74–78 YouTube, 120 Ziffle, Arnold, 13