Sounds of Resistance: The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism [1 & 2] 9780313398056, 9780313398063, 2013006762

Citation preview

Sounds of Resistance

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sounds of Resistance The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism Volume 1: Activism in the United States Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie, Editors

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright 2013 by Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sounds of resistance : the role of music in multicultural activism / Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie, editors. volumes cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-313-39805-6 (hardcopy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-39806-3 (ebook) 1. Music — Political aspects. 2. Protest songs — History and criticism. 3. Political ballads and songs — History and criticism. I. Rojas, Eunice, editor. II. Eades, Lindsay Michie, editor. ML3916.S69 2013 781.5'92—dc23 2013006762

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-313-39805-6 EISBN: 978-0-313-39806-3 17

16

15

14

13

1

2

3

4

5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Volume 1: Activism in the United States Introduction to Volume 1 Lindsay Michie 1. “Toward a Truer World”: Overt and Implied Messages of Resistance from Slave Songs to Rap Ian Michie

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

2. Red Power: American Indian Activism through Powwow Music and Dance Paula Conlon and Paul McKenzie-Jones

xi

1

21

3. Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement Victor Wallis

47

4. Green Pastures of Plenty: Woody Guthrie and Eco-Citizenship Matthew D. Sutton

65

5. Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets in Indigenous Hip-Hop: North American Indian Influences in African American Music T. Christopher Aplin 6. Sight Syncs Sound: Civil Rights Music, Robert Houston’s Photography, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign Aaron Bryant

85

113

7. Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music Neill Clegg

145

8. Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement Tyson-Lord J. Gray

163

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

vi

Contents

9. Resistance and Relapse: The Politics of Drug Discourse in Rap Music Michael P. Jeffries 10. You’re Equal but Different: Women and the Music of Cultural Resistance Charles Walton

183

203

11. The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era 229 Craig A. Meyer and Todd D. Snyder Volume 2: International Activism

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction to Volume 2 Eunice Rojas

xi

12. “The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”: The Role of Music in the Struggle against Apartheid in South Africa Lindsay Michie and Vangeli Gamede

251

13. No Future: Punk Music in Postindustrial Britain and the United States Brian E. Crim

271

14. These Rocks Will Roll: Songs and Resistance in Communist Poland Marek Payerhin

291

15. Return of the Vagabond: Cui Jian and China’s Democracy Movement Carlos Rojas

311

16. Afrobeat: The Music of Fela Kuti Lindsay Michie and Ayoyinka Oriola

329

17. Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory: Paz y Baile Lori Oxford

355

18. Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas: The Bachata Genre as a Vehicle for Social Commentary—Past and Present Patricia Reagan 19. The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos Stephen Silverstein

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

373 397

Contents

vii

20. Pulling at the Stake of Oppression: Lluís Llach’s Catalan Nationalism from Dictatorship to Democracy Eunice Rojas

423

21. Reading and Sounding Protest: Musical and Lyrical Markers in Brazilian Tropicália and Canção Engajada Chris Stover

447

22. Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho Alexandro D. Hernández

473

491

Index

513

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

23. “Spitting Phlegm at the System”: The Changing Voices of Anticolonial Puerto Rican Protest Music Eunice Rojas

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Acknowledgments

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

We would like to thank the following people for their assistance in the production of this series: Marcus Sandidge and John Parker for help with research; Dan Eades for providing useful tips on editing a series; Brian and Julia Crim for their frequent and welcome distractions from the editing process; Emily Birch for initiating this project and guiding us so well through the first phase; all of our contributors for their enthusiasm, hard work, and patience with the progress and organization of their chapters; and most especially our editor Kim Kennedy White for her constant help and much appreciated advice through each stage of editing and writing these two volumes.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Introduction to Volume 1

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lindsay Michie

The intersection of activism and music in the United States is evident throughout its history. In 1640, New York governor William Cosby burned disrespectful ballads on the steps of the City Hall in frustration at not being able to discover their authors.1 Abolitionists during the slave trade and plantation era adapted hymns to their cause, changing the lyrics to protest against slavery; the rise of the labor movement in reaction to the ill effects of the industrial revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century was accompanied by musical resistance. “Every participant in revolutionary activity knows from his own experience that a good mass song is a powerful weapon in the class struggle,” American composer Aaron Copeland wrote in the first Workers Song Book. “No other form of collective art activity exerts so far-reaching and all-pervading an influence.”2 Each chapter in this volume discusses that influence through movements in the United States that have challenged authority and the status quo and have been fired up by music. Protest songs in the United States have either complimented or contradicted the strain of individualism that runs alongside resistance in U.S. history. From the gospel music of slavery in the 18th and early 19th centuries with its messages of freedom shared through an underground system, to the music of the Occupy Movement of 2011 shared through Facebook and Twitter, music has played a key role in the tradition of rebellion in the United States. To fully comprehend the motivating qualities of the music described in the following chapters, it is, of course, necessary to actually listen to it. Nothing illustrates the power of music more than hearing it. The message described through lyrics and context tells a story, but the written word fails to convey the emotional unifying effect of protest songs, especially

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

xii

Introduction to Volume 1

those that have no words, such as Jimi Hendrix’s powerful and disturbing rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” played by him in concerts during the height of the anti–Vietnam War protest movement. The nuances of resistance music and its performance underpin its message, giving songs an added force that words on a page obviously cannot express. Listening to protest songs in isolation, however, is still not the same as collaborating with them as part of a collective response to oppression—any more than reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is the same as hearing it for the first time as part of a crowd. Regrettably, it is not possible for either the music described in each chapter to burst out from the pages of this volume or the dancing that often accompanied it, particularly in the case of African American and American Indian music. What is accomplished by each contributor, however, is the painting of a vivid picture of resistance through music within the context of specific oppression followed by specific reaction. The stories of the musicians involved are often as compelling as the music itself and these stories connect the creative urge within humanity to the collective urge to address injustice, whether through songs that inform and provoke thought and eventual action, or through songs that directly unite and propel those already protesting. More recent examples of the former category include songs such as P. F. Sloan’s “The Eve of Destruction,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People.” Music in the latter category includes freedom songs of the civil rights era such as “Everybody Says Freedom” and the legendary “We Shall Overcome.” There are also songs that provide a message of protest written in code, the most obvious example being resistance hymns of the Underground Railroad. All three of these forms of protest music play a part in the stories of resistance covered in this volume. The relationship between politics and music is a strange one. Any discussion of protest music can awaken emotions as strong as those that have driven political movements, possibly because protest music often represents the intersection of politics and fandom. Woody Guthrie was a protester, but he was also a musician with a following, as was Bob Dylan. Dylan’s switch in the 1960s to electrified music and to songs that were viewed by a disappointed fan base as an abandonment of a cause, provoked as much if not more heated discussion and protest as the music of his folk period. Dylan responded with his own form of resistance. When asked during an interview in 1966 in Stockholm why he was no longer writing and singing protest songs, Dylan answered that “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” was “very, very protesty. And, uh, one of the protestiest of all things I ever protested against in my protest years.”3 Politics can also direct the response to music.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction to Volume 1

xiii

In 1940, Paul Robeson performed Earl Robinson’s and John La Touche’s “Ballad for Americans” at the Republican Presidential Convention. In 1949, Robeson had to run for his life in Peekskill, New York, after singing the same material. He was chased by rock throwers organized by the same political party in coordination with the Ku Klux Klan.4 The sometimes comfortable, but often uneasy relationship between politics and music is demonstrated by Craig Meyer and Todd Snyder in their chapter on the changing political rhetoric of hip-hop in the era of Barack Obama. As they point out, in the 1990s, most, if not all, politicians distanced themselves from hip-hop and rap, and often made political capital out of denouncing this form of music as violent and degenerate. Obama changed that relationship in the expression of his preference for various hip-hop songs, and his acceptance of and direct dialogue with rap artists, bringing their music into the arena of public discourse and capturing a large part of the youth vote in the process. The relationship between politics and music is also highlighted in a quote by John Morgan O’Connell, found in Paula Conlon and Paul McKenzie-Jones’s chapter on American Indian activism and powwow music. O’Connell observes that protest music both promotes conflict and attempts to find its resolution. The legendary Pete Seeger, whose presence is ubiquitous in many resistance movements—both national and international—and in a number of chapters in this volume, represents one example of this contradictory relationship. The music and activism of Seeger, promoting both aggressive challenges to the status quo and calls for peace, run like a thread through the history of protest songs in the 20th century, and even into the 21st century; for example, when Seeger made an appearance at the Occupy Movement of 2011 at Zuccotti Park in New York City. As Victor Wallis points out in his chapter on labor music, Seeger has often been strategic in his use of music; at times pouring on the message of resistance full force, and at other times watering it down to create a mass appeal. Pete’s father Charles Seeger played a key role in the revolutionary impulse of the Composers’ Collective in the early part of the 20th century and, regarding the complex relationship between politics and music, Charles later made this unsettling observation: “No one had any idea what would be the nature of ‘revolutionary music,’ you see, and it took me a long time after this to realize that there’s no such thing as revolutionary music. Music doesn’t take any cognizance of the dichotomy between revolutionary and not revolutionary.”5 The complicating factors that both connect and divide activist movements necessarily spill over into the musical aspect of resistance and include elements such as the heightened emotions of participants, the “mainstreaming” of issues and musical genres, and the racial, gender, and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

xiv

Introduction to Volume 1

class divisions that have informed a large part of U.S. history. With regard to emotions and music, these can be strong on both sides of an issue, a situation which at times leads to the strange connection of music and violence. The youth of the 1960s rebelled not only against their society and government, but also, in keeping with the tradition of younger generations, against their parents; and this rebellion was reflected in popular songs of the time. Those of the previous generation often reacted against the youths’ rebellion with enhanced patriotic fervor, reflected in military music and suppressive actions. In 1963, for example, the Fire and Police Research Association of Los Angeles called for the investigation of folk music as a tool in the subversion of American youth; demonstrations of that decade were punctuated many times by violent clashes between singing protesters and reactionaries. Music has often been viewed as a threat by the authorities it criticizes, making it a direct target for attack. Ian Michie illustrates this point in his chapter on black American resistance and protest from the antebellum period to the present, when he quotes civil rights activist John Lewis describing how prison guards taunted those jailed to “sing your goddamn freedom songs now!” Meyer and Snyder also underline this aspect of protest music in pointing out the strong reaction to the messages and aggressive nature of hip-hop music that in the 1990s led to censorship, public destruction of recordings, and denunciation by prominent politicians. Regarding the mainstreaming or commercialization of resistance music, this phenomenon has often acted as a subtle yet effective means of undermining the revolutionary strength of protest songs, especially since it tends to involve the participation of the artists themselves. Two different types of evolutions of the commercialization of protest music can be seen to take place in the more recent history of activism in the United States: musicians moving from protest to popular music and musicians incorporating protest in their already popular music. Bob Dylan and other musicians from the 1960s, along with many hip-hop artists of the 1990s fit into the former category. A large number of musicians occupy the latter category, including Harry Belafonte, Bruce Springsteen, and, more recently, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine who has moved back and forth fairly effectively between popular music and protest. While these artists have focused primarily on social and political concerns, popular musicians have also taken on broader issues such as the environment, as described by Tyson-Lord Gray in his chapter on eco-protest music of the 1970s. Joni Mitchell, Bo Diddley, and Marvin Gaye are three musicians highlighted by Gray who have addressed environmental destruction specifically in their songs. Another particularly well-known example of the adopting of a serious cause

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Introduction to Volume 1

xv

by popular musicians in the United States is the release of the song “We Are the World” in 1985, a collaboration of celebrated pop artists designed to put attention on famine in Africa (and resurrected in 2010 as “We Are the World for Haiti” following the devastating Haitian earthquake). This example, however, and some of the songs that have called attention to world pollution, demonstrate the difference between direct musical criticism of authority and oppressive policies, and a call for collective action in largely acceptable causes such as providing aid to starving Africans or awareness of global warming. The last element—racial, gender, and class divisions—represents the combination of issues and identity in protest movements. All the chapters in this volume contain some aspect of this element as it relates to resistance music. It is what makes the participants often feel that they are singing and performing to maintain their own existence as a people, class, or culture, and, in some cases, to save their own lives. Academic and activist Cornel West states,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

It was music that sustained Africans on the slave ships making their way from Africa to the New World . . . We had to constitute some form of comradery and community, and music did that. It preserved our sanity, as well as our dignity. . . . as a nonliterate people, we learned to manifest our genius through what no one could take away—our voices and our music.6

Six chapters directly address the issues of ethnic identity and the use of music to combat attempts by the government and society to deny, suppress, and at times destroy that identity. Conlon and McKenzie-Jones describe the strong connection between activism and the music of the powwow in American Indian tradition to illustrate its major role in strongly challenging the destruction of a culture and a people by U.S. authorities whose government laws issued the disturbing mandate in the 1880s, “Kill the Indian and Save the Man.” Native children sent to federal boarding schools to cleanse them of their heritage returned to their reservations even more determined to maintain that heritage through singing and dancing in defiance of federal law. Conlon and McKenzie-Jones further describe how the powwow became a powerful expression of cultural activism in the 1960s, culminating in the formation of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and adoption of the AIM song as its anthem. Chris Aplin uses the example of three indigenous MCs—RedCloud, Quese, Imc, and Emcee One—to discuss American Indian contributions to hip-hop performance as it relates to colonial oppression and social

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

xvi

Introduction to Volume 1

awareness of Native identity and culture. Each MC has his own definition of his role as activist musician. Quese puts a stress on human rights and using music to bring social awareness to the history and circumstances of his people while, at the same time, returning to his people a sense of their own power. Emcee One defines “activism” as getting people to “act,” not necessarily against authority, but against those things he believes harm his community and communities as a whole such as domestic violence, rape, drugs, alcohol, genocide, and poverty. Red Cloud is more cautious in adopting the mantle of activist, claiming that he does use his music to bring awareness to issues, but that he picks his battles. Gray connects the Environmental Movement of the 1970s with the investment of minority and indigenous groups in this cause through ecoprotest music in order to illustrate the point that environmental issues and the music that accompanies them should not be and have not been primarily the concern of white people. Examples he discusses include the Hawaiian Renaissance that protested destruction of wetlands and testing of bombs on the island of Kaho’olawe, and the cultural diversity of musical participants in the first Earth Day Celebration of 1970. He also makes the larger point of eco-protest music creating and encouraging greater knowledge and empathy regarding issues such as the toxic effects of chemicals that seeped into the water and environment of the Love Canal community in Niagara Falls, New York, exposed in 1978. Several chapters in this volume address the issues of oppression of African Americans and their response through music. Michie highlights the direct connection between slave songs that brought, in the words of Frederick Douglass, the “horrible character of slavery” to an unaware public, and the freedom songs that carried on into the civil rights era to challenge the continued oppressed condition of black people in U.S. society in terms of segregation, their limited role in government, and lack of protection from violence. Michael Jeffries makes a connection between resistance and the drug culture of the predominantly black underclass of the projects as expressed in rap and hip-hop music. The music, as he points out, in all its complex and contradictory expressions of rebelliousness, represents both an aggressive demand for attention and assistance and a statement of survival at whatever cost. Meyer and Snyder, in discussing Obama, and Michie, in tracing the continuing theme of resistance in black American communities, address hip-hop in the context of identity and culture. All three chapters explore how this genre of music reflects the feelings of disempowerment and challenges the oppression experienced by those the hip-hop songs represent. Both Michie and Jeffries also highlight the role resistance

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction to Volume 1

xvii

music plays as a coded message: on the one hand, as songs to convey messages between those enslaved on plantations and on the other hand, as a form of “guerilla incursion” in hip-hop music that uses vernacular to challenge the standard rules and ownership of words used by society and to criticize police, government, and the media in hip-hop language only accessible to those who speak it. The relationship between music and the issue of oppression of the poor and working classes is examined in Aaron Bryant’s chapter on music and photography and the Poor People’s Campaign of the 1960s, and Wallis’s chapter on music and the labor movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. This relationship is also taken up by Matthew Sutton in his chapter on the music and activism of Woody Guthrie. Bryant illustrates the intersection of images and music as powerful creative expressions of the plight of the poor in the United States which was the last campaign led by Martin Luther King Jr. before his assassination in 1968. The Robert Houston photographs in his chapter punctuate a story that tells how King came to connect the war on poverty with anti–Vietnam activism, as he viewed the money spent this war as contradictory to attention on the plight of the poor in the United States. The chapter also illustrates how King appreciated the need to utilize the powerful effect of music on his movement, and Bryant demonstrates this specifically in Houston’s photography which captures, for example, images of musicians such as Harry Belafonte and activist–folksinger Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, who worked closely with King early on and as part of the Poor People’s Campaign’s cultural programs. Sutton makes a strong connection between Woody Guthrie’s championing of the rights of working people, particularly farmers and immigrants hit hard by the Depression of the 1930s and the Dust Bowl, and his celebration and respect for the natural land of his country. Guthrie’s promotion of a vision of harmony between the land and working people “in the service of democracy” is spelled out in his music and performances; for example, in his tour to support Aid for Agricultural Workers in 1939, during which he stressed the need for people to have music in order to work the land and to fight against oppression. Wallis links the songs about work and organizing in labor movements with songs that express personal hardship in such a way that they unite working people through a common experience. He makes the point echoed throughout both volumes in this series that music takes a message beyond the comparatively pedestrian approach of pamphlets and speeches and, in the case of union organizing, beyond the language barriers between many of the workers, to unite its participants in a common feeling and direction.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

xviii

Introduction to Volume 1

The protest and resistance of women to a male-dominated society in the United States have also found expression in music, with examples that include “The Woonsocket Suffrage Song” written by an anonymous suffragette in 1842 and adopted as a rallying cry for participation of women in the political process, and women’s rights songs of the Hutchinson Family Singers of the mid-19th century. Charles Walton, in his chapter on women and the music of cultural resistance, discusses the relationship between music and womanhood in terms of both identity and as an expression of resistance against male oppression; and he traces this relationship against the backdrop of the history of popular music in the United States. Using examples that include musicians such as Maybelle Carter, Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn, Patti Smith, Queen Latifah, and those in the riot grrrl movement, Walton lays out the constant challenge to female performers of positioning themselves as artists and women in an environment controlled largely by men, and how that challenge is further complicated by capitalism and media distortion of both women’s place in society and their message. Many of the issues and accompanying protest music that propelled resistance movements in the United States came together in an outburst of protest and song that marked the 1960s. The folk music tradition that characterized protest movements of earlier eras erupted in a newfound widespread popularity that shared the stage or merged with the Freedom Songs of the civil rights movement and politically conscious rock music. In the course of this decade, popular songs began to express rebellion on a large scale and the voice of popular singers such as Joan Baez served as a clarion call for social awareness and resistance to policies and laws viewed as oppressive. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War became a rallying point for musical expression and protest as the youth increasingly questioned their direct participation (by draft) in a war they saw as destructive and unnecessary. Neill Clegg examines this development in his chapter on anti–Vietnam War protest music, picking out specific songs dealing with the war and examining their message as well as their social, political, and musical impact. He argues that the music and protest represented an antidraft movement as much as it acted as an antiwar movement. Clegg further puts forward the proposition that, although their popular appeal brought attention to issues of war and peace, in many ways, the protest songs that targeted the Vietnam War had more of an impact on popular music than they did on the war itself. Activists have never been slow to recognize the unifying effect of music. Phil Ochs, a musician specifically discussed in Clegg’s chapter, expressed the motivation of protest singers shared throughout the history of resistance

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Introduction to Volume 1

xix

when he stated, “One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies.” Ochs also said, “A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.”7 That is the unusual power of a protest song. Music, furthermore, is a particularly difficult thing to suppress. Sheet music and recordings can be destroyed or censored, but if the tune or words remain in people’s memories, it is very difficult to completely eradicate them or their message, unless, ironically, by overkill which is what often makes commercialization the most effective means of weakening the force of resistance music. The pattern of the relationship of resistance music to authority can be seen as similar to that of resistance itself to authority: the music at first flies under the radar of the system, drawing attention in small pockets of alternative venues; it then becomes popular enough to threaten the system; the system suppresses then co-opts the music; and, after a while, the music reformulates itself and once again flies under the radar of the system. Such has arguably been the tradition of music and resistance in the United States. Each of the following chapters in this volume tells the story of one particular aspect of that tradition.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. David King Dunaway and Molly Beer, Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 29. 2. Ibid., 32. 3. Sean Wilentz, “Review of 33 Revolutions Per Minute,” New York Times, April 29, 2011. 4. Steve Courtney, “Peekskill’s Days of Infamy,” The Reporter Dispatch (White Plains, NY), September 5, 1982. 5. Dunaway and Beer, Singing Out, 38. 6. Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope (Carlsbad, CA: Smiley Books and Hay House, 2008), 110–11. 7. Pete Mason, “Musings on the Power of Music, Part Two,” Relix, May 5, 2012. http://www.relix.com/features/2012/05/11/musings-on-protest-music-part-two?2 (accessed December 9, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 1

“Toward a Truer World” Overt and Implied Messages of Resistance from Slave Songs to Rap Ian Michie

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

When I was a child and a young man growing up in London, black music provided me with a means to gain proximity to the sources of feeling from which our local conceptions of blackness were assembled. The Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and above all black America contributed to our lived sense of racial self. The urban context in which these forms were encountered cemented their stylistic appeal and facilitated their solicitation of our identification. They were important also as a source for the discourses of blackness with which we located our own struggles and experiences. —Paul Gilroy1 What you’re looking at is a culture of people so in love with life that they can’t stop fighting for it—people who’ve seen death up close, literal death, but also the kind of dormancy and stagnation that kills your spirit. They’ve seen it all around them and they don’t want any part of that shit, not at all. They want to live like they want to live—they want to impose themselves on the world through their art, with their voices. This impulse is what saved us. It’s what saved me. —Jay Z2

In 1845, Fredrick Douglass wrote of the songs he would hear slaves sing on their way to complete errands for their home plantation in Talbot County,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

2

Sounds of Resistance

Maryland. The duty was considered a privilege, and, as Douglass describes it, the entrusted group would “make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.”3 The slaves would invent the songs as they traveled “consulting neither time nor tune,” combining their shared experience to produce “the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” At the time of hearing these sounds Douglass was unconscious of their complex meaning, believing that the songs only conveyed the sentiment of joy at being released from the daily toil of the plantation. But writing in later years Douglass understood the true significance of the improvised slave songs, believing that those “wild songs” ingrained the first notions of the dehumanizing effects of slavery into his conscious self. Douglass considered slaves songs as one of the most effective tools in bringing the “horrible character of slavery” to the unaware public. “Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains,” Douglass writes, “those songs still follow me to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.”4 Douglass, the preeminent African American abolitionist and philosopher, recognized the conscious expression of resistance in the slave songs he heard, but he also understood that in slave society overt expressions of resistance usually met with severe retaliation from the planter authority. The songs he heard were presented in improvised, inconsistent, and contradictory language thus providing multiple meanings that covertly conveyed the cruel and dehumanizing effects of slavery. African Americans had employed this form of expression since the 17th century, using musical structures imported from Africa to generate communal idioms that resisted the imperial planter authority from a position of severe disadvantage. The songs, however, endured the institution of slavery, providing a vital element of collective communication to a segment of society that had few other means of communal resistance. Songs such as the ones Douglass heard on his Maryland plantation provided a foundation for black American music through which a thread of resistance toward white American authority has run unbroken into the 21st century. Resistance in African American music existed well before Douglass’s writings, with idiomatic musical expressions traveling with slaves from Africa and combining with the conditions of Anglican Christian slave society to form a distinctive language of communal experience. Slave songs, which informed the creation of spirituals, conveyed the sentiment of resistance in implicit terms, often disguising the desire for freedom in the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Toward a Truer World”

3

aspiration for heavenly reward in religious songs or, in the case of Douglass’s example, the happiness of visiting the “Great House.” To a large degree this passive conveyance of experience survived the Civil War and remained an important element in the freedom songs of the mid-20th century. Freedom songs, often less implicit than slave songs, nevertheless expressed a desire for inclusion in the American franchise, freedom from the restrictions of segregation, and a legitimized voice in the political process. Themes of freedom and inclusion linked these two forms of African American music, motivating endurance in the struggle to gain access to an equal standing in American life. A turning point occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Douglass’s account attests the passively resistant character of slave songs, spirituals, and freedom songs do not make them any less powerful idiomatic tools, but because of the severely marginalized position planter culture, and later segregationism, place them in, African Americans found few viable opportunities for direct and active confrontation toward the plantation franchise. The music, therefore, reflected an expression that worked within the strictures of the oppressive social system. Many black activists of the 1960s and 1970s were seeking to break those strictures. Events and developments such as the assassination of Martin Luther King, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the confrontational rhetoric of African American leaders such as Malcolm X, and the creation of the revolutionary leftist Black Panther Party, influenced a sentiment of renewed nonpassive resistance against American oppression toward blacks. Musical forms began to reflect this sentiment more frequently, allowing for overt expressions of resistance, often improvised, in a style that conveyed the anger and frustration of black American life. From this reformed interpretation of black resistance music emerged rap and hip-hop that often addressed issues of identity, culture, and violence in inner-city black communities. To many black artists the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did little to relieve the inequality experienced by blacks in American society, and they now expressed their disillusion in direct and confrontational terms creating an overt language that many believe is the most effective expression of black identity and resistance. The late 1960s and 1970s marked the time when African American resistance music transformed from a passive expression of resistance to an active rejection of the white American social system. The message went from being a call for inclusion to one of extreme disenchantment that directly confronted racism and threatened revolution. The transformation was not immediate; themes of resistance had gradually emerged and strengthened

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

4

Sounds of Resistance

during slavery, through the Jim Crow era, and into the civil right movement, but the disillusionment experienced after the apex of the civil rights movement informed a denunciation of American culture by many African Americans, which is directly reflected in current forms of black activist rap and hip-hop.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Slave Songs and Spirituals Both Fredrick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the inherent power present in slave songs. Du Bois wrote that “by fateful chance the Negro folk song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas.”5 Douglass thought of them as “altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.”6 Diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut described the experience of hearing a camp meeting hymn: “To me this is the saddest of all earthly music, weird and depressing beyond my powers to describe.”7 White Southern author Eliza Frances Andrews reinforced these experiences by portraying the songs as “mostly a sort of weird chant that make me feel all out of myself when I hear it way in the night, too far off to catch the words.”8 These descriptions allow for an imagined sense of what it was like to hear the songs within their context. But the meaning of the songs was often lost on their audience. Du Bois was frustrated with those who misunderstood the songs’ meanings, which he called “the articulate message of the slave to the world.”9 To Du Bois’s mind the songs may have been be perceived as careless and at times happy but were actually “the music of an unhappy people, the children of disappointment,” telling of “death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”10 In the songs the slave resisted his or her position in life, hoping for a better life either on earth or in heaven. Du Bois writes that “Through all the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.”11 Du Bois, writing these words in the early 19th century, used the slave songs as an example of the injustice he still saw in the world around him; thus, the song allowed for an evaluation of the treatment of blacks in the time of slavery and in succeeding generations. While the emotional delivery of the slave songs appears to have been poignant to those who heard them, a tangible and consistent element of direct

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Toward a Truer World”

5

resistance is elusive. The introduction of Christianity to African American communities brought biblical interpretations of suffering, redemption, forgiveness, and reward to black music in the form of spirituals, but historians and sociologists disagree on the degree to which slaves used spirituals to openly express resistance. On the one hand scholars such as Lawrence Levine assert that spirituals are the primary evidence in understanding the slaves’ world view because they “afforded them the possibility of both adapting to and transcending their situation.”12 Other scholars point to work songs, word games, and play songs as equally important in that they were more apt to display satire and humor, allowing for a more complete picture of slave imagination culture. Regarding this cloudy understanding historian John White concludes that “the slave spirituals, like other ‘black sources,’ offer ambiguous, ambivalent and incomplete testimony concerning the slave experience.” White goes on to describe this two-sided coin by stating “Afro-American slave religion simultaneously provided rationalizations for a submissiveness that allowed the sufferer to embrace the divinity of the martyred Savior and the apocalyptic vision and retributive actions of a Nat Turner.”13 This sentiment is fully expressed in the description of African American religious music during and after slavery. The songs could radiate great hope and extreme despair seemingly at the same time. Ethnomusicologist Ronald Radano further underscores the intricacy of the songs’ meaning by observing that they “may have represented the sonic evidence of a more performative gesture that incorporated a variety of bodily action, from singing to acting to stepping out.”14 These elements taken together could allow the song and the performance to mean many different things to a variety of audiences, inviting evaluation of the black American condition on several interpretive levels. Whether slave songs and spirituals promoted submissiveness in black populations or provided an instrument for distinct self-expression, most observers agree that the inequality inherent in the slave and segregation eras found a conscious outlet in the delivery if not always the verbal message of the songs. W.E.B. Du Bois called them “sorrow songs,” in that the singers “walked in darkness, for they were weary at heart.”15 In Du Bois’s interpretation the music he heard came from a place of despair that related directly to the dehumanizing conditions of slavery. James Weldon Johnson, co-composer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which was for some time regarded as the Negro National Anthem, viewed the creation of spirituals in a somewhat different light. In the spirituals, many of which had become standards by Johnson’s day, the author found incomparable nobility. “I have termed this music noble,” Johnson writes, “and I do so

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

6

Sounds of Resistance

without qualifications. Take for example Go Down, Moses; there is not a nobler theme in the whole musical literature of the world. If the Negro had voiced himself in only that one song, it would have been evidence of his nobility of soul.”16 Johnson produced a two-volume anthology of African American spirituals in which he traced a direct line from African musical forms to the songs he presented in his book. He criticized those who regarded the songs as amusements asserting that “such people have no conception of the Spirituals. They probably thought of them as a new sort of ragtime of minstrel song. These songs cannot be properly appreciated or understood unless they are clothed in their primitive dignity.”17 Johnson is attempting to redirect attention away from the vaudevillian and minstrelsy reception of the songs whose meaning had, through white interpretation and rationalization, transgressed into one of childlike nostalgia for the Old South. Johnson, a prominent Harlem Renaissance activist, promoted the songs’ true dignity in an effort to rehabilitate the traditional African heritage that created such an expressive and influential art form. His anthology contains over 300 songs, the lines of which employ: great play for their powers of graphic description. The stories are always dramatic and the pictures vivid and gorgeously colored. The style, in contradiction of the general idea of Negro diffuseness, is concise and condensed. It might be said that every line is a picture.18

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Moses plays a predominant role in many of the songs, reinforcing the notion of American slaves’ identification with the People of Israel and physical as well as spiritual emancipation. “Go Down, Moses” offers the verse: Go Down, Moses, Way down in Egypt land, Tell ole Pharaoh, Let my people go.19

The line “Let my people go” has unmistakable double meaning in the context of slavery, and many other songs such as “Steal Away to Jesus” reiterate the sentiment of escape from bondage, which calls for a homecoming: Steal away, steal away, Steal away to Jesus. Steal away, steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here.20

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Toward a Truer World”

7

The notion of a temporary condition permeates the spirituals in Johnson’s book. The themes of displacement so present in Old Testament stories held particular significance for the creators of these songs. Death, redemption, and independence all take on similar importance as salvation offers freedom from slavery either in the form of emancipation or the spiritual passing into the next world. The messages vary between uplift of the spirit at the promise of heavenly reward to the trials of living in the earthly realm. “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” laments the seemingly irrevocable condition of earthly temptation, but can also be interpreted as a cry for relief from the trials of slavery:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord Nobody knows like Jesus. Brothers, will you pray for me, Brothers will you pray for me, Brothers will you pray for me, An’ help me drive ole Satan away.21

“I’m Troubled in Mind” also calls on Jesus to offer redemption to a soul who is “ladened wid trouble an’ burdened wid grief.”22 Forgiveness is less of a theme than salvation in many of these songs, as if the authors were appealing for a softening to their burden of suffering rather than pardon for past behavior. In “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” the narrator asks Jesus to drive ole Satan away but does not say if Satan is the tempter or simply the cause of the narrator’s pain. Interpretation of these appeals could include an implied critique of the conditions of slavery by the author with characters such as Pharaoh and Satan representing the oppressor, in this case the slave system, and the paternal characters such as God, Moses, and Jesus acting as representatives, leaders, and redeemers for an otherwise disenfranchised population. While the interpretation of slave songs and spirituals lent themselves to assertions of black identity and nationalism for authors like Douglass, Du Bois, and Johnson, it would be overly presumptive to regard the songs as primarily overt songs of resistance against slavery. Above all, the songs served a religious purpose, addressing a distinctive set of circumstances for a distinctive American population. Themes of redemption, salvation, independence, justice, exoneration, and vindication abound in white Christian forms of religious expression as well as black, indicating a communal desire to transcend the earthly trials of life. But the creation of so many spirituals in the black Christian tradition with themes such as coming home and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

8

Sounds of Resistance

stealing away to freedom do allow for the identification of complex and multiple political meanings beneath the surface of the songs’ religious context. As African American Studies professor Craig Werner states: “The use of double meanings, accessible only to those attuned to the cultural code, developed as a survival strategy.”23 To Du Bois the final message was clear, that the songs expressed a deep desire that one day, like God, society would judge men by quality of their soul rather than the color of their skin.

Gospel and Freedom Songs In 1933, Zora Neale Hurston wrote of the lack of authenticity in contemporaneous performances of spirituals, particularly by whites, but also by black performers of spirituals such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers who enjoyed worldwide acclaim in the late 19th and early 20th century. Hurston asserts, “The spirituals that have been sung around the world are Negroid to be sure, but so full of musicians’ tricks that Negro congregations are highly entertained when they hear their old songs so changed.”24 The delivery was so full of embellishments that the songs became hard to recognize to the source from which they originated. What Hurston calls the “Glee Club” style had:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

gone on so long and become so fixed among concert singers that it is considered quite authentic. But I say again, that not one concert singer in the world is singing the songs as the Negro songmakers sing them. If anyone wishes to prove the truth of this let him step into some unfashionable negro church and hear for himself.25

The “unfashionable negro churches” Hurston speaks of continued the tradition of the spiritual by producing exalted forms of religious expression that directly related to their condition as patient but active recipients of God’s reward. From the time of Hurston’s writing black gospel music, a continuation of spiritual song writing and singing from the slave and post– Civil War eras, has influenced American culture as well as activism within the black community immeasurably. Ethnomusicologist Portia K. Maultsby traces the impact of black gospel music on 20th century culture by asserting that the distribution of the music through media such as radio stations and record companies as well as performances in large concert halls, theaters, and festivals produced a secular audience apart from the congregations from which the music originated.26 While other forms of African American music developed and became popular during the 20th century, most significantly blues and jazz,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Toward a Truer World”

9

black gospel music did the most to provide a musical language that sustained the civil rights movement and augmented the rhetoric of resistance so prevalent in the era. The combination of gospel’s messages of uplift and perseverance and the advancements in audio and radio technology gave the voice of African American resistance a much wider and responsive audience than in the preceding century. The reverberation of sentiments that had survived since slavery worked to reinvigorate activism against Jim Crow and segregationist attitudes. Black gospel singers, perhaps more so than their jazz counterparts, became international celebrities, and gospel’s lyrical idiom could more directly express sentiments of resistance than many instrumental jazz forms. Gospel ultimately informed the freedom marches of the 1950s and 1960s, providing familiar ballast to a leadership that had gained prominence in southern black churches. The transformation from spiritual, to gospel, and then to freedom song was direct and did not require significant retooling. The message was still one of a community that maintained its solidarity and resistance through strong spiritual conviction, unified expressions of hope, and continuity of community tradition. African American historian Craig Werner asserts that if Martin Luther King gave the civil rights movement a vision, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson “gave it a voice.”27 Jackson became a celebrity among blacks in the 1960s and hosted a weekly radio show on CBS that exposed whites to black gospel music around America. She occasionally crossed over into pop music, but managed to stay true to her gospel roots, which she had absorbed growing up in poverty in Louisiana and Chicago. Jackson’s music came from what Werner refers to as “sanctified churches,” which “valued religious ecstasy more highly than polished phrasing or perfect pitch.” Werner describes the highly charged atmosphere during these church services stating: “at times, a sanctified church could erupt with a collective energy that transformed centuries of bitter hardship into moments of pure connection—with self, community, and the soul-deep presence of the Lord.”28 Jackson’s appeal reached a crossover audience as well, allowing rural whites access to black music that they could only previously experience by attending a sanctified church service. In 1955, during the Montgomery bus boycott, King and Ralph Abernathy asked Jackson if she would use her voice to support their struggle. She began performing at rallies around Montgomery despite physical threats by racist whites. Gospel music reinforced Jackson and many others’ resolve in not giving in to the white power structure. Jackson continued to lend her voice to the movement, and in 1963 made her famous appearance at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in which King

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

10

Sounds of Resistance

delivered his defining “I Have a Dream” speech. Jackson sang Clara Ward’s “How I Got Over,” which echoed the spirituals’ message of perseverance toward heavenly reward through the Savior’s guidance: How I got over How I got over You know my soul looks back and wonder How I got over

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

I’m gon’ wear a di-garment In that New Jerusalem I’m gonna walk the streets of gold In that homeland of the soul.29

As Werner asserts “When Mahalia sings that she’s going to make her heaven home, she’s most certainly singing about saving her soul. But she’s also, and without any sense of contradiction, singing about freedom, moving up to full participation in American society.”30 American commentator Studs Terkel recalled a conversation with Jackson where “she explained to me that the spiritual wasn’t simply about Heaven over there, ‘A City Called Heaven.’ No the city is here, on Earth. And so, as we know, slave songs were code songs. It was not a question of getting to Heaven, but rather to the free state of Canada or a safe city in the North—liberation here on earth!”31 Jackson carried these codes, less implicit but still working under the suppression of an often hostile and violent white majority, and employed them in her delivery at Montgomery, Washington, and other locations where she sang for the movement. She tailored the message to fit the demands of the struggle, that of political and social equality for African Americans. This adaptation of expression carried over to direct activism by the civil rights movement’s youth factions who used music to sustain them as they staged protests, marches, sit-ins and cross-country journeys to bring awareness to their cause. Perhaps the most effective of these organized protests were the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), young black and white men and women took part in the protests, which defied segregation by having multiracial groups openly ride forms of segregated public transportation in the South. They often broke laws, which led to jail time during which they would use music, frequently borrowed and adapted from spirituals, to sustain them. “Singing was a way of releasing tension,” says Freedom Rider Ernest “Rip” Patton Jr., “so we did a lot of singing, a lot of the songs came from old spirituals, they just changed the words to fit whatever was going on at that time.”32

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Toward a Truer World”

11

Jim Zwerg, also a freedom ride participant, demonstrates the spontaneous quality of the singing claiming that an adapted verse came to him for the folk song “Eyes on the Prize” and he sang it as he boarded a segregated bus, inserting “Riding on this big Greyhound (bus)” in the lyrics.33 CORE member Ernest Patton reiterates this notion of experiential spontaneity, demonstrating how protesters altered the songs to strengthen the resolve of the group with words such as:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around Turn me around, turn me around Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around I’m gonna keep on walkin’ Keep on talkin’ Walking up the King’s highway34

Patton’s variation on a spiritual melody still holds fast to certain elements of African American musical expressions of resistance. The “King’s highway” has both a spiritual and political meaning in the verse, allowing the notion of defiance of the oppressing political power, the king’s highway in secular terms, while acknowledging the presence of the true King, God, whose highway ultimately leads to vindication and equality. During the civil rights era, messages such Patton’s and Zwerg’s became more explicit, although direct political expression could still result in severe retaliation. White authority now had no trouble in identifying the songs’ significance. This often brought stricter punishment and intimidation tactics for protesters who spent time in jail for their activism. John Lewis recalls, “You get to the prison, a guard gets out with his rifle drawn and he says something like ‘sing your goddamn freedom songs now!’ ”35 The protesters would ignore this intimidation. Hank Thomas who was not deterred by the jailers’ threats recalls, “because I wouldn’t stop singing I got put in solitary confinement three different times.”36 Patton remembers that the jailed activists would use music to communicate from cell to cell: “We had a small group in our jail cell, and we had a quartet and I was part of the quartet, and we would sing to the ladies late at night when things were quiet.” Patton sings a verse that promises continued unity: I know, I know we’ll meet again, I know, I know we’ll meet again, I know, I know we’ll meet again, Someday.37

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

12

Sounds of Resistance

Patton explains “the reason for that singing was to let them know that we were okay, and then they would sing back to us and then they would let us know that they were okay.”38 Guards would retaliate in various ways. “If they wanted to stop our singing or control our behavior they would take the mattresses,” remembers Joan Mulholland to which Bernard Lafayette Jr. adds, “We’d say [singing] You can take our mattresses, oh yes, you can take our mattresses, oh yes, [ends singing] we’d start piling mattresses at the door, so we were with the program, we were still gonna sing, and we continued to sing.”39 Singing Freedom Songs became the primary form of communication in these protesters’ experience. Similar to slave songs and spirituals of their ancestors they contained the combined elements of being both a soothing activity to lessen the burden of their singers’ condition and a direct expression of resistance to oppression. Like Fredrick Douglass’s traveling slaves, the Freedom Riders combined tradition with spontaneous adaptation to relate their experience as it occurred in the present. As Lafayette relates, “Music put us in harmony with each other, gave us support for each other, and we relished the opportunity, even if you didn’t have a great voice it didn’t matter, you could hum, so everybody would sing.”40 John Lewis also notes the importance of Freedom Songs to the movement stating, “singing, the music, became a powerful non-violent instrument, I’ve often said without the music, without the singing, we would have lost the sense of solidarity, it gave us hope in a time of hopelessness.”41 The music also brought adapted spirituals and gospel music into the mainstream of American political consciousness. At the same time it reinforced notions of a black nationalist identity proposed by writers such as Du Bois and the cultural assertions of the Harlem Renaissance. White recording artists such as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez helped popularize the music while becoming heavily influenced by its style and message. Songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Keep Your Eye on the Prize,” became symbols of resistance to an unequal social system. Freedom songs still employed traditional forms of expression in African American music, but the broadcasting of the civil rights movement into the living rooms of America by major news networks allowed the songs to be viewed, perhaps for the first time, primarily for their political message. While the music opened many Americans’ eyes to the struggles of the civil rights movement it also laid the groundwork for what would become an increasingly open and direct criticism of America in black American music. The civil rights movement helped bring traditional spiritual black music to the mainstream by transmitting voices such as Mahalia Jackson’s into the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Toward a Truer World”

13

living rooms of black and white Americans and raising awareness of African American struggles from the time of slavery to the present. At the same time rhythm and blues borrowed gospel forms to broaden the audience further to American radio stations that catered to an often younger generation. Artists who, like Jackson, honed their talents in church settings, began to emerge on American Rock and Roll and R&B stations and continued to echo sentiments of resistance to the unequal social system. Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin brought a gospel background to their performances and while radio stations in the early 1960s were reluctant to play songs with overtly political lyrics, the consciousness of America toward black struggles raised by leaders such as King and Jackson allowed for implied messages to surface. Otis Redding’s 1965 “Respect” tells of a relationship where one member is not getting the respect he deserves, but the politically charged title and refrain also imply a persistent disrespect by white society for blacks.42 In the voice of Aretha Franklin the song became a gendered political statement that found (and still finds) resonance in practically all forms of political resistance to the status quo. Franklin furthered her message in a 1968 song called “Think” in which she asks her lover to stop and think about what he is actually doing to damage their relationship. This is a common theme in popular music, and on its own does not necessarily indicate a political agenda, but the refrain of “freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom!” sung in an ascending scale with increasing timbre allows a reevaluation of the song as a direct political assertion toward genuine equality in American society.43 By the time of the release of “Think,” politics had become a staple in much of popular music’s message, and the end of the 1960s marked a critical point in African American music as disillusionment toward the nonviolent protest strategy employed by Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other organizations gave way to anger and frustration over blacks’ continued mistreatment by the white establishment. The civil rights movement had given rise to an increasing reevaluation of what it meant to be black in America, and the creation of several black studies programs at U.S. universities encouraged an embracing of African and African American heritage and rejected the American mainstream, which, it was thought, sought to eliminate an authentic African identity through assimilation. Direct assertions of identity became more prominent than sentiments of inclusion and participation. Along with Franklin’s “Think,” 1968 saw the release of Soul singer James Brown’s “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which called for black empowerment in language that in no way was couched or veiled with vague meaning. The song asserts: we demand a chance to do things for ourselves.44

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

14

Sounds of Resistance

Brown’s song was strengthened by his use of the call and response style, using children—the future generation—to affirm his declaration and drive home the point that direct black cultural assertion and resistance was now a permanent element of American culture.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Rap and Gospel Rap Black Nationalism found its first prominent leadership from Malcolm X who had developed his political ideology through the Nation of Islam. The organization’s leader Elijah Muhammad preached on the total rejection of white society, paramilitary training for black youths, and the creation of autonomous black institutions. Malcolm X’s candid anger at the injustice of American society resonated with blacks but alarmed many whites who could more readily receive the nonviolent appeals of Martin Luther King when considering equality. Malcolm X disputed that American liberalism aided blacks in their struggle. In 1964, he declared, “No, I’m not American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.”45 These sentiments would reverberate with many other youth activists whom historian Gary Gerstle observes, “formed an articulate vanguard, their stature enhanced by a national television media corps that couldn’t resist showcasing them in news broadcasts and documentaries.”46 Rather than reaching out to an aspiring middle class of blacks who called for assimilative integration into the political process, Elijah Muhammad and Malcom X sought to influence a younger, angrier, more urban population. As Gerstle states: “these organizations possessed indirect but powerful links to tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of poor and restive blacks living in impoverished and isolated ghettoes in northern and western cities.”47 It was in this geographical locality, black nationalists argued, that blacks were the most underserved by the civil rights movement. As nationalists attempted to provide the population with a political voice, disenfranchised urban environments gave rise to alternate modes of dress, speech, economy, and artistic expression. Music particularly took on a directly political tone, and overt, often angry, political expression became an integral part of urban artistic creation. As anthropologist John F. Szwed states in his attempt to define the origins of rap, “Rap is rhythmic talk, talk leaning toward music.” Szwed locates the difference with English language in rap by stating: “Rap departs from the regular stresses of English, redeploys them, making the sounds and words jump to the superimposed beat. It retunes English, causing pitch

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Toward a Truer World”

15

and stress to move independently, making speech appear even less speechlike and more musical.”48 This transformation of language resulted directly from the influence of black ministers and orators who would speak in a performative style that employed rhythm to add emphasis and multiple meanings to their speech. Along with ministers, Szwed credits toastmasters, radio DJs, and celebrities such as boxer Muhammad Ali as allowing an assertion of spontaneous rhythmic speech to emerge in the 1970s. Like Szwed, musicologist William C. Banfield also locates the origins of rap in earlier performative speech, especially in DJs “whose music grew out of the Jamaican tradition of rapping over the beat breaks of old James Brown and other 1960s–1970s R&B records.”49 While these influences were often more directed at entertainment than resistance and political action, the combination of cultural forces, as in the days of slavery and segregation, allowed multiple interpretations and deliveries. Artists who continued to witness injustice in American urban environments in the 1970s began to use rap as a new mode of political expression that allowed an outlet for freeform and spontaneous social criticism. Sociologist Theresa A. Martinez argues that “present day African American popular cultural expression is yet another form of oppositional culture in the face of perceived institutional discrimination, racial formation, and urban decay.” She goes on to assert that

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

political and gangsta rap of the late 1980s and early 1990s was an ardent form of resistance and definite expression of oppositional culture, bringing to light long perceived problems in our nation’s inner cities, and effectively heralding the 1992 Los Angeles riots that shocked a nation and a globe.50

Martinez explains that current discourses on rap frequently conclude it to be the most prevalent form of cultural resistance and survival within the dominant culture, but, similar to slave spirituals before it, the art form often appears contradictory. Working within an exploitive, materialistic and commoditized industry model (much like slavery and sharecropping) rap still allows for a serious evaluation of social injustice by managing, in the words of activist and journalist Clarence Lusane, to “deconstruct and destroy racist images of black youth while at the same time construct a new humanity and society that is more egalitarian and just than the one in which they live and function.”51 The assertion of aspirations toward a society where blacks enjoy equality and autonomy within dominant American culture informs this deconstruction of the former black nonviolent resistance and reinforces young urban black identity as the harbinger of the new humanity of which Lusane writes. Maneuvering in the “contradictory and tense space” of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

16

Sounds of Resistance

corporate music recording and distribution, rap artists are able to resist and contradict the hegemony of the dominant culture and significantly change attitudes about race and identity within the mainstream music market. Although rap presents a much more overt assertion of resistance to cultural and political hegemony it still operates within a capitalist mode of distribution just as slave spirituals resisted through Christian modes of conveyance. Their similarities lie in this characteristic: the ability to use the hegemonic constraints to form their own modes of resistance that is then directed back at mainstream culture. One distinguishing difference between the two is the increased language of violence present in many forms of rap. While the language of violent revolt is not new in African American history, communicating it publically was not usually viable in most African American communities until the last half of the 20th century. During the Reagan era of the 1980s and early 1990s, urban environments became increasingly violent and impoverished while law enforcement, perceived as the strong arm of oppression, became a major target for rap lyrics.52 Groups such Public Enemy and N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitudes) addressed problems in the inner city and police, culminating in N.W.A.’s 1989 release of “Fuck tha Police,” which predicted a violent resolution to police harassment, stating he’s “a young nigga” on the warpath and, when he’s finished, “it’s gonna be a bloodbath of cops dying in L.A.”53 Ice Cube, a member of N.W.A., and other urban rappers wrote lyrics that predicted a series of revolts in Los Angeles and in retaliation for political and economic disenfranchisement of blacks in the inner city. African American Studies scholar Donn C. Worgs calls these lyrics “fantasies of violent revolt,” and theorizes that they act as ways for black youths to “seize or reconstruct their humanity” concluding that essential component has been a “persistent element in the black imagination.” Worgs’s assertion underscores the concept that the definition of identity and nationhood in African American culture based on nonhegemonic self-description is a recurrent and enduring theme in black resistance music.54 A direct connection between slave spirituals and rap music may be found in the understudied but increasingly popular form of gospel rap. Belonging to a group referred to as Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), gospel rap grew out of a push in the late 1960s and 1970s by Christians, mainly youths, to retool traditional conveyances of Christian themes. The music held appeal for young Christians who responded to a combination of evangelical presentation and rock and roll arrangements, and while conservative church leaders struggled at the time to maintain established forms of worship, CCM has become an influential and profitable industry with record

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Toward a Truer World”

17

sales of over fifty million albums a year.55 Gospel rap takes the fundamental components of CCM, an evangelical message and integration into congregational worship, but joins it with the secular word devices of rap to speak in a language that is at once evangelical and resistant to former religious conventions. This has caused criticism from religious leaders and secular rap artists alike with one claiming a corruption of traditional church values and the other claiming a lack of authenticity in gospel rap’s message and presentation.56 When seen as simply a way to appeal to younger worshipers, gospel rap may have less to do with resistance than secular forms of the genre. A reevaluation of black churches, though, where messages of resistance persisted and informed the civil rights movement in gospel music, can provide exegesis into the implied forms of resistant expression found in the new genre. Black churches can be viewed as having two fundamental functions, that of the priestly and the prophetic. The priestly function provides traditional symbols, modes of worship, and community activities to strengthen the congregation’s relationship with the Deity.57 In this form, the church is not seen as direct commentator on secular matters, but as a separate community whose function is to provide a direct connection to the spiritual realm. In the prophetic form the church is more “focused on societal problems and considers the church a mechanism for social, economic, and political liberation.”58 Prophetic churches view their relationship with God as being intrinsically tied to active involvement in the outside community. To be a successful member of a prophetic congregation activism must accompany faith, and political commentary may be related from the pulpit to resist and critique secular institutions in society. Within this prophetic tradition gospel rap emerged as an extension of societal interpretation. As one gospel rap artist puts it: “Holy hip hop is the language of this generation . . . to filter the gospel in a form of parable to music. Isaiah said God was going to do a new thing, the people preaching aren’t the messengers your parents listened to, the message—living a positive life, being a man for God or a virtuous woman—is the same.”59 Sandra L. Barnes concludes in her study of rap and religion that “gospel rap artists use this music medium to evangelize to young audiences who are interested in both Christianity and the hip hop culture and contend that gospel rap is a viable, valid, and effective Christian expression on par with spirituals, gospels, and hymns.”60 Barnes asserts that rap in a church setting may indicate “new appropriations of Black Church culture for contemporary times and contemporary challenges.”61 As secular rap acts as a transformative and humanizing practice, gospel rap, bridging the implied resistance

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

18

Sounds of Resistance

of spirituals and gospels with overt style and activism of hip hop culture, has the potential to provide just as valid a transformation for black youths through the prophetic form of worship. In writing of the group of men singing as they traveled to the plantation house Fredrick Douglass remarked on the spontaneous quality of their songs. The lyrics sprang up from an experiential quality in the slaves’ lives, one that directly confronted their surroundings and condition but masked their critique in vague, contradictory terms. Their resistance remained coded in language and presentation that connected the group in implied meaning yet fooled others around them, even their fellow slave Douglass. As 19th-century commentators observed the haunting, sorrowful sounds of slave songs many were moved toward sympathy, but as James Weldon Johnson asserted, slave spirituals did not have to indicate a pitiable condition as he located nobility and dignity in the hundreds of spirituals he collected. This dignity carried over into the 20th century with the emergence of gospel as one of the driving forces behind the successes of the civil rights movement. Frustration and violence marked the end of the 20th century for blacks, most prominently in poor inner cities, and with the violence came direct expressions of resistance that reclaimed an African American identity in the form of rap and hip-hop culture. While rap has been mainstreamed to a point where it may be considered past its political potency, resistance is still present in implicit and explicit terms. African American culture has reacted to diverse and challenging conditions with music for four centuries, culminating in a complex relationship between American hegemony and transformative assertion. Each stage of African American resistance has transformed not only African American life but American life in general.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 109. 2. Jay Z, Decoded (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 20011), 86. 3. Fredrick Douglass, in Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, with Related Documents, ed. David W. Blight (Boston, MA: Beford/St. Martin’s, 2003), 51. 4. Douglass, Narrative, 51–52. 5. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1995), 265. 6. Douglass, Narrative, 51. 7. Mary Boykin Chesnut, in A Diary From Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 149. 8. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 249.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Toward a Truer World”

19

9. Du Bois, The Souls, 267. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 274. 12. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 32–33. 13. John White, “Veiled Testimony: Negro Spirituals and the Slave Experience,” Journal of American Studies 17, no. 2 (August 1983), 262. 14. Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 141. 15. Du Bois, The Souls, 264. 16. James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York: The American Viking Press, 1925), 13. 17. Ibid., 13–14. 18. Ibid., 39. 19. “Go Down, Moses,” traditional, from Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 51. Note that all lyrics cited as “traditional” are in the public domain. 20. “Steal Away to Jesus,” traditional, from Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 114. 21. “Nobody knows the Trouble I See,” traditional, from Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 140. 22. “I’m Troubled in Mind,” traditional, from Johnson, The Book of American Negro Spirituals, 120. 23. Craig Werner, A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 6. 24. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Signifyin[g], Sanctifyin’, & Slam Dunkin’ A Reader in African American Expressive Culture, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 306. 25. Ibid., 307. 26. Portia K. Maultsby, “The Impact of Gospel Music on the Secular Music Industry,” in Signifyin[g], Santifyin’, & Slam Dunkin’ A Reader in African American Expressive Culture, ed. Gena Dagel Caponi (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 173. 27. Werner, A Change, 6. 28. Ibid. 29. Clara Ward, “How I Got Over,” traditional, 1951. 30. Werner, A Change, 6. 31. Ibid., 7. 32. Ernest Patton Jr., “The Music: A Short Film from Freedom Riders,” American Experience 4, no. 27 (May 16, 2011), http://video.pbs.org/video/1568414227. 33. Jim Zwerg, rearrangement of “Keep your Eyes on the Prize,” traditional, from Patton, “The Music.” 34. Mary Gardner and Thomas A. Dorsey, “Walking up the King’s Highway,” traditional, from Patton, “The Music.” 35. John Lewis, from Patton, “The Music.” 36. Hank Thomas, from Patton, “The Music.”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

20

Sounds of Resistance

37. Patton, traditional, from Patton, “The Music.” 38. Ibid. 39. Joan Mulholland and Bernard Lafayette Jr., from Patton, “The Music.” 40. Lafayette, from Patton, “The Music.” 41. Lewis, from Patton, “The Music.” 42. Otis Redding, “Respect,” Otis Blue (Volt/Atco V-128, 1965). 43. Aretha Franklin and Teddy White, “Think,” Aretha Now (Atlantic 2518, 1968). 44. James Brown “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Sat it Loud— I’m Black and I’m Proud (King 6187, 1968). 45. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (April 1964). 46. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 298. 47. Ibid., 300. 48. John F. Szwed, “The Real Old School,” in The Vibe History of Hip Hop, ed. Alan Light (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 3, 7. 49. William C. Banfield, Cultural Codes: Makings of Black Music Philosophy, an Interpretive History from Spirituals to Hip Hop (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2010), 174. 50. Theresa A. Martinez, “Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap as Resistance,” Sociology Perspectives 40, no. 2 (1997), 268. 51. Clarence Lusane, “Rhapsodic Aspirations: Rap, Race and Power Politics,” The Black Scholar 23, no. 32 (1993), 51. 52. Donn C. Worgs, “ ‘Beware of the Frustrated . . .’: The Fantasy and Reality of African American Violent Revolt,” Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 1 (September 2006), 35–38. 53. Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E, “Fuck tha Police,” Straight Outta Compton (Priority/Ruthless, 1988). 54. Worgs, “Beware,” 40–42. 55. Sandra L. Barnes, “Religion and Rap Music: An Analysis of Black Church Usage,” Review of Religious Research 49, no. 3 (March, 2008), 32. 56. Ibid., 322. 57. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the AfricanAmerican Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 12. 58. Barnes, “Religion and Rap,” 320. 59. Scotty Ballard and Javonne Stewart, “The Ministry of Hip Hop,” Jet 110, no. 8 (2006), 30–33. 60. Barnes, “Religion and Rap,” 324. 61. Ibid.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 2

Red Power American Indian Activism through Powwow Music and Dance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Paula Conlon and Paul McKenzie-Jones

The AIM Song, considered the national anthem of the American Indian Movement (AIM), continues to generate an outpouring of memories about fighting for Native rights wherever and whenever the song is performed. Much of the song’s power, however, derives from the vibrant relationship that activism and the powwow have shared from long before the AIM Song became a siren call to disaffected American Indians and captured the imagination of the general public. As noted by anthropologist William Powers, Plains music and dance have become symbolic of American Indian resistance to the adoption of Euro-American culture since the turn of the 20th century.1 This chapter will look beyond the myth that American Indian activism rode on the coattails of the 1960s civil rights movement. The initial growth of Native activism was a reaction against EuroAmerican interference and misinterpretation of Native cultural life, showcased in Wild West shows and World Fairs at the turn of the 20th century. In contrast, the intertribal powwow that spread across the continent provided a means for Native people to network and share experiences. For many Native activists, powwow music and dance have been the embodiment of their cultural past and formed the bedrock of their identity, dating from prereservation tribal military societies through the reservation and allotment eras to the present day. The multilayered cultural event that became the modern intertribal powwow was used to honor Native veterans at the end of the Second World

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

22

Sounds of Resistance

War in the mid-1940s, which contributed to the decision to formally revive many of the Plains warrior societies. This in turn fostered the renewal of tribal ceremonials that took place outside of the powwow circuit. The music and dance performed at these powwows and ceremonials reinvigorated a sense of nationalism that carried over into the political arena. These artistic expressions became the thrust that resulted in the activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for the right of tribal self-determination, founded on cultural expression of traditional values exemplified by prayer songs at the drum to open and close political meetings. Tara Browner, Choctaw ethnomusicology professor and longtime powwow dancer, begins her Native American music classes at the University of California Los Angeles by defining the powwow as an event where “American Indians of all nations gather together to celebrate their culture through music and dance.”2 The emblematic drum group, considered the “heart beat” of the powwow, is made up of 10 to 12 male drummer/ singers seated around a large, wooden-framed drum. Behind the men, female singers join in later in the song at a higher pitch (usually using octave displacement). Honor beats—a succession of hard drum beats—occur at predefined places in the song to honor the drum and cue the dancers. Dancers interact with the honor beats in various ways defined by their style of dance.3 For instance, the men’s straight dance style accentuates the act of bending over and peering at the ground during the honor beats, to symbolize hunting for animal tracks. The AIM Song typifies the basic powwow song structure of lead (head singer begins the first line of the song); second (the rest of the male drummer/singers join in the song); first chorus (“A” section of the song); honor beats (strong drumbeats); second chorus (“B” section of the song); repetition of the entire song (often four times through); tail (“coda” or final section, a repetition of the second chorus); and a short series of strong drumbeats to end the song. The AIM Song also typifies classic Plains singing, featuring a tense, tight vocal style; melodic phrases exhibiting “tumbling strain” contours that begin on a high pitch and drop drastically lower over the course of the song; the presence of minor third intervals between pitches; repetitions of the most prominent note at the end of the song; frequent rapid changes in pitch and volume along with pulsation of notes; and mostly unison singing accompanied by one large drum played by several people.4 Reflecting the birth of AIM in the Minnesota area, the AIM Song exhibits the Northern style powwow song features of a high male vocal range and hard drumbeats. Northern songs (from the central and northern Plains

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

23

and Great Lakes regions) are contrasted with Southern songs, synonymous with Oklahoma and featuring a lower male vocal range and less strident drumbeats. Competitive powwow dance styles are similarly associated with their region of origin. Northern “drums” (referring to a powwow singing group) are used for the women’s northern buckskin, jingle dress, and fancy shawl dance, and for the men’s northern traditional, grass dance, and northern fancy dance. Southern drums are used for the women’s southern cloth and southern buckskin, and for the men’s straight dance and southern fancy dance. Noncompetitive social powwow dances, accompanied by either Northern or Southern drums, include the round dance, intertribal, and two-step.5 The powwow generally begins with the grand entry, a colorful parade in which dancers enter the arena, beginning with flag bearers and followed by head dancers, tribal leaders, men, women, and children, while the drum group sings an intertribal dance song. Intertribal powwow songs are often made up of a combination of translatable text and vocables (syllables without dictionary definition, such as “hay yah, yo he yay”). Contemporary songs comprised entirely of vocables, such as the AIM Song, have become increasingly common. Most powwow dances, including the grand entry, move in a circle in a clockwise direction. Dennis Zotigh (Kiowa, Santee Dakota, and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo), longtime powwow dancer and singer from Oklahoma, currently serves as a cultural liaison person with the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) that opened in Washington, DC, in 2004. He notes that the competitive nature of American Indians has prevailed throughout history, displayed in footraces, wrestling matches, and lance or arrow throwing contests.6 These physical competitions involved athletic training in order to excel, and paint and amulets were worn to gain advantage and protect them from negative forces. This spirit of competition now asserts itself in dancing and singing competitions at intertribal powwows, with Plains warrior societies dictating a male-dominated social order. As powwow contests and prize monies expanded, specific divided categories were developed, which were determined by dance style, age, and gender. Basic rules such as keeping time with the beat of the drum, stopping on the last beat of the drum, and not losing a major regalia article remained in place. Plains Indians lived by the honor system and would disqualify themselves if any infraction of these rules was broken. As in most athletic events, dance preparation has become an art, with physical stamina, dedication, showmanship, and knowledge of songs, along with an outstanding dance outfit as the key ingredients needed to produce a champion dancer.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

24

Sounds of Resistance

The roots of Native activism go back to the treaties, traditions, and ceremonies of the past, all of which revolved around music and dance. Often subtle but ever present, music provided the backdrop to numerous moments of Native protest against the federal campaign to destroy tribal cultures and assimilate Indians into the dominant society. This chapter will examine the role of the powwow as an integral part of American Indian activism and identity, and analyze the use of powwow music and dance as a strategic political tool to display Native pride and resistance and combat assimilation.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Assimilation and Allotment Era, 1871–1934 In 1871, the U.S. Congress ended treaty making, albeit acknowledging its obligation to uphold existing treaties. In 1883, the Courts of Indian Offenses were established on reservations to enforce federal regulations banning dancing, traditional religion, polygamy, gift giving, and other Native customs. Canada followed the U.S. lead, enacting federal laws banning Native ceremonies, including cultural artistic expression through music and dance. The Native experience in Oklahoma has a particularly complicated history. Sixty-seven tribes were forcibly removed from various parts of the United States to Indian Territory (present Oklahoma) from the 1830s through the 1870s. Allotment, the federal policy of dividing communally held tribal lands into individually owned private property, took effect in 1887. The 1889 Land Run, with the “surplus acreage” sale to settlers, was the forerunner to Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907.7 It is generally accepted that the Ponca “homecoming” celebration in 1876 was the first intertribal powwow, held to commemorate the Ponca’s arrival at White Eagle in Indian Territory after forced removal from Nebraska. This celebratory dance, to which all neighboring tribes were invited, provided a traditional Plains introduction of the Ponca to the community, despite the fact that the reservation era was now in full swing. The Ponca’s subsequent gifting of the “rights” to their Hethuska Society over the next 40 years to the Osage, Sac and Fox, and Comanche tribes, also forcibly removed to Indian Territory, forms the basis of the modern powwow’s southern straight dance category. The first diffusion of the Ponca tribe’s Hethuska Society was to the Osage in appreciation for that tribe’s protection and support in tending to their elderly and infirm while the Ponca strove to acclimatize to their new environment. The motif of cultural activism is apparent when one takes into account that the gifting of the Hethuska to other tribes occurred at the height

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

25

of the dance bans during the reservation and allotment eras, when Ponca leaders feared they would not be able to continue the society within their own tribe. Indeed, the Ponca Hethuska ceased as an active organization in 1919 after two federal laws banned Native dance, and the society was not resumed until 1958. Throughout this time, however, the Ponca continued to sing and dance as guests to the Osage In’Loshka Society. By the 1960s, the Ponca had established a reputation of being the best powwow singers in Oklahoma. Ponca Hethuska songs around the big drum gradually became known as War Dance songs, and later as Intertribal songs. Government laws in the 1880s included edicts to send Native children to federal boarding schools, whose mandate was to “Kill the Indian and Save the Man,” the infamous slogan of Commissioner Richard Henry Pratt, founder and director of the first Indian residential school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Over a 30-year-period, more than 100,000 Native children in the United States, and over 150,000 in Canada, were separated from their families and forced to reject Native culture from the ages of 5 or 6 until they were 18 or even older. The mortality rate in Native boarding schools hovered around 10 percent of each year’s crop of students, often due to tuberculosis, and was aggravated by overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and inadequate nutrition. Simultaneously, the concentration of Native people onto small, confined areas of reservation land gave ethnologists rare access to Native cultures. Smithsonian Institution ethnologist, Frances Densmore (1867–1957) collected over 3,500 songs throughout her long career for her many talks and publications. Her ability to find singers reveals that performative traditions, banned by the federal Office of Indian Affairs, persisted at the very least in the memories of Native people. The irony of this situation was not lost on the Native singers in the communities she visited, who asked why she, a government worker, was requesting them to perform songs associated with dances that the federal government had forbidden since the 1880s. Densmore’s reply that she was preserving their heritage for their children was complicated and conflicted by the fact that she was simultaneously involved in a plan to introduce her own version of their songs, in Western notation, to federal Indian boarding schools and the non-Native public.8 The non-Native public’s fascination with the “vanishing Indian” was fueled in large measure by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows and the proliferation of World Fairs around the turn of the 20th century. Twenty-eight million people, nearly half the population of the United States at that time, attended the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the Americas’ many nations and peoples were represented. Celebrated Czech

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

26

Sounds of Resistance

composer Antonín Dvorˇák (1841–1904) published an article in a New York newspaper after touring the 1893 exhibition, encouraging American composers to look to their folk traditions to find their nation’s voice. Native people represented the closest relationship to the American landscape, and by 1913 these American classical composers, known as “Indianists,” had written hundreds of Western art music pieces based on Native themes.9 As Browner points out, however, there is a paradoxical discourse inherent within Indianist music: changing the songs to fit into the Western musical system to make them accessible to the general public thereby contributing to the degradation of their authenticity, the very reason for which the Native songs were sought out.10 President Theodore Roosevelt’s public endorsement of ethnologist Natalie Curtis’s 1907 publication of Native melodies, The Indians’ Book,11 made a strong impression on Francis Leupp, Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1905 to 1909. As a result, Leupp ushered in a new music curriculum for Indian boarding schools in 1907, based on Native melodies collected by ethnologists and works by Indianist composers. In Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin notes that, “in culture, context counts for more than half of meaning,”12 and the sanitized tribal music being taught to Native children in federal residential schools was a world away from its original setting within traditional indigenous knowledge. He goes on to state, however, that the word “revival” in its literal sense—to bring back to life—is largely inapplicable to most musical situations because expressive culture does not really die, behaving “more as a spiral, changing, but dipping back along the way.”13 In this sense, the skeletal Native melodies presented to Native children were ready, waiting for a chance to come to fruition. When the first wave of Indian boarding school students graduated in the 1890s, many of these young adults chose to return to their reservations over being “assimilated.” These “returned students,” as they became known, were now accomplished musicians from years of disciplined training in residential school marching bands, where both boys and girls learned to play and march in step in perfect time to avoid punishment. Anna Moore Shaw, a student at Phoenix Indian School, spoke about how the military marching was so internalized that when they heard band music blasted over the radio outside a store on one of their monthly visits to town, they automatically fell into step, and they could not get out of step, no matter how hard they tried.14 In “The Citizenship of Dance,” historian John Troutman discusses how returned students to the Lakota (Sioux) reservations openly defied oppressive federal regulations, dancing and singing with an urgency and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

27

determination not witnessed in decades, using dance as a means to reincorporate themselves into the families and communities that assimilationists had hoped they would abandon.15 In effect, the boarding schools actually stimulated the Native dance renaissance of the early 20th century. Moreover, returned students and their families, cognizant of the government’s desire to indoctrinate a patriotic spirit within reservation communities, soon discovered that requesting permission from the Indian agent to celebrate national holidays with a “gathering” generally found a favorable response. A ledger drawing from 1898 depicts men traveling to one of the first Oglala Fourth of July giveaways, with American flags on the horses’ heads and dance regalia stowed in the covered wagon.16 In 1901, Yankton (Sioux) activist Gertrude Simmons wrote to her cohorts about organizing a resistance, voicing her concern that if they waited until there were more educated individuals the old arts would be partially if not wholly lost.17 By 1911, the Society of American Indians (SAI) was founded, and it remained active until 1923. The SAI, most of whose members were college educated, had three classes of membership. Active members (U.S. Indians) and Indian associates (Indians from other parts of the Americas) could hold office, but Indian associates could only vote on matters pertaining to their own tribe(s). The third group, associates (persons of non-Indian blood who were interested in Indian welfare), were nonvoting members.18 Historian Philip Deloria notes that this society “offered a foundational narrative for a kind of cultural politics that would be constantly rediscovered and renewed by Indian people throughout the 20th century.”19 The SAI held an annual powwow throughout its 12-year existence. Indeed, the powwow was its most visible attraction, and in 1923, the final year of the organization’s existence, the powwow actually attracted more Indian visitors than the annual conference. The SAI’s collective search for a national Native community developed webs of relationships that long outlived the organization, and the intertribal powwow that spread across the continent provided a means for Native people to network and share experiences. This search also led to the organization’s downfall, as the search for a collective Indian identity was usurped from within by the resurgent tribal nationalism of the organization’s membership. By 1924, tribal identity and intertribal connections within the SAI created an irreparable rift within the leadership as it rendered the idealized pan-Indianism upon which the organization had been founded a redundant concept. The powwows also provided a vehicle for Native people to combat the pervasive image of the stereotypical “vanishing Indian” depicted in the Wild West shows and World Fairs.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

28

Sounds of Resistance

In A Dancing People, historian Clyde Ellis discusses many instances that exemplify cultural activism via powwow music and dance, such as when the Pawnee agent informed the tribe in 1921 of the rules of Commissioner Charles Burke’s Circular 1665, the third, and final, federal dance ban.20 Upon being told that the agent was instructed to prevent dances, celebrations, powwows, and gatherings of any kind, the Pawnee listened politely before heading off to “a ceremonial feast, dancing etc.” Another group of Indians from Oklahoma (made up of Wichitas, Delawares, Wacos, Keechies, and Tawakonies) were unwilling to be passive targets of yet another lecture by a federal bureaucrat; they fired back a letter of their own, defending their practices and lampooning Burke’s presumptions with a series of questions, the first one of which was “Please explain the meaning of ‘Pow-wow.’” Such occurrences were not rare in Oklahoma during this period as many more Indians realized that their newfound status as landowners, with the expiration of the 25-year allotment trust period, also removed the shackles of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) supervision. In many cases, rather than sell or lease their land as government officials feared, these new landowners celebrated their relative freedom by holding, hosting, or sponsoring dances, ceremonials, and powwows, safe in the knowledge that they were now free to do so without threat of repercussion. Even those landowners who were still dependent upon monthly annuities risked the wrath of the Indian agent and the removal of rations in order to dance. The rise in such dances to welcome returning Native veterans from the First World War (1914–1918), coupled with the General Citizenship Act of 1924 that bestowed U.S. citizenship on the remaining one-third of Indians who had not yet assumed it, led Commissioner Burke to change his stance to one of asking Indians politely not to dance rather than threatening them, to no avail. Furthermore, Burke’s agents reported that local nonIndians often resisted the enforcement of dance restrictions as much as the Native population. In 1924, the Blackfoot Agency superintendent wrote Burke that professional dancers at a recent powwow had received constant solicitations from moving picture companies, rodeos, and artists.21 The 1926 Homecoming Powwow, held at Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas, is generally considered as the most blatant act of cultural activism of this era. Intended as a small dance to thank the tribes who had donated funding toward the building of the new Haskell football stadium, the powwow quickly overshadowed all else as over 2,000 Indian participants and competitors descended on the university. While the school board intended the new stadium and the Homecoming game to showcase the success of western education on the university’s Indian students, the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

29

opposite effect was felt. The town itself reverberated to the sound of drums for 10 days prior to the Homecoming weekend, as an “Indian Village” was hastily erected on a nearby hill overlooking the stadium to accommodate the number of Indians who attended the event. Such was the draw for Indian participants that a special train carriage had to be laid on to transport a delegation of Blackfoot Indians from Montana. Apart from Osage and Quapaw delegations from Oklahoma, flaunting their oil wealth with brand new cars and western clothing, none of the Indians were seen out of their dance outfits from the Friday to Sunday. The constant donning of their regalia for the entire event was a deliberate and conscious effort to display tribal distinction and diversity in contrast to the school’s assimilationist symbolism.22 An advertisement in the Indian Leader, Haskell’s student newspaper, contained a description of the powwow’s Friday Night Program, stating, “No entertainment or program planned especially for Indians would be complete without some form of Indian Dancing Contest,” and the winner of the fancy dancing contest “will be determined by applause received from the audience.”23 This now-famous contest established Ponca Gus McDonald as the first World Fancy Dance Champion and the Ponca tribe as the perennial hosts of the fancy dance championships. The 1926 Haskell Homecoming Powwow has become an iconic symbol of cultural activism in the powwow arena. It is largely forgotten that the Haskell football team romped to victory as part of an ultimately unbeaten season. In this arena also, the student athletes, and their supporters, declared their record to be a victory for the collective Native student body against the onslaught of forced assimilation into American culture. The Haskell powwow set in motion a cultural resurgence that, in Oklahoma, led to a group of Kiowa dancers creating the American Indian Exposition in Anadarko, Oklahoma. The Exposition, inaugurated in 1931, celebrated its 80th year of operation in August, 2011, showcasing music and dance traditions of Oklahoma’s many tribes at its week-long annual gathering. In 1932, Bacone College in Muscogee, Oklahoma (founded in 1880), added a Native music component to its curriculum, a landmark achievement giving Native students access to unadulterated Native music, taught by Native instructors.

Reorganization Era, 1934–1946 The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 ended allotment, extended the trust status of Indian land indefinitely, recognized tribal governments, and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

30

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

initiated economic development programs. In 1929, however, the Stock Market Crash and resulting Great Depression of the 1930s, coupled with overfarming in the Plains area during the Dust Bowl Era, resulted in the promised federal revolving loan fund to help initiate Native self-government being severely underfunded. Nevertheless, the intertribal powwow continued to flourish in Oklahoma and across the Plains, with tribes frequently cohosting celebrations and singers joining each other at the drum irrespective of tribal identity, often as a means to distribute available resources to those most in need. In the early 1940s, cultural revitalization picked up again as an accompaniment to American Indian participation in the Second World War. The willingness of Indian men and women to be immersed in the war effort, whether on the Home Front or in the Armed Forces, led many Americans, including those in government, to believe that this also signaled a willingness to submit to total assimilation and acculturation into American society. Conversely, many of the Indians, especially those of the Plains tribes, saw this willingness to enlist as a reemergence of the warrior culture they so deeply revered. For the tribes, this reemergence manifested itself in many different ways, both within the powwow arena and as part of ceremonial life. The resurgence of the warrior ethos led to the revitalization of long dormant, but never forgotten, warrior societies, songs, and ceremonials in honor of returning and lost war heroes. The focal point of these societies, first seen in army day and navy day parades at the Anadarko Expo and now visible at every modern powwow, is the tribal or intertribal color guard. Toward the end of the war, in 1944, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) was founded to defend treaty rights, promote voting rights, and advocate for the land claims process.

Termination and Relocation Era, 1946–1961 Largely as a result of the efforts of the newly formed NCAI, the 1946 Indian Claims Commission Act provided a legal mechanism for tribes to seek restitution for land claims and mismanagement of tribal funds. In 1952, however, the BIA established the Voluntary Relocation Program to encourage Native people to leave rural and reservation communities for the cities. The following year, in 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 articulated the federal policy of termination, seeking to eliminate the trust relationship and destroy tribal sovereignty. Then, in 1958, the BIA initiated the Indian Adoption Project, placing hundreds of Native children in non-Indian foster homes before the project was dismantled in 1967.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Red Power

31

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The conception of the urban intertribal powwow in the same era was a palpable rejection of federal assimilationist policy, created as a direct reaction to counter the bewildering and disorienting effects of the relocation program of the 1950s under which rural and reservation Indians were transplanted to the city. The Indian Centers that sprang up as support and resource outlets for these displaced Indians organized weekly and monthly intertribal dances, and it was from these dances that the annual Indian Center intertribal powwows were launched. Superficially, the ad hoc mixture of many different Indian nations in one dance hall lends itself to the panIndian label, especially in an urban, nonreservation setting. On the contrary, rather than being in search of a new Indian identity or taking the last step to complete assimilation, these intertribal powwow dances were intended to preserve and retain cultural traditions that had been left behind. It was at this point that anthropologist James Howard saw a conglomeration of symbols that he interpreted as pan-Indianism, which he described in 1955 as “one of the final stages of progressive acculturation, just prior to complete assimilation.”24 If one looks at the federal policies and programs either directly affecting, or at least threatening, Indian nations during this era, however, one can see how this resurgence was cultural activism at its most blatant, especially in the creation of urban intertribal powwows. A close look at the origins of both this resurgence and the federal policies of the mid-20th century shows how far apart the worldviews of the BIA and Native people still were in this era. In his 1976 publication on the Gourd dance as a revitalization movement in the mid-20th century, Howard acknowledges that “now and then some aspect of culture long considered lost and forgotten rises . . . to confound those who see only a steady attrition of American Indian culture in the modern world.”25

Self-Determination Era I, 1961–1973 The American student movement, begun in direct connection to the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, became a new kind of audience for folk and indigenous music. Their interest and support were generated by the broader political and social movement, in which the criticism of a mass, technological culture was of central importance.26 In the midst of the burgeoning rock and roll revolution appeared Canadian Cree folk artist Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose antiestablishment song, “The Universal Soldier,” resulted in her being blacklisted on U.S. radio stations, harking back to the 1950s when American folk singer Pete Seeger had been sanctioned for his critical stance on federal government policies.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

32

Sounds of Resistance

The Native front during the tumultuous 1960s saw the founding of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961 and AIM in 1968. Again, the label “pan-Indian” was applied to the creation of these new Indian organizations as the manifestation of a new political identity of American Indian over and above tribal or cultural identity. On the contrary, the primary objectives of these Native organizations were and continue to be the maintenance and protection of distinct cultural identities and sovereignty.27 The NIYC, for example, went to great pains to recognize the traditional role of women in tribal politics and strove to promote Native women’s rights as much as men’s. The NIYC and AIM were not the only intertribal organizations founded during the 1960s, but they quickly became the flagship organizations of a network of smaller clubs. For example, Adam Nordwall, a Red Lake Chippewa from Minnesota, emerged as a local leader in the Bay Area of San Francisco with the United Council. After he moved there in 1951 to be closer to his mother, Nordwell began developing programs to help newcomers from reservation communities adjust to urban life. Inspired by the Quaker Church’s establishment, in 1961, of the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, Nordwall and his colleagues created the United Bay Area Council of American Indian Affairs, Incorporated (United Council). The membership was made up primarily of Native social clubs already in existence, including the Navajo Club, the Haskell Alumni, the Haida Tlingit Club, and the Four Winds Club. The United Council offered fellowship and traditional singing and dancing, throwing parties at Christmas and feasts at Thanksgiving.28 Also in 1961, tribal leaders held the American Indian Chicago Conference with the intention of drafting a collective Native “Declaration of Purpose” to challenge incoming president John F. Kennedy’s promises of a “New Frontier.” The conference mandate included hosting Indian Country’s first national intertribal powwow. In the War Dance category, first and second places went to Tom Eschief and Clyde Warrior, charter members of the NIYC, formed later that year. Two years later, in 1963, the NIYC was gifted a drum by a member of the Cochiti Pueblo tribe, in recognition of their commitment to maintaining traditional practices among their members. Traditional tribalism and contemporary activism were entwined within the NIYC, and its membership epitomized this relationship. Founding member Clyde Warrior (Ponca) (1939–1968), for example, was immersed in traditional and contemporary music from birth. Raised by his grandparents near Ponca City, Oklahoma, he participated in elaborate Ponca dances and ceremonies throughout his childhood, while also accompanying them

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

33

on the powwow trail. He later gained a reputation as a graceful and inspirational dancer as he traveled to powwows across Indian country. When the NIYC held its annual meetings on Indian reservations, they ended every meeting by gathering around a drum and sharing tribal songs. Warrior was frequently the leader of those songs, astonishing his colleagues with his memory of songs from all over the country. When he heard talk of alienation, cultural revival, and renewed pride in Indianness, Warrior would bristle. “How . . . can you revive something that is living and breathing? Indian people . . . needed renewal, but Indian culture?”29 Through the efforts of Warrior and other leaders such as Mel Thom, Hank Adams, and Herb Blatchford, the NIYC became renowned for its vibrant and eloquent speakers. The “movement,” as Thom described the NIYC, also organized the first mass intertribal protest with the Pacific Northwest “fish-ins” of 1964. NIYC members made education their flagship cause, alongside treaty rights and tribal self-determination, fighting for and creating many educational opportunities for American Indians, from high school to college and even graduate school. They also took cultural activism in the powwow arena to new heights throughout the 1960s. By 1967, the NIYC was considered to be at the cutting edge of Indian radicalism, with its brash, confrontational attitude.30 One such instance was in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the NIYC supported the Cherokee people’s picketing of the 1967 opening of the Cherokee Village. The protest was based on the fact that this amphitheater and living history area was part of the Cherokee Cultural Center, built using federal funds awarded to the tribe from their land claims settlement while Cherokee families continued to live in abject poverty.31 Also in 1967, the NIYC organized an intertribal powwow with the express purpose of being a vehicle for political protest against the manipulation and commercialization of Indian dances and ceremonials by the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial Committee in New Mexico. Founded in 1922, Gallup had long been the flagship arena for ceremonial dance exhibitions from tribes all across the United States. By the 1960s, it was also one of the very few of its kind that was not now owned or operated by Indians, be it by tribe or intertribal committee. The NIYC was answering a call for help from the Navaho and Hopi nations who felt the exploitation at the hands of the Gallup committee far more keenly than the many visiting tribes and dancers who participated each year. The subsequent agreements reached between the tribes and the committee, whereby the Navaho and Hopi gained valuable cultural leverage in the organization, and the massive publicity the powwow received, created

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

34

Sounds of Resistance

a new dynamic in the powwow world. The publicity ensured that the protest powwow became a viable tool in the cultural wars that ensued between urban Indians and the BIA in the forthcoming years, as more activists took up the baton. One of these urban activists was Richard Oakes (Mohawk), who enrolled in the new Native American Studies program at San Francisco State College in 1969 and encouraged other Native people to do the same. Saddened by the bickering and drinking he encountered on Indian reservations and at Indian bars in urban centers, Oakes theorized that “drinking seems to fill a void in the lives of many Indians. It takes the place of the singing of a song, the sharing of a song with another tribe.”32 The adoption of powwow singing into the inner workings of AIM as an expression of Native pride dovetailed well with Oakes’s vision to help the Indian community move forward. In 1969 and 1970, the powwow became a powerful symbol of cultural militancy, as much as a vehicle for cultural activism, during the 19-monthlong occupation of the former federal prison on Alcatraz Island, a mile off the coast of San Francisco. Oakes’s boldness, good looks, and fierce intellect made him a natural choice as spokesman for the student occupiers of Alcatraz, who called themselves the “Indians of All Tribes.” From the beginning of the Alcatraz occupation on November 20, 1969, the emerging celebrities spent their evenings sitting around a drum or in small groups, singing and talking until they were ready for bed.33 When occupation organizers, for whom no amount of irony could be too much, declared Thanksgiving Day a week later to be an Open House, a local restaurant (Bratskellar’s) volunteered to cater the affair, and non-Indians showed up at the dock with gifts of food and water. On the day itself, hundreds of Indian guests were greeted by the sound of drums. Alcatraz soon became an extension of the burgeoning powwow and Indian Center scene that had developed along the California coast, and many returned to Alcatraz on a regular basis to celebrate their Native identity via song and dance within a supportive community. Worldwide footage of the protest powwows held on the island turned a cultural celebration into a dynamic political tool. Not only were Indians reclaiming federal land but they were celebrating that land with age-old traditions of song and dance televised for the world to see. The press crowned Oakes “Mayor of Alcatraz,” and designated Alcatraz as the beginning point of modern Indian radicalism. In Like a Hurricane, activists Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) and Robert Allen Warrior (Osage) point out that the press was mistaken. “Oakes was, in fact, inheriting a mantle of leadership.”34 AIM began taking form in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the summer of 1968, when 200 people from the Native community turned out for a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

35

meeting called by a group of activists to discuss ways for Indian people to take control of their own destiny. Also in 1968, the American Indian Civil Rights Act provided a model code for Indian courts, requiring states to obtain tribal consent before assuming jurisdiction over Indian land, and the Bilingual Education Act of that year resulted in the funding of nearly 70 Native language projects in the 1970s. AIM’s name came about after the initial proposal, “The Concerned Indian Americans,” was abandoned when they realized its acronym “CIA” already had a prominent connotation in U.S. political circles. Two of the older, respected Native women said, “Well, you keep saying that you aim to do this, you aim to do that. Why don’t you call it AIM, the American Indian Movement?”35 Recognizing there was something missing from the movement, AIM founders searched out a young medicine man in South Dakota they had heard about for advice, and Holy man Leonard Crow Dog told them that “to be an Indian is to be spiritual.”36 AIM founders realized that they have the spirituality, yet they are warriors. Using the drum as a bond, they reenacted the warrior class of the past century: “That circle around the drum brings us together. We can have two or three hundred people around that drum, all from different tribes, all singing the same song.”37 As noted by Zotigh, the drum is the single most important element of a powwow, and many American Indians believe it to be a gift from the Great Spirit.38 He explains that the spirit or heart beat is alive within the drum because it was originally made from two spirits that were useful to the Indian. The drum maker must have good intentions, thoughts, and a positive frame of mind so the drum will emanate good feelings to the singers, and the drum should be treated like a human being and an extension of the family. Native elders have proclaimed that “A drum’s spirit can make you happy when you are sad and even uplift you both physically and spiritually.”39 By the early 1970s, AIM had become as synonymous with the protest powwow as it had with protest itself. Having taken the initiative displayed by the NIYC, who maintained a drum and prayers at every meeting, and the Indians of All Tribes at Alcatraz, AIM members went a step further and created the powwow protest song that came to be known as the AIM Song. At every demonstration, occupation, siege, or disturbance they caused, witnessed, or attended, AIM ensured there was a drum, songs, and dancing. Stripped of contests, vendors, and often any audience except the participants and news media, these protest powwows were as raw and vibrant as prereservation ceremonials and early, precontest dances from the days of the federal dance bans at the dawn of the 20th century.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

36

Sounds of Resistance

AIM is well known for its militant stance of the early 1970s, epitomized by their support of the lengthy occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969–1970; their week-long occupation of BIA headquarters in Washington, DC, in 1972; and their 72-day standoff at the Wounded Knee Hamlet on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973. There was, however, another side to AIM. Their achievements during this time period include the Minneapolis AIM Patrol in 1968 (to address issues of extensive police brutality); the establishment of the Indian Health Board of Minneapolis in 1969 (the first Indian urban-based healthcare provider in the nation); the installation of the Legal Rights Center in 1970 (to alleviate legal issues facing Indian people); the founding of the Red School House in 1972 (offering culturally based education services to Native K-12 students in St. Paul, Minnesota); the founding of the Heart of the Earth Survival School in 1972 (a K-12 school established to address the high dropout rate among American Indian students and the lack of cultural programming); and the Legal Action for School Funds initiative in 1973 (to assist Native survival schools when the federal government abruptly canceled education grants following AIM’s standoff at Wounded Knee). From their early beginnings as a grassroots effort to stop police brutality among Indian people, the AIM organization grew to include more than 40 chapters in the United States and Canada. Donald Fixico (Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole) noted the importance of the rise of AIM for Native youth like himself who were coming of age during the late 1960s and 1970s.40 He remembers being affected not only by the activism of AIM, articulating a new kind of militant leadership founded on respect for tribal traditions, but also by the explosion of American Indian Studies programs on various college campuses. Fixico states that, “For me, Indian intellectualism was a critical part of activism,”41 and he notes three books of that era that served as particularly powerful expressions of this kind of Red Power, arousing and shaking America’s conscience: Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969); N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, House Made of Dawn (1969); and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970).42 The NIYC and AIM’s persistence in standing their ground on Native rights paid off. In July of 1970, President Richard Nixon formally renounced the policy of Native termination. The policy was the most recent attempt at total assimilation of Indians by the federal government. It resulted in over 100 tribes losing federal recognition of their status as sovereign nations. Termination referred to the loss of the federal trust relationship, and funding for tribal services, that had been guaranteed by the treaty making

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Red Power

37

process of the 18th and 19th centuries. The policy also saw over 12,000 Indians lose their tribal affiliation, and as such, their “official” Indian identity. In 1973, the Menominee Restoration Act repealed termination of the federal trust responsibility for the Menominee, with other restorations of tribes “terminated” by the federal government to follow. Dance historian Jacqueline Shea Murphy notes that coincident with the emergence of a more visible, rather than vanishing, rhetoric of Indianness in America in the 1960s and 1970s was the increasing emergence of Native American dance companies on public stages.43 In 1963, Winnebago and Hopi performing artist, Louis Mofsie, incorporated the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a New York City–based intertribal dance troupe that had its roots in the Mohawk community in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The minister at the Native community’s Cuyler Church offered the teenagers in his congregation the use of the space to start a dance troupe as a kind of youth group activity. For over four decades, the troupe has presented intertribal and powwow-based educational programs throughout the New York City area. The Cuyler Church minister’s progressive attitude was a far cry from his predecessors who had ruled with an iron hand at Indian residential schools, founded by the clergy that operated alongside federal institutions.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Self-Determination Era II, 1974–1982 In 1974, the International Indian Treaty Council was organized. The subsequent Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975, along with the Tribally Controlled Community College Act in 1978, meant that tribes could now create colleges with culturally relevant curricula. AIM’s members marching to the BIA in Washington in 1972 had included among their demands that Indian religious freedom and cultural integrity be protected, and the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) in 1978 formally acknowledged Native people’s right to worship through ceremonials and traditional arts. Also in 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, defining Native children as collective resources, essential to tribal survival, and erecting significant barriers to prevent adoption of Native children by anyone without tribal affiliation. The passage of this Act ended a century of tyranny over Native children, and helped ensure that Native music and dance traditions would continue to be passed down to future generations through enculturation and participation at powwows and other Native gatherings. Canada’s counterpart law protecting Native children from growing up away from the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

38

Sounds of Resistance

traditions of their own people was enacted in 1984, two years after Canada’s 1982 Constitution Act made specific mention of aboriginal rights.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Self-Determination Era III, 1983–1993 Murphy discusses how the passage of AIRFA in 1978, granting Native people the freedom to express their religion through the fine arts, also helped create an atmosphere that enabled more public exploration of Native dancing.44 The American Indian Dance Theatre (AIDT) was formed in 1986 when Kiowa theater director Hanay Geiogamah decided to bring Native dance to the forefront of his theatrical explorations. Company members were chosen from American Indian festivals, ceremonials, and powwow competitions throughout North America, and the company presented a variety of dances with roots in various tribes’ social and ceremonial dances, especially powwow dancing. Members of the AIDT have toured the continent and overseas, and the company was the subject of a Public Broadcasting (PBS) special Dance in America in 1989, followed by a PBS sequel in 1993. In 1989, Native delegates contributed to the United Nations’ (UN) Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the following year, in 1990, they began sending nonvoting delegations to the UN. Also in 1990, the Native American Language Act repudiated past policies aimed at eradicating Indian languages, declared Indians were entitled to their own languages, and promised assistance in language revitalization, including language transmission via song and dance. The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 required federally supported institutions with human remains, funerary objects, or cultural patrimony to identify the descendants and provide the opportunity for them to reclaim these objects. This in turn encouraged tribes to pursue repatriation and invest in tribally controlled museums, including collections of musical instruments and dance regalia.

Self-Determination Era IV, 1993–2012 The Indian Tribal Justice Act of 1993 strengthened the tribal court system, and the following year saw the growth of grassroots campaigns to preserve sacred sites and protect the environment. In 2004, the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC, featured many hundreds of Native musicians and dancers from all parts of the country at the opening celebrations, with a large contingent of Native

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Red Power

39

college students from Oklahoma making the trek on buses sponsored by the Oklahoma tribes. Included with displays of tribal music and dance traditions was the intertribal powwow in all its glory. Associate curator Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) notes that “despite my best efforts, irony lives,” telling people that working for AIM in the 1970s and for NMAI as a federal employee in the 2000s “has more in common than you might imagine.”45 In 2006, the UN Human Rights Commission adopted the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and back home in the United States, Native Hawaiians demanded recognition of their sovereignty. In June 2011, the Red Earth Festival in Oklahoma City celebrated its Silver Anniversary, with over 1,200 powwow dancers participating. Founded in 1986, Red Earth showcases competition powwow dancing, Native art exhibits and cultural demonstrations, a parade through downtown Oklahoma City, and a venue for Native artisans to sell to the public. Many of the professional dancers who compete at Red Earth and elsewhere on the powwow circuit frequently also participate in their tribal ceremonial dances, such as champion fancy dancer Kevin Connywerdy, of the Kiowa and Comanche tribes. Connywerdy regularly dances with his family at the annual Kiowa Gourd Clan and Kiowa Black Leggings Society ceremonials, and he was Head War Dancer at the 2011 Comanche Nation Fair, held annually on Labor Day weekend in Lawton, Oklahoma.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Summary The proximity of Oklahoma tribes to one another contributed to an overarching “Southern” powwow musical aesthetic that has changed relatively little since the late 1800s. Northern tribes, however, were spread over a far greater land area, and BIA policies controlling travel between reservations inadvertently fostered a climate of musical diversity, limiting crossfertilization and leading to the splitting off of Northern from Southern styles by the early 1920s. As noted by Browner, however, song forms contain unlimited possibilities for variation of phrase length, tempo, drum accents, vocal embellishments, melodic contour, and overall range.46 Furthermore, song categories for powwow music are generally fluid, with songs serving dual purposes depending on the performance context.47 Beginning in the 1950s, activist movements, urban relocations, and accessibility to recording technologies have contributed to musical alterations in powwow songs that go beyond basic formal structures, taking on new meanings beyond the powwow itself. This led to the development of the generic intertribal powwow song, medium-tempo multipurpose songs

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

40

Sounds of Resistance

with texts entirely of nonlexical syllables that accompany rounds of intertribal dancing. These songs were traded from group to group, recorded during live performance, and turned into core repertories of urban drum groups with multitribal memberships. In the 1990s, Native singers developed new terminologies to deal with the process of musical change in powwow songs, with the term “contemporary” used to describe the generic mode of performance of Northern drum groups (and groups that sing in the Northern style) that is outside of tribal or regional customs, such as the AIM Song. The song texts of “contemporary” songs are almost always made up entirely of nonlexical syllables (vocables), or simple four- to five-word phrases that can be pronounced by those outside the originating tribe. Singers pronounce the text exactly and synchronize their vocal delivery (which contrasts with “original,” also a Northern style). Nowhere in Browner’s analysis of intertribal powwow songs does the word “pantribal” enter into the discussion. Rather, she describes powwow music as being “in an ongoing state of sonic transformation,”48 due in large part as a reaction to forces and pressures of competition, commodification, and migration from tribal homelands to urban areas (and back again). Based on her many years of experience as a dancer on the powwow trail, Browner concludes by observing that, for many powwow participants, both intertribal and tribal-specific songs serve an additional function to complementing the dancing. When listened to outside of the powwow arena, the songs themselves “fill a specific sonic and emotional void . . . [and] create a kind of portable Indian space.”49 If one takes the dictionary definition of activism as “the doctrine or practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.,”50 then the powwow arena appears to fall outside of this remit within the context of asserting cultural activism. If we view the powwow within the context of the federal policies of assimilation and termination, though, it is an entirely different story. Both of these policies were oppositional forces that inculcated the desire for cultural protection and preservation within tribal communities, rather than contributing factors that mitigated pan-Indianism. As such, cultural activism becomes much easier to identify in the powwow arena. As much as those who contend that the powwow is simply a secular celebration ignore the deep sense of ritual and spirituality that permeates the powwow, so those who label it as pan-Indian ignore the equally deep sense of honor and gratitude that current participants feel they owe their

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Red Power

41

previous generations. The charges of pan-Indianism or pan-tribalism due to the mixture of tribal symbols or traditions on display ignores the fact that this sharing and mixing had been a normal result of tribal interaction since long before European contact, let alone the reservation era. Pan-Indianism is, under the terms of those who defined it, a merging of tribal identities and cultures to the point of rendering the original cultures and identities obsolete. The modern intertribal powwow has no such mandate. It is indeed intertribal, in that participants acknowledge shared meaning and traditions among their distinct cultures, while at the same time taking action to continue their preservation. Without denying the shared aspects of powwow culture across tribal, regional, and cultural boundaries, Ellis reminds us that many Native communities use the powwow to assert a tribally distinct, rather than a generalized, sense of Indianness.51 He quotes a dancer he visited with at Stroud Powwow in Oklahoma in the summer of 2003, who told him that, “I love to dance to all of that powwow music, but if it’s one of our Comanche songs, it really reminds me of who I am and why I’m here. So that’s what I’d say about this Pan-Indian stuff.” One of the most common aspects of the modern intertribal powwow is an insistence on ensuring that contestants and audience alike are aware of the full history of the dances, songs, and regalia that they either wear or are watching. Whether the creation of the fancy dance at Haskell or the Hethuska origins of the straight dance, the emcee ensures that the knowledge is carried forward. The fancy dance was born of a contest at Haskell for tribal bragging rights. Three tribes, the Ponca, Kiowa, and Cheyenne, boasted three very fine war dancers in Gus McDonald (Ponca), Steve Mopope (Kiowa), and Chester Lefthand (Cheyenne). The agreement was that the three men would compete for the title of World Champion Fancy Dancer, with the winning tribe retaining the rights to host future world championships. The contest was won by Gus McDonald, who donned a double war bustle, one around his waist and the other across his shoulders, and incorporated the movement and agility of the Ponca’s Feather Pulling dance, that he had learned as a member of the Hethuska Society. The Feather Pull had been a dance used to diplomatically settle disputes between the Ponca and the Sioux in Nebraska. The winning warrior was the one who could pull a three-inch feather from the floor, with his teeth, while in full dancing motion. The warrior’s hands were never allowed to touch the floor. The straight dance is seen as the most traditional dance of the Southern powwow circuit. It is also closely rooted with the rites of the Ponca’s Hethuska ceremony. After the removal of the Ponca from Nebraska to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

42

Sounds of Resistance

Indian Territory in the late 1870s, the tribe “gifted” the rights to their warrior society to the Osage. In subsequent years, they made the same gift to the Sac and Fox, Comanche, and other nations. As the powwow circuit flourished in the wake of the Haskell Homecoming Weekend, many dancers took to the arena in the regalia they wore in the ceremonial derivatives of the Hethuska. As the powwow evolved from a celebration of “war dancing” to a contest event, the sheer number of dancers in this regalia led to the creation of the “straight dance” category. Pride in tribal identity is as strong now as it ever was, despite the previous century that began with dance bans and included the twin assaults of relocation and termination on cultural identity. Activism may be a label that lends itself more readily to the political, placard-waving protest arena but the enduring legacy of song, dance, ceremony, and tradition that is the modern intertribal powwow is testament to a long tradition of cultural activism in the dance arena and ceremonial arbor. In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Welsh nationalist Raymond Williams (1921–1988) notes that, in the sense of tradition as active process, those who have looked into particular traditions have observed that it only takes two generations to make something traditional.52 Blackfire (Dine/Navaho), an alternative punk rock band, uses fragments of the AIM Song to frame their 2007 double album’s title song, “[Silence] is a Weapon.” The use of the AIM Song as a referent affirms its arrival into the realm of “traditional” powwow song repertoire. Even when sung in snippets by a solo singer, with no drum or backup singers and surrounded by contemporary popular instrumentation and English lyrics, the AIM Song continues to serve as a catalyst for Native pride and determination to resist assimilation. In the book Music and Conflict, ethnomusicologist John Morgan O’Connell states that “music occupies a paradoxical position, used both to escalate conflict and to promote conflict resolution.”53 A curious irony appears in the liner notes of Disc 2 of [Silence] is a Weapon. Subtitled The Earth Does Not Belong to Us, We Belong to the Earth, the tracks are introduced as Dine/Navaho songs passed down from Haastjjn O’inii, “the man that can see,” a warrior ancestor who had many different songs because he trained warriors.54 So what is the AIM Song, accompanied by a hand drum, doing tucked away on track 11? The notes explain that the AIM Song “is recognized and shared as a song of struggle, celebration and honoring for many Indigenous Peoples.” Accordingly, the rationale behind Blackfire’s use of the AIM Song as a scaffold for their contemporary punk rock protest song, “[Silence] is a Weapon,” is better understood.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Red Power

43

The AIM’s three and a half years in the spotlight in the early 1970s was a season of intense struggle for power and respect, giving thousands of Indians a raison d’être.55 As a result, the protest powwows of this era are often viewed as the most riveting example of cultural activism in the powwow arena. On the other hand, the intertribal powwow and its music have evolved over the course of the entire 20th century, constantly exploring new avenues and different modes to exhibit Native performative artistic expression and maintain cultural heritage. Just as Native tribes and organizations have fought in the federal courts to protect political sovereignty, so Native drums, singers, and dancers have gathered on sacred ceremonial grounds, local dance halls, and even any available fields, using Native music and dance to protect, preserve, and perpetuate cultural sovereignty for future generations.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. William K. Powers, War Dance: Plains Indian Musical Performance (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1990), 18. 2. Tara Browner, Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-Wow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 1. 3. Paula Conlon, “Dance, American Indian,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/D/DA008 .html (accessed June 30, 2012). 4. Bryan Burton, Moving Within the Circle: Contemporary Native American Music and Dance (Danbury, CT: World Music Press, 2008), 23. 5. Conlon, “Dance, American Indian,” n.p. 6. Dennis W. Zotigh, Moving History: Evolution of the Powwow (Oklahoma City: The Center of the American Indian, 1991), n.p. 7. Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, http://digital.library .okstate.edu/encyclopedia (accessed February 23, 2012). 8. John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879–1934 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 159–60. 9. Michael V. Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 184–85. 10. Tara Browner, “ ‘Breathing the Indian Spirit’: Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the ‘Indianist’ Movement in American Music,” American Music 15, no. 3 (1997), 279–80. 11. Natalie Curtis, The Indians’ Book: An Offering by the American Indians of Indian Lore, Musical and Narrative, to form a Record of the Songs and Legends of Their Race (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1907), xx. 12. Mark Slobin, “Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music,” New York Folklore 9 (1983), 37. 13. Ibid.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

44

Sounds of Resistance

14. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas), 118. 15. John W. Troutman, “The Citizenship of Dance: Politics of Music among the Lakota, 1900–1924,” in Beyond Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism since 1900 (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 95. 16. Ibid., 98. 17. D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, “At the Headwaters of a Twentieth-Century ‘Indian’ Political Agenda: Rethinking the Origins of the Society of American Indians,” in Beyond Red Power (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 76. 18. Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971), 72. 19. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 233. 20. Clyde Ellis, A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 108–9. 21. Troutman, Indian Blues, 100–101. 22. Benjamin G. Rader, “ ‘The Greatest Drama in Indian Life’: Experiments in Native American Identity and Resistance at the Haskell Institute Homecoming of 1926,” The Western Historical Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Winter 2004), 429–50. 23. Ellis, A Dancing People, 102. 24. James H. Howard, “Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma,” The Scientific Monthly 81, no. 5 (1955), 220. 25. James H. Howard, “The Plains Gourd Dance as a Revitalization Movement,” American Ethnologist 3, no. 2 (1976), 243. 26. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119. 27. “Americans Before Columbus,” National Indian Youth Council Newsletter, n.d., n.p. 28. Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press, 1996), 9. 29. Ibid., 39. 30. Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 129. 31. Daniel M. Cobb, “Devils in Disguise: The Carnegie Project, the Cherokee Nation, and the 1960s,” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Summer 2007), 482. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 19–22. 34. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 35. 35. Vernon Bellecourt, “Birth of AIM,” in Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, ed. Peter Nabokov (New York: Penguin Books, c. 1978, rev. ed. 1991), 375. 36. Ibid., 376.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Red Power

45

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

37. Ibid. 38. Zotigh, Moving History, n.p. 39. Ibid. 40. Donald L. Fixico, “Witness to Change: Fifty Years of Indian Activism and Tribal Politics,” in Beyond Red Power (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 5. 41. Ibid., 6. 42. Ibid., 6–7. 43. Jacqueline Shea Murphy. The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 198–99. 44. Ibid., 200. 45. Smith, Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, 186. 46. Tara Browner, “An Acoustic Geography of Intertribal Pow-Wow Songs,” in Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America, ed. Tara Browner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 135. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 138. 49. Ibid., 139. 50. American Heritage Collection Dictionary (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 14. 51. Clyde Ellis and Luke Eric Lassiter, “Introduction,” in Powwow, eds. Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter, and Gary H. Dunham (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xi. 52. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Collins, Fontana Communications Series, 1976), 269. 53. John M. O’Connell, “Introduction: An Ethnomusicological Approach to Conflict,” in Music and Conflict, eds. John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 12. 54. “The American Indian Movement Song,” liner notes in Blackfire: [Silence] is a Weapon: The Earth Does Not Belong to Us; We Belong to the Earth, T 05, Disc 2 (Tacaho Records, 2007), n.p. 55. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 277.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 3

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement Victor Wallis

I The longest-standing fount and propagator of American labor songs, and in some ways their exemplary embodiment, has been the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), better known as the Wobblies. The first edition of their Little Red Songbook appeared in 1909. A note to the 36th edition, which was published on May 1, 1995, reads: “Today’s IWW hopes this Little Red Songbook will help make workers’ history, not just preserve it.” The Songbook’s prefatory material also includes the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, which puts forward the following declaration:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”1

The one sentiment vital to all working-class struggles is solidarity. Solidarity is what makes it possible for each of us to think beyond our personal interests to some kind of common good. Even the most narrow tradeunionist agenda draws on this sentiment. Ralph Chaplin’s song “Solidarity Forever,” a legacy of IWW days,2 thus remains the anthem of the muchdiminished U.S. labor movement of today. Solidarity in its fullest expression transcends boundaries of occupation and locality, of culture, race, gender, and nation. At whatever level it is felt, solidarity is what strengthens each of us to take risks when doing so becomes necessary to the pursuit of our collective goal. Insofar as it fortifies us all to face down those risks, it also provides a kind of backup to each of us, at once reducing our individual vulnerability and increasing the likelihood of our joint success.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

48

Sounds of Resistance

There is a link between the capacity for solidarity and the ability to define the struggle in broad human terms. “A fair day’s wage” is a demand stripped of class content. It is bland enough not to be controversial in itself, even to the bosses. But it also treats wages as though they were governed by some kind of objective standard. This is misleading in two ways. First, it implies that the wage is in principle an equitable arrangement, whereas the essence of the wage is that it is a mere token payment, largely conditioned by market forces and unreflective of the workers’ real input (let alone their real needs). Second, the notion of “fairness” itself is relative. What seems fair to the workers may not seem fair to the boss, and what is judged as fair by one set of workers may be undercut by the lower expectations of another set. If the noblest expressions of the labor movement are songs like “Solidarity Forever” (with the visionary line “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old”), its meanest manifestations are the taunts hurled at strikebreakers, as in the song “Are You a Scabby?”3

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You fawn and you caress [the boss], you bow and you stoop, You’re enough, by God, to make a maggot puke.

While the rage against strikebreakers is understandable, the reality is that they are typically among the most downtrodden members of their class— those who nowadays are more commonly stigmatized by ethnic slurs or as “illegal aliens.” From the beginning, the bosses have sought to take advantage of such demographic divisions (including also the gender division), playing off one group against another and fostering a competitive culture in which those who enjoy even modest benefits adopt hostile and exclusionary stances toward anyone they might view as threatening their status. The IWW has always resisted this dynamic. It immediately distinguished itself from other early labor organizations not only by its uncompromising rejection of class society, but also by its clear commitment to inclusiveness in matters of race. This was a matter of principle and hence of moral conviction, but it was grounded at the same time in material interest, in that the surest way to neutralize potential strikebreakers was to recruit them into the union. Partly because of severe government repression, however, the IWW did not become the predominant force in shaping the U.S. labor movement. There was only one major wave of labor militancy in later years: the one that sparked the birth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. This generated its own crop of radical songs,4 although the CIO itself would eventually revert to the model of “business unionism” made

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

49

already familiar by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), in which union bureaucrats—later to become very highly paid—collaborate with capital and its political agents in narrowing the political horizons of the rank and file. The impact of this turn was partly offset by the antiracist work of Communist organizers in the South and the United Auto Workers in the North, all of which would later be reinforced by social movements from outside the trade unions.5 Thanks to such developments, some of the IWW’s commitment to inclusiveness eventually became common currency—at least in words. But its larger vision of a world without bosses long remained “off the table.” That the IWW nonetheless remained the emblematic repository of American labor songs tells us something about those songs’ function. Their role is to inspire. To inspire, they must evoke deeper and more universal feelings than those elicited by the self-interest of narrowly defined groups. Like the IWW itself, they transcend the limits of collective-bargaining demands and encompass the full span of human aspirations. To view labor music as a call to resistance is thus to see labor in its universal aspect: as an activity originally common to all humans, and subsequently evaded (during the mature and vigorous years of anyone’s lifespan) only by small, exploiting minorities. Resistance is directed precisely at the oppression inflicted by those minorities, but this oppression takes a wide range of distinct forms, of which dictatorial command over work-rhythms is only the most immediate. The same ruling class that sets workers’ time-and-motion protocols or that decides when workers are no longer “needed”—when profit can no longer be generated by their labor—also shapes our physical surroundings, designs belief systems for us, and, among other measures of control, seeks to distract us, corrupt us, divide us from one another, and turn some of us into killing machines. In the process, it generates poverty, war, psychological scarring, and environmental devastation. There are no clear dividing lines among these channels of domination (or among their effects). They emanate from a common source, and they are mutually reinforcing. By the same token, there can be no sharp lines of demarcation among the various dimensions of resistance. Songs about work or about union organizing mix easily with laments about personal hardship, and these can take any number of directions, as individual narratives become vehicles for conveying widely shared experiences. Not surprisingly, the great songwriters are unconstrained by topic boundaries. In this, they are true to the lives of those they sing for. We must therefore understand labor movement in an inclusive sense. It does not consist just of trade union members (who now make up less than

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

50

Sounds of Resistance

10 percent of the U.S. workforce); it embraces a much larger constituency, of which union organizations are at present only an imperfect expression. The labor movement is, literally, the working class in motion. As a class—rather than just an “interest organization”—it has aspirations beyond the day-to-day crumbs it must seek from the capitalists. Artistic expression may or may not entail explicit reference to such aspirations in their broadest sense—wherein people imagine “another world”6— but it evokes a pertinent radicalism by the very scope of the feelings it brings together, whether they link diverse individuals and groups, or whether they span different dimensions in the life experience of any single person. Moreover, just as labor music cannot be tied, in its lyrics, to any precise topical focus, so also, going beyond the question of verbal content, it is not limited to any single musical genre. Of course, topical songs, especially when putting forward a narrative, draw typically from the tradition of the ballad and are in that sense justifiably classified as folk. But the folk label, despite its original meaning, took on a broader usage in the post-Second World War years. By that time, the efforts of folklorists had converged with the ongoing work of activist songwriters to create a broader repertoire in which traditional songs and original compositions to some extent merged. Although this new folk category had a broader audience than did the earlier music, its classification in contradistinction to popular (or pop) music nonetheless carried with it an implicit marginalization—implying that folk music was something other than popular. In fact, the supposed dichotomy between folk and popular seems to reflect what was at first a politically grounded classification (more on this below) but which subsequently became solidified in step with marketing strategies—whose impact could only increase as the recording industry expanded and as competition for radio audiences intensified. All such genre boundaries are relative, however, and they begin to blur as soon as we remind ourselves, for example, that blues music evolved out of chants elicited from the forced labor of slave times, and then further developed into instrumental jazz compositions.7 In a similar fashion, songs from the early years of union organizing consisted typically of fresh lyrics set to widely familiar hymn tunes. Well into the 1940s and 1950s, artists who later came to be classified as folksingers enjoyed broad commercial diffusion. In the later years, the formal rubrics displayed in record shops, together with growing corporate control over radio outlets, made such crossing of the lines more and more difficult. Nonetheless, moments of heightened popular mobilization—epitomized by huge demonstrations against the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

51

Vietnam War and by the 1969 Woodstock Festival—erased all boundaries, establishing a tradition of political engagement that a wide array of bands and songwriters would continue to uphold.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

II The place of song both in physical work and in mass protest appears to be universal. What is distinctive about labor songs in any one country will reflect what is unique to that country’s overall history. The U.S. case is one in which multiple streams have come together to form whatever there is of a common working-class culture. This much can no doubt be said of many countries, but the combination within the same borders of a plantation economy based on slave labor and a relatively advanced industrial economy based on wage labor—replenished by immigrants from almost every part of the world—has set the U.S. experience apart since early on, and with long-lasting effects. Our focus on labor songs prompts us to seek a class-based community, but when such varied backgrounds come into play, a common workingclass culture does not arise spontaneously. Two or more subgroups may share “objective” class ties, in the sense of being alike victimized by highly disadvantageous conditions of work, imposed by a single class of large property owners, but it is not at all unusual for one of the oppressed sectors to try to disavow any possible commonality with those whom they view as being below them. The most enduring manifestation of this practice has been the formation of a racially defined “white” identity during the Colonial period of U.S. history—an identity that, although initially created as a device for institutionalizing black slavery, persisted long after formal enslavement was ended.8 It is noteworthy that of the two sections in Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America devoted to songs from the South, the only section containing a whole category of work songs is the one entitled “The Negro South.”9 Outside of the South, the most enduring work songs emerged later, especially in the mining regions of the Western frontier. Contrary to the persistent academic stereotype of the frontier as a region of widely shared opportunity, what marked it especially was the climate of unrestrained land grabs, vigilantism, and openly venal local authorities, unabashedly at the service of capital. In this setting, which is where the IWW found its strongest base, labor songs took on a new dimension. Instead of being about the work process itself, they were about organizing. The working-class songwriter Joe Hill—a Swedish immigrant who joined the IWW in California

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

52

Sounds of Resistance

in 1910 and was martyred by a Utah firing squad in 191510—explained the importance of his widely popular verses (set to well-known tunes) in quite practical terms: “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once. But a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over”—and can thereby impress itself on far greater numbers of people, including those who are unable or unmotivated to read.11 In addition, music transcends language barriers—a virtue applied to great advantage in organizing workers of “forty different nationalities” for the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile industry strike of 1912.12 Finally, the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, a contemporary of Hill, took the argument beyond one of comprehension and diffusion to one of depth of commitment:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression. If such a movement has caught hold of the imagination of the masses they will seek a vent in song for the aspirations, the fears and the hopes, the loves and the hatreds engendered by the struggle. Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement; it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.13

The emotions associated with solidarity and struggles for justice, particularly when they cross boundaries of geography and culture, carry us to the highest levels of expressiveness. No single genre can claim ownership of this domain, but it can be entered and filled by particular artists. One such artist was Paul Robeson, whose incomparable bass voice gave worldwide resonance to the songs of many epochs, languages, and cultures. The negro spirituals were a permanent and distinctive part of his repertoire, but he also became the world-acclaimed bearer of Alfred Hayes’s inspiring tribute, “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” (music by Earl Robinson). Robeson combined the discipline and finesse of a classically trained singer with the elemental moral force powered by a global struggle against oppression. He transformed songs of religious faith or entertainment into calls to arms, as in the narrative of workers along “Ol’ Man River” (the Mississippi), for whom the words “get a little drunk” eventually gave way, in his later renditions of that song, to “show a little grit” (“ . . . and you land in jail”).14 His identification with the labor movement took the form not just of abstract solidarity, but of bringing his performances directly to workers on the front lines. When he was interrogated in 1956 by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, much of his prepared statement (which he was not allowed to deliver) consisted of a list of mainly workers’ organizations around

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

53

the world whose invitations he was prevented from accepting because he had been denied a passport.15 Robeson was probably the most world renowned of the artists who came under ideological assault in that period, but all tribunes of workingclass culture were affected. The weight of the attacks testifies to the depth of the sentiments that, from the standpoint of capital, had to be rooted out and discredited. No songwriter did more to give expression to those sentiments—from the Depression years through the 1940s—than Woody Guthrie. His formative experiences were of the hardships of working-class life. Through a mix of commitment, impulse, and circumstance, he never fully escaped those hardships; yet his vision, as expressed in song, was cast in universal terms. More specifically, his signature composition, “This land is your land . . . ”—with its narrative evocation of the unemployment lines and its depiction of “private property” as an obstacle to personal freedom—evolved as a deliberate repudiation of the ubiquitous “God Bless America.”16 Guthrie was a living refutation of the widespread ideological mantra according to which advocacy of socialism, communism, and antiracism (unless one was a direct victim of racial discrimination) was the posture of a privileged—and hence hypocritical—“liberal elite.” The popular radicalism he embodied would in the long run pose a threat to capitalist hegemony. It could be tolerated up to a point, in the interests of “class peace,” but it was especially incompatible with the agenda of global counterrevolution taken up by the U.S. ruling class under the bipartisan rubric of the Truman Doctrine (proclaimed in 1947).17 To implement this agenda in the face of widespread hopes for what in later years would be called a “peace dividend,” it was necessary to stigmatize the whole radical-democratic culture that had evolved in the 1930s—stimulated in part by New Deal-funded arts projects and perhaps best encapsulated in the song “Ballad for Americans”18—and which had in some respects been reinforced by the antifascist coalition of the war years. Robeson was one of many artists to be silenced, as the whole “folk” tradition, with songs of working-class struggle at its core, came under attack. The repression of those years established a kind of cultural divide between the radical song styles that preceded and followed it. It was not that the old motifs disappeared, but the underlying impulses had to present themselves in a different guise. The sometimes almost sentimental expressions of warmth and unity that typified the activist music of the 1930s became sullied under an onslaught that sought to paint them as no more

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

54

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

than Communist propaganda. Just as the concept of peace became thus tarnished, so also did the effort to evoke common class interests across boundaries of nation and race. Artists such as Pete Seeger and his collaborators tried through various venues—songbooks, performances, recordings—to keep the earlier hopes alive, but their ability to retain wide audiences depended in part on their eventually diluting the political content of their performances. This was largely a tactical choice; it did not diminish their readiness to defy congressional inquisitors (as Seeger notably did, citing the First Amendment argument, which, by questioning the legitimacy of the investigations, exposed him to the risk of being prosecuted for “contempt”). But the bigger impact of the witch-hunts lay in drastically curtailing the ability of the public—in particular, the working class—to think freely about political matters and to stand up for its common interests, in the face of inducements toward a purely “private” definition of one’s life goals.19 The latter approach fit well into the model of business unionism, which was a major beneficiary of the anticommunist campaigns, becoming in effect—after passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947)20—the only officially acceptable paradigm for trade-union practice. Labor music, however, although born and nurtured in the tradition of radical class struggle, could not be fully jettisoned even by those who favored an accommodation with capital. But while many of its most eloquent words (as in “Solidarity Forever”) remained unchanged, once they lost their original context of an oppositional culture, their recitation became merely ritualistic. The lines might still be sung, in pep-rally fashion, but their wider message no longer resonated. New songs written within this accommodationist framework might still borrow at times from the deeper working-class culture, but a shallow agenda could inspire only ephemeral expressions.21

III The relationship between organized labor and artistic creativity has been problematic from the start. Some have viewed the two as antithetical; others have seen them as mutually supportive. The more hopeful side of this interaction has shown itself primarily in periods of mass mobilization. It is in such periods that one can find the requisite convergence and sense of common purpose between individual artists (performers and/or composers) and the people whose traditions they draw on—and whose interests they try to serve. The postwar repression ruptured the convergence of the 1930s and 1940s. It could not, of course, put a permanent end to popular protest, but

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

55

what it did mean is that subsequent waves of activism—together with their musical expressions—would be much less (if at all) centered around the labor movement. This effect would in turn be reinforced by the large-scale shift of industrial jobs (where unionization had been most successful) to low-wage regions in other countries. To the extent that protest-music lost its labor roots, it sometimes took on a more individualistic or cynical cast. In so doing, it could still express a widespread malaise, but without offering, even implicitly, an alternative vision. Under the circumstances of a newly reawakening social consciousness (following the disintegration of the Old Left), a stance of this sort, blending skepticism, sarcasm, and irreverence, may have been the only one that— whether intentionally or not—could shake large numbers of people out of their apathy. This understanding is what enables us to politically situate Bob Dylan—a pivotal figure who crossed musical genre lines, created a whole new litany of popular expressions that helped define the culture of the 1960s (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), and yet resolutely shunned links to any organized movement.22 But for songwriters who still had a sense of mission, there remained a lot of issues to address. While not neglecting longstanding questions of social injustice (poverty, racism, etc.), they also broached, among other things, matters of social conformity, political hypocrisy, gender oppression, environmental degradation, and the horrors of war. The scope of what these artists put forward is prodigious. I can only touch on a few highlights here. Pete Seeger remained an iconic presence in the midst of the social movements of the 1960s. Always a tribune for labor organizing, he crossed seamlessly, in his advocacy, into the civil rights struggle, for which he adapted and popularized the song that eventually became its anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” And in 1967, at the height of the U.S. troop-presence in Vietnam, he made a successful end-run around corporate censorship to reach seven million listeners with the first broadcast performance of his allegorical song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,”23 in which the Mississippi River (used in Second World War as a training site) served as stand-in for any future quagmire: “We were [in successive verses] knee-deep/waist-deep/ neck-deep in the Big Muddy, And the big fool said to push on.” Radical performers have always faced the challenge of reaching people beyond their core constituencies. But the core constituencies themselves expanded dramatically during this period. It was among the younger activists of the civil rights movement that this first became apparent, as the apartheid regime of the Southern states highlighted the hypocrisy of the official U.S. claim to be fighting for freedom in Southeast Asia. Once the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

56

Sounds of Resistance

principal legal demands for civil rights had been met (a process that culminated with the Voting Rights Act of 1965), opposition to the Vietnam War became the common plank for every strand of social protest and revolutionary organizing. The radical sentiment underlying this stance found expression in one of the climactic moments at the vast Woodstock festival, when Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar howled out what had become, for so many victims of repression (at home as well as abroad), the terrifying violence of the star-spangled banner.24 In the context of a commitment to activism, however, the exemplary songwriter of this period was Phil Ochs. His trajectory rose and fell with that of the antiwar movement, but his songs covered the full span of social issues. He fused the wit and irreverence of his age with a conversational style, always clear and sometimes lyrical. Above all, he saw himself as a political actor and was dependably available to sing for mass demonstrations. But how did Ochs’s radicalism fit in with labor sentiment in his time? Enormous publicity was given in 1970 to a clash between flag-waving construction workers and antiwar protesters. And indeed the AFL–CIO leadership, seeing its own role only in narrow trade-unionist terms, remained unwilling to question official definitions of the “national interest.” Yet the pro-war posture of these sectors of the labor movement clashed with the basic interests of the working class, as corporate/military priorities triggered a sharp turn away from progressive social policies—including those promoting the freedom to organize—thereby setting in motion the sharpened social polarization, deregulation, and financialization that culminated in the economic crash of 2008.25 Not only was war not in workers’ interest; most of them did not even think that it was in their interest. Contrary to the impression given by media hype, out of all sectors of the U.S. population, the working class was the one that least favored the U.S. presence in Vietnam.26 But its opposition to such policies was inchoate. It could give rise to a high pitch among workers who were actually sent into combat, and who, tormented by the absurdities and the cruelty of their mission, gathered in large numbers to cheer antiwar entertainers. And the scope and depth of their disaffection was confirmed as military discipline crumbled.27 But their rebellion was not organized, any more than was the discontent of their communities at home. The working class was unrepresented politically, in that its members lacked a political instrument for acting together on their own behalf. Working-class consciousness thus remained in a kind of limbo, in which it has largely persisted. On the one hand, workers’ disaffection could to some extent be tapped for electoral purposes by one or other of the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

57

dominant (bourgeois) political parties. On the other hand, workers would fairly quickly recognize in every case—whichever of the two parties held top office—that their needs had not been addressed.28 Despite whatever hopes might be raised every four years, the more enduring feeling was thus one of powerlessness. In the absence of a politically significant workingclass movement, discontent blended—even if uneasily—with acquiescence to much of the dominant cultural paradigm. These contradictory pressures frame much of what can be said about popular protest singers of the last few decades. What is surprising is how much of recent popular music in the English-speaking world is actually the work of artists with left wing or at least populist sympathies. One can be reminded of this by reviewing the remarkable assemblage of bands and songwriters described in Dorian Lynskey’s 33 Revolutions per Minute;29 they span the entire gamut of contemporary styles, from rock to punk to reggae, from country to hip-hop, while also including artists who defy categorization. In terms of our focus on the U.S. working class, however, the emblematic singer, among those with audiences in the millions, is clearly Bruce Springsteen. Both his roots and his song repertoire point to this. His best-known song, “Born in the U.S.A.,” became a cause célèbre in the presidential campaign of 1984. With lyrics lamenting the economic hardships of working people, its title (and refrain) nonetheless became the touchstone for some rosy patriotic flourishes on the part of the incumbent Ronald Reagan. Springsteen’s intent, as a biographer puts it, was “to rouse America, not coddle it”;30 his response to the misappropriation of his words, however, was studiously ambivalent. Whatever the immediate considerations behind this ambivalence, the underlying tension that it reflected was shown in other ways, not only by Springsteen himself but by others as well. Lavishly promoted performances become increasingly characterized by deafening levels of amplification. Lyrics become indistinct, if not completely drowned out. Audiences for such events typically end up focusing little on the content of the lyrics in any case.31 If the lyrics have an oppositional character, this means that their potential political impact can therefore be regarded by music industry magnates as negligible—a small price to pay for the ample box-office revenues that flow in. We thus witness a paradoxical situation, in which stances supportive of the working class are embraced by many of the most popular artists but are to a large extent neutralized by a combination of (1) how the artists are promoted (the star system), (2) how any explicit message they might put forward is blurred (obfuscation of lyrical content), and (3) how the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

58

Sounds of Resistance

dominant, commercially mediated culture has shaped the audience’s receptivity. The neutralization is imperfect, however, making the situation inherently fluid. The dynamics of co-optation and subversion co-exist in a precarious balance, from which politically committed artists may occasionally find ways to break out without losing their audiences.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

IV How, then, to analyze the current situation of labor music? On the one hand, we have the old standbys that are sung, at least in their refrains, by almost everyone. Several of these have already been mentioned here (“Solidarity Forever,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “We Shall Overcome”), and there are others too (such as “Which Side Are You On?,” “Bread and Roses,” “Union Maid,” and the communist anthem, “The Internationale”). On the other hand, we have a long tradition of labor and radical songwriters—like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Anne Feeney— who perform for audiences. Guthrie even wrote two of the above classics (“Union Maid” as well as “This Land . . . ”). Although many songs coming out of this tradition have become well known, they are nonetheless more apt to be listened to than to be collectively sung. Their function, in any case, is to convey an argument or a narrative. However, moving they may be, they demand conscious attention to the lyrics. In between these two poles, though, are all the songs whose diffusion is mediated by the music industry and that thereby permeate the social environment, often becoming known casually and subliminally, as broadcast background music, heard countless times. Within this latter category of songs, as we’ve seen, working-class themes and progressive politics occupy at best a shifting and problematic position. Overall, the more powerful the working-class movement, the greater the popularity of the more radical artists. After the end of the Vietnam War (1975), when activism ebbed in the United States, radical politics found a stronger musical foothold in England, where the band The Clash, for example, drew 80,000 in 1978 to a “Rock Against Racism” concert in London, while Billy Bragg played a major role, a few years later, in building support for a national miners’ strike. Meanwhile, for less massive but more militant audiences, Leon Rosselson created a repertoire comparable to that of Phil Ochs in its wit, musicality, and breadth of vision.32 Tom Morello, cofounder of the American band Rage Against the Machine, in 1991 would later credit The Clash, along with the hip-hop band Public Enemy, for his own politicization.33

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

59

If class struggle came most sharply into focus in Britain, what most notably developed in the United States beginning in the late 1970s were the pounding rhythms and often vitriolic language of hip-hop. Originating in the depressed New York neighborhood of South Bronx, hip-hop nonetheless had from the outset a global dimension and international resonance.34 It was an expression of the economically marginalized sectors of the working class, but its defiant and relentless beat quickly engaged other sectors, especially among youth. Perhaps even more dramatically than any previous genre, hip-hop embodied a two-pronged rejection of the social milieu from which its protagonists emerged. In part, this took the form of a kind of bullying self-aggrandizement (the mode favored by the music industry), but in part—sometimes in the same performers—it took the form of “fighting the power.”35 The rebellious stance exemplified both by Rage and by the more political hip-hop bands has been flowing back into the labor movement. A high and perhaps pivotal moment was the massive response by Wisconsin workers, in early 2011, to the right-wing governor’s attempt to revoke collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees. This occasioned an exuberant and driving song by Morello entitled “Union Town.”36 More generally, there are hints of a revived appreciation of past artists who previously had been under a cloud. Thus, the AFL–CIO website recently encouraged its readers to link to a celebration of Paul Robeson on the part of the National Maritime Union.37 Clearly, the scope and repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis have been spreading. Promises to solve the resulting devastation by measures from above lost credibility as the Obama administration failed to capitalize on what was seen by many to be the most promising political threshold in recent memory. Instead of the “new New Deal” that some projected—in which public funds would be allocated to useful, labor-intensive, and decently remunerated social projects (including support for the performing arts)—the dominant approach has been one that maintains the previous administration’s military priorities and, on the domestic front, limits itself mostly to tax credits and private-sector subsidies. Economic insecurity therefore continues to pervade working-class life. At the same time, in the sphere of education, a heightened emphasis on competition and testing has drawn allocations away from the public sector (including in particular its cultural programs). The historical moment is thus one that could spark a long overdue reradicalization of the U.S. working class. Certainly there is no lack of provocation. The question is whether gut reaction can translate into purposeful

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

60

Sounds of Resistance

political practice. Right-wing politicians and media are expert in tapping into the anger of certain oppressed sectors, but they do so by building on a mindset—involving competitiveness, religiosity, and patriotism—which is already promoted by the dominant commercial culture. If the working class is to organize successfully on its own behalf, it needs a cultural matrix of its own: one with a diversity of forms of expression to match the diversity of its membership, but one that nonetheless can inject—as did the IWW—a solidly grounded moral force into all its practical efforts. No medium is more suited to carrying out this task than that of song, which can instruct at the same time that it inspires. Of course, this has been known since even before the time of the Wobblies. But the process of implementing it requires constant reinvention. The dominant powers of the present pose new obstacles to anyone who would challenge them. Those performing traditional working-class jobs have been scattered across the globe, and the ready sense of unity they might have had in an earlier epoch has been fragmented politically. Dollars have framed the official political debate more tightly than ever. Low wages, combined with union busting, subcontracting, and cutbacks of social services, have forced people to work longer hours with less security—often at more than one job—just to maintain their households. The relentless burden saps the quality of their lives and takes away the time and energy they would need in order to respond effectively.38 And yet there are promising developments as well. One is the cumulative impact of the song traditions we have examined, multiplied by the greater technological facilities for propagating popular ideas. Another may be thought of as the “up” side of all the negative things that have been happening. As more and more occupations are destabilized, a greater range of skills is represented among the un- and underemployed. As wider swaths of the population are caught up in the prison-industrial complex, the prisons themselves increasingly become schools of political awareness.39 And while globalization spurs an economic “race to the bottom,” it also awakens greater numbers of people to drawing inspiration from acts of collective resistance in faraway places. The first signs of a growing cultural resistance are already present. Even before the huge 2011 protests in Wisconsin, grassroots actions in many parts of the country displayed the continuing creativity of those who see the underlying class issues that are at stake. A notable development over the last few years—as original as the sitdown strikes of the 1930s—has been the “flash mob,” in which at least a dozen solidarity activists enter the site of some retail service and suddenly form themselves into a singing or dancing

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

61

group, with instrumental accompaniment, and perform a specially composed song of protest for all the workers and customers. The performers disperse and vanish after just a few minutes, but with the whole act videotaped for diffusion over the Internet.40 Such fleeting occupations of business space have more recently been overtaken by prolonged occupations of public space. The Wisconsin State Capitol, which was occupied continuously for over two weeks, was the site of the first such volley. Occupy Wall Street, which began in September 2011, marked, in conjunction many subsequent parallel actions throughout the country, a new historic level of public awareness and militant dissidence, clearly targeting the core institutions of capitalism. As previously silent constituencies begin to find their voices, songs of disclosure and of struggle, like those of David Rovics, Dave Lippman, and, most recently, Makana,41 continue to inspire.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes Since the Internet makes it easy for readers to look up any artist, I keep citations of recent subjects to a minimum. For comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, I am grateful to Jonathan Scott. 1. This statement was added in 1908 to the original constitution of 1905. The texts of all IWW Constitutions, as they evolved over the years, are available at http://www.workerseducation.org/crutch/constitutions.html. The importance of the IWW’s contribution to labor music is underscored in Ted Gioia, Labor Songs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 233ff. 2. Set to the tune of the Civil War’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Solidarity Forever” first appeared in the 1916 edition of the IWW Songbook. 3. Text in Jerzy (George) Dymny, ed., The Canadian Wobbly Songbook (Toronto: IWW, 1990), 12. For additional scab songs, see The Little Red Songbook, 36th ed. (Chicago, IL: IWW, 1995), 28, 54, 61, 68, 77. 4. Ronald D. Cohen, Work and Sing: A History of Occupational Labor Songs in the United States (Crockett, CA: Carquinez Press, 2010), 94–101. 5. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 228–31; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), ch. 11 (“Uneasy Partners”). 6. Borrowing here from the slogan made familiar by the World Social Forum: “Another world is possible.” 7. See Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 573ff; LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow, 1963); Sidney Finkelstein, Jazz: A People’s Music (New York: International Publishers, 1988 [1948]).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

62

Sounds of Resistance

8. See Theodore W. Allen, Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, ed. Jeffrey W. Perry (Stony Brook, NY: Center for the Study of Working Class Life, 2006). This 40-page pamphlet summarizes the findings of Allen’s two-volume study, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1994, 1997). 9. The preeminent traditional work song “John Henry” (“Steel gon’ be the death of me”) is also included in this section, although under the heading of “Ballads.” The other Southern section contains—under the heading “Hard Times and the Hillbilly”—a few work songs, mostly of more recent vintage (notably, “16 Tons,” written by Merle Travis in 1947). 10. See William M. Adler, The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 11. Hill, quoted in Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 18 (citing Philip S. Foner, The Case of Joe Hill [1965], 11). 12. Gioia, Labor Songs, 234. 13. James Connolly, “Revolutionary Song” (1907), in James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, eds. Owen Dudley Edwards and Bernard Ransom (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1907/xx/revsong.htm. 14. Robeson’s modification of the original lyrics (from Showboat) is well known. He also changed “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’ ” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.” Paul Robeson Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson (New York: John Wiley, 2001), 293. 15. Text of Robeson’s Statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, eds. Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 380f. 16. See Mark Allan Jackson, Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), ch. 1. 17. The most thorough overview of this phenomenon is William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995). On the links between the U.S. global agenda and internal repression, see Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Schocken Books, 1974). 18. Sung by Robeson in November 1939 to a CBS radio audience of millions. See Robbie Lieberman, “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 40. 19. This atomization was epitomized in suburbia. On the political agenda behind federal promotion of suburbs, see Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), ch. 8, “The McCarthy Hearings on Housing.” 20. Taft-Hartley was a landmark measure to scale back labor’s gains from New Deal legislation; it specifically excluded from legal protection any union that failed to disqualify Communists from elective office.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement

63

21. The light-hearted mockery that labor songwriter Joe Glazer applied to the bullying inquisitor Senator Joseph McCarthy—in a song about McCarthy based on “McNamara’s Band” (text in Glazer’s memoir Labor’s Troubadour [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001], 112)—is emblematic, in the sense of targeting the style, rather than the substance or impact, of the anticommunist crusade. (Glazer’s career as a trade union official included an overseas stint in the 1960s with the U.S. Information Agency.) 22. As Dorian Lynskey puts it, Dylan embodied “the I protesting the we”; see 33 Revolutions, 66. 23. See www.peteseeger.net/givepeacechance.htm; performance: www.you tube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4. 24. On the controversy this aroused, see Michael Ventre, “Hendrix Created Banner Moment at Woodstock” (2009), http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/32175232/ ns/today-entertainment/t/hendrix-created-banner-moment-woodstock/. 25. For a concise introduction to this process, see Richard Wolff, “Capitalism Hits the Fan” (dvd, 2008), or text at http://www.rdwolff.com/sites/default/files/ attachment/4/03Wolff.pdf. 26. Andrew Levison, The Working-Class Majority (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1974), 158–63. For the sake of brevity, I refer to all adult members of the working class as “workers,” irrespective of whether they are employed, unemployed, in the armed forces, in prison, or retired. For discussion of who constitutes the working class, see Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 29–36. 27. On opposition to the war from within the armed forces, see the documentary film Sir, No Sir (David Zeiger, dir., 2006). 28. Nothing is more predictable than the drop in popular “approval ratings” between the beginning and the end of each president’s tenure in office. 29. See Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute. The book provides lively introductions to the various artists, and has a useful appendix listing their albums. 30. Christopher Sandwood, Springsteen Point Blank (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 212. 31. Ray Pratt, Rhythm and Resistance: The Political Uses of American Popular Music (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 182. 32. Other major singers of class struggle from Britain include A. L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, and Dick Gaughan. 33. Interviewed by Keith Olbermann, August 2011, http://current.com/shows/ countdown/videos/tom-morello-supports-wisconsin-teachers-and-unions. 34. Robin D. G. Kelley, Foreword to Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle, eds., The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2006), xi. 35. See Yusuf Nuruddin and Victor Wallis, eds., “Hip Hop, Race, and Cultural Politics,” special issue of Socialism and Democracy 18, no. 2 (2004). 36. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZT71DxLuM.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

64

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

37. See http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/09/10/robeson-display-traces-singersfight-for-equality-and-unions/. 38. An example of the extremes this has led to is the conditions in 2011 at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania, http://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917,0,7937001,full.story. 39. See the exchange of prison letters in Part Two of Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Defying the Tomb (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2010). 40. See the “Hark! Walmart” Flash Mob at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Gz1nWKV0YxE. 41. David Rovics’s “Occupy Wall Street,” http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/ blog/2011/10/11/music-david-rovics-occupy-wall-street/; Dave Lippman’s “Occupation Is On,” http://davelippman.com/Occupation.html; Makana, “Occupy the Planet: We Are the Many,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tCeC0xYQdo.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 4

Green Pastures of Plenty Woody Guthrie and Eco-Citizenship

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Matthew D. Sutton

In one of the most widely read reviews of Woody Guthrie’s 1943 semiautobiographical novel Bound for Glory, New Yorker critic and public tastemaker Clifton Fadiman reinforced the self-image Guthrie artfully constructed. “Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box,” Fadiman wrote, “are a national possession, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world.”1 Fadiman, like many other partisan readers, idealized Guthrie as an iteration of the American natural man, at once a living monument of timeless national values and a representative voice for the oppressed. In tandem with his remarkable body of socially conscious music, Bound for Glory has long been examined as a protest work, a vivid chronicle of the Dust Bowl, and a proto-Beat travelogue. What has been overlooked is the power and relevance of Guthrie’s lyrics and prose as ecocritical texts. What Bound for Glory and his songs of social commentary promote, ultimately, is neither Romantic pastoralism nor a “green” Utopia, but rather harmony and sustainability between working people and the land in the service of democracy. Named after the 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, to Charles and Nora Guthrie. Prominent in local politics as an outspoken antisocialist, Charles Guthrie speculated in real estate in largely rural Okemah during

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

66

Sounds of Resistance

the first great “oil boom” of the 1910s.2 With Oklahoma leading the nation in oil production, land that was once the province of family farmers and tenant farmers was given over to large oil concerns; as many as 30,000 oil derricks sprouted up in the state by 1916.3 The family’s fortunes fell sharply in the early 1920s, however. A precipitous drop in commodity prices led farmers renting on the Guthries’ land to default on their leases, resulting in the Guthries’ losing their own farm and uprooting in search of work. Nora Guthrie began experiencing dementia, seizures, and other symptoms of Huntington’s disease, a genetic nerve disorder, and was committed to the state asylum after a fire at the family home. By the age of 14 Guthrie was living on his own. Leading a peripatetic life in his teens and early twenties, Guthrie eked out a living doing odd jobs and performing music at dances. The harsh realities of Guthrie’s early life contrast sharply with the relatively idyllic portrait he painted in Bound for Glory’s early chapters of his boyhood in Oklahoma. There, the region’s temperate climate and rich soil support generations of steward farmers, who work the land conscientiously. The landscape transforms radically, however, when Okemah experiences a series of speculative endeavors by outsiders: first a run on the coal supply, then extractions of lead and zinc, and finally the oil boom. In the novel, the Guthrie family rides out the full cycle of the oil boom in Oklahoma, as the temporary spike in the local economy helps Woody’s father regroup from his past collapsed real-estate investments. This recovery is short lived, however. As production increases, oil seeps into every available space of the town, polluting the streams, farmlands, and air. While the town enjoys its brief moment of prosperity, its foundational ecology—pure water, clean air, and fertile soil—suffers irreversible damage. In the short term, Okemah’s citizens overlook this destruction, in thrall only to what Guthrie terms the “religion of the oil field,” making the town a virtual theocracy run by oil concerns.4 Under such control, residents’ livelihoods are subject to the rapacity of the oil market, the industry’s reliance on rapid resource extraction, and the randomness of “wildcat” oil drilling (drilling away from established oil fields). Whether or not wildcat drilling strikes black gold, it leaves the land scarred and the citizens poorer. By extracting the maximum amount of oil from productive sources and leaving dry sources to linger as environmental blights, the wildcatters epitomize the pursuit of private profit over civic virtue and the wants of the present over the needs of the future. Few things of sustainable value remain in their wake. The demographic makeup of the town changes just as drastically. Young Woody, always on the lookout for adventure, becomes enthralled with the people who follow the oil boom: drillers, peddlers, roustabouts, and prostitutes. All these newcomers dismiss Okemah’s customs and laws. The

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

67

boom-bust cycle allows a new, environmentally destructive population to enter the community, deplete it of its natural and manmade resources, and move on to the next site of exploitation. The American boomtown represents not only a treacherous peak on an economic cycle, but also on an environmental cycle, one that inevitably results in an unsustainable ecology. To illustrate in the novel the stark dialectic between sustainability and rapaciousness, citizen and subject, Guthrie employs the trope of the ghost town. After speculators abandon the tapped-out oil fields, and drought and dust storms do away with the local farms’ once-abundant topsoil, precious little remains in Okemah. The town’s deserted Main Street and decaying homes stand in contradistinction to the traditional American narrative of civic growth and progress. Using Okemah as a representation of the rapidly industrializing nation, Guthrie lambasts the civic irresponsibility of the “boomchasers,” the ruthless capitalists who pollute the environment with their hit-and-miss wildcat drilling, deplete the region of its natural resources, and leave despair and economic disaster in their wake. As the book’s middle chapters feature his novelistic counterpart wandering down a seemingly endless highway of lifeless ghost towns abandoned by oil speculators, Guthrie shows us fear in a town full of dust. Amid this environmental dystopia, Guthrie sounds a single note of redemption in a scene where his fictionalized alter ego and his mother cultivate a garden in their modest, post-oil boom home. Only in this scene does Guthrie, the author, express at length a traditional sense of pastoralism, as he exults, much like Thoreau in the bean field episode of Walden, in the simple act of sowing seeds and turning over deep, rich soil. Such care stands in contrast to the less conscientious farmers of that time, namely the so-called suitcase farmers of the Southern Plains who, other than brief residencies during the planting and harvesting seasons, raised their crops absentee. Their negligence was especially acute during the long period of drought and soil erosion in the Midwest during the 1930s commonly known as the Dust Bowl. Historian Timothy Egan notes the suitcase farmers’ partial responsibility in the ensuing environmental crisis, as scores of inexperienced wheat growers, ignorant of soil conservation techniques, simply walked away from unproductive fields when it was clear they could not turn a profit, leaving valuable topsoil to blow away.5 Like wildcat oil drillers, the unskilled, profit-driven farmer resisted the role of land steward, to the detriment of the community. The direct effect of the Dust Bowl and the Depression on Guthrie’s songwriting can be traced by the divergence in the themes of his first successful compositions. Guthrie wrote “Oklahoma Hills,” a tribute to his home state, in 1937 not long after he moved to Los Angeles, a period in which he was,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

68

Sounds of Resistance

according to biographer Ed Cray, “largely indifferent to politics.”6 The song’s jaunty tune, breezy pastoral lyrics, and evocation of the “cowboy’s life” were in line with the escapist popular music of the day. (With substantially rewritten lyrics, “Oklahoma Hills” became a sizable hit for Woody’s cousin Jack Guthrie in 1945.) While Guthrie’s next commercially successful song, a revision of his own “Dusty Old Dust” (first written in 1935, adapted throughout the late 1930s, and retitled “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” in the Weavers’ 1950 version) also seemed light hearted on the surface, the impressions left by the Dust Bowl and rural people’s westward migration were evident. As Mark Allan Jackson notes, in songs like “Dusty Old Dust,” Guthrie drew upon his firsthand experiences living in Pampa, Texas, during “Black Sunday,” the notoriously destructive dust storm of April 14, 1935, blending his reportage with humor.7 In “Dusty Old Dust,” the sudden dust storms blow in and reshape every aspect of life on the plains, from young lovers who lose sight of each other in the dark, to shopkeepers who opportunistically sell basic commodities at wildly inflated prices, to a corrupt preacher who takes up one last collection before skipping town.8 Beneath the good humor in the stanzas and the seemingly carefree farethee-well in the refrain lies a stark truth many in Guthrie’s audience knew all too well: with the land celebrated in “Oklahoma Hills” blowing away, the everyday people represented in each verse of “Dusty Old Dust” were forced to leave, in hopes of greener pastures. Guthrie moved from Pampa, Texas, to California in 1937, near the end of the Dust Bowl migration. Though many migrants worked the land, Guthrie represented a different type of journeyman, a town dweller seeking new opportunities in the emerging media center of Southern California. Once settled in Los Angeles, Guthrie earned notoriety on local radio station KFVD, first with a repertoire of cowboy songs and sentimental ballads, then gradually through songs with more socially observant lyrics. Guthrie cultivated a following by breaking with popular music conventions; framed by unpretentious on-air repartee, Guthrie’s songs spoke from the perspective of the newly arrived worker, alternately bemused and embittered by the conspicuous displays of wealth and power in 1930s Los Angeles.9 Police authority tenaciously guarded that wealth and power. Established growers and corporate farms made extraordinary profits in the 1930s from temporary labor; one-third of the richest farms in the United States were concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley, despite widespread poverty in the region. By one contemporary estimate, 200,000 farm workers were employed in California in 1936, almost twice as many as had been employed in 1920. That same year, local law enforcement made its most blatant attempt to curb migration into California. Officers of the Los Angeles

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

69

Police Department, on orders from Police Chief James Davis, positioned themselves at the state’s eastern and northern borders, as far away as the California-Oregon state line 800 miles north of their jurisdiction, to turn away would-be residents.10 Davis rationalized the police action by claiming such a show of force was necessary to “keep our unemployment and crime conditions to a minimum,” casually conflating out-of-work people with criminals.11 The police force received a great deal of popular support for the action, with one newspaper applauding the chief for “heading off the tramps” and “protecting this city from a migrant invasion.”12 An increasingly politicized Guthrie commented on the prejudices many Californians held against their fellow Americans on compositions he introduced on his radio show, including “Talking Dust Bowl” and “Do Re Mi.”13 In the latter song, California virtually shuts its door to any would-be resident or visitor without the requisite “do re mi” (i.e., money). In this deceptively jovial song, Guthrie protests the heavy-handed patrolling of the California border and acutely identifies the unspoken premise undergirding restrictions on intra-migration into California: migrants could be tolerated as seasonal farm workers and day laborers but not as vested, landed citizens. White migrants from the Midwest, labeled “Okies” or “Arkies” regardless of their point of origin, were absorbed into the labor stream, though segregated from Asian and Mexican farm workers.14 Furthermore, Guthrie biographer Joe Klein writes, “The word ‘Okie’ had become a slur, a word the goons spat out to describe all the migrants, all poor white people.”15 By identifying those seeking work as undesirable and inassimilable, unsympathetic Westerners could freely collapse all new arrivals into one class, deeming them a social problem at best, a threat to public welfare at worst. The estimated half million migrant workers in California during the mid to late 1930s were often reduced to squalid surroundings; permanent jobs in the area were scarce and children often lacked basic health care and education. Newcomers accustomed to cultivating hundreds of acres had little chance to improve what little land they now had, forced to work their temporary patch of ground to the point of depletion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs were often compromised by local business influences and police actions, minimizing their benefit to migrants. A Federal Transient Service, established in 1933 to assist displaced families with necessities like food, shelter, and health care, was shut down two years later at the height of the Dust Bowl migration.16 New Deal–sponsored agricultural subsidies and grants landed disproportionately in the hands of the wealthiest farmers, who wielded economic, political, and personal influence.17 Mechanization and a gradual move to the cities reduced the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

70

Sounds of Resistance

need for farm hands; the resultant competition for jobs emboldened growers to reduce wages further. More compelling, though, were the human costs of the westward movement and the economic exploitation of “hired hands,” many of whom had once owned and operated their own farms. Though the majority of those seeking refuge in California were white, unethical business practices knew no borders and observed no color line. In an interview with Studs Terkel, farm-labor activist Cesar Chavez recalled his family’s sudden uprooting from their small homestead near Yuma, Arizona, in 1934:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

If the local bank approved, the Government would guarantee the loan and small farmers like my father would continue in business. It so happened the president of the bank was the guy who most wanted our land. We were surrounded by him: he owned all the land around us. Of course, he wouldn’t pass the loan. One day a giant tractor came in, like we had never seen before . . . In the matter of a week, the whole face of the land was changed.18

Thus, families like the Chavezes were pushed into the pool of Californiabound migrant laborers, sacrificing their autonomy and leaving their carefully cultivated land at the mercy of developers and their bulldozers. Guthrie left California and relocated to New York in 1940, where he enjoyed his most prolific period as a songwriter and author. Perhaps not coincidentally, this stretch of creativity was influenced by a cohort of singers, writers, and actors involved with the Popular Front. Adopted by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) in 1935, the Popular Front united communists and socialists with labor leaders, women’s rights advocates, and civil rights activists to address issues both domestic (such as lynching) and global (especially the rise of fascism in Europe).19 After the collapse of the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany and the United States’ entry into Second World War in 1941, the Popular Front’s efforts shifted to supporting the Allied war effort.20 Though, like many in the cultural wing of the Popular Front, Guthrie was never an official member of the CPUSA, he was sympathetic with the party’s stance against oppression. Soon after his arrival in New York City, Guthrie performed at a benefit for migrant workers alongside other progressive musicians and recorded for the first time the series of documentary songs, like “Do Re Mi,” that were released as Dust Bowl Ballads.21 Even before his incorporation into the Popular Front, Guthrie exemplified the movement’s concerted effort to reach working people. Though mediated rather than directly delivered to local workers, Guthrie’s lyrics, his columns for the San

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

71

Francisco-based, Communist Party–affiliated newspaper People’s World, and his radio show addressed economic and social issues in plain and humorous language, in a manner that subverted the hegemony of commercial journalism and radio. To meet his audience halfway, Guthrie drew from contemporary popular sources, especially the folksy humor of Will Rogers and the music of Jimmie Rodgers.22 Though many of Guthrie’s songs combined topical lyrics with well-known traditional melodies, he was equally adept at employing popular tunes. One such example is “Boomtown Bill,” written at the request of the Oil Workers International Union in 1942 and recorded by Guthrie as a member of the Almanac Singers. To the tune of “The Wabash Cannonball” (a folk melody familiar to virtually all radio listeners through Roy Acuff ’s phenomenally successful 1936 recording), the lyrics imagine a composite oil worker, “Boomtown Bill,” toiling in oil fields across the nation, pledging his loyalty to both the labor union and the antifascist cause. “Boomtown Bill” explicitly spells out the Popular Front agenda for working people during Second World War, as “Bill” temporarily sublimates his fight for labor rights in order to play a larger role in the home front war effort.23 Just as Guthrie set aside pacifism and his distaste for the oil industry’s irresponsibility to contribute to the defeat fascism abroad, the representative working man in “Boomtown Bill” focuses his work on the commonwealth. Environmental preservation played a part in Guthrie’s one-man campaign against fascism. The direction and force of Guthrie’s environmental awareness, most pronounced in the years between 1941 and 1943, can be traced through his letters, now preserved in the Woody Guthrie Archives. Surprisingly, Guthrie’s environmental concerns grew out of his pacifism and an initial ambivalence toward U.S. involvement in Second World War. In a February 25, 1941, letter to Lee Hays, Guthrie’s future bandmate in the Almanac Singers and later a member of the Weavers, Guthrie wrote passionately about the implicit claim on private farmland by the U.S. government, who were still holding on to their official stance of neutrality as war raged in Europe. Guthrie railed to Hays that farmers’ labor and usable land could be “all poured down the gutter of European Wars [. . .] litterally [sic] reduced to a blank rotten patch just because we took sides in gambling games and fights that broke out 5,000 miles across the ocean.”24 As Ed Cray notes, Guthrie, like many in his left-wing cohort, eyed President Franklin Roosevelt with suspicion during the 1930s and early 1940s, with the belief that Roosevelt was under the influence of big business and seeking to enlist working-class men to fight on behalf of unfettered capitalism.25 As an alternative to profiteering and militarism, Guthrie visualized out-of-work

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

72

Sounds of Resistance

men employed in public-service projects, including “housing, soil reclamation, dam building, health centers and vacation centers for workers.”26 For all of his dismay on behalf of struggling farmers and the looming conflict in Europe, Guthrie leavened his letter to Hays with humor, closing with a characteristic quip: “For Jesus said, ‘The Poor shall inherit the Earth—’, and we don’t want it to be all wore out and eroded down slick as an eight ball when we get it.”27 In a letter written in Los Angeles to actor and fellow activist Will Geer two days later (February 27, 1941), Guthrie predicted detrimental effects to the environment resulting from the impending Lend-Lease Act. Though remembered as the means by which the United States provided its allies with weapons before entering Second World War II, the act also arranged for massive food deliveries to beleaguered Great Britain and France, with one million tons of food exported in 1941 alone. In the letter, Guthrie warned that the effort to ramp up commodity production so suddenly would tax the land and lead to soil erosion, a serious matter in the Midwest after the Dust Bowl. If the Midwest were to be charged with the responsibility of providing free Europe as well as the United States with the bulk of its commodities, Guthrie admonished, the already overburdened land would soon be “over-planted, under rotated, unnaturally planted, hurried, rushed . . .”28 In these letters we detect hyperbole, to be sure, arising from both his socialist-inspired convictions (such as lambasting the War in Europe as another “Bankers’ War”) and his recent conversion, through his reading of several books on the subject, to the gospel of soil conservation. More surprisingly, though, we catch a glimpse in these letters of Guthrie in a fleeting phase of political isolationism, expressing resentment at the prospect of using U.S. farmland as ammunition in Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy.” Though resolutely antifascist, Guthrie, like most of his Popular Front cohort, remained pacifist until Germany broke its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in June 1941, upon which he rallied to the Allied cause, eventually volunteering for the Merchant Marines after the United States entered the war. In 1941, the lines of alliances were redrawn, and the United States entered an uneasy association with the Soviet Union. It was at this point that Guthrie launched into the writing of Bound for Glory, intent on merging his localized environmental concerns with the more global concern of ending the spread of totalitarianism. In the set piece that opens the book, “Soldiers in the Dust,” the main protagonist “Woody,” a folk-singing rambler/philosopher, hops a boxcar hurtling through the Midwest packed with dozens of other men looking for work. The disenfranchised men lament their separation from the land, and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

73

from steady work. As part of a new migrant class unsettled by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the huddled masses in the boxcar are subjected to both the dangers of travel and to environmental hazards, including the hot and dry drought conditions and the smoke and thick cement dust that the passengers breathe in. The scene in the boxcar subverts the foundational tropes and myths of European American intra-migration. The hallowed image of families boldly moving westward in covered wagons toward a new frontier is replaced by the assemblage moving stealthily by railroad, with the boxcar a microcosm of conflict within the class system. For displaced Midwesterners and Southerners seeking agricultural or construction work during the Depression, there is no “elbow room” or freedom of mobility aboard the crowded boxcar, no consensus, and no promise of a better life at the end of the trail. Boxed in like commodities, working men engage in a cruel battle royal for the most basic resources: air, water, food. Compounding their collective sense of alienation, the men in the boxcar are, in literal terms, breaking the law. Their real-life counterparts were regularly detained by local law enforcement, under common-law charges such as vagrancy or newer provisions such as California’s Indigent Act, passed in 1933 to discourage the poor from entering the state. Such laws virtually criminalized poverty and compelled people to work for substandard wages under severe working conditions. When his journeys take him west out of oil country into California, the character “Woody” discovers a similar pattern of exploitation toward migrant fruit pickers. The real Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was famously emblazoned with the legend “This Machine Kills Fascists,” draws clear, timely parallels between the European fascist and the American corporation that strips the most vulnerable laborers of their identity and rights. Guthrie was not the first to make this observation; in his 1939 exposé of migrant labor conditions Factories in the Fields, progressive journalist and Popular Front figurehead Carey McWilliams used the term “fascist” nine times in his damning characterization of large-scale farm owners and local authorities’ collusion in driving down wages and imposing extralegal limits on workers’ rights. Guthrie read Factories in the Fields while living in Los Angeles, and recommended it to his friend and occasional singing partner Pete Seeger as “the bible of the migratory working people.”29 In his own semifictional depiction of a “jungle camp” adjacent to a large citrus farm, Guthrie’s writing assumes a sweeping, Whitmanesque tone, as the camp’s hungry, penniless detainees rise above their toils to collectively narrate their visions and dreams of progress and freedom, complete with working factories and farms and fairly distributed prosperity.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

74

Sounds of Resistance

Though the cause of the Okies was taken up by John Steinbeck in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath (a work that moved Guthrie so deeply that he encapsulated its plot in the 17 verses of his ballad “Tom Joad”), the book’s notoriety and sales did not immediately translate into widespread sympathy for disenfranchised farm families. Cynical progrower novels and films came out in quick succession to counter Steinbeck’s portrayals, with titles like Plums of Plenty, Of Human Kindness, and Grapes of Gladness.30 Each defended the prevailing system that favored wealthy farmers, and degradingly characterized migrants as lazy and in need of constant handouts. Articles in the Country Gentleman, a popular periodical of the day that usually proffered farm and household advice and light entertainment in the form of moralistic short stories, perpetuated antimigrant sentiment by taking an unusually polemical stance against temporary farm workers. Despite the widespread misery left in the wake of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, one of the articles singled out migrants and blamed those seeking relief for their own misfortunes: “I can remember the time when people on welfare were looked down upon, and no one applied for help except in the most deplorable extremity.”31 Following a litany of familiar vague complaints about Okies—regarding their supposed impecuniousness, tendency to drink, and hostility toward formal education—the author concluded the current population were nearly inassimilable: “Elevating the migrants to even a degree of responsible citizenship is going to be a long and heartbreaking job—a process of evolution that probably will require several generations.”32 The Country Gentlemen pieces articulated what became a mainstream position during the Depression: that migrant workers were a permanent underclass with limited civic rights, whose use was contained to being contracted for temporary work at the lowest possible wage and who could be politically and socially marginalized with little repercussion. As a form of cultural response to these attitudes Guthrie, along with Will Geer, joined a group of activists touring California farms on behalf of the John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers in the summer of 1939.33 Performing music and satirical skits for migrants in camps near the town of Arvin, Guthrie, Geer, and company found common cause with migrant workers through entertainment. In his People’s World column, Guthrie declared that such grass-roots efforts “peps them up, bolsters their spirit of unity and brings them laughing and singing down to the Cotton Patch or Warehouse Gate or Factory Door [. . .] You don’t have to depend on Hollywood for your entertainment.”34 Likewise, in Bound for Glory, the protagonist Woody finds fulfillment as a troubadour, talking and singing to working people wherever they gather and seek jobs. Woody travels through

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Green Pastures of Plenty

75

42 states and encounters loggers, fruit pickers, and oil drillers, singing and spontaneously composing all the way, his ever-present battered guitar marking him as one sympathetic to the dispossessed. After hearing Woody play for fruit-pickers in the fields, one of his fictional listeners remarks, “Boy, you sure can sing about work, whether you get any done or not.”35 In his admittedly flattering self-portrayal, Guthrie creates music both as much-needed diversion and as a running commentary on the dignity of labor and the tribulations of farm workers. Guthrie emphasized the role of leisure and music in an article for the New York Times that accompanied Bound for Glory’s publication, titled “America Singing,” an obvious nod to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing.” Through singing, Guthrie contends, migrants and settlers alike can express civic virtue:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

People everywhere across the country are all working on the same big job. You hear them talk in the wheat fields of North Dakota, and it’s just about the same words as you’ll hear down in the celery patches or along the docks in lower California, and they say, “We got to all get together, and work and fight together.” People’s songs say this same thing. The migratory workers are trying to turn every grain of good dirt into a green leaf. They have contests to see who can turn out the most of the best quickest . . . People need work music. People need music to march by and to fight with, and if you composers don’t dish it out right on the split second, you’ll find folks passing you up and making up their own songs and playing and singing it.36

Even while laboring, Guthrie’s idealized singing worker incorporates elements of improvisation and free play. For Bound for Glory’s depiction of music in the migrant camps, Guthrie likely drew upon his visit in 1941 to the Shafter Farmworkers Community, about 15 miles northwest of Bakersfield, California. Set up by the federal government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Shafter camp was operated, governed, and policed by its residents, many of whom were displaced Midwesterners.37 FSA camps like Shafter not only helped needy families get back on better economic footing, but took steps to improve residents’ health (e.g., providing fresh produce, clean drinking water, health clinics, and proper sanitation facilities), and reintroduce the type of participatory democracy that had been denied in grower-sponsored camps.38 With a letter of introduction from Carey McWilliams, then serving as chief of the state of California’s Division of Immigration and Housing, Guthrie was hired by the FSA to play a “sharecropper’s ball” on the camp site on April 4, 1941.39 Guthrie’s commitment to bring music and levity to the camps is admirable. Even more

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

76

Sounds of Resistance

significant, though, is his use of music to remind residents of their inherent dignity and civic rights. In a letter to the Almanac Singers that July, Guthrie proclaims that he and his fellow folk musicians must “see to it that the seeds are sown which will grow up into free speech, free singing, and the pursuit of happiness that is the first and simplest birthright of a free people.”40 Such optimism is a common thread of Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads and Bound for Glory, in which downtrodden citizens’ rights and well-being are reaffirmed through song in the unlikeliest of surroundings. Surprisingly, in Bound for Glory Guthrie makes little mention of one of his most significant environmental statements: the creation of a song cycle chronicling the construction of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams on the Columbia River in May 1941, funded by the federal government. Clearly, conservation was on Guthrie’s mind in early 1941, judging from the letters he wrote during that time to his contemporaries Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Millard Lampell; and in significant ways the Columbia River project was the materialization of his vision of employing the disenfranchised in public-works undertakings. In Bound for Glory, however, Guthrie modestly describes his commission from the Bonneville Power Administration as “a good job [. . .] from Uncle Samuel.”41 In fact, Guthrie was nominated for the position by his friend and Library of Congress archivist Alan Lomax. Because a longer stint would put his left-leaning politics under scrutiny, Guthrie was only employed by the Bonneville Power Administration for one month.42 (For his efforts, Guthrie was paid $266.66.)43 Initially, plans were made to feature Guthrie in a documentary publicizing the dams’ construction, but his role was reduced to writing and recording music, some of which was later utilized in promotional films.44 Significantly, Guthrie’s lyrics in the songs later collected as the Columbia River Collection rhapsodize over the dams, a constructed part of the environment, in terms poets and songwriters previously reserved for nature in its purest form. As they have been traditionally referenced in popular song, the United States’ natural resources are both a potent symbol for nationalist mythologizing (as in the celebration of “purple mountain majesties” and “shining” seas in Katharine Lee Bates’s “America the Beautiful”) and part of the United States’ tangible wealth and power.45 Descriptions of waving wheat fields, flowing rivers, and vast skies in patriotic songs underscore the bounty of the land. In the same vein, Guthrie exalts the natural beauty of the Columbia River alongside its ability to produce electric power and good jobs for working men. Coupled with this turn to the mythopoetic is Guthrie’s reawakened patriotism, which had ebbed during the Great Depression. As Second World War neared, Guthrie changed his formerly

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

77

isolationist tune, exhorting workers to fulfill their collective duty and, in the parlance of the time, “do their bit” to win the war. By sheer numbers alone, the dam project must have impressed Guthrie. To build a lock-and-dam system powerful enough to divert the river, the Army Corps of Engineers employed as many as 3,000 workers at a time, most of whom crossed state lines in search of a job. Hourly wages ranged from $0.50 to $1.20, an enviable sum when many growers considered $0.30 an hour an extravagant wage for strenuous farm labor.46 Consequently, hundreds of former Okies and migrants found work building the dams, in addition to a dignity of labor denied to most workers in the fields. As Guthrie and other proponents portrayed it, massive infrastructure projects, and by extension the beneficence of the New Deal, represented not simply a short-term alternative to low-wage farm labor, but a model for initiatives in the common interest that paid workers a fair wage. In the song “Washington Talkin’ Blues,” Guthrie makes one of his strongest cases for citizen-led environmental sustainability, as he sings from the viewpoint of a logger clearing trees for the dam project. Although lumber companies demanded that workers clear acres of timber, with little ecological foresight, the song’s narrator defies the economically driven order, vowing to plant two trees for every one he is ordered to cut down.47 The “cut one, plant two” concept was passed down from the Kaweah colony, a 19th-century cooperative farm in California’s Sierra Nevada range that was memorialized in Factories in the Fields.48 Ironically, the Kaweah colony was uprooted in the 1890s by a large-scale federal project (the establishment of the Sequoia National Park) and marginalized for its espousal of “scientific socialism”; during the New Deal, though, the colony’s conservation impetus and communitarian ideals were partly incorporated into government work. As a documentarian of one such project, Guthrie looks to the Columbia Basin dams as a signpost to a region and a nation more receptive to cooperative ideals. Acts of ecological balance such as “cutting one, planting two” absorb the harsh lessons of the Dust Bowl boomtown while keeping overdevelopment in check. In Guthrie’s positivist view, the judicious control of nature can work to the advantage of long-suffering laborers and end the boom-and-bust cycle that previously defined Anglo-American settlement in the West. In one of Bound for Glory’s collectively narrated passages, migrant workers waiting to build California’s Kenneth Dam voice their desire to work, not simply for a wage, but in service to a cooperative, large-scale national endeavor, much like the hero in Guthrie’s ballad “Boomtown Bill.” One worker visualizes the completed dam and its ability “[t]o catch water to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

78

Sounds of Resistance

irrigate new land, and water all of this desert-looking country here. And when a little drop of water hits the ground anywhere out across here— a crop, a bush, sometimes even a big tall tree comes jumping out of the dirt. Thousands and thousands of whole families are going to have all the good land they need, and I’m-a going to be on one of them little twenty acres.”49 A fellow migrant picks up the thread: “Did you ever stop to think that th’ most, th’ best part of it is all th’ electric power this dam’s gonna turn out? . . . People at work all of th’ time on little farms, and whole bunches and bunches of people at work . . .”50 The scene provides a poignant counterpoint to the book’s opening image of desperate, out-of-work men confined to a boxcar. In Guthrie’s optimistic vision of imminent social and environmental renewal, a sophisticated irrigation system can end Western droughts and revitalize good farmland. In turn, productive land leads to an end to unemployment and massive displacement. Ideally, stewardship of the land will point the way to the redistribution of resources and wealth, a return to agrarian values, and a lifting of the nation’s mood. In his speech dedicating the opening of the Bonneville Dam, President Roosevelt lauded the project for its promise in preventing future Dust Bowls through irrigation.51 Likewise, Bound for Glory glorifies the dam system as a perfect— almost Divine—solution to the nation’s woes. In the final verse of Guthrie’s contemporaneous ballad “The Great Historical Bum” (also known as “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done”), a renewed United States, economically and emotionally lifted by the Columbia River Dam project, consolidates its strengths to defeat the forces of European fascism. The song’s eponymous narrator, as a self-described “bum,” adopts and elevates a loaded term often used by California authorities to dehumanize the homeless and indigent. The transhistorical narrator humorously describes a series of triumphs by common people, going back to the construction of the Egyptian pyramids, through the American Revolution and Civil War, ending with the Dust Bowl and construction of the Grand Coulee and Boulder Dams. The narrator describes the dams as an endpoint to history not simply for their immensity, but for the collective effort it requires to build them and, by extension, assist in the American effort against fascism overseas. For Guthrie, the publically funded dam is a tool of democracy and common wealth. The dam powerfully symbolizes redistribution: of resources, access, and prudently distributed wealth and power.52 In imitation of the migrantization of farm labor, the large-scale construction projects Guthrie admires still rely on itinerant labor. One could argue that the idealized dam builder in the Columbia River songs and the vilified boomchasers of Bound for Glory ultimately hold much in common.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

79

However, in one of his most enduring songs of the period, “Pastures of Plenty,” Guthrie contends that migration and citizenship, as well as private wealth and common wealth, are not mutually exclusive. The song’s composite narrator is the dignified, willing worker encountered both in Guthrie’s earlier ballads and in the pages of Bound for Glory, seeking seasonal work across the regions, suffering through substandard accommodation and treatment, perhaps sacrificing his or her health, yet still producing “green pastures of plenty” from once-depleted soil.53 In the final verse, Guthrie restates the main theme of Bound for Glory, and visualizes migrants banding together in a collective effort of wartime camaraderie and declaring themselves free from intimidation, in line with President Roosevelt’s January 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech. As a matter of citizenship, the cultivation of a land is a simple yet powerful declaration of belonging and a restatement of civil rights unjustly taken away. In contrast to the wildcatters and “suitcase farmers” who exacerbated the Dust Bowl by a sense of civic and economic over-entitlement, migrants, though unlikely stewards, sow the seeds of responsible citizenship. Guthrie’s civic/environmental imagination has its blind spots, however. In both Bound for Glory and his proenvironmental songs, men exclusively do the work of land and water preservation, while women keep the proverbial homefires burning. Guthrie’s solutions for environmental sustainability are resolutely liberal, humanist, and anthropocentric. As seen in his promotion of massive construction projects along the Columbia River, Guthrie seemed to cling to the equivocation of his time, wanting in essence to have it both ways and neatly subdivide the vast river into a “productive” area marked by massive hydroelectric dams and a scenic, natural “nonproductive” area. While Guthrie’s near-contemporary Aldo Leopold lamented the “breaking up” of land in the name of progress in his Sand County Almanac (1950), Guthrie celebrated manmade environmental change when it resulted in a more equitable distribution of wealth and common resources. For Guthrie, the collective act of building for the common good such an unprecedented superstructure as the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams with once-idle hands overrode his admiration of “unspoiled” nature. And we can only extrapolate how Guthrie would conceive of a more global, less nationalistic environmentalism. Just as Guthrie eludes simple political categorization, his place as environmentalist is a fluid one, as his environmental consciousness was subordinate to his veneration of citizenship and the ideal of American pluralism. Ironically, as Simon Frith observes, Guthrie’s Dust Bowl songs made their greatest impact with the urban intelligentsia, as migrants’ limited

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

80

Sounds of Resistance

leisure time and consumer choices led them mainly to the escapist music of Tin Pan Alley.54 Yet Guthrie’s patriotically tinged 1940s environmentalism was gradually absorbed into mainstream culture. In April 1966, the year before his death, Guthrie was awarded the Conservation Service Award from the U.S. Department of the Interior for his work for the Bonneville Dam Administration, along with congratulatory letters from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Senator Robert Kennedy. Udall, who was instrumental in the drafting of federal laws mandating clean air, water, and the protection of endangered species, commended Guthrie for depicting “our struggle to use the land and save it too,” thus promoting the type of pragmatic, technologically assisted use of resources proponents in recent years have termed “bright green” or “positive” environmentalism.55 In the years between Guthrie’s Columbia River song cycle and the U.S. folk revival of the early 1960s, though, folk music gravitated toward an antidevelopment, “back to the land” pastoralism. Even Guthrie’s symbol of social and environmental harmony, the building of hydroelectric dams in the Northwest, was decried in song by folksinger Katie Lee for its dramatic transformation of the natural landscape.56 Ironically, Guthrie’s environmental advocacy became obscured at a time when both his body of work and the environmental movement received its highest degree of attention. Guthrie’s colleague Pete Seeger embodied the type of conservationism most prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, one that conflated the local with the global, and viewed nationalism skeptically. As Seeger’s biographer David King Dunaway observes, the singer’s environmental efforts were in some ways a retreat from more confrontational political action. Frustrated with the stasis and factionalism among Civil Rights activists in the late 1960s, Seeger turned to environmentalism and led an effort to build a 106-foot-long sloop dubbed Clearwater to call attention to water pollution around his home in New York’s Hudson Valley.57 Rather than attempt to unite people nationwide along class lines or political affiliation, Seeger’s localized environmentalism called upon individuals’ consciences to make small changes in one’s outlook and commercial consumption. In the Hudson, Seeger found a symbol for the nation’s “green spaces” as a whole; in his advocacy and hands-on work reducing pollution along the river, Seeger modeled a type of resourcefulness smaller in scope, if not ambition, than Guthrie’s sweeping ideas of American progress. Guthrie’s expansive conception of land stewardship and owneroperated farms still has resonance today. Beginning in 1985, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp mounted annual Farm Aid benefit concerts to promote and financially support family farms. Initially organized to counter the high number of foreclosures of small farms in the Midwest,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

81

Farm Aid’s concern has grown in recent years to encompass the environmental advantages of small-scale farming (as opposed to the “chemically dependent” agriculture of the corporate farm), the dietary advantages of natural foods, and the sense of community engendered by direct dealings between grower and consumer. Farm Aid concerts typically spotlight performers stylistically indebted to Guthrie, from Bob Dylan to Steve Earle to Woody’s singer/songwriter son Arlo, underscoring his enduring influence more than a third of a century after his death. At the close of each year’s performance, the assembled musicians’ version of Guthrie’s most wellknown song, the anthemic “This Land Is Your Land,” not only serves as a rousing finale but also a fitting reminder of Guthrie’s far-reaching vision. Bound for Glory was written at a pivotal point in Woody Guthrie’s career, situated between his first draft of “This Land Is Your Land” in 1940 and its initial recording in 1944. Perhaps in the process of writing the novel and performing his songs for working people, Guthrie was still conceptualizing how and why “this land was made for you and me.” Depicting the Depression era as a crossroads, with the nation’s ideals and principles tested by hard times, Guthrie filtered the social conscience of Carey McWilliams and the candor of John Steinbeck through the poetic cadences of Walt Whitman and the populist spirit of folk music to express optimism and dignity in story and song, using both the natural and manmade environment of the American West as his backdrop. For Guthrie, neither the ghost town nor the policed migrant labor camp defines the United States so long as people commit themselves to developing the land sensibly and productively. The populist environmentalism of Bound for Glory, the Dust Bowl ballads, and the Columbia River song cycle deserves reconsideration as the United States reaches another crossroads, as pressing issues such as environmental protection, present-day migrant farm labor, and the rebuilding of New Orleans after the infrastructure failure following Hurricane Katrina compel the nation to find common ground, both internally and with its global neighbors, at a place where citizenship and stewardship meet.

Notes 1. Clifton Fadiman, “Books: Minstrel Boy,” The New Yorker, March 20, 1943, 68. 2. Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 8. 3. Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: Norton, 2004), 14. 4. Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (New York: Dutton, 1943), 115. 5. Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Dust Bowl (Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), 50.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

82

Sounds of Resistance

6. Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 109. 7. Mark Allan Jackson, Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), 56. 8. Woody Guthrie, “Dusty Old Dust,” in The Woody Guthrie Songbook, ed. Harold Leventhal and Marjorie Guthrie (New York: Today Press, 1976), 208–11. 9. Woody Guthrie, “Songs, People, Papers” n.d., in Woody Guthrie Archives, Manuscripts Series 1, Box 4, Folder 31. For all quotations and correspondence: Words by Woody Guthrie. © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 10. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 80. 11. Rick Wartzman, Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 166. 12. “Heading off the Tramps,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1936, A4. 13. Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980; repr., New York: Ballantine, 1986), 96–97. 14. Federal Writers’ Project, California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, 1939), 69. 15. Klein, Woody Guthrie, 81. 16. Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields (1935; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 310. 17. Gregory, American Exodus, 12–13. 18. Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 59. 19. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1996), 4–8. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid., 269–70. 22. See Barry Mazor, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 180. 23. Woody Guthrie, “Boomtown Bill,” in The Nearly Complete Collection of Woody Guthrie Folk Songs (New York: Ludlow Music, 1963), 18–19. 24. Woody Guthrie to Lee Hays, February 27, 1941, in Woody Guthrie Archives, Correspondence 1, Box 1, Folder 31. 25. Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 166–67. 26. Woody Guthrie to Lee Hays, February 27, 1941, in Woody Guthrie Archives, Correspondence 1, Box 1, Folder 31. 27. Ibid. 28. Woody Guthrie to Will Geer, February 27, 1941, in Woody Guthrie Archives, Correspondence 1, Box 1, Folder 18. 29. Ibid., Box 3, Folder 13. 30. Wartzman, Obscene in the Extreme, 28, 46, 186. 31. Alice Reichard, “California’s Adult Children,” Country Gentleman (February 1940), 9. 32. Ibid., 35.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Green Pastures of Plenty

83

33. Ronald D. Cohen, “Will Geer and Woody Guthrie: A Folk Music Friendship” in The Life, Music and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal, ed. John S. Partington (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 135. 34. Woody Guthrie, Woody Sez (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1975), 129–30. 35. Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 363. 36. Woody Guthrie, “America Singing: Author of ‘Bound for Glory’ Recalls What the Plain People Sing,” New York Times, April 4, 1943, 7. 37. Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, The Unpublished Writings of an American Folk Hero, ed. Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal (New York: Harper, 1990), 260–61. 38. McWilliams, Factories in the Fields, 301–03. 39. Carey McWilliams to Farm Security Administration, Arvin and Shafter Camps, March 19, 1941, in Woody Guthrie Archives, Correspondence 2, Box 3, Folder 44. 40. Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays, July 8, 1941, in Woody Guthrie Archives, Correspondence 1, Box 1, Folder 3. 41. Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 340. 42. Cray, Ramblin’ Man, 206–7. 43. John Greenway, “Woody Guthrie: The Man, the Land, the Understanding,” in The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival, ed. David A. DeTurk and A. Poulin Jr. (New York: Dell, 1967), 195. 44. Mark Pedelty, “Woody Guthrie and the Columbia River: Propaganda, Art, and Irony,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 3 (2008), 331. 45. See Timothy E. Scheurer, Born in the U.S.A.: The Myth of America in Popular Music from Colonial Times to the Present (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 156–57. 46. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bonneville Lock and Dam: In Celebration of Our Fiftieth Year (Portland, OR: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1987), n.p. 47. Woody Guthrie, “Washington Talking Blues,” Columbia River Collection (Rounder compact disc, 1987). 48. McWilliams, Factories in the Fields, 44. 49. Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 331–32. 50. Ibid., 332–33. 51. Egan, The Worst Hard Time, 307–8. 52. Guthrie, Songbook, 59–61. 53. Ibid., 182. 54. Simon Frith, “ ‘The Magic That Can Set You Free’: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community,” in Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 34. 55. Guthrie, Songbook, 48. 56. David Ingram, “ ‘My Dirty Stream’: Pete Seeger, American Folk Music, and Environmental Protest,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 1 (2008), 22. 57. David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 285–89.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 5

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets in Indigenous Hip-Hop North American Indian Influences in African American Music

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

T. Christopher Aplin

Hip-hop, a musical culture born in urban African American ghettos during the 1970s and 1980s, provides an important reminder about the historically consistent cosmopolitanism of indigenous North American peoples. Some readers will find this fact perplexing, a result of the intractable and well-documented gulf between expectations of what “Indian” histories and identities mean to non-Natives and their self-evident meanings within indigenous communities, themselves. Skeptics might pause to think: hip-hop is Black, and not Red; modern, not “traditional;” it is of the urban ghetto, not rural reservation; it is of the hood, not “of the world.”1 The properly confrontational, but honest hip-hop reproach to non-Native doubters: Get over it. We first begin to reconcile the unexpectedness of indigenous North American hip-hop by addressing widespread ignorance about indigenous interactions with African-derived peoples in the New World. In the earliest days of the colonial encounter, eastern woodlands tribes lived in close

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

86

Sounds of Resistance

proximity to and alongside African peoples in the American southeast. This closeness continued as many Africans accompanied those peoples of the Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole peoples) to the place then known as Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) in the first half of the 19th century. Their relationship continued as former slaves increasingly migrated to Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, as Oklahoma moved toward statehood in the early 20th century, and beyond.2 Together, the relationship between these ethnic groups in the often-overlooked state of Oklahoma quietly contributed to the emergence of an American musical identity that permeated the 20th century. In the many centuries that American Indians interacted and intermarried with, sheltered, and even enslaved African peoples, there have been many parallels and divergences in African and Native American experiences. The divergence of expectations regarding Indians and their hip-hop also resides partially in our own limited knowledge about who we imagine indigenous peoples are. Late 19th-century social–scientific thinking foolishly assumed the imminent extinction of the “Vanishing Indian”—an evolutionarily savage people belonging to a simpler stage of human development—before the onward march of progress, “civilization,” of modernity. American Indians did fade from a broader American consciousness in the 20th century, but not due to their presumed demise as culturally distinct peoples. While large populations of former slaves sought cultural integration in the urban centers of the American north, rural and reservationbound Native peoples linked to ancestral land in contrast emphasized their distinctiveness, their separatism that was a by-product of their tribal– national sovereignty in relationship to the U.S. government. Although the 2000 Census shows growth in indigenous populations, the impact of the earlier primitivist assumption still endures. So much so, that Indians still unreflectively represent to many noncommunity members an anomalous symbol of a horse-bound, buckskinned past absent technological modernity, including turntables (for scratching) and mics (for spitting). Native MCs wield hip-hop as a musical tool of resistance and protest. That is to say, the prophetic MCs, lyrics, and values of this modern musical genre promote not only resistance to enduring postcolonial social ills, but also protest vocally against antiquated cultural stereotypes that presume “Indian” peoples as both premodern and evolutionarily less complex. An important touchstone for reaffirming traditional values, indigenous hiphop demands recognition of the profound influence of indigenous North American peoples on American music, identity, and consciousness.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

87

This chapter focuses on indigenous musical interactions across ethnic divides, specifically those built in the encounter between American Indian and African American peoples of the United States. Hip-hop’s appeal has gone global across three decades of development. Its prevalence in the indigenous communities within the United States is only one indicator of its popularity spanning the modernizing cities of India, to the African savanna, to the urban Indians of Los Angeles and rural reservations throughout North America. Reservations certainly are not the urban ghettos of New York that gave life to hip-hop’s original vision. They share similarities, however, despite rural isolation—both house the marginalized survivors of colonial domination who too frequently dwell in poverty and suffer its related social ills, while experiencing social marginalization. As is a common African American convention, American Indian hiphop acts as a reminder of past civil rights struggles and motivator in current progressive movements that have increased in political influence since the turbulent 1960s. It is similarly self-referential in the samples and imagery that juxtapose hip-hop’s newness against the longevity of indigenous “tradition.” Many Native MCs and crews promote hip-hop culture in combination with religious and political consciousness as a vehicle for youth empowerment through cultural advocacy, political equality, and personal responsibility. For Native peoples, this amounts not to just social criticism but ideally to personal resistance, community activism, and social uplift. Although American Indian and African American experiences are broadly similar in many ways, this article nonetheless emphasizes how indigenous histories and experiences are uniquely articulated in hiphop performance. Scholar Tony Mitchell notes in Global Noise that many non-African American performances of hip-hop evident throughout the globe are too frequently assumed a “derivative outgrowth of an African American-owned idiom.”3 African American innovations were fundamental in the development of the blues, jazz, rock, and hip-hop, to be sure. But, indigenous hip-hop and this article suggests that, though little studied todate, American Indian music, history, and consciousness were also of significant influence in the construction of modern African American musical and cultural identities. This chapter profiles three distinctive, current indigenous MCs— RedCloud, Quese, Imc, and Emcee One—who come from and address the Native peoples of North America (including Mexico, the United States, and Canada) in a distinctive voice. Quese, RedCloud, and Emcee One’s efforts toward hip-hop empowerment are rooted in their upbringing, spirituality, and shared tribal “traditions.” Nevertheless, the way

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

88

Sounds of Resistance

each addresses common themes of historical interaction, social and geographic movement, and colonial oppression set the stage for understanding indigenous contributions to hip-hop performance and give a better idea of the way that each artist expresses personal identity and indigenous creds through music. Each MC represents a unique perspective in a spectrum of indigenous experience. An understanding of the music of these MCs shows how they utilize the conventions of the hip-hop genre to reappropriate and “indigenize” the musical genre and put it to work by and for indigenous communities. Through development of these three artists as case studies, this article concludes by suggesting that Native peoples do not simply make an “interesting” contribution to the hip-hop idiom commonly attributed to African American origins within the urban boroughs of New York City. Rather, this chapter lays the groundwork for an Indigenous-centered understanding for the origins of hip-hop—music form that has become an international phenomenon—in a way that better accounts for both the traditional basis of hip-hop in Native communities and the multilayered, cosmopolitan musical productions of both Native and African American peoples.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Keeping It Real: The Prophet MC and First-Person Biography Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, a New York–based street conscious advocacy group founded in the 1970s, established hip-hop musical culture upon four core performance elements: MCs (emcees), DJs (disc jockeys), B-boys and B-girls (break-dancers), and the “aerosol arts” (graffiti). The MCs of hip-hop practice are the performers of rap, those rappin’, or speaking rhythmically over a beat, over music. Ethnomusicologist Cheryl Keyes traces the origins of the MC back to the bardic traditions of West Africa and to the southern oral traditions of storytelling, singing and preaching, toasting and boasting African Americans.4 As the hip-hop artist most centrally concerned with the word—the message intended to stimulate audiences to action (whether to dance, to political action, to salvation)—the MC is the most prominent spokesman of the hip-hop doctrine. Hip-hop scholar Imani Perry insightfully describes the MC as displaying several qualities that express an almost prophetic nature to their hip-hop advocacy: the MCs act as spokesmen for, or represent, their community, or group; their lyrical narrative is open for sociological interpretations about the real, or truth of their message (“this is the documentary story of my world,” the MC tells us through rhyme); and their “organic brilliance” of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

89

person and message is “articulated via theological imagery,” giving the impression that they are “divine and divinely inspired.”5 A religiously inspired visionary, the MC is therefore a prophet that seeks to advocate for social change through action and message. Since the desire to “keep it real” is also a central tenet of rap, biography plays a significant role in defining the character and message of prophetic MCs. Biography allows the MC to proclaim deep links within some specific social community and thus narrate personal experience as a “real” depiction of caste, class, people, or “hood.” Through biography and the fidelity of their lyrical “real”-ness, MCs establish themselves as a representative of community and legitimate their prophetic vision. Quese, Imc, RedCloud, and Emcee One all share some common characteristics. All are of Indigenous/Latino heritage, were influenced by Christian theology (both positively and negatively), and were significantly impacted in youth by some of the difficult social issues that poor communities face. They each adhere to a tradition dating back to the earliest days of hip-hop and the activism of the Zulu Nation—RedCloud, Quese, and Emcee One provide outreach to youth in schools, community centers, various other institutional outlets, and even nightclubs through the promotion of political advocacy and personal empowerment. Each performer grew up listening to many types of rap, but was particularly influenced by the music and activities of the hip-hop “underground” and “conscious” rappers such as KRS-One, X-Clan, Public Enemy, Tribe Called Quest, and (more recently) Immortal Technique. Through the four elements of hip-hop, these goldenera rappers like Bambaataa encouraged youth to nonviolent confrontation, the exercise of political action, and the expansion of religious and cultural “consciousness,” of knowledge. Having experienced hip-hop’s earliest popularity, each MC would probably agree that the musical genre had lost some of its empowering character by the early millennium. RedCloud, for example, once noted the common divergence many hip-hop heads attest to: “Original hip hop was uplifting and positive. It gave somebody hope and changed people’s lives. It was street poetry anybody could relate to. Now, people are rapping about things that your average person can’t relate to—the cars, the diamonds, the money.”6 Emcee One echoes this sentiment in his song “Lukewarm II Hot,” where he transforms one of the raunchy, braggadocio storytelling, beatbox-and-rhyme classics of the hip-hop canon7 into a vehicle for a social “consciousness” message: “I miss that old La-Di-Da-Di, we like to party/ Now rap is just sex, sex, sex, kill somebody/It used to be an art, a spark for social change/And in some strange way I kinda miss them old days.”8

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

90

Sounds of Resistance

Although united by the positive aspects of hip-hop culture, the responses from the MCs have been mixed when asked whether their music, careers, and lives amounted to what one might define as activism. In an interview in which I asked about the role of activism in his work, Quese, for example, was straightforward in seeing a connection between his rhyme, conference work, and advocacy: The activism part is the part that involves our human rights as people; our rights to who we are as a people; our right to live; our right to want to live in peace; our right to want to protect this land, our way of life, our identity, our culture. So, I’ll always be an activist when it comes to bringing social awareness and empowerment to our people. Everything that was taken from our people, [I want] to . . . take it back and give it back to our people in the way that it was; to take it back to our people in the right way.9

In a written correspondence, Emcee One was careful to qualify and define “activism” in his own terms: [Activism is] a popular term . . . [that] most likely describes what I do . . . [if] it’s without the militant connotation it can have. [I have] the desire to get people to “act,” yes! But being described as an activist sometimes implies I belong to a certain political party, or fringe movement, and this I’m not. I am neither Dem[ocrat] or Republic[an]. I’m against domestic violence, rape, crime, murder, suicide, genocide, poverty, entitlement, ruggedness, drugs, alcohol, [and] teen pregnancy. I’m for health, wellness, youth empowerment, leadership, and moving people more together, than towards the fringe.10

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

RedCloud was ambivalent about the terms “activism,” or “activist,” or perhaps simply humble in his expectations of the contributions he could make in others’ lives: Well, maybe I’m not an activist. I like to know everything about it before I fight for it . . . I’m more of a student. I wouldn’t say that as far as [me being] an activist. I’m just a writer. I’m an entertainer. I’m a student. I’m a disciple. I think there has to be a middle way [between activism and self-indulgent hip hop narcissism]. By all means stand up for yourself. [But], see both sides of the story. I like to see it from all angles before I open my mouth . . . I’ve learned to pick my battles now. I’ve learned what to be upset at. I’ve learned what to stand up for. I’ve learned that I don’t have to stand up for everything that happens. I like to pick my battles. Give me a good one, and we’ll talk.11

Although distinct in their perceptions of their own activism, each of these MCs would likely agree with RedCloud’s answer to the follow-up question:

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

91

“Are there any particularly good [fights] that you have chosen?” RedCloud replied: “Standing up for my [Indigenous] people: Mexico, Canada, US. I like to fight for the little man. I hate bullies—whether a government, or a physical guy.” RedCloud, like his hip-hop colleagues, therefore instills this spirit into his lyrical rhyme, as well as into his community fundraising and performance activities. Quese, RedCloud, and Emcee One know each other and their work and have “battled” as emcees alongside and against each other. They share a good-natured professional competitiveness among themselves as friends and colleagues. They are also mutually reinforcing in their common goals of youth empowerment and are professional enough to rock the mic right with each other. Yet, their divergence on the role of “activism” in their work is only one contrast among many. The following section is intended to give us a basic biographical portrait of each MC that will help to bring the character of the personalities, music, and social motivations into clearer light.

The Christian, the Preacher—Emcee One

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Emcee One was born Marcus Anthony Guinn. He is of Osage/Potawatomi/ Delaware and Puerto Rican descent,12 with Oklahoma roots and a California hometown: San Jose. The son of a teen mother, Emcee One experienced a turbulent youth in an unstable family lacking economic resources and marked by sexual, substance, and physical abuse. His mother’s love for him, combined with the uncertainty of her erratic, self-destructive behavior, did the most to lay the foundation for the philosophical questions that One confronts through his rhyme. Through the even-handed influence of his grandmother, Beatrice Marie Guinn, One eventually turned to Christianity and secured the foundation he desired: Looking back it wasn’t me pulling myself out of harm’s way, it was creator God loving me before I loved him. I can look back now and clearly see times he kept me safe, and when I wasn’t safe, he comforted me through the storms. It’s funny to think of it like storms—in the bible Jesus describes the relationship with Him with the use of storms. He says (paraphrased) that 2 men build a house, one on sand the other on the rock. When the storm comes the one on the rock remains. My take: not because the HOUSE was any more worthy, but because the rock [the foundation, ed.] was!13

A self-described nondenominational “Bapticostal,” Marcus felt the salvation found through Christianity was “not by works [I] could boast of . . . but because He [God] reached down to us.” From that perspective, it

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

92

Sounds of Resistance

was God that entered Guinn’s life and changed it in a way that led the MC to compose rhyme and speak to motivate youth through workshops and conferences at tribal centers, detention centers, and schools. Alongside Brian and Marcus Frejo (or, Quese, Imc), One was among the original masterminds in creating both an annual Oklahoma City-based hip-hop showcase called Culture Shock and its mobile hip-hop crew correlate, Culture Shock Camp. With a shared history as drug and alcohol-free youth advocates, a common spirituality, and a love of hip-hop, members of Culture Shock promoted a positive message for youth during the peak of its activity in the late-1990s and early millennium. Although united in their empowering message, Culture Shock disagreed on the specifics of that message. When God “radically altered” One’s life, it changed his work with Culture Shock, as well: “So, during the change, we as a group began to disagree more and more. I became preachy and probably obnoxious at first . . . they would work the clubs . . . [and] musically I moved from clubs/car shows/ hip hop shows to . . . church shows.”14 The members of the original Culture Shock Camp continue to hold each other in high esteem and still represent the spirit of their original crew in individual performances as well as collaborative performances and occasional recording sessions. Religion changed Marcus’ life. Additionally, his interpersonal and hiphop language changed to that of an emphatic believer, almost preacher-like in its inwardly reflective, humbly confrontational advocacy for his religious faith. He currently operates a production company called Hundredfold/ One Innertainment that promotes his music and public-speaking activities. His rhyme and conference presentations are mutually reinforcing, addressing issues including making healthy lifestyle choices, developing healthy relationships (with emphasis on sexual abstinence and mutual respect), conflict resolution, and personal responsibility. Musical performance and public speaking have been part of One’s life during his time in Oregon, Washington State, Washington, DC, and throughout Oklahoma. His skills in music and public speaking have also taken him on travels to most states in the United States, every province in Canada (including indigenous communities north of the 60th parallel), and France.

The Indian Nationalist, the Teacher—Quese, Imc Known at different times as Marcus Frejo, Marcus Friese, Marcus Frejo Little Eagle, Quese Frejo, and Quese, the Emcee, Quese, Imc (as he is currently known) was born in Oklahoma City, of Pawnee/Seminole and Mexican heritage, and raised in Moore, Oklahoma. His Seminole people were a Green Corn practicing, Stomp Dance singing Eastern woodlands people

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

93

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

dislocated from the American southeast in the first half of the 19th century; his Skidi Pawnee were a prairie people religiously oriented by the stars. An Oklahoman at his roots, he was raised Southern Baptist in Oklahoma and in the Seminole “Indian” churches of Wewoka, Oklahoma. After attending Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, he returned to his older brother Brian Frejo, hip-hop, and the Oklahoma club scene. Quese began rapping at age 7, inspired in part by his older brother, Brian, who was once a DJ on local Oklahoma City FM radio with his own hip-hop show.15 Brian was, by Emcee One’s estimation, the individual that “put all the hustle” into organizing the initial Culture Shock event at the turn of the millenium.16 The dream of this event manifested itself for the Frejo Brothers, Emcee One, and their friend and collaborator, Sleepy Eye, late one night at a Denny’s in Oklahoma City on southwest 89th and Penn. Based upon the premise that “[non-Native Americans] think we still live in tepees and ride horses”17 the group clearly intended their musical and political statement to be a direct challenge to these and other existing stereotypes, as much as to highlight the talent of Native artists. The event saw a four-year run in Oklahoma and Texas and eventually gave way to a mobile configuration of artists—including Shock-B [Brian Frejo], Quese, Duo the Sik Prophet, Emcee One, Nemesis, and J.B.—performing both solo and collaboratively under the name Culture Shock Camp. As a solo artist, Quese is a humble, but unapologetic activist. This activism is a central part of his responsibilities with Culture Shock; with NVision, the Native nonprofit he helped found; and in his work with the Native American Rights Fund (a legal defense firm recently associated with the Cobell vs. Salazar decision).18 When suggested that his music communicated a “sense of indigenous nationalism,” Quese qualified the statement carefully with the following: I hear you say that word ‘nationalism’ . . . I say that it’s about bringing pride to our people to be proud about who we are—not on a separative level like we’re separate from [non-Indians] (because we’re humans, you know). But, at the same time we have our history and our history should not be overlooked and forgotten. But, unfortunately, it is. So, what do we have to do? We have to tell our story, in our way . . . I want notoriety for the struggle of our people, for the beauty of our people, for what we have come through, for where we are at, and where we are going to go. That is what I want to shine the light on.19

Although primarily interested in communicating on an indigenous community level, raising a sense of historical and cultural consciousness among non-Natives is equally important. His rhyme and the ease of his voice in

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

94

Sounds of Resistance

conversation give the impression of a patient scholar-teacher, welcoming and encouraging the listener along. While his rhyme is filled with his trademark poignancy, humor, and warm, forward-looking optimism, there is nonetheless a subtle frustration, a gently roiling unease that is an undertone to his language and betrays the pervasive ignorance he feels obscures knowledge of Native peoples’ fundamental contributions to American (and, subsequently World) history, knowledge, and identity. His desire to spread his message has taken him on tour throughout the United States, Canada, and to Western Europe (particularly to Germany). Quese recently returned to his Oklahoma roots from a seven-year residence in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Urban Cosmopolitan, the Trickster—RedCloud RedCloud was born of Huichol-Mexican descent and was raised in Compton-adjacent Hawthorne, California, during the late 1980s and early 1990s when gangster rap was storming the country. He was the offspring of a teen mother who surrendered his care to another family. His surrogate father was in a gang called Redondo 13 and his brothers were in Lawndale 13, so he discovered gang life, tattoos, and hip-hop early—he was “jumped into” Hawthorne’s Little Watts gang when he was in the sixth grade. He was about to skip school one day in eighth grade when he discovered that his middle school was hosting a hip-hop assembly. Instead of ditching, he decided to attend the performance by former gang members. The performers individually delivered tragic testimony of their life experiences through spoken statements and then performed them through hip-hop rhyme that urged students toward a life of peace over violence. The message resonated with RedCloud. The performers passed out flyers after the show promoting another “free concert.” RedCloud did not know when he arrived at that “free concert” the following Friday that it would be held at a church. These early experiences with community-outreach-oriented hip-hop and Christianity had a long-lasting impact on his life as he became a student of the Bible and honed his skills as an MC interested in similarly affecting young lives. RedCloud took his name from a respected war leader of the Lakota peoples at the close of the 19th century. It is interesting (and, funny) to note that he did not choose the name himself. The Huichol MC received the name from a Pechanga friend. As he recounted in an interview: “[My friend gave me that name] and then BOOM: [RedCloud mimics typing as though Googling the name ‘Red Cloud,’ squinting to determine what he would find] Oh—the war chief! Oh—he’s [Chief Red Cloud, ed.] undefeated [on

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

95

the battle field]. I’m undefeated [as a battle MC]! It’s as easy as that!”20 This story reveals the ease with which geographically distant tribal experiences (whether Huichol, Pechanga, or Lakota)21 are transposed and overlaid on top of individual hip-hop experiences in the modern day, as well as the comedic character that RedCloud brings to his conversations, performances, and recordings. This vignette usefully sets up the trickster-like nature of RedCloud’s character—he is difficult to pin geographically, culturally, and artistically. The playfulness of RedCloud, the artist, and the gravity of his personal history and community responsibilities rest in an ambiguous tension. In contrast to the devotion of Emcee One and the scholarly, self-critical analysis of Quese, RedCloud is a little harder to categorize. “I’m trying to avoid being pigeon-holed in the Native hip hop market,” he once told me. “I am also trying to avoid being put in the Christian rap category. I am a hip hop artist who happens to be Native.” Both Native and Christian are important aspects of RedCloud’s identity, as is, coincidentally, gangster. But more importantly, as an artist, he is a shape-shifting student of genre: “It’s what the song calls for,” he says simply, “If a song calls for me to lift somebody up, I’m going to lift somebody up. If the song calls for me to murder a rapper, I’m going to murder a rapper.”22 Despite common origins in indigenous communities, parallel roots in Christian theology, and allegiance to hip-hop culture, each of the MCs addressed in this chapter articulates his musical personality in characteristic ways. Their music contrasts most clearly when thought of by their thematic lyrical emphasis—as the devout Christian/preacher, the patient scholar/ teacher, the playful cosmopolitan/trickster. These archetypal characterizations are not without precedent in hip-hop practice: one need only think of Arrested Development’s Speech and Public Enemy’s Professor Griff and Flava Flav. Nevertheless, archetypal characterization takes one but a short distance to understanding their unique character, the diversity of modern indigenous experience, and the universality of hip-hop practice. There are certain shared themes that highlight the contrasting styles that define each MC. Each artist and his recordings are characterized by a specific quality of recorded sound and dynamic range. RedCloud and Emcee One are relatively “old-school” in their reliance on studio recordings, for example, and display a corresponding richness of dynamic audio range (RedCloud’s most recent 1491 Nation is of particular note for the depth of its West-Coast inspired bass end). Quese’s albums are “indie”-aesthetic recordings produced on the computer, generally raw in the quality of their rhythms, with the bass subordinated under the tap of the high-hat—a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

96

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

more East-Coast approach, with better rhythmic resemblance to the highend tautness of a Stomp Dance water drum and turtle shell shackles23 than the booming bass of an Alpine. Each artist also distinguishes himself by his choice of sampled music. Emcee One tends to favor straight R&B/funk, with a dash of rock as the musical foundation of his lyrical rhyme. He also typically remains focused on the arc of his storytelling, or (generally Christian) “message,” and allows only modest space for indigenous references, or hip-hop lyrical quotation. Quese, in contrast, mixes hip-hop, funk and broader pop-cultural and hip-hop references with “world”-like musical samples (such as layered bird song, gentle pentatonic melodies on Asiatic zithers, Latino-derived dances, and ceremonial, powwow, and Native popular music references). True to the fundamentals of his gangster upbringing, RedCloud mixes hiphop, funk, R&B, rock, and oldies, with an innovative twist in its measure of indigenous powwow. In all their musical differences and the distinctiveness of their individual biographies, the recorded output of each artist nonetheless displays parallels in thematic content. This in large part has to do with parallels in youthful experience and their collective knowledge of indigenous communities gained from visiting reservations in their musical travels. Issues of sexuality, substance abuse, domestic violence, oppression and dispossession, and the role of Christianity in their lives and communities are common to all. Nevertheless, all similarly express themselves defiantly, even optimistically, in their lyrical rhyme. In the process they present themselves to their audiences as examples of the potential for human achievement through individual agency and discipline, through religious reflection, and through worldly vision.

Religion Hip-hop’s edgy, urban irreverence has always conflicted with organized religion. Yet, African American hip-hop embodies a notable share of religious imagery and values, both from Islam and Christianity. Through conventional imagery, MCs espousing religious ideology promote the “truth” of their message and encourage listeners to self-reflection and, ultimately, selfknowledge based upon those truths. Imani Perry notes that, as prophets or shepherds, African American MCs lead the unaware, the black “invisible man” into “a powerful personage in society.”24 As unofficial ministers, rappers speak of hip-hop “as a calling and the mic as a tool allowing the MC to spiritually feed the audience.”25

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

97

Religious iconography and ideology has a place in Native American hip-hop, too, but its manifestation is distinctive to indigenous culture and history. Native relationships to Christianity are fraught with conflicting political, spiritual, and intellectual agendas, perhaps even more so than those of the African American community. Regarding Native North America, for example, past generations of scholars have typically avoided the serious study of indigenous Christian hymnody in part because the musical form was seen as something suspect, a genre of outside, “European” coercion indicative of indigenous cultural assimilation, acculturation, or to put it bluntly, “sell-out.” Scholars since the 1990s have become more interested in the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples. They have, as a result, begun evaluating Native appropriations of theology, the potential for indigenous hymns as a transmitter for community language, even Christianity and Christian song’s viability as a community-based “tradition.” Despite recent heightened interest in Christianity, indigenous communities in Oklahoma, for example, are still often subtly divided between powwow people and church people who continue to debate Christianity’s proper place. RedCloud, Quese, and Emcee One provide an informative glance into the various perspectives that inform contemporary relationships to Christianity. One’s devotional rhyme suggests Christianity is fundamental to his belief in the human capacity for change in songs such as “Tears (Jesus Wept),” or “I Forgive You,” as well as for the redemption he describes in songs such as “Shine,” and “Gotta Make Moves.” He is appropriately critical of the historical and contemporary shortcomings of imperfect individuals spreading a “perfect” gospel (taking on variously opportunists, doubters, and the violence of colonialists), but his overall commitment to faith, as represented in his recordings, is steadfast. In contrast, Quese displays an ambiguous relationship to Christianity through his music. Raised in the churches of Oklahoma, in the introduction to “Greencorn” he embraces the Christian hymn practices of his Seminole peoples. In “I Am My Ancestors,” however, he uses ethnographic snippets with indigenous peoples to critique Christianity as a tool of colonization. After a series of self-revelatory experiences as a young man, he is in many ways a reborn Native traditionalist dedicated to his Pawnee and Seminole heritage, their respective creators (Atias Tirawahat, of Pawnee tradition and Ofvnka for Seminole), and the iconography (stars and corn) of their rich ceremonials. RedCloud’s Christian orthodoxy is unique since his use of medical marijuana resulted in a split between him and his Christian record label, Syntax records in 2010. This parting of ways arose from divergences in state law, national law, and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

98

Sounds of Resistance

Christian morality. Cast out by his label, his most recent release 1491 Nation Presents: MC RedCloud is predominantly secular in lyrical and musical approach. Nevertheless, he maintains the same subtle, nonproselytizing, deeply personal certainty in his commitment to God, both in conversation and through modest lyrical statements that imply the presence of God in otherwise decadent subject matter (e.g., on “Get Tribal”). Native communities have long associated music and dance with nativist religion-based “revitalization movements,” from Handsome Lake in the American Northeast and Wovoka and the Ghost Dance in the West, among others. Sacred ceremonials have always linked religion to music and dance. As a musical form used to motivate and empower youth with community commitment, hip-hop in many ways seems an appropriate extension of this pattern. The marriage of sacred Christian theology to a secular, politically charged, often decadent musical genre frequently leads to the evaluation of some deep ideological conflicts between Christianity and indigenous peoples. This conflict, however, is essentially constructive, as it allows reflection on the agency of contemporary individuals who find philosophical resolution for underlying tensions and, ultimately, define their relationship to Christianity according to their own vision.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Social Consciousness Hip-hop is often music concerned with conflict and dysfunction, rage and psychological pain, and limited reference to stable familial and romantic relationships. It is worth remembering that RedCloud, Quese, and One are from broken homes that, in varying degrees, displayed internal stress from some combination of unexpected, or teen pregnancy, substance abuse, and violence (domestic or gang related). This cluster of issues provides a starting point for contextualizing the personal experiences of the MCs (and others they “represent”). Through life experience these issues became variables in an equation that each MC has confronted and sought to solve. As representatives of community, or peoples, these MCs describe in lyrical rhyme and public speaking the ways that their lives reflect these circumstances. They attempt to raise youth “consciousness” by pointing others of shared background away from common entrapments and toward the full development of their skills and human potential. MCs deliver these messages in album releases, live performances, and often also via workshops held at churches, schools, and community centers. None adhere to the common themes and types of activities that define a “consciousness”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

99

rapper at all times, but each artist was touched by the possibilities for social change that arise in hip-hop performance. All three MCs are concerned with dysfunction, psychological pain, and the absence of healthy relationships, a fact evident in their common development of prominent social themes including sex-love-relationships, substance abuse, and violence in their attempts to motivate and raise awareness within their audience. The dysfunction that arises where youth, sexuality, substance abuse, and domestic violence meet is of central concern in the writings of Emcee One, a by-product of their deeply personal meaning in his life and formative understanding of his world. Autobiographical songs like “Mom’s Song (Keep on Flying)” and “I Forgive You” provide concrete evidence of the destructiveness of substance dependency and domestic violence, and are also important documents of the power of personal change and forgiveness in emerging stronger from the perils of witnessing the self-destruction of others. Although Quese explores the difficulties of family life in tunes like “Celine,” “Luchando” (from Spanish, for “fighting,” or “struggling”) and the autobiographical track “Mad,” he also allows space for depicting romantic relationships through light-hearted sarcasm in “The Love that Hate Made” and “Mussy.” Quese opts for descriptive fiction in his song “Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles” (where he describes a homeless Indian community bound by the bottle finding redemption through traditional song) and metaphorical language in “Whiskey Bottles” (“Whiskey with the red man in a red dress and blood redness/With a red cape and some wampum and some red tape and a coffin”)26 to express the dangers of substance abuse. RedCloud’s poignant “Aquanet,” from 1491 Nation, articulates a multilayered position on substance abuse by performing a metaphorical intervention on the listener from the perspective of an authoritative counselor, providing sociological interpretation of reservation life, and describing his own personal struggles with mind-altering substances. Each MC also addresses various forms of violence that plague povertystricken communities, including domestic violence (“Mom’s Song [Keep on Flyin’],” by One; “Mad,” by Quese), suicide (“Billy Jean Left Hand,” by Quese; “P.S.A. Native American Suicide,” by One), and colonial and gang violence (through various songs such as “Battle of Little Big Horn,” “Boulevard Knights,” and even in the humorous fiction of “100 Cholos”). Each artist stresses the importance of making good, positive, or constructive decisions that lead away from the dangers of early sexuality, substance dependency, and physical violence, often by using their own personal

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

100

Sounds of Resistance

biography, or a fictional descriptive narrative to inform audiences of positive alternatives to negative circumstances.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Youth Empowerment through Self-Responsibility Each MC tends to perform at the same type of venues, such as churches, Native events, schools, and nightclubs. Churches are the primary venue for hip-hop performances by Emcee One. Approximately 80 percent of his performances now take place at church-sponsored events. RedCloud still gets an occasional church show, even though he is no longer affiliated with a Christian label. Native events typically describe any musical event hosted by a tribal body that might include youth wellness conferences, powwows, or a gig at a tribally run casino. RedCloud continues to perform at three prominent venue types: clubs, school shows, and Native events. His school performances entail work at both Native and non-Native facilities. This type of work is among his most important: “I love the schools—that’s how they found me. That’s how my life was changed: because they came to my school and took the time to love on me. So, I’ll always do schools, no matter what.”27 Native events like powwows “are good,” to him, “because I can also watch. I can be a student. I love when I’m allowed to be a student, as well.”28 Emcee One’s life as a performer has recently been eclipsed by his youth advocacy work. Although he recently recorded a new album, Introducing Again for the First Time: Emcee One, A.K.A Marcus Anthony (2012),29 he tends toward work with Church and Native-based wellness and youth advocacy projects involving public speaking and personal motivation. In 2011, he worked with the Warrior Leadership Summit (a tribal and nondenominational faith-based organization that motivates youth with “a hope that so many have found in the Christ”)30 and with the United National Indian Tribal Youth (or, UNITY, an organization that emphasizes cultural self-knowledge and encourages Native youth toward mental, social, physical, and spiritual wellness). Quese tends toward workshops on cultural awareness, empowerment, leadership, art, hip-hop performance, and suicide and alcohol prevention at reservation community centers, libraries, and powwows. Their advocacy work is weighty, but it does not represent the full extent of their performances. Quese played clubs in the Oklahoma City area for years, toured with the Vans Warped Tour twice, and performed at clubs, museums, and coffee shops in Los Angeles during his tenure there. RedCloud’s advocacy work is still on his mind, but he is at present thriving in his club work.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

101

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Empowerment toward Self-Responsibility It is generally argued that hip-hop is committed to Otherness. It holds sacred the reality of the disenfranchised, the socially and economically marginalized, particularly those arising from the ranks of the ethnic minority. Hip-hop is, by extension, “oppositional” in the fact that the marginal, or peripheral is placed as central, dedicated to a sense of antipathy in respect to a larger, presumably hegemonic society. Implicit in the character of hip-hop, then, is the assumption that the MC, as representative of hood and people, draws the strength of his character from the overall powerlessness of his social status. Each MC, of course, articulates the strength of his rebellious, oppositional subversion uniquely. Although Quese addresses indigenous struggle and long-standing stereotypes squarely, he tends to emphasize both community and individual growth through expansion of “consciousness,” awareness, or education. As a result he frequently portrays a future filled with prosperity and trans-national unity for indigenous peoples. Quese’s rhyme, as evident in “Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles,” is realistic about the social ills facing modern Native peoples. Nevertheless, he remains a visionary by consistently anchoring the listener in the strong roots of tradition, while still providing a genuinely hopeful, forward-looking path into the future. Arising from his personal biography and perhaps equally because he considers himself a redeemed sinner, Emcee One does not generally long for the past in the manner that Quese does. In direct, honest language, Emcee One universalizes his Christian philosophy for applicability in other peoples’ lives in songs such as “Shine,” and “Gotta Make Moves,” portraying the past as a mere starting point for future possibilities. He is also more confrontational in leadership and language than Quese. He gives no quarter and directly, but good naturedly, goads the listener to commit to personal and spiritual transformation through the energy of his own example. A unifying theme in the rhyme of RedCloud, Quese, and Emcee One is their stance that fulfillment of personal potential is the product of individual action, rather than of genetic or cultural predetermination, trauma, or curse. From their perspective, human achievement is a consequence of choice and discipline. As a technical MC and practitioner of martial arts, RedCloud models that discipline and reminds his audiences of their potential. “God Gave Rock and Roll to You,” from 1491 Nation, is one example of his sometimes conscious approach. Based on the Kiss song of the same name, RedCloud and his featured artists reveal biographical details of unnamed individuals who overcame poverty, violence, and defied the odds, only later revealing

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

102

Sounds of Resistance

their identities as the musical icons Ozzy Osbourne, Elvis Presley, and Bob Marley. The tale is intended to remind his listeners that they can excel, even coming from the most difficult of circumstances. It seems contradictory that the sense of empowerment that MCs like RedCloud, Quese, and Emcee One hope to instill through youth conference and school performance arises from a larger sense of powerlessness within their audience. But, the MCs act as symbols of personal attainment for their audiences by describing the travails of their origins and their personal victories as they struggled to rise above the difficulties they faced. They motivate their audiences to ground their struggles firmly in community, in religion, in tradition. They represent values such as ambition, motivation, and discipline in their quest for self-actualization. They also offer audiences hope that they, too, can overcome their struggles through a similar process of self-reflection and individual action.

Afro-Indian Intersections

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

And even as the soul of [hip-hop] music resonates with marginalized people of various nationalities and ethnicities, in its American form, it is overwhelmingly and fundamentally black American—and expressive of that experience.31

This chapter describes several conventional assumptions about African American hip-hop seen as central to the MC and the musical style, generally. These include the musical form’s emphasis on conflict, dysfunction, religious imagery, and civil rights and black power “nostalgia”;32 as well as the MC’s role as community representative and prophetic documenter of “the real.” As prominent, recurrent conventions of hip-hop culture, these characteristics are useful not only in thinking about indigenous varieties but also in acknowledging parallels in African and Native American hip-hop experiences. We can construct a postcolonial typology and see parallels in experience across the board: African-heritage peoples disenfranchised via exile and enslavement, indigenous North Americans via military conquest, land loss, and reservation consignment; post-1960s political countercultural organization and protest in opposition to a hegemonic, dominant order; and on-going struggles toward political and economic equality. It is interesting to note that it is not uncommon for both African and Native American peoples to state that they exist, or walk in “two worlds,” with a sense of Ralph Ellison-ian “invisibility” arising from the contested

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

103

negotiation between oppressed ethnicity and dominant hegemony. The statement places minorities as subalterns in political juxtaposition to an oppositional force. Yet, biographers have noted that the author of The Invisible Man was both proud to be a “wee-bit Creek” and influenced by a family patriarch known as J. D. Randolph—an Oklahoma-territory African American described by Ellison as having straight black hair, and what Ellison called “the highly-pitched, somewhat nasal timbre of an Indian tribesman” that herded ponies with Indians before joining the land run that formed Oklahoma City.33 What this suggests is that the worlds transversed by ethnic minorities—and, Americans generally—are more multifaceted than this sense of Black-and-White/Red-and-White duality suggests. In terms of American musical history, it is important for African and Native American peoples to stop looking past, or rendering invisible, the Other, and connect so that the full dynamism of American musical creation can be told with the greatest fidelity.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Indigenous Hip-Hop So, how has Native America influenced global hip-hop culture? Evidence of indigenous influence within American hip-hop has been modest, but mighty. Hip-hop evocations of Native cultures such as Nelly’s “Shake Ya Tailfeathers” (featuring P. Diddy, Murphy Lee, and the Florida Seminoles “Tomahawk Chop”), or Outkast’s “He-ya” (whose 2004 live Grammy performance mixed stereotyped sung vocables, tepees, and buckskin with Parliament Funkadelic intergalacticism) generally operate at the level of stereotype, or caricature. Yet, this tradition of popular cultural caricature strikes, if not at the heart of indigenous culture, then at least hip-hop culture. Mr. Wiggles, an early Puertorriqueño B-Boy was known for a fundamental break dance move known as the “Indian Step.” The classic hip-hop movie Warriors features a lead character known as “Cochise” (after the famed Chiricahua leader) and evokes postmodern urban gangland culture as reflective of an imagined premodern tribalism. One of the most sampled tracks in the hip-hop lexicon, “Apache,” by the Incredible Bongo Band (1973) was first manipulated by the Sugar Hill Gang, in their influential “Apache (Jump on it!)” (1981). The Sugar Hill Gang draws upon jumbled popular and historical old-West imagery (“Tonto, Jump on it! Jump on it!, Kemosabe, Jump on it! Jump on it!/Custer, Jump on it! Jump on it!, Apache, Jump on it! Jump on it”), a mimicked “war cry” ululation (made by quick clasping of hand to mouth), and rhyme playing with “Indian” and old-West imagery. Numerous artists

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

104

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

subsequently sampled “Apache,” including DJ Kool Herc, Run DMC, KRSOne, Missy Elliot, and Moby, among many others. These phenomena, the product of post-1970s urban cultures, presumably have little true connection to Native people or practices, except in the way that they evoke some vague “Indian” character to their creators. Indigenous hip-hoppers nonetheless commonly seize these popular images as ridiculous, or funny; with a postmodern sense of detached irony; or as meaningful reminders of the tremendous cultural ignorance of the larger nonindigenous world. For young Native MCs and other hip-hop community members they at the same time represent a tacit recognition of indigenous contributions to global hip-hop culture and consciousness. Sometimes panned by intellectuals,34 Native hip-hoppers often move to the grooves while appropriating cultural meaning for their own ends. Native and African American cultural intersections have been central to this article. Native MCs frequently utilize African American hip-hop conventions, such as the importance of the prophetic MC, the intermingling of religious and political imagery, and the role of social consciousness and youth empowerment. But, a bigger and perhaps more important question is what contributions have Native peoples made to existing hip-hop musical forms? During our interview for this article, I raised to Quese the orally debated, but generally unwritten belief among some ethnomusicologists that there were so-called “blues notes”—or, pentatonic pitch materials characterized by sliding ornamentations usually attributed to “African” origins—in the song styles of southeastern peoples. On this prompt, the MC took a moment to address his understanding of Seminole-African interactions in musical terms: Quese, Imc: That’s where they say the blues comes from—those Greencorn Stomp Dance songs. It’s not written . . . [but] what we were told a long time ago is that those Greencorn Stomp Dances were really powerful; And during a lot of the wars that they were singing those songs a lot. And those [escaped] slaves at that time were seeking refuge with the Seminole-Creek. And there are the blues notes [evident in Greencorn associated Stomp Dance songs]. They say that a lot of those songs the slaves really liked them. And at that time, the slaves were helping with war . . . you know for the Seminole to fight the United States Government. They say that [the slaves] liked the songs. They liked the tunes. [They say] that [the slaves] used those tunes and from those tunes came the Negro spirituals. And from those old spirituals came the blues. And from the blues came the jazz. From the jazz came the R&B/ Funk-Soul. And from the R&B/Funk-Soul came the hip hop. But, nobody is going to believe that because it is not written. And nobody wants to give credit to the indigenous people on this continent . . . [in part] because it takes away from a culture of another nationality.35

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

105

Quese here touches upon a little known, little explored part of history in suggesting that Native peoples might have made an unrecognized (or, “invisible”), but significant contribution to African American heritage. He inserts his Creek-Seminole and the indigenous people of North America, more generally, at the beginning of a cycle of musical development, and then presents himself and other hip-hoppers like him as a natural extension of a long, Afro-Indian development of American music.36 There is a broad compelling logic that guides this insight into the musical creations of Native and African American peoples. As noted in the introduction, eastern woodlands tribes such as Quese’s Seminole lived in close proximity to and alongside African peoples in the American southeast. The period of war that Quese speaks of in fact refers to the interactions of the “Seminole” peoples—or, those Creek, Choctaw, Yuchi, Yamasee, other mixed indigenous populations, and the escaped slaves and freedmen often called the “Black Seminole”—who fled American control of the plantation south for the generally unoccupied, Spanish-controlled lands of Florida. It was estimated that at the height of Afro-Indian interactions during the second Seminole War (1835–1842), approximately 800 Black Seminole, or self-liberated slaves were resident in villages adjacent to indigenous villages. Having intermarried with and adopted the language, dress, and customs of neighboring natives, historian Kenneth Porter noted that “the relationship between the blacks and the [Seminole] tribes people might be described as primitive democratic feudalism, with basically no personal inequality between the two groups.”37 As a result of the prominence of the civil rights movement within American national imagination and the undeniable innovations of African American musicians across the 20th century, studies of music making and cultural transmission tend to emphasize the impact of African-derived practices, such as music, upon Native nations. The comparative musicologist George Herzog, for example, wrote a 1939 paper entitled “African Influences in North American Indian Music,”38 that argues call-and-response song forms; cries, yells, and spoken parlando formulas; melodic modes; and a sense of improvisational spirit indicate considerable influence of African musical practices upon those songs associated with the ceremonial Greencorn as performed by Cherokees in the case of Herzog’s study, as well as Native southeastern peoples, generally. In a practice not uncommon to musical, cultural, and historical scholars, Herzog cites broad stylistic traits as evidence of an African imprint upon indigenous musical practices. But, the widespread dispersal of similar song and ceremonial forms by native nations ranging from present-day Louisiana, to Florida, and northward to New York indicates a considerable time-depth for indigenous (rather than African) development of call-and-response song

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

106

Sounds of Resistance

form. The generally resilient nature of ceremonial religious practices (which some argue are more conservative than other cultural areas in adapting the changes of outside influence) likewise suggests that many of the traits described by Herzog are of indigenous origin. Finally, since Herzog draws his conclusions based upon the Cherokee recordings of anthropologist Frank G. Speck, he never addresses how an African-derived minority so prominently influenced the more populous, slave-holding Cherokee majority. These silences in the work of Herzog draw attention to the many questions still left unanswered regarding Afro-Indian encounters with the United States. And until such questions can be convincingly answered, the possibility remains that the flow of influence in the 18th and 19th centuries was at least more reciprocal than generally assumed, if not inverse. Native and African Americans remained closely connected over centuries as Africans accompanied the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples during forced removals to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. The subsequent soldiery of the Black Seminole in both Mexico and Texas led them to continued interaction and conflict with indigenous peoples. The so-called Buffalo Soldiers of the U.S. Army importantly manned Western posts in the fight against indigenous nations from Oklahoma, to Arizona, to the northern Plains. For relocated southeastern tribes, specifically, Afro-Indian social interaction continued after 19th-century removals to “Indian Territory” and into the early 20th century as swing jazz began to evolve in the dancehall “territories” that linked Oklahoma to the emerging Kansas City sound. Saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker—that important bridge between the Kansas City swing and the internationalization of jazz—had indigenous roots due to his mother’s Oklahoma origins and Choctaw heritage.39 Writer Gene Lees notes that Dave Brubeck and Lena Horne, among numerous other jazz notables, had indigenous heritage.40 “There was Indian in Duke Ellington’s family,” adds Lees, noting that Ellington’s sister Ruth once told Dave Brubeck: “All the credit’s gone to the African for the wonderful rhythm in jazz, but I think a lot of it should go to the American Indian.”41 Well aware of this sparsely documented, generally unwritten truth, Quese, Imc gave the author and readers a moment to reflect on indigenous contributions to the articulation of modern American musical identity as he proudly proclaimed in interview: [O]ur people played a part in that [the creation of the blues and subsequent American musical culture]. What that tells me is: look how powerful that [Seminole Greencorn] music was. That music is a part of the world today because of what our people were able to do in our music.42

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

107

Certainly there have been many parallels between indigenous and African peoples over the centuries. Both display similarities in their musical aesthetic: the intermingling of the sacred, secular, and the political; the enunciation of text in a manner that confounds the boundaries between melody, speech, and rhythm; as well as the central place of rhythm, of a beat. Through hip-hop, Native and African American prophetic MCs have sought to promote youth empowerment through expanded consciousness of spiritual, historical, and political heritage, provoking individual audience members to personal and social change. The fundamental experience for Indigenous and African American hip-hoppers is their common economic disenfranchisement and isolation as ethnic minorities at the economic, geographic, and social margins of a modern nation. Despite broad commonality, the significant differences between distinct peoples and their musical creations cannot be overlooked, or rendered invisible. If 19th- and early 20th-century Indian lands and nations were known on one hand as a cultural refuge, even Eden for blacks from colonial American oppression,43 Afro-Indian relations are also nonetheless vexed by African slavery and citizenship within Indian territories.44 The romance and reality of Afro-Indian relationships took on additional layers of complexity in the 19th century as their political projects diverged: indigenous peoples fought for rights to predominantly rural ancestral land and the sovereignty of established tribal cultures and institutions from American intervention, while urban relocation of diasporic African Americans laid the groundwork for an integrationist struggle for civil rights that rivets U.S. national and popular memory still today. Indigenous hip-hop rhyme as a result documents themes of historical interaction, movement, and colonial oppression distinctively. Ralph Ellison, an Oklahoma-born, African American writer that cherished his multiethnic heritage, once noted: “There’s no denying the fact that Americans can be notoriously selective in the exercise of historical memory.”45 For Ellison, this fact was a natural result of America’s possession of two versions of history: one a written, nationalistic and stylized mythology, the other “unwritten and as chaotic and full of contradictions, changes of pace, and surprises as life itself.”46 Although Ellison refers to the divide between African American and broader American national memories, he nonetheless sees the recurrence of historical amnesia, the invisibility of the common humanity shared and developed across ethnic divide, as detrimental to the understanding of self- and national identity: By pushing significant details of our experience into the underground of written history, we not only overlook much which is positive, but we blur

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

108

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

our conceptions of where and who we are. Not only do we confuse our moral identity, but by ignoring such matters as the sharing of bloodlines and cultural traditions by groups of widely differing ethnic origins, and by overlooking the blending and metamorphosis of cultural forms which is so characteristic of our society, we misconceive our cultural identity. It is as though we dread to acknowledge the complex pluralistic nature of our society, and as a result we find ourselves stumbling upon our true national identity under circumstances in which we least expect to do so.47

Native contributions to broader American cultures and practices are too often relegated to the hazy mists of historical footnote, a fact attested to by the scholar of Indian history and experience, Philip Deloria: “The world we inhabit is the shared creation of all peoples, though the costs and benefits have been parceled out with astonishing inequality, as have the notions about who has been active in that creation and who has been acted on.”48 Yet, American Indians’ early status as the dominant ethnic population of this nation assures their influence was and indeed remains central to the character of both national and African American identity in the United States. Anthropologist and hip-hop scholar H. Sami Alim rightly notes that there is little that can be done to wrest the origins of hip-hop from African American authorship in the Bronx.49 Hip-hop cultures throughout the world have nevertheless claimed ownership of the musical form to address their individual senses of social marginalization, inequality, and struggle. Still more strikingly, other indigenous groups throughout the globe have exerted ownership by emphasizing hip-hop’s indigenous origins within localized communities.50 Yet, how many hip-hop heads, peoples, or cultures might truthfully claim direct influence in the authorship of the musical form, itself? For MCs like Quese, then, ancestral authorship of hip-hop allows indigenous people to refute cultural stereotypes that relegate indigenous experience to the past by highlighting their role in the construction of the modern global present. They in the process overthrow a sense of cultural invisibility and marginalization, thereby reclaiming their influential place within modern narratives about American social and musical identities. Quese humbly claims some share of Seminole authorship in hip-hop, due in part to documented histories shared and cultures built between indigenous and African-derived peoples in the American southeast and Oklahoma. Acknowledgement of indigenous contributions to African American histories does not “take away from another nationality,” as Quese noted in the quote that opened this section. Rather, as Ralph Ellison noted above, it defies and clarifies expectation. And, Quese’s statements regarding the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

109

active impact of Native Americans upon African American culture, identity, and music from early spirituals to hip-hop should be heeded. These cultural exchanges are uniquely American. They represent a history once invisible, but in need of being brought to light. Quese remains humble about this unwritten fact. He—like RedCloud, Emcee One, and many indigenous people throughout the United States—is waiting for the rest of us to catch on.

Artist Discography and Websites Emcee One. 2004. A Collection of Demos. One Innertainment. Emcee One. 2007. Somebody’s Gotta Tell’em. One Innertainment. Emcee One. 2011. Homepage. August 28, 2011. http://www.emceeone.com. Quese, Imc. 2002. Quese the Emcee. Self-produced demo. Quese, Imc. 2004. The Betty Lena Project. Makosee Music. Quese, Imc. 2007. Bluelight. Makosee Music. Quese, Imc. 2011. Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles. Makosee Music. Quese, Imc. 2011. Homepage. October 2, 2011. http://www.queseimcmusic.com. RedCloud. 2007. Hawthorne’s Most Wanted. Syntax Records. RedCloud. 2011. 1491 Nation Presents: MC RedCloud. 1491 Nation Records. RedCloud. 2011. Homepage. August 28, 2011. http://mcredcloud.bandcamp.com. RedCloud and Crystle Lightning. 2012. LightningCloud. http://lightningcloud .bandcamp.com.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. That is, African, not “Indian”; present, not past; integrated, not sovereign; and socially limited to the local, not the global. 2. Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland, eds., Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 3. Tony Mitchell, “Another Root—Hip hop Outside the USA,” in Global Noise: Rap and Hip hop Outside the USA, ed. Tony Mitchell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 10–11. 4. Cheryl Keyes, “At the Crossroads: Rap Music and Its African Nexus,” Ethnomusicology 40, no. 2 (1996), 225. Keyes sees rappin as having roots twice removed from its urban origin. Its genesis, Keyes says, is “traced from African bardic traditions.” These African traditions were later influential to “southern [American]based forms” developed by “storytellers, blues singers, preachers, toasters and prison boasters” before final migration and development in the American urban north. Keyes juxtaposition of blues singers, preachers, and prison boasters is in many ways suggestive of hip-hop’s ambiguous admixture of sacred and secular elements, a subject developed as a key theme of this current article, as well as its sister article, T. Christopher Aplin, “Expectation, Christianity, and Ownership in Indigenous Hip Hop: Religion in Rhyme with Emcee One, RedCloud, and Quese, Imc,” MUSICultures 39, no. 1 (2012), 42–69.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

110

Sounds of Resistance

5. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 38–39. 6. CBNMusic, Hip hop/RedCloud/Syntax Records, http://www.cbn.com/ cbnmusic/artists/RedCloud.aspx (accessed February 10, 2011). 7. Emcee One is drawing from Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew’s seminal b-side track “La Di Da Di” (1985), featuring Ricky D (also known as “Slick Rick”). 8. Emcee One, A Collection of Demos (One Innertainment, 2004). Reprinted with permission. 9. Quese, Imc (Marcus Frejo), interview by author, June 17, 2011, Pasadena Public Library, Pasadena, California (audio recording). 10. Emcee One (Marcus Guinn), personal correspondence with author, June 6, 2011. 11. RedCloud, interview by author, July 22, 2011, LaLa’s Argentine Grill, Studio City, California (audio recording). 12. Many Native North Americans identify themselves to others by stating their tribal affiliations, or allegiances (Kiowa, Choctaw; or, more frequently, their mixed ancestry, e.g., Kiowa/Comanche; Otoe/Pawnee). Marcus’s origins are even lengthier than most, but notes that it is important for him to represent himself fully when asked so he can stay “connected to the whole of myself.” His Osage heritage is the closest to him. The Osage are a seminomadic Siouan people originally from Arkansas and Missouri, later removed to Kansas, then Oklahoma. Their contemporary Osage Nation headquarters are located in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. The Potawatomi are an Algonquian-speaking Woodlands group originally from Indiana, later removed to Kansas, then Oklahoma. Their current headquarters are in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The Delaware Nation/Tribe is also an Algonquian-speaking Woodlands representative in Oklahoma. Originally resident of the east coast from Pennsylvania to New York, the Delawares were removed west to Indiana and later to Oklahoma. Their current headquarters are in Anadarko/Bartlesville, Oklahoma. 13. Emcee One, personal correspondence with author, June 6, 2011. 14. Ibid. 15. Allison Owings, Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutger’s University Press, 2011), 134. 16. Emcee One, personal correspondence with author, June 6, 2011. 17. Quese, Imc, interview by author, June 17, 2011. 18. Cobell v. Salazar is a class action lawsuit brought by American Indian representatives against the U.S. Department of Interior, suing for mismanagement of trust assets. Often stated to be the largest class action suit of its kind, the court found for the plaintiffs in December 2009, awarding Native peoples 3.4 billion in compensation. 19. Quese, Imc, interview by author, June 17, 2011. 20. RedCloud, interview by author, July 22, 2011. 21. The Huichol are indigenous peoples most commonly found in west-central Mexico, the Pechanga (a band of the Luiseno peoples) in Temecula, California, and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets

111

the Lakota in the northern Plains of the United States (in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Nebraska). 22. RedCloud, interview by author, July 22, 2011. 23. Eastern Woodlands Stomp Dance song performances are accompanied by the rhythmic shaking of turtle shell, or condensed milk can rattles, bound to a leather sleeve and tied around the calves of female “shell shakers.” A percussive idiophone, these rattles are also known as “shackles.” 24. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 149. 25. Ibid., 151. 26. Quese, Imc, Hand Drums for Whiskey Bottles (Makosee Music, 2011). 27. RedCloud, interview by author, July 22, 2011. 28. Ibid. 29. Currently available for download at http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ introducing-again-for-the-first/id547433396. 30. Emcee One (Marcus Guinn), personal correspondence with author, July 13, 2011. 31. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 2. 32. Ibid., 8; 54. 33. Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 7, 16. 34. Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 224–26. 35. Quese, Imc, interview by author, June 17, 2011. 36. Poet and Musician Joy Harjo echoes this sentiment in an interview: “when I hear our [Creek] music, I always think of Africa announcing itself as part of the mix. It also goes the other way. The root of blues, rock, and jazz is around that stomp dance fire, too, and it’s never, ever mentioned”; Eugene B. Redmond, “A Harbor of Sense: An Interview with Joy Harjo,” in Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, eds. Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 29. 37. Kenneth Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom Seeking People (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 6. 38. George Herzog, “African Influences in North American Indian Music,” in Papers Read at the International Congress of Musicology Held at New York, September 11th to 16th, 1939, eds. Arthur Mendel, Gustave Reese, and Gilbert Chase (New York: Music Educators’ National Conference for the American Musicological Society, 1944), 130–44. 39. Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 3. 40. Gene Lees, Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 39–40. Family lore and many publications indicate that Lena Horne has Blackfoot heritage, though a family history indicates heritage is more likely Creek, or Cherokee; see Gail Lumet Buckley, The Hornes: An American Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 35.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

112

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

41. Lees, Cats of Any Color, 40. 42. Quese, Imc, interview by author, June 17, 2011. 43. “If white America has been a wilderness of biblical proportions for African slaves and their descendants, Indian physical and relational landscapes have represented a new Eden for blacks, characterized by the possibilities of transformation,” Miles and Holland, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, 10–11. 44. Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 45. Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 124. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 125. 48. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 6. 49. H. Samy Alim et al., eds., Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7–9. 50. For an example of indigenous African, Australian Aboriginal, and New Zealand Maori origins of hip-hop, see Alastair Pennycook and Tony Mitchell, “Hip Hop as Dusty Foot Philosophy: Engaging Locality”, in Alim et al., Global Linguistic Flows, 25–42.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 6

Sight Syncs Sound Civil Rights Music, Robert Houston’s Photography, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Aaron Bryant

Robert Houston’s photography reflects a synchronicity between music, social movements, and visual culture. Whether its presence is explicit as the subject of a portrait or more subtle in its influence on the photograph’s mood and tone, the music and ideas of social movements are often the muse of Houston’s visual work. Focusing on images related to poverty and Martin Luther King Jr.’s final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC), this chapter will examine select photographs by Robert Houston to explore the connections he draws between his art, music, and social movements. From images of peace rallies and fundraisers to portraits of hymn and prayer, Houston crafted social commentary through visual documents that are as timeless as they are historically significant. Revelatory in their insight and innovative in their approach, Robert Houston’s images mark a critical shift in American history, while documenting music’s import to King’s crusade for human rights.

Background

The Poor People’s Movement Scholars have produced rich materials on the civil rights movement since King’s assassination in 1968. These materials, however, generally offer the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

114

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Robert Houston, Preach and Protest, Boston, MA: 1967. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

customary accounts of the period as they relate to King’s earlier campaigns as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) such as the demonstrations in Alabama, Mississippi, and Washington. Most civil rights photography and narrative histories only offer a cursory glance of the Poor People’s March, if they offer any commentary at all. Yet, the poverty movement is significant as the final crusade and chapter of King’s life. In the last year of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. faced severe criticism for his move beyond racial issues in the south to the broader concerns for human and economic justice nationwide. In 1967, against the backdrop of America as one of the richest, most powerful nations in the world, tens of millions of Americans lived in poverty. In a January 1968 intraorganizational document, the SCLC reported that 35 million Americans were classified as poor, while another 30 million lived just above the poverty line.1 Seeing this as a paradox of injustice in a nation of means and prosperity, King publicly challenged the economic gaps that he believed stood between the American dream and the nation’s realities. His intent was to expose the political relationship between race, class, and economic power. Equally controversial was the civil rights leader’s opposition to the Vietnam War. In denouncing Lyndon Johnson and the war in Asia, King openly confronted the federal government and severed ties with one of his most

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

115

influential political allies, the American president. The civil rights leader argued that investments in global conflict siphoned the critical resources needed for domestic programs that would help the nation’s poor. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” was overshadowed by a war in Asia, and political ideology abroad eclipsed the needs of Johnson’s “Great Society.” In an address before the Nation Institute at the Beverly-Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, King argued, “The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed domestic welfare programs, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.”2 As the war in Vietnam escalated, Johnson’s war on poverty waned. From the Appalachian to Western cities, poverty plagued America’s promise, while urban centers congested with hopelessness raged with riots and desperation. Sharecroppers earned pennies per day for the work they tendered on obstinate land bled of its promise and fertility. King, the SCLC, and other civil rights organizations, knew they had to provide America’s poor with hope and answers to poverty. For King, America’s economic imbalance had reached a crisis level. The progress of modernism brought advances in industrial and rural technologies that triggered unemployment in America’s urban centers and rural south. This widened the economic gap between the nation’s rich and poor and the gap seemed to grow exponentially. On March 15, 1967, Marian Wright, a young lawyer and activist working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Mississippi, appeared before Congress to offer her testimony on the living conditions of Mississippi’s poor. She spoke before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty to explain how farming mechanization and the reduction in cotton planting under federal subsidy programs left thousands in the Delta region jobless. Additionally, a federal programmatic shift from giving surplus food to the poor to requiring the purchase of monthly food stamps with money the poor did not have, left thousands of more people hungry. According to Wright, the results were disastrous.3 Wright testified a second time in April of that year as Congress held hearings in Jackson, Mississippi to evaluate the war on poverty. At Wright’s urging, a delegation of nine U.S. senators visited poor families in Mississippi to witness the extent of the region’s deprivation for themselves.4 After completing the tour and chronicling their observations, the delegation returned to the nation’s capital with recommendations for President Johnson. Senator Robert Kennedy led the mission. Moved by what he saw, he urged Wright to meet with King to discuss mobilizing the poor and bringing their cause to Washington. With an understanding of law and a firsthand knowledge of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

116

Sounds of Resistance

the impact legislation had on the nation’s underprivileged, Wright inspired a critical strategy to address poverty as a national issue. She proposed a movement in which America’s poor would converge in Washington to air their grievances before Congress. Taking their message of economic justice across the country, King and the SCLC began a “people-to-people” tour to recruit participants for a campaign, in which a national community would rally in Washington to protest for an “Economic Bill of Rights.” Each day, demonstrators would descend on the steps of federal agencies and congressional offices to demand jobs, equitable income, healthcare, and safe, affordable housing. Plans for the campaign suffered severe setbacks, however. King was assassinated days before protests were scheduled to launch and the movement lost focus and momentum. Perceptions of civil rights changed as the American public and media confused nonviolent protests with the waves of riots exploding across the country. The War in Vietnam and national fears and resistance to social change weakened the campaign’s efforts and base of support. Nonetheless, in King’s honor the movement continued and officially began in Washington on April 29, when 100 leaders met with federal representatives to present a poor people’s lists of demands. On April 30, Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as president of the SCLC, presented the campaign’s objectives in his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment, and Poverty.5 Abernathy’s summary included a call for new units of low-income housing; a repeal of welfare standards imposed by the 1967 Social Security Amendments; a free food stamp program; and an expanded school lunch program. He also requested collective bargaining rights for farmworkers; an emergency food program for 256 of the nation’s poorest counties; and partnerships between public and private entities to create one million jobs in 1968, and another million by 1972.6 Not all of Abernathy’s demands were met by the end of the campaign, but with extensions to existing federal programs and the creation of new ones, Congress responded to many of the campaign’s objectives with legislation that later reshaped America’s economic and cultural landscape.

Robert Houston’s Photography In the days following King’s assassination, Robert Houston left the security of his job as a lab technician in Boston to pursue a career as a documentary photographer full time. To honor King’s vision, Houston committed himself to capturing images that made a visual commentary on poverty and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

117

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

social injustice. This would be Houston’s contribution to the civil rights movement. While visiting publishers and photo agents in New York to present his portfolio of work, a chance encounter with the noted photographer Gordon Parks landed Houston one of the most significant opportunities of his career. Through Parks, Robert Houston was hired by Black Star, the leading photography agency at the time, and by May 1968, the agency had sent the photographer on assignment for Life magazine. Life assigned Houston to Washington, DC, to capture images of King’s poverty campaign. He left for Washington in May 1968 and lived among demonstrators to document their lives and daily protests. As an artist who emerged during the final years of the civil rights era, Houston differed from the more established photographers of the time, like Charles Moore, who often produced images of confrontation. By contrast, Houston’s images are reserved. They are subtle in their emotional intensity and distinguish themselves among the conventional images of civil rights that capture moments of aggressive action and mobilization. While photographers like Moore often focused on the heightened intensity of crowds, Houston portrayed the subtleties of humanity and the discrete ways in which struggle quietly manifests in everyday lives. The nuance of hands, a brow that furls with empathy, and thought and prayer caught in his subject’s eyes make an appeal to a sense of selfless understanding. In crafting social observations through images that are as timeless as they are historically significant, Houston’s photography disrupts the customary narratives of civil rights by introducing visual evidence that supports a different lens on the movement. He creates individual portraits of dignity to find nobility in places one might assume it could not exist. Through his portrayals of humanity, Houston captures portraits of hope in the resistance of everyday existence. This perspective helps to distinguish Houston from other photographers of the era.

Music, Movements, and Resource Mobilization In October 1967, for example, during his “people-to-people” tour to recruit participants and support for his poverty campaign, King held an antiwar rally and campaign fundraiser in Boston, where Houston photographed a rare series of images entitled At Boston Garden. The series includes previously unseen images of Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Dizzy Gillespie, and King taken months before King’s death. As Houston recalls, during the event, the civil rights leader addressed his audience with a variant of what is now one of his most well-known speeches, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

118

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

King delivered the address again months later in Memphis on the day before his assassination. Although cameras were not allowed in the arena, Houston, who had arrived early and befriended Belafonte during rehearsals for the night’s performance, was given special access to set up equipment to photograph the occasion. Stationed at the base of a platform that served as a stage, the photographer stood a few feet away from a lectern to capture a selection of unique portraits. The most unusual image is Houston’s King At Boston Garden 1. The photograph captures the civil rights leader in a matchless moment, in which he stands at a podium before an anxious audience. He is quiet, motionless, and still. There are no gestures of a preacher’s performativity or displays of heightened emotion. Instead, King is solemn, and as Houston remembers, prophetically at peace. The photographer captured an extraordinary moment in which King revealed himself from behind the veil of his public persona. Although the civil rights leader was one of the most recognizable figures of the 20th century, Houston portrayed him as accessible, human, and vulnerable in a rare moment of isolation. This humanity, as captured by Houston’s portrait, is the essence of what made King an effective leader.

Robert Houston, King at Boston Garden, Boston, MA: 1967. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

119

Anthony Oberschall (1993), in his theories on social movements and mobilization, argued that feelings of oppression imposed by an identified common enemy are not enough to rally groups around a social cause. There also must be compelling leadership and an organizational base with an expansive network of resources. Houston’s image of King taken during the concert in Boston is significant in its representation of a uniquely accessible and relatable icon of authority. King, after all, was president of one of the most influential organizations of the civil rights movement. While poverty in America always existed, the PPC evolved, as do most social movements, from more than a sudden emergence of grievances. In applying Oberschall’s thesis, the movement had organizational direction that leveraged its network, as well as shifts and gains in available resources, to create mobilization. This includes leadership with the resources and credibility to assemble communities around a common culture and cause for collective action. For King, music played an essential role in mobilizing these networks. It attracted communities, defined a common culture, and framed a mutual purpose around which groups could organize. King recognized that concert events, like the fundraiser in Boston, were a critical component of social movements as occasions to enlist public involvement and support. In addition to helping to raise money to fund the work done by organizations like the SCLC, concert rallies were a key to motivating and maintaining the drive and spirit of movement participants. Musicians and musical performances solicited media and public attention, while also activating communities and resources around collective identities that were tied to shared progress. Summarily, music rallies contained all of the necessary elements for social movement mobilization. First, concerts helped to open access to a support network of potential donors, participants, and other contributors. Second, music galvanized communities of individuals by framing the critical issues that the movement addressed. Third, concert rallies helped to remove the mental barriers to participation, with music as a gateway or cultural bridge to action. Further, music mobilized traditions, reshaped a common sense of culture, and articulated a communal identity and purpose. On November 22, 1966, for example, King wrote a letter to Harry Belafonte, in which the civil rights leader discussed the need for creating political agency for the poor through building a multiracial coalition. The letter requested Belafonte’s support and assistance in organizing a Freedom Festival. The festival would be a rally and fundraiser at the Houston Astrodome scheduled for February 1967. In the document, King’s language demonstrates confidence in Belafonte’s ability to rally the contributions of other

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

120

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

artists whose participation would give the movement, in King’s words, a “renewed courage and vigor.”7 By the time King wrote the letter, of course, the two men had been personal friends and colleagues in the movement for 10 years. They first met in 1956, when King contacted Belafonte to arrange a meeting in New York at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. In his personal memoir, Belafonte recalls their introduction and describes King, even then, as being concerned with American’s poor and alleviating poverty.8 At Abyssinian, Belafonte committed his support to King and the cause for civil rights, and in the 12 years that followed, the entertainer was consistent in contributing his resources to the movement. Belafonte began by making donations to the Montgomery Improvement Association in support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Later, the entertainer toured and produced concerts and fundraisers with other actors and musicians as headliners, including friends such as Frank Sinatra, Dizzy Gillespie, Sidney Poitier, and Sammy Davis Jr.

Robert Houston, Poitier and Belafonte at Boston Garden, Boston, MA: 1967. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

121

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Belafonte’s close friend Poitier hosted the rally and fundraiser that Houston attended in Boston, while Dizzy Gillespie and Belafonte were headlined as featured acts. On October 27, the day following the concert, the Boston Globe reported that Belafonte brought the audience of 9,000 people to its feet.9 This suggests that through an alliance with popular entertainers and icons of music, the poor people’s movement gained credibility and access to a greater number and diversity of people and resources through the appeal and support of musicians. The moral and public messages of the crusade were associated with recognizable, trusted figures who could link a new vision of social change to and through their music and its preexisting culture. This culture included a network of performers, fans, and other supporters. Such a strategy facilitates the resource mobilization process that is necessary for social movements by making participant recruitment, communications, media relations, and fundraising efforts more effective and “target specific.” As a niche or subgroup demographic, musicians and entertainers share a network that is exclusive to group members or industry insiders. This social and cultural capital is more easily accessed and mobilized by group

Robert Houston, Belafonte at Boston Garden, Boston, MA: 1967. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

122

Sounds of Resistance

members, like Belafonte, who could marshal support through a direct recruitment effort. As sociologist Craig Jenkins observed, the “bloc recruitment” of established groups is the most efficient method of recruiting protest participants, particularly for large social movements.10 King’s concert rallies demonstrate how the potential for a group’s enlistment in a movement can be determined by the extent to which members are part of a preexisting culture. When various groups meet within the public sphere of a performance space to engage a collective culture, these gatherings serve as potential sites for mobilized action. Music, therefore, becomes a cognitive tool of praxis and galvanization.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Music, Culture, and Cognitive Praxis Churches are another example of public spheres in which members interact to create a shared culture of performativity and praxis. Within the church, this is done through rituals, sermons, biblical narratives, and of course, music. As Gary Fine explains in his examination of social movement discourse and group culture, an organization such as a church can serve as a site of engagement and cultural enactment, where values are formed and invested with shared meanings. Group participation, therefore, provides an arena for organizing the processes involved in cultural work. This includes identity formation, ritual action, as well as resource mobilization.11 Traditionally in African American communities, church congregations and their musical traditions were discursive sites for culture and ideology. Within the church, culture and ideology are propagated through the narratives and practices of traditions and rituals that become a part of everyday life. Prayers before each meal, weekly Bible meetings, choir rehearsals, and beginning and ending gatherings with prayer and song each help to build a sense of collective identity through a consciousness and practice of ritual and traditions. The church provides a set of symbols and representations that are related to ideas that become meaningful through their performance. Conceptually, protest marches and “political demonstrations” are also “performative demonstrations” of culture. As the performance of music in church is an expression in which group cultures gain power, agency, and significance through a ritual of collective action, the same holds true for the performance of music and freedom songs in social movements. Hermeneutically, the songs and lyrics are interpretations of ideologies that frame an understanding of the world. As part of the rituals and traditions of social movements, the performance of ideology and culture through music links collective thought and action with the cultural meanings and symbols of movement participants.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

123

As Aldon Morris observed, during the civil rights era, black churches filled an institutional void by offering guidance and support to a diverse group of oppressed communities. They were also environments that disciplined, trained, and developed potential leaders. Further, the church was an outlet for social and artistic expression, as well as a discursive space for engaging social and political issues. Through the narratives of sermon, testimony, and song, the church offered meaningful cultural symbols and practices that engendered hope, enthusiasm, and resilience in its members.12 Robert Houston captures these ideas in his photograph Hymn, Protest, and Prayer. It is through a collective frame of ritual, hope, and resilience that a social movement builds unity between its members, and the unity of hope and resilience is often expressed through music. Houston recalls that in the moment he captured this particular image, police officers had warned demonstrators that if they kneeled and prayed, they would be arrested. In spite of the warning, protesters kneeled, prayed, and sang hymns and freedom songs. Seeing the irony of hope and prayer as acts of resistance, Houston captured the moment as a commentary on democracy and the power of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. The image’s subject matter is not only cultural, it is ideological in that by producing a collective culture and belief system through prayer and song as acts of resistance, one creates solidarity between group members. During the civil rights era, gospel songs, hymns, and spirituals were transformed into freedom songs, in which compositions, in the tradition of Negro spirituals, helped demonstrators sustain solidarity through a cognitive praxis of hope and resolve. In addition to being consumers of music, civil rights demonstrators reconceived cultural traditions to evolve and transform music to meet the needs of the movement discourse. Traditions were modified through a catalytic intervention facilitated by the movement’s consciousness. As Eyerman and Jamison maintain, demonstrators refer to and revive traditions, while simultaneously changing them. Both the social movement and its political actors reinterpret established, collective structures of meaning that make a new form of communication and action possible.13 Robert Houston’s Hymn, Protest, and Prayer documents a moment of cultural and political intervention where music facilitates mobilization through recontextualizing traditions.

Civil Rights and Folk Traditions Modifying cultural traditions to challenge political ones demonstrates how, within cultural–political mediations, new forms of expressions emerge

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

124

Sounds of Resistance

through social movements. The song “We Shall Overcome” offers an example of this idea. The composition’s history reflects the ways in which movements can connect generations by making use of and transforming the past. Originally, “We Shall Overcome” was a Negro spiritual known as “I’ll Overcome” or “I’ll Be All Right.” Charles Tindley, a black minister in Philadelphia, revised the spiritual in 1901, with a European-style arrangement. He entitled the song “I’ll Overcome Some Day.” In Charleston, South Carolina, the spiritual was adopted by the American Tobacco Workers Union during the strike of 1945, where the song’s lyrics and title were changed to “We Will Overcome.” In that instance, by changing the subject “I” to a collective “We,” the lyrics were transformed into a discourse of solidarity to reflect the needs of a group, rather than the individual, in the present and projected future. Lucille Simmons, a tobacco worker, taught the latter version of the song to Zilphia Horton, music director of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Horton later shared the composition with Pete Seeger, who helped transform the spiritual into a freedom song of the civil rights movement. Since that time, the composition has come to symbolize contemporary social movements, as an anthem of civil rights and a trope for human justice around the world. As Seeger recalls:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

But the song really got around in the spring of 1960, when Guy [Carawan]. . . organized and helped run a South-wide workshop at Highlander on songs for the civil rights movement. And three weeks later some of those who had attended the workshop sang the song with Guy at the founding convention of SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] in Raleigh, North Carolina, for several hundred black and white students. Within a few months, it was known as the unofficial theme song of the movement.14

Carawan, who was musical director at the Highlander Folk School in the 1960s, remembers the early civil rights workshops he conducted, in which he suggested modifying the lyrics to serve the needs of the movement. According to Carawan, “sometimes people would be suddenly moved to change a word—like Bernice Johnson Reagon did when she changed ‘over my head in the air’ to ‘FREEDOM in the air’—and something happened. People realized that these were their songs,” Carawan continued, “and they could change them to express what they were feeling.”15 From spirituals and hymns that were transformed into freedom songs, the music created by artists like Reagon, Seeger, and Carawan was a reflection of the synergy between the civil rights movement and folk traditions. Music positioned civil rights as a democratic movement that was by and for the people.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

125

During the PPC, Ralph Rinzler, a folklorist and the assistant secretary for public service at the Smithsonian Institution, mobilized his network resources to serve an essential role in organizing the campaign’s cultural programs. Rinzler, a founding director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, secured commitments from both the Newport Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution to support music and children’s programming in Resurrection City. The Smithsonian provided performance space, equipment, and other materials. Although many of the programs were held inside the encampment’s Folk Cultural Center, Rinzler secured other venues, including the auditorium at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, the Museum of History and Technology’s Concert Shell at West Potomac Park, as well as smaller stages along the National Mall. From May 20 through May 24, for example, the Highlander Folk School conducted a Poor People’s Cultural Workshop at the Glen Kirk Presbyterian Retreat Center in Gainsville, Virginia. Although the center was located 25 miles outside the nation’s capital, the workshop, which Carawan and his colleague at Highlander Anne Romasco coordinated, was part of Resurrection City’s cultural programs. Conrad Browne, Highlander’s associate director, Myles Horton, Highlander’s cofounder, and Ralph Rinzler were also part of the workshop committee.16 Recognized for his work at Highlander, including his collaborations with Carawan and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Alan Lomax worked with Rinzler to organize daily programs for the campaign, along with Jimmy Collier and Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, an activist and folksinger who worked with King before becoming a SNCC official. Kirkpatrick was Resurrection City’s cultural program director, with Collier serving as his assistant. Lomax and Kirkpatrick had collaborated in the past as musicians who performed and recorded with Pete Seeger. In their vision for the campaign’s cultural programs, the musicians planned daily rehearsals and gatherings with community leaders and teachers who would learn freedom songs and share their ideas for mobilizing communities through music. Kirkpatrick and Collier prepared the lyric sheets for freedom songs, which protesters rehearsed and sang during demonstrations. Kirkpatrick and Collier also shared a prior relationship, having collaborated a few months earlier in a performance at Carnegie Hall. Additionally, the two musicians had recorded two albums together and were preparing for a national tour. In describing their partnership and vision for the PPC, Kirkpatrick stated, “All Jimmy and I are doing is try[ing] to reach folks’ hearts and minds, and change ’em from the inside. If we can learn to like each other’s culture,” he continued, “we can learn to like each other.”17

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

126

Sounds of Resistance

Robert Houston, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick Leading a Workshop in Resurrection City, Washington, DC: 1968. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Music, Discourse, and the Public Sphere “Testimony Meetings” also were scheduled each week where freedom songs were sung and networks were created by participants who shared their personal experiences and narratives. Additionally, the center was a site in which musicians of different races and cultures could exchange music, share performance techniques and histories, and collaborate on composing songs to create new music for the movement. This is an example of how the music of social movements helps to create new traditions and cultures. In an internal document to articulate a vision for cultural programs, Kirkpatrick and Lomax outlined the following objectives: To develop knowledge, understanding, and pride in the cultural heritage of the marchers—the black Afro-American, the Latin American, the Appalachian, the Indian. To use song and dance and folk-drama in expressing the political aspirations of the marchers and to train and develop cultural workers and leaders in those skills. To enrich the life of the marchers and help build an exciting and fulfilling cultural life in Resurrection City and other campsites. To involve the marchers in active, creative cultural expression.18

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

127

Every gathering began and ended with freedom songs and demonstrators sang before and after a major speech. Children were taught singing games, which they performed onstage before an audience. Program planners organized a Poor People’s Action Theatre that was modeled after the Teatro Campesino, a performance organization of farm workers in California. Additionally, programs included weekly Sunday People’s Revival Meetings at the Reflecting Pool along the mall. As the “Program for Poor People’s Culture” explains: For generations, most Americans have spent their Sundays in church, singing, worshiping and preaching and praying. The Poor People’s March, a deeply religious movement has its own approach here. Every Sunday it will invite the churches, the choirs, the ministers, the religious of the whole Washington area to worship together, to sing together, to consider the problems of this country together. . . The first of these meetings take place this Sunday. Next Sunday, Mahalia Jackson will be the star attraction and we should work to make it a smooth gathering.19

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

With an understanding that churches were a key resource for mobilization, other “singing ministers,” in addition to Kirkpatrick, were invited to participate in the campaign’s cultural programs, including Pearly Brown,

Robert Houston, Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin Exercising His Vocal Cords at Resurrection City, Washington, DC: 1968. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

128

Sounds of Resistance

C. J. Johnson, and Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, father of the legendary soul and gospel singer Aretha Franklin. Kirkpatrick and Collier referred to their culture tent as the “Many Faces Soul Center” and it would serve as a focus of Resurrection City’s public sphere. According to Soul Force, the SCLC’s journal, while the Soul Center was used primarily as a location for music-related projects, including talent shows and performances by musicians like Pete Seeger and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, the tent was also a site for council meetings and press seminars where protesters could meet with members of the media to “educate them about the real story of the Campaign.”20 Additionally, the tent was a site for personal stories, where demonstrators, through sharing their life histories, reinforced and stabilized their sense of unity and identity. The participation of respected musicians like Franklin, Kirkpatrick, and Seeger in this kind of programming endorsed the poor people’s cause and reinforced their sense of legitimacy and purpose. Solidarity was expressed and formed through a discourse of traditions shaped by music as a cultural site of ideological performativity. The tent and the music itself were discursive spheres or arenas in which individuals sang to mobilize and frame common issues. Known for his R&B compositions “A Lonely Man” and “The Man and the Woman,” which were recorded by the Chi-Lites, for example, J. Edward Haycraft contributed several compositions to the Soul Center’s songbook, including “Mother Take Me Back,” “Keep on Flowing Dreamy River,” “Peace on Earth,” and “In Resurrection City.”21 Through music and cultural programming as opportunities for discourse, individuals and groups were able to influence and generate the cohesion needed for political action. Jürgen Habermas argues that although they differ in the size and makeup of their publics, style of proceedings, climate of debates, and epistemic orientations, discursive arenas are ongoing, organized discussions that have several conditions in common. In his analysis on politics and discourse, Habermas notes three important characteristics that are shared by public spheres. First, there are no hierarchies or presuppositions that an equality of status exists, because public spheres disregard status. Second, there is a “domain of common concern” around which the public assembles to create a discourse to challenge and interrogate mainstream ideologies. Third, public spheres are inclusive.22 The civil rights movement in general and the PPC in particular, constructed discursive sites that met each of these criteria through music and cultural programming. Social movements, therefore, as a discursive space, are cultural arenas in which narratives are expressed through engagement. It is through these

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

129

spheres of interaction that movement participants strengthen their commitment to one another and the movement as a mutual cause. As churches, concert fundraisers, and rallies demonstrate, organizations can utilize culture to mobilize its members through the individuation of established traditions and the production of a movement culture through ritual. The vision and strategy behind the PPC’s cultural programs makes this point. Within the civil rights movement, this maneuver was most effectively employed through music and other forms of expression. As a symbol and cultural resource, music provided what Ann Swidler refers to as a “tool kit” that is used to produce meaning and structure.23 When groups have the collective tools to generate new forms of ideology and culture, a community emerges around issues of cultural and political solidarity and identity. As the involvement of figures like Carawan, Kirkpatrick, and Collier demonstrates, therefore, musicians were essential to reaching and teaching communities, spreading the campaign’s message, engaging communities through interaction, and building a sense of group purpose.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Identity, Agency, and Blues as Resistance Among the portraits of musicians that Houston photographed, the one he seems most proud of is his image of Kirkpatrick in which the musician seems to stand as a solitary figure. Houston captured the portrait at an angle below the guitarist with the sky as a frame or backdrop. The vantage point from which Houston shot the image heightens the impression that Kirkpatrick was, as his friends remembered, a “gentle giant.” Houston portrays the musician’s stature as imposing, while his facial expression remains nonthreatening and even comforting. This visual paradox mirrors a contradiction in the assumptions one might have of Kirkpatrick based on his history with the Deacons for Defense and Justice, as well as the Black Panther Party. Known for his advocacy through music, with such recordings as “Everybody’s Got a Right to Live,” “We’re Gonna Walk the Streets of Washington,” “The Cities Are Burning,” and “The Fires of Napalm,” Kirkpatrick was a valued colleague among folk musicians and leaders of the civil rights movement. A large man at six-feet-two-inches and two-hundred eighty six pounds, in 1964, the former defensive tackle for the Dallas Texans was involved in organizing the Deacons for Defense, an armed, self-defense, civil rights group founded in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The organization was formed to protect voter registration volunteers working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) from attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Although

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

130

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkpatrick was considered mild mannered by most people who knew him, the Deacons were considered a militant group that the mainstream later compared to the Black Panthers. After graduating from Grambling with a degree in Biology, Kirkpatrick spent 9 years teaching science in southern high schools and African American teachers colleges. He was dismissed from Grambling for his militancy, and later expelled from Texas Southern University where he was working toward a master’s degree in Sociology. Kirkpatrick got involved with the Deacons of Defense following the 1965 racial events in Bogalusa, Louisiana.24 In 1966, the musician brought the SNCC to Houston, Texas. Not unlike other civil rights activists of his generation, “Kirk,” as he was called in Resurrection City, aggressively advocated for civil rights and Black Power in the south. To inspire student involvement in the civil rights movement, the musician organized interracial teach-ins at Texas Southern University, Rice University, and the University of Houston. He also helped students to organize demonstrations at Texas Women’s University. Houston’s portrait of Kirkpatrick is minimalist in its approach and content. With few visual distractions, the viewer’s gaze focuses on the guitarist and the photographer’s impressions of the musician’s essential nature. Kirkpatrick carries his instrument and is neatly dressed in a simple

Robert Houston, Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Resurrection City, Washington, DC: 1968. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

131

shirt and denim work jacket that is manufactured with brass buttons by Lee. This was a typical uniform for many activists. Denim clothing, work shirts, and jackets symbolized modesty and a solidarity with farm and industrial laborers. There are no rings on the musician’s fingers or printed fabrics to distract from the visual reserve of his clothing. The photograph is austere, which heightens the subject’s humility. Clouds add subtle depth and texture to the image’s background, while part of a tree emerges from the photograph’s lower-right corner to add additional layers and textures. The tree also defines a vantage point or perspective on the photographer’s angle and Kirkpatrick’s spatial relationship to the ground, tree, and sky. The folk singer’s stature is further heightened by the illusion that the tree reaches only to his shoulder. Through scenic choices in content and composition, the image suggests a spatial and philosophical link between Kirkpatrick and his music, stature, and environment. Although it appears he is strumming his guitar, one cannot be sure whether the musician is also singing, humming, or pensively mute. A review of additional images from the series suggests that Kirkpatrick is engaged in each: quietly singing and perhaps, humming in meditation. One might assume the guitarist was performing for a crowd, but because of the photograph’s minimalist content and the angularity of its vantage point and composition, the portrait also suggests, semiotically, that when Houston captured the image, Kirkpatrick was performing alone, for himself and God. The sky as a prominent backdrop or frame might support this reading. It seems the singer stood in isolation, silent with his mouth closed and his eyes focused, as he concentrated into the distance. As with his portrait of King in Boston, through capturing a moment of Kirkpatrick’s silence, Houston portrayed a quiet, unpretentious, and perhaps vulnerable side of a figure whose identity was often associated with the force of his voice and the power of his words. Revealing the multiple layers of an individual’s essential nature is another distinguishing feature that separates Houston’s photographs from other civil rights images. With a simple shot, this particular portrait of Kirkpatrick raises questions about the complexities of identity, subjectivity, agency, and consciousness. With an image that captures both the folk and blues as musical and social ideas, Houston is making a subconscious commentary on identity, blues ideology, folk traditions, and their historical relationship to social justice. As noted by Eyerman and Jamison: The country blues emerged at about the same time as DuBois was articulating the characteristic double consciousness of “black folks.” As the nineteenth

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

132

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

century came to an end, blacks in the South were subjected to massive violence and oppression, and a segregated social order was being put into place, with “separate but equal” laws and rules and institutions for blacks and whites. No longer were the sorrow songs of the slaves sufficient to express this contradictory condition of free and not-free; a new form of collective music came forth, which can be seen to have translated the ambiguous social situation into words and stories. The blues helped rural blacks make sense of their emerging double consciousness, which was of a different order than the relatively benign dual identity that DuBois articulated for middle-class blacks in the North.25

Central to the construction of identities and the concept of “double consciousness” is the notion that subjectivity is always shifting and revealing fragments of a multiple self. The self assumes an identity or subject position that shifts and adapts to changes in one’s environment, circumstance, or social conditions. This subconscious or cognitive maneuver is created in order to negotiate the relational parameters that define the extent to which one belongs or “fits in.” Along these lines, subjectivity is discursively produced within public and psychological spheres. Engaging the discourse will shape one’s subjectivity from which an individual can make meaning and sense of their environment as a discourse participant. Individuals or subject positions are not only discursive products, they shape the discourse and, thus, their own subjectivity within the dialectic of a public space. This suggests that within discursive subjectivities, one has the agency of self-determination, which opens opportunities for an individual to create actions that produce change. This includes change to one’s self and their environment. Carawan suggested these ideas when he observed that while teaching freedom songs at Highlander, “People realized that these were their songs and they could change them to express what they were feeling.”26 Recognition that an individual has discursive subjectivity and self-determination produces self-realization and awareness. This shapes an identity in which the knowledge of one’s agency produces a new social consciousness where an individual recognizes they have a voice— musical, political, or otherwise. These ideas, which Houston reflects in his photography, are part of a blues ideology and the consciousness raising of civil rights music. Songs of the movement helped individuals to speak their identities and sing themselves into existence. As in the Cartesian je pense donc je suis or cogito ergo sum, the blues ideology proclaims “I sing, therefore, I am” and music becomes the foundation of knowledge and existence. As Kirkpatrick once stated, the answer to solving America’s racial problems

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

133

is to “let a man be what he is . . . Don’t try to make him into something else.”27 The blues and music of social movements allowed individuals to sing themselves into being. From the industrialization of southern Reconstruction to the modernism of the 1960s, the blues, with its subject “I” as a personal testimony in a narrative “we,” was critical to the identity formation and cultural expression of social change. As such, the minimalism of Houston’s portrait of Kirkpatrick is significant to the photograph’s aesthetic and social commentary. The image demonstrates the photographer’s efficiency in focusing on the subject’s essential nature and, in a modernist way, reducing the content to its essence. In principle, Houston portrays Kirkpatrick as he is rather than making “him into something else.” While the denim represents a present and historical connection to farm and industrial laborers, the guitar signifies a past in folk and blues tradition, and Kirkpatrick’s gaze suggests, “I think, I sing, therefore, I am.” History has recorded the civil rights movement as a series of large-scale demonstrations, marches, and group confrontations. Robert Houston, however, saw the movement through a lens of individual subjectivities and traditions that were mobilized into collective action. As an artist, Houston often concentrated on portraits of individuals and the discrete ways in which protest quietly manifested in everyday lives. For Houston, individual hope is the key to mass resistance, and hope exists in the seconds split by his camera’s lens. Like the blues, Houston captures a subject “I” to represent a collective “We.” Additionally, in his photograph of Kirkpatrick, the musician symbolizes the individual’s engagement in social movements through the principles and practice of protest that are both lived and thought. At once cerebral and existential, it is protest in its most nonviolent form in which one’s continued existence is a form of resilience and protest. As Eyerman and Jamison argued, “the exemplary action of music and art is lived as well as thought: it is cognitive, but it also draws on more emotive aspects of human consciousness. As cultural expression,” the scholars continue, “exemplary action is self-revealing and thus a symbolic representation of the individual and the collective which are the movement.”28 The blues, like social movements, is culture and culture is cognitive, as well as emotive, in its relationship to group consciousness and identity. Emerging from the work songs, field hollers, and spirituals of an agrarian past, the blues served as an articulation of personal and group experiences, or a “We” told through the narratives of a subject “I.” Houston Baker notes:

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

134

Sounds of Resistance

The blues performance is further suggestive if economic conditions of AfroAmerican existence are brought to mind. Standing at the juncture, or railhead, the singer draws into his repertoire hollers, cries, whoops, and moans of black men and women working in fields without recompense. The performance can be cryptically conceived, therefore, in terms suggested by the bluesman Booker White, who has said: “The foundation of the blues is working behind a mule way back in slavery.” As a force, the blues matrix defines itself as a network mediating poverty and abundance . . . Many instances of the blues performance contain lyrical inscription of both existential lack and commercial possibility.29

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Thus, as previously argued and as Eyerman, Jamison, and Baker might attest, an individual’s blues represent the lives of a collective. In his image Blues and Guitar, for example, a “blues matrix” serves as an essential trope

Robert Houston, Blues and Guitar, Crestwood, VA: 1966. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

135

in Houston’s commentary on poverty and social justice. The subject of the portrait is a guitarist, who sits on the edge of a bed and performs while Houston captures his image. In his younger years, the bluesman earned a living as a migrant farmer who traveled along the east coast to work on southern farms for room and board. He lost his left eye in a “jook joint” brawl and has spent his entire life poor and struggling with ailments and misfortune. Houston relays this story each time he is asked about the image. When Houston shot the photograph for his portfolio on poverty and civil rights, the guitarist was working on a farm in Virginia, and because of his age and partial blindness, the musician spent most of his days playing his instrument and taking care of the other farmers’ children. The photograph is set in a horse stable where migrant workers slept and lived. As a migrant laborer, the guitarist spent most seasons traveling from Florida to Virginia looking for work, so he carried limited material possessions. He owned a few items of clothing and shoes, his personal memories, his blues, and a guitar. While the image captures privation, Houston also portrays existential resilience and the redemption of the blues, its customs, and its connection to folk histories. In many ways, the photograph materializes Amiri Baraka’s distinction of the blues, in that it reveals “something of deep cultural significance about the nature of African American existence in America, and, by extension, the nature of American society as a whole.”30 This image differs from other photographs Houston has taken of poverty. If the crisp edges and high contrasts of the 1960s and civil rights photography seem more inspired by technology, the modernism of jazz, and the energy of a post-Beat generation, then Houston’s Blues and Guitar visually replicates the blues and a folk aesthetic of a New Deal America. The image’s form and content are more reminiscent of photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers during the Depression. Rather than creating the contemporary flat, sharp lines, and surfaces of civil rights photojournalism, Houston uses a painter’s eye to construct the illusion of three dimensionality. By manipulating the image’s background, the photographer creates multiple surfaces and textures. He expands the image’s depth of field and layers of dimensions by adjusting the camera’s shutter speed and F-stop. In channeling the Pictorialist movement, Houston imposes an impressionist blur on the setting behind the photograph’s subject to extend the background and create the illusion of depth and multidimensionality. A pole, shoe bag, chest, and mirror to the left of the guitarist heightens the distinctions between the musician as the primary plane of sight and the secondary plane that is subtly blurred by

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

136

Sounds of Resistance

the physics of distance and the photographer’s technique. Just as the FSA photographers made visual commentaries on New Deal legislation during the Great Depression, Houston comments on law and civil rights during an era of Johnson’s War on Poverty. This particular method of photographing folk traditions and the blues matrix directly contrasts the minimalist approach of Houston’s portrait of Kirkpatrick. Together, the two images capture an historical trajectory of Baraka’s blues and blues as a form of protest culture. One image portrays the Delta music aesthetic of a post-Reconstruction and Depression era south while the other image represents the late modernism of civil rights. Not unlike the creative strategies of the folk music and freedom songs of the civil rights movement, Houston extends back into history to modify historical traditions and make them relevant to social movements in the present day.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

King’s “Blues Transformation” Months following the Chicago Demonstrations of 1966, King traveled to Mississippi to march and protest the shooting of James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. During the “Meredith March Against Fear,” the civil rights leader along with a delegation of SCLC representatives visited a school house in Marks, Mississippi, a rural town in Quitman County along the Delta. King experienced what Clyde Woods referred to as a “blues transformation,” that would inspire the PPC years later.31 According to Woods, the emergence of the blues marked a “Third Reconstruction.” Similar to Houston’s image Blues and Guitar, the blues was a form of cultural expression, social theory, and a critique of a plantation economy in the south. As a form of folk discourse, the blues emerged in reaction to economic and sociopolitical restructuring in the Delta during a post-Reconstruction period. Inspired by his visit and affected by a subconscious blues ideology, King’s poverty movement would emerge as the civil rights leader, Marian Wright, and Robert Kennedy sought to address the poverty and quality of life in Mississippi. While touring the Delta, King witnessed the consequences of the plantation economy and the economic factors that were a foundation for the exploitation of farm laborers. According to Woods, this would ignite the blues and the poor people’s movement as acts of resistance. As a form of cognitive praxis, the blues would be both knowledge-bearing ideology and truth-producing culture created as a means of agency and survival in a racialized economy. It represented a desire to create a culture of autonomous

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

137

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Robert Houston, Blues and Guitar, Wilmington, DE: 1967. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

communities and realities that were independent of a plantation system, which was also the ideological basis of the PPC. When blacks migrated from the south to the north to find work in industrial centers, the blues migrated with them as a connection to and reminder of folk traditions. Understanding the history of the blues and its ability to bring northern and southern cultures together, Alan Lomax mobilized the support of his colleague and friend Muddy Waters for the Poor People’s March. Lomax, in his capacity as a folklorist, is credited with “discovering” Waters in 1941, after recording the musician in Stovall, Mississippi, for the Library of Congress. Waters was unique among blues guitarists. He combined musical influences that appealed to audiences across race and generations in both the north and south, which was appropriate for King’s vision of the poverty movement. The musician produced electronic music that echoed the angst and energy of urban centers, while remaining culturally rooted in the Delta. Lomax contacted Waters and the bluesman agreed to come to Washington, along with Little Walter, Otis Spann, and the guitarist Willie Dixon. By Wednesday, May 15, Rinzler’s secretary, Elizabeth Michaels, spoke with Waters by telephone to discuss his visit to Resurrection City. Michaels followed the conversation with a letter dated May 16, to confirm travel

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

138

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Robert Houston, Cultural Program at Resurrection City, Washington, DC: 1968. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

arrangements. “You will be driving to Washington,” she wrote, “leaving Friday evening, May 17, and arriving in Washington, sometime Saturday, May 18, in time for an afternoon performance to be followed by an evening concert.” The letter included a check for $800 to cover travel expenses for Waters, his driver, and a seven-piece band. The group would receive an additional $500 after arriving on May 18 at the SCLC offices on U Street in Washington.32 On the day of the concert, Alan Lomax called the SCLC’s U Street headquarters to confirm Waters’ arrival. Reportedly, no one in the office had seen or heard from the bluesman or his band. Taking a chance on finding the musicians at Resurrection City, Lomax went to the concert site to look for Waters at the National Mall. Performances would take place at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in front of the Reflecting Pool. When Lomax arrived onsite, he noticed a Cadillac with its windows down parked in the shade. Approaching the car, the folklorist found Waters and his musicians resting. Waters was at the wheel. The group had left Chicago at 9 P.M. the night before and arrived in Washington the following morning in time for breakfast. Although the band had stopped by the SCLC headquarters earlier that morning, staff in the office was uncertain about the band’s instructions.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

139

Waters then decided to wait at the performance site near Resurrection City. After Lomax arrived, the group set up their equipment. They would perform Saturday afternoon on the same site where King had once stood and Marian Anderson sang to challenge racial injustice. In recounting Waters’ performance, Lomax wrote:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The audience, folks from the ghettos of the Midwest and the Deep South, knew this sound. It was theirs. They danced it into being on a thousand nights in barrooms and at house parties. Now the old Delta music, rechristened rhythm and blues, was on stage in the nation’s capital. A roar of applause swept across the Reflecting Pool into Lincoln’s marble house. The politicians might not be listening, but soon the whole world would be dancing to this beat and singing the blues.33

Countless other musicians provided support and resources to make invaluable contributions to the PPC. In a letter, dated May 30 to Elliot Hoffman of the Newport Folk Festival, for example, actor and folk musician Theodore Bikel sent two checks to Hoffman in support of Rinzler’s music festival and cultural programs. Bikel also contacted Paul Schrade, former director of the United Auto Workers in California, to discuss rallying support from the Delano workers Teatro Campesino, the United Farm Workers’ theater in California. Additionally, Bikel had conversations with Jack Golodner about getting support from the musicians union in Washington, DC. At the time, Bikel was working in Las Vegas in his celebrated performance of Teyve, the lead character in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” The actor and folk singer closed his letter with a commitment to arrange with Rinzler a visit to Washington and a “handshake tour” of Resurrection City.34 Bessie Jones, a founding member of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, is another example of the vital role musicians played in the PPC. Jones made the commitment to live in Resurrection City for three weeks, and during that time, she engaged demonstrators through her music, and according to Rinzler, the singer was a “constant source of material and enthusiasm.”35 Jones made arrangements to arrive in Washington the same day as Waters, Saturday, May 18. She would leave Brunswick, Georgia on a Greyhound bus that Friday evening and arrive in Washington Saturday afternoon. While performers like Bernice Johnson Reagon and Pete Seeger conducted workshops to help build morale and unity among the adult demonstrators, Jones conducted children’s programs during the afternoons and evenings several times a week.36

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

140

Sounds of Resistance

Coda

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

For many musicians who participated in the PPC, their performances were more than concerts for a social cause. They created public spheres in which artists and audiences consumed and produced a movement culture of political voice and agency. From compositions like “Black and Blue” and “We Shall Overcome” to jazz sets in clubs and music festivals, music has played a critical role in building solidarity between communities around shared political and social issues. Artists like Duke Ellington had performed for organizations like the NAACP since the 1930s. Other entertainers such as Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Louis Armstrong also leveraged their talent and notoriety to take stands against social injustice. In 1960, the Freedom Now Suite, a five-part composition composed by Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr., presented a musical narrative on racial inequalities in America and South Africa. In addition to making free copies of the album available to organizations for fundraising purposes, in January 1961, Roach performed the suite at a benefit concert at the Village Gate in New York.

Robert Houston, Dizzy Gillespie Performing at Resurrection City, Washington, DC: 1968. (Image courtesy of Robert Houston. Used with permission.)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sight Syncs Sound

141

As his reliance on the support of friends like Harry Belafonte and Dizzy Gillespie suggests, King recognized this impact music has had on mobilizing communities around a discourse of civil and human justice. In support of the Highlander Research and Education Center, for example, the civil rights leader wrote, “I have attended meetings at Highlander. The philosophy and activities of [the] Highlander Center . . . are similar to those of [the] SCLC.”37 He believed, as history has proven, there was strong synergy between music and social movements. Whether it was the Delta blues, the folk music of Appalachia, or jazz in New York City, music made significant contributions to civil rights and social justice. As noted in his opening address at the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, King stated: God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph . . . Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.38

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Through motivating communities, framing critical issues, and creating a shared culture of identity and purpose, as this passage suggests and Houston’s images prove, music was a catalyst to meaningful social action during King’s final crusade, the PPC.

Notes 1. Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “Poor People in America: Economic Fact Sheet for the Poor People’s Campaign, January 1968,” Organizational Records, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Records (SCLC), 1954– 1970, The Poor People’s Campaign, Series VIII, Office of Economic Opportunity April–June 1968, The King Library and Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. The actual numbers for America’s poor varied based on the definitions of poverty and statistical measures used. Poverty classifications changed due to fluctuating variables. For example, the poverty line is relative to time and agencies applied different criteria to measure and define deprivation. For this report, the SCLC set the poverty line

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

142

Sounds of Resistance

at $3,130 per year for a family of four and $1,540 for an individual, which were similar to figures used by the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1968. 2. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” speech presented at the Nation Institute, Los Angeles, February 25, 1967, Manuscript Collection, The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968, The King Library and Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. 3. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Examining the War on Poverty, Part 1: Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, 90th Congr., 1st sess., March 15, 1967, 157–68. 4. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Examining the War on Poverty, Part 2: Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, 90th Congr., 1st sess., April 10, 1967, 642–58. 5. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Employment and Training Legislation: Hearings on S. 3063; S. 3249; S. 2938 before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, 90th Congr., 2nd sess., April 30, 1968, 279–91. 6. Ralph D. Abernathy, “Statement of the Reverend Dr. Ralph David Abernathy, President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference before the Senate Committee on Manpower, Employment, and Poverty, 30 April 1968,” Organizational Records, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Records (SCLC), 1954–1970, The Poor People’s Campaign, Series VIII, Ralph D. Abernathy Statements April–June 1968, The King Library and Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. 7. Martin Luther King Jr., letter to Harry Belafonte, November 22, 1966, Manuscript Collection, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929–1968, The King Library and Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. 8. Harry Belafonte and Michael Shnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2011), 198. 9. William J. Fripp, “King Attacks Vietnam War Costs at Hub Concert to Aid ‘Exodus’,” Boston Globe, October 28, 1967, 1, 4. 10. J. Craig Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983), 538. 11. Gary Alan Fine, “Public Narration and Group Culture: Discerning Discourse in Social Movements,” in Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1995), 130. 12. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 5. 13. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 160. 14. Pete Seeger and Bob Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 8. 15. Ibid., 39. 16. Ralph Rinzler, Workshop Announcement, n.d., Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sight Syncs Sound

143

17. William Clopton Jr., “A Big, Angry Man Turns Nonviolent,” The Washington Post, June 17, 1968, sec. B6. 18. Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick and Alan Lomax, Program for Poor Peoples’ Culture, n.d., Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1 19. Ibid., 3. 20. Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “Soul Center,” Soul Force 1, no. 4 (June 19, 1968), 6; Organizational Records, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Records (SCLC), 1954–1970, The Poor People’s Campaign, Series VIII, Soul Force (June 1968), The King Library and Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. 21. Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “Songs of the Poor,” Soul Force 1, no. 4 (June 19, 1968), 11; Organizational Records, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Records (SCLC), 1954–1970, The Poor People’s Campaign, Series VIII, Soul Force (June 1968), The King Library and Archives, Atlanta, Georgia. 22. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), 36. 23. Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 24, no. 2 (April 1986), 273. 24. Clopton, “A Big, Angry Man Turns Nonviolent,” sec. B1, B6. 25. Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 76. 26. Seeger and Reiser, Everybody Says Freedom, 39. 27. Clopton, “A Big, Angry Man Turns Nonviolent,” B6. 28. Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 23. 29. Houston A. Baker Jr.,“Belief, Theory, and Blues: Notes for a Post-Structuralist Criticism of Afro-American Literature,” in African American Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 234. 30. Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963), ix. 31. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998), 187. 32. Elizabeth C. Michaels, letter to Muddy Waters, May 16, 1968, Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 33. Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Delta, 1993), 422. 34. Theodore Bikel, letter to Elliot Hoffman, May 30, 1968, Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 35. Ralph Rinzler, letter to Theodore Bikel, June 3, 1968, Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 36. Ralph Rinzler, letter to Bessie Jones, May 14, 1968, Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

144

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

37. Martin Luther King Jr., “Dr. Martin Luther King on Highlander,” in Highlander Reports: Black Power in Mississippi (Knoxville, TN, n.d.), 3; Ralph Rinzler Collection, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 38. Leonard Brown, John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 176.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 7

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Neill Clegg

Few periods of the 20th century were more evocative of the early French revolution’s romantic fervor than the years 1961 through 1963. Indeed, The Sixties, Gerald Howard’s collection of influential essays and excerpts from that decade, begins with lines from Book IX of Wordsworth’s The Preludes that, while celebrating the early revolution, recall the years when the anti– Vietnam War protest song first appeared and began to stand apart from its predecessors in the protest song genre. The unique position of this decade’s music has two principal causes. First, it emerged along with, and because of, a newly fashionable liberal intelligentsia that embraced U.S. engagement with the wider world. Second, the emergence of this new protest music coincided with the development of a more powerful entertainment industry, one reflective of “advanced capitalism” as described further on. In his introduction to The Sixties, Howard references the work of Malcolm Crowley, who suggested historic cycles as paradigms through which to view literary changes. According to Howard, such cycles appear in America’s willingness to engage global real politik in the 20th century.1 Following this line of thinking, the period of First World War through the late 1920s was one of international engagement, while the 1930s through America’s entering Second World War saw the United States withdraw from the international stage. Another period of self-involvement followed the ceasefire ending the Korean War. By the months immediately preceding the Kennedy victory in the 1960 elections, there were renewed interests in international involvement among the Liberal intellectuals who would comprise the Kennedy administration and its supporters. Close behind these new energies, however, were unprecedented cultural shifts that would undermine the apparent Liberal victory: a New Left and new war overwhelmed the liberal establishment.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

146

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Cultural Markers The work of five writers—Arthur Schlesinger, C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, James Baldwin, and Eldridge Cleaver—provides contrasting accounts of American society, both white and black, and they also provide a description of the advanced corporate forces transforming the country during the decade. Their essays present views of the liberal (and later, radical Leftist) ethos rising against its Enlightenment foe, conservatism, but they also account for the postmodern corporate culture that renders the liberal/conservative dialectic irrelevant. In the January, 1960, issue of Esquire magazine, Schlesinger wrote “The Eisenhower epoch—the present period of passivity and acquiescence in our national life—is drawing to a natural end.”2 His words anticipated the country’s need to return to a more idealistic view of the American way. He noted the rise of comic satire, intellectual disdain for the social complacency, and the “Beat Generation” as symptoms of this yearning. In Culture and Politics, C. Wright Mills3 claimed the world was at the end of the Modern Age, and that the postmodern world would render our traditional understanding of society and self meaningless. Such understandings were rooted in the rational individual and society’s need for reason. The new, hyper-rational, corporate world would reward neither. At the far end of this argument is the rise of anarchy. In 1960, his “Letter to the New Left,” urged young intellectuals to turn their attention away from labor issues (he regarded labor as a partner with management) and toward alienation, anomie, and authoritarianism. In The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness Repressive Desublimation, Herbert Marcuse described the tendency for advanced capitalism to regard all discord as consumer issues. “Invalidating the cherished images of transcendence by incorporating them into its daily reality testifies to the extent to which insoluble conflicts are becoming manageable.”4 He suggests that disagreement with government policies may be dissolved by the “unseen hand” of the bureaucracy. Although Marcuse came to these issues through philosophy rather than sociology, his arguments had much in common with Mill’s. Both regard the advanced states of capitalism and communism as repressive to independent thought, substituting, in its place, happy consciousness. Marcuse’s account of advanced capitalism’s capacity to absorb opposition criticism explains the transformation of antiwar protest music into popular music entertainment, and the failure of the antiwar movement to have a significant impact on the war. In 1963, James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”5 was a warning to white America—and especially the liberals—detailing black rage over economic

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

147

repression, and black disproportionate representation in the American military in Vietnam. He cautioned that an increasing militancy in the black population, led in part by the Nation of Islam, was being fueled by black separatists, to be sure, but by white racists as well. By 1963, Baldwin was an established essayist, particularly favored by liberals who appreciated Baldwin’s ability to express black rage without making liberals feel responsible for racism. As a result, many liberals were not prepared for Baldwin’s revealing that George Rockwell (leader of the American Nazi Party) had donated money to the Nation of Islam in an effort to make a race war more likely. Nor were they prepared for the work of the more radical black writers of the late 1960s such as The Last Poets and Eldridge Cleaver. In Soul on Ice,6 Cleaver described the police as the domestic equivalent of the American military: designed to protect the life styles of those in power. His writing was only the print manifestation of the “domestic war” waged by the Black Panthers and Cleaver. In an interview with Reason magazine, he describes ambushes of police patrols in Oakland, Detroit, and other cities.7 While the preceding arguments are not offered as evidence of a causative relationship to the evolving counterculture and its music, they do suggest two accelerating realignments. On the one hand, the former alliance of workers and the Left as workers moved to the right, leaving students to occupy the New Left. On the other hand the marketplace began to recast protest music as a commercial enterprise.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Roots of Sixties Antiwar Music Several streams of traditional and later music influenced the antiwar music of the 1960s, including folk, African American spirituals, and the protest music of earlier decades. This last genre demonstrates the purpose music served in previous protest movements. In Linthead Stomp, Patrick Hubber writes: Music played a central role in these labor conflicts, not only because of southern millhands’ penchant for singing but also because of union organizers’ encouragement of singing as an effective means to foster solidarity among striking workers and to sustain their morale as a strike dragged on.8

In addition, in 1926 the Daily Worker identified singing as a primary means of uniting striking workers, encouraging the workers to create new lyrics for traditional melodies in order to make the songs more specific to the occasion. Woody Guthrie was among the first to create new songs for specific

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

148

Sounds of Resistance

labor actions and, although his work pre-dated the Vietnam era, songs such as “This Land Is Your Land” were rallying cries for that time. In part, this is due to Guthrie’s drawing upon the lineage of American literary idealism. His reference to the land is an appeal to nature in the tradition of Emerson and Whitman. Guthrie’s use of nature is an expression of the Platonic ideal, a source of truth. Guthrie’s strength in tune crafting combined with strong lyrics here is paramount. In asserting that this land—our homeland—belongs to you and me, Guthrie unites us all in a quest for that which is “naturally” ours, be it equality, liberty, justice, or, as in the 1960s, an end to an unlawful and intolerable war. At the same time, the melody moves by simple scale steps— easily sung by all participants—ascending to the final, declaimed words of each line. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” returned antiwar music to its African American roots as it decried the Vietnam War’s continuing disproportionate claim of the lives of black youth, and the mounting destruction of black communities in Philadelphia, Newark, Watts and elsewhere following the riots of 1964–1965 and those following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Specifically, the West African “sorrow song,” using the African version of the pentatonic scale forms the material for Gaye’s melody (e.g., “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “My Girl” use the pitches of the pentatonic scale in C).9 In the broader perspective, the antiwar movement, in a very real sense, initially followed the path forged by the civil rights movement, whose music, while not specifically a part of this study, was a significant part of the antiestablishment culture. The principal music influence in this protest genre is the folk music revival of the 1960s. While interest in the folk tradition, especially the Appalachian tradition, began with the field recordings of Alan Lomax in the 1930s,10 it was the recordings and college appearances of Pete Seeger and the Wayverlys that sparked substantial interest in this music. By the early 1960s, folksingers and writers in Greenwich Village, including Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan, were generating interest among recording companies in this revived folk music. As discussed below, it is the influence of John Hammond and his recognition of Bob Dylan as a potential pop star that would change American popular music.

An Overview of the Vietnam War Provided in this section and the next are events most directly connected with the public perception of the war in Vietnam, its associated political

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

149

events, and the music protesting that war. Despite the United States having become involved in this conflict as early as 1955 (when U.S. troops were sent to train an army for the newly formed South Vietnam), the conflict remained below the public’s consciousness for several years. The uneasy 1954 truce with North Korea—and by extension with Communist China—left the people, already exhausted by the Second World War and eager to withdraw from foreign engagement, determined to rebuild their economy. It is useful to remember that a military draft had been established as a contingency in 1948, so that no new law was required to draft young men for military service. By 1960, the presence of Soviet troops in Cuba, at the United States’ doorsteps, was much more in the public eye and would remain so for some time. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis served to reenforce this preoccupation with threats close to home. Thus, the Kennedy administration’s formation of a Military Assistance Command–Vietnam (MAC-V) and increase in the number of U.S. “advisors” from 700 to 12,000 went largely unnoticed. By the end of 1963, however, events in Vietnam began to garner frequent mention in evening news broadcasts. Following Kennedy’s November assassination in Dallas, Johnson increased both numbers of troops in Vietnam and cost of the war; thus, the war began to attract more attention among the intellectual Left. In August of 1964, a North Vietnamese patrol boat attacked the USS Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf. Following reports of a (doubtful) second attack against a U.S. ship, the Air Force conducted its first attack against North Vietnam. One week later, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving President Johnson wide powers to conduct the war in Southeast Asia. By early 1965, the then-USSR and the United States had clearly chosen North and South Vietnam, respectively, as proxies in their global conflict. As Vietcong attacks against American troops and bases expanded, Johnson sent two Marine battalions, the first American combat units in-country, to protect Danang air base. By June, 1965, the U.S. presence had increased to 18 battalions, and film coverage of American combat operations was a regular part of nightly news in the United States. By December, American combat troops numbered over 200,000. By the end of 1965, troop strength had reached 400,000. In June 1967, Defense Secretary McNamara told Congress the American bombing campaign was ineffective. At the same time, General Westmoreland, commanding U.S. forces in Vietnam, exuded confidence in the war. On January 21, 1968, the Tet Offensive spread over much of South Vietnam, including Saigon. Although the American military correctly described the offensive as a military failure for the Vietcong, it cast doubt about Westmoreland’s competence and shook the confidence of many Americans. Within days, Westmoreland

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

150

Sounds of Resistance

requested an additional 206,000 troops. Clark Clifford, the new Secretary of Defense, rejected the request. In March, advisors urged Johnson not to escalate the war, where troop strength stood at 540,000. Within a week, on March 25, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. He halted all bombing of the North. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and as a result violence erupted in black ghettos across the country. In Chicago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president as riots raged outside the convention center. Having campaigned on a “secret plan to end the war,” Richard Nixon was elected president; he appointed Henry Kissinger as secretary of state. In early 1969, Melvin Laird, the new secretary of defense, began a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia. He also announced a new strategy, “Vietnamization,” to cover the withdrawal of American troops. In October, 1969, massive antiwar demonstrations in Washington, DC, signaled growing public dissatisfaction with Nixon and the war. In April, 1970, Nixon announced that U.S. and South Vietnam forces had attacked Communist strongholds in Cambodia. In response, large antiwar demonstrations spread across the country, and, on May 4, National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State. In February 1971, South Vietnamese troops invaded Laos to attack the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In March, Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of civilians in the village of My Lai. In June, the New York Times began to publish the Pentagon Papers, and the publishing was upheld by the Supreme Court. By December, American troop strength was down to 140,000. In the first months of 1972, Nixon increased the bombing of North Vietnam, including Hanoi and Haiphong, and announced the mining of Haiphong harbor. On June 17, five men were arrested for breaking into Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. On May 29, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, although the war stumbled on through 1975. On April 23, President Ford declared the war “finished,” and, on April 29, the last American personnel were evacuated from Saigon.11 Of these select events, a few are more relevant due to the change they brought to public perception of the war: the increase in funding and advisors (1963); the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964); the Tet Offensive and assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy (1968); the secret expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia (1971–1972); and the expanding revelation of misdeeds within the Nixon administration. As the protest movement and music grew in fervor, these events appear to be triggers for new songs, although the public’s “consumption” of this music would undergo striking changes as protest music entered the mainstream of pop music.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

151

The Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

1963–1965: Greenwich Village and the Early Songs of Paxton, Ochs, and Dylan The first songs calling attention to the Vietnam War followed the deployment of additional advisors to South Vietnam. Tom Paxton’s long career as a successful composer in the folk idiom earned him wide recognition. Talking Vietnam Pot Luck Blues (1963) was among the earliest contributions to the body of Vietnam War protest songs. Written from the draftee’s point of view, it satirizes the war as a “jobs program” while noting Lyndon Johnson’s lies to the American public and the Vietnam peasant’s lack of loyalty to the Saigon government. Its form is straightforward—a four-line verse followed by a chorus of similar length. Its most memorable line may be about the Americans saving Vietnam from the Vietnamese. Paxton’s music, while falling well within the lines of folk music based on its guitar part and lyric structure, has a harmonic structure a bit more urbane than one might have expected from the genre’s Anglo-Appalachian roots. This is not surprising from Paxton, though, whose folk revival classics such as “The Last Thing On My Mind” were typically more sophisticated. Phil Ochs’s “Vietnam” (1963) is less of a song—in the strictest sense of the term—than a satiric monologue with guitar accompaniment. Ochs’s work in Greenwich Village established him as a harsh critic of the Establishment, and cynical of the CIA’s role in Vietnam. His lyrics focus on the CIA’s role in the political machinations in Saigon and the use of the words “trainer” and “adviser” to obscure the combat role of American soldiers in Vietnam. Like Bob Dylan, Ochs “went electric” in the mid-1960s, although without the remarkable uproar that followed Dylan. Both his “Vietnam” and Paxton’s song on the same topic seem to echo Schlesinger’s identifying satire as a feature of Leftist intellectual social commentary. Interestingly enough, this sort of song-based humor did enter mainstream entertainment, but through folk musicians such as The Smothers Brothers, whose television variety show in the late 1960s continued this tradition.12 The work of Bob Dylan, although drawing upon some of the same sources as Paxton and Ochs, stands apart in two ways. First, his songs, at least those reaching an audience beyond Greenwich Village coffeehouses, did not mention Vietnam specifically. Indeed, his best-known song from this time, “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963, released on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan) follows the lineage of American idealism from Emerson and Whitman through Guthrie, in that it appeals to nature for the strength of his

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

152

Sounds of Resistance

images. He poses questions drawing us out of civilization, into nature, and finally into the absurdity of way: men walking down roads, then white doves flying over seas, and finally cannonballs “flying” through the air, all leading to the refrain’s reference to the blowing wind. The tune itself owes more to the melodically and harmonically straightforward American folk tradition than did much of Paxton’s output. Only the final question, asking how many times a cannonball must fly, refers to war. Other songs of this period, such as “The Times They Are a-Changing” and “Masters of War,” are more provocative than specifically topical. “The Times They Are aChanging” seems, in hindsight, eerily predictive of the coming cultural polarization and the split between the Democratic liberal wing and the New Left’s anarchy and the militant members of the Black Panthers, the YIPIES, and the Weathermen who would wage the “domestic war.” Released on Dylan’s second studio album, the music is taken from the Irish and Scottish “Come All Ye Bold Highwaymen.” Again in keeping with the lineage of American idealism, the image of nature (flooding water) stripping away the old to make way for the new (drenched to the bone) is still chilling. Dylan stands apart for a second reason, as well. John Hammond recognized Dylan’s singular talent as a singer/songwriter and introduced him to Columbia Records. Hammond, arguably the most important “talent scout” of the 20th century, had brought to stardom musicians from Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, and Count Basie, to Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen. The role of singer/songwriter is well established in pop music now, but was unknown in the early 1060s. Prior to Dylan, most rock and roll and many rhythm-and-blues artists recorded songs written by professional song writers, often associated with publishing companies such as those located in New York’s Brill Building. Writers such as Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and Carole King wrote and produced hit songs for artists in New York, Philadelphia, Memphis, New Orleans, and other cities during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The singer who wrote his own material presented producers with a more complete entertainment package, and by eliminating the song writer, simplified the production formula. Hammond produced three studio recordings with Dylan (Bob Dylan, 1962, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963, and The Times They Are aChangin’, 1963). Dylan moved beyond the folk-music culture in the 1965 release “Like a Rolling Stone,” including in his band electric guitars, bass, and drums, instruments typical of rock and roll. According to Rolling Stone, Dylan began the folk-rock idiom when he allowed The Byrds to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

153

record “Mr. Tambourine Man” in 1967. The folk-rock idiom, more than any other, influenced the antiwar music that appealed to rock audiences.13

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Folk Rock The importance of folk rock to 1960s antiwar protest music lies in the willingness of folk music to address serious topics. American pop music, and the rock and roll evolving from rhythm and blues, consisted largely of love songs and novelty songs (such as “Splish Splash,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Poison Ivy”). These styles were not acceptable to those speaking out against the prevailing establishment. In order to distinguish folk rock from more traditional rock and pop styles of the early 1960s, the music of Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones provide a useful comparison with the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and The Byrds. From its earliest derivations from the rhythm-and-blues styles of T. Bone Walker, Professor Longhair, and Muddy Waters (to name only three), rock was a music based in riffs—short, highly rhythmic, melodic phrases. Along with the drums and bass, the guitar, piano, and horn riffs provided rhythmic propulsion for songs in the early rock styles. In Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, Berry’s vocals ride the energy of his repetitive guitar riffs, while the melodic lines of Beach Boys (who openly acknowledge their debt to Berry), although harmonized, still rely on repetitive guitar and piano riffs for its energy. The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” “Honky-Tonk Women,” and “Brown Sugar” all rely on guitar riffs announced in each tune’s introduction. This and other characteristics derive from the blend of African and European elements as found in early jazz and mid-century blues and rhythm and blues. These include a tendency for the drummer to emphasize the second and fourth beats of the measure with the snare drum or the hi-hat cymbal, for the bass player to arpeggiate the harmony on the quarter notes, and for the horns or background vocalists to engage in “call-and-response.” The styles of the other group of English rock groups of the early and mid-1960s (particularly the early, pre-“Sergeant Pepper” Beatles) were influenced by, in addition to blues and early rock, both the British folk tradition and skiffle music (a British style derived from American jug bands of the early 20th century). These influences provide a “softer” style, one more suggestive of strumming guitars as a prime source of rhythmic energy and are less dependent on drums and guitar riffs. The Beatles’ “Do You Want To Know a Secret” and “Ferry ‘Cross The Mersy” by Gerry and the Pacemakers are examples of this English rock style.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

154

Sounds of Resistance

Dylan’s evolving musical style also demonstrated alterations to the traditional folk music styles. For instance, his recordings of both “The Times They Are a-Changing” and “Masters of War” are very much in the traditional style: the guitar part “strums” each chord on the quarter note or (occasionally) the eighth-note, while the lyric, although nuanced poetically, is rhythmically straightforward. By the time “Mr. Tambourine Man” was recorded, Dylan’s performances demonstrated characteristics similar to those in blues and early rhythm and blues. His harmonica playing is embellished with smears and blues notes, and the guitar parts, admittedly not as vigorous as those of Chuck Berry or The Beach Boys, are more propulsive and riff-like. With the stage set for the emergence of folk rock by 1967, The Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” introduced this style to a wider music audience, one not as familiar with the blend of folk and rock. Suggestive of the rock styles discussed previously, The Byrds’ version opens with a more “composed” musical figure than a typical riff, although the opening figure does not generate significant propulsion (or forward motion) for the recording.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Song Form It is worth noting the “form” or structure of the song types mentioned above, because the form determines how frequently the “lyric hook” or central message is repeated. Folk songs often fall into one of several “strophic” forms, meaning that the music—by which one means the “tune” or melody and the harmony accompanying it—repeats for each verse. Each verse may contain two, three, four, or more lines, with two lines repeating to indicate the end of the verse. “This Land Is Your Land” follows this model, as does “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” By contrast, American popular songs of the first half of the 20th century, such as those of the Broadway stage, tend to follow a song structure in which a short opening, one that transitions from the spoken dialogue of the play, leads to a song having a 32-measure form of AABA (the tune for the eight-measure A sections being essentially the same, while the eight-measure B section is quite different) or a 32-measure ABAB form (in which the second A and B differ slightly from the first). As a result, much of the repertoire of early rock tunes, especially those mass produced in the Brill building and other song mills, tended to follow these generic structures. The forms developed during the early 1960s, often allowing the message lyric to be repeated more frequently. Songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die,” and “The Universal

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

155

Soldier” are examples of song forms adapted for this purpose. Again, these songs point to the changes brought to rock by Dylan and folk rockers. Finally, as antiwar protest music began to be increasingly shaped by the music industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a return to forms reminiscent of the verse-verse-chorus form.

Antiwar Protest Songs, 1963–1971 The following songs have been chosen for discussion in this chapter because of their popularity and wide distribution. They are presented roughly according to their longevity in the public mind and date of release. There are several songs frequently associated with the war and the protest movement that have been omitted, largely because they are more reflective of the counterculture than the war specifically. Into this category fall Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” By the same token, both “Ohio,” by Crosby Still, Nash, and Young, and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” are included as songs giving witness to the domestic war spilling over from the Vietnam War. It is also worth noting that the following songs fall into three categories that overlap in time. The first includes the early, folk-type songs of Paxton and Ochs, among others. These are satiric in nature, ridiculing the government agencies (CIA, covert agents, and military “trainers” active in Vietnam). The second are songs such as “Universal Soldier” and “Eve of Destruction” that gave a musical voice to growing public protest. The third are songs that openly ridicule draftees, such as Country Joe MacDonald’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag.”

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” As mentioned previously, Dylan’s 1963 release found a selective audience on the college circuit initially, but reached a much wider audience when recorded by Peter Paul and Mary (#2 on the Top 100 in August, 1963; #17 over the course of the year). This recording was a folk song by any measure, the group having only three vocalists with guitar and bass. Melodically, it lacks the emphatic refinement of Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” although its melodic repetition, perhaps, underscores Dylan’s role as bard; the message always outweighs the music in Dylan’s work. Only the final verse refers to war (“how many times must a cannonball fly?”), and doesn’t mention Vietnam at all. While that would ordinarily eliminate this song

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

156

Sounds of Resistance

from consideration here, the year of its release (1963) and performance settings (Greenwich Village and college campuses prior to its release) involved audiences aware of the war as an emerging topic. It seems worth noting that this song retained its original folk character, and was not influenced by the developing pop/rock music industry.

“Turn! Turn! Turn!” The Byrds’ 1965 recording of Pete Seeger’s folk classic (based on a passage from Ecclesiastes) coincided roughly with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the institution of a military draft. Not unlike The Byrds’ previously mentioned “Mr. Tambourine Man,” this tune is in the folkrock idiom. Unlike “Mr. Tambourine Man,” it prominently features a finger-picking style electric guitar, but otherwise resembles “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the form is strophic, and the melodic structure is a repetitive ascending and descending curve. Written by Pete Seeger before the war gained wide attention, it does not mention the Vietnam War.

“The Universal Soldier”

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Canadian folk singer Buffy Saint-Marie’s song, calling for individual responsibility for war actions, gained little attention beyond the coffee-house circuit until it was recorded by Donovan in 1965. Rather than cite Vietnam, specifically, she addresses the nature of warfare over the ages, although the Vietnam conflict was an ominous subtext. It has much more to do with the folk music proper than folk rock, and its melodic content retains a convincing simplicity that serves the lyric well.

“The Eve of Destruction” Barry MacGuire’s gruff-voiced vocal gave his 1965 release of PF Sloan’s song a curious urgency. It continues the emerging folk-rock genre, although its bombastic edge is a bit over the top for this style. The lyrics, warning of the exploding “Eastern world” and gun-toting pacifists who deny that “we’re on the eve of destruction,” seem less connected to an authentic antiwar voice than the previously mentioned songs. Its sing-song melody and predictable lyrics may have indicated the coming commercialization of protest music as predicted by Marcuse and Mills.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

157

“For What It’s Worth” The Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 recording of Stephen Still’s antiwar anthem not only continued to solidify the place of folk rock in American pop music but also gave a more dramatic warning to the growing cultural crisis. In addition, it demonstrated musical and production characteristics that would become increasingly important, including a solid lyric hook that repeats after each verse, background vocals to heighten emotional connection, and an enhanced role for the solo electric guitar (such as the single note chime during the interludes between verses). Equally important, it prepared the nation’s ears for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who would expand the palette of folk rock.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag” This darkly satirical sing-along, recorded by Country Joe (MacDonald) and the Fish in 1967, marked the turn toward the third stage in antiwar songs, those ridiculing young men caught in the draft and sent to war. Its verses resemble a patter song, of sorts, not unlike the early Greenwich Village satirical pieces by Paxton and Ochs, while the chorus, intended for group participation, borrows from the traditional jazz standard “Muskrat Ramble” by Kid Ory, a New Orleans trombonist who played with Louis Armstrong on his Hot Five and Hot Severn recordings. The song became popular at rock festivals and college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In identifying those called up in the draft and sent to war with the government prosecuting the war, the song seems to exacerbate the us/them dichotomy that would play a dominant role in New Left activities from 1968 forward. These activities included violent protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the domestic war as waged by groups such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Symbianese Liberation Army. In addition, one may argue that this song marked the conversion of antiwar protest music into an entertainment vehicle created for the concert and festival rather than the street and protest.

“Give Peace a Chance” John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” is one of the few anti–Vietnam War songs to fulfill the protest song function of the earlier eras: it is melodically and lyrically simple, and thus easily sung, and unites the singers in

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

158

Sounds of Resistance

a common voice. In addition, it placed one of the leading figures in pop music squarely at the center of antiwar protest music, at once legitimizing protest music as a cultural norm, and stamping protest music as a viable commercial product to desublimate the discontent of young protesters.

“War” Edwin Starr’s Motown 1969 recording of Whitfield and Strong’s antiwar soul classic bears the imprint of soul studio production and takes many of its cues from the black church. In this regard, Starr serves as a preacher in the chorus, commenting on the choir’s asking what war is good for, and, in the verse, singing/speaking on war’s effects on society. The recording had the effect of moving protest music further into the category of entertainment, reaching white and black audiences. It coincided with an expanding public disapproval of the war, although, as noted above, President Nixon still maintained approval rating with the majority of voting Americans.

“Ohio”

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Neil Young’s song, recorded and released by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in 1971, was still another example of the folk-rock idiom, although it may have portents of the country-rock idiom that was emerging during the previous few years with groups such as Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Eagles. Written in response to the May 4, 1970, killing of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, it offered a stirring call to those willing to stand against the war. While misunderstandings of the events surrounding the shootings have clouded its legacy, it stands as an indicator of the cultural polarization in the country at that time.14

“What’s Goin’ On” Marvin Gaye’s 1971 classic soul anthem remains one of the landmark recordings of the early 1970s, involving not only the full production values of Motown—Latin percussion, lush strings and background vocals—but also the modal harmony and lyrical jazz saxophone style that were becoming popular. Clearly intended for the concert stage, this work offered no pretense of a utilitarian function as a protest rallying cry. Its verse lyrics refer to mothers crying over lost sons and brothers dying in the war, but

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

159

the release, a brief section preceding the “what’s goin’ on” hook, refers to the street scene with “picket lines and picket signs” being no cause for domestic, authoritarian brutality. Musically, the form is more complex with the verseverse-release-hook lyric structure mentioned above, but also two extended instrumental sections featuring the sort of “non-functional” harmony used in jazz of the preceding decade. As an indication of the effect the marketplace was having on music, Marvin Gaye, and this album were more a part of the entertainment world, and not the antiwar movement. There seems to be no documentation at hand of Marvin Gaye performing this piece, or any of his music, at a venue designated a “protest meeting.” Rather, his performances were at concerts, which were commercial ventures for profit.

“Bring the Boys Home” Freda Payne’s 1971 release seems, in retrospect, shaped for commercial appeal from its beginning. If Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” broke new ground in combining aspects of black music, Payne’s recording returned to the predictably safe and acceptable. By 1971–1972, the public outcry against the war was reaching a majority, and storm clouds were gathering over the newly reelected Nixon Administration. The structure of the song, two verse and chorus (AAB), was by then an accepted norm. With that stated, there is something in Payne’s plaintive voice that raises the lyric’s plea that we need to bring the boy’s home alive from this senseless war, and the “sanctified church” sound of the track possesses a certain authenticity.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reflections Setting aside questions about the above-mentioned songs and their musical value, two questions remain: were the protest songs of the anti–Vietnam War movement effective as instigators of successful protest, and, if not, did their failure reflect Marcuse’s predictions that advanced capitalism tends to subvert discontent. If one measures the success of the protest movement by its success in ending the war, the answer appears to be no. The protest movement gained momentum with the government expanding the draft, and the war continued for almost another 10 years, including an enormous buildup of American forces in Vietnam. Even if one views Johnson stepping down as somehow indicative of a changing public attitude, his decision not to seek a second term seems more connected to the 1968 Tet offensive demonstrating the failure of Johnson’s policy. Even Nixon’s “secret plan to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

160

Sounds of Resistance

end the war”—which largely amounted to an expansion of the offensive to Cambodia with no significant result—occurred in spite of public protest. The war ended when it no longer made economic sense for the country and not so much because of the influence of antiwar songs on the public protest movements. Was its lack of direct impact due to capitalism’s co-opting influence? This is problematic, until one begins to view the antiwar movement, writ large, as an antidraft movement. In this light, the music did become a concertmusic “product” consumed by students and others who were deferred from the draft as long as they were in school or working in some field deemed socially essential. From the standpoint of music, one may argue that in the early 1960s—a time in which the United States was considering overseas adventurism and spreading American interests into Southeast Asia—the heightened social consciousness (particularly as voiced by Dylan) began to transform popular music in the United States even more than it influenced politics.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Arthur Schlesinger, “The New Mood in Politics,” Esquire, January 1960, in The Sixties, ed. Gerald Howard (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 44. 2. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 417. 3. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” http://www.marxists.org/subject/ humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm (accessed November 5, 2012). 4. Herbert Marcuse, “The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation,” in The Sixties, ed. Gerald Howard (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 85. 5. James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” in The Sixties, ed. Gerald Howard (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 113. 6. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968), 115. 7. Lynn Scarlett and Bill Kauffman, “An Interview with Eldridge Cleaver,” Reason (February 1963), http://reason.com/archives/1986/02/01/an-interviewwith-eldridge-cle (accessed October 12, 2011). 8. Patrick Hubber, Linthead Stomp (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 32–34. 9. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 5. 10. “Alan Lomax Collection,” The American Folklife Center, http://www.loc.gov/ folklife/lomax/ (accessed November 14, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music

161

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

11. Stanley Kaenow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 672–83. 12. Ibid. 13. Barry Gifford, “The Byrds: The Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” Rolling Stone (August 14, 1968), http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/ sweetheart-of-the-rodeo-19680814 (accessed November 17, 2012). 14. Jerry M. Lewis and Thomas R. Hensley, “The May 4 Shootings at Kent State University: The Search for Historical Accuracy,” http://dept.kent.edu/sociology/ lewis/lewihen.htm (accessed November 15, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 8

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Tyson-Lord J. Gray

In 2008 will.i.am, member of the music group The Black Eyed Peas, released the Emmy-winning video “Yes We Can.” The lyrics to the song were taken from a speech delivered by then–presidential candidate Barack Obama. This video, directed by Jesse Dylan, featured appearances from a array of celebrities from Scarlett Johansson to Common. It received more than three million views on YouTube within the first week and won an Emmy in June 2008. Yet, even more impressive is that this compilation exhibited a fusion of music, multicultural participation, and activism reminiscent of the U.S. environmental movement. People have seldom associated any particular music with the U.S. environmental movement. A brief look through several historical analyses suggests that neither have environmentalists. Take for instance The Green Revolution by Kirkpatrick Sale, American Environmental History by Louis Warren, or First Along the River by Benjamin Kline; none of these texts make any mention of the role of eco-protest music in the development and advance of U.S. environmentalism. Consequently, these depictions offer an incomplete picture and fail to portray the multicultural activism characteristic of this era. A substantial number of African Americans have been critical of mainstream environmentalism. They have noted that mainstream environmentalism has demonstrated very little concern toward environmental justice issues and is advocated primarily by whites.1 Consequently, sociologist Robert Bullard, theologian James Cone, and ethicist Theodore Walker Jr. have each accused mainstream environmentalists of racist practices. Phaedra

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

164

Sounds of Resistance

Pezzullo and Ronald Sandler pointed out in “Revisiting the Environmental Justice Challenge to Environmentalism,” that, as opposed to working in cooperation, environmental justice and environmentalism have often been characterized by division and even hostility.2 The purpose of this chapter is not to negate these concerns. As the complete volume of Environmentalism and Environmental Justice by Pezzullo and Sandler indicates, whites from mainstream environmentalism and minorities working for environmental justice must find ways to mend the past and work toward healthy collaboration in the future. However, as much postmodern scholarship has pointed out, one should constantly guard against monolithic historical narratives. Rosemary Ruether in Sexism and God Talk explains how historical accounts of religious ideas are often promulgated, mediated, and eventually canonized in favor of those with power. Counter or opposing ideas are then marginalized and suppressed as the winning group declares their account as the true and orthodox interpretation.3 Reuther stated that these ideas remain vital so long as they continue to speak to individuals in the community and provide for them the redemptive meaning of individual and collective experience. Yet, they fall apart when the received interpretations contradict experience in significant ways. When this occurs, individuals attempt to return to the origins of the religion in order to delineate a more radical interpretation that aligns with their contemporary experiences. As Thomas Dunlap points out in Faith in Nature, environmentalism shares many similarities with religion. It is a way of accepting the universe and has its own scriptures, totems, history, and theology.4 Reuther’s analysis then is significant. The history of the U.S. environmental movement has often been told in favor of the majority. It has been connected with middle and upper-middle class whites in mainstream environmentalism with little attention given to role of minorities. This portrayal has fostered the illusion that minorities played no significant role in the development of the U.S. environmentalism. The reinterpreting of this history, however, has begun to take place within recent scholarship. Dianne D. Glave’s Rooted in the Earth and To Love the Wind and Rain with Mark Stoll, African American Environmental Thought by Kimberly K. Smith, Black on Earth by Kimberly N. Ruffin, and Native Americans and the Environment by Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis are all such endeavors. Collectively, these texts express minority environmental activism exhibited through animal protection, conservation, labor, music, religion, education, and activism. They provide a new framework from which to view America’s history of environmentalism.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

165

The investments of Native Americans, African American, Latino/a, and Hawaiians have gone unappreciated for too long. My intention in examining eco-protest music within the U.S. environmental movement is to add to this reinterpretation, retelling, and refiguring. Before proceeding further, it is perhaps necessary to point out that the prefix “eco” has become somewhat of a trope within recent years. Businesses use it to remind customers that they are ecofriendly, manufacturers use it to broadcast that they are eco-conscious, and industries use it to display that their products are eco-safe. With the popularity of being eco-chic then, the term has come to mean everything and nothing. Given this reality, it was surprising that a search for the term “eco-protest music” in recent environmental scholarship turned up empty, necessitating here a definition. Without delving into a lengthy prolegomena, music in its most basic sense is “vocal or instrumental sounds possessing a degree of melody, harmony, or rhythm.”5 Protest is “to make a strong objection.”6 And ecology is “the interrelationship between organisms and their environment.”7 I suggest then that a working definition for eco-protest music is, “an objection to the disregard for human interrelationship with the environment, communicated through melody, harmony, and rhythm.” By defining eco-protest music in this way, I intend to include chants and spoken word performances with a clear message of opposition to environmental injustice while excluding songs that may evoke nature appreciation but are not deployed as a means of protest. Of course, much scholarship has been written regarding the subversive protest in slave spirituals lyrics and thus, there are multiple readings of texts. The purpose of this definition is merely to provide boundaries for this essay. It is neither meant to function as a universal nor to negate other definitions that also hold cash value.8 The word “communicated” is also intentionally used in this chapter so as not to limit protest to verbal expression. In this way it seems that there is room within an eco-protest musical canon for instrumentals that are set to visual arts that also communicate opposition to environmental injustice. Finally, as a point of departure, the environmental movement is rarely regarded as a monolithic whole but is often divided into moments in history. Most scholars place the modern environmental movement in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. I argue that the eco-protest music of this era more than merely reflects ideals but was a means of expanding and advancing the movement. Eco-protest songs themselves were acts of protest and frequently extended a call to arms. To date, these contributions have largely gone unacknowledged and uncelebrated. I contend that the retrieval of these songs allows for a reinterpretation of U.S. environmental history;

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

166

Sounds of Resistance

one that views the U.S. environmental movement as a national awakening inclusive of blacks, Hawaiians, Native Americans, Latinas/os, and whites. During this history, eco-protest music served three primary functions: a means of education, a mode of empathy, and a mechanism for engagement.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music as Means of Education The philosopher John Dewey once wrote, “artists have always been the real purveyors of news.”9 By this Dewey meant to emphasize the role of poetry, art, and music not only in evoking public sentiment but also in promoting public awareness. Most accounts of the modern environmental movement begin with the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Published in 1962, Carson documented the detrimental effects of pesticides, specifically DDT, on birds. An immediate success, Silent Spring remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 31 weeks and sold more than half a million copies.10 The modern environmental movement had begun. By 1972, however, when the United States banned the use of DDT, much had transpired over the previous decade. Though a seminal contribution, Silent Spring had not created the revolution alone. As Kirkpatrick Sale indicated in The Green Revolution, the forces that lay behind the environmental movement were multiple and complex.11 As with all movements, modes of education and awareness were varied. Ecological activist and musician Jan Lundberg wrote, “Any idea can become more powerful through a song than through mere speech or publishing.”12 And although Silent Spring was substantial in bringing environmental issues to the public forefront, it was often musical selections that promoted and perpetuated these concepts within society. Take for example the “People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It” campaign by Keep America Beautiful. Initiated following the second Earth Day celebration in 1971, this campaign focused on minimizing litter. At its height, it was reported that Keep America Beautiful received more than 2,000 letters a month from people wanting to join their local team.13 This same emphasis, however, is seen in the 1971 song “Pollution” by rhythmand-blues musician Bo Diddley. Diddley sang, “Some of you people don’t understand/Stop throwing your garbage in the streets and use your can.”14 Also released in 1971 was the Billboard hit “Mercy Mercy Me” by singer– songwriter Marvin Gaye. Perhaps one of the most compelling songs at the time, Gaye sang “Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas, fish full of mercury/Oh, mercy, mercy, me.”15 This image of an oil spill was one that society would have been all too familiar with. Earlier that year two tankers

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

167

had collided in the mouth of San Francisco Bay spilling 840,000 gallons of oil into the Pacific and destroying miles of the shoreline. A year prior, the month-long study “The Williamstown Study of Critical Environmental Problems” had been conducted by 100 scientists and professionals. They found that up to 1.5 million tons of oil were being introduced into oceans annually through ocean shipping, offshore drilling, and accidents. The potential effects of these disasters included direct killing of ocean life through coating, asphyxiation, and poisoning as well as destruction of food sources. And only two years earlier, an oil platform explosion off the coast of Santa Barbara spewed three million gallons of crude oil into the Pacific that destroyed the ecosystems and killed thousands of dolphins and birds. As Gaye sang “Mercy Mercy Me,” these lyrics no doubt evoked images of these incidents. The reference to mercury is also significant. In 1969, the Ontario Water Resource Commission discovered elevated levels of mercury in the sediment of the St. Clair River. A subsequent study of mercury levels in the river’s fish resulted in the Mercury Crisis of 1970. An investigation revealed that the industrial company Dow Chemical Chlor-Alkali had been discharging mercury into the river for over 20 years.16 Although safe in small quantities, mercury is a toxic substance and large amounts can cause speech, hearing, and walking impairments, mental disturbances, or even death. Fishing from the river was banned and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially set regulations for mercury levels in fish and shellfish moving in interstate commerce. This also led to the development of the Canada–U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) in 1972 whose purpose was to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Great Lakes basin ecosystem. Similar environmental initiatives established during the 1970s included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Save the Bay. From 1970 to 1979 a dozen major pieces of environmental legislation were passed through Congress, membership in the Big Ten environmental organizations increased, and books such as The Greening of America and The Limits of Growth became bestsellers. This all led President Richard Nixon to label the 1970s “the decade of the environment.”17 In 1974, Christopher D. Stone published the article “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Stone argued that just as rights had at one time been given to women, blacks, children, and corporate entities, they should also be extended to include inanimate objects such as forest, oceans, and rivers. Stone’s concern was not merely the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

168

Sounds of Resistance

preservation of these objects but their perpetuation in a rapidly growing society. In 1968, ecologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb describing the damage occurring to the Earth from supporting such a huge population. Ehrlich warned that the result of population growth would be starvation, upheaval, and the depletion of resource such as fertile soil and groundwater.18 Stone wrote, “We are depleting our energy and our food sources at a rate that takes little account of the needs even of humans now living.”19 This concern is also echoed in the 1974 hit by the multicultural band Tower of Power. Composed of African American, Mexican, and White musicians, Tower of Power educated listeners about natural resource exploitation and advocated the increase of renewable sources of energy. In “Only So Much Oil in The Ground” they highlighted the reality that alternative sources of power must be found by singing, “There’s only so much oil in the ground/Sooner or later there won’t be none around.”20 It is of course no coincidence that in 1973, just one year earlier, the ArabIsraeli war had begun. Arab oil-producing states imposed a year-long embargo on oil exports to the United States. The resulting long gas lines, high gas prices, and the 1973 stock market crash brought attention to the U.S. dependence on foreign petroleum and caused Congress to pass the Solar Energy Research, Development and Demonstration Act of 1974. This act stated that it would be the policy of the federal government to “pursue a vigorous and viable program of research and resource assessment of solar energy as a major source of energy for our national needs.”21 The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) located in Golden, Colorado, was also established in the same year. Under the leadership of George Van Dyne, its mission was to develop renewable energy and energy efficient technologies and practices; to advance related science and engineering; and to transfer knowledge and innovations to address the nation’s energy and environmental goals. The song “Only So Much Oil in The Ground,” then, was a means of bringing greater attention to the United States’s need to invest in renewable sources of energy. In the spoken word piece “H2O Gate Blues,” Gil Scott Heron connected America’s energy crisis with the blues when he spat, “we done had the United States government talking about the energy crisis blues.”22 Heron goes on to condemn the economics of war, the corruption of government, and what he calls “ecological warfare.” Inside the cover of the album Winter in America, he wrote “We approach winter, the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises.”23

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

169

As this album and other eco-protest music demonstrates, the environmental education of American society during the environmental movement was multicultural and multidimensional. Prior to the 1960s, very little was known about dangers to the environment and few people expressed concern. Opinion polls taken in 1965 and 1970, however, showed an increase from 17 to 53 percent in the number of respondents who rated “reducing pollution of air and water” as one of the three top issues for government.24 Throughout the 1970s, books, article publications, environmental campaigns, and laws played a seminal role in the environmental education of society. With lyrics warning against environmental neglect and foretelling ecological devastation, eco-protest songs as well were critical in this endeavor.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music as a Mode of Empathy Sociologist James M. Jasper notes that affective and reactive emotions enter into protest activities at every stage and are an integral part of movements.25 They are often tied to moral values and pervade all of social life. Understanding this can explain why individuals join protest movements, why they leave, and why they stay. Jasper goes on to say that many people are inspired to join movements by events such as the death of a loved one, outrage at plans for a nuclear plant, or indignation over the planned building of a waste dump. For the residents of Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, the situation was much worse. In 1978, following an informal survey of health issues and birth defects in the neighborhood, reporter Michael Brown discovered an unusual degree of abnormalities among residents. These included nosebleeds, headaches, lesions, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It was later discovered that the Love Canal community had been built on top of many tons of toxic chemicals that had been seeping into the neighborhood’s air and drinking water for decades.26 Subsequent research concluded that there were more than 248 different types of chemicals in the over 20,000 tons of waste on which the community was built. Residents were immediately forced to evacuate and in total over 1,000 families had to be relocated. Three years later the punk rock music group Flipper penned these lyrics to the song “Love Canal,” “We are breeding, our children look like monsters.”27 This image, of a child born looking like a monster, evoked memories of the children, which had been born with three rows of teeth, three ears, or six toes during the Love Canal tragedy. Such imagery undoubtedly aroused feelings of outrage as it did when the tragedy was discovered.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

170

Sounds of Resistance

As environmental engineer Daniel Vallero noted, Love Canal galvanized the American public into understanding the problems of hazardous waste and was the impetus for the passage of legislation such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA); the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA); and the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA).28 Yet, Jasper noted that reactive emotions alone will not maintain a movement, one must also feel affective emotions toward the individuals or the work in which they are engaged. Eco-protest music has been beneficial in this regard by reminding individuals of why a cleaner, healthier, and sustainable society matters. In Marvin Gaye’s 1971 song “Save the Children” he sang, “There’ll come a time, when the world won’t be singin’/Who’s willing to try to save the world?”29 Gaye’s concern for the children is echoed by the British folk rock singer Cat Stevens in the opening track from his 1970 album Tea for the Tillerman. The lyrics are those of a man watching the development of skyscrapers and highways and asking the question, “Where do the children play?”30 The concerns of these songs are universal. Every race and culture can identify with the desire to protect and care for their young. The image of children in eco-protest songs served to evoke empathy from listeners as they identified with the outrage over environmental pollution and envisioned a cleaner and healthier society. Empathy was also evoked through song and imagery utilized in the 1971 so-called crying Indian commercials. When Keep America Beautiful began their “People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It” campaign, the image of a Native American with a single tear falling from his eye became synonymous with environmental concern. In the Public Service Announcement, Iron Eye Cody paddles his canoe up a polluted river with chemical plants lining the shores. After arriving at the littered riverbank, standing only feet from a freeway, more trash is tossed out a car window and lands at his feet. With a single tear falling out Cody’s eye, the commentator says, “Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country, and some people don’t. People start pollution, people can stop it.” In spite of criticisms by Elizabeth Royle in Garbage Land that Keep America Beautiful was founded by beverage and packaging companies that advocated antilitter campaigns as opposed to utilizing recyclable materials, a practice she refers to as “corporate greenwashing”;31 this ad won two Clio awards, was named one of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th century by Ad Age Magazine, and grew to become one of the most popular ads on television.32 Noticeably, however, there are very few words, 27 to be exact. For the majority of the commercial, viewers listen to the bombastic

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

171

beating of drums, the pulsating cadence of trumpets and trombones, and the growing crescendo of clarinets and flutes. The dazzling virtuosity of this instrumental culminates just as Iron Eye Cody reaches the polluted shores. As he gets out of the canoe, the camera focuses on his expression of disappointment, the music subdues and the mood changes. In addition to this imagery, then, I suggest that this soundtrack is another example of eco-protest music. The casting of a Native American was also significant since many in society at that time felt that Western ideals were the root cause of the ecological crisis. This was largely due to an article published in 1967 by Lynn White entitled “The History Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” White argued that Christianity was the most anthropocentric religion the world had ever seen.33 He contended that the Western dualistic worldview that positioned humans over nature and the industrial revolution were to blame for modern environmental injustice. Consequently, many began to regard Asian, Native American, and indigenous religions as more environmentally conscious than Christianity. By depicting a Native American in the role of environmental caretaker, this campaign was able to tap into those sentiments in conveying the importance of respecting nature. If, however, Royle is correct in her assessment that the crying Indian commercial was a tactic by corporate industries to divert attention from recyclable packaging legislation, perhaps then they overlooked the clear criticism of industrialization. As Iron Eye Cody is rowing down the river, the banks are lined with smokestacks and chemical companies, a scene reminiscent of the 85-mile stretch of river from Baton Rouge to New Orleans also known as cancer alley.34 As Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner pointed out in Deceit and Denial, by the early 1970s the Mississippi River had already become crowded with oil and chemical companies and the state continued to encourage expansion. In addition to the link between pollutants and cancer revealed by a National Defense Fund study; the building docks and storage areas had rendered the river virtually inaccessible to residents.35 This infringement of developments into natural areas is precisely what prompted Canadian born musician and songwriter Joni Mitchell to write “Big Yellow Taxi.” The lyrics stated, “They took all the trees and put ’em in a tree museum.”36 Mitchell wrote this song on a visit to Hawaii in 1975 when, after checking into her hotel, she looked out from the window to see beautiful green mountains and then looked down to see an expansive parking lot. As with other eco-protest songs “Big Yellow Taxi” sought to remind society that the things that mattered most did not have a price tag.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

172

Sounds of Resistance

Animal rights also became a chief concern during the 1970s. In 1972, the United States passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act followed in 1973 by the Endangered Species Act. As news surfaced of the pilot whale hunts taking place in the Faroe Islands that resulted in the killing of more than 900 whales a day and 1,000 dolphins being clubbed and stabbed to death by Japanese fishermen, people were outraged. “Save the Whales” quickly became a popular slogan and the rock duo Crosby and Nash composed the song “To the Last Whale . . . Critical Mass/Wind on the Water.” The fourth stanza of this song expresses the senselessness felt by these tragic killing. “It’s a shame you have to die to put the shadow on our eye.”37 In the same year Pete Singer published the text Animal Liberation, which has become the grounding theory for animal protection. Singer argued that animals should be respected because they can feel suffering. This same argument was advanced in the defense of plants. In 1973, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird published the book The Secret Life of Plants suggesting that despite their lack of a nervous system and a brain, plants may actually be able to feel and remember.38 Characterized as a fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relationships between plants and animals, The Secret Life of Plants became a New York Times bestseller. In 1979, this book was developed into a documentary with Stevie Wonder producing the soundtrack. The album, also bearing the same title, contains the lyrics, “For most felt it was mad to conceive/That plants thought, felt, and moved quite like we.”39 This song, “Same Old Story,” expressed appreciation to George Washington Carver who in the 19th century had believed plants were able to reveal their hidden secrets upon request. According to Wonder, the refusal of people to believe Carver then and the refusal of people to believe Tompkins and Bird in the 1970s was the same old story. Wonder not only expressed chagrin at this reality but through his lyrics attempted to evoke compassion and empathy for plants. The most poignant songs on the CD however, are those with no words, merely instruments. They, like many other eco-protest songs, arouse emotions that are often the impetus and motivation for action.

Eco-Protest Music as Motive for Engagement A final function of eco-protest music during the environmental movement was as a motive for engagement. Standing together in unison against a common foe is often a bonding experience for members of a movement. Consequently, individuals developed close ties and allegiances with each

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

173

other, which inspires and motivates their participation. Jasper wrote, “Collective emotions, the reciprocal ones especially, are linked to the pleasure of protest. Most obvious are the pleasures of being with people one likes, in any number of ways. Other pleasures arise from the joys of collective activities, such as losing oneself in collective motion or song.”40 Such experiences are similar to what sociologist Emilie Durkheim described as collective effervescence, which is the freedom individuals feel within a group that allows them to move outside of the constraints of their everyday life. In this sense eco-protest music becomes a totem. It strengthens, encourages, frees, and provides a source of unification. Individuals feel connected and thus, empowered. The first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970, provided such an occasion. According to a commentator in Philadelphia, the crowd was estimated at 40,000–60,000 individuals composed of whites, blacks, young, and old. The performers represented a mix of cultural diversity as well as different types of environmental protest. Sally Eaton from the cast of the musical Hair opened up singing “Welcome, sulfur dioxide/Hello, carbon monoxide.”41 This song offered a sarcastic response to industrialization and pollution and ended by reminding listeners of the reality that pollution will eventually kill us. “Vapor and fume, at the stone of my tomb/Eating at the stone of my tomb.”42 Later that year the Clean Air Act was passed, which stipulated that factories and power plants must install special smokestack filters to prevent the discharge of ash and other pollutants. They were also required to install antipollution equipment or use alternative fuels in order to limit the release of sulfur dioxide.43 Following Eaton, the Native American band Redbone sang their song “Red and Blue,” which evokes the image of a Native American expressing sorrow over the destruction of the environment. The opening stanza sings, “A Day in the Red Dominion, To Hunt on the Plains of Freedom/Gone is the Life that God Meant for Me, Nothing left that’s Free.”44 By contrasting the freedom of nature with individual freedom, the message of the song reminds listeners that humans are inextricably connected to the environment. To destroy nature is to simultaneously destroy the life that God meant for humans. In the one-hour prime-time CBS News Special Report of this Earth Day celebration, the broadcaster noted that the event was “as much like a rock music festival as a teach-in on the environment.”45 The people, he indicated, were “as much aroused by the music as by the damage done to the environment by pollution.”46 This was, however, a new phenomenon. As historian Robert A. Rosenstone points out, at the beginning of the 1960s

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

174

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

nobody took popular music very seriously.47 Although highly recognized, Elvis Presley was someone no critic would have thought of as being a serious artist. This of course changed as popular music evolved from being primarily about love and began to deal with civil rights demonstrations, drug experiences, interracial dating, and war. Songs began to deal with real world experiences, and this resonated with teenage listeners. By the 1980s several articles and essays appeared in The Journal of Early Adolescence and Youth and Society analyzing the effects of music and media on youth behavior. One article published in 1983, “Television and Music: Contrasting Media in Adolescent Life,” reported on a study of the relationship between adolescent television viewing versus listening to youth music and their effect on participation in adult-structured segments of daily life. The study found that as adolescents grew older their television watching decreased and music listening increased. The researchers suggested that this was due to popular music’s emphasis on speaking to salient youth concerns and feelings. They also concluded that the increased music listening resulted in greater involvement and emotional participation in the world. The study also observed that young people reported higher motivation, greater excitement, and more openness when listening to music. It found that music, more so than television, has the ability to inspire youth and mobilize them toward action. This is because music provides support for the alienation felt by adolescents living in an adult society. Not surprisingly then, while greater television watching corresponded with greater time spent with family, greater music listening corresponded to greater engagement with friends and within society.48 This is obvious throughout the socially turbulent era of the 1960s and 1970s. As Kline noted, Many people, especially the younger generation, supported such issues as the civil rights movement, sexual freedom, feminism, alternative lifestyles, and the anti–Vietnam War movement—all of which countered traditional American views. These activists rallied against the evils they perceived in American life. One of these evils was the uncontrolled exploitation of the environment.49

As emotions grew during the first Earth Day, students smashed car windows as a means of defiance, and in Omaha students walked around in gas masks as a statement of their disapproval. This symbolic act was no doubt readily recognizable since only three years earlier 50 students at the University of Pennsylvania had received national attention for wearing gas masks

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

175

during their annual Hey Day March in protest of the university’s involvement in chemical and biological warfare research. In Boston students decided to close their Earth Day celebration with a “die-in” at the Boston Logan Airport. In order to symbolize the problems of airport and airplane pollution, the students staged coffins in the airport and gathered around them with flowers as they sang, “Give Earth a Chance.” This slogan had become popular by the year 1970 as it was a spin-off from the more popular anti–Vietnam War slogan, “Give Peace a Chance.” By recasting it here, the students were recalling a legacy of protest and engagement. This was not uncommon as chants and slogans were often placed to already existing protest tunes such as with “Dumpster Diving Forever.” One stanza of this song states, “They have wasted untold millions and they waste more every day.”50 These lyrics were placed to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” a protest song written during the Civil War to promote abolition. By utilizing this tune, activists, who were primarily white, were able to evoke the spirit of resistance deployed during abolitionism by African Americans. This fusion of cultures, however, did not end with songs, it extended into activism. Between the years 1941 and 1990 the United States utilized Kaho’olawe, the smallest of the eight major islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, as an official site for bomb testing. Much of the original vegetation on Kaho’olawe was destroyed and fishing in nearby waters was unsafe. Hawaiian activists and musicians George Helm and Walter Ritte held huge rallies in protest of this destruction and in January 1976, along with seven others, they occupied the island as a means of resistance. The Kaho’olawe nine, as they were later referred to, included eight native Hawaiians and Karla Villalba, a Native American. Villalba later shared that having fought for land rights as a Native American on America’s mainland she was able to identify with the Hawaiian demonstrations. The first protests were held by Kalama Valley residents in opposition to a proposal that would have destroyed wetlands and displaced residents in order to erect condominiums and build boating facilities for tourists. The plight of the families who were ordered to vacate their homes attracted the attention of environmental activists on the mainland and in conjunction with Hawaiian residence they formed the group Kokua Kalama, which means Help Kalama.51 Antiwar activists, Student for Democratic Society, environmentalists, and even the Black Panthers were all critical in helping to organize protests for the Kalama Valley community. Environmental historian Sylvia Washington noted in Natural Protests that Black Panthers

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

176

Sounds of Resistance

openly embraced certain concerns and tenets of the environmental movement that were in line with their revolutionary ethos.52 The Hawaiian Renaissance, as it was labeled, sought to protect native lands from exploitation and destruction. Although rarely seen as being a part of the U.S. environmental movement, sociologist George H. Lewis noted that three major issues were prominent concerns for Hawaiian’s during this era: land use issues, ecological and cultural impacts of mass tourism, and the destruction of traditional culture and the dying out of the Hawaiian people. Similar to environmental protest on the mainland, then, the Hawaiian Renaissance was an awakening to the dangers of industrialization and toxic chemicals on the environment. Similarly eco-protest music functioned as a means of building solidarity and as a motive for engagement. Lewis further noted the musical forms chosen by protest musicians usually involve elements drawn from the traditional music of the oppressed group. These elements often use traditional melodies, transformed by the use of new lyrics, but which are recognized by most participants as deriving from the people’s music.53 This strategy is visible in the lyrics of “Nanakuli Blues,” by the Hawaiian natives Liko Martin and Thor Wold. This song speaks of a Hawaiian looking out and seeing that the pristine nature of his island has been destroyed. One line states, “The beaches they sell to build their hotels.”54 This song became popular as many Hawaiians identified with the plight of Kalama Valley residents. The feeling of the loss of home and land to tourism was a common sentiment on the islands and was expressed in an interview by Hawaiian activist Walter Ritte. “I hate tourists. Oh, I don’t hate the tourist person—I hate the industry. We have no control over the industry. It’s like a giant malignant cancer and it’s eating up all our beaches, all the places that are profound for our culture. It’s grabbing them. They take the best.”55 Thus, the shared connection through song often served to galvanize residents toward engagement. In 1977, as activists were planning to occupy the island of Kaho’olawe in order to gain public recognition, George Helm and his cousin James Kimo Mitchell, a National Park Service Ranger, were both lost at sea attempting to swim back to Maui. Facing torrential weather and with no boat, they were overtaken despite the short distance from Maui. Following this unfortunate tragedy, the native Hawaiian Harry Kunihi Mitchell wrote the song “Mele O Kaho’olawe.” This song paid tribute to the nine individuals who protested destruction on Kaho’olawe but it also called for others to join in stating, “Let us band together the Hawaiian Kingdom.”56 Although it could be assumed that Mitchell’s call here is a regional one, it is not. “Mele O Kaho’olawe” was addressed to Native Americans such as

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

177

Villalba, Hawaiians, mainland environmentalists, Black Panthers, and anyone else who shared a love for the land. Like other eco-protest songs, it encouraged individuals to join together and protest ecological destruction.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Conclusion In conclusion, the modern environmental movement, which began with a few health concerns and the publication of a book, has grown exponentially. Following the founding of the EPA, the development of an international Earth Day, the passing of countless environmental laws, and several successful advertising campaigns, environmentalism has come to be inclusive of a plurality of concerns. Today, environmentalists are involved in animal rights, natural conservation, nature preservation, environmental justice, climate change, global warming, renewable energy, urban sprawl, international trade, and toxic chemicals; just to name a few. In many ways this can be viewed as a testament to the success of the 1970s in bringing about environmental awareness and inspiring a nation to action. As I have argued, this was neither the result of one medium nor one culture. Rather, environmental advocacy from its inception has been multifarious and diverse. As David Schlosberg points out in his book Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism, there has never been such thing as a monolithic environmentalism. I would also contend that there has also never been such a thing as a monolithic medium of environmental advocacy. Rather, environmental education has always taken multiple forms through books, essays, reports, commercials, speeches, laws, and music. By examining the legacy of what I deem to be eco-protest music, I have suggested that the U.S. environmental movement was undergirded and advanced through multicultural participation and crosscultural musical collaborations. However, there have been certain limitations to this project. As Reuther states in Sexism and God-Talk, the process of reinterpretation is never an easy one because original sources have often been lost forever. Contemporary attempts at retrieval can only work within the canon that has been passed down. Perhaps this is what Glave was referring to when she wrote in Rooted in the Earth, “unearthing the letters and autobiographies cited in this book required the skills of a treasure hunter.”57 Perhaps the task of retrieving the minority report always does. Consequently, one always feels as if something is missing; something that was not written, was not recorded, or was not saved. Moreover, these songs fail to tell us what they meant for the individuals who wrote them or for those who heard them. What the eco-protest music

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

178

Sounds of Resistance

from the Environmental Movement does offer however, is a counter narrative to that of mainstream environmentalism. Through these songs we see a multicultural endeavor in advancing the environmental movement, which focused on education, empathy, and engagement. Although I have only focused primarily on the period between the 1960s and 1970s for the purpose of this chapter, it is worth mentioning that eco-protest music has continued throughout the development of environmental thought in American history. Arguably one of the most popular environmental songs to date was the Grammy-nominated ballad “Earth Song” by pop icon Michael Jackson. This song asked the question, “Did you stop to notice all the blood we’ve shed before/Did you ever stop to notice this crying Earth its weeping shores?”58 And in 2006, Melissa Etheridge won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “I Need to Wake Up.” Written for the soundtrack to the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, this song states “I’ve been asleep and I need to wake up now.”59 Of course there is irony in Etheridge calling for America to wake up nearly 50 years after the rise of the environmental movement. Yet, the reality is that since the publication of Silent Spring the United States has increased its production of chemicals fivefold.60 According to sociologist Daniel Faber, nearly 462 million pounds of pesticides are applied to the nation’s cropland each year and over 41 million people live within four miles of a toxic waste site.61 Unfortunately then, the environmental landscape is as problematic today as it was in the 1960s. For those who are committed to the legacy of environmental activism, they should not overlook the potential and benefits of eco-protest music. As symbols of an intricate fusion of ecological awareness, environmental activism, and provocative artistry, eco-protest music still has the ability to educate and inspire a generation. Its legacy as well as the current fusion of environmentalism and cinema in movies like Wall-E, An Inconvenient Truth, The Day After Tomorrow, and Avatar should make individuals once again reflect on Dewey’s quote, “Artists have always been the real purveyors of news.”62

Notes 1. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Ronald Sandler, Environmental Justice and Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007). 2. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Ronald Sandler, “Revisiting the Environmental Justice Challenge to Environmentalism,” in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007). 3. Rosemary Ruether, God and Sex-Talk (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993). 4. Thomas Dunlap, Faith in Nature (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

179

5. The Free Dictionary by Farlex, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ (accessed June 5, 2011). 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. “Cash value”1 is a term coined by the philosopher William James, which determines if a belief is true based on its function in our lives. See William James, The Meaning of Truth (New York: Longman Green and Co., 1909). In this regard, truth is always subject to change and always an empirically derived construct. In guarding against a monolithic definition of eco-protest music, therefore, I have intentionally left the conversation open for other readings and understandings. 9. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Athens University Press, 1927), 184. 10. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). 11. Ibid. 12. Jan Lundberg, “Musical Message: Singing Our Way to the Next Culture Change,” Culture Change, February 7, 2010, http://www.culturechange.org/cms/ content/view/603/68/ (accessed June 8, 2011). 13. See http://adcouncil.org. 14. Bo Diddley “Pollution,” Tales from the Funk Dimension 1970–73 (Checker, 1972, vinyl). 15. Marvin Gaye, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” What’s Going On (Motown Record Corporation, 1971, vinyl). 16. See http://epa.gov. 17. Byron W. Daynes and Glen Sussman, White House Politics and the Environment (Houston, TX: TAMU Press, 2010), 10. 18. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1968). 19. Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” in Environmental Ethics, 5th ed., eds. L. Pojman and P. Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008), 298–308. 20. Urban Renewal, “Only So Much Oil in the Ground,” Tower of Power (Warner Bros. Records, 1974, vinyl). 21. 42 U.S.C. § 5551: US Code—Section 5551: Congressional declaration of findings and policy. 22. Gil Scott-Heron, “H2O Gate Blues,” Winter in America (Strata-East Records, 1974, vinyl). 23. Gil Scott-Heron, Winter in America (studio album). 24. Benjamin Kline, First Along the River (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 90. 25. James Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements,” Sociological Forum 13, no. 3 (1998), 297–424. 26. Michael Brown, Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals (New York: Random House, 1983). 27. Flipper, “Love Canal,” Love Canal (Subterranean Records, 1981, vinyl). 28. Daniel Vallero, Paradigms Lost (Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

180

Sounds of Resistance

29. Marvin Gaye, “Save the Children,” What’s Going On (Motown Record Corporation, 1971, vinyl). 30. Cat Stevens, “Where Do the Children Play,” Tea for the Tillerman (A&M Records, 1970, vinyl). 31. Elizabeth Royle, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2005), 184. 32. See http://adcouncil.org. 33. Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” in Environmental Ethics, 5th ed., eds. L. Pojman and P. Pojman (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008), 14–21. 34. See Beverly Wright, “Living and Dying in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’,” in The Quest for Environmental Justice, ed. R. Bullard (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2005). 35. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002). 36. Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” Big Yellow Taxi (Warner Bros. Records Inc, 1970, vinyl). 37. Crosby and Nash, “To The Last Whale: Critical Mass/Wind on the Water,” Replay (Atlantic Records, 1980, compact disc). 38. Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1973). 39. Stevie Wonder, “Same Old Story,” The Secret Life of Plants (Motown Record Corporation, 1979, digital record). 40. Jasper, “The Emotions of Protest.” 41. Sally Eaton, “Air,” Hair (RCA Victor, 1988, MP3). 42. Ibid. 43. Kline, First Along the River. 44. Redbone, “Red and Blue,” Redbone (Epic Records, 1970, vinyl). 45. “Earth Day: A Question of Survival,” CBS News Special, CBS, April 22, 1970. 46. Ibid. 47. Robert Rosenstone, “The Times They Are-A-Changin’: The Music of Protest,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (1969), 131–44. 48. Reed Larson and Robert Kubey, “Television and Music: Contrasting Media in Adolescent Life,” Youth and Society 15, no. 1 (1983), 13–31. 49. Kline, First Along the River, 87. 50. Ted Botha, Mongo: Adventures in the Trash (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 100. 51. Neal Milner, “Home, Homelessness, and Homeland in the Kalama Valley: Re-Imagining a Hawaiian Nation Through a Property Dispute,” The Hawaiian Journal of History 40 (2006), 149–76. 52. Sylvia Washington, “Ball of Confusion: Public Health, African Americans, and Earth Day 1970,” in Natural Protest, eds. M. Egan and J. Crane (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2009).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement

181

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

53. George H. Lewis, “Da Kine Sounds: The Function of Music as Social Protest in the New Hawaiian Renaissance,” American Music 2, no. 2 (1984), 38–52. 54. Country Comfort, “Nanakuli Blues,” We are the Children (Hana Ola Records, 1974, vinyl). 55. Lewis, “Da Kine Sounds.” 56. Olomana, “Mele o Kaho’olawe,” And So We Are (Seabird Sound Inc., 1977, compact disc). 57. Diane Glave, Root in the Earth (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010), 10. 58. Michael Jackson, “Earth Song,” HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1 (Epic Records, 1995, compact disc). 59. Melissa Etheridge, “I Need to Wake Up,” An Inconvenient Truth (The Island Def Music Group, 2006, compact disc). 60. Daniel Faber, “The Political Ecology of American Capitalism,” in The Struggle for Ecological Democracy (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), 28. 61. Ibid. 62. Dewey, The Public and its Problems.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 9

Resistance and Relapse The Politics of Drug Discourse in Rap Music

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Michael P. Jeffries

Eminem (Marshall Mathers) is a self-cultivated spectacle of hip-hop controversy and contradiction. Perhaps the most intriguing development in Eminem’s saga is his public battle with substance abuse and addiction. From the moment he burst on the scene, Eminem rapped about and discussed his use of sleep medication, prescription painkillers, and mood regulators, sprinkling references to other drugs and alcohol throughout much of his music. These dangerous coping mechanisms for anger and emotional pain exact a hefty price on those who choose them indiscriminately, and in 2005, he was hospitalized and treated for dependency on sleep medication. Seemingly defiant as ever, Eminem next returned to the limelight in 2009 with the release of Relapse, an album with accompanying cover art featuring an image of Eminem’s face comprised of a collage of pills. Behind the scenes, though, Mathers’s façade of nihilism and invulnerability came crashing down in 2007, when he overdosed on painkillers, reportedly to the brink of death. Eminem checked himself back into rehabilitation in 2008, and has reportedly been clean and sober since. The album recorded after rehabilitation, Recovery (2010), centers on Mathers’s reinvention. Eminem’s is not just the story of a recreational user turned addict; it is about the politics of fame, drug abuse, music, and the dispossessed. Hip-hop’s role in this drama has evolved, as hip-hop artists (rappers, in particular) have been the chief targets of the bigoted moral panic machine since the 1980s, and the very phrase “hip-hop” is used indiscriminately by politicians and commentators as a code word for all manner

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

184

Sounds of Resistance

of deviance and debauchery. So when speaking about drugs in hip-hop, one always runs the risk of reinforcing race and class laden stereotypes and misinformation, and validating the misguided notion that hip-hop is uniquely pathological. Still, the intersection of hip-hop, drug use, and the commerce of the drug trade is a rich field for deconstructing hegemony and the politics of resistance. Drug and alcohol use is intertwined with a number of musical communities. Artists, fans, and historians describe the impact of drugs on jazz, rock, disco, and reggae collectives, as chemical influences alter musical performance and conceptions of oppositional identity. This resistance does not take the form of traditionally conceived political activism; rather, it operates at the level of meaning-making and social identity. While drug discourse in commercially successful rap music shares a number of similarities with its instantiation in other musical communities, its relationship to resistance is far more complex. This essay traces the relationship between resistance and drug discourse in hip-hop through four persistent tropes. First, drugs are invoked as metaphors for “dope,” an adjective used to describe powerful music, which is a vernacular turn that destabilizes traditional uses and understandings of drug terminology. Second, hip-hop artists highlight use of specific drugs and alcoholic beverages as status symbols, meant to signify rappers’ rebelliousness and triumph as underdogs in late capitalist society. Unfortunately, this form of resistance rarely includes deep criticism of capitalism, and often affirms sexist standards of masculinity. Third, discussion of the drug trade as a staple of depressed urban communities is employed as proof of one’s willingness to resist authority (especially the police), and express disgust with one’s economic oppression. Drug dealing is often cast as a reasonable, if nihilistic, employment choice in a society that actively inhibits ghetto residents’ ability to acquire training and secure jobs within the legitimate economy. Fourth, rappers openly divulge the extent to which drugs and alcohol are used to cope with psychological pain, including suffering caused by poverty. Resistance here takes the form of the will to endure pain and survive, and in some cases, it includes a critique of the institutionalized inequality that embeds illicit drugs within poor black and Latino/a neighborhoods. Together, these developments force a reconsideration of the cultural politics of resistance in musical traditions.

Resistance and American Hip-Hop Music Jocelyn Hollander and Rachel Einwohner provide a comprehensive literature review of resistance studies, observing that most theoretical debates

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Resistance and Relapse

185

about resistance often boil down to two central issues: recognition and intent. In reality, neither criterion constitutes a sufficient litmus test for resistance. The authors note that while significant research is dedicated to self-conscious social movements wherein resistance is materially manifest in public and widely recognizable material acts, recent contributions highlight less obvious forms of resistance that occur in our everyday lives. Rather than exclusively highlighting dramatic, contentious, physically embodied acts, Hollander and Einwohner alert us to the importance of smallscale symbolic acts, which may revolve around discourse, talk, and silence. They observe that resistance does not require evidence of linear progress toward publicly acknowledged political goals. To the contrary, resistance is a sometimes halting, sometimes fluid endeavor, as power and domination provoke resistance, which prompts further suppression. The rules of the game may change on the fly, and “Resistance is not always pure . . . even while resisting power, individuals or groups may simultaneously support the structures of domination that necessitate resistance in the first place . . . neither resisters nor dominators are monolithic: inevitably, there is variation in both groups.”1 Tricia Rose uses James Scott’s “public” and “hidden” transcripts framework in her seminal text, Black Noise (1994), to demonstrate the extent to which various hip-hop communities and artists throughout the 1980s and early 1990s resisted oppression.2 Public transcripts are the accepted discourses of social order and propriety; the rules broadcast in the public sphere for everyone to hear and abide by. Hidden transcripts are produced by the disempowered, and often coded in language that prevents oppressors from grasping the full meaning of the message. Rose argues that hip-hop artists collectively produce hidden transcripts, as rap music’s social criticism challenges the police, government, and media.3 Poor black and brown urbanites disregarded by Reagan-era policies produced a collection of texts and performances that mediate violence within their neighborhoods and critique the policies and authority figures that constrain and condemn their lives. Presaging Hollander and Einhower’s observations about the ebb and flow of oppressors and resistors, Rose and Scott emphasize that hidden transcripts are often incorporated into the public domain as means to minimize disruption. A number of scholars echo and expand Rose’s argument about rap music as collective discursive resistance. Where Rose is primarily focused on East Coast communities, Robin Kelley, Theresa Martinez, and Eithne Quinn turn to the West Coast in their respective analyses of classic gangsta rap—a conflicted, often misogynistic and nihilistic storytelling tradition that rises from and critiques the poverty and violence of daily life in Los Angeles.4

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

186

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Murray Forman argues that no matter the geographical setting, rap music engages in a redefinition of the physical space of the blighted postindustrial city. Instead of conceiving of their homes as worthless slums without any redeeming qualities, rappers create “the hood” through their raps. It becomes a place that does not deny the harsh reality of postindustrial urban life, but imbues such neighborhoods with a sense of pride, solidarity, and shared interest.5 Both Todd Boyd and Bakari Kitwana frame hip-hop as a form of generational resistance among young African Americans disconnected from the civil rights politics of respectability heralded by their elders.6 Craig Watkins points out that Reagan-era hip-hop was wrongly dismissed as a social movement because it was driven by young people, and until recently hip-hop was defined as a “youth culture.”7 Reading hip-hop as a monolithic form of age-based resistance grows more difficult as hip-hop communities continue to age, and occasionally, conflict with each other. The internal fissures of hip-hop communities present themselves even more readily when examining hip-hop history through the lens of gender. Rose, Imani Perry, and Gwendolyn Pough are three of many hip-hop feminists who document and describe women’s resistance within hip-hop spheres, as female artists object to and fight back against persistent sexism in rap music.8 Where much of the reading on this form of resistance focuses on female artists, hip-hop fans with stigmatized gender identities, including queerness, often employ hip-hop practices and aesthetics to challenge their marginalization from mainstream rap culture and affirm themselves.9 Russell Potter points out that regardless of content or theme, rap’s reliance on vernacular, which challenges the rules and ownership of the words and phrases we use, is a form of guerilla resistance. He explains the vernacular as antilanguage: it is not a monolithic battering ram (and indeed, where would one batter?), but a guerilla incursion; it steals language, steals sounds, steals the media spotlight, then slips away, regrouping at another unpredictable cultural site. An engagement with the forces of the hip-hop vernacular . . . is foredoomed to the kind of bogged-down defensiveness that bests an army in guerilla territory.10

As Potter, Perry, and others emphasize, much of this vernacular violence is executed through signifying—indirect communication that includes rhyming, mimicry, exaggeration, and a host of other tactics designed to connect performers with a specific audience while excluding (and often irritating) discursive outsiders. Signifying in hip-hop extends beyond the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Resistance and Relapse

187

verbal communication of rap and into the recording itself, which often contains subversively stolen and resampled tracks, often to the dismay of the original musicians, and their record companies. As hip-hop emerged as a profitable business, record companies moved to protect their masters and secure payment for unlicensed use of musical recordings,11 but sampling remains an aesthetic feature and an often intentional guerilla tactic among hip-hop producers. In discussing music’s influence on social movements Eyerman and Jameson insist not only on music’s knowledge building potential, but also its “identity-giving qualities.”12 Oppositional identity is often specified as collective, but individual identity and performance present additional opportunities to observe and engage music and resistance. The individual may well be part of a greater musical community, and share in the identity and the political goals of fellow community members. But even if that social connection is not especially robust, or the goals of the community are not especially ambitious or well articulated, music can still stimulate resistance, because it helps individuals survive on a day-to-day basis. Writing about the politics of fandom, Lawrence Grossberg warns that affinity for and identification with music may not dictate or guarantee political action. But performing one’s fandom can stave off depression and hopelessness. First and foremost, love of music can impart the will to survive—a necessary precondition for any sort of political movement.13 An oft-cited historical example of this truth is the sustaining power of African American slave spirituals in American slave communities as discussed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Sterling Stuckey, and others. “In such a context mere survival qualifies as an oppositional political act.”14 The context in contemporary society has changed, however, as there has emerged a means of music consumption that is decidedly individualized. Digital file sharing and personal listening devices enable us to be completely alone, yet accompanied by all the songs we choose. Tia DeNora’s qualitative study of everyday music listeners highlights our propensity for choosing music to change both mental and bodily states. We imagine the mood we would like to be in, and select a song or artist that will take us to that place. We know that certain songs will improve our focus and work rate, or conjure memories of our friends or loved ones. Music is not merely a reflection of a given state or mood; it becomes constitutive of that mood.15 My own study of everyday hip-hop listeners supports DeNora’s findings, as respondents choose rap music not only because certain songs and artists present truths about their social world, but because it serves as a building block of both collective and individual identity, shaping memory and helping fans cope with life on a day-to-day basis.16

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

188

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Drugs and Music The drug-induced chemical components of musical experience also fall within the realm of individual performativity, with clear connections to DeNora’s work on music as a form of self-management and mood adjustment. In some cases, evidence suggests that specific drugs are made to heighten musical experiences based on genre. For example, marijuana and hallucinogens played major roles in the aesthetics and politicized musical content of the rock/folk counterculture movement,17 but were replaced by cocaine as the drug of choice at the height of disco, as the tempo of the music and the club scene demanded a stimulant that could keep dancers going all night.18 As the high-energy house and rave party scene replaced disco, ecstasy played an equally dangerous and vital performative role at dance parties that lasted well into the morning hours.19 Fans’ testimonies of a drug aided listening experience are echoed by artists, who describe choosing specific drugs with performative intent. Jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, offers a detailed account of his early experiences playing saxophone under the influence of pot. Mezzrow goes on to describe additional benefits of playing while high on marijuana, including increased tolerance of band members’ mistakes,20 and an aura that fit with the relaxed and mild jazz aesthetic.21 Jazz is a useful domain for tracing the development of drug discourse in musical subcultures, because like hip-hop, its history demands attention to the links between structural, cultural, and performative considerations. The deathly dark side of post war jazz communities’ fascination with drugs is exemplified by the prevalence of heroin, a narcotic that touched the lives of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane, among others. Heroin is a depressant, which certainly jibes with the mellow jazz ideal, and artists describe a sense of being able to block out the world or focus solely on composing while high. Nevertheless, as jazz evolved and bebop arose to replace the big band style in the postwar era, the marginal and edgy self-identification of bebop musicians carried the onus of embodying an oppositional and dangerous lifestyle. Thus, heroin became more than a musical tool, emerging as a status symbol among bebop musicians.22 Aesthetics and personal performative choices intertwine to produce drug subcultures in musical communities. Prioritizing these connections, though, can lead to a romanticization that glosses over the commerce of the drug trade and the transmission of drug knowledge, such that the music itself magically explains the prevalence of drug culture. This is a major analytic problem, because it presents opportunities to demonize entire musical

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Resistance and Relapse

189

communities, reduce the music to an assault on morality, and paint everyone who chooses to partake in “dangerous” music as worthy of moral panic. Schneider offers an important corrective in prioritizing the spatial dynamics of postwar jazz clubs as social settings that brought together artists, fans, gangsters, drug dealers, and addicts.23 In analyzing the spatial and commercial dynamics of these clubs, the surge in heroin use is more responsibly explained as a result of a unique set of complementary opportunities. The drug market is allowed to operate with very few restrictions in the clubs, and it is facilitated primarily by the gangsters, dealers, and pimps. The prevalence of the narcotic is complemented by the fact that knowledge about using the drug is transmitted in the exact same space, as addicts socialize new users on site. It is not simply that there is something endemic or mystical about jazz that explains the heroin problem, it is a unique set of social conditions that integrate drug commerce and use with musical experience. This is an important lesson when considering the tropes of drug and alcohol discourse in hip-hop, where the decrepit postindustrial economies of urban neighborhoods figure prominently as part of rappers’ origins stories, spaces of musical production, and broader narratives.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hip-Hop as “Dope” Music The year 1988 is not the definitive starting point for drug discourse in hip-hop, but it is a moment where the complexity of drug discourse in rap music is illuminated in a decidedly public manner. It is the year that legendary rapper Rakim pronounced himself “The Microphone Fiend,”24 a moniker that not only serves as a song title, but continues to follow him as a nickname. There is no mistaking the simile when Rakim raps, “I fiend for the microphone like heroin/soon as the mic kicks, I need a fix.”25 This theme is repeated ad nauseam by modern-day rappers, without any substantive ingenuity or evolution. Hip-hop music is as addictive as a narcotic, and rappers express their love for it using addiction as a metaphor to convey their compulsion to rap. In discussing his recovery, Eminem explains, “Rap was my drug. It used to get me high and then it stopped getting me high. Then I had to resort to other things to make me feel that. Now rap’s getting me high again.”26 Mere months before Rakim proclaimed himself the microphone fiend, Public Enemy had already challenged this glorification of drug discourse in rap music when they released “Night of the Living Bassheads” (1988). Discussed at length by Rose, this song plays on and critiques the multiple

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

190

Sounds of Resistance

meanings of drug discourse in rap. Chuck D opens the song by condemning the notion that “dope” is a benign word for “funky.” He emphasizes the ways the drug economy destroys the black community, producing dealers and addicts that prey on their neighbors in the name of the quick fix— either money or chemical high. Finally, the rap emphasizes the multiple meaning of drug terminology at the end of each verse. The end of the first verse, for example, warns listeners not to confuse the bass-heavy sound of rap with the poison that is freebase cocaine, as the DJ finishes Chuck’s final sentence with the word (Bass or base) sampled from another track. “please don’t confuse this with the sound/I’m talkin’ bout. . .” and then goes silent. The DJ finishes Chuck’s sentence as we hear the word “Bass!” (also a slang term for freebase or crack cocaine), sampled from another song, inserted into the void as the start of the chorus.27 The purpose of the song is not to condemn any and every rapper who has ever used drugs as a metaphor in his or her song, but a passionate plea for ending self-destruction in black urban communities. Following Potter’s argument, these efforts constitute a clear vernacular assault on conventional understandings and critiques of the drug problem. If these are the two poles of drug discourse established in the late 1980s, the dope music metaphor gained significant traction, overwhelming the antidrug message in the commercial rap public sphere in the 1990s. Jennifer Lena documents the deleterious effects of corporate investment on the content of widely available rap music during the 1990s. As large record companies turned rap into big business, puerile and often disturbing themes in rap music grew more commonplace.28 It is difficult to overstate the influence of gangsta rap, and more specifically, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992) on these developments. Dre’s turn toward marijuana as brand and metaphor was difficult to predict in 1988, when he served as the musical maestro of Niggas With Attitude (N.W.A.). N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton (1988) not only contains the song “Dopeman,” where Ice Cube rails against drug dealers and everyday people foolish enough to try cocaine, but “Express Yourself,” where Dre himself raps about his disdain for marijuana or ‘cess, warning that the drugs are known to give users brain damage. “I don’t smoke weed or cess/’Cause it’s known to give a brother brain damage.” Less than five years later, Dre is unapologetically buying chronic and Remy Martin, and “smelling like Indo-nesia” as he cruises down the block on “Let Me Ride” (1992).29 The album is littered with references to smoking pot, and both the back cover and the compact disc feature a marijuana leaf as insignia. In Welcome to Death Row (2001), multiple contributors to The Chronic, including Snoop Dogg, confirm that marijuana was regularly present in the recording studio.30 When Dre and Snoop followed The Chronic

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Resistance and Relapse

191

with another multiplatinum hit—Doggystyle (1993), the g-funk aesthetic was encoded in smoke, as antipolitical and semipornographic party music fused with hypermasculine braggadocio.31 Dre names his albums after marijuana, partially in homage to what he and his colleagues perceive as the creative benefits of the drug, but also as means to capitalize on the “dope music” metaphor as marketing strategy. Buy the album, and it will get you high. Dre brands himself not only as someone who will elevate your mood, but also as someone who embodies rebellion. He builds on the momentum of his N.W.A. roots, purposefully resisting authority by provoking those who condemn hip-hop as distasteful and dangerous, while eschewing the more socially responsible and politically radical components of N.W.A.’s catalog. The commercial success of g-funk artists’ unapologetic endorsement of marijuana set the stage for the widespread affirmation of drug themes as means to convey power and oppositional identity.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Drugs as Rebellious Status Symbols Use of alcohol and illegal drugs as signifiers of rebellion is not unique, but one of the ways this discourse in hip-hop differs from previous musical traditions is the extent to which drugs and alcohol are intertwined in narratives glorifying personal wealth and consumer culture. This difference is especially pronounced if we compare hip-hop’s drug discourse to the rock and folk counterculture of the 1960s, which rose as an explicit critique of consumer capitalism. As Rose and Scott warn, public transcripts are constantly engaged in absorbing hidden and revolutionary transcripts in order to preserve the hegemonic order, so perhaps we should not be surprised that corporate rappers discuss specific strains of marijuana and brands of alcohol in the same breath as luxury cars and jewelry. Jay-Z’s music and biography as a drug dealer turned corporate music mogul provides a number of flashpoints illustrating this phenomenon. The chorus for the party anthem “Roc Boys” brags that the “dope boys of the year” have enough money to pay for everyone’s drinks; they are the life and financial lifeblood of the party. “You ain’t even gotta bring your purses out/we the dope boys of the year, drinks is on the house.”32 The boast is multilayered. Jay-Z’s record company Roc-a-fella Records is a play on word Rockefeller, intended to signify the company’s financial power. When the “Roc” in Roc-a-fella reappears in “Roc Boys,” the reference to the drug trade crystallizes as “Roc Boys” and “dope boys” serve as slang for young men who sell dope. Of course, the dope has multiple meanings, derived from Jay-Z’s past as a drug dealer and present as a producer of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

192

Sounds of Resistance

dope music, but in both cases, the drug signifier conveys financial success. It is not enough to be simply rich, though, the power of the dollar must be earned through dangerous, hypermasculine labor that falls outside the bounds of the legitimate economy, and displayed through the conspicuous consumption of alcohol. Just as Dre uses a particular strain of marijuana to earn credibility, rappers including Jay-Z refer to specific brands of high-end alcohol to project an aura of exclusivity and privileged knowledge. Much of the most widely available commercial rap sounds like an exercise in product placement, as brands like Grey Goose, Courvoisier, and Dom Perignon, are three of the many drinks of choice for tastefully altering one’s state of mind. When the makers of Cristal issued a statement in disapproval of the frequency with which rappers gave shout outs to the champagne in their songs, Jay-Z denounced the company as racist, vowing never to rap about Cristal again, purchase the drink for personal consumption, or serve it in any of the nightclubs he owns. A universal hip-hop boycott of Cristal was never a legitimate threat, but this example illustrates the ways drug and alcohol discourse is employed by rappers as another means of bragging and boasting about status derived from a seductive mix of outlaw and consumer capitalism aesthetics. Of course, it is difficult to maintain one’s status as someone who resists authority by drinking and flaunting wealth, especially since alcohol is a legal drug. A number of rappers, however, have picked up the mantle of marijuana as a sign of resistance, and the discourse around pot is similarly intertwined with conspicuous consumption. Chief among the contemporary rappers who openly discuss marijuana use is Wiz Khalifa, who openly brags about a $10,000 per month marijuana habit, and has released a number of songs, albums, and mixtapes with marijuana-themed titles. Wiz straddles a difficult and sometimes contradictory line, arguing that pot should be legalized because “everybody needs it,” and “The world would be a better place,” while emphasizing that he does not endorse universal use. He explains, “I don’t say, ‘Yo, get up and do that.’ I said that’s what I do, and I tell you what I do while I’m doing it. I’m not trying to push drugs on anybody.” Khalifa warns that shameless marijuana use is not for everyone, because “People gotta stay free, people need jobs, people got parents that probably wouldn’t be with it, so don’t ruin your life trying to be like me.”33 This delicate stance positions Wiz as a figure of resistance because he thumbs his nose at authority, specifically the legal machinery that criminalizes marijuana. He has been arrested for possession, and continues to openly discuss his willingness to break the law. Wiz also constructs himself

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Resistance and Relapse

193

as a rebellious and dangerous figure by virtue of his do-what-I-want-to-do ethos, warning that everyday people who try to be like him are in danger of ruining their lives. This ethos often teeters on the brink of nihilism when it is invoked by rappers with a more gangsta disposition and a penchant for more dangerous drugs. Perhaps the most commercially viable hip-hop rebel without a cause is Lil’ Wayne, who was charged with multiple felonies, including drug and gun possession, resulting in a yearlong prison sentence. Wayne’s raps discuss marijuana in addition to more lethal drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, and “syrup”—a mixture of promethazine and codeine. Wayne refuses to quit drinking syrup, despite its role in the death of famed Houston rapper Pimp C, because nobody has the right to tell him what to do, or disparage his formula for success. I feel like everything I do is successful and productive. It’s gonna be hard to tell me I’m slipping. It’s hard to sit and tell a n—a ‘Stop.’ ‘F—, how can we tell this n—a to stop when every f—ing thing he do is successful . . . Why focus on me? Don’t compare me to no one. Don’t compare me to no one who has passed, and why they passed. I can walk out this b—h right now and get hit by a bus. Don’t judge me. You wanna judge me, put on a black gown and get a gavel. Get in line with the rest of them that’s about to judge me. I got court dates every other month. It’s me against the world—that’s how I feel.34

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The first thing to note here is that Wayne is flirting with disaster, with a defiance that conjures the fall of Amy Winehouse, as well as the aforementioned Eminem and Pimp C. Second, in this rant, Wayne connects those who moralize about his drug use to those who judge him for criminal transgressions. This is a loaded implication, because of the racialized history and racist outcomes of the criminal justice complex, especially with respect to the criminalization of drug use and possession.

The Drug Trade, Poverty, and Unjust Authority Descriptions of drug trade activities in rap music are a double-edged sword. On one hand, many of these performances offer no viable social critique, as rappers describe themselves in exaggerated, socially toxic terms as means to embody hypermasculine antiheroes that record companies believe are marketable to a mass public. On the other hand, more eloquent and conflicted descriptions of the drug trade in urban ghettos shed light on a purposefully forgotten segment of the American population and economy. Rappers who discuss their upbringing in impoverished

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

194

Sounds of Resistance

neighborhoods with robust drug economies are aware of their multiple roles as antiheroes and peddlers of ghetto authenticity, martyrs, and documentarians. As Nas raps on “Memory Lane” (1994) “Check the prognosis—is it real or showbiz?/My window faces shootouts, drug overdoses—live amongst no roses.”35 In an interview with journalist Bill Moyer, The Wire creator David Simon affirms the drug trade as a form of destructive social welfare in the absence of legitimate employment opportunities. When such work is the only viable economic option one has, the “just say no,” campaign is revealed as a farce. “Economically, we don’t need those people,” Simon says. “The American economy doesn’t need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is.”36 Rappers have been preaching this gospel for years, as famed rapper Tupac Shakur laments in “Changes” (1998) the government’s choice to carry out an endless war on drugs, rather than a war on poverty, “instead of war on poverty/they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”37 Shakur’s complaint is not that police disrupt the illegal drug economy; it is that the police regularly abuse their authority, harassing, maiming, and murdering ghetto residents, who are all stereotyped as drug dealers. Black and brown urbanites’ fraught relationship with the police has deep roots in hip-hop history. The criticism is foundational across political, geographical, and generational genres of rap, as acts with drastically different performances of resistance—Public Enemy, to N.W.A., to Jay-Z—all offer searing critiques of police misconduct and the criminal justice system. In the best case scenario, hip-hop communities rally around these sentiments and engage in political action that more closely approaches more widely recognizable forms of resistance. Two such cases are the Black August Hip-Hop project, a long-standing group that organizes concerts and benefits to raise awareness about global human rights, and the legislative campaign against the New York State Rockefeller drug laws, launched by Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. The commerce of the drug trade takes on an added dimension with respect to discourses of labor as projected in rap music. Quinn notes that the illicit drug economy provided seed money for many of the early gangsta rap acts on the West Coast, and this means of financing one’s rap career with drug money is frequently repeated by contemporary rappers. It must be said that many of these claims are simply false; the vast majority of commercially successful rappers do not have work histories as drug dealers.38 Andrea Queeley rightly notes that white-owned corporate record

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Resistance and Relapse

195

companies’ efforts to project, commoditize, and sell images of black and Hispanic criminality to a largely white consumer base play a crucial role in sustaining racist stereotypes and the “tough on crime” discourse.39 Nevertheless, some renowned figures in hip-hop, such as 50 Cent, Jay-Z, and the Notorious B.I.G. do have personal histories that include labor in the drug trade, and these details are essential to their mythic significance as triumphant underdogs. When Nas raps, “somehow the rap game reminds me of the crack game,” in “Represent” (1994),40 he is somehow reminded because people who grow up in neighborhoods such as Nas’s home in the Queensbridge Housing Projects are often introduced to the meaning of work through the job market of the illicit economy. “Hustlin’” is a longstanding rhetorical trope in African American vernacular traditions, but in the case of commercially successful hip-hop music, hustlin’ as a worker in the underground economy becomes intertwined with hustlin’ as a rapper. So when Rick Ross releases the smash hit “Hustlin’” (2006), the drug dealing he describes on the track (through signifying) is seamlessly folded into the nonverbal mood of day-to-day work—a feeling cultivated by the mellow, hypnotic beat, and the song’s repetitive refrain “everyday I’m hustlin’.”41 Hustlin’ in the illicit economy is a survival strategy, which can certainly be read as an act of resistance when poverty and racism prescribe social death, rather than a haphazard choice to participate in a leisurely subculture. This strategy, however, is not without costs.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Suffering and Remorse in Hip-Hop Drug Discourse While much of the drug discourse in popular rap music takes the form of hypermasculine boasting and prideful contempt for authority, deep undercurrents of self-interrogation, existential reckoning, and moral critique force us to recognize this complex and contested manifestation of resistance. In the examples above, rappers discuss their personal drug use as an enjoyable leisure activity, but stories such as Eminem’s remind us that drugs and alcohol are often used to cope with deep pain, often caused by poverty and marginalization. Contrary to popular belief, hip-hop ghettogangsta performances, including tales from the drug trade, feature vivid descriptions of protagonists’ pain, vulnerability, and self-medication with chemical substances. Style P’s “I’m a G” (2011), contains many of the objectionable themes of the genre, but it opens by highlighting his difficult upbringing, which he copes with by “drowning in my sorrows, drinkin’ liquor, tryin’ to smoke alone.”42 This is far from atypical, as rappers often convey a range of emotions about drug use and the drug trade within the same track.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

196

Sounds of Resistance

There is a long and underappreciated tradition of drug-related raps that focus on the deleterious psychological effects of life in the dope game, including depression, remorse, and paranoia. The classic text is Geto Boys’ dark and captivating “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” (1991). As the pressure and danger of the drug trade mounts on those involved, Scarface and his fellow Geto Boys explain how the distinction between user and dealer collapses, as the daily paranoia and stress of the drug dealer make him feel as if he is as anxious and desperate as the addict. This is a canonical song in the genre, as contemporary rappers continue to signify on “Mind Playing Tricks” sampling both lyrics and rhyme styles with some regularity. One such reprise is Clipse “Nightmares” (2006) as Pusha T repeats lines and directly mimics the Geto Boys’ rhyme patterns as he portrays the harrowing flip side of Jay-Z’s glamorous dope boy image. Even though he has made the transition from dealer to rapper, Pusha still takes extreme precaution to keep a low profile and worries that karma is catching up with him.43 In another track on the same album, entitled, “We Got it For Cheap,” Malice (the other half of Clipse) explains that if he were financially stable, he would never lead his brother, whose real name is “Terrence,” into the drug trade.44 Note that all of this occurs in the context of rapid rapping about seducation and trappings of the drug trade. Pusha T’s stage name plays on the word “pusher” as a slang term for drug dealer, and the track title, “We Got it for Cheap,” signifies on phrases spoken by drug dealers advertising their product at a competitive price. In cases like these, hiphop music replaces chemical substances as fuel for survival, as the cure for what ails ghetto survivors is confession and self-expression. Unless listeners are attentive to the word play and cross-referencing between hiphop artists and generations, the full meaning of such songs is lost, and the artist is reduced to just another rapper glorifying drug dealing and senseless violence. In addition to the personal suffering and coping strategies, hip-hop’s rap music is laden with instances where rappers lament the communal suffering imposed upon the ghetto by the drug economy. Tupac’s critique in “Changes” is not solely concerned with the injustice of police misconduct and the war on drugs. The lyrics contain another passage where he laments the mercenary capitalism of the drug trade, as dealers make money by selling poison to their neighbors. Shakur weaves his critique of the drug trade into a more intricate narrative about ghetto depression and destruction in the song “Brenda’s Got a Baby” from his debut album 2Pacalypse Now (1991). The social destruction caused by the drug trade is not the main focus of the narrative, but as Tupac tells Brenda’s story, it is impossible to ignore the influence of illicit drugs on the protagonist’s life. Listeners

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Resistance and Relapse

197

learn that Brenda’s father was “a junkie, putting death into his arm,” and the song explicitly suggests that Brenda’s drug-related familial destruction cannot be isolated from the problems of the entire community. As a single mother without any support network or prospects for legitimate employment, Brenda turns to drug sales in an effort to generate income, but ends up getting robbed. Tragically, prostitution is Brenda’s last resort, and the harrowing note on which Shakur ends her tale.45 So while “Brenda’s Got a Baby” cannot be characterized as an “antidrug song,” Tupac’s performance clearly qualifies as an act of resistance against the plague of illegal drugs in poor black and brown communities. In another explication of the causes and effects of drug culture in the ghetto, Dead Prez opens their critically acclaimed LP, Let’s Get Free (2000), with a track entitled “Wolves.” The track is not a song, rather, it is an excerpted audio clip of a speech given by Omali Yeshitela who recounts a parable about a wolf licking the blade of a blood-stained knife, fashioned as a trap by hunters. The wolf cuts his tongue, but believes the blood belongs to his prey, and continues to lick the knife until he bleeds to death. Yeshitela explains that this story is a metaphor for the drug trade in poor black communities, where dealers believe they have found a way to sustain themselves, all the while engaging in their own self-destruction by licking the knife of communal exploitation and violence. But instead of giving into racist moral panic whipped up by the criminalization of poor black “wolves,” Yeshitela urges listeners to identify the root of the problem: the hunters who set the trap in the first place. “Imperialism, white power” is the enemy for Yeshitela, and resistance to the plague of drugs must be directed at those who institutionalize racism and poverty.46 Both Tupac and Dead Prez emphasize the drug-related suffering inflicted upon marginalized black and Latino/a people while simultaneously offering encouragement to actually resist this oppression on songs like Shakur’s classic, “Keep Ya Head Up” (1993), a song that constitutes a double-sided form of resistance. First, resistance is manifest in the act of providing a critique of ghetto suffering that calls attention to institutionalized economic inequality, rather than simply ghetto and drug culture pathology. Tupac describes how ghetto dwellers struggle to pay their rent without turning to the illicit economy, and criticizes the government for spending more money funding wars than feeding the poor. And second, Shakur implores listeners who live in such communities to survive, stand up and reject the expectations and stereotypes cast upon them by white supremacist imperialism. As in “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” drug discourse is interwoven in Tupac’s critique of so-called ghetto pathology. He laments, “I blame my mother, for turning my brother into a crack baby.”47

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

198

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Drug discourse in hip-hop music contains far more moving parts than its appearance in other musical communities, and as such it provides the opportunity to apply multiple understandings of resistance. Crucially, hip-hop drug discourse rarely manifests as overt political resistance, but instead as social resistance, which proves to be problematic. When drug abuse is mixed with the conviction that such actions embody unburdened rebellion, the rush of defiance can lead to denial that the user has lost control of her habit. The more commonly identified problem with hip-hop drug discourse is that drug narratives often include content that reinforces disparaging stereotypes of black and Latino/a people. The racial inequity built into criminal justice processes is a bottomless well of national shame, and when multinational corporations profit from casting black and brown bodies in the same hackneyed outlaw roles, we have more than one reason to disparage the most widely available and recognizable drug raps. Not all drug-related performances fit smugly within the bounds of racist stereotypes, and recognizing the different facets of drug discourse in rap music imparts lessons about both hip-hop and resistance. Where hiphop is concerned, the analysis above demonstrates not only the folly in condemning all drug-related hip-hop music as hedonist and/or criminal, it illustrates the capacity for multiplicity and reflexivity within individual hip-hop performers. This is especially important in media and industry contexts that build rigid typologies for rap acts. Some of these types are perfectly suitable and useful. For example, the distinction between east coast, west coast, and southern hip-hop performers corresponds to specific, locally derived aesthetic differences that comprise distinct, if fluid, regional trends and types. The troubling sort of typology is that which concerns the character of a given rapper. As this chapter argues, rappers who are often considered thugs or gangstas, such as 50 Cent and Tupac, certainly reflect on and critique their relationship to drug culture and drug commerce.48 Moreover, the evolution of rappers like Eminem shows that these performers may change their relationship with drugs and drug commerce at any time, rendering their previously assigned labels and categories incongruent with the content of their performances. As for resistance, all theories built around the familiar poles of recognition and intent do not need to be abandoned. Nevertheless, reducing questions of resistance to litmus tests for these two criteria inhibits our ability to understand musical performance, reception, and meaning. In rap music, regardless of their intent, performers resist race- and class-based oppression

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Resistance and Relapse

199

through vernacular and narrative tropes that undoubtedly bolster offensive stereotypes of black and Latino/a people. In some cases, the executors of oppression realize the challenges posed by hip-hop cultures and attempt to repress or dismiss artists and fans who claim hip-hop identities. In other cases, the revolutionary qualities of hip-hop music are obscured by the fog of spectacle and commerce, and the powers-that-be ignore art they consider frivolous and trivial. But scholars who want to understand how resistance works must allow for its messiness and indeterminacy, because this is how it is played and sung by the musicians we love, heard by the masses, and danced in the world.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (December 2004), 539. 2. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 3. Ibid., 105. 4. Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Theresa Martinez, “Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap as Resistance,” Sociological Perspectives 40, no. 2 (1997), 265–86; Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangster Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 5. Murray Forman, The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002). 6. Todd Boyd, The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip-Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002); and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggas, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005). 7. S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005). 8. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004). 9. Andreana Clay, “I Used to be Scared of the Dick: Queer Women of Color and Hip Hop Masculinity,” in Home Girls Make Some Noise!: A Hip Hop Feminist Anthology, eds. Gwendolyn Pough, Elaine Richardson, and Aisha Durham (Mira Loma, CA: Parker Publishing, 2007), 148–65. 10. Russell A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 76.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

200

Sounds of Resistance

11. Regina Austin, “The Black Community, Its Lawbreakers, and a Politics of Identification,” Southern California Law Review 65 (1992), 1769–817; Wayne Marshall, “Giving Up Hip-Hop’s Firstborn: A Quest for the Real After the Death of Sampling,” Callaloo 29, no. 3 (Summer 2006), 868–92. 12. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 23. 13. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 65. 14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1999 [1903]), 207–390; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 15. Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16. Michael P. Jeffries, Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 17. Jack Curry, Woodstock: The Summer of Our Lives (New York: Grove Press, 1989); Pete Fornatale, Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock (New York: Touchstone Press, 2009); Joel Makower, Woodstock: The Oral History (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 18. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (New York: Grove Press, 1999). 19. Matthew Collin, Altered State: the Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (London: Serpent’s Tale, 1997); Willy Pederson and Anders Skrondal, “Ecstasy and New Patterns of Drug Use: A Normal Population Study,” Addiction 94, no. 11 (1999), 1695–706. 20. Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (New York: Citadel Underground, 1990 [1946]), 74. 21. Ibid., 94. 22. Eric C. Schneider, Smack: Heroin and the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 28–29. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Rakim first refered to himself as a “microphone fiend” in 1987, when he and DJ Eric B. released their first album, Paid in Full (Island, 1987). On the track “I Got Soul,” Rakim raps “I drip steam/like a microphone fiend.” However, in 1988, Rakim and Eric B. released their second album, Follow the Leader (MCA), which features a single called “Microphone Fiend.” 25. Eric B. and Rakim, “Microphone Fiend,” Paid in Full (MCA, 1987). 26. Shaheem Reid, “Eminem Admits he ‘Almost Died’ from Drug Overdose,” MTV News, May 4, 2009, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1610557/ eminem-admits-almost-died-from-drug-overdose.jhtml. 27. Public Enemy, “Night of the Living Bassheads,” It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Def Jam/Columbia, 1988). 28. Jennifer C. Lena, “Social Context and musical Content of Rap Music, 1979–1995,” Social Forces 85, no. 1, (September 2006) 479–95.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Resistance and Relapse

201

29. Dr. Dre, “Let Me Ride,” The Chronic (Death Row/Interscope/Priority, 1992). 30. Welcome to Death Row, directed by S. Leigh Savidge and Jeff Scheftel (Santa Monica, CA: Xenon Pictures, 2001, DVD). 31. See Quinn’s definition of g-funk in Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 144–45. 32. Jay-Z, “Roc Boys,” American Gangster (Roc-a-Fella/Def Jam, 2007). 33. Steven Roberts, “Wiz Khalifa Explains Why He’s Open About Marijuana Use,” MTV News, November 9, 2010, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1651842/ wiz-khalifa-explains-why-hes-open-about-marijuana-use.jhtml. 34. Shaheem Reid, “Lil’ Wayne on Syrup: Everybody Wants Me To Stop . . . It Ain’t That Easy,” MTV News, February 28, 2008, http://www.mtv.com/news/ articles/1582520/lil-wayne-on-syrup-everybody-wants-me-stop.jhtml. 35. Nas, “Memory Lane,” Illmatic (Columbia, 1994). 36. David Simon interviewed by Bill Moyers, “Bill Moyers Journal,” PBS, April 17, 2009, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/transcript1.html. 37. Tupac Shakur, “Changes,” Greatest Hits (Amaru/Death Row/Interscope, 1998). 38. Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang, 57. 39. Andrea Queeley, “Who Owns Black Art?: Hip Hop and the Aesthetics of Criminalization,” Souls 5, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 1–15. 40. Nas, “Represent,” Illmatic (Columbia, 1994). 41. Rick Ross, “Hustlin’,” Port of Miami (Slip-n-Slide/Def Jam/Poe Boy, 2006). 42. Styles P., “I’m a G,” Master of Ceremonies (D-block/eOne, 2011). 43. Clipse, “Nightmares,” Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up/Star Trak/Jive, 2006). 44. Clipse, “We Got it for Cheap,” Hell Hath No Fury (Re-Up/Star Trak/Jive, 2006). 45. Tupac Shakur, “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” 2Pacalypse Now (Amaru/Interscope, 1991). 46. Dead Prez, “Wolves,” Let’s Get Free (Loud, 2000). 47. Tupac Shakur, “Keep Ya Head Up,” Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.S. (Amaru, Interscope, TNT, Priority, 1993). 48. Despite the centrality of drug dealing to his biography and the gangsta aesthetic as a rapper, 50 Cent does not drink alcohol or use illegal drugs, because he saw the toll these substances took on friends and family members. See “50 Cent on why he never did drugs: ‘I see them respond so differently so I stay away,’ ” CNN, October 31, 2011, http://piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/31/50-centon-why-he-never-did-drugs-i-see-them-respond-so-differently-that-i-stay-away/.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 10

You’re Equal but Different Women and the Music of Cultural Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Charles Walton

Popular culture provides a framework for “doing gender”1 inasmuch as songs, films, print media, art, fashion, television, and the web offer texts for us to read and mingle with what Norm Denzin, the ethnographic sociologist, refers to as the “things the members of our culture tell one another about being men and women.”2 The position of women in popular music has been informed by contradiction and the spectacle of hyperreal gender performance wherein we bear witness to the worst, as in the abject depersonalized sexualization of hip-hop vixens that litter so-called reality rap videos. We must admit, however, that popular music has also allowed for running critical social commentary through songs of resistance that call into question the hegemonic structures that yield the gendered scripts that have historically subordinated women to men. This chapter seeks to highlight women’s involvement in the music of cultural resistance by analyzing selected songs by female artists that call attention to matters of social justice with respect to issues related to gender and other topics. Some attention will be given to the role of women in the history of early American popular music highlighting such artists as The Carter Family, who recorded “Single Girl, Married Girl” (1927) and Billie Holiday whose “Strange Fruit” (1939) played a key role in the antilynching movement. However, much of this chapter will be devoted to the more recent developments of the underground feminist punk movement called riot grrrl as well as the plight of female rappers.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

204

Sounds of Resistance

Popular culture, and specifically, popular music, has long provided a social space wherein men and women “do gender.” “Doing gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’”3 The notion of doing gender corrects the default position of gender conceptualized as a role. Gender transcends roles and is more akin to performance. Through various cultural mediums, therefore, we act out gender and so reproduce it in our everyday lives. Popular music has been an important cultural space wherein such gender performances take place. Given the heterogeneity of popular music there has been a wide array of representations regarding gender and sexuality. When considering mass culture and the mechanics of the culture industry in which such culture is produced, the question arises as to who is it that authors whose images? C. Wright Mills, in his seminal work The Sociological Imagination (1959), encouraged the reader to begin each sociological study by bearing in mind the structure of the particular society in question. The twin dominant structures of patriarchy and capitalism shaped the production, consumption, and criticism of popular music from its inception. The subordination of women to men has informed the history of popular music just as the commodification of sex and beauty has occupied a sense of cultural primacy. Men have more often been positioned as subjects while women have been positioned as objects. Representations of women have most often been conjured up from the male gaze. Moreover, the Freudian Madonna-whore complex, which bifurcates women as either pure saint like creatures or devious, tempting, and promiscuous has informed such depictions of women. Historically, women have been either placed upon a pedestal as the unattainable ideal or denigrated as harlots. Such representations have left a void in popular culture for authentic women. Nevertheless, there is a pattern of cultural resistance in that some women have sought to author their own images, write their own songs, and challenge the systems of cultural oppression that would have them be second class citizens. In the 1920s the old-school feminism of Maybelle Carter was made manifest in “Single Girl, Married Girl” (1927), which offered a stern critique of the patriarchal institution of marriage. Sister Rosetta Tharpe fused the secular and the sacred in the 1930s and 1940s and offered one of the most important precursors to rock and roll. The 1950s saw Wanda Jackson emerge as the “Queen of Rockabilly.” Many read Janis Joplin as appropriating maleness as she fronted an electric blues band in the 1960s and became one of the most important musical figures in the counterculture movement. In the 1970s singers like Patti Smith blurred the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You’re Equal but Different

205

conventional gender boundaries in their androgynous presentations of self. Late 1970s and early 1980s female punk bands like The Slits and The Raincoats laid the groundwork for the riot grrrl bands of the 1990s like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Huggy Bear, and Heavens to Betsy, many of whom reappropriated sexist pejorative terms in an attempt to undermine the power embedded in them. Of course, there is more than enough room for those who would remake patriarchal gender relations veiled in the image of cool, albeit in a traditional manner. There is, however, a culturally resistant history of popular music in which those who sought to deconstruct such patriarchal gender relations have worked to expose the false consciousness of such representations that subordinate women to men. The mere fact that women have become more visible/audible in popular music does nothing to undo patriarchy if those women merely serve as props for heterosexual male fantasy (e.g., Britney Spears, Cristina Aguilera, Rhianna). Several contradictions with respect to gender permeate the social space of popular music. We clearly recognize the history of popular music as androcentric in its character inasmuch as it was, in its origins, made by men, financed by men, and criticized by men. When members of one gender usurps the reigns of representation they construct the image of the other they want to see. The culture industry of music, like virtually all other industries, has been one in which men dominate in the means of production. In the music industry men have dominated recording, publishing, distribution, as well as comprising the majority of the artistic talent. As noted previously, historically in the music industry women were largely represented through the male gaze. With respect to the means of consumption, women have become influential as consumers and are now arguably, the most important demographic the industry must court. The fact that music as a cultural form works more “from the ground up” than film, or television, for example, suggests that there is ample opportunity for writing one’s own narrative, albeit in the trappings of a largely patriarchal culture. Although major labels have long dominated the production and distribution of popular music there has always been a competing independent culture of labels and artists that in some sense has operated as a “farm system” for the major labels. Perhaps it is more feasible for some people to decide their own path in music because they are less dependent on the more differentiated infrastructures that inform film and television. Film and television are characterized by a more highly specialized division of labor with respect to production. Music can be made with meager instrumentation and a creative will, and this fact has never been more clearly visible than in the current age of “bedroom singers” and “laptop composers.”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

206

Sounds of Resistance

Selected Cases of Women’s Music of Cultural Resistance Women’s marginalized place in patriarchal cultures puts them in a unique position to make commentary on the institutions that have subordinated them. Women are capable of offering a standpoint perspective, embodying what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”4 Du Bois claimed that as a black man in Jim Crow America, he had the unique vantage point of navigating between two cultures and the burden of having to reconcile his “two-ness.” The idea here is that those who are marginalized, move between the dominant culture and subculture, and thus are in a position to expose structures of domination in a way that those who are privileged by such structures are incapable. The social construction of gender has yielded gendered worlds and where those vested in male privilege are likely to see the world as gender neutral, women are keenly aware of difference. In this light, women are in a better position to reveal truths about patriarchy than are men. In the following section the focus will turn to selected cases of women’s role in the music of cultural existence. Those included, by no means, represent the whole of such music, but rather, offer a window into how women have been instrumental in authoring music that critiques systems of oppression be they with respect to gender or other matters.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Carter Family In 1927, The Victor Talking Machine Company sent producer Ralph Peer to Bristol, a city split by State Street, one side Tennessee, the other Virginia, to hunt for “hillbilly” music. The nascent northeastern based recording industry had a problem selling records in the South. It seemed southern folks were not too keen on the musical offerings of Tin Pan Alley. A Georgia furniture salesman (early phonographs were sold in furniture stores and often embedded in furniture) named Polk Brockman had recommended that Ralph Peer, then working as a field scout for Okeh, record a fiddle contest champion named John Carson in an effort to find content that Southerners would find appealing. Much to the chagrin of Peer, it worked, and thus began the quest to commodify Appalachia. Four years later, Peer went to Bristol and put an advertisement in the local paper to draw talent from around the region. The Carter Family, from nearby in Maces Spring, answered the call and along with Jimmie Rodgers, became one of the most influential acts to explode out of the “Big Bang of Country Music.” The Carter Family included A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and Sara’s first cousin Maybelle. A. P. Carter was indeed the patriarch of the family yet

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You’re Equal but Different

207

his contribution to the music was mainly in the role of a song hunter and occasionally bassing in. Without question The Carter Family was fueled by two amazingly talented women. The case could be made that The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers are in some sense, responsible for two different strands of country music. Jimmie Rodgers may be the original outlaw country singer inspiring the likes of Hank Williams Sr. and Merle Haggard, whereas, The Carter Family, informed by gospel music, represent more the family values faction of country music. The point is made all the more interesting given that their song “Single Girl, Married Girl” (1928) may well be the first feminist anthem in the American popular music canon. Ironically, the song derives from a traditional English ballad that A.P. heard his mother, Molly, sing growing up. On the record we hear Sara Carter sing, “Single girl goes to the store and buys . . . Married girl, rocks the cradle and cries.” The record struck a chord with women of the South. According to Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirschberg in their book on the Carter Family, “ ‘Single Girl,’ a married woman’s lament for the loss of her carefree girlhood, moved the disks. There must have been a lot of women out there who felt kin to something they heard in Sara’s lone voice . . . It sold, and kept selling, all over the South.”5 While Maybelle and Sara Carter couldn’t be characterized as flappers in any context, the song reflects some progressive thinking about the institution of marriage in a country in which women had just won the right to vote seven years prior. Moreover, the mere notion that two women would be fronting a band in the 1920s was groundbreaking at the time and sent the message to other aspiring young women that success could be had despite the androcentric character of the nascent music industry. The success of The Carter Family also exploded the myth that the only role for women in music would be as singers. Mother Maybelle Carter proved to be one of the great early innovators in guitar picking style, developing what has become known as “the Carter scratch.” Her flatpicking technique involved thumbing the bass notes while strumming the melody. “Mother” Maybelle Carter, as her name suggests, nurtured a good many guitarists in the country vein, and continues to be cited as one of the giants in terms of influence today.

Marian Anderson Marian Anderson was a world-class contralto, who like many African American performers found Europe more welcoming than her own native country when it came to artistic opportunity. Considered one of the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

208

Sounds of Resistance

best voices of her generation, Anderson made her reputation abroad, and though the opera singer did not envision herself as a civil rights pioneer she would prove influential in the racial discourse of America, even drawing support from a sitting First Lady to champion the cause. The institutional discrimination that Anderson faced must have been daunting as she experienced the same sort of racism that her jazz contemporary Billie Holiday became accustomed to dealing with on tour: separate entrances, hotels, restaurants, and the like. The level of discrimination was exposed on a national level in the spring of 1939 when Anderson was refused the opportunity to play at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, because of her skin color. Sol Hurok, Anderson’s manager, had thought it was time for Anderson to play at such venues of note and pursued a booking through the management of the venue. When the owners of the venue, The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), discovered that the singer in question was African American they cited their “white artists only” contract policy and refused to grant the booking. The DAR had no idea what the general reaction would be as the contradictions in America with regard to race were increasingly being exposed. Raymond Arsenualt writes of a piece that appeared in the New Yorker shortly thereafter. It found irony “in the ‘decision to bar Miss Anderson, a distinguished Negro singer, from Constitution Hall, which of course, takes its name from a document guaranteeing Miss Anderson freedom from racial discrimination.’ ”6 Anderson’s stature in the opera world at that time had grown so great and the public outrage was so palpable that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sent a letter to the DAR to announce her resignation from the organization. Harold Ickes, the sitting Secretary of the Interior, then invited Anderson to give a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand were in attendance that day in 1939 to hear Marian Anderson open her set with the lines “My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, to thee I sing.” While Anderson was a reluctant foremother in the civil rights struggle the manner in which her story unfolded made her a central figure in forcing the discussion about race in America.

Billie Holiday Billie Holiday, an African American woman also born in Philadelphia, was a contemporary of Marian Anderson’s, yet made her fame with jazz. By the late 1930s, Holiday had already begun to shape her reputation as one of jazz’s greatest voices through her work with Lester Young, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie. “Strange Fruit” was written by Abe Meeropol, a Jewish

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

You’re Equal but Different

209

schoolteacher and union activist, who was inspired to first write the poem that was later set to music, after seeing a photograph in a newspaper depicting the lynching of two black southern men. After being introduced to the song in 1939, Holiday began singing “Strange Fruit” around clubs in New York City, with some trepidation given what she anticipated to be the reaction to such a racially charged song. “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze” are the strange fruit borne by poplar trees: “a strange and bitter crop,” indeed. Nevertheless, Holiday pressed Columbia, her record company, to let her record the song. Columbia feared the political content of the song would pose a problem for them commercially, particularly in the South, and they refused to cut the record. Crowd reaction to the song was mixed. Many white patrons at the Café Society, where she regularly performed, were offended. Meg Greene writes that Holiday’s own mother questioned her commitment to the song, “Even Holiday’s mother hated the song, asking her daughter why she was risking her career and possibly even her life to sing ‘Strange Fruit.’ ”7 Determined, Holiday sought an independent label to record the song and found a willing partner in Commodore Records, which put the song out originally later the same year. “Strange Fruit” would prove to be very influential in an antilynching movement that eventually mounted enough societal pressure to end the practice throughout the South.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Loretta Lynn Although Loretta Lynn’s music has highlighted some of the vicissitudes of working class life, most notably in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1969), which was also the title of a popular film in 1980, we don’t typically think of the popular country singer–songwriter as a protest singer. Her song “The Pill” (1975), however, caused quite a stir when it was released after sitting on the shelf for three years for its critique of patriarchal marriage and advocacy of women’s reproductive rights. Loretta Lynn explains, “You know we recorded that song three years ago, but we held it out, figuring people weren’t ready to accept it. When we released it the people loved it. I mean women loved it. But the men who run the radio stations were scared to death. It’s like a challenge to the man’s way of thinking.”8 When the song was released some radio stations in the South refused to play it but it eventually received enough airplay to chart, though ultimately the song was more a fixture of Lynn’s live sets than successful on radio, in part because it challenged the aforementioned family values that seemed to resonate with a large number of country music fans. Ironically, these family values in country music had

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

210

Sounds of Resistance

been fostered by The Carter Family whose song critiquing patriarchal marriage has already been discussed. Though it is unclear how much of the song is autobiographical, the story told in “The Pill” appears as if it could have some overlap in the singer’s life, given that she had six children and had been married at the age of 14. The singer in the song tells of a young woman who was promised more than what she got and has grown tired of the sexual double standard her husband appears to embrace. She both laments the bondage of multiple births of a young mother and yearns for her own sexual independence. Lynn warns “There’s gonna be some changes made right here on Nursery Hill, You’ve set this chicken your last time, ‘cause now I got the pill.” Moreover, the song championing the reproductive rights of women was significant not because the idea was revolutionary in the mid-1970s, but rather was important because Loretta Lynn represented mainstream country music and many women looked to her for social cues. One could argue that Loretta Lynn, with her song, “The Pill,” aided in the popularizing reproductive rights.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Patti Smith: Godmother of Punk Women such as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Armatrading defined the female folk scene of the 1960s and 1970s and as such, performed songs that aligned them with a counterculture aesthetic that encompassed a sense of social consciousness yet also expressed individuality. At that time in popular music history, women were likely represented via the somewhat glamorous attribute of an all girl vocal group or as the sensitive hippie folk singer. The mid-1970s saw the emergence of a radically different female figure in popular music, one given to androgyny and one that did not conform to the largely traditional roles women had assumed in popular music up until that time. “Patti Smith single-handedly redefined the role of women in rock ‘n’ roll. She was present at the birth of the new music, moved from hardedged underground poetry to full-on punk racket, broke her damn neck and still came back for more.”9 Patti Smith grew up in a Jehovah’s Witness family, dropped out of school, worked briefly in a factory, and parlayed a talent for spoken word poetry into a lead role in New York’s nascent punk rock scene in the mid-1970s. Smith explains her background, “When I was young what we read was the Bible and UFO magazines . . . My dad was equal parts God and Hagar the Spaceman in Mega City.”10 John Cale, of Velvet Underground fame, produced Patti Smith’s debut record Horses in 1975 to great critical acclaim.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

You’re Equal but Different

211

Several publications list the record as being among the top 50 albums of all time. Smith had released a single prior to Horses, which featured the often covered Billy Roberts tune “Hey Joe” on the a-side with an original, “Piss Factory,” as the b-side. In “Piss Factory” (1974) Smith relates her frustration with her early work experience and foretells her punk rock dream as a way out. Sheila Whiteley, author of Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (2000), writes of “Piss Factory,” “Ending with the words ‘I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York and I’m gonna be so bad, I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return never return no never return to burn out in this Piss Factory,’ the song provides an insight into Smith’s underlying determination to leave the suburban environment of her childhood.”11 The sentiment expressed in “Piss Factory” exemplified the nihilism that underscored working-class youth’s resistance to reproduce the lives of their parents, so evident in early punk rock. Her androgynous presentation of self led many to assert that Smith appropriated maleness as a means to reject the narrowly defined roles women held in popular music. Yet, Patti Smith by no means denied her femininity. Her music is also characterized by brazen sexual content by standards of the day, a fact that also drew the curious and enhanced her reputation for authenticity. Patti Smith was a pivotal figure in defining the origins of a punk rock aesthetic and in so doing became one of the most influential singers, no matter which gender, in the history of popular music.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Curious Plight of Female Rappers Similar to rock culture, the hip-hop culture of rap has been male dominated, but rap differs from rock with respect to the ways that gender intersects with race in the genre. Although the origins of rock and roll were largely informed by black performers, rock made itself over in a white image. For example, Elvis Presley is a pivotal figure in the history of American popular music because he made it cool for white folks to listen to black music as they never had before. By the 1960s and certainly into the 1970s, rock music was overwhelmingly white with a few exceptions. Considering the origins of rap music in the late 1970s, the genre emerged as subversive on a number of levels, both with respect to its racialized political content informed by spoken word poets like the late Gil Scott Heron and The Last Poets, who were the precursors to rap, and with respect to musical form itself, essentially, a postmodern music, made by recombining or repurposing original sources (sampling). While acknowledging the presence of party rap by the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

212

Sounds of Resistance

likes of Sugar Hill Gang and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, the most important rap early on was political by definition, and had an Afro-centric character (e.g., Public Enemy, KRS-One). At the outset, White America vilified hip-hop culture, but as with all other innovative/deviant musical forms, the appropriation by the dominant group would take place in short order such that it is now standard to have a rap jingle endorsing corporate goods and services. Nevertheless, along the way in that process of decontextualization, the content of the music changed. As more and more middle-class white teenagers began to buy records, and they began to envision white rappers, the less attractive an Afro-centric message became, as well as the so-called thug life that was then elevated to cultural primacy in the form of gangsta rap, or reality rap. Gangsta rap appeared to celebrate the gang life and misogyny, which fed into the popular imagination of what urban black life must be like, rendering gangsta rap something akin to a postmodern minstrel music, except that there was no need to “black up” anymore. The misogynistic themes prevalent in the songs of N.W.A., Too $hort, The Geto Boys, and most infamously, in the songs of 2 Live Crew, made even more problematic the relationship of feminism to hip-hop culture. Tricia Rose, a professor of African Studies at Brown and author of several books on hip-hop culture, writes, “Gangster rapper Ice Cube calls for killing police officers and then turns his rage on black women, calling for slaying ‘bitches’ in the same phrase. Cube’s lyrics suggest state authority figures and black women are similarly responsible for black male disempowerment and oppression.”12 Emerging female rappers often appeared reluctant to criticize their male counterparts for their attitudes toward women. While many first generation female rappers embodied feminist ideals in their lyrics such as exemplified in Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First” (1989), “A woman can bear you, break you, take you,” few women in hip-hop called out misogynist male rappers otherwise. Rose warns that it is misguided to create some dichotomy of male vs. female rappers who operate in opposition to one another. She advocates, “Repositioning women rappers as part of a dialogic process with male rappers (and others), rather than in complete opposition to them, I want to consider the ways black women rappers work within and against dominant sexual and racial narratives in American culture.”13 Rose sees female rappers in dialogue with male rappers contesting some of the sexist representations they have constructed, and also in dialogue with the larger dominant culture with respect to the black woman’s position of double jeopardy, victimized by both racial and gender discrimination.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

You’re Equal but Different

213

The contradictions in hip-hop culture yield multiple strategies with regard to how female artists construct their presentations of self in rap music. Some, like the aforementioned Queen Latifah, put forth more straightforward feminist critiques of gender relations while others have been more prone to appropriate maleness in some respects to exploit men’s own sexual weakness. Michael Jeffries writes,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

In recent years, however, the form that commercially successful female MCs’ rhetorical resistance frequently takes is an adoption of the hegemonic masculine ethos of sexual exploitation. Whereas MC Lyte or Queen Latifah may have demanded respect on the grounds that reducing them to exclusively sexual vessels constitutes a denial of their humanity, many of today’s most famous female MCs, such as Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, demand respect by reducing men to sexual pawns whom they control and exploit for erotic and monetary gain.14

It is no surprise that capital shapes culture and moreover, that female rappers would learn to use the commodification of sex to their personal advantage despite what it may mean for the representation of women in rap. Lil’ Kim’s songs like “Magic Stick” (2003) and “Kitty Box” (2005) exemplify the sentiment that women can be empowered by accenting their sexual control over men. In “Kitty Box” (2005) Lil’ Kim raps “They love me ‘cause I’m nasty, but classy . . . If you’re ballin’ put your bid in, you broke, forget it, You’re just another doll chasing the Kim.” As Rose has pointed out, commercially successful female rappers often tread the fine line between that which is sexually explicit and that which is exploitative. While a large part of societal reaction has focused on misogynistic laden rap, it is important to note that hip-hop culture does not have a monopoly on misogyny in music, and moreover, there are numerous examples of self-reflexive rap authored by men that call into question the value of misogyny in the culture at large. Reiland Rabaka, noting the contradictions that characterize hip-hop culture, writes, “Indeed there is a need to critique the hypermasculine histories of hip hop that either exclude, co-opt, or devalue women’s contributions, but even as we undertake these critiques it is important for us not to negate the contributions of male hip hoppers who have questioned and condemned misogynistic rap music and hip hop’s sexism in general.”15 Examples of such male rappers might include Tupac’s “Keep Ya Head Up” (1993) even as it is juxtaposed with some of his songs that do women no favors.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

214

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Writers like Rose and Rabaka argue that it is feasible to be both a rapper and a feminist, but seem to suggest there is no one manifestation nor proper way in which they might be combined. Contradictions abound in hip-hop culture and the plight of the female rapper is complicated by the ways in which the socio-historic constructions of race and gender intersect in her. Thus, the female rapper is often misunderstood relative to dominant cultural discourse. Of late we have seen the emergence of bohemian female rappers like Seattle’s THEESastisfaction who warn the presumably male listener to “Leave your face at the door, Turn off your swag and check your vain.” THEESatisfaction who record for the iconic indie label Sub Pop Records, recall the more Afro-centric roots of rap music, offering critiques of the multiple hegemonic structures that inform everyday life. It remains to be seen how commercially successful such neo-indie rap will be, but it does show that rap is evolving as a genre and fully capable of cultural resistance to the hegemonic structures that shape society, as well as the stereotypical representations that ideologically support them. Rose leaves us with this final thought, “The resistant facets of black women’s participation in rap and their attempts to redefine their own sexual imagery is better understood when we take the historical silence and sexual objectification of black women into consideration. The subject matter and perspectives presented in many women’s rap lyrics challenge dominant notions of sexuality, heterosexual courtship, and aesthetic constructions of the body.”16 For many female rappers feminism was perceived as a white woman’s domain inasmuch as it ignored many racial and class differences, which for them, intersected with gender in their lives in a unique fashion. The feminism female rappers have constructed and embody may not be as easily read as some other forms, but nonetheless is capable of speaking truth to power.

Riot Grrrl One of the most significant movements in the arena of gender and music that has taken place in the past 20 years is what became known as the riot grrrl movement. The following section is devoted to detailing the evolution of the riot grrrl movement, because unlike other protest songs authored or sung by women, riot grrrl represents a subgenre of post punk music wherein gender was at the core, the central theme that characterized the music. No other music, it would seem, gives us the opportunity to explore how gender has been positioned in the musical discourse of cultural resistance.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You’re Equal but Different

215

Riot grrrl was largely a gender-based American and British music movement that occurred in the early 1990s and remained viable throughout the decade. In part, riot grrrl contested the androcentric character of rock music in general, and punk, in particular. The music and sentiments expressed clearly owed a debt to some of the gender punk bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s: Patti Smith, The Slits, The Raincoats, and The Au Pairs. These bands, some of which contained token male musicians, demonstrated that girls need not be mere decorations or props for adolescent male rock and roll fantasy, but rather, they could rock themselves. While these precursor bands weren’t as overtly political as the riot grrrl bands to come, songs like “It’s Obvious” (1981) by The Au Pairs off of their debut record Playing with a Different Sex, offered social commentary on the value of egalitarianism in the construction of gender, though seemingly taking an essentialist position, delivered in sarcastic tone, suggesting “You’re equal, but different . . . It’s obvious.” Throughout the 1980s the American northwest increasingly became a hotbed for independent culture, most notably a loosely organized but formidable music scene. Against the tide of the corporatization of rock that increasingly courted the formulaic, tried and true, and no different than its cousin media of film and television, independent culture valorized the novice, the amateur, the untutored creativity that made itself over as authentic against the McBands of the era. So-called classic rock had appeared to run its course with all of its tropes and choreographed attitude throughout the 1970s and arena rockers like Asia, Journey, and REO Speedwagon dominated rock culture in the early 1980s, soon to be joined by the hair metal bands like Motely Crue, Poison, and Quiet Riot. Most likely spurred on by the punk movement of the mid-1970s, as well as precursors like the Velvet Underground, an alternative culture took shape in the early 1980s that appropriated the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic from punk and elevated the homemade and lo-fi to cultural primacy. The fact that an alternative culture emerged at that time is not, in itself all that shocking, given the cycle of cultural resistance that has been constant throughout industrialization (e.g., Situationists, Flappers, Beats, Diggers). Of course, what is different about all these movements is the content that comes to characterize them. Another integral development to take into consideration with respect to the rise of indie culture is that it was taking place at a time when there were significant changes afloat with respect to the infrastructure for production, distribution, and consumption of art. Innovation in technology was finally coming to a point where students of Walter Benjamin (1936) might realize

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

216

Sounds of Resistance

one of his dreams outlined in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production,” that is, the democratization of systems of production, distribution, and consumption. The last 30 years have seen wholesale revolutions with respect to the way that music is produced, distributed, and consumed. The whole world of music has become so decentralized that the industry is at odds to figure out how to reinvent itself and stay relevant. The early part of the 21st century has seen the rise of bedroom singers and laptop DJs who may chart via YouTube or iTunes, having uploaded the content before they went to bed. Moreover, perhaps the main attraction of producing an independent culture is the allure of maintaining control of the process of production and thereby offering something that is likely to be read as more authentic than the art that capital molds. Major labels came to be viewed as exploiting bands and facilitating false consciousness for consumers. In her book on indie culture Kaya Oakes states,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

When punks in the eighties decided to start forming their own record labels in answer to this inherently exploitative scenario, their main motivation was control. If you were signed to an independent label, you had control over how you sounded in the studio, how your album art came out, what the label could and couldn’t do to promote and market your music, where you would play shows, and what lyrics you could sing.17

Riot grrrl would prosper in an indie culture in which women could author their own stories, images, and criticism of patriarchal culture at large, and the androcentric rock culture in particular. As mentioned before, the American Northwest, perhaps grabbing the baton from Athens, Georgia, had become the region in which an indie environment seemingly prospered the most throughout the 1980s. Portland and Seattle are known today as the main cities responsible for facilitating indie culture and music yet, a lesser known town, Olympia, Washington, played a more prominent role in the genesis of riot grrrl. Olympia is home to Evergreen State College, the type of liberal arts institution that would offer narrative evaluations in lieu of grades. The college was instrumental in creating an environment open to counterculture and a thriving element of artistic creativity was juxtaposed with a working-class ethic in the town otherwise. Calvin Johnson, who started his own simple-core band, Beat Happening, and subsequently his own label K records in 1982, had been a DJ at the local college radio station KAOS. It is also worth noting that Sub Pop records, which was the original home of Nirvana, the band that broke indie into the mainstream, started

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You’re Equal but Different

217

as a fanzine (which was frequently accompanied by cassettes) in Olympia before forming the label proper in Seattle. Olympia also was home to the Kill Rock Stars label, formed by Slim Moon in 1991, which served as one of the main vehicles for riot grrrl bands. Calvin Johnson’s contempt for corporate rock and his passion for the innocence of amateurism is nowhere more evident than in his own band’s work. “The scene’s flagship band for the most of the ’80’s was the willfully unvirtuosic Beat Happening, a shambolic trio that played a messy, barely amplified, childish pop of folk chords on acoustic guitars, sparse rhythms beat out on just a few drums at a time, snapped fingers; their songs were often affectingly tender (and even slyly randy) ditties about secret picnic spots or dancing with fish at the beach.”18 The fact that Beat Happening could barely play their instruments was inspiring to a number of girls who would participate in riot grrrl, that is, that a band need not be an end in itself, rather, a band could be a vehicle for something greater, perhaps a vehicle for social commentary. Although K records began producing and distributing cassettes only (a staple technology of the indie scene), Johnson eventually began pressing seven-inch records in a series referred to as the International Pop Underground. By this time Johnson had a business partner in Candice Peterson and the two conceived one of the first original indie music festivals: The International Pop Underground Conference, which took place in August 1991 in Olympia. The first night was devoted to female acts and was referred to as “Girl Night,” which had been shortened from “Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now.” Bands on the bill that night included some of the American fixtures of riot grrrl: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy. That one concert dominated by female acts would be enough to congeal the riot grrrl movement and serve to put music to feminism in a fashion that had not been seen to date. Sara Marcus writes, “If the IPU was a spark that helped ignite the forthcoming flurry of mainstream interest in indie music, ‘Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now’ was the bomb that exploded longstanding notions about women’s roles within the indie scene.”19

Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy One of the things most often misunderstood about riot grrrl is that it existed as a culture and a movement prior to being subgenre of post punk. Several members of the respective bands had taken college courses that involved discourse about gender in a fashion that was germane to academic circles but often ignored elsewhere. The exposure to academic works of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

218

Sounds of Resistance

feminism coupled with common life experiences that may have included any combination of sexual assault, domestic violence, sexism, and dysfunctional and broken families, positioned these young women to search for a voice that they did not have in society’s traditional institutions. Several bands began as fanzines or used fanzines as part of their feminist cultural resistance. While inspired intellectually by ideas espoused in feminist theory and in the worlds of art and photography, academic feminism seemed a bit cold and detached for Bikini Kill member, Kathleen Hanna. Nonetheless, her internship through the college helped those ideas come alive and inspired her to put those ideas into practice by helping these women, and in turn, perhaps, helped her reconcile some gender-related trauma from her own life. “Her internship was the realest thing in her life. She worked at Safeplace, a domestic violence shelter, doing crisis counseling and giving presentations at high schools on rape and sexual assault.”20 Bikini Kill, introduced Hanna to Tobi Vail, a like-minded soul with band experience and a feminist fanzine called Jigsaw. Julia Downes explains the importance of fanzines to youth culture in the 1980s and through the mid1990s, “In a world before the internet, the main means of communicating and networking across America was through exchanging zines and writing letters.”21 Hanna and co-Bikini Kill member Kathi Wilcox, were attracted to the manner in which Vail called attention to the fact that men and women lived in different worlds. This idea stood in opposition to the conservative notion that the world was gender neutral, and to the self-righteous liberal position that claims to see past gender. Wilcox recalls, “It struck me as really unique because everyone in my college seminars was like, ‘You know, people are people, it’s all the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl.’ And she was acknowledging a difference, especially if you are the girl in question.”22 Every social movement has a myth of origins, that is, a narrative that is often told to explain how the movement came into existence. Riot grrrl also has such a narrative. In the fall of 1990 Hanna, Vail, and Wilcox started a fanzine called Bikini Kill, which would serve as the literary arm of the band of the same name they formed with token male guitarist, Billy Karren. So the flagship band of riot grrrl sprung from a fanzine and grew into a band. Sara Marcus relates one other myth of origins narrative regarding Hanna’s impetus to form a band. Evidently a photography teacher had exposed Hanna to the work of the postmodern feminist/anti-feminist writer Kathy Acker and it was a revelation for the 19-year-old college student who was trying to work out some of her own demons through writing. Hanna eventually attended a workshop in Seattle given by Acker and despite being

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You’re Equal but Different

219

chosen out of the workshop attendees as an opening act to read before Acker, Hanna grifted her way into an interview with Acker, posing as media, a reporter for a magazine that turned out to be a zine. Granted one on one time with her idol, Hanna sparred with Acker. Marcus notes in this encounter a moment of enlightenment for the young feminist, “Acker took issue with some of the younger woman’s ideas. The pair’s main disagreement was over how sexism affected men: Kathleen felt they benefited from it, and Acker argued with force that it harmed them emotionally too; that Kathleen was making an intellectual and political mistake by viewing sexism as an us-versus-them game.”23 The other advice Acker gave Hanna was delivered in a one-on-one conference that each workshop participant had with the writer. When Acker asked Hanna why she wanted to write and why she did spoken word, a tearful Hanna replied “I feel like no one’s ever listened to me. I want people to listen.”24 The writer replied, “If you want people to hear what you’re doing, don’t do spoken word, nobody likes spoken word, nobody goes to spoken word. There’s more of a community for musicians than for writers. You should be in a band.”25 Bikini Kill went on to be the flagship band of American riot grrrl, and aside from inspiring numbers of girls to start their own bands and write their own zines, Hanna and her female riot grrrl compatriots created a supportive network and female spaces for young women to share their stories and participate in dialogue regarding issues of gender and sexuality. Hanna was also known to use her experiences as an intern to counsel girls who habitually came up after shows to share their experiences. Bikini Kill was at the forefront of a movement to empower women both in the indie scene and hopefully, in the world at large. As stated previously, riot grrrl was not merely a means to describe feminist punk bands of the early 1990s, it was a movement characterized by more organization and structure than most elements of youth culture. The fanzines, and meetings, as well as the more visible bands, were all ways of creating this young feminist network. Given the level of organization, members were able to mobilize politically as well as draw attention to social injustice in local spaces by confronting and speaking out against offenders. Riot grrrls were dedicated to challenging any gender hegemony and they were known to use confrontation to challenge male rockers and punks to acknowledge the sexism that was not just institutional but cultural in how it informed the scene. Marion Leonard writes, “Many of those involved in riot grrrl challenged traditional images of female display. Members of Bikini Kill would write such words as ‘SLUT’ across their midriff and arms in pen. This personal labeling pre-empted any derogatory term that might be

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

220

Sounds of Resistance

directed at them. These women thus confronted spectators with the very terms designed to prohibit female display.”26 The confrontational style and will to turn the tables on male privilege is what fueled riot grrrl politics. The music was in many respects, secondary to the message, a mere vehicle for the politics of gender. Bratmobile offers us another example of a band that grew out of the zine culture, specifically, a zine called Girl Germs. In 1991, a couple of University of Oregon students, Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, were encouraged by Tobi Vail, drummer for Bikini Kill and zine writer, to start their own zine or band. While the sophomores were immediately productive in the zine department, the band was a little bit slower to develop. Yet, embodying the riot grrrl spirit, they would not let the fact that they could not play instruments stand in their way to forming a band. A Valentine’s Day booking by Calvin Johnson forced them to realize Bratmobile, a band in name only until that date. “Months into their band-life, the dynamic girl duo had written no songs. ‘We were a fake band,’ Alison confessed. ‘We were all talk.’ They had worked up a few a cappella numbers, covers of Beat Happening and Go Team songs, and started grabbing the mic between the sets of reggae bands at frat parties in Eugene. Partygoers mostly ignored them, when they weren’t laughing at them outright.”27 Panicked at the prospect of having to play, the duo approached a local musician of some note to inquire about songwriting advice. The advice, to listen to Ramones records, suggested a musical style to emulate rather than a sense of creating some truth. In true riot grrrl fashion Neuman and Wolfe rejected the suggestions with intent. “Molly and Allison had never listened to the Ramones. ‘Something in me clicked,’ Allison said. ‘Like okay, if most boy punk rock bands just listen to the Ramones and that’s how they write their songs, then we’ll do the opposite and I won’t listen to any Ramones, and that way we’ll sound different.”28 Bratmobile’s minimalist punk was clearly more informed by the twee sound of Beat Happening, whereas Bikini Kill’s sound was harder, faster, and more similar to some of the Washington, DC, hardcore bands. Nevertheless the members of Bratmobile often found themselves on the same bill as Bikini Kill and in the wake of Bikini Kill’s self-titled first EP for Kill Rock Stars in 1992 word began to spread across the country. According to Kaya Oakes, “After seeing one or both of these bands perform, more young women became inspired to start bands and zines on their own. Riot grrrl represented the first time in the history of indie culture that women joined forces to try and change some of the status quo sexism that’s been a part

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

You’re Equal but Different

221

of women’s lives for centuries and has also infected indie throughout its history.”29 Similar to the story of Bratmobile, is that of Heavens to Betsy, another duo who existed as a cool band name prior to becoming a band. Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and had been inspired to pilgrimage to Athens, Georgia, in 1990. Still teenagers, the two wanted to experience the town featured in the seminal indie documentary Athens Georgia Inside/Out (1987). Upon their return Sawyer put to use pieces of a drum kit they had purchased and Tucker adopted an old Les Paul from her father. The following year when Tucker attended Evergreen, while Sawyer remained in Eugene to finish high school, the former began talking up their band Heavens to Betsy. Invited by Johnson to play “Girls Night” at the IUPC on the same bill as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile, two of their favorite bands, the duo was pressed into action. For Tucker, having been exposed to feminist theory and seeking to apply it to her everyday experiences, songwriting allowed her the opportunity to express the sentiment she had been unable to articulate in poetry. Marcus writes, “The subject matter for the songs came easily to her too. She had hit puberty at eleven, before anyone else in her grade, and boys were always grabbing at her body.”30 On the night of their first performance, in August 1991, Heavens to Betsy rose to the occasion and impressed the likes of punk statesman Ian McKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi) and Guy Picciotto (Rites of Spring, Fugazi). Sara Marcus, in Girls to the Front reports that, in particular, the song Tucker wrote, “My Secret,” seemed to connect on an emotional level with audience members. “The strongest of the three (songs), the uncompromising “My Secret” put a sexual abuser on notice.”31 The song narrates a revenge fantasy to kill, presumably, a rapist, for retribution. “My secret is I want you dead.” The three bands, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy represent American riot grrrl culture and they are but a sampling of the movement. It is important to recognize that although these bands represent the American Northwestern founding of riot grrrl, there was a formidable east coast presence in Washington, DC, and a transatlantic presence in England. Riot grrrl was made to be local, and “chapters” grew around the world. Riot grrrl, at its peak, on the precipice of co-optation, offered a brand of feminism recast in the vernacular of punk culture and most importantly, it gave a voice to women in an androcentric artistic space to confront hegemonic ideas about gender. Julia Downes, in her work on the riot grrrl phenomenon, writes,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

222

Sounds of Resistance

Riot grrrl rewrote feminism and activism into a punk rock rebellion and youth-centered voice that was felt to be missing from forms of feminism available in the 1990s. Feminism was seen to be addressing the concerns of older, middle-class, heterosexual and educated women and riot grrrl was seen to be a re-working of feminism to work through the needs, desires, and issues in the situations specific to young girls and women in 1990s America.32

Riot grrrl by no means dismantled patriarchy, but it did usher in some self-reflection in the largely male-dominated indie and punk world. The movement left a legacy of infusion of feminism in punk music and, opened up more space for other female singers who may not have been regarded as riot grrrls but nonetheless faced some of the same boundaries and constraints as did the riot grrrls. Riot grrrl also created a more visible vehicle for feminist messages aside from the hidden seminars of liberal arts colleges, and thus facilitated more public discourse about gender. Downes succinctly makes the case that, “Riot grrrl also proposed a different way of conceptualising feminist activism, to move away from traditional state-focused protests like marches, rallies, and petitions, towards an idea of cultural activism which incorporated everyday cultural subversions like creating art, film, zines, music, and communities as a part of feminist activism.”33

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Backlash and the Legacy of Riot Grrrl Once the national media became aware of riot grrrl, what had been largely a localized, grass roots, loose organization of female punks determined to force conversation about gender suddenly became a novel subculture ripe for exploitation in the corporate gaze. Marisa Meltzer observes, “To the mainstream media, a bunch of angry but still sexy twenty-something women was irresistible, and they were quick to descend upon the scene. Sassy, Newsweek, USA Today, LA Weekly, Seventeen, and the British music weekly Melody Maker all wrote early stories on the movement in 1992 and 1993.”34 Much of the coverage was patronizing and sought to characterize the movement as comprised of naïve, middle-class college girls who had more bark than bite. The huge success of Tobi Vail’s one-time boyfriend Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana had blown the top off the indie kettle, and now mainstream media was looking to cover anything indie that moved. Riot grrrl was among the first bit of fodder for the media’s growing appetite for what was called “alternative” at the time. Soon riot grrrls were being courted by daytime TV talk shows and featured as bit characters on sitcoms like Roseanne. The media glare grew

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

You’re Equal but Different

223

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

bright and the nuances of riot grrrl messages didn’t always translate well in the coverage. As with most subcultures, the national media turned riot grrrls into caricatures. Most of the focus concentrated on riot grrrl fashion, the fact that Hanna had worked as a stripper yet sang about sexual abuse, and the aforementioned slurs that some girls would write on their exposed bodies as a means of confronting sexism with its own language. According to Downes, “Most of those involved in riot grrrl were shocked by the media attention in terms of its negativity, misinformation and journalistic attempts to discredit ideas and actions of the people involved.”35 In an attempt to curb the volume of negative media attention, organizers within riot grrrl sought to impose a media blackout that some viewed as a sign of defeat. Many of the women were coming to realize the ways in which capital colonizes media to create a spectacle out of any social movement and they began to experience the alienation that afflicts individual actors that become spectators in their own drama. Riot grrrls began to fear they had lost the one thing they cherished in the founding: control. “They decided that the mainstream media was taking too large a role in defining what riot grrrl was, so bands, zine editors, and riot grrrl organizers simply stopped cooperating with outsiders en masse.”36 The effect of the media blackout was negligible in the end. The movement had begun to fragment and like many other subcultures, once the dominant culture began the process of co-opting the riot grrrl phenomenon, its decontextualization and disintegration began. Like many organized groups, riot grrrl quickly became hard to manage and perhaps, the blackout came at a time when the movement itself was becoming more and more narrowly politicized. Lois Maffeo (scenester) saw a growing polarization between two factions: the women who were involved for political reasons (discussing identity politics, organizing benefit concerts) and the ones interested in personal gain (making sure the band or zine was popular).37

Several of the bands persisted, but many of the zines succumbed to, or were transformed into, blogs in the wake of the internet. Indie and punk had already been co-opted by the dominant culture. Soon enough, the angry fervor of riot grrrls would be usurped by the more commercial friendly pop message of “girl power” offered up by the Spice Girls. “Fiftythousand-dollar cars sported bumper stickers reading ‘GIRLS RULE!’ and the Spice Girls sang a diluted message of riot grrrl’s rage for teen audiences who had never heard of Kathleen Hanna.”38 Perhaps the vitality of the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

224

Sounds of Resistance

movement had been swallowed up by the hegemonic machine riot grrrls had feared all along. In the end, riot grrrl was made over in the dominant group’s image and turned on itself.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Like film, popular music often tells us what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, and thus, has long provided individuals with a template for doing gender. The musical dramaturgy of gender has been liberating in that it has offered listeners as well as performers an opportunity to remake their gendered identities, but it has also been restraining in that the music market has typically privileged more sexist images of women than others. The intersection of capitalism and patriarchy has served to commodify and promote images of women that conform to the patriarchal ideal of woman. Even in the space of cultural resistance (e.g., riot grrrl, rap) we have witnessed what images and representations are privileged through commerce. As shown earlier, some feminist ideas were firmly in place in the infancy of the recording industry (e.g., The Carter Family). In addition, women who participate in the music of cultural resistance have not only been concerned with gender but also other causes of social justice (i.e., Billie Holiday). Contradictions also tell the story of the role of women in the music of cultural resistance. Certainly the sexual politics of the late 1960s were reflected through, and fueled in part by, the music that characterized the counterculture. The promotion of sexual liberation and the turn toward the culture of narcissism may have meant that women were given permission to enjoy sex but this still did not serve to subvert the predominance of patriarchy. Many women who fronted bands in that day appeared to appropriate maleness, as in the case of Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and the godmother of punk rock Patti Smith. These androgynous women were often juxtaposed with the girl groups (Supremes/Martha and the Vandellas) and their hyper femininity or the female folk singers (Joan Baez/Joni Mitchell/ Carole King). Women and men have been sexualized through popular music, but more often than not, men have had more control of their own images, whereas women had less over theirs. Popular music is full of representations in which not only do men objectify women (1980s hair bands/rock/gangsta rap) but increasingly women serve to objectify themselves as if the consequence of some internalized sexism (Brittney Spears/Cristina Aguilera). Yet, if we listen we can hear other voices: those that call into question the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

You’re Equal but Different

225

prevailing order. And when resistance becomes fashionable, that is, when the revolution is televised, to recall that classic black power anthem of the early 1970s, capitalism will commodify that as well. The issue of authenticity is of great interest currently in the sociology of music. Writers such as Peterson have argued that popular music has more to do with the fabrication of authenticity than anything else, as performers, songwriters, and artists, try to remake themselves into something that will allow them to sustain the spectacle. These questions of authenticity inform our understanding of music that may be characterized as culturally subversive to the prevailing system of gender stratification. Arguably, the commodification of anything read as authentic is destined to become a caricature of that thing, or to use the terminology of the highly influential sociologist, Jean Baudrillard, it is destined to reappear as simulation, ultimately mocking the sociohistorical circumstances that gave rise to that culture. In essence, the process of decontextualization cues an erasure of history. Blatant examples include the fabricated all female group, Spice Girls, and their use of the phrase “girl power.” So it is that even music that may call into question patriarchal gender relations, becomes a T-shirt or a catch phrase and the riot grrrl is made over as a spectacle in her underwear with “slut” scribbled across her stomach. Her social imperative is undermined by the submission to capital and the male gaze. What seems clear in all of the cases dealt with in this chapter, no matter their success in affecting structural or cultural change, all of these women were effective at pointing out some contradiction with respect to the ideology of gender and the reality of its practice.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” in The Social Construction of Gender, ed. Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (London: Sage, 1991), 13. 2. Norm K. Denzin, “Sexuality and Gender: An Interactionist/Poststructural Reading,” in Theory on Gender/Feminism on Theory, ed. Paula England (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1993), 202. 3. West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” 14. 4. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg & Company, 1903), 3. 5. Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 105.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

226

Sounds of Resistance

6. Raymond Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 133. 7. Meg Greene, Billie Holiday: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 61. 8. Lorreta Lynn and George Vecsey, Lorreta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 62. 9. Al Spicer, The Rough Guide to Punk (London: Rough Guides, 2006), 295. 10. Ibid. 11. Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2000), 99–100. 12. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 150–51. 13. Ibid., 147. 14. Michael P. Jeffries, Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip Hop (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 155. 15. Reiland Rabaka, Hip Hop’s Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2011), 169. 16. Rose, Black Noise: 170. 17. Kaya Oaks, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2009), 45. 18. Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 37. 19. Ibid., 124. 20. Ibid., 38. 21. Julia Downes, “Riot Grrrl: The Legacy and Contemporary Landscape of DIY Feminist Cultural Activism,” in Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now, ed. Nadine Monem (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 19. 22. Kathi Wilcox cited in Kristin Schilt, “Riot Grrrl is . . . The Contestation Over Meaning in a Music Scene,” in Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, ed. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 118. 23. Marcus, Girls to the Front, 34. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock Discourse and Girl Power (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 121. 27. Marcus, Girls to the Front, 60. 28. Ibid., 61. 29. Oaks, Slanted and Enchanted, 128. 30. Marcus, Girls to the Front, 60. 31. Ibid., 97. 32. Downes, “Riot Grrrl,” 26.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

You’re Equal but Different

227

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

33. Ibid., 27. 34. Marisa Meltzer, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music (New York: Faber & Faber, 2010), 28. 35. Downes, “Riot Grrrl,” 31. 36. Meltzer, Girl Power, 33. 37. Ibid., 35. 38. Oaks, Slanted and Enchanted, 134.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 11

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era Craig A. Meyer and Todd D. Snyder

Our day is coming. It’s inevitable that the president in another five years will be a hip-hopper. —KRS-One, stated in 20031

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hip-Hop Music versus the American President Hip-hop music is the most prominent, and certainly the most visible, form of African American cultural expression to take shape in the United States during the past 30-plus years. Born amid the budding hip-hop culture of the South Bronx during the mid-to-late 1970s, hip-hop music quickly moved from New York’s inner-city boroughs to the top record industry charts. Today, it is almost impossible to ignore hip-hop music’s influence on American popular culture. American music, movies, and fashion have been forever changed by hip-hop. Yet, despite the genre’s continued cultural relevance and music industry staying power, hip-hop music remains polarizing among cultural critics. For some, hip-hop music is misogynistic, homophobic, and promotes violence and drug use among America’s youth. For others, hip-hop music is voice as action: a genre of music that exemplifies the oppressed voices of an often-overlooked and disenfranchised American demographic.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

230

Sounds of Resistance

One of the most controversial and often-criticized aspects of the rhetoric found within the hip-hop genre is a blatant disregard for the American political process. Politicians and hip-hop artists have long been at odds. With the rise of so-called gangster rap during the early 1990s came criticism from local and national politicians that hip-hop music was corrosive to the morals of American society. Many hip-hop artists, feeling as if they were being used as political scapegoats, countered this argument by suggesting that American politicians were either unaware or unwilling to address the socioeconomic problems of the impoverished inner-city African American neighborhoods from which hip-hop was born. Until recently, American politics and hip-hop music were often in direct opposition to each other. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign marked a clear turning point in the often-hostile relationship between hip-hop music and American politicians. Never before had a presidential candidate inspired such a variety of hip-hop artists to promote political optimism in their music. Equally impressive was Obama’s ability to inspire hip-hop artists to openly campaign for him during television events and public concerts. This turn of events was indeed in stark contrast to the genre’s earlier history of political skepticism and disillusionment. In the past, presidents and presidential candidates were almost always vilified in hip-hop music. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have long drawn ire from many hip-hop artists. Each of these former presidents have been criticized, mocked, and openly disrespected in a variety of popular hip-hop songs. The same can be said for politicians such as Bob Dole, Dan Quayle, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. Moreover, African American political figures such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Condoleezza Rice have also garnered a fair amount of criticism from hip-hop artists. When looking back on this antagonistic relationship, Obama’s ability to evade the wrath of hip-hop’s disdain for American political figures seems all the more groundbreaking. The pro-Obama hip-hop rhetoric proliferated throughout the 2008 campaign represented a first for a genre that has long maintained a clear distrust toward American politics. Ronald Reagan, the first American president to openly address hip-hop and its culture, has been depicted as anything but a hero within this musical genre. Reagan hip-hop references range from downright crude and vulgar gestures of disrespect to politically and socially aware criticisms of his presidential platform. For example, on the aptly titled 1988 song “Cusswords,” rapper Too Short jokes about having sexual intercourse with the then First Lady Nancy Reagan.2 This is not to suggest that all Reagan hip-hop references

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

231

were of a vulgar nature. Although Too Short’s lyrical jab at President Reagan only had a tangential political agenda (i.e., directed at his wife), other hip-hop artists were clearly publicly critical of Reagan’s presidency. In 1988, KRS-One, then a member of the rap group Boogie Down Productions, offered the following anti-Reagan sentiment on the song “Stop the Violence”: “we fight inflation, yet the president’s still on vacation.”3 The distrust of Reagan’s leadership is even more apparent in the 1987 song “Squeeze the Trigger” where rapper Ice-T states, “we buy weapons to make us strong/ Ronald Reagan sends guns where they don’t belong.”4 This line, a reference to the Iran-Contra Affair, signals a long-held hip-hop rhetoric that suggests Reagan’s administration was responsible for the crack epidemic that rocked inner-city ghettos throughout America in the late 1980s, a notion that has yet to disappear in some contemporary hip-hop songs. For instance, in Jay-Z’s 2007 hit “Blue Magic,” he raps “blame Reagan for making me into a monster/blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra.”5 A similar anti-Reagan sentiment is expressed in Kanye West’s 2004 song “Crack Music” where West argues President Reagan played a crucial role in answering the problem that the Black Panthers posed to mainstream America: “Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer.”6 These lines, hip-hop’s past and present, demonstrate hiphop music’s contempt for Ronald Reagan’s presidential legacy. Hip-hop music’s overwhelming criticism of American politics did not disappear during the one-term presidency of George H. W. Bush. Ushered in by a new wave of socially conscious rappers, the early 1990s would bring about a new era of political resistance in hip-hop music. For instance, in his 1991 song “Words of Wisdom,” rapper, actor, and cultural icon Tupac Shakur argues that the hip-hop generation has no obligation to engage in patriotic gestures: “Pledge a allegiance to a flag that neglects us?/honor a man [President George H. W. Bush] that refuse to respect us?”7 This antinationalistic rhetoric expressed on Tupac’s debut album, The 2Pacalypse Now,8 was in line with the messages being promoted on the albums of hiphop groups such as Public Enemy (e.g., It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back9 and Fear of a Black Planet10) and on the albums of West Coast rappers such as Ice Cube (e.g., AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted11 and Death Certificate12) and Ice-T (e.g., The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech . . . Just Watch What You Say13 and Home Invasion14). Further, amid the racial tensions of the early and mid-1990s, such as the Rodney King incident and subsequent riots in Los Angeles, many hip-hop artists continued to express an open distrust of American political leaders. For these rappers, the American political system was inherently flawed, leaving the African American underclass marginalized, silenced, and discounted. The cultural battle lines had

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

232

Sounds of Resistance

clearly been drawn. As politicians continued to publicly condemn hip-hop’s transgressive messages, rappers continued to use their music as a sounding board to express their lack of faith in the political process. This trend would continue through the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Today, Bill Clinton is often remembered as a president who was popular among African American voters. It would be remiss, however, to assume Clinton escaped criticism from hip-hop artists during his presidency. From playful allusions to the Monica Lewinski scandal on songs such as Snoop Dogg’s “True Lies”15 or Eminem’s “Who Knew”16 to mocking references of President Clinton’s famous “I did not inhale” quote on George Clinton’s hip-hop inspired collaboration Paint the Whitehouse Black, President Clinton was often the brunt of punch lines in hip-hop music.17 Bill Clinton also drew some of the same harsh criticisms from socially conscious rappers like his Presidential predecessors. For example, on his multiplatinum hit “How Do U Want It,” Tupac Shakur explicitly attempts to present the American political machine in direct opposition to the hip-hop movement: “Bill Clinton, Mr. Bob Dole/you are too old to understand the way the game’s told.”18 Shakur’s message was received with praise in the hiphop community. His argument, that hip-hop music was under attack by misinformed and outdated critics that were out to destroy the movement, resonated with a youth culture that understood the disconnect between themselves and older generations. According to many hip-hop artists, the American political machine was out to expose and eliminate the perceived ills of hip-hop and its music. Among this overwhelming clamor to censor hip-hop music in the 1990s, any public endorsement from a hip-hop artist was unheard of and unwanted. In an attempt to calm the fears of suburban parents who were frightened by hip-hop’s growing influence and popularity, politicians distanced themselves from hip-hop culture whenever possible. Further, as had happened with hip-hop culture, hip-hop music went “from dismissal to denigration” in the public’s eyes.19 The vulgar, violent, and often sexist lyrics found in many hip-hop songs continued to garner more and more mainstream attention from politicians and media outlets. Hip-hop had become synonymous with transgressive behavior. During Clinton’s two-term presidency many hip-hop artists began writing music that was directly aimed at the American political powers-that-be. For example, in his 1999 song “I Wanna Talk to You,” rapper Nas uses his musical medium to express the hip-hop community’s political frustrations.20 Nas’s song, like many hip-hop songs produced during this era, promotes the notion that mainstream politicians are simply out of touch with the concerns of the hip-hop community. In the song, Nas asks those in

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

233

power to imagine growing up and trying to raise a family in the impoverished slums that gave birth to the hip-hop movement. It is a song that reminds listeners of how life in the ghetto can breed a fatalist mindset in America’s youth. On the chorus Nas raps that he wants answers from mayors, governors, congressmen, the FBI, CIA, and, of course, the president.21 For Nas, and many of his high-profile hip-hop peers, the American political process was one that excluded the voices of the hip-hop generation. Moreover, Clinton was a president who did little to bridge the gap. Thus, the concept of using popular music to communicate the concerns of the African American underclass to mainstream politicians continued to be a common hip-hop trope during Clinton’s presidency. In the popular 1997 hip-hop documentary Rhyme and Reason, rapper Method Man begins the film with a freestyle highlighted by the following line: “Fuck the president/he don’t represent the ghetto resident.”22 In many ways, this line represented the cultural mindset of many hip-hop artists at the time. For example, Tupac Shakur’s posthumously released song “Letter to the President,” the musical embodiment of this political mindset, caricatures the American political system as one that is indifferent to the concerns of inner-city African American publics. In “Letter to the President,” Shakur believes President Clinton would never sit down to talk to him because, “He’s scared to look into the eyes of a thug nigga.”23 This same narrative formula was later promoted in New Orleans rapper Master P’s 1997 song “Dear Mr. President.”24 Master P’s song, like those by Nas and Shakur, hinged on the assumption that no American president would actually sit down and talk one-on-one with a member of rap’s elite. At the time, such an occurrence seemed like an unrealistic request. Therefore, conversations like the ones imagined on songs by Nas, Tupac, and Master P were relegated to the fictionalized realm of the hip-hop imagination. Disdain for President Clinton, although well documented in hip-hop songs, pales in comparison to the barrage of insults aimed at his successor George W. Bush, perhaps the most infamous of the hip-hop-era presidents. Referred to as “this monster/this coward/that we have empowered” on Eminem’s hit song “Mosh,” Bush often was painted as a tyrant by hip-hop artists throughout his eight-year presidency.25 New York rapper Jadakiss, for example, stirred up controversy by speculating on conspiracy theories that suggested Bush was aware of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on his popular song “Why”: “why did Bush knock down the towers?”26 Eminem, among others, questions Bush’s reasons for choosing to invade Iraq in a number of popular songs, “Mosh” and “Square Dance” being two of the most obvious examples.27 Bush was also criticized for how he handled the post-Hurricane

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

234

Sounds of Resistance

Katrina disaster in Jay-Z’s song “Minority Report.”28 However, this was even more evident when Kanye West spoke out against Bush on live television. In 2005, West notoriously stated, during a Red Cross fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”29 West’s words demonstrated that the hip-hop generation was yet to find a major political figure that understood and appreciated the culture. His feelings were mirrored by Nas who rapped, “In the hood nothing is changing, we ain’t got no choice who to choose [in the 2004 Bush vs. Kerry election]/Ten years ago they were trying to stop our voices and end hip-hop.”30 Animosity toward the political system, but pointedly at Bush, continued throughout his eight-year term. By the end of his second term as president, Bush’s hiphop approval rating was at an all-time low, which mirrored the general feeling of America as well. More than ever before, hip-hop artists began to use their celebrity and artistic platform to express disdain for American politics. Hip-hop’s dominant political rhetoric had, thus, become part of the rhetoric of political resistance. Since the late 1980s, critics of the genre have worried that hip-hop music’s antiestablishment rhetoric would breed political nihilism among America’s youth. To be fair, this was probably the case for some listeners. The political message in many early hip-hop songs was one of hopelessness (e.g., “I Wanna Talk to You” by Nas, “Letter to the President” by Tupac and the Outlawz, or “Dear Mr. President” by Master P). For many rappers, the American political process failed to serve the needs of lower class African American citizens who lived in the ghetto. Therefore, to take part in the democratic political process was a waste of time. Until Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, no mainstream hip-hop artists had ever expressed respect or admiration for a presidential candidate in their music. The harsh backand-forth discourse between American politicians and hip-hop artists became a recognizable pattern for listeners. For over a generation, hip-hop had been dismissed as youthful rebellion by more influential parts of society: mainstream media, political parties, and politicians. As the hip-hop movement progressed, politicians took note and made clear that this movement led young people down a path of illicit behavior. This trend led to a long-standing cultural resentment of the American political process by and within hip-hop music, the most influential aspect of hip-hop culture. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, hip-hop music established a clear and undeniable political narrative. This message was one of mistrust and disregard for the political process. This chapter discusses the evolution of hip-hop’s political conversation and how, finally, the election of Barack Obama opened the metaphorical

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

235

space for the younger generations raised on hip-hop’s presence and influence to make their voices heard via the democratic political process. The goal is not to paint Obama as hip-hop’s political grandmaster. Rather, it is to highlight how Obama’s 2008 campaign represents a cultural turning point in the longstanding distrust of the American political process found in popular hip-hop music. Obama’s ability to channel the hip-hop vote was unique in that it was counter to this musical genre’s history of an antagonistic relationship to mainstream American politics.

A New Discourse between Hip-Hop and Politicians

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Undoubtedly, Obama made a major impact on American history with his campaign and its influence on youthful voters. Hip-hop’s sway was perhaps never more apparent than when Obama’s then-opponent John McCain attempted to pander to a hip-hop audience. On August 25th, 2008, three days prior to Obama’s keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado, the Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, McCain appeared in front of a group of anxious teenagers at Phoenix, Arizona’s Central High School. Nationally broadcast on C-SPAN, Senator McCain’s message was anything but rhetorically savvy. After briefly reminding his young audience of their patriotic obligation to familiarize themselves with the issues and participate in the democratic election process, McCain haphazardly transitioned into a prepared speech written on a note card: Most importantly, I know why you are sitting here and that is not to listen to me so much. But I brought a special friend along with me today. A great American success story. As you know, he is from Puerto Rico. He has been married for fifteen years. He has children age fourteen, twelve, and ten. One of his most famous songs, I know you’re very familiar with, “Gasolina.” Well, it means—here he is—Daddy Yankee!31

When McCain pronounced the song title as “GasAlina” (it should be “GasOlina”), he paused, possibly realizing his error as the students at Central High School seemed to snicker. Then, after a momentary loss of words, he called Daddy Yankee out to the stage. As Daddy Yankee took the microphone, he began his public endorsement of McCain, but was cut off by someone that appeared to be a McCain aide who whispered in his ear. As Daddy Yankee returned to his public endorsement, McCain quickly interrupted him mid-sentence by turning him around to face a group of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

236

Sounds of Resistance

star-stuck teenagers. Like a puppet, Daddy Yankee briefly put the microphone aside and began a series of hugs and handshakes for the students standing in the first few rows. McCain, during Yankee’s walking the rope, broadly smiled and clapped his hands—clearly out of his element, as he stood off to the side awkwardly. This scene made clear that for most politicians and pundits, hip-hop culture is a conundrum. Those who grew up during hip-hop culture’s swift rise to mainstream visibility understand how odd this event was because never before had a presidential candidate so blatantly sought help from a member of the hip-hop community. Further, never before had the hip-hop vote held such influence in the political system. After all, just 12 years earlier Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole launched a series of public attacks against the violent and morally deplorable themes sometimes found in hip-hop music. The early 1990s also brought a series of anti-hip-hop demonstrations lead by figures such as U.S. politician and civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker, religious leaders such as Reverend Calvin Butts, and celebrities such as Dionne Warwick. In Harlem, for example, garbage bags full of hip-hop albums were literally crushed by steamrollers on the streets. Outside record stores, angry picketers protested the themes of rap music. Radio stations and major American retailers began to give in to political pressure by attempting to limit public access to the uncensored messages of hip-hop music. In stark contrast, 2008 would mark a new chapter in hip-hop’s political conversation, and with the entrance of Obama as a possible presidential candidate, rap music began to sing a vastly different tune. So, watching Senator McCain parade Daddy Yankee around the stage as if he were an ex-president or celebrated war veteran, one could not help but realize how far hip-hop had come during the previous decade. Based on the history between hip-hop and politics, McCain’s political spectacle was undoubtedly a sign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s ability to influence the hip-hop vote. By this time, however, the hip-hop community had already cast its ballot—for Obama. Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign and election, popular artists such as Kanye West, will.i.am, and Jay-Z openly expressed their support for Obama through music, online viral videos, and television spots. Almost overnight, Frank Shepard Fairey’s pensive blue and red Warhol-esque Obama image became a mainstay in the hip-hop fashion world. The hip-hop community, like much of America, caught Obama-mania. For the past 20 years, the most visible aspect of hip-hop culture—its music—served as a mouthpiece for the political frustration and disenfranchisement of an often-neglected portion of American culture. Tricia Rose notes, “Rap’s poetic voice is deeply

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

237

political in content and spirit, but its hidden struggle—that of access to public space and community resources and the interpretation of Black expression—constitutes rap’s hidden politics.”32 With Obama’s quick rise to fame, hip-hop gained a voice within American politics. This innovative and highly influential subculture, which had taken shape in the povertystricken and crime-filled streets of the Bronx during the 1970s, found a political figure that seemingly understood their struggle and could speak their language. With the song “My President,” released during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, rapper Young Jeezy spoke of the hope and inspiration he felt from Obama’s potential candidacy: “win lose or draw man, we congratulate you already homie/see I motivate the thugs right but see you motivate us.”33 In “Black President,” another pro-Obama song, Nas positions Obama as a positive symbol: “I think Obama provides hope, challenges minds of all races and colors to erase the hate and try to love one another so many politicians are snakes, we[‘re] in need of a break.”34 This Obama-mania in American pop culture ushered in another era of hip-hop and created new inroads to politics and its discourse. For the first time in the genre’s history, a groundswell of hip-hop artists was taking part in the democratic process by producing candidate-endorsing theme songs and openly attempting to recruit younger voters. The slew of pro-Obama hip-hop songs were, of course, milestones for a genre of music that, for years, expressed disdain for the system. Popular rap artists crafted music that resembled a new political rhetoric—one that leaves room for hope, change, and responsibility. These new standards embrace the possibility that American politicians are (finally) listening to the voices of hip-hop voters. Nevertheless, to truly appreciate or understand the significance of these current musical and cultural trends, one must be able to define hiphop as a cultural movement as well as come to understand its long political history. Because hip-hop culture, in essence, is a political statement.

The Birth of Hip-Hop’s Voice Most music historians and cultural critics trace the roots of hip-hop back to the impoverished slums of the South Bronx. In the early 1970s, young African Americans and Latinos were in the midst of creating a movement that would forever change the face of American culture. Through graffiti art, break dancing, DJing, rapping, and a unique brand of social activism, these founders of hip-hop culture would permanently transform our country’s cultural landscape. Graffiti was the first piece of visual evidence of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

238

Sounds of Resistance

hip-hop’s birth as a form of cultural expression. As graffiti began to appear more frequently on the outside of abandoned buildings and subway cars, the local New York media took notice. Some graffiti consisted of spray painted murals to lost loved ones; others displayed vivid scenery that depicted the hardships of life in the ghetto, while many were simply creative and colorful tags that displayed the pseudonym of the artist. Despite the fact that most instances of graffiti were found within impoverished lowerclass neighborhoods, a war on graffiti erupted, which was fueled by New York politicians and members of the local media. Mayor John V. Lindsay, for example, “devised and debated graffiti-related policies and programs and issued numerous public statements” about graffiti.35 In doing so, however, politicians began what would later become a harsh and often antagonistic narrative with the hip-hop community. By interpreting graffiti art as nothing more than teenage rebellion or vandalism, they were unable to see the rhetoric behind these recent outbreaks of artistic expression or do anything about the conditions from which they arose. Graffiti, then, was a cry for help: a way to speak to others, an attempt to be heard by the outside public. It was this same artistic energy and rhetorical aim that would influence the b-boys and b-girls, popularly known as break dancers, DJs, and MCs that would help advance hip-hop culture in the coming years. As a cultural movement, hip-hop was more than petty vandalism or artistic expression. Many of hip-hop culture’s early figures were equally concerned with community activism. This was, in large part, due to the influence of hip-hop’s most mysterious founding father Afrika Bambaataa. Like many young African American males forced to grow up embedded in the economic and social hardships of life in the inner-city ghettos of New York City, Bambaataa (born Kevin Donovan) was affected by the realities of street life. As a leader of the street gang The Black Spades, Bambaataa quickly became a notorious figure in local New York neighborhoods. After a trip to Africa, however, the one-time gang member experienced something of a spiritual rebirth. When he returned to New York, he changed his name to Afrika Bambaataa Aasim. Influenced by the 1964 movie Zulu, which told of “a late-nineteenth-century Zululand leader [called Bhambatha] who led an anti-tax revolt against the British colonial authority in South Africa,” Bambaataa attempted to use his leadership skills to create positive change within his local Bronx community.36 As hip-hop scholar Jeff Chang points out in his history of hip-hop culture Can’t Stop Won’t Stop—Afrika Bambaataa “saw the future before anyone else.”37 Bambaataa told local gang leaders his name was Zulu for “affectionate leader,” and that he wanted to create a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

239

culture of unity for African Americans throughout New York’s inner-city communities.38 In so doing, Bambaataa became the founder of the Universal Zulu Nation—the first hip-hop institution—and he would use his organizational skills to promote literacy and socially conscious behavior, to bridge the communication gaps between rival gangs, and to create a culture of peace in the budding hip-hop community. It was this spirit of unity, as well as a passion for community-oriented thinking, that would spread the message of hip-hop through the boroughs of New York. Though distinct, there are similarities between Bambaataa’s brand of community activism and Barack Obama’s beginnings as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. Bambaataa, like Obama, understood the importance of regulating and organizing historically impoverished and disenfranchised communities; he was also aware of the dangers of not doing so. Again similar to Obama, Bambaataa was interested in spreading a message of change and unity. Obama, however, did not come from the same harsh background as Bambaataa. Nor did Obama grow up directly surrounded by the influence of the burgeoning hip-hop movement. Still, when revisiting hip-hop’s beginnings in the realm of community activism, one can see why hip-hop would view Obama’s background as a community organizer positively.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Rapport between Obama and Hip-Hop Hip-hop has always been concerned with the expression of a culture that has viewed itself as voiceless, which is in some ways reminiscent of Obama’s own story. Obama’s political career and the hip-hop movement have similar beginnings. In his memoir, Obama discusses a moment where people heard him give a speech, and he realized they were listening to his words, and this realization made him “hungry for words” because they “could carry a message, support an idea.”39 Much like rap artists who use words as their vocal cannon, Obama learned the same lessons. Power can come from words, and “[w]ith the right words everything could change.”40 One of the turning points in his life was when one of his close friends, Regina, emphasized to him that “It’s not just about you. It’s never just about you. It’s about people who need your help.”41 As he reflects on her words, later in that same sequence, Obama refers to himself as a “bum” and, based on this passage, it is clear her words had great impact on him.42 This self-deprecating discourse is also common in hip-hop music such as when some rap artists call themselves thugs. The frustration of realizing one’s disadvantaged place within society has long been a key theme in hip-hop anthems. Further, Obama’s

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

240

Sounds of Resistance

youth was filled with controlled rage over the injustices he saw as a young multiethnic man. Perhaps there were feelings of exclusion and certainly— as Obama himself writes about—identity. Likewise, in an interview with Bill Moyers, Cornel West posits that rap music is a product of underprivileged youth based in “their sense of being rejected by the society at large, of being invisible in the society at large, with a subversive critique of that society.”43 Perhaps it is this underlying sense of rejection, disenfranchisement, and a vision of community organization and unity, that connects the cultural mindset of the hip-hop movement to that of Obama during his younger days. When considering these parallels within Obama’s background and hiphop’s early activism, it becomes clear that he is able to grasp the oftenmisunderstood rhetoric of hip-hop culture. This, however, is not to say that Obama views himself as a member of the hip-hop community. During the past few years, Obama has continually stated that he is too old to officially view himself as a member of the culture. This has led many to view Obama as something of a father figure to hip-hop. Obama is nevertheless critical of some aspects of hip-hop society and even of the fervent youth that supports him. For instance, at one point during Obama’s 2008 campaign, Obama openly commented on controversial legislation regarding various fashion trends like saggy pants. He said, “brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, [and] your underwear is showing. What’s wrong with that? Come on.”44 Unlike many past-political figures, though, Obama is able to criticize elements of hip-hop culture, particularly violent lyrics and baggy pants, without stripping hip-hop of its dignity and still providing a respectable place within American politics. During the 2008 campaign many compared Obama’s relationship to hip-hop culture to that of a father or political advisor. Writer Gabe Meline, for example, claims “hip-hop can think of Obama as a really, really cool dad. He’ll trust hip-hop to be good, and it’ll occasionally live up to that trust. It’ll do things he disapproves of, but he’ll be tolerant, with measured criticism.”45 It is this ability to simultaneously praise and criticize hiphop that sets Obama apart from his predecessors. In walking this political tightrope, Obama has been able to channel the attention and admiration of hip-hop voters in a way that is unique to American politics. Moreover, Obama has appealed to hip-hop partly because he knows the music and the moves. One incident where he was criticized demonstrated this fact. Upon hearing the criticism, he made a motion of brushing something off his shoulder—which was at the time a Jay-Z dance move from his song

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

241

“Dirt Off Your Shoulder.”46 Teresa Wiltz, a reporter who picked up on the connection, believes the move was a “seminal moment in the campaign, the merging of politics and pop culture.”47 Obama’s calculated approach in dealing with hip-hop culture unquestionably helped him win over many rap artists who frequently had spent their creative energies criticizing the political structure. Those unaware of hip-hop’s long-standing tradition of antagonistic rhetoric toward government might suggest that Obama’s race is the great equalizer. When considering hip-hop’s tendency to criticize leading African American political figures, though, it becomes apparent that Obama won over the hip-hop community as no other African American leader had done before. For example, Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988; yet, hip-hop never rallied behind him like they did for Obama. In fact, according to Hip-hop scholar Akil Houston, Jackson “has often been critical of it [hip-hop], without recognizing some of its strengths”;48 whereas Obama, while still critical, is clearly supportive when he says, “honestly, I love the art of hip-hop.”49 More important, however, is Obama’s ability to reprimand (or to be parental to) hip-hop such as when he states, I don’t always love the message of hip-hop. There are times where even with the artists I named [Jay-Z, Kanye West], the artists I love, ya know, there’s a message that is not only sometimes degrading to women, not only uses the “N” word a little too frequently, but also something I’m really concerned about is always talking about material things.50

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Even when he is being critical, he is showing support—he understands there are portions of the music that are reasonable and responsible. More so than any of his presidential predecessors, Obama seems willing to acknowledge hip-hop’s potential; he explains, I’ve met with Jay-Z and I’ve met with Kanye, and talked to other artists about how potentially to bridge that gap [of how hip-hop can be effectively used], and I think the potential for them to deliver a message of extraordinary power that gets people thinking. You know the thing about hip-hop today is it’s smart. It’s insightful, and the way they can communicate a complex message in a very short space is remarkable. And, a lot of these kids, they are not going to be reading The New York Times; that’s not how they are getting their information. So the question then is, “What’s the content? What’s the message?” I understand folks want to be rooted in the community; they want to be down, but what I always say is that hip-hop is not just a mirror of what is, it should also be a reflection of what can be.51

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

242

Sounds of Resistance

In this passage, Obama demonstrates his ability to imagine the responsibility of hip-hop to have a positive impact on the youth of America. Even filmmaker and outspoken critic Spike Lee commented that activists from the Civil Rights era and older African American politicians need to realize, “this is a new day.”52 More so than the old guard, Obama recognizes the fact that hip-hop is indeed an art form; one that has the potential to portray a message that is powerful. When considering the history of hip-hop’s political conversation, the tone of respect in Obama’s depiction of hip-hop is quite different from that of previous politicians, like Bob Dole, who only condemned hip-hop as corrosive to society; Obama sees its strengths (and weaknesses) and is able to create an atmosphere that respects both the politics and the community. Moreover, Obama does not publicly use rappers as scapegoats. Nor does he pretend the violent or potentially vulgar lyrics of one particular rapper represent the entire hip-hop community. Instead, Obama sees hip-hop for what it truly is—a nuanced and complicated set of voices that represent a slice of American culture.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Obama, Hip-Hop, and a New Rhythm One of the most enlightening aspects of Obama’s public comments regarding hip-hop is his ability to recognize hip-hop as a full-blown culture that has roots in actual communities suffering from the cyclical effects of poverty. Although the hip-hop movement’s “political identity has played a subordinate role to the power and popularity of hip hop’s commercial identity,” its growing potential to create cultural waves is increasingly heard by the politicians in Washington, DC.53 As S. Craig Watkins explains, the inspiration for the hip-hop movement has always been where it came from—the ghettos, the streets, and, of course, the communities.54 Watkins also points out the value of hip-hop to the larger context of the American quilt: “The issues that confront the hip-hop movement, inevitably, are intertwined with some of the larger and more vexing challenges facing millennial America.”55 Obama, like hip-hop, directs us to be a community, not a black community, but a global community that tackles the concerns we all face such as health care, terrorism, poverty, and education. Hip-hop’s character believes that action begins from within, and as such, hip-hoppers are able to mobilize themselves—Obama understood this and used it to his campaign’s advantage. Part of Obama’s quick success was the influx of money from everyday people that wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves. Will.i.am, for example, created a video that quickly went viral after hearing

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

243

an Obama speech.56 He explains that Obama “inspired me to want to change myself to better the world.”57 Thousands of others believed the same, logged on, and became active in the political system—many for the first time. In response and in a brilliant stroke of strategy, the Obama campaign utilized the Internet by encouraging “supporters to actually do something, besides donate money.”58 The Obama website buzzed with information as to how people could connect with others locally and champion Obama in their own hometown, grassroots, American streets. Obama and his campaign effectively organized people at this base level because Obama had taken his lessons from the poor, disregarded streets of Chicago. From that hard-earned learning, Obama’s “My.BarackObama. com attracted 3,306 grassroots volunteer groups, 4,416 personal fundraising pages, 6,706 personal blogs, and 38,799 people with individual profiles building networks to support Obama.”59 These statistics alone demolished any other candidate’s complete online presence—and this was only one site. Further, Obama’s website updated frequently—a tactic to get repeat traffic throughout the day—with not only textual content but also “videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events.”60 The relentless updates helped fuel and give energy to those connected via smartphones and other mobile technology (a staple of today’s youth), but also provided a new view each time traditional web users visited the site. Similar to hip-hop, Obama’s handlers recognized the productivity and unharnessed power available through connecting to younger generations and this enthusiasm carried over into older generations. Even pundits like Bernard Goldberg could not escape Obama’s influence. Goldberg, in his book A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, quotes David Gergen, on the night of Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver, gushing about Obama’s speech: “it was less a speech than a symphony. It moved quickly, it had high tempo, at times inspiring, then it became more intimate, slower. . . . It was a masterpiece.”61 Even though Goldberg clearly has no love for Obama and the tone in his book is conservative and disparaging of then Democratic nominee, he notes how the media created one simple equation: “Barack Obama = good.”62 Furthermore, Obama’s speeches are lyrical in their sound and impression. Gergen even suggests a musical score, but to hip-hop culture and perhaps to youth, they ring of rap. Musical artists have utilized this quality in his speeches and made several songs embedding Obama’s words into a score, such as the aforementioned will.i.am’s viral video that took YouTube by storm.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

244

Sounds of Resistance

Moreover, the day before the presidential election in Ohio, in a multistate tromp, hip-hop heavies such as Jay-Z and P. Diddy appeared on stage together along with Mary J. Blige and Beyoncé Knowles to encourage folks to vote the next day. Diddy commented that voters should expect to be in line “for at least seven hours.”63 Jay-Z, also on stage after a lyric or two, said, “Obama is running so all our children can fly!”64 And later in Philadelphia, Blige spoke with conviction:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

We have to show our children that we are more than what they have been looking at. We have to show ourselves and take control of our destiny. [. . .] Barack Obama is a true example of something different. We are looking at what we’ve been praying for, for centuries—someone that loves us, someone that cares, and someone that press[es] through the pain [. . .] Forget your anger. Because guess what, I’m a victim of anger too. I’m a victim of impatience too. But we have to do something different, yo.65

Thus, it becomes clear that Obama’s story undoubtedly inspired the hiphop community during the 2008 election. Not only did Obama represent to many people the fulfillment of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for a more equal America, but his political triumph was indeed quite similar to the rags-to-riches story that has long served as the hip-hop American dream. Obama’s political mythology is in many ways directly in line with the mythology of hip-hop culture. Like Bambaataa, who returned from Africa to the South Bronx with a new vision of community awareness and organization, Obama declared he would return to the south side of Chicago after attending Harvard, and he did. So often in America, and more specifically in the urban areas of cities, people are told or promised something, and it is just talk. Obama’s action of returning, as he said he would, garnered him credit among constituents—and nothing is more valuable than honesty and street cred in hip-hop. Like the hip-hop artist who escapes the perils of the ghetto to rise to fame and national visibility, Obama’s campaign victory served as a reminder that people can transcend their circumstances. In a mid-campaign interview, Obama continued to offer a vision for hip-hop’s potential: Imagine communities that are not torn up by violence. Imagine communities where we are respecting our women. Imagine communities where knowledge and reading and academic excellence are valued. Imagine communities where fathers are doing right by their kids. You know, that’s also something that needs to be reflected. Art just can’t be a rear-view mirror. It should have a headlight out there.66

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

245

During his swift rise to political fame, Obama quickly gained the attention of the more socially conscious and political artists in the hip-hop game. Talib Kweli, for example, realizes that Obama’s impact on popular culture and music hits many fronts. Kweli said in an interview that “it’s not about him winning the election; it’s about the man he is.”67 Kweli also cites Obama’s impact on artists such as Common, Young Jeezy, Nas, Jay-Z, and Mos Def. More importantly, Kweli observes, “He’s inspired black men to send out mass emails [sic] to other black men, saying, ‘We gotta stop saying “n—” so much. We gotta take care of our families. We gotta raise our babies.’ ”68 After the online interview, a comment section was available where one person writes, “[Obama] IS HIP-HOP”69 and another adds, “We all have a lot of work to do so. Make Obama PROUD!!!”70 These comments highlight how integrated Obama has become in the hip-hop community and how some consider Obama as a person who can give specific praise. Moreover, by working toward the common goals together, “we” can overcome our common concerns. This idea of community is something rarely seen in pop culture and politics. To suggest, however, that Obama has done nothing more than to win over the hearts and opinions of hip-hop’s most political figures is to undermine the impact of Obama on various branches of hip-hop. For example, in an atypical meeting with rapper Ludacris (after the song “Obama is Here,” also called “Politics as Usual” where Ludacris explicitly and negatively referred to Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and George W. Bush), Obama discussed what Ludacris explained as hip-hop’s potential for “empowering the youth.”71 This type of meeting was historic for a few reasons, most notably, a politician was sitting down with a rapper to discuss issues privately and respectfully. This is far removed from the days of crushing rap CDs on the streets. Obama’s meeting with Ludacris was also historic in the sense that it demonstrated Obama’s willingness to actually sit down and listen to rappers, such as Ludacris, who are often viewed as vulgar or violent by the mainstream media. This meeting also begs the question of why Obama, more so than any leader in American history, is able to actually gain the respect and attention of hip-hop artists, socially conscious or otherwise. Unlike previous critics who believed it to be a sophomoric trend, Michael Eric Dyson, an urban-culture scholar, writes, “Hip-hop culture is the most explosive, engaging, and controversial form of (black) American pop culture to find global circulation and acclaim in the last quarter century, and is worthy of serious critique and investigation.”72 It is clear that Obama understands Dyson’s view of hip-hop culture. In an interview Obama stated “I think that there’s no doubt that hip hop culture moves our young people powerfully, and some of it is not just a reflection of reality, it

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

246

Sounds of Resistance

also creates reality.”73 Here, Obama reminds American audiences of hip-hop culture’s ability to impact American culture, for better or for worse. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was able to engage hip-hop in an open and public political dialogue that allows members inside the community and members outside the community to retain their integrity and self-worth. When Obama speaks about hip-hop music or culture, he is able to do so with authority and, more importantly, credibility. Unlike past politicians who often stumble to correctly name the artists or songs they were criticizing, Obama displays a clear and obvious understanding of the work and influence of trendsetters such as Jay-Z. Although Obama’s history provides clear parallels to hip-hop, this is not to suggest that the marriage between Obama and hip-hop culture will continue to be a happy one. If the past has taught us anything, it is that hip-hop will likely never shed its rebellious roots and become conformist or overtly patriotic. Whether Obama will be able to effectively use his overwhelming support in the hip-hop community to his political advantage remains to be seen. Obama’s willingness to uphold the potentials of hip-hop music may eventually become a political problem for the president. For example, in 2011, First Lady Michelle Obama was publicly criticized for inviting Chicago-based rapper Common to the White House to read poetry (this criticism stemmed from harsh antiBush statements made by Common earlier in his career). The future will show whether hip-hop’s rightful place in American politics will produce actual change within the communities that gave birth to it. Nevertheless, we do know that hip-hop, more so than ever, has garnered newfound respect and influence within the American political spectrum, because it has never been afraid to explore the realities from which it has matured.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2005), 137. 2. Too Short, “Cusswords,” Too Short, © 1988, by Jive, compact disc. 3. Boogie Down Productions, “Stop the Violence,” By All Means Necessary, © 1988, by Jive/RCA, compact disc. 4. Ice-T, “Squeeze the Trigger,” Rhyme Pays, © 1987, by Warner, compact disc. 5. Jay-Z, “Blue Magic,” American Gangster, © 2007, by Def Jam, 2007, compact disc. 6. Kanye West, “Crack Music,” Late Registration, © 2004, by Def Jam, compact disc. 7. Tupac Shakur, “Words of Wisdom,” 2Pacalypse Now, © 1991, by Interscope, compact disc. 8. Tupac Shakur, 2Pacalypse Now, © 1991, by Interscope, compact disc.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

247

9. Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, © 1988, by Def Jam, compact disc. 10. Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet, © 1990, by Def Jam, compact disc. 11. Ice Cube, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, © 1990, by Priority, compact disc. 12. Ice Cube, Death Certificate, © 1991, by Priority, compact disc. 13. Ice T, The Iceberg/Freedom of Speech . . . Just Watch What You Say, © 1989, by Sire/Warner Bros. Records, compact disc. 14. Ice T, Home Invasion, © 1993, by Rhyme Syndicate, compact disc. 15. Snoop Dogg, “True Lies,” The Last Meal, © 2000, by No Limit/Priority/ EMI Records, compact disc. 16. Eminem, “Who Knew,” The Marshall Mathers LP, © 2000, by Aftermath, compact disc. 17. George Clinton, Paint the Whitehouse Black, © 1993, by Paisley, compact disc. 18. Tupac Shakur, “How Do U Want It,” All Eyez on Me, © 1996, by Death Row, compact disc. 19. Michael Eric Dyson, The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (New York: Basic, 2004), 401. 20. Nas, “I Wanna Talk to You,” I am . . ., © 1999, by Ill Will/Columbia Records, compact disc. 21. Ibid. 22. Peter Spirer, dir., Rhyme and Reason (Miramax Home Entertainment, 1997), DVD. 23. Tupac Shakur and the Outlawz, “Letter to the President,” Still I Rise, © 1999, by Death Row, compact disc. 24. Master P, “Dear Mr. President,” Da Last Don, © 1998, by No Limit/Priority/EMI Records, compact disc. 25. Eminem, “Mosh,” Encore, © 2004, by Aftermath, compact disc. 26. Jadakiss, “Why,” Kiss of Death, © 2004, by Ruff Ryders, compact disc. 27. Eminem, “Square Dance,” The Eminem Show, © 2002, by Aftermath, compact disc. 28. Jay-Z, “Minority Report,” Kingdom Come, © 2006, by Def Jam, compact disc. 29. “Kanye West Hurricane Katrina,” from a Concert for Hurricane Relief televised by NBC on August 21, 2006, YouTube video (2:20), posted by “aaronweaver17,” August 21, 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pVTrnxCZaQ. 30. Nas, American Way, © 2004, by Sony, compact disc. 31. Daddy Yankee, “Gasolina,” Barrio Fino, © 2004, by Universal/El Cartel, compact disc; “Daddy Yankee Endorses John McCain,” from C-Span telecast on August 28, 2008, YouTube video (2:27), posted by “AssejiAsseji123,” August 28, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1sV7ZkzQYU. 32. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994), 145. 33. Young Jeezy, “My President,” The Recession, © 2008, by Def Jam, compact disc. 34. Nas, “Black President,” Untitled, © 2008, by Def Jam, compact disc.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

248

Sounds of Resistance

35. Craig Castleman, “The Politics of Graffiti,” in That’s the Joint!: The HipHop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 21. 36. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), 91. 37. Ibid., 89. 38. Ibid. 39. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers, 2004), 105. 40. Ibid., 106. 41. Ibid., 109. 42. Ibid. 43. Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic, 1999), 299. 44. Quoted in Gabe Meline, “Hip-Hop President: How Will Obama’s Presidency Change the Face of Hip-Hop?” Metroactive, December 31, 2008, http:// www.bohemian.com/bohemian/12.31.08/music-obama-0853.html. 45. Ibid. 46. Jabari Asim, What Obama Means: for Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 42. 47. Quoted in ibid. 48. Akil Houston, e-mail to authors, Athens, Ohio, August 5, 2009. 49. “USA President (3:50), from a BET interview with Obama, posted by “starrground,” February 3, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSVG7jRp_g. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Quoted in Gwen Ifill, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 42. 53. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 149. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 150. 56. “YES WE CAN—Music Video Barack Obama” (4:30), YouTube video, will.i.am’s “Yes We Can Song” inspired by and reflective of Obama’s speeches, posted by “YouBamaVideos,” February 2, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1yq0tMYPDJQ 57. Quoted in Asim, What Obama Means, 18. 58. Eric Boehlert, Eric, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press (New York: Free Press, 2009), 252. 59. John K. Wilson, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest (Boulder: Paradigm, 2008), 15. 60. Ellen McGirt, “The Brand Called Obama,” Fast Company, March 19, 2008, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/124/the-brand-called-obama.html. 61. Quoted in Bernie Goldberg, A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media (Washington: Regnery, 2009), 17. 62. Ibid., 18.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era

249

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

63. “Hip-Hop Royalty in Ohio for Obama!” rally in Ohio on November 3, 2008, YouTube video (1:29), posted by “palestranet,” November 3, 2008, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WphVomWrk64. 64. Ibid. 65. “Barack Obama Rally in North Philly with Kevin Liles, Mary J. Blige, Diddy, and Jay-Z,” Obama rally in Philadelphia on November 3, 2008, YouTube video (10:00), posted by “KeyFrame215,” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eCuTJPIdzes. 66. “USA President Barack Obama Opinion on Hip-Hop & Rap 2008” (3:49), posted by “starrground,” February 3, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=pFSVG7jRp_g. 67. Quoted in Margeaux Watson, “Barack Obama: Hope for Hip-Hop?” Entertainment Weekly, November 21, 2008, http://music-mix.ew.com/2008/11/21/ talib-kweli/. 68. Ibid. 69. “Elphilthmoor,” quoted in Watson, “Barack Obama Opinion.” 70. “Aretha,” quoted in Watson, “Barack Obama Opinion.” 71. Associated Press, “Sen. Obama, Rapper Ludacris Meet for a Chat,” MSNBC, November 20, 2006, http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/15972471/ns/ today-entertainment/t/sen-obama-rapper-ludacris-meet-chat/. 72. Dyson, Michael Eric Dyson Reader, 399. 73. Jeff Chang, “Barack Obama Q & A (Part One),” Vibe, August 2, 2007, http://thehometeam.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/barack-obamavibe-magazineqa-part-one/.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Sounds of Resistance

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Sounds of Resistance The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism Volume 2: International Activism

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie, Editors

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright 2013 by Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sounds of resistance : the role of music in multicultural activism / Eunice Rojas and Lindsay Michie, editors. volumes cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-313-39805-6 (hardcopy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-39806-3 (ebook) 1. Music — Political aspects. 2. Protest songs — History and criticism. 3. Political ballads and songs — History and criticism. I. Rojas, Eunice, editor. II. Eades, Lindsay Michie, editor. ML3916.S69 2013 781.5'92—dc23 2013006762

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-313-39805-6 EISBN: 978-0-313-39806-3 17

16

15

14

13

1

2

3

4

5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116–1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Volume 1: Activism in the United States Introduction to Volume 1 Lindsay Michie 1. “Toward a Truer World”: Overt and Implied Messages of Resistance from Slave Songs to Rap Ian Michie

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

2. Red Power: American Indian Activism through Powwow Music and Dance Paula Conlon and Paul McKenzie-Jones

xi

1

21

3. Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement Victor Wallis

47

4. Green Pastures of Plenty: Woody Guthrie and Eco-Citizenship Matthew D. Sutton

65

5. Urban Beats, Religious Beliefs, and Interconnected Streets in Indigenous Hip-Hop: North American Indian Influences in African American Music T. Christopher Aplin 6. Sight Syncs Sound: Civil Rights Music, Robert Houston’s Photography, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign Aaron Bryant

85

113

7. Anti–Vietnam War Protest Music Neill Clegg

145

8. Eco-Protest Music and the U.S. Environmental Movement Tyson-Lord J. Gray

163

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

vi

Contents

9. Resistance and Relapse: The Politics of Drug Discourse in Rap Music Michael P. Jeffries 10. You’re Equal but Different: Women and the Music of Cultural Resistance Charles Walton

183

203

11. The New Political Rhetoric of Hip-Hop Music in the Obama Era 229 Craig A. Meyer and Todd D. Snyder Volume 2: International Activism

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction to Volume 2 Eunice Rojas

xi

12. “The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”: The Role of Music in the Struggle against Apartheid in South Africa Lindsay Michie and Vangeli Gamede

251

13. No Future: Punk Music in Postindustrial Britain and the United States Brian E. Crim

271

14. These Rocks Will Roll: Songs and Resistance in Communist Poland Marek Payerhin

291

15. Return of the Vagabond: Cui Jian and China’s Democracy Movement Carlos Rojas

311

16. Afrobeat: The Music of Fela Kuti Lindsay Michie and Ayoyinka Oriola

329

17. Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory: Paz y Baile Lori Oxford

355

18. Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas: The Bachata Genre as a Vehicle for Social Commentary—Past and Present Patricia Reagan 19. The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos Stephen Silverstein

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

373 397

Contents

vii

20. Pulling at the Stake of Oppression: Lluís Llach’s Catalan Nationalism from Dictatorship to Democracy Eunice Rojas

423

21. Reading and Sounding Protest: Musical and Lyrical Markers in Brazilian Tropicália and Canção Engajada Chris Stover

447

22. Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho Alexandro D. Hernández

473

491

Index

513

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

23. “Spitting Phlegm at the System”: The Changing Voices of Anticolonial Puerto Rican Protest Music Eunice Rojas

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Acknowledgments

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

We would like to thank the following people for their assistance in the production of this series: Marcus Sandidge and John Parker for help with research; Dan Eades for providing useful tips on editing a series; Brian and Julia Crim for their frequent and welcome distractions from the editing process; Emily Birch for initiating this project and guiding us so well through the first phase; all of our contributors for their enthusiasm, hard work, and patience with the progress and organization of their chapters; and most especially our editor Kim Kennedy White for her constant help and much appreciated advice through each stage of editing and writing these two volumes.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Introduction to Volume 2

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eunice Rojas

According to Joseph Jordania in his book Who Asked the First Question?, on the origins of human choral singing, resistance is found at the very root of song. Jordania explains that early hominids first developed singing as a means of collective defense against predators. Gathering together in song and dance served primarily to scare off potential enemies but had the added benefit of encouraging social bonding as well.1 Furthermore, rhythmic mass singing is not just any loud noise but instead is one that sends a message of organized and united resistance—a group willing and prepared to fight as one. Although choral singing has been in continuous decline for thousands of years and humanity has undergone substantial changes since our ancestors first gathered together to sing and stomp their way to safety, the use of music as a means of resistance against foes has remained strong and appears to be somewhat of a universal phenomenon. A quote by musician Hugh Masakela cited in Vangeli Gamede and Lindsay Michie’s chapter on music in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa sums this idea up nicely: “Because we can’t beat these people physically, you can scare the shit out of them with the songs.”2 Protest music in one form or another can be heard all across the globe as societies turn to music to voice dissent or dissatisfaction with oppressive social orders. Apart from inspiring fear in predators and bonding singers together, Jordania points out one more advantage that music had for prehistoric people: the uniting effect of rhythmic singing offered an almost hypnotic feeling of communal safety to every member of the group as the individuals were numbed from fear by the music they were creating. Thousands and thousands of years after people first sang lions away on the African savannah, the quintessential reggae protest singer Bob Marley echoed this idea of the numbing power of song in this lyric from the song “Trench Town

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

xii

Sounds of Resistance

Rock”: “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.” Although most people today are no longer standing up to large animal predators on a daily basis, protest music still often provides a somewhat safe means of expressing resistance when free speech has been suppressed. Song often emboldens people to speak out against injustices in ways in which they might otherwise be too inhibited to do. Whether with a chant of defiance, a coded communication of musical metaphors or a catchy tune that spreads a message out to a wide audience, resistance music unites protesters in the relative safety of collective expression. The classic resistance song of modern times, at least in the Western world, is probably “L’Internationale” (The Internationale), the anthem of the socialist workers’ movement in France. Written in 1871 by Eugène Pottier and set to music in 1888 century by Pierre De Geyter, throughout the 20th century, “L’Internationale” was adopted by socialist, communist, and anarchist movements around the world, and the song’s chorus calls for all of humanity to gather together in a final struggle in order for the human race to become international. Such has been the worldwide influence of the song that it has been translated, adapted, and sung in at least 98 different languages, and in the pivotal year of 1989, for example, versions of it were sung by protesters both in Tiananmen Square and at the Berlin Wall. Another protest song that has rallied protesters the world over is “El pueblo unido jamás sera vencido” (The people united will never be defeated), originally written by Sergio Ortega and the Chilean folk group, Chilapayún, and released in 1975 in support of the popular unity government in Chile that had elected the socialist Salvador Allende in 1970. In the years following Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 right-wing military coup, which brought with it an oppressive and violent dictatorship, the song was made even more popular by Inti-Illamini, another Chilean musical group, as the anthem of the Chilean resistance against Pinochet regime. Like France’s “L’Internationale,” “El pueblo unido” has been widely translated, and versions of it have been sung during demonstrations during the 1979 Revolution in Iran and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, just to name a couple, and recently, variations of the title chant were heard in Tunisia and Egypt as part of the Arab Spring protests. The anti-Pinochet fervor on the part of groups such as Chilapayún and Inti-Illamini was fueled by the killing of Chilean activist and folk revival singer Víctor Jara in the aftermath of the 1973 coup. Jara, who along with Sergio Ortega had penned Allende’s campaign theme, “Venceremos” (We Shall Triumph), was at work at the university when Pinochet’s tanks seized the campus and imprisoned all the faculty, staff, and students present at the time. During the days following their capture, the singer–songwriter

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Introduction to Volume 2

xiii

sang to comfort and uplift his fellow captives, and before he was killed Jara managed to scrawl out the words to one last unfinished song in which he laments how difficult it is to sing well when having to sing about terror. Singers of resistance music have frequently faced censorship, persecution, and even arrest, but they do not often end up paying the ultimate price as Jara did for his perceived subversive activities. In the summer of 2011, though, in the midst of an uprising in Syria as protesters demanded the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, a singer named Ibrahim Qashoush who was thought to be the author of the insolently titled anthem “Come on Bashar, leave,” was found floating lifelessly in the Orontes River with his throat cut and his vocal cords ripped out. Qashoush, dubbed the “nightingale of the revolution” after his death, may not have survived the revolt, but his song has only gained popularity as it spread from voice to voice along the streets in Syria and to an even wider audience over the internet.3 Despite the fact that Jara was friends with American political activist and singer–songwriter Phil Ochs, the Chilean regarded his U.S. counterparts as mere protest singers, a designation he used somewhat disparagingly due to the way he perceived those artists succumbing to the commercialization of protest music in the United States. According to Jara, the U.S. authorities had

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of so-called “protest music”; second, the creation of “idols” of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry—they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term “protest song” is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term “revolutionary song.”4

Although Jara attributes the watering down of protest music to actions taken by the U.S. authorities, the process that Jara describes is part of a pattern that can be seen repeated in several of the chapters that make up this volume of essays on resistance music outside of the United States. The tendency seems to be that in capitalist societies, especially when artists reach out to audiences in the United States, the powerful music industry manages to transform musical political or social messages into commodities to be bought, sold, and marketed in such a way as to maximize profits. Artists at the mercy of the industry to help spread their music and their message to as wide an audience as possible find themselves tainted or overtaken by the commercialization or, in the alternative, relegating themselves out of the limelight for their unwillingness to comply with the demands of the commercial audience.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

xiv

Sounds of Resistance

Brian Crim’s chapter on punk music in postindustrial Britain and the United States, for example, explains how punk became a victim of its own success because a musical style founded on opposition to the system was no longer able to survive once that same system embraced it. Lindsay Michie and Ayoyinka Oriola, in their chapter on Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti describes the artist’s decline in popularity while on tour in the United States when his audiences craved more entertainment and less politics. On a similar note, Patricia Reagan’s chapter on the bachata genre as a vehicle for social commentary demonstrates how that genre became less socially and politically conscious as it became less marginalized. In communist countries, where the music industry is largely, if not completely, controlled by the State, it is the government that often co-opts resistance music and musicians into relaying state-sponsored messages instead of the original protest sentiment intended by the artists. Stephen Silverstein’s chapter on the evolution of the Cuban protest song describes how Castro’s regime managed to recruit certain singers in order to convert them from subversive elements into spokespersons of the Cuban Revolution. Those artists who did not wish to bend to the government’s plan found themselves forced either to remain silent or flee the island. In somewhat similar fashion, Carlos Rojas’s chapter on Cui Jian—known as the godfather of Chinese rock—explains how the Chinese State granted Cui Jian relatively free reign to continue performing the music democracy protesters had sung in Tiananmen Square in 1989 probably because the government realized that his voice of dissidence would be heard more loudly if silenced by censorship than if allowed to profit from the system he was trying to critique. To a certain extent the tactic was effective as Cui Jian’s commercial success served to undermine his political message. My own chapter on Lluís Llach’s Catalan nationalism helps to exemplify how censoring dissent often backfires on an oppressive government as the Catalan singer–songwriter often found his fans clamoring so desperately to hear songs he was forbidden from singing that they sang them en masse themselves. By the same token, Chris Stover’s chapter on Brazilian protest music highlights how a song banned by the government for fear that it would be used as a slogan for student demonstration did indeed later become a slogan for revolutionary action. Similarly, my chapter on Puerto Rican anticolonial music points out that the island government’s efforts to call in the National Guard in order to rid the streets and stores of reggaeton music failed miserably as cleaner reggaeton gained appeal among middle class youth and banned reggaeton was only made more attractive for having been censored.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Introduction to Volume 2

xv

Often, censors of protest music are not savvy enough to properly restrict subversive musical content. Marek Payerhin’s chapter on songs and resistance in Communist Poland quotes a punk rocker as stating: “Even if a censor came to the concert, as was sometimes the case, as long as someone did not say in-between the songs ‘down with Communism,’ but sang it, then the censor did not hear it. They did not know how to listen to this kind of music.”5 Similarly, in my chapter on Lluís Llach, I note how Franco’s censors frequently disallowed the word “revolution” but would allow the almost identically pronounced “revulsion” substituted in its place. Alexandro Hernández’s chapter on the Mexican Son Jarocho genre demonstrates how a musical style banned during the Inquisition has seen a revival as resistance music over a century after it was first prohibited. Another chapter dealing with Mexican music, Lori Oxford’s piece on ritual and memory in the music of the rock fusion group Maldita Vecindad, shows how that group both raises awareness about contemporary social issues and encourages collective memory of the injustices of the past. As quoted by Victor Wallis in his chapter on labor music in the United States, which is included in the first volume of this series, Irish republican leader James Connolly has stated that “No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression . . . Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement.”6 The language of revolution is, therefore, music, and the chapters of this volume, dealing with protest music from five different continents demonstrate that music is truly the universal language of political and social resistance.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Joseph Jordania, Who Asked the First Question?: The Origins of Human Choral Singing, Intelligence, Language and Speech (Tblisi: Logos, 2006), 298. 2. Hugh Masakela, from Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, dir. Lee Hirsch (Kwela Production, 2002). 3. Anthony Shadid, “Lyrical Message for Syrian Leader: ‘Come on Bashar, Leave’,” The New York Times, July 22, 2011, C2. 4. Quoted in Dorian Linskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holliday to Green Day (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 216–17. 5. Zbigniew Krzywan´ski quoted in Beats of Freedom—Zew Wolnos´ci, dir. Leszek Gnoin´ski and Wojciech Słota (Adam Mickiewicz Institute and TVN S.A., 2010). 6. James Connolly, “Revolutionary Song” (1907), in James Connolly: Selected Political Writings, eds. Owen Dudley Edwards and Bernard Ransom (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1907/xx/ revsong.htm.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 12

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon” The Role of Music in the Struggle against Apartheid in South Africa Lindsay Michie and Vangeli Gamede

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale. You may be poor, you may have only a ramshackle house, you may have lost your job, but that song gives you hope. African music is often about the aspirations of the African people, and it can ignite the political resolve of those who might otherwise be indifferent to politics. . . . Politics can be strengthened by music, but music has potency that defies politics. —Nelson Mandela1

In 1948, the National Party in South Africa swept to power on a platform of systematic and legal separation of people into four classifications, white, “colored” (people of mixed race), Indian/Asiatic, and African, and effectively banned all groups of people—except those classified as white—from varying degrees of rights, amenities, and freedom of movement. This was the system known as apartheid that became an entrenched and increasingly internationally vilified method of government in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. While independence movements in countries throughout the rest of Africa overthrew European authority and established their own governments, the Republic of South Africa maintained the rule of a white minority over a “non-white” population that made up roughly 90 percent of the country. During this 46-year period, opposition to apartheid found

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

252

Sounds of Resistance

expression through the actions of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Congress of Trades Unions (SACTU), the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), Black Consciousness (BC), and the United Democratic Front (UDF). Opposition also found in expression through song. In the words of activist Sifiso Ntuli, “throughout the struggle, there was music.”2 The movement against apartheid can be roughly divided into five stages: the Defiance Campaign of the 1950s—brought to an abrupt halt with the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela in 1964; suppression and exile of the liberation leaders marked by underground movement and activity from the border countries of South Africa in the 1960s; the rise of the BC movement and student uprisings of the 1970s; total disruption and increased international pressure of the 1980s; and negotiation toward democracy culminating in the release of Mandela in 1990 and the holding of free elections in 1994. Each of these stages of opposition was both expressed in, and often propelled by music, which operated as an organizing instrument that helped maintain the struggle even during its most challenging times. Music played an integral role at celebrations, funeral student rallies, religious revivals, cell meetings, training camps, union meetings and many other social gatherings, and was combative and rebellious in tone, making specific references to life under apartheid. It was also increasingly accompanied by “toyi-toyiing,” a repetitive energetic form of dancing that moved crowds of demonstrators through the streets. If music was the heartbeat of the liberation movement in South Africa, no song was more familiar to all involved in this movement than what became known as the African National Anthem, “N’kosi Sikeleli Afrika.” This is a song that has a long tradition in the history of Africans in South Africa and early on evolved into a symbol of resistance and unity that often served as a prelude and a coda to all antiapartheid meetings and demonstrations. The original composer was Enoch Mankayi Sotonga, a songwriter and teacher at a mission school near Johannesburg. Written in 1897, the song, according to the historian D. D. Javabu was “inspired by a depressed heart” due to the oppression of black people by the white authorities in South Africa.3 Sotonga wrote only one known verse, but the Xhosa poet, S.E.K. Mqhayi added seven more stanzas that focused on socially progressive themes, such as community, education, and mutual understanding. The song is an affirmation of African unity and subtly petitions a holy spirit to intervene on the side of the “Nation of Africa.”4 During the years of the antiapartheid movement N’kosi Sikeleli Afrika could not be sung without a raised fist.5 Writing about the first time he was

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

253

arrested, Mandela describes how the police vans that transported him and his comrades to the prison, “swayed to the rich voices of the defiers singing N’kosi Sikeleli Afrika.”6 The song became so threatening to authorities that it was banned during apartheid. Singing it could lead to arrest and up to eight years imprisonment, even though, in the words of the playwright and historian Duma Ka Ndlovu, “It’s not a revolutionary song as we would call it. It’s a prayer. A very soothing, genuine, unthreatening prayer.”7 The success of the National Party in South Africa in the 1948 elections was followed by the rapid passing of the Population Registration Act, The Bantu Education Act, The Group Areas Act, and the Separate Amenities Act: legislation that helped form the pillars of apartheid. The Youth League of the ANC, led by Mandela, began to promote a “Program of Action” in response to this repression that put increased emphasis on confrontation involving demonstrations, boycotts, and passive resistance that echoed Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha.8 In 1955, the ANC-led Congress movement drafted the Freedom Charter, a document that declared a commitment to a nonracial democracy, equal opportunity for all people, and a future democratic and multiracial South Africa. The Charter was endorsed by all member organizations, including the ANC, Natal Indian Congress, white radicals in the Congress of Democrats, and the South African Communist Party (which had just been banned by the apartheid government).9 These actions marked the launching of the Defiance Campaign throughout South Africa, and led to strikes, demonstrations, challenges to the Pass Laws, and “stayaways,”10 all of which were punctuated by music. One activist who was arrested and imprisoned during this time described the background of song to his experience: “Now we are swinging in the huge kwela-kwela [police van] towards the Fort [jail]. They are singing, I am singing too: Izokunyathela I Afrika . . . Africa will trample you underfoot. Unrepentant. People seen through the mesh: surprise and dawning understanding. The thumb raised in reply. Mayibuye I Afrika! [Come back Africa!].”11 While the ANC organized its resistance to the apartheid government in the 1950s, the Federation of South African Women (FSAW) brought together women from all different backgrounds in South Africa to challenge injustice of the system. The FSAW stated in its charter of 1954 that its purpose was to unite “all women in common action for the removal of all political, legal, economic and social disabilities.”12 Two years later, 20,000 women marched to the government buildings in Pretoria as part of a massive anti-pass law campaign against the apartheid government. The pass laws required that all Africans (including previously exempted women) carry a reference book that authorized them to be in a certain area. It essentially

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

254

Sounds of Resistance

kept Africans away from urban areas, except for reasons of employment. Albertina Sisulu, wife of antiapartheid activist Walter Sisulu, and considered by many to be the mother of South Africa’s liberation struggle, recalled the march on Pretoria:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Our leaders, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Sophie Williams, and Rahima Moosa attempted to give our protests to the prime minister J. G. Strijdom, but when we got there, he’d left, he’d run away. When the four women returned, we stood in silent protest for thirty minutes and then started singing Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika. Twenty thousand women singing Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika, you should have heard the sound of the echoes in the Union Building. There was nothing like that sound, it filled the world. Then we sang a song of the women, Strijdom, wathina abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo, uzakufa—Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, you have struck a rock, you have unleashed a boulder, you will die.13

Many of the Defiance Campaigners were led by the actions, compositions, and deep bass of the singer/activist Vuyisile Mini. Mini joined the struggle against apartheid at age 17 and later became Secretary of the Dock Workers’ Union and the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union, both affiliated with SACTU. He then joined the Defiance Campaign, and was imprisoned for entering railway property reserved for whites only.14 Mini was also among the 156 arrested, along with Nelson Mandela, in the Treason Trial of 1956. He soon became known among the Defiance Campaigners for his protest songs, which he would sing at campaign meetings, demonstrations, and in prison, to raise the spirits of his fellow protesters. The activist and poet Jeremy Cronin (later Deputy Minister of Transport in South Africa) states, “Probably because of his bass voice, he was one of the best organizers in the liberation movement.”15 Mini’s most popular song was “Nannts’indod’emnyama, Verwoerd,” which could be heard throughout the townships in the 1950s and was recorded by Miriam Makeba. Singer Dolly Rathebe remembers, “When you really wanted to make the whites mad, you sang, “Nannts’indod’emnyama, Verwoerd.”16 The words mean “Watch out, Verwoerd. Here comes the black man,” and refer to Hendrik Verwoerd— often described as the architect of apartheid—who was Minister of Native Affairs from 1950 to 1958, and Prime Minister from 1958 to 1966. In 1963, the security police arrested Mini and charged him with sabotage. He was hanged in 1964. Ben Turok, former Secretary of the South African Congress of Democrats, was serving a three-year term of imprisonment at the same time and recalled the death of Mini. He remembered the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

255

occupants of the death cells communicating to the prison that their end was near in “gentle melancholy song.”

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

And then, unexpectedly, the voice of Vuyisile Mini came roaring down the hushed passages. Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving. . . . Soon after, I heard the door of their cell being opened. Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section.17

Mini and his songs were part of a thriving musical culture in South Africa that was most often expressed on the raucous and energetic streets of Sophiatown, a township on the edge of Johannesburg that, in the 1950s, was one of the few remaining areas where black South Africans could own land. Described as “the Harlem of South Africa,” Sophiatown gave birth to the music of Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuka, Dollar Brand (now Abdullah Ibrahim), Kippie Moeketsi, The Ink Spots, The Manhattan Brothers, the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and Miriam Makeba, who became known to musicians throughout the world as “Mama Africa.” The music that came out of Sophiatown combined jazz and blues and an upbeat local sound called “Marabi” and “Kwela” that featured the pennywhistle. (“Kwela” is a Zulu word that means “Get up!” or “Jump up!”—an instruction to those about to be picked up by the police.) Many of the songs were an expression of life for Africans living in townships such as Sophiatown, and encompassed protest and opposition to apartheid. These songs included “Jikele Emaweni” by the Manhattan Brothers, a song about the hardship of working in the diamond and gold mines of South Africa; and “Scullery Department” that Kippie Moeketse wrote to express his disgust at having to go through the kitchen and stand in the alleyways during breaks when performing at white clubs.18 Much of the music that came out of Sophiatown demonstrates the particular power of songs that were sung in a language shunned by the majority of the white population. To sing in a language not understood by the authorities meant that the music could operate as a kind of code to communicate frustration and solidarity among Africans, and work against the apartheid government’s attempts to divide and rule. In most cases music was a camouflaged way of demonstrating resistance, as it was aimed at bypassing or ignoring apartheid. The song “Meadowlands,” was written when

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

256

Sounds of Resistance

the South African government finally forced the occupants of Sophiatown out of the township and tore it down to build a suburb for white people, despite resistance organized by Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and other ANC leaders.19 The song has a happy sound to it with words that seem to express content with moving to Meadowlands, a crude township erected on the outskirts of Johannesburg to house the newly evicted population. The words, however, were understood to be ironic by the Africans and new words were added that were not caught by the authorities. The singer Sophie Mgcina describes the reaction of white people when they heard the Africans singing “Meadowlands”: “They used to clap hands, you know, think it’s nice music. Oh, these blacks can sing so nice. And they clap their hands while we sing, ‘we will shoot you, we will kill you. Be careful what you say. You gonna die slowly, be careful what you do.”20 Resistance to apartheid in the 1950s reached a climax with the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960, when a peaceful march organized by the PAC to protest the carrying of passes caused police to panic and fire into the crowd, resulting in the death of 69 people, many of them shot in the back. The resistance movement reacted with strikes and stay aways throughout the country, and the government declared a state of emergency, while banning the ANC and PAC, and launched an intense crackdown on all forms of opposition. Mandela went underground and formed Mkhonto We Sizwe (MK) the military wing of the ANC, arguing that the violence of the apartheid government was now too severe to be met merely with nonviolent resistance.21 His subsequent capture and arrest culminated in the famous Rivonia Trial that aroused international attention. The climax of the trial came when Mandela gave an historic passionate speech in defense of himself and the struggle. Together with Sisulu and six ANC leaders, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and a tough period for the struggle followed in the 1960s with the imprisonment and exile of many of the protest leaders, and the movement of opposition leadership to the border countries of South Africa and to Europe. Many South African musicians were also forced into exile, including Kippie Moeketsie, Abdullah Ibrahim, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela. The last South African recording of Dorothy Masuka during this time was about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, President of the Congo, and provoked one of several police raids at her studio. Masuka was declared a “wanted person” (at the time she was in former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe), and could not return to South Africa for the next 30 years.22 The music of the struggle continued during the 1960s, but had a hushed element to it and often took on mournful overtones. This was a time when Miriam

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

257

Makeba sang the song “Bahleli Bonke,” which asks the question “Where are the leaders?” and names Mandela, Sisulu, and other prominent comrades, before answering, “They are all sitting in jail.”23 Hugh Masekela argues that in the 1960s music became an even more important weapon in the struggle because “any possibility of open legitimate protest had come to an end after the Sharpeville massacre.”24 Two songs that express the sadness yet perseverance of the antiapartheid movement during this period are “Thina Sizwe” and “Senzeni Na?” “Thina Sizwe” expresses the mourning of “We, the black nation” for the land “stolen from us from the white man;”25 while “Senzeni Na?” asks the simple question “What have we done?” Duma Ndlovu states of “Senzeni Na?”: “Somewhere along the lines, a thousand years from now . . . ‘Senzeni Na,’ like ‘We Shall Overcome,’ will take her rightful place in society, because at one time a mass body of people related to that song.” The musician Sibongile Khumalo asks, “Can you imagine, that’s one line . . . ‘what have we done?’ repeated over and over and over . . . I mean, come on. You have no other option but to stand up and go and fight.”26 The 1970s in South Africa witnessed the rise of the BC movement led by Stephen Biko and the student uprisings that reached a climax in Soweto on June 16, 1976. The primary cause of the initial uprising was the decision by the apartheid government to force black students to learn math and social studies in Afrikaans—the language, in the eyes of protesters, of oppression. The killing of students in the demonstration led to clashes between riot police and protesters that left more than 575 dead and 2,389 wounded.27 The achievement of independence, meanwhile, in border states such as Mozambique and Angola in 1975, and Zimbabwe in 1979, helped both to reignite and fuel the struggle. Students were now leaving South Africa to join MK’s guerilla armies in the border countries and raising the level of disruption and sabotage within South Africa. There was a new fearlessness—almost recklessness—among the youth of South Africa in the antiapartheid struggle and this was again both reflected in and propelled by music. Activists who were students during that time have memories that combine singing freedom songs with running away from the police.28 Lindiwe Zulu, a former freedom fighter from that time (who stated, “I was too angry to be a student”), remembers that after the Soweto uprisings of 1976, “you see the songs of youth with energy. Youth that is dynamic.”29 The energy of the youth began to infect the older generation. Singer Vusi Mahlasela tells the story of being constantly harassed when he was young due to his activism and membership in the ANC and the cultural group “Ancestors of Africa” while he was living with his grandmother. The harassment intensified

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

258

Sounds of Resistance

particularly around the anniversary of the Soweto uprising, when the police rounded up young people a few days before June 16 and held them in jail until about June 20: On the tenth of June the police came and surrounded the house. My grandmother came, switched off all the lights in the house, and opened the kitchen door. And she said, “Vusi’s here and you’re not going to take him tonight. I’m tired of you having to come here harassing us while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes. He is here and you’re not going to take him. I’ve got a bowl full of boiling water. The first one who comes in here gets it.” And they left.30

The inspiration of newly independent African states on the borders of South Africa was accompanied by an increased encompassing of the traditional roots of black South Africa. Young radicals of the 1970s took a second look at the authentic lore of their culture and traditions that had formerly been scorned by urban sophisticates or tamed and incorporated into the system by apartheid authorities. Tradition was now revisited as a source not of unchanging and passive separation but of creativity and unity. The poet Maishe Maponya remembers wearing traditional clothing for performances, memorizing all their lines so that the police would be unable to seize their material, and enacting their art with a rhythm and spontaneity that echoed the history of their culture:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The drum became part of our performance . . . it created a kind of a free flow out of the performance. One poet would be reading and reciting, and another would jut in with lines . . . and then proceed, and then someone else would come in and create choruses, and sounds, and rhythms. . . . We used musicians, we had flutes . . . and we had a guy playing the guitar. . . . And so in that sense for us, you know, music became the basis.31

As repression provoked resistance it intensified artistic rebellion. The painter Sydney Selepe believes that all the various forms of resistance had a defining cultural characteristic: “When I was a kid [in the 1970s], if it was not political, it was not art.”32 Many of the cultural developments of the 1970s happened underground because of the radical content and illegality of unlicensed clubs and meetings. One of the challenges was finding a space to do what was forbidden. Many performances and community arts projects that reflected a powerful African consciousness were continually harassed by apartheid authorities. In 1972, Phiri, a musical adaption of Ben Jonson’s 17th century satire, was

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

259

shut down during rehearsals in Johannesburg. Sophie Mgcina was part of the cast and recalls:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The LP [of the play] was recorded and it was banned, because it spoke about apartheid. But what is political if you say [sings]: “Madam, please before you shout about your broken plate/ask me what my family ate . . .?”33

Jazz music that challenged apartheid during the 1970s was played in unlicensed music clubs, primarily in Johannesburg. The existence of many clubs was short lived because they could not stand up to the constant raids and restrictions or could not afford to pay off the township police or hold together audiences who were continually intimidated by the authorities. One of the most resilient of these was Lucky Michaels’s Pelican in Orlando township. The Pelican not only hosted jazz music, but cabaret, pop, and traditional music, including the early formation of the now famous a capella group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, then known as Black Mambazo. Michaels remembers being raided three months after they opened: “They piled as many people as they could into kwela-kwelas and took them to Orlando Police Station. . . . And the beautiful problem was they arrested the Malawian ambassador. . . . When the station commander came in . . . he saw . . . a guy sitting here in a long dress and a funny hat . . . and . . . realized: hey wait man, you’ve just arrested the ambassador from Malawi!” Michaels also recalls what kept his club going: “Insanity! That’s what I had. I had insanity and defiance.”34 The illegal station Radio Freedom came onto the scene at this time, broadcast from Lusaka, and former activists recall listening to it under their blankets at night.35 Musical groups such as Malombo made a connection with the BC movement through its expression of African national culturalism and the aims of BC.36 There arose an impatience in the younger generation of activists that challenged what it perceived as passivity in the resistance of the 1960s, including the songs. Laments of the 1960s such as “Senzeni Na” fully implicated the Boers in oppression as the agents and architects of apartheid. But the song had, to the newly politicized youth, an uneasy mix of pain and protest. As one activist expressed it, “Blacks know what they have done. Blacks know what they have not done. Blacks know what they must do. There is no more time for wimpish lament, self-pity, begging or praying.”37 The songs of the 1970s became more militant, with words such as “They are lying to themselves. Arresting us, killing us, won’t work. We’ll still fight for our land”; and “We will shoot them with our machine guns.” With the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

260

Sounds of Resistance

growth of MK, songs were changed to fit a war situation. As one activist puts it, they were “changing a word here, changing a word there. Putting an AK here, taking out a Bible there.”38 A song used by the Pan-Africanist Congress, for example, changed the words from the hymn, “Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees,” to “Let Us Break Chains Together with Our Guns.”39 One of the songs that symbolizes this more militant time is the freedom song “Shona Molonga,” which actually came from the tradition of African domestic servants having Thursdays off. Africans had difficulty saying the word Thursday, so it became known as “Sheila’s Day,” and was originally a song about meeting on that day. During the 1970s, the words were changed to meet the conditions of the times and became “we will meet where we would rather not meet—in the bushes with our bazookas.” It included the repeated phrase: “Shorten the days until we meet again, the struggle for freedom continues.”40 It was also during the 1970s that a culture arose in the training camps of MK that centered on performance and music. The camps often held competitions for the best song, and for songs sung while marching through the bush and in drills and practices, and would draw on both old traditions and new debates, including how to fight a just war. The 1970s also witnessed the formation of one of the ANC’s most significant cultural projects in exile, the Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble, based in London. Established in 1975, this ensemble performed throughout Europe with considerable success, incorporating narrative, poetry, and song to communicate a message against the apartheid regime and raise international awareness about the situation in South Africa. The ensemble was also a starting point for developing practical ways to incorporate cultural activity in the struggle for national liberation, particularly the mobilization of music. After 1976, the group added many songs to their repertoire that arose out of the Soweto uprising. By 1979, however, Mayibuye was struggling to continue due to organizational problems and the fact that its members worked largely on a voluntary and unpaid basis. Its role as a project in exile was eventually taken over in the 1980s by the Amandla Cultural Ensemble as a result of the Culture and Resistance conference held in Gaborone in 1982 and attended largely by ANC members. That same year the ANC established a Department of Arts and Culture and ANC President Oliver Tambo stressed the role of cultural workers in the struggle against apartheid. The Amandla Cultural Ensemble was later viewed by the ANC as one of its most significant achievements in the area of cultural opposition. The ensemble was organized primarily by exiled musician Jonas Gwangwa starting

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

261

at the World Black Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) held in Lagos in 1977. Gwangwa put together an impromptu musical group that he called Amandla (“power”—a popular liberation slogan) that met with great success, and the group accepted invitations to tour Tanzania and Zambia. This group evolved into the Amandla Cultural Ensemble and the majority of performers in it were young soldiers from training camps. Some, such as Man Santana Ntombela, made requests to leave the group to return to the frontlines of resistance. Ntombela was emphatically denied his request by the ANC leadership because the ANC believed so strongly in Amandla’s importance in organizing the international community. Much of Amandla’s repertoire drew from the culture of exile and MK camps, including many freedom songs and use of the “toyi-toyi.”41 The 1980s in South Africa marked a time of greater internal disruption combined with international pressure on the apartheid government. P. W. Botha (often referred to as “the old crocodile”) became prime minister and combined a superficial easing of apartheid restrictions with tightening security and a raised level of violence against the resistance movement. Protesters took to the streets in increasing numbers and greater confidence despite the repressive tactics employed against them.42 The song “Mannenberg” written by Abdullah Ibrahim, rose to prominence at this time. Referring to a township illustrating the forced removal of the “coloreds” from District 6—the Sophiatown of the Cape Area—it was a song with few words but a catchy melody that was an instant hit when it was first released in 1974. In the 1980s, it experienced a revival as an anthem for the antiapartheid movement, and was played at rallies, demonstrations, and benefit concerts, evoking a collective response from dancing audiences and musicians who would flock to the stage to join in.43 According to writer Mandla Langa, “The tune became a popular metaphor for all the townships where trouble brewed.”44 Songs during this time were more intentionally political but often their messages were disguised in metaphor and hidden messages. Johnny Clegg and Juluka wrote and performed songs with antiapartheid messages including one borrowed from a Zulu proverb that demonstrated how the small bull can defeat the large bull through superior weaponry. Yvonne Chaka Chaka recorded a song called “Winning My Dear Love” that all her fans understood to be in reality “Winnie Mandela” (the wife of Nelson Mandela) and they would sing those words at her concerts. Lucky Dube sang of a “Liquor Slave” but sang the words live with his fans as “Legal Slave.”45 Other musicians such as Roger Lucey and Mzwakhe Mbuli challenged the state more directly. Lucey wrote and recorded the song “Longile Tabalaza”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

262

Sounds of Resistance

about police brutality in the South African prisons that tells the story of a man arrested and who died within days in detention. The sentence for owning this banned song was up to five years imprisonment.46 Mbuli challenged the state directly with songs such as “Behind the Bars” and “Shot Down.” Both suffered as a result of their protest songs: Lucey finally gave up his musical career after the Security Branch intimidated his record label and raided his house, and tear gas was poured into the air-conditioning during one of his performances.47 A hand grenade was thrown into Mbuli’s house, he was shot at, and the authorities refused his passport applications.48 A prominent feature of protest song at rallies, funerals, and demonstrations in South Africa during the 1980s was the “toyi-toyi,” the jogging dance that accompanied the singing and is said to have originated on the guerilla training grounds in Zimbabwe to keep up the endurance and the spirits of freedom fighters.49 The 1980s were often referred to as the time of “The People’s War,” when songs were designed to articulate a new urgency and a new direction, and the toyi-toyi reflected this. Johnny Clegg believed that the combination of dances and lyrics as a whole in black South African culture worked with the ethic of courage and endurance that created a form of resistant masculinity. To experience this combination of dance and song was to experience a moment of empowerment and a brief understanding of what it means to be alive.50 The former activist Vincent Vena claims, “The toyi-toyi was our weapon. We didn’t have guns so it became a tool we used in a war.” According to another activist, “The toyi-toyi made us not to see the bullets and the guns that the whites used to shoot us.” Hugh Masekela describes the use of the toyi-toyi in frank terms: “Because we can’t beat these people physically, you can scare the shit out of them with the songs.”51 Several former riot policemen have admitted that they were scared by the singing, the toyi-toyiing and the sheer numbers of the protesters. They would hear the African word “Kumo!” (Charge!) and know that “this kumo comes with stones.”52 Ndlovu states, “What I saw in the ’80s I had never seen in my life and I could never ever imagine. Because it was as if we had put the struggle into fifth gear . . . It gave you chills just watching it.”53 Ian Herman of the Cape Town group the Genuines expressed the turbulent mood of the music reflecting the times: We were talking about and expressing what was going on around us. We were breaking free from our chains, and we were filled with anger. We wanted to turn a negative situation into a positive situation; sometimes we could do it with love, sometimes with hate. The thing that people couldn’t take was the ugly side. A lot of the band’s energy and what we had to say was ugly, because we were living in ugly times.54

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

263

The 1980s also marked a period of increased international attention to and involvement in the politics of South Africa, and music played a large role in this development. The cultural boycott of South Africa by the United Nations gained momentum and was more effectively enforced. In 1981, the Associated Actors and Artists of America—an organization with close to 250,000 members—voted unanimously that none of its members should perform in South Africa, and the purpose of the boycott broadened from simply not performing for segregated audiences to ending apartheid altogether. The ban also encompassed groups from South Africa performing in other countries, which brought mixed reactions from black South Africa musicians. According to Khaya Mahlangu:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

It was OK and not OK. Not OK, in terms of not being able to travel extensively, because I felt if there was any cultural boycott, why should it be against the people who are the victims of apartheid? And it left a bitter taste. But on the positive side we were able to get more into ourselves. People were able to appreciate that, hey, we have music here—music that we can call South African and be proud of.55

One of the more visible controversies resulting from the ban was the recording of the album Graceland by Paul Simon. The critically acclaimed and immensely popular album raised the difficult question of how the cultural boycott affected South African musicians attempting to raise awareness of their culture and music internationally, an awareness that Simon’s album had highlighted in his use of South African musicians on the tracks and the recording of many of the tracks in South Africa. The album increased the visibility of black South African music, but it broke the UN boycott and Simon came under heavy criticism from activists in South Africa and overseas for making the album. He had apparently consulted musician and veteran civil rights activist Harry Belafonte before going to South Africa, and Belafonte had advised Simon to talk to the ANC—advice that Simon did not follow. In 1987, Simon claimed that he had been cleared by the ANC, although Dali Tambo (son of ANC president Oliver Tambo and founder of Artists against Apartheid), denied that any clearance had been given. The resulting controversy was eventually calmed by the involvement of Hugh Masekela who offered to go on tour with Simon. This tour also included Miriam Makeba, and Masekela placed emphasis on the performances bringing South African musicians together and providing their music with international exposure. “South African music has been in limbo because of apartheid,” he told a reporter later. “Exile and the laws have parted us and caused a lack of growth. If we’d been free and together all these years, who knows what we could have done?”56

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

264

Sounds of Resistance

The 1980s also marked the advent of the song “Bring Back Nelson Mandela” by Masekela, which helped push Mandela, the symbol of the antiapartheid struggle, to the forefront of international attention. Pressure increased on the apartheid regime through the cultural boycotts and concerts held in honor of Mandela. The strain of “The People’s War” and the economic consequences of disinvestment and sanctions combined with a suffering economy at home led the South African government to recognize that its regime was irrational in practical terms even as it still struggled publicly to admit its immorality. F. W. deKlerk took over the leadership of the National Party and then the government, and the first major decision of his office was to announce the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC as well as other opposition parties. The country then began to move painfully toward a democratic system that encompassed the rights of all the people and away from rule by the white minority, a process that culminated in the democratic elections of 1994. When Mandela was released from prison, he began his first address to the public with the traditional call and response that punctuated all rallies and demonstrations in South Africa and reflected the tradition of music in Southern Africa going back to ancient times. He raised his fist with the cry, “Amandla!” (Power!) and the crowd responded with raised fists and the response, “Awethu!” (To the People). He then called out “Mayibuye!” (Come back!) and the crowd once again responded “iAfrika!” (Africa!)57. Music continued to play a role in politics in South Africa during this time, but it was a role that reflected the trepidation mingled with hope that accompanied the painful transition toward democracy, and the confusion facing a movement that until this time had always occupied a place of opposition. A fierce political rivalry arose between the ANC and the Natal-based Inkatha Freedom Party, secretly fueled by the South African Defense Force, and many feared that the country was teetering on the brink of civil war. The negotiations toward a new government moved through frustrating phases of short progression followed by stalling due to outbreaks of violence or assassinations such as that of Chris Hani, the ANC Youth Leader tragically killed by rightwing extremists. Music in South Africa at this time began to take on a celebratory tone, reflected especially in the rallies that commemorated the release of Mandela and later the opportunity for all people in South Africa to exercise their vote. Music also, however, continued to be prominent at demonstrations and funerals often expressing frustration with the process of transition and the continued violence. The role of music in South Africa also came into question during the early 1990s, sparked by a controversial paper written by ANC activist and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

265

jurist Albie Sachs in 1989 called “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom.” In the paper he called for a ban from that time on of the term “culture as a weapon of struggle,” arguing that creativity had often been sacrificed for politics, and quality for righteousness. To Sachs, it was time once more to sing love songs: “What are we fighting for but for the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including our sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world? . . . Let us write better poems and make better films and compose better music.”58 What Sachs was arguing for was the use of art to express not just the formula of struggle, but the richness and diversity of the newly emerging South African nation, but the paper caused a reaction among artists and musicians. Trumpeter Dennis Mpale states,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

It felt like being kicked in the guts. Like no one valued what we had done. And like there was going to be nothing for us to do in the future. Which is not true, because politically, we’re not there yet. Winning elections is just the start.59

In 1992, singer Letta Mbulu released the album Not Yet Uhuru (liberation) and Sophie Mgcina argued, “Music is storytelling. It should conscientise and talk about [the things] that are happening in this country. . . . We’re not free yet; we’ve just been liberated.”60 Because music is an intrinsic part of black South African culture, it necessarily accompanied many of the changes, challenges, vicissitudes, and celebrations of postapartheid society and politics. The song “Umshini Wami” (My Machine Gun), for example, experienced a revival with the political campaign of Jacob Zuma, president of the ANC since 2005 and now president of South Africa. “Umshini Wami” represented the guts of the struggle during the antiapartheid years, and University of Witwatersrand Research Associate Liz Gunner argues that its renaissance in 2006 exposed in South Africa a longing in the body politic for a political language other than that of a distancing and alienating technocracy. . . . The song—and song more widely— became the means by which a group of the marginalized within the . . . ANC seized back agency and the power to determine the flow of change in the new era.61

The incorporation of music in protest was evident again August 2012, when a series of strikes broke out in South Africa and over 80,000 mineworkers downed tools in demand for a large increase in their salaries. The

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

266

Sounds of Resistance

strike led to a backlash from police who fired on striking mineworkers in the North West province, killing 34 strikers, and causing a national outcry and crisis. Singing and toyi-toyiing punctuated the strikes and the aftermath of the killings, and reawakened sentiments from the antiapartheid period of resistance, as the mines were held to still represent mainly wealthy white interests. Old liberation songs such as “Senzeni na?” were revived and “Ayabeleka Amaphoyisa” (The police are running away) and “Amaphoyisa ayangcangcazela” (Police are terrified and trembling). In the words of a former activist,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The singing during ANY strike action will always be there. It is usually what mobilizes the strikers to action. It is what makes them stick together as a unit. It is what makes them to stand firm on what they are demanding. It is what gives that strength to move forward with the strike without fearing the consequences.62

Music is such a strong element in South African and African society as a whole that to try to separate it out and define its role in events is a complex endeavor. Even now, activists from the apartheid era disagree as to whether songs gave birth to the struggle or the struggle gave birth to song.63 What can be said of music’s role in the antiapartheid movement was that it provided people with a sense of unity, identity, and purpose in the struggle. One woman remembers her youth in the midst of apartheid: “The freedom songs evoked a kind of pride in me. There was no age group boundary. Absolutely not. You could be standing next to a sixty-year-old woman who would be singing . . . ‘Senzeni Na?’. And there would be a bond and an immediate kind of acknowledgment of . . . what we were about.”64 Victor Modise, Executive Officer of Arts and Culture in Johannesburg believes music was “the most powerful mobilizing instrument that the ANC ever had. Because, you know, it was entertainment. . . . People would just eat it up and buy it.” Violinist Jonas Gwungwa stresses, “Music is very important to us. . . . And we’re not going to sing because we want to sing. We are a singing nation . . . [During apartheid] singing lightened the burden that was there.”65 Protest songs did not merely form the backdrop to revolution in South Africa, nor were they just part of an underground artistic tradition among Africans. To activists music acted as a revolutionary tool that served to educate, awaken political consciousness, and galvanize the African people to action. It was a vehicle for condemning the oppressive regime and informing the entire world about the evils of apartheid. It is not an exaggeration to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

267

state that every activist involved in the antiapartheid struggle sang freedom songs. Music was an essential weapon in the struggle against apartheid and in the pursuit of national liberation and democracy in South Africa.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1994), 155. 2. Sifiso Ntuli, from Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony, dir. Lee Hirsch (Kwela Production, 2002). 3. Quoted in Alton B. Pollard III, “Rhythms of Resistance: The Role of Freedom Songs in South Africa,” in “This is How We Flow”: Rhythm in Black Cultures, ed. Angela M. S. Nelson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 105. 4. Ibid., 146. 5. Personal memories of former student activists Kogie Thangavelu, Vangeli Gamede; personal memories of Lindsay Michie Eades. 6. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 114. 7. Duma Ka Ndlovu, quoted in Amandla! 8. Lindsay Michie Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 14. 9. G. Williams, “Celebrating the Freedom Charter,” Transformation 6 (1988), 73–86. 10. “Life’s Just Fabulous, White Madam!” protest bill distributed by the Defiance Campaign, 1960. Document PC2/4/6, Alan Paton Center, University of Natal, Pietermaritzberg, South Africa. 11. Description by Alfred Hutchinson, Treason Trial, 1956. Document PC2/4/10, Alan Paton Center. 12. “Charter Adopted at the Founding Conference of the Federation of South African Women Johannesburg, 17 April 1954,” Indigenous People of African and America, http://www.ipoaa.com/federation_of_south_african_women.htm. 13. Peter Maqubane and Carol Lazar, Women of South Africa: Their Fight for Freedom (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1993), 39. 14. “Vuyisile Mini,” ANC Historical Documents Archive, http://www.anc. org.za/ancdocs/history/misc/mini.html. 15. Jeremy Cronin, quoted in Amandla! 16. Dolly Rathebe, quoted in Amandla! 17. “Vuyisile Mini,” ANC Historical Documents Archive. 18. Hugh Masekela, from Sophiatown, dir. Pascale Lamche (Little Bird Productions, 2003). 19. Memorandum, “On Families Left Homeless in Sophiatown Submitted to the Johannesburg City Council,” September 28, 1959, Document PC2/4/11, Alan Paton Center. 20. Sophie Mgcina, quoted in Amandla! 21. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 234–46.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

268

Sounds of Resistance

22. Lara Allen, “Commerce, Politics, Musical Hybridity: Vocalizing Urban Black South African Identity During the 1950s,” Ethnomusicology 47, no. 2 (2003), 228–49. 23. Miriam Makeba, quoted in Amandla! 24. Freedom Sounds: The Musical Liberation of South Africa, six-part series presented by Hugh Masekela. BBC Radio 2, London. Broadcast on March 31, April 7, April 14, April 21, April 28, and May 5, 2004. 25. Chris Stapleton, African All-Stars: the Pop Music of a Continent (London: Quartet Books, 1987), 192. 26. Duma Ndlovu and Sibongile Khumalo, quoted in Amandla! 27. Eades, The End of Apartheid in South Africa, 19. 28. Audrey Brown, quoted in Amandla! ; person memories of Kogie Thangavelu, Vangeli Gamede. 29. Lindiwe Zulu, quoted in Amandla! 30. “Vusi Mahlasela Sings ‘Thula Mama.’ ” TedGlobal (2007), filmed June 2007. http://www.ted.com/talks/vusi_mahlasela_sings_thula_mama.html. 31. Interview for Ubuyile. Quoted in Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Politics in South Africa (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 144. 32. Interview with Judy Seidman, 2001. Quoted in Ansell, Soweto Blues, 144. 33. Interview for Ubuyile, 2000. Quoted in Ansell, Soweto Blues, 145. 34. Ibid., 146–47. 35. From Amandla! 36. David B. Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985), 196. 37. Pollard, “Rhythms of Resistance,” 114. 38. Duma Ndlovu, quoted in Amandla! 39. Pollard, “Rhythms of Resistance,” 108. 40. Sifiso Ntuli, quoted in Amandla! 41. Shirli Gilbert, “Singing Against Apartheid: ANC Cultural Groups and the International Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” Journal of African Studies 33, no. 2 (June 2007), 421–41. 42. Personal memories of Kogie Thangavelu, Vangeli Gamede, Cameron McConnachie, and Lindsay Michie Eades. 43. John Edwin Mason, “ ‘Mannenberg’: Notes on the Making of an Icon and Anthem,” African Studies Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Fall 2007), 25–46. 44. Ansell, Soweto Blues, 153. 45. Jeremy Marre and Hannah Charlton, Beats of the Heart: Popular Music of the World (London: Pluto Press Limited, 1985), 39; Freedom Sounds. 46. Freedom Sounds. 47. Paul Erasmus, “Roger, Me and the Scorpion: Working for the South African Security Services During apartheid,” in Shoot the Singer! Music Censorship Today, ed. Marie Korpe (London: Zed Books, 2004). 48. Michael Drewett, “Music in the Struggle to End apartheid: South Africa,” in Policing Pop, eds. Martin Cloonan and Reebee Garofalo (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“The Toyi-toyi Was Our Weapon”

269

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

49. Interview with activists (requested at the time that their names be withheld) by Lindsay Michie Eades, 1989–1990. 50. Liz Gunner, “Jacob Zuma, the Social Body and the Unruly Power of Song,” African Affairs 108, no. 430 (January 2009), 27–48. 51. Vincent Vena, Former ANC activist; Hugh Masekela, quoted in Amandla! 52. Erasmus, “Roger, Me and the Scorpion”; General Adrian de lo Rosa (former head of riot police), quoted in Amandla! 53. Ndlovu, quoted in Amandla! 54. Ansell, Soweto Blues, 185. 55. Ibid., 183. 56. Robin Denselow, “Paul Simon’s Graceland: The Acclaim and the Outrage,” The Guardian (London), April 19, 2012. This controversy has recently been revisited with Simon’s decision to return to London to give a Graceland concert to commemorate its 25th anniversary, and because of the release in 2012 of the movie Under African Skies, a documentary directed by Joe Berlinger about the making of Graceland. 57. Personal memory of Lindsay Michie Eades, February 11, 1990. 58. Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines,” TDR 35, no. 1 (1991), 187–94. 59. Ansell, Soweto Blues, 263. 60. Ibid. 61. Gunner, “Jacob Zuma.” 62. Private e-mail exchange between Lindsay Michie and Vangeli Gamade, October 10, 2012. 63. Activists discussion in Amandla!; personal memories of Kogie Thangavelu and Vangeli Gamede. 64. Gail Smith, journalist, quoted in Amandla! 65. Victor Modise, Heritage Museums, Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, and Jonas Gwungwa, violinist, Soweto Chamber Orchestra, “Music and Apartheid in South Africa,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3XhzmNxR8w.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 13

No Future Punk Music in Postindustrial Britain and the United States Brian E. Crim

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Punk was about the apocalypse. Punk was about annihilation. Nothing worked, so let’s get right to Armageddon. You know, if you found out the missiles were on their way, you’d probably start saying what you always wanted to, you’d probably turn to your wife and say, “You know, I always thought you were a fat cow.” And that’s how we behaved. —Legs McNeil (cofounder, Punk magazine)

Less than a decade after the Woodstock musical festival, the idealistic hopes and dreams of the so-called hippie generation foundered in the wake of the Vietnam War, spiraling inflation and unemployment, and incompetent or corrupt political leadership. Youth living in Britain and America’s deteriorating urban environments in the 1970s turned to music yet again to rage against parents, their governments, and their economic prospects. This time the tone was considerably different. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was shrieking “There is no future/In England’s Dreaming” only a decade after The Mommas and the Poppas wrote their wistful and melodious 1960s anthem, “California Dreamin’.” If music is a window into the values of a society, punk music was an accurate reflection of the attitude of many young people toward the miserable socioeconomic conditions in postindustrial Britain and the United States between 1976 and the early 1980s. Punk was a primal scream of frustration, a site from which one could

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

272

Sounds of Resistance

articulate radical views via music, fashion, and the arts. As Legs McNeil noted, punk was interested in shock and awe; destruction, not creation. Despite their best efforts to embody a nihilistic spirit, punk musicians reinvigorated rock music and changed the music industry in remarkably constructive ways. Ironically, punk was a victim of its own success. As one critic observed, “it is precisely when punk becomes popular culture that it ceases to be punk.”1 A revolution based on tearing down the icons of the past and celebrating the raw energy of amateur musicians can hardly survive those musicians becoming icons themselves. Pure punk may have lasted only a few years, but the music it inspired, often called post-punk or alternative music, continues to thrive. Punk shook the dominant culture to the core and served to critique the status quo in a spectacular fashion, but it soon became part of the culture it despised. Reflecting on his band’s whirlwind journey from the garage to packed arenas, Clash front man Joe Strummer lamented the irony of becoming a successful punk musician: “I can’t believe we became the people we tried to destroy.”2 The word punk was synonymous with juvenile delinquency, a fact not lost on those musicians and their fans that appropriated the term for themselves. Legs McNeil liked the connotation: “On TV, if you watched cop shows, Kojak, Beretta, when the cops finally catch the mass murderer, they’d say ‘you dirty Punk.’ It was what your teachers would call you. It meant you were the lowest of the low.”3 McNeil is credited with popularizing the term after cofounding Punk magazine. One of the first “fanzines,” a magazine published for fans by fans, Punk covered the emerging musical revolution in New York and London. “The word ‘punk’ seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked,” McNeil writes, “drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.”4 McNeil’s partner, John Holmstrom, reveled in the controversy: “Us putting punk on the cover was like putting the word fuck on the cover. People were very upset.”5 From the outset punk adopted an “in-your-face” attitude that attracted outcasts and misfits alienated from an increasingly irrelevant 1960s counterculture and marginalized by a conservative backlash in Britain and America. Punk is a subculture that mixes youthful rebellion with artistic experimentation. Despite rejecting the hippies’ values as maudlin and irrelevant, the punk movement shared the hippie subculture’s ability to communicate a comprehensive worldview. Sociologist Dick Hebidge claims that both hippie and punk cultures blended fashion, politics, and music in a way that resisted mainstream society. Legs McNeil reduced the politics of punk to “doing anything that’s gonna offend a grown-up.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

No Future

273

Just being offensive as possible. Which seemed delightful, just euphoric. Be the real people we are.”6 There were exceptions, of course, but McNeil realized that in an era of postmodernism rejecting the overtly political was itself political.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Punk’s Origins Aside from the question of where punk began—Britain or the United States—the debate over who influenced the most significant punk bands continues to engage music historians and dedicated fans alike. Four innovative proto-punk bands who found their start in the late 1960s are at the top of the list: The MC5, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, and The Velvet Underground. The first two bands hailed from the Detroit area, the others from New York. The Velvet Underground was Andy Warhol’s musical experiment and a unique addition to his New York “Factory” of postmodern art. As an avant-garde artist and true iconoclast, Warhol wanted his band to erase the boundary between art and life and eliminate the division between the audience and the artists. Warhol believed society was nonsensical and wanted The Velvet Underground to reflect his postmodern take. The more confused the audience was the better. Alvin Gibbs, a Punk musician and its unofficial historian, described the Velvets’ music as “a dark, dark mind fuck of a sound . . .” that produced noncomprehension and outrage in mainstream audiences while simultaneously inspiring dozens of bands forming in the seedy underbelly of New York.7 Featuring such iconic musicians as Lou Reed, John Cale, and the German model/singer Nico, The Velvet Underground was an initial attempt to free the counterculture from the influence of 1960s psychedelia and the tiresome politics of the radical Left. If the Velvets pushed the envelope artistically, the Detroit bands brought raw energy and aggressiveness to the forefront. Detroit was a remote, economically depressed, and racially divided city with seemingly little in common with the counterculture’s hotspots of New York and California. Consequently, The Stooges and MC5 were angrier and attracted a more working-class following. Iggy Pop (James Osterberg), also known as the “Godfather of punk,” described The Stooges’ first gigs: “It was the ugliest chicks and the most illiterate guys—people with skin problems, people with sexual problems, weight problems, unemployment problems, mental problems, you name it, they were a mess.”8 The Stooges focused on the boredom and hopelessness of growing up on television amidst failing cities and dysfunctional suburbia. MC5 was the most overtly political band of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

274

Sounds of Resistance

the punk pioneers because of its manager, John Sinclair. Sinclair founded the White Panther Party to express solidarity with the Black Panthers and later booked the MC5 to play outside of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The group was the first and only performance before violence erupted. Some of Sinclair’s radical ideas, such as going over the heads of established record companies to distribute music, inspired other bands to follow suit. Sinclair advocated the independent label so important to the industry today. He wanted the MC5 to serve an authentic revolution and recruit thousands of teenagers to rebel against authority and fight for racial equality. For its part, the band wanted to make music and be famous. Sinclair later remarked, “Those guys wanted to be bigger than the Beatles and I wanted them to be bigger than Chairman Mao.”9 It was not the first time a band’s political message contradicted its desire for fame and fortune. The band with the most direct influence on the British punk scene was The New York Dolls. Emblematic of the punk “do-it-yourself ” attitude, these four amateur musicians and an actor turned lead singer developed a cult following in New York’s underground music scene. The Dolls borrowed from multiple genres (glam rock, blues, and jazz) and flirted with sexual boundaries by dressing as transvestites. During a visit to New York, London fashion guru and social activist Malcolm McLaren met the Dolls and was immediately taken with their music and personal style. McLaren outfitted the group in provocative gear such as Soviet uniforms and flags and used unorthodox means of promoting the band. McLaren arranged for the Dolls to tour Britain in 1975 during which most of London’s future punk vanguard saw the Dolls in concert and left the experience emboldened. Sid Vicious, the infamous bass player for McLaren’s second band, the Sex Pistols, summed up the group’s influence: “I did like the New York Dolls a lot—their ambiguity and also the racket they churned out. I was very impressed by their ordinariness and how bad they were.”10 A back-handed compliment to be sure, but the point was that the Dolls were more personality than virtuosity. The Dolls broke up in 1975 after several of its members succumbed to heroin addiction. Despite this sad end to a ground-breaking band, The New York Dolls were genuine, raw, and proof that anyone could take the stage if they had something interesting to say. Joe Strummer declared 1968 “a great year to come of age.”11 The naïve romanticism of the counterculture proved inadequate once confronted with the realities of war, violence, and political repression. The affluent societies of Europe and the United States began to unravel within a few years

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

No Future

275

of that tumultuous summer. Politically, the Left seemed irrelevant and exhausted. The counterculture internalized this growing discord and nihilism and responded in kind. Richard Hell, an influential punk musician with the band Television, termed his cohort the “Blank Generation” to convey the rootless existence of growing up in a deteriorating and heavily mediated social environment. It is no wonder punk fashion consciously mimicked the aesthetics of films such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), a harrowing and dark film featuring vicious hooligans preying on a crumbling British society. Art mimicked reality in this case. Musically, bands like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges infused rock music with an aggressive and experimental attitude. Alvin Gibbs writes that these punk precursors “spawned new attitudes and music on both sides of the Atlantic. The New Wave picked up these attributes like a soldier who picks up a relic from a fallen comrade—a transfer of power.”12 New York and London witnessed this rebirth of rock music in the mid-1970s. It seemed the Blank Generation found its voice, and it was angrier and more iconoclastic than anything rock music spawned before or since.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Sex Pistols: “The Filth and the Fury” Such read the Daily Mirror’s headline a day after the Sex Pistols appeared on Bill Grundy’s popular daytime talk show Today on December 1, 1976, and let loose a string of vulgarities. The avuncular Grundy was soon fired and the Sex Pistols became a household name. What was once a subculture for unemployed street hoodlums and slumming university students exploded onto the national stage and had another newspaper asking, “Who are these Punks?” The proto-punk bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired hundreds of disaffected youth to retreat to their garages and empty warehouses and churn out coarse, albeit sincere music. Some of these garage bands would strike gold; others simply found a sense of belonging in the “punk nation” emerging in Britain’s larger cities. The Sex Pistols and The Clash in particular became synonymous with the English punk movement. The answer of where punk truly started depends on whether you ask a Briton or an American, but there was certainly enough significant crossfertilization between New York and London to suggest that the movement took root in both the cities by the end of 1976. The more relevant issue is comparing the differing styles of punk. Cultural critic and film maker Mary Harron recognized a fundamental distinction in English punk, which she described as “more volatile and edgy and more dangerous” than the New York bands coming on the scene at the same time.13

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

276

Sounds of Resistance

Neither Britain nor America fared well economically in the 1970s, but Britain had it worse. Once the seat of a great empire and an equally strong economy, by 1975 Britain had cast off over a million and a half manufacturing jobs and struggled to remain relevant on the world stage. Unemployment skyrocketed, the trade unions balked, and a series of ineffectual Labour governments watched helplessly as the social fabric of the cities deteriorated. Fifteen percent of Britain’s population in the 1970s was between the ages of 13 and 21, two-thirds of which were working class. With the economy in a downward spiral, fully one quarter of these working class youths were on the dole (receiving unemployment benefits). Wayne Barrett, lead singer for the Manchester punk band Slaughter and The Dogs, believed growing up in a postindustrial wasteland in northern England determined his musical direction: “When you write a song in that kind of environment, you can’t say, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ It’s got to be a little bit of angry. We didn’t set out to be punks.”14 Punk was a product of its environment—depressed, urban, and hopeless. As word of the Sex Pistols emerged from the London underground a myriad of youth cultures—student, working class, skinheads, and artists— experienced an epiphany. Paul Morley, an important music journalist who saw the Sex Pistols’ first gig in Manchester, spoke for the growing number of self-described punks:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Pistols brought everything bang up to date, it was absolutely for you. It was about the times. You couldn’t really get any idea what they were singing about, but you just had a gut instinct this was about how you felt. And about the nation. And about how pissed off you were. And about what you were expected to accept as a teenager. And about how fucked up your future was going to be. You just knew that’s what it was all about even with the mayhem that was being caused.15

To reiterate the British media’s question, who were these punks? The Sex Pistols were the brainchild of Malcolm McLaren. McLaren began his musical management career with The New York Dolls, whom he met on a marketing trip related to his day job as the co-owner of a trendy clothing store called SEX in London. McLaren’s partner was the avant-garde fashion designer, Vivienne Westwood. McLaren and Westwood were attracted to the proto-punk bands in London and New York because they experimented with fashion and style in unique ways. Combining fashion with the still undefined trend in underground music made sense commercially, but for McLaren in particular, it was an opportunity to make a profound political

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

No Future

277

statement. McLaren attended several art colleges in the 1960s, an era in which art schools were Britain’s primary sites of radical politics, progressive and unconventional lifestyles, and drug experimentation. McLaren admitted that he “learned all my politics and understanding of the world through the history of art.”16 For McLaren the most interesting movement was the Situationist International, a group of Marxist artists and intellectuals who made their mark on the May 1968 uprising in Paris. The Situationists believed in fulfilling all human desires in such a way that undermined advanced capitalist societies. They rejected a formal ideology, preferring to promote revolutionary individualism and free expression. One way to challenge the capitalist order and agitate for change was to construct situations where desires could be explored. The Situationists painted graffiti, left pamphlets in public places, and, most subversively, used mass media and marketing methods against the very societies that relied on such methods to assert control. McLaren and Westwood saw fashion as one avenue to continue the work of the Situationsts; music was another. McLaren in particular was interested in expanding his influence outside the doors of SEX. A few of his customers, young ruffians with stolen instruments and no discernible musical talent, provided an opportunity. Steve Jones was already in a garage band called The Strand when he asked McLaren to help him get his start. McLaren agreed and recruited an art student named Glenn Matlock to play bass. Bernie Rhodes, a partner in SEX and later the manager of The Clash, looked after the band while McLaren traveled to New York. Rhodes is credited with finding the true heart and soul of what would become the Sex Pistols, lead singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten). Rhodes was more interested in Rotten’s look, but told him he had to learn vocals. Rotten remembers his response to Rhodes: “You’ve got to learn how to sing. Why? Who wrote the rules?”17 McLaren named the band the Sex Pistols to market his clothing, but he also liked the wordplay and double entendre. McLaren explained that it came “from the idea of a pistol, a pin-up, a young thing, a better-looking assassin,” which was ironic since the band members were not exactly handsome in a conventional sense.18 “By nurturing the Sex Pistols,” Alvin Gibbs wrote, “he had forged his hammer of destruction and his day was at hand.”19 The Sex Pistols began their unlikely ascent to fame in 1975 by playing in London’s seedier pubs. From the start they were offensive and disastrous in every way, a reputation that only generated more interest. Johnny Rotten verbally abused the audiences with such missives as “You’re all so fucking boring! You make me fucking sick!” and initiated a mutual

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

278

Sounds of Resistance

spitting ritual between the band and audiences known as “gobbing.”20 Their earliest followers included Siouxsie Sioux and Richard Severin, who later became Siouxsie and the Banshees, and a young Billy Idol. Vic Godard, lead singer of Subway Sect, remembers seeing the early Sex Pistols gigs: “The Pistols don’t play great and, as such, a kid in the audience can relate to that . . . he can visualize himself being up there on stage.”21 One of the most enduring legacies of punk was the trend toward encouraging amateur musicians to carve out a space for themselves and reinvigorate rock music. Clean vocals and musical virtuosity meant nothing without passion and individuality. On February 21, 1976, the New Musical Express (NME) ran a banner headline: “Don’t Look Over Your Shoulder But the Sex Pistols are Coming.” The summer of 1976 was electric musically as garage bands everywhere tapped into the energy and spirit emanating from the Sex Pistols and touring American bands like the New York–based Ramones. Music journalists already interested in the noisy pub bands were immediately taken with the Sex Pistols. Charles Schaar Murray, a regular contributor to NME, was intrigued by the conflation of fashion, politics, and lyrics: “The Pistols are all those short-haired kids in the big boots, and rolled up baggies and sleeveless T-shirts. Their music is coming from the straight-outof-school-and-onto-the-dole deathtrap which we seem to have engineered for Our Young: the ’76 British terminal stasis, the modern urban blind alley.”22 The Sex Pistols garnered interest throughout England courtesy of an underground musical press. On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played before an audience of no more than 50 people in Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. This “gig that changed the world,” as it would later be remembered, spread punk music to the postindustrial North and helped create influential post-punk bands like Joy Division/New Order, the Happy Mondays, the Smiths, the Cure, and the Fall. Virtually every one of the 50 spectators either formed bands themselves or played a vital role in the music industry, either as producers, promoters, or journalists. Steve Diggle, who later fronted the Buzzcocks, was instrumental in arranging the gig. He declared the concert “the day the punk rock atom was split, no doubt about it, they were glamorous and didn’t give a fuck.” Journalist Peter Oldham recalled the revelation of seeing the Sex Pistols live: “After they finished, you weren’t quite sure whether they were good or what. But they attack and the aggression was something to behold.”23 1976’s Summer of Punk ended with a festival at London’s 100 Club in September during which punk bands from all over England networked and fed off of a growing energy emanating from the Sex Pistols’ meteoric rise.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

No Future

279

Malcolm McLaren relished the underground success of his Situationist musical experiment, but to be truly revolutionary the group had to reach a national audience. In October, 1976, the Sex Pistols signed with one of the largest music labels, EMI, for a reported 40,000 pounds. The signing shocked the industry and seemed to contradict punk’s core values, but McLaren enjoyed the irony of using corporate means to inflict chaos on Britain’s collective consciousness. A few months later the Sex Pistols achieved an unprecedented degree of infamy after the Bill Grundy appearance. Glenn Matlock called Grundy a “dirty fucker” and a “fucking rotter” on live television and some of the entourage who crowded the stage bore swastikas on their sleeves. McLaren could not have asked for a better scenario. SEX employee and stylist Jordan explained the significance of the appearance: “It alienated the Sex Pistols from every ordinary, normal, God-fearing person in the country which immediately made every child of those God-fearing parents absolutely adore the Sex Pistols. There was a great influx of outrage on the one hand, and love on the other.”24 The band’s public and private behavior was so atrocious that EMI quickly severed ties. A few weeks later, A&M Records signed the Sex Pistols in front of Buckingham Palace for even more money than EMI offered. This relationship lasted only days after the band, now featuring Sid Vicious, trashed A&M’s offices and ravished the secretaries. Soon after this debacle, McLaren scored the most dramatic signing when Richard Branson’s Virgin Records snapped up the Sex Pistols and their signature album, God Save the Queen, for an astronomical fee. With each firing the Sex Pistols acquired more publicity and wealth—the Situationist International would have been proud. The Sex Pistols entered a new phase when Sid Vicious joined the band in early 1977. Glenn Matlock was fired for supposedly liking the Beatles too much and getting cold feet about attacking the Queen so vociferously in God Save the Queen, although the departure had more to do with a clash of egos between Matlock and Rotten. Simon John Ritchie, aka Sid Vicious, was Rotten’s good friend and a regular fixture in the punk underground. Ritchie adopted the name “Sid” in honor of Rotten’s pet hamster and “Vicious” because both Ritchie and the hamster were anything but. Sid Vicious was young and attractive and generally sweet when he was not indulging in drugs and alcohol, however, the problem was that Vicious was usually high on something. A terrible musician, Vicious substituted talent for spectacle— mutilating himself on stage, beating reporters with steal chains, instigating fights with skinheads, and generally living every moment in a drug-induced stupor. Vicious’s antics attracted a well-known American punk groupie and drug dealer to the stars named Nancy Spungen. Spungen’s arrival in the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

280

Sounds of Resistance

entourage coincided with the band’s downward spiral by exacerbating tensions between members and McLaren’s management style. The Sex Pistols enjoyed unprecedented popularity during the summer of 1977 because of the success of God Save the Queen, but there was trouble ahead. The Sex Pistols flamed out during the course of an ill-fated U.S. tour in January 1978. The tour was designed to maximize confrontation and generate media coverage, and on these counts, the tour was a success. What better way to wage symbolic warfare than to take punk music to Memphis, the birthplace of Elvis Presley? At the band’s first Texas gig, Rotten screamed, “You cowboys are all a bunch of faggots!”25 Everywhere the Sex Pistols went fighting ensued and negative publicity followed. The constant tension between McLaren and Rotten over the band’s direction and McLaren’s manipulations and interference came to a head on January 14, 1978, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Rotten took the stage, sang one number, and walked off in disgust. That was the end of the Sex Pistols. In a sad postscript, Sid Vicious was accused of murdering Nancy Spungen in a New York hotel room on October 12, 1978, and finally met his own end six months later after overdosing on heroin. The whole sordid affair fueled an already skewed opinion of punk in the media. “This is just what the tabloids had been waiting for, Alvin Gibbs writes, “the proof that their depictions of punk and its leaders as dangerous and immoral had been justified and accurate all along. Punk had thrown up its own Charlie Manson and the British press especially, had a field day.”26 From their inception the Sex Pistols were always much more than Johnny Rotten’s sneer or McLaren’s contrived Situationist exhibitions—they spoke to Britain’s systemic problems and for a population most of the nation ignored. The Sex Pistols produced some of the most quintessential punk songs ever written. “Anarchy in the UK,” Alvin Gibbs notes, “embodied the spirit and power of the punk rock revolution. It was a call to arms, an anthem and a warning—it was the fine noise of a generation.”27 God Save the Queen mocked Britain’s most precious national symbols in such a way as to reveal the monarchy’s irrelevancy amidst severe economic decline. The song declared there was “no future for me/no future for you” in this “fascist regime.” The album God Save the Queen coincided with Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee and served as the rallying cry for the counter-celebration. While an initial analysis may lead one to believe the Sex Pistols were simply out to destroy their “Englishness,” they were actually trying to reclaim their national identity for the working class and the younger generation. Dissent, after all, is another proud British tradition, like the monarchy. Director Dick Jarman released his bizarre and disturbing film Jubilee in 1977 as well. A fantasy

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

No Future

281

in which Queen Elizabeth I is magically transported to a futuristic Britain in which punks battle the state amidst the ruins of Britain’s great cities, Jubilee is most effective as a critique of 1970s Britain because it is filmed in London’s decaying neighborhoods. The graffiti is real and the blighted city blocks and squatters are authentic. The film featured several performances from punk bands as well. The Sex Pistols revealed the disparity between what Britain was celebrating in 1977 and what it had become. Malcolm McLaren proclaimed punk “the gross enemy of apathy.” He told the Daily Mirror that the Sex Pistols “created a spark of life and energy which now turned into a forest fire. The everyday lives of the street kids were poverty-stricken garbage—financially and spiritually.” Johnny Rotten, who feuded with McLaren over the band’s promotion, could at least agree with him on that. Concerned that the Sex Pistols were developing a reputation for violence and mayhem, Johnny Rotten also told the Daily Mirror that “what we produce is a climate of controlled frenzy. . . . Our songs are anti-God, anti-the Queen, and anti-the palsied values of present day society. I am a revolutionary. . . . An anarchist. I want to stir people up to think for themselves. That’s all.”28 The Sex Pistols was not the first punk band, but they were the most influential, certainly in Britain. The Sex Pistols may have preached anarchy and no future, but they added another dimension to British culture and began a new chapter in rock history.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Clash: London Calling The most commercially successful punk band was The Clash, although they soon left the confines of the punk genre and explored music from all over the world. Like the Sex Pistols, The Clash was discovered and then refashioned by an employee of the avant-garde SEX boutique in London. Inspired by the Sex Pistols, individual members of The Clash were already hopping from garage band to garage band before Bernie Rhodes decided to build a band of his own. The front man for The Clash was no Johnny Rotten, a working-class hooligan with a bizarre appearance, but the son a British diplomat and a product of English boarding schools. Joe Strummer, born John Graham Mellor, traveled the world as a child before enduring a lonely boarding school existence. The experience shaped his politics and contributed to his restless nature. Strummer recalled what his school years actually taught him: “Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom. But I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control, and it didn’t have any inherent wisdom.”29 An art school dropout

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

282

Sounds of Resistance

like McLaren, Strummer lived as a squatter in tenements where he mixed with London’s minority population and eventually found a calling in the punk subculture. With a unique voice and superior intellect, Strummer completed The Clash ensemble and began to frequent London’s burgeoning punk scene. The Clash took their name from an advertisement for a controversial art exhibit. The sentence that caught their eye read, “A clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled.”30 In a crumbling postindustrial Britain, The Clash could not have found a more appropriate quote. Their first single was released in March of 1977. “White Riot” was a call for white youth to riot for something worthy like racial tolerance and inclusion. Underground fanzines celebrated The Clash’s debut album for its genuineness. Mark Perry’s influential Sniffin’ Glue described it as like looking into a mirror. For discerning punk fans like Perry, a band that can speak to the anger and disillusionment of his generation was rare, especially with so many Sex Pistols knockoffs inundating London. Perry ended the glowing review by declaring, “THE CLASH TELLS THE TRUTH!”31 The Clash’s signature album was London Calling. Released at the end of 1979, which was arguably the end of the pure punk era, the album reflected The Clash’s interest in funk, jazz, reggae, and world music while still speaking to the punk themes of alienation, anticonsumerism, and antiestablishment. The song “London Calling” invoked the famous BBC World Service beacon from the Second World War; although this time The Clash was broadcasting the values of an entirely different audience. “London calling to the faraway towns, now that war is declared—and battle come down” was a grand pronouncement that punk had replaced the heroic war generation, and more immediately, the 1960s. Still, The Clash was not as nihilistic as their brothers-in-arms the Sex Pistols because they saw potential in activism and organizing youth to affect positive change. Rolling Stone magazine compared the Sex Pistols in a recent retrospective of The Clash: “Whereas the Sex Pistols addressed a darkness at the heart of all things—rock and roll’s equivalent of Beyond Good and Evil—the Clash still envisioned a good despite evil.”32 The Clash’s success came at a cost, and many punk purists resented their fame, musical evolution, and politics. Joe Strummer was aware of the hypocrisy that came with success and became increasingly uncomfortable with playing before arenas and achieving tremendous popularity in the United States. Mark Perry was furious with the band he so admired in 1977. Only two years later he wrote, “Punk died the day Clash signed to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

No Future

283

CBS [Records].”33 The Clash’s politics also alienated some punks. Sensitive to the criticism leveled against punk for using the swastika as a shockfashion statement and fearing too many racist skinheads were undermining punk’s credibility, The Clash joined Rock Against Racism and wrote songs about race relations and imperialism. The Clash also contributed to better relations between Catholic and Protestant youths in Northern Ireland by playing a legendary concert in Belfast in 1977. Young people were less interested in their parents’ battles and were willing to cross sectarian divides to share music. Punk guitarist Bob Quine summed up the complaints of Clash critics in these terms: “[T]hey tried to put a socially redeeming value about social issues in their fucking songs but I don’t think they had the slightest idea what they were talking about.”34 The Clash came from the same milieu as the Sex Pistols, but they survived into the 1980s and transcended the genre. They also offered an alternative to the pure existentialism and rage emanating from other punk bands. Punk scholar Ruth Adams notes that punk “offers reasons to be proud of being English that do not rely on the subjugation of other races or nations, or of the lower social classes.”35 The Clash helped reinvent Englishness to include punk as a point of pride.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

American Punk and Hardcore: “Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue” Most of the proto-punk bands came from the United States and punk groups like the Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads were already in full swing when their British counterparts were just beginning to take London by storm. The Ramones’ July 1976 tour to England generated interest in punk. Two years later the Sex Pistols’ American tour inspired a second, angrier phase of punk in the United States. Figures like Malcolm McLaren bridged the Anglo-American divide by virtue of managing The New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols. Punk was a fusion, or more accurately, a collage of British and American music, fashion, and attitude. Naturally, each contingent claimed to be the first. Ramones manager Danny Fields described the group’s July 4, 1976, London gig as “metaphorically appropriate, because here it was the two hundredth anniversary of our freedom from Great Britain, and we were bringing Great Britain this gift that was going to forever disrupt their sensibilities.”36 The Sex Pistols would have disagreed, although they and the upstart Clash were as excited by the Ramones tour as anyone. British punk was rooted in more rage and nihilism than the American variant, which tended to be more suburban and middle class in both its origins and audience. The Sex Pistols’ American tour

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

284

Sounds of Resistance

influenced the growth of hardcore music in several American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Hardcore came into its own in the early 1980s and surpassed British punk in its aggression and cynicism. The most important punk band from the United States was The Ramones. The original members hailed from Forest Hills, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens that seemed to typify the boredom of suburban existence in the early 1970s. The group became regular performers at the club CBGB in 1974 and for the next year cobbled together a loyal following. The full name of the club was Country, Blue Grass, and Blues, although from its inception CBGB was the focal point for proto-punk and punk in New York. Legs McNeil was blown away by The Ramones’ first appearance at CBGB: “They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song . . . and it was just this wall of noise. . . . They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new.”37 It was not until The Ramones toured Britain during the so-called Summer of Punk that they found their stride and ended the decade as the premier American punk band. The Ramones never achieved tremendous commercial success even after trending more toward pop music in the 1980s and making the cult-classic film Rock’n’Roll High School (1979). The Ramones even cut an album with legendary producer Phil Spector. Despite changing members at times, The Ramones survived 20 years before performing their last concert in 1996. Deservedly, The Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. The Ramones were not at as overly political as British punk, and less angry. Their music and style subverted the rock genre in humorous and playful ways, yet they tapped into the same sort of teenage ennui and antisuburbia sentiment as their predecessors, The Stooges. The Ramones portrayed themselves as the anti-Beatles, but this was not to say they disrespected rock’s greatest icons. They took their name from Paul McCartney’s pseudonym of Paul Ramon, the name McCartney used before the Beatles became the Beatles in 1960. The differences between the two bands were meant to be comical. The Ramones were outfitted as juvenile delinquents in leather jackets, cartoon T-shirts, and ripped jeans; only the mop haircuts were reminiscent of The Beatles. These were not heart throbs, however, and cultivating the classic misfit look was deliberate. Music critic Tom Carson interpreted The Ramones as examples of “the attractiveness of the comic loser, the closest thing we have to the idea of the holy fool.”38 With songs like “I Want to be Sedated” and “Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue,” The Ramones embraced the drop-out aspect of Timothy Leary’s “turn on, tune in, drop out” formula from the 1960s. Every song seemed to urge youth

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

No Future

285

to delay the misery of adulthood as long as possible. The Ramones popularized the term “punk” and spawned a host of fanzines like Mark Perry’s Sniffin Glue that educated British audiences about the new sound in New York. Consistently juvenile with a growing pop sensibility, The Ramones were never dangerous and harbingers of chaos like some of their British counterparts or the American hardcore bands in the 1980s. The Sex Pistols’ brief incursion in the United States in 1978 had far reaching consequences. For many American teenagers, particularly in the suburban wastelands of California, the Sex Pistols’ assault on the senses and menacing persona was a revelation. American punk outside of the long shadow of New York and the legendary CBGB evolved into the subgenre of hardcore music. The garages of suburban Los Angeles teemed with adolescents subjected to an ultraconservative backlash courtesy of a president who was once a Hollywood actor. The resurgence in values conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s penchant for military adventurism fueled hardcore’s content and style. Hardcore gigs were usually more violent, albeit controlled violence, and virtually anyone could take the stage if they had the swagger. According to scholar Ryan Moore, bands like the Dead Kennedys, Fear, and Black Flag “spoke for young white suburbanites lacking morals or a sense of purpose to the point to self-parody.”39 The Dead Kennedys took the most offensive name possible to highlight the metaphorical distance between “Camelot” and Reagan’s White House, and Fear produced ominous songs with such titles as “Let’s Have a War,” “I Don’t Care About You,” and “We Destroy the Family.” With lyrics like “Let’s have a war!/Blame it on the middle-class!/Let’s have a war!/We’re like rats in a cage!”, Fear offered a visceral counterpoint to Reagan’s utopian “Morning in America.” Black Flag enjoyed a long career and left a greater mark by founding SST Records in 1978, one of the most important independent labels in the music industry. American punk and hardcore flourished in an era of social conservatism and Cold War paranoia at a time when post-punk had already taken root in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Punk and Social Activism Despite preaching fiery nihilism and anarchy, punk rock changed the music industry and contributed to legitimate social change. Ruth Adams credits punk with transgressing racial, class, gender, and sexual boundaries manifest in mainstream society. Punk “created a safe space in which individual expression and diversity could be given free reign.”40 There is no question that punk was predominantly performed by whites for whites, but its desire

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

286

Sounds of Resistance

to challenge the status quo and subvert existing genres of music led some prominent bands to experiment with diverse styles. The Clash in particular introduced the punk audience to reggae and Rastafarianism by incorporating reggae music and writing lyrics that compared the plight of blacks in England to those of white unemployed youths. The African American band Bad Brains began as a jazz fusion group called Mindpower before changing their name in 1977 and becoming one of the first hardcore bands. Based in Washington, DC, Bad Brains is a musically adept, experimental band, but its essential style in form and content was hardcore. Bad Brains is unique for being an African American hardcore band with a mostly white audience, but it is not surprising that their music addresses the same anticapitalist, anticonservative, and antiestablishment themes as any white suburban band. The band itself, according to music scholar Shayna Maskell, obtained the “trappings of ‘authentic blackness’: their hair was dreaded; they spoke with faux-Jamaican accents, and espoused Rastafarian principles both in interviews and in their lyrics.”41 Bad Brains and their “rastapunk” fans suggest punk is not as insular as some of its critics claim. Punk’s do-it-yourself attitude gave women unprecedented access to opportunities in the music industry. If punk was about destroying the existing culture, specifically the music industry’s corporate conservatism, women could only benefit. Before punk, rock and roll was an exclusively male domain populated by professional musicians. Punk blurred the lines between artist and fan to the point that one could watch the Sex Pistols in a club one night and be on stage the next. Legendary BBC disc jockey John Peel noted that “[p]unk opened the door for plain women in dungarees to get up on stage and play.”42 Siouxsie Sioux, who was anything but plain, used to follow the Sex Pistols around from gig to gig and even showed up on stage at the Bill Grundy appearance before taking matters into her own hands and forming Siouxsie and the Banshees. Her “punkette” image augured the popular Goth style of the late 1980s and 1990s. Patti Smith was one of the more influential proto-punk artists in New York. A poet, actress, playwright, and model, Smith toured Britain and is credited with spreading the punk ethos across the Atlantic. She earned the moniker “Godmother of Punk” and continues to write and perform music from every genre. Debbie Harry, better known as Blondie, was another pioneer punk musician from New York. Both Harry and Smith were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for innovating music and paving the way for more female artists. Female punk bands performed for women and addressed women’s issues in venues that were more welcoming than most other punk gigs. While established music producers and record companies shunned female rockers,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

No Future

287

punk’s celebration of the amateur and the advent of the independent label changed the landscape to their benefit. Sexual ambiguity was yet another way punk, especially early punk, challenged mainstream society while simultaneously undermining rock music’s ultramasculine bearing. The trend toward flirting with sexual boundaries began with The New York Dolls and The Stooges along with British influences on punk like Roxy Music and David Bowie. Malcolm McLaren dressed the Sex Pistols in cowboy T-shirts inscribed with the word “gay” partly for the shock value and partly to demystify the stigma of being homosexual. No one actually thought the Sex Pistols were gay, but punk seemed to endorse any subculture that threatened the dominant culture. For example, one of the premier independent labels specializing in punk music was called Rough Trade, a term homosexuals used to denote casual sexual encounters and gay prostitution. Gay punk fans attracted to the political possibilities for themselves and other social causes formed fanzines and created a subgenre of hardcore called Homocore in cities like San Francisco. Although most punk bands and their fans were white heterosexual men, the punk ethos was appropriated by women and minorities intent on changing a music industry that had neglected them for too long.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Punk: The Legacy Legs McNeil resented punk’s popularity and mourned the loss of its underground spirit: “[A]fter the Sex Pistols tour, I had no interest in doing Punk magazine. It just felt like this phony media thing. Punk wasn’t ours anymore. It had become everything we hated. It seemed like it had become everything we started the magazine to rage against.”43 Perhaps it was inevitable that a movement as substantial as punk would itself become mainstream. The amateur musicians had become professionals and record labels took greater note of the commercial potential of teenage nihilism. Still, one of punk’s most important legacies is the enduring success of independent labels. Punk became post-punk in the 1980s and alternative music in the 1990s and 2000s. Post-punk is characterized by greater musical virtuosity and more introspective lyrics. Music critic Simon Reynolds notes that post-punk was more ambivalent about politics than bands like The Clash. “As bohemian nonconformists,” Reynolds writes of post-punk musicians, “they were usually made uncomfortable by calls to solidarity or toeing the party line.”44 Post-punk continued the revolution in the music industry and still managed to support progressive causes in Britain and the United States. The return of affluence and left-center governments in both

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

288

Sounds of Resistance

countries in the 1990s demystified punk’s essential message, but its legacy remains a matter of attitude rather than a specific political position. Jon Savage, author of an important book on the Sex Pistols, summed up punk’s legacy better than anyone: “History is written by those who say ‘No’ and Punk’s utopian heresies remain its gift to the world.”45

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Michelle Phillipov, “Haunted by the Spirit of ’77: Punk Studies and the Persistence of Politics,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 20, no. 3 (September 2006), 390. 2. Julien Temple, dir., The Filth and the Fury (Film Four, 2000, DVD). 3. Ryan Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Deconstruction,” The Communication Review 7 (2004), 313. 4. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 204. 5. Alvin Gibbs, Destroy: The Definitive History of Punk (London: Britannia Press, 1996), 57. 6. McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 299. 7. Gibbs, Destroy, 31. 8. McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 67. 9. Gibbs, Destroy, 39. 10. Ibid., 15. 11. Julien Temple, dir., Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (Sony Legacy, 2007, DVD). 12. Gibbs, Destroy, 38. 13. McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 248, 244. 14. David Nolan, I Swear I Was There: The Gig that Changed the World (Shropshire, UK: Independent Music Press, 2006), 80. 15. Ibid., 64. 16. Gibbs, Destroy, 46. 17. Temple, The Filth and the Fury. 18. Dominic Molon and Diedrich Diedrichsen, Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 76. 19. Gibbs, Destroy, 67. 20. David Simonelli, “Anarchy, Pop and Violence: Punk Rock Subculture and the Rhetoric of Class, 1976–78,” Contemporary British History 16, no. 2 (September 2002), 128. 21. Ibid., 125. 22. Ibid., 128. 23. Nolan, I Swear I Was There, 15, 65. 24. Gibbs, Destroy, 109. 25. Ibid., 201. 26. Ibid., 20. 27. Ibid., 104.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

No Future

289

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

28. Simonelli, “Anarchy, Pop and Violence,” 131. 29. Mikal Gilmore, “The Fury and the Power of the Clash,” Rolling Stone, March 3, 2011, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN =58638005&site=eds-live (accessed March 13, 2011). 30. Ibid. 31. Gibbs, Destroy, 119. 32. Gilmore, “The Fury and the Power of the Clash.” 33. Ibid. 34. McNeill and McCain, Please Kill Me, 289. 35. Ruth Adams, “The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures, and Nostalgia,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 4 (October 2008), 476. 36. Pete Lentini, “Punk’s Origins: Anglo-American Syncretism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2003), 154. 37. “End of the Century: The Ramones, 2011,” http://www.pbs.org/ independentlens/endofthecentury/legacy.html. 38. Lane Van Ham, “Reading Early Punk as Secularized Sacred Clowning,” The Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 2 (2009), 318. 39. Moore, “Postmodernism and Punk Subculture,” 317. 40. Adams, “The Englishness of English Punk,” 477. 41. Shayna Maskell, “Performing Punk: Bad Brains and the Construction of Identity,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21, no. 4 (2009), 418. 42. Helen Reddington, “The Forgotten Revolution of Female Punk Musicians in the 1970s,” Peace Review 16, no. 4 (2004), 440. 43. McNeill and McCain, Please Kill Me, 334. 44. Simon Reynolds, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 6. 45. Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 541.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 14

These Rocks Will Roll Songs and Resistance in Communist Poland

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Marek Payerhin

The success of social activism depends greatly on the emergence of an agreement as to the nature of the problem, the agent(s) responsible for its existence, the common interest and identity of the aggrieved, and the likelihood of their triumph if they undertake some collective action to remedy the problem.1 In other words, activists need to define who we are in contrast to them, and why we (should) fight against them. Scholars point to the crucial role of framing in mobilization to action. Frames are “persuasive devices used by movement leaders to recruit participants, maintain solidarity, drum up support and, in some instances, demobilize opposition.”2 Only when frames help individuals identify injustice, the existence of some human actors responsible for their suffering, do people feel “the righteous anger that puts fire in the belly and iron in the soul,”3 which can turn them into activists. Equally crucial to the mobilization of protest are collective action frames that “suggest not merely that something can be done” about the injustice “but that ‘we’ can do something.”4 To achieve their purpose, movement’s frames have to be “aligned” with individual people’s perception of reality rooted in their culture and confirmed by daily observations.5 Thus, movement frames are culture specific, both in the sense of their larger societal cultural contexts (e.g., at the national or subnational level) and each individual’s personal cultural cues derived from experience. Songs may be among the most natural means of connecting new, even radical ideas to the established cultural milieu. Movement activists recognize this and often pour a new wine of protest lyrics into old bottles of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

292

Sounds of Resistance

familiar tunes. Throughout history, challengers freely borrowed popular tunes and molded them into vehicles of revolutionary or otherwise incendiary framing. For example, most of the freedom songs of the American civil rights movement were adaptations of religious hymns well known to movement participants.6 Similarly, the Temperance movement in the United States used tunes from a whole slate of patriotic songs, hymns, Scottish melodies, and Civil War songs.7 Songwriters had no qualms about making frequent use even of The Star-Spangled Banner, La Marseillaise, America, Hail to the Chief, Onward the Christian Soldiers, and Yankee Doodle (most of which were based on other songs’ tunes).8 In the end, many of the Temperance movement’s songbooks contained just lyrics but no notes, only information to what popular tune they should be sung.9 As we shall see below, some Polish songs of resistance also followed this familiar path. While many scholars tend to emphasize collective action frames developed by movement leaders,10 this study looks at the widespread grassrootslevel “leaderless” use of protest songs as an important mobilizing aspect of antigovernment resistance in Communist Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter explores several layers of this phenomenon: (1) the use of religious anthems as a form of protest by the members of the Catholic Church; (2) student protest songs; (3) workers’ protest ballads; (4) songs of defiance originating from political cabarets; (5) a musical that came to define the drab reality as well as the defiance of the common people; and (6) rock and reggae music concerts where Polish musicians used transparent codes to challenge the official ideological orthodoxy. But first, a brief comment on the broader regional context of the use of songs in social mobilization in Poland is in order.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Songs of Protest in Eastern Europe Music and songs played an important role in the social protest that brought an end to Communism in Eastern Europe and in the subsequent “color revolutions” in the region. Songs were very much tools of mobilization and resistance among disgruntled workers, farmers, young professionals, students, and churchgoers. Even in the depth of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, folksy chastushki lampooned the repressive regime and its propaganda, often at considerable personal risk to the singers.11 When the East German workers struck against the regime in 1953, they resorted on impulse to “singing the revolutionary songs of their fathers.”12 In Czechoslovakia, it was the persecution of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe that led to the creation of the famous Charter 77 human rights

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

These Rocks Will Roll

293

movement, and the Jazz Section of the musicians’ union created an important challenge to the Communist “normalization” after the Prague Spring.13 In the run-up to the aptly named “Singing Revolution” in Estonia, the early stirrings of the pro-independence political movement came in the form of reinvented but time-honored folk singing in public spaces. “At mass meetings, thousands of people sang new songs specially written by popular composers for these events, together with the pre-war patriotic songs and the historical, patriotic repertoire of the 19th-century song festivals. The words ‘Estonia’ (Eesti) and ‘freedom’ [vabadus] were repeated like a magic formula.”14 The term “singing revolution” was also applied later to the Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004. Remarkable for its sweeping success in bringing Viktor Yushchenko to power, the event focused a great deal of prodemocracy energy around the relatively small space of the Independence Square in Kiev and soon developed into “the longest rock concert in history.”15 The orange crowd gained a unifying anthem through the song Razom Nas Bahato (Together We Are Many) that catapulted into fame a little-known rap band Gryndzholy (anglicized to GreenJolly). “Together we are many/ We cannot be overpowered,” was a reassuring refrain to the freezing crowds of protesters apprehensive about a possible violent crackdown. Placed on independent websites, downloaded into a multitude of digital music players, and played on the radio, Razom Nas Bahato helped keep up the revolutionary spirit until the protesters’ eventual triumph.16 All these phenomena notwithstanding, what seems to make the Polish case stand out is the sheer volume and diversity in the types and sources of music used to protest against the regime. Certainly, the number of institutions and organizations challenging the hegemony of the Communist Party exceeded those of Poland’s neighbors and contributed to a particularly vibrant civil society. Still, whether in authoritarian or democratic societies, protesters have to cope with a significant presence of official, authoritiesderived framing efforts designed to seek societal cohesion and reduce potential appeal of challengers.17 Not surprisingly, much of the context for framing processes in Poland was provided by the legitimacy-seeking efforts of the Communist government.

The Use of Music by the Regime In terms of the political impact of music, Poland shared some important characteristics with other Communist societies. By and large, “Communist regimes . . . have shown a distinct preference for music falling into one of two

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

294

Sounds of Resistance

categories—either triumphant, ‘progressive,’ programmatic music, or mindless, nonevocatory, ‘harmless’ music.”18 The former was abundant in Poland in the cheerful work songs of the 1940s and 1950s that extolled the efforts of the working class as it was rebuilding the country after the devastation of World War II. Broadcast on the radio and through the omnipresent public loudspeakers, the songs were filled with enthusiasm and pride about “building a new house, yet another new house, for our future, better days.”19 The enormous May Day parades organized every year to celebrate the International Labor Day were extravaganzas of colors and uplifting music—a massive yet engineered display of support for the regime, further broadcast on radio and TV.20 As for the harmless music, the state controlled the only two television and three radio channels that allowed to broadcast in the country, and most of the music presented there fell into this category. Together with the assorted song festivals—from international to domestic, including the specialized festivals of Soviet and military songs—these constituted the main public performance venues available to mainstream musicians. Since the new governing elite of Party chief Edward Gierek was eager to present itself as dynamic modernizers willing to overcome the legacy of human right abuses by the previous regimes, it expended considerable efforts to promote the songs and performers supporting that image. Soon, sequined and coiffed singers in bell-bottoms sang “how good it is to get up at daybreak” (group “2+1”), prominent artists sang at the military song festival in Kołobrzeg, “girls, don’t scrimp on giving your hearts to the soldiers” (Anna Jantar), while hits at other festivals included “I am happy with anything” (Wojciech Skowroński). While the Communist Party and its government attempted to use music and songs to help mobilize political support or at least to placate the society, the authorities also used other resources at their disposal, especially coercion and censorship, to diminish chances of serious challenges against their political and social dominance. Yet, they had to face strong cultural countercurrents from groups that fought for the preservation of what Michel Foucault called popular memory. [T]hose who are barred from writing, from producing the books themselves, from drawing up their own historical accounts . . . nevertheless do have a way of recording history, of remembering it, of keeping it fresh and using it. The popular history was, to a certain extent, even more alive, more clearly formulated in the 19th century, where, for instance, there was a whole tradition of struggles which were transmitted orally, or in writing or songs, etc.21

The main areas of contention over historical memory included the legitimacy of the current regime, especially as judged against the long history

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

These Rocks Will Roll

295

of governance in Poland, the interpretation of recent events in terms of national interests of Poland, and, consequently, feasibility of political alternatives to Communism, including other sources of legitimacy. In this regard, the oppositional messages, including songs as expressions of resistance, came mostly from the Catholic Church, worker activists, students, political cabarets, and rock musicians.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Religious Songs Much has been written about the central role of the Catholic Church in Poland’s history.22 The nation traces its history back to the introduction of Christianity, and the Church has often been seen as the repository of Polish culture during the times in which the Polish state was wiped off the map, especially throughout the partitions and foreign occupation from 1795 to 1918. The three powers that controlled the Polish territory during that time—Prussia/Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary—differed in their approaches to allowing expressions of Polish national identity but most Poles found themselves facing some form of coercive culture war with either Germanization (Kulturkampf of chancellor Otto von Bismarck) or intensive attempts at Russification. In contrast, while the Catholic rite at the time remained in Latin, religious songs provided an important vestige of Polishness that helped maintain a sense of identity that was to survive for more than 120 years (and thus several generations) for the nation without statehood. Ironically, the most popular patriotic religious hymn, Boże Coś Polskę (God Bless Poland) was initially created in 1816 as a laudatory loyalty song for the Russian czar who became the titular king of Poland after the Congress of Vienna.23 Within a few years, however, its original lyrics were converted to exclude references to the czar and provide the most widely circulated element of musical subterfuge. Every Sunday, millions of the faithful in this overwhelmingly Catholic country were to sing the invocation, “Before your altars/we bring our prayers/Bless our free Motherland, oh Lord!” However, whenever the nation felt to be under a foreign yoke, the lyrics were replaced with, “Restore our free Motherland, oh Lord!” It was devastating to the perceived legitimacy of the Communist regime that throughout its reign (1945–1989) the altered version of the hymn clearly dominated, just as it did during the Nazi occupation of the country and throughout the time of partitions. Since the Church hierarchy and local priests would have been able to prohibit this evident challenge to the government’s authority, the practice of singing the defiant version of the song reveals the position of relative

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

296

Sounds of Resistance

strength of the Church in Poland, unique among the Soviet Bloc members. Despite some ardent attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to curtail the role of religion, by the 1970s the Communists had to settle for an uneasy compromise with the Church. Not only were the nearly 90 percent of Poles the Church claimed as its members allowed to participate openly in religious rituals, but the Church became the de facto largest institutional expression of political opposition in the country. Some of the largest gatherings of people in the country not organized by the Communist authorities were the regular mass pilgrimages to the Jasna Góra shrine in Częstochowa, where religious hymns and other songs featured prominently. Until 1979, this sort of collective experience outside of the prescribed, official cultural sphere was probably the largest religious event in Eastern Europe. This was to change with the accession to papacy of the strong willed and charismatic Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Kraków in 1978, and his visit to Poland as Pope John Paul II the following year. Scrambling to respond, the government largely ceded the arrangements for the gigantic outdoor masses to the religious authorities, which developed into an unprecedented display of spiritual unity and organizational prowess of the Church. In places such as the outdoor mass at Błonia in Kraków, about a million people sang together and saw one another in the multitude of the faithful—an important experience that was to help build the collective trust needed for the nationwide wave of strikes that gave birth to the Solidarity movement in 1980. Broadcast live on state television, the Pope’s visits captivated the imagination of the national audience.24 On this and several further visits of the Pope to his home country one striking feature was the crowds of admiring youngsters, greeting the pontiff with guitars, and a rich repertoire of modern religious songs. Music became an important hallmark of this nascent cultural phenomenon as the youth movement infused new energy into the activities of academic and teenage religious circles. These became new fronts in the ideological battle for the souls of the society.

Student Protest Songs Young and critical—and still largely unaffected by the need for compromises in the political and economic reality of a Communist system—college campuses provided a natural milieu for the emergence of social and political contestation. Mostly ballads suitable for guitar accompaniment, student songs tended to find their way quickly into dormitory rooms and around campfires, especially when they were popularized through the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

These Rocks Will Roll

297

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

official and relatively liberal Student Song Festival. The songs blended the spirit of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Vladimir Vysotsky, and Bulat Okudzhava with a strong admixture of nationalistic fervor and biting irony. That patriotic passion mixed with antiauthoritarian messages was especially evident in Jacek Kaczmarski’s historical vignettes that recalled some crucial moments in Polish history and sought to teach lessons that transcended epochs.25 Yet, his most famous song, “Mury” (Walls), made him into the bard of Solidarity despite his intended criticism of revolutionary ardor. Kaczmarski found himself fascinated by “L’Estaca” (The Stake), a song by a Catalan anti-Franco artist Lluís Llach, and by its reception at concerts where a multitude of fans sang along eagerly. However, the image of a mass movement that can be carried away by emotions worried him, so Kaczmarski wrote his own lyrics that were to warn against such as possibility. Ironically, from the time when the song “Mury” was first performed in 1978, the audiences immediately latched on mostly to the refrain that seemed to exhort the listeners to form a social movement and start a rebellion: “Pull from the walls their teeth, the bars!/Break the chains, break the whip!/And the walls will fall, fall, fall/and bury the old world!” Heard from the stage of a student festival and replicated in student clubs and at private parties, the refrain acquired the power of a political manifesto. By 1980, it was practically adopted by the striking workers and their nascent labor organization, Solidarity, as the battle song against the “walls,” “chains,” and “whips” of the Communist system. Later, “Mury” served as the tune of underground Solidarity’s radio broadcasts. Swept aside in the enthusiasm was the original intent of the author: a warning against an excessive faith in one’s own righteousness. And then they saw how many they were, they felt their power and time, And with the song that the dawn is near they marched through the cities’ streets, They toppled monuments and ripped out cobblestones —This one is with us! This one against us! Who is alone is our worst enemy! Yet the singer was also alone26

In fulfillment of his foreboding, Kaczmarski’s song took on a life of its own, and agitated audiences often avoided singing the closing refrain that to the author was the very essence of the message27: He looked at the crowds’ even march/Silently, he listened to the thud of steps/And the walls grew, grew, grew/ The chain dangled by the feet.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

298

Sounds of Resistance

Jacek Kaczmarski was also perhaps the most successful imitator of the musical style and message of the Russian bard of protest songs, Vladimir Vysotsky. A particularly striking example was “Obława” (“Wolf Hunt,” or “Coursing”), his adaptation of Vysotsky’s song “Wolf Hunt.” Written in 1974, when Kaczmarski was just 17, “Obława” describes the demise of a wolf pack, torn to pieces by hounds and shot to death by hunters. Kaczmarski’s song is faster than Vysotsky’s as it races to an adrenaline-pumping, unusual guitar beat. The song presents a universal theme that made it young audiences’ favorite. Even though the hunt kills wolves of all ages, from innocent pups to a grizzled veteran, the dramatic, haunting refrain announces, “Hunt! Hunt! A hunt on young wolves!/Those wild, quick-tempered/ brought up in a dense forest!” The powerful metaphor coupled the generational solidarity of the “young and wild” with a sense of menace emanating from those in control of guns and dogs. It could not have been lost on the audience that obława in Polish also means a police round-up or manhunt. Equally potent was the final message from the narrator wolf who barely escapes, a ringing reveille to the generation: But the hunt isn’t over and the hounds are not asleep And young wolves keep dying throughout the whole wide world Don’t let yourselves be skinned! Defend yourselves too! Oh, brother wolves! Defend yourselves before you all perish!

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Obława” also includes a crucial cultural adjustment: whereas Vysotsky’s wolves are trapped because they have been acculturated not to cross a line of red flags, the metaphor would not work well within Polish reality. Kaczmarski explained: There are some fundamental differences there because, for example, I introduced hounds. Someone told me later . . . that you don’t hunt wolves with dogs because a dog would not attack a wolf.28 But I did this consciously. Unlike Vysotsky, I couldn’t use the image of a red rag above the ground that a wolf is afraid of. This metaphor was important in the Soviet Union since it referred to the inertia of those hounded down who are unable to jump over the red rag even if they lives depend on it. Instead, in Poland everyone jumped over that red rag if they wanted to or when they had to. In Poland the problem were the dogs, or relatives off the same branch, that were ready to go against their own kind.29

The government was wary of the subversive potential of young songwriters. In a secret internal report in 1981, the security police headquarters

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

These Rocks Will Roll

299

in Wrocław expressed its concern that “antisocialist activists will attempt to control and dominate the young literary circles and the culture-creating youth in order to create a foundation for future antisocialist activities,” and that there will be an increase in “attempts to eliminate the influence of censorship on their artistic work.”30 Aside from the conspiracy theory, these fears proved rather prescient.

Workers’ Songs

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

If the Communist Party was uneasy about university students singing rebellious though reflective songs about the human condition, its most serious ideological and strategic dilemma was how to treat expressions of workers’ solidarity and collective demands. After all, the party—formally known as the Polish United Workers’ Party—had “workers” in its name and it fashioned itself as the defender and promoter of interests of the proletariat. Yet, that image was routinely doubted and periodically challenged by the very proletariat, such as in the waves of worker protest in 1956, 1970, 1976, 1980, and 1988. With much of the original postwar enthusiasm long gone and much of high expectations of progress and prosperity dampened by the less rosy reality, the Communist Party had to struggle to retain the loyalty of its purported class base. When the striking workers of Szczecin marched on the local Party headquarters during the street confrontations in December 1970, they burst into song. First came the national anthem, and then, just like the East German protesters in 1953, they instinctively reverted to the songs of earlier generations of revolutionaries. We were told through a bullhorn that we are to turn back. But from up front came the call that we are walking ahead. So we all moved forward, singing The Internationale. We walked for a few meters. Then through the bullhorn came a warning that they were going to use guns.31

Besides The Internationale, the international proletarian anthem, they also sang a World War II–era Communist guerrilla battle song and traditional Polish revolutionary songs, such as the “On to the Barricades (you working people).” Even in the heat of the moment, it would be impossible to miss the absurdity of the Communist government’s violent suppression of people whose songs were calling on all to “raise high the red banner!” The sense of proletarian identity was not always the primary identification of protesters, as the relative importance of The Internationale and the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

300

Sounds of Resistance

national anthem, the “Dąbrowski Mazurka,” illustrates. The national anthem was sung very frequently, usually at major events. It provided a much needed boost to striking workers during their negotiations with the regime, such as those led by Lech Wałęsa in Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. Wałęsa often used it to tap into the sense of national pride, evidently intended to deny legitimacy to the “less-Polish” regime, and to rally Poles regardless of their class affiliations. He intoned the anthem’s “Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła” (Poland hasn’t perished yet) upon announcing the strikers’ triumph in Gdańsk, and whenever he needed a sense of common interest to prevail over hotheads in the crowd.32 But the anthem also characteristically trumped The Internationale when the latter was appropriated by the regime. During the August 1980 sit-in strikes in Gdańsk, the delegates to the interfactory strike committee listened in to a radio transmission of a potentially important Party meeting. Yet, when that broadcast meeting ended with a traditional singing of The Internationale, the striking workers overcame their weariness and jumped to their feet to drown it out with their rendition of the national anthem, clearly as a counterpoint to the proletarian song.33 Revolutionary situations were also natural settings for new songs to emerge. Usually set to well-known tunes—whether older battle songs, traditional folk tunes, or simply current pop music—those spontaneously created songs provided a running commentary on the unfolding events. For example, World War II–era ballads lent their tunes to new songs chronicling the clashes in Szczecin in 1970–1971. One boasted, “On December 17 of that fateful year/the shipyard went against the palace of Fatty/They burned down his armchair, burned down the carpets/He was left with charred ruins and some fences around.”34 Another warned and called out for worker solidarity: “Don’t get yourselves captured, shipyard workers/You the Steelworks and the Conglomerate/bring help to shipyard workers.”35 Yet another one boldly stated, “Poles are not afraid of truncheons or tanks,” and the fresh crop of martyrs received a quiet recognition in the somber warning, “Tomorrow . . . someone will remember that Stach or Jerzy used to work here.”36 Probably the most famous song born during the rebellious antigovernmental working-class protests was “The Ballad of Janek Wiśniewski,” also known as “The Ballad of Janek from Gdynia” (“Ballada o Janku Wiśniewskim; Ballada o Janku z Gdyni”). It was based on a real-life event in Gdynia in December 1970 when the military opened fire at unarmed workers arriving to work after several days of violent clashes. Outraged workers picked up the body of an 18-year-old Zbigniew Godlewski and carried him downtown on a door used as stretchers. The striking image inspired a local architect, Krzysztof Dowgiałło, to write the lyrics using a generic name “Janek Wiśniewski” since he did not know the name of the victim.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

These Rocks Will Roll

301

The story of the ballad is typical of other worker battle songs in that it remained unknown outside of that milieu for some 10 years until the next wave of protest that brought “Gierek’s decade” to a radical halt. Then, during the sit-in strikes in the summer of 1980, striking workers used the factories’ public announcement systems to circulate and popularize their older and new songs. “The Ballad of Janek Wiśniewski,” with music composed by Mieczysław Cholewa, gained much fame as it spoke to the consciousness of the working class for whom the memory of the 1970 events was sometimes dormant but often still raw: They carried him on a door through Świętojańska Street Against cops, against tanks Boys from the shipyard, avenge your comrade Janek Wiśniewski fell

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

One is wounded, another beaten The bandits [police] from Słupsk desired blood It’s the party that shoots at workers Janek Wiśniewski fell.37

As in so many other forms of symbolic communication, the lyrics carried many connotations easy deciphered by the listeners. And like many other revolutionary songs, it called for revenge and threatened the perpetrators with vengeance (“Just wait you scoundrel; we will get you,” directed at the local Party official). It also framed the death of “Janek” in terms of lofty goals and ideals: “Don’t cry, mothers, it’s not for naught/That there is a black bow on the shipyard banner/For bread and freedom, and a new Poland/ Janek Wiśniewski fell.” The ballad came to national and even international fame after Krystyna Janda sang its altered, dramatic version in the closing scenes of Andrzej Wajda’s award-winning 1981 film about the birth of Solidarity, the Man of Iron. The composer of the music, Cholewa, performed the song (as “The Ballad of Janek from Gdynia”) at hundreds of venues, and audio tapes of these performances circulated throughout the country.38 The most prominent of those concerts was the Review of Truthful Songs—The Forbidden Songs39 (Przegląd Piosenki Prawdziwej—Zakazane Piosenki) in August 1981, an independent festival where the ballad became the opening motif on each of the three days. Nevertheless, together with the crucial First Congress of Solidarity, held just two weeks later, the festival left few doubts among the ruling elite that the formidable ideological challenge would need to be met with a crackdown. When that crackdown came in the form of martial law on December

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

302

Sounds of Resistance

13, 1981, most Solidarity leaders and many activists found themselves arrested and placed in “internment camps” throughout the country—over 10,000 people in all.40 Soon, those sites became the new centers of independent songwriting as the prisoners again used well-known tunes as well as original music to create new protest songs. Smuggled out of the prisons as text as well as on audio cassettes, some of them made rounds among Solidarity supporters and into underground radio stations’ broadcasts. The theme of revenge occurred frequently. Activists interned in Rzeszów-Załęże used Szara Piechota, an old tune of the Polish Legions from World War I, to sing “We Don’t Want Commies” (“Nie chcemy komuny”) and threaten “the red rabble”: “Since Yalta this Soviet nightmare continues and grows stronger each year/Don’t be afraid of struggle, line up today, the red rabble is in front of you . . . Poland, it’s time to draft up the bill for your wounds, let the red rabble pay.”41 Another war-time melody served to convey the sense of betrayal and a promise of revenge in a song titled simply “December 13th”: “Black death visited the coal mines at the criminal command of Mr. General . . . The nation remembers you, Mr. General, have no illusions, history will take you to account.”42 References to the killings and “pacification” of striking coal miners and other workers as the police and military took over the occupied plants also continued in the tradition of worker ballads.43 Quite characteristically, Solidarity’s “pirate” radio stations readily tapped into the symbolism of songs, both traditional songs of resistance and the contemporary ones. Particularly popular on the air—and also frequently broadcast by the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe broadcasting in Polish from Germany—were songs by Jacek Kaczmarski and Jan Pietrzak, a representative of another genre: political cabaret.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Political Cabaret If Kaczmarski’s songs inspired to action and warned against complacency, few songs packed the emotionally charged dose of patriotic pride of Jan Pietrzak’s “Żeby Polska była Polską” (“So that Poland be Poland”). Often interpreted in English as “Let Poland be Poland,” the song became well known when it lent its title to a major international television event in 1982, created by the United States Information Agency to protest the introduction of martial law in Poland, and headlined by President Reagan and a host of celebrities. Quiet and reflective in nature, the song itself is a series of images from pivotal times in Polish history that highlight the suffering and perseverance of the nation facing adversity. Its primary appeal rested on the assertion of a long and proud national tradition—by far exceeding its

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

These Rocks Will Roll

303

Communist-dominated period. It also included a brief tribute to the role of patriotic songs in maintaining the Polish identity and aspirations for independence: “By the bonfires there kept erupting an indomitable native tune/ So that Poland, so that Poland, so that Poland be Poland!” Before this song “erupted by the bonfires” and earned its writer the grand prize at the 1981 Opole festival, it started in the very private setting of a political “Kabaret Pod Egidą” (Cabaret under the Aegis) in Warsaw. The cabaret gathered largely intelligentsia audiences eager to hear witty jokes and intelligent songs poking fun at the social and political reality of the time. Even though it was subject to censorship and investigation by the security police, the cabaret was allowed some artistic license. During the strikes of 1980, it turned out that “So that Poland be Poland” had been widely circulating throughout the country and duplicated numerous times from one audio cassette to another. Striking workers played it over their plants’ public announcement systems to an enthusiastic reception and immediate singing along. As antigovernment protests spread, Pietrzak traveled between numerous venues. “So that Poland be Poland” became an oft-repeated motto of the movement and even found its way into the official documents of the Solidarity trade union.44 Then, with the imposition of martial law, Pietrzak was curtly told by the military authorities that the time for the song was up: “we are now taking care of Poland.”45 Still, as mentioned above, his song remained very much alive, thanks to clandestine networks and Radio Free Europe broadcasts.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

A Musical Martial law also cut short the circulation of Kolęda-nocka (Nighttime Carol), a musical by Ernest Bryll and Wojciech Trzciński that debuted in December 1980, just a few months into the existence of Solidarity. The musical used the Christmas theme and rock music to depict various aspects of recent history and current concerns of its audience. The Christmas story was powerfully updated. For example, Mary has to give birth to Jesus in a staircase of a block since the family has been waiting in vain for its own apartment for many years. The most striking fragment of the performance quickly became a hit of its own. The “Psalm of Those Standing in Line” used the most pervasive fact of life in the shortage-ridden economy—waiting in lines to obtain basic supplies—as a pretext for a broader social commentary. “Za czym kolejka ta stoi?” (What is this line for?), a singer asks in a grammatically incorrect but popular vernacular. “For grayness!” the choir responds. “What are you waiting for in this line? For old age! What are you going to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

304

Sounds of Resistance

buy once you get there? Tiredness! What are you going to bring home? A stony doubt!” This disheartening allegory would be devastating but the frustration reaches a crescendo with a powerful call to keep courage: “Be like a rock, stand, persevere!/One day these rocks will stir/and will roll down like an avalanche/through the night, through the night, through the night.” No wonder that the military regime banned the performances as soon as it took power, but it was soon to face mass street demonstrations signaling that the time of rolling rocks had come.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Rock Music As in Kolęda-nocka, the stark contrast between the official propaganda of success and the bleak reality proved to be a constant irritant that made its way into lyrics of rock songs, such as this one: “Yesterday again you saw on the news/an agitated crowd of tired people . . . The anchorman delivered harsh words/from which a sudden anger rose/And a fury started springing up in you/until you thought: enough of silence” (Lombard: Przeżyj to sam). As Polish youth were increasingly able to travel abroad and bring home some acquired musical tastes as well as modern instruments, they put the phrase “enough of silence” to immediate use on stages of numerous rock concerts. This domain was to be uniquely theirs. The importance of rock (and later also reggae) music in Eastern Europe as an expression of social discontent has generated some scholarly interest.46 Vaclav Havel, himself an ardent rock aficionado, observed that the Communist governments’ attempts to control their societies meant that “anything from a rock group to a concert to a mass became political.”47 However, with some rare exceptions, such as the “turbofolk” that nationalist Serb authorities were able to use to arouse xenophobic frenzy among their compatriots,48 rock music tended to be a realm largely autonomous of the government. Pedro Ramet observes that because “rock lyrics . . . displayed a consistent and unmitigated subjectivity, refusing to cater to political parties or programs . . . [they] tended to be either egocentric or critical of social policy,” and therefore, “[a]s a musical form, rock [was] generally considered harmful by East European communist elites.”49 Some of the appeal of rock was universal: the rhythmic and captivating music, concerts that imposed few constraints on wild behavior, lyrics that connected with the audience, and enough antics to alienate the older generation. Yet, for the Polish youngsters rock also offered additional incentives—rock concerts were colorful, apparently unscripted, and in many ways exact opposite of their grey, everyday reality. At the legendary Jarocin

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

These Rocks Will Roll

305

Rock Festival, a Mecca for nonconformist youth and rock performers, an admirer noted that, “there were no indifferent lyrics, there were no lyrics about b.s.; they all were unusually wise, engaged, talking about the pain of an individual against the backdrop of totalitarianism, and it was being directed to people who immediately understood it.”50 Attempts at breaking the ceiling of official and unofficial restrictions came with a price. For example, punk rock band Dezerter was originally to be named “SS-20” after the Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missile but concert organizers would not hear of it, afraid that this name would be seen as too confrontational by the authorities.51 Similarly, in early 1982 a popular punk band Brygada Kryzys (“Crisis” Brigade) was pressured to accept the abbreviation of their name to “Brygada K.” since the officials did not like the negative connotations of the full name. When they refused, they could get no invitations to perform anywhere, and had to disband.52 Another band, Maanam, found its music banned from the radio after it refused to entertain an international Communist youth gathering in Warsaw.53 Sometimes the audiences seized the initiative and inserted their own lyrics into popular songs. Such was the case with the hit “I Would Like to be Myself ” (Chciałbym Być Sobą) by the band Perfect. It quickly became known as “We Want to be Ourselves” (Chcemy Być Sobą) when enthusiastic crowds took ownership of this expression of generational angst and yearnings by singing along at concerts. Even though rock fans tended to come to those concerts to forget about their everyday reality, it never was too far from the surface. After a few months of violent clashes with the hated riot police ZOMO under the martial law in 1981 and 1982, politics burst onto the stage during Perfect’s concert in Warsaw. Instead of their customary “we want to be ourselves,” the audience now roared, “we want to beat up ZOMO.”54 Perfect went along with the theme, titling its next record UNU after the letters reserved for license numbers of military vehicles patrolling Polish streets. Some songs on the record included transparent allusions to the new martial situation: “A hundred green people descended on land/and their commander growled aloud” (Co za hałas, co za szum). For all performers, censorship was a constant threat since all lyrics had to be preapproved by a special office. The writers, as well as their audiences, honed their skills in exchanging veiled meanings between the lines. When the British punk rock vocalist Charlie Harper visited Poland in 1983 and read some lyrics by the band Republika, he sighted: “You are so lucky here. I write any way I want to, nobody is going to pull it out. But you are forced to dabble in poetry.”55 Others counted on their luck and generational differences by agreeing to remove “questionable” sections demanded

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

306

Sounds of Resistance

by the censor but then performing the original version anyway. Krzysztof Grabowski from the punk rock band Dezerter, explained, It was our assumption that either we sing what we want or we don’t sing at all. Even if a censor came to the concert, as was sometimes the case, as long as someone did not say in-between the songs “down with Communism,” but sang it, then the censor did not hear it. They did not know how to listen to this kind of music.56

At the Jarocin Rock Festival, another prime target of security police and censors, the band T. Love was formally prohibited in 1984 from singing this refrain of its song, “Upbringing”: “You need to love and respect your Motherland/Not to trample on the flag and spit at the national emblem/You have to trust and believe in something/To love your Motherland and not to spit at the national emblem.” Since the Communists removed the royal crown from Poland’s emblem, the reference was too much for the censor. Still, in the end, the band performed the full version.57

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Conclusions Before there was Solidarity, before KOR, the “round table,” and the collapse of the Soviet system—there was a song. A whole avalanche of songs, to be precise, and this chapter has attempted a brief overview of this rich field. Even though the various genres had been created in rather different milieus, their cumulative effect should not be overlooked. The songs of protest started the process of digging a hole under the edifice of the political system that had allowed little room for other forms of protest. They routinely challenged the government’s presumption of its sole proprietorship of cultural symbols and communications, and questioned the legitimacy of the system, its likely longevity, or whether its existence was indeed inevitable within the context of the long history of the Polish nation and its culture. Created from the typical position of weakness, these songs were the tools of the powerless. Like other “weapons of the weak”58—from jokes to acts of disrespect—they denied legitimacy of the regime and helped redirect people’s emotions and sense of self-worth or self-identity away from the Communist propaganda and ideals. In fact, they helped create the new sense of identity, one that transcended “sectarian” divisions of music genres. By performing the songs and listening to them, as well as copying cassettes, and singing along or later singing in a circle of friends—people

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

These Rocks Will Roll

307

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

performed hundreds of thousands of acts of courage. Social divisions notwithstanding, few people were exposed just to one of the music genres. Collectively, the songs provided a growing number of new points of reference, metaphors, and common symbols. In terms of collective action framing theory, most songs discussed here provided plenty of illustrations of injustice and defined the social forces responsible for it. Whether in the sharp lyrics of internment camp ballads or in Kaczmarski’s metaphors of bloody hounds serving their masters, the multitude of songs blamed the Polish Communist Party for serving interests other than those of the Polish society. Frequent recollections of Poland’s past glories increased the sense of common identity, while the litanies of present-day suffering helped highlight common interests and a sense of injustice. “So that Poland be Poland” constitutes perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate the yearning of most of the nation; knocking down constraining walls and breaking whips mobilized listeners to fight where struggle was needed, while “being like a rock” gave encouragement to live through everyday ignominies. All these elements are crucial when it comes to creating trust. Trust, in turn, is what lowers the fear of participation and propels individuals to take the risk of acting collectively, which was so important to societal mobilization in 1980 and to maintaining a sense of continuity throughout the 1980s. The wave of strikes in 1980 and its aftereffects throughout the following decade helped create a tectonic shift in Poland in ways that earlier similar events did not. The traditional major preoccupation and nightmare of the Communist Party—an oppositional alliance between workers and intellectuals (including students)—was prevented in 1968 and in 1970. Yet, in 1980 such an alliance did emerge. One important difference was the rise of the common understanding of shared interests and values, manifested through a variety of channels, including the humble songs of defiance.

Notes 1. William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (1986), 464–81. 2. Francesca Polletta, “Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements,” Qualitative Sociology 21, no. 4 (1998), 421. 3. Gamson, Talking Politics, 32. 4. Ibid., 29.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

308

Sounds of Resistance

5. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” in International Social Movement Research, Vol. 1, From Structure to Action: Comparing Movement Participants Across Cultures, eds. Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988), 197–217. 6. R. Serge Denisoff, “Protest Songs: Those on the Top Forty and Those of the Streets,” American Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1970), 818–20. 7. Paul D. Sanders, Lyrics and Borrowed Tunes of the American Temperance Movement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006). 8. For example, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written to the melody of a British song of merriment “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and “America” was set to the tune of the British “God Save the King/Queen.” 9. Sanders, 259. 10. For a comprehensive review, see Marek Payerhin and Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh, “On Movement Frames and Negotiated Identities: the Case of Poland’s First Solidarity Congress,” Social Movement Studies 5, no. 2 (2006), 91–115. 11. Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12. Gareth Dale, “ ‘Like Wildfire’: The East German Rising of June 1953,” Debatte: Review of Contemporary German Affairs 11, no. 2 (2003), 142. 13. Fredo Arias-King, “Orange People: A Brief History of Transnational Liberation Networks in East Central Europe,” Demokratizatsiya 15, no. 1 (2007), 62. 14. Marju Lauristin and Peeter Vihalemm, Return to the Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian Post-Communist Transition (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 1997), 88, cited in Alan J. Brokaw and Marianne A. Brokaw, “Identity Marketing: The Case of the Singing Revolution,” Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing 8, no. 4 (2001), 26. 15. Bohdan Klid, “The Orange Revolution: ‘The Longest Rock Concert in History’,” The Ukrainian Weekly 73, no. 48 (2005), 5. 16. Matthew J. Duffy, “Code Orange: How the Internet, Cell Phones and New Technologies Helped Shape the Ukrainian Revolution of 2004,” Atlanta Review of Journalism History 9 (2010), 69–84; Mariya Vlad, “GreenJolly and their Hit Song on Maydan and at the Eurovision Song Contest,” Welcome to Ukraine (2005), http://www.wumag.kiev.ua/index2.php?param=pgs20052/98. The song later became Ukraine’s entry into the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest. 17. For example, Gitlin found that in the antiwar movement of the 1960s in the United States, mainstream media tended to rely heavily on government sources for information and disparaged the movement in a variety of ways—Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 18. Pedro Ramet, “Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany,” World Politics: A Quarterly Journal of International Relations 37, no. 1 (1984), 91. 19. “Budujemy nowy dom” in Loch Camelot, “Śpiewać Jak Dawniej—Piosenki z Czasów PRL,” gazeta.pl, http://krakow.gazeta.pl/krakow/1,35796,3317473.html# ixzz1T8bu29Ah (accessed July 25, 2011).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

These Rocks Will Roll

309

20. Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 21. Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 123 (emphasis added). 22. See, for example, Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol. 2: 1795 to the Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Kubik, The Power of Symbols; Neal Paese, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: the Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). 23. Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, “Boże Coś Polskę,” http://dziedzictwo. ekai.pl/text.show?id=435 (accessed June 14, 2011). 24. See Kubik, The Power of Symbols. 25. For an extensive discussion of historical references in Kaczmarski’s songs, see Krzysztof Gajda and Michał Traczyk, Zostały Jeszcze Pieśni: Jacek Kaczmarski Wobec Tradycji (Warsaw: MG, 2010). 26. These lyrics, like all in the chapter, are translated from Polish by the author. 27. Jacek Kaczmarski, “Mury,” http://www.kaczmarski.art.pl/tworczosc/za powiedzi/mury.php (accessed June 11, 2011). 28. Kaczmarski’s informer was likely incorrect since the use of “wolfhounds” for hunt coursing was fairly routine in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. 29. Jacek Kaczmarski, “Obława,” http://www.kaczmarski.art.pl/tworczosc/ zapowiedzi/oblawa.php (accessed July 1, 2011). 30. Wojewódzki Urząd Spraw Wewnętrznych in Wrocław, Charakterystyka Kontrwywiadowcza z Grudnia 1980 r. Oraz Uzupełnienia Charakterystyk Za Rok 1981—Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN)—Archive File IPN WR 053/2126. 31. Małgorzata Szejnert and Tomasz Zalewski, Szczecin: Grudzień, Sierpień, Grudzień (London: Aneks, 1986), 38. 32. The Birth of Solidarity: The Gdańsk Negotiations, 1980, trans. A. Kemp-Welch (London: Macmillan, 1983), 275, 433. 33. Dionizy Smoleń, “Tłum Czy Społeczność Zorganizowana? Strajkujący w Stoczni Gdańskiej w Sierpniu 1980,” in Solidarność w Ruchu 1980–1981, ed. Marcin Kula (Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2000), 199. 34. Szejnert and Zalewski, Szczecin: Grudzień, Sierpień, Grudzień, 36. “Fatty” was the local party secretary. 35. Ibid., 49. 36. Ibid., 60–61. 37. “Kazik Ballada o Janku Wiśniewskim,” http://teksty.org/kazik,balladao-janku-wisniewskim,tekst-piosenki (accessed April 20, 2013). The English translation is my own. 38. The complexity of the political situation at the time was revealed more than two decades later, when Mieczysław Cholewa admitted that he had been a secret police collaborator throughout the period (Roman Daszczyński, “Agent SB Przeprasza Bogdana Borusewicza,” gazeta.pl, http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/ Wiadomosci/1,80273,2546256.html [accessed June 15, 2011]).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

310

Sounds of Resistance

39. Another symbolic reference, since a classic movie by this title depicted the Polish underground songs used during the Nazi occupation of the country in World War II. 40. Jerzy Holzer and Krzysztof Leski, “Solidarność” w Podziemiu (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1990). 41. Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN), “Pieśni Internowanych,” http://ipn. gov.pl/portal/pl/846/15447 (accessed June 12, 2011). Szara piechota, in turn, also used an older tune. 42. Ibid. 43. See 13grudnia81.pl, “Muzyka,” http://13grudnia81.pl/portal/sw/713/6656/ Muzyka.html (accessed June 5, 2011). 44. Marcin Kula, ed., Solidarność w Ruchu 1980–1981 (Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 2000), 71. 45. Jan Pietrzak, “Prawda w Żartach Zawarta. Z Janem Pietrzakiem, Twórcą Kabaretu Pod Egidą Rozmawia Patrycja Gruszyńska-Ruman,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (July 2008), 11–17. 46. See, for example, Arias-King, “Orange People”; Taras Kuzio, “Civil Society, Youth and Societal Mobilization in Democratic Revolutions,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39, no. 3 (2006), 365–86; Ramet, “Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany”; Jim Riordan, “Soviet Youth: Pioneers of Change,” Soviet Studies 40, no. 4 (1988), 556–72; Larry Rohter, “Musicians Who Poked at the Iron Curtain,” New York Times, November 9, 2009, 1; Tomasz Zarycki, “Cultural Capital and the Political Orientations of the Younger Generation of the Russian and Polish Intelligentsia,” Russian Education & Society 51, no. 2 (2009), 3–43. 47. Arias-King, “Orange People,” 62. 48. Ibid.; Eric D. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999). 49. Ramet, “Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany,” 91. 50. Jerzy Owsiak in Beats of Freedom—Zew Wolności, dir. Leszek Gnoiński and Wojciech Słota (Adam Mickiewicz Institute and TVN S.A., 2010). 51. Leszek Gnoiński and Wojciech Słota, dir., Historia Polskiego Rocka (Discovery Historia Channel, 2008). 52. Ibid. 53. Gnoiński and Słota, Beats of Freedom—Zew Wolności. 54. Kamil Wicik, “Chcemy Bić ZOMO,” Polskie Radio, http://www. polskieradio.pl/9/325/Artykul/218669,Chcemy-bic-ZOMO-Kamil-Wicik (accessed May 30, 2011). 55. Zbigniew Krzywański in Gnoiński and Słota, Beats of Freedom—Zew Wolności. 56. Ibid. 57. Muzeum Regionalne w Jarocinie, “Znalezisko,” Muzeum Regionalne w Jarocinie, http://www.muzeumjarocin.pl/index.php?strona=znalezisko (accessed May 30, 2011). 58. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 15

Return of the Vagabond Cui Jian and China’s Democracy Movement Carlos Rojas

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“I’ll give you my dreams, and also my freedom. . . . ” The barely audible strains of a song oozed from the restaurant speakers. “Great lyrics,” some guy sitting behind us said to his dinner companion. “Just hearing them makes my hair stand on end.” —Wang Shuo, Playing For Thrills

Regarded as the godfather of Chinese rock, Cui Jian is a figure riddled in contradictions. Despite being almost synonymous with China’s early underground rock scene, he is now one of the nation’s most recognizable musicians. Despite being closely identified with political dissent, he has been generally tolerated by a government notoriously intolerant of protesters. Despite being a symbol of political and institutional iconoclasm, he has nevertheless emerged as a quintessential cultural icon in his own right. A paradigmatic symbol of both political dissent and of the cultural establishment, Cui Jian dramatizes many of the deep fissures that run through contemporary China. Some of these tensions are visible in the early reception of what is perhaps Cui Jian’s most famous song, “Nothing to My Name,” which became the informal anthem of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in Spring of 1989. The protests had begun in late April, initiated by college students mourning the death of the proreform political figure Hu Yaobang. Over the next several weeks, the protests grew quickly to include tens of thousands of protesters assembled in cities throughout China, as the ideological focus of the demonstrations also expanded to embrace a variety of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

312

Sounds of Resistance

causes including political reform. Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” was enthusiastically embraced by the Tiananmen Square protesters, who regularly played it over loudspeakers and sang it themselves. The protests were brought to an abrupt end in the early morning of June 4, when the People’s Liberation Army moved into the Square. Although Tiananmen Square itself was almost empty by the time the military arrived, many protesters and other citizens were killed or wounded in other parts of the city. This forcible evacuation of the Square was then followed by a systematic persecution of many of those who had been involved with the protests. Curiously, though, Cui Jian, despite having been a vocal supporter of the protesters and emblematically associated with the movement, survived the subsequent crackdown relatively unscathed. After maintaining a low profile for the remainder of the year, in early 1990 he was given permission to launch a major nationwide tour in which he performed works from his 1989 album Rock and Roll and the New Long March, including the album’s most famous song, “Nothing to My Name.” We find a rather different appropriation of the same song in Wang Shuo’s novel Playing for Thrills, also from 1989. A native Beijinger who began writing fiction in the mid-1980s, Wang Shuo quickly became one of contemporary China’s most popular and successful authors, known for his distinctive brand of hooligan fiction focusing on disillusioned urban youth. In Playing for Thrills, there is a scene in which an unidentified couple in a restaurant is idly discussing Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name,” which happens to be playing over the loudspeakers. The lyrics feature a first-person narrator earnestly promising his presumptively female companion his “dreams” and his “freedom” as he entreats her to run off with him. Upon hearing these lyrics, the man in the restaurant remarks half-ironically to his female companion, “Great lyrics. . . . Just hearing them makes my hair stand on end. . . . and also my freedom—that’s so stirring. When you go that far, what else is there to give? If I were in his place, I’d give you my democratic rights and earnings.” The companion replies coldly, “I don’t need those. Give them to someone who really wants them”— implicitly echoing the response of the woman in the song, who repeatedly responds to the narrator’s urgent entreaties with a dismissive laugh.1 If the association of “Nothing to My Name” with the 1989 democracy protests suggests that Cui Jian’s work carries progressive political implications, Wang Shuo’s allusion to the same song in his 1989 novel presents Cui Jian’s work in a rather different light. While the Tiananmen Square democracy protests may be seen as a high point in progressive political activism during the post-Mao era, Wang Shuo’s fiction was arguably emblematic of an inverse, deeply apolitical, trend during the same period. The first major

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Return of the Vagabond

313

contemporary Chinese author to forsake the State-sponsored national and local Writers’ Associations and instead rely entirely on actual sales revenue for income, Wang Shuo symbolized a move toward a market-oriented approach to cultural production. Just as Wang Shuo’s fiction explores the underbelly of the government’s enthusiastic promotion of economic development and cultural liberalization in the post-Mao era, his fictional appropriation of Cui Jian’s most famous song in Playing for Thrills points to the (a)political implications of Wang’s literary project itself. Even as the unidentified man in the restaurant points to the song’s political resonances, his female companion replies dismissively, but in doing so she implicitly suggests that a renunciation of politics, in a contemporary Chinese context, may well be a perceived as a deeply political act in its own right. This question of the relationship between an embrace and renunciation of politics is one that haunts Cui Jian’s own work. At first glance, the contrast between these two nearly contemporary citations of Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” is striking. Even as the Tiananmen Square protesters foregrounded the song’s progressive political resonances, the characters in Wang Shuo’s novel used the same work to articulate a broader cynicism about the very possibility of political idealism. What both examples share, however, is that they are products of a sort of ventriloquism, a strategic appropriation of someone else’s words for potentially divergent purposes. Just as the student protesters in Tiananmen were using Cui Jian’s song as a vehicle for articulating their own frustrations and aspirations, the anonymous couple in Wang Shuo’s novel (and, by extension, even Wang Shuo himself) is using the same song to voice a rather more cynical perspective on the very idea of “democratic rights.” I argue that the significance of Cui Jian’s work lies not merely in the surface meaning of his lyrics, but rather in the interplay between the lyrics of his songs and the ways in which they have been ventriloquistically appropriated in different contexts. Seen as perlocutionary utterances, Cui Jian’s songs come to assume a dynamic, protean existence, wherein their political significance often lies not so much in what is explicitly contained within the lyrics themselves, but rather in how the works are being cited and used. Below, I examine several discrete moments from Cui Jian’s career, anchoring my discussion in analyses of specific songs. While my approach is primarily textual, in each case I focus on the ways in which the lyrics speak to the ways in which Cui Jian’s work has itself been used. In other words, I use a textual approach precisely in order to argue that the songs’ political implications lie not in the literal meaning of the lyrics, but rather in the ways in which the songs themselves have been appropriated—including by

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

314

Sounds of Resistance

Cui Jian himself. It is in this process of ventriloquistic citation and appropriation that we find the true political, apolitical, and politically apolitical stakes of Cui Jian’s career and oeuvre.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Nothing to My Name” Born in 1961 to parents who were both ethnically Korean performers (his father, who is from China, was a professional trumpet player, and his mother, who is herself from Korea, was a member of a Korean dance troupe), Cui Jian began playing trumpet at the age of 14, and in 1981 he joined the Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra. Given that Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening-Up Campaign, launched in 1978, enabled a general loosening of Maoist-era economic and cultural strictures, consumers in the 1980s, therefore, had much greater access to Western cultural products, and artists were granted considerable latitude to develop new forms of expression. It was during this period that Cui Jian, inspired by songs by artists like John Denver and groups like Simon and Garfunkel, began teaching himself to play guitar. Other groups that would influence the development of his musical taste included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Police, and Talking Heads. In 1984, Cui Jian and several fellow musicians founded a band called Qihe ban, or Seven-Ply Board, for which Cui played guitar and was also the lead singer, and later that same year they released their first tape, entitled Return of the Vagabond. Cui Jian soon began writing his own lyrics, with his first song being “It’s Not That I Don’t Understand.” His break-out work didn’t come until two years later, with “Nothing to My Name,” which he debuted at a May 1986 concert in Beijing commemorating the Year of World Peace. Sung in Cui Jian’s distinctively rough, course voice, “Nothing to My Name” opens with the speaker trying to convince his companion to run off with him, to which she responds with casual nonchalance, laughing at the fact that he has “nothing to his name”: “Nothing to My Name” (lyrics, music, and performance by Cui Jian) I used to ask repeatedly, when will you run off with me? But you always just laugh at me —Nothing to my name. I want to give you my dreams and give you my freedom. But you just laugh at me

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Return of the Vagabond

315

—Nothing to my name. Oh . . . When will you run off with me?2

The second stanza echoes the first, with the narrator asking himself why his companion continues laughing at him, and why he nevertheless “continue[s] pursuing [his] dreams.” In the third and final stanza, however, the tone of the song shifts abruptly, as the narrator tells his companion his “final request.”

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

I tell you I’ve been waiting for a long time, I tell you about my final request I want to grasp your hand, And take you with me. Right now your hands are trembling, Right now your tears are falling Can it be that you are telling me that you love me? Nothing to my name Oh . . . When will you run off with me?

Although on the surface this “final request” appears to merely echo the earlier ones, this time the woman responds emotionally, hands trembling and tears running down her face. An emotional bond appears to have finally been established between the two, though the precise reasons for the bond are not specified within the lyrics themselves. As Andrew Jones notes in his 1992 study of China’s contemporary music scene, Cui Jian has repeatedly denied that “Nothing to My Name” has any political connotations, and specifically that the phrase “I have nothing” is meant to be “equivalent to ‘we have no freedom and democracy.’”3 And yet, the popularity of the song among the Beijing democracy protesters in the Spring of 1989 suggests that the work had genuine political ramifications. Not only did Cui Jian himself perform the song for the protesters, Wu’er Kaixi, one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests, claimed that Cui Jian had an even greater influence on the protests than did such prominent dissidents as Fang Lizhi and Wei Jingsheng, and he adds that “Nothing to My Name” “serves to reflect the sense of loss and the disorientation of Chinese youth.”4 Noting these tensions between Cui Jian’s own statements about the song’s meaning and the ways in which the work was understood by others, Jones concludes that “that authorial intent may well be beside the point.”5 Questions of authorial intent notwithstanding, the larger “point” may well be that the true significance of the work, or any

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

316

Sounds of Resistance

work, lies in the ways in which it is being performed, or cited, in different contexts. In addition to “Nothing to My Name,” another song that Cui Jian performed for the Tiananmen Square protests in Spring of 1989 was one that he composed for the occasion. Entitled “Opportunists,” the song describes how the democracy protesters initially discovered this “opportunity” to express themselves: “Opportunists” (lyrics, music, and performance by Cui Jian) Suddenly an opportunity arises Everything was empty and aimless just like when our mothers gave birth to us it is not like we said we were willing.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

What, in the end, was this opportunity? At first it is not entirely clear, but the movement is already unfolding swiftly and decisively, and seriously.6

The song’s refrain is “Oh,. . . . now that we have this opportunity, we should display our desire/Oh,. . . . now that we have this opportunity, we should display our strength.” As Andrew Jones notes, this was the first song in which Cui Jian “strays from his uncompromising individualism by adopting the collective pronoun ‘we’ instead of a singular ‘I.’ ”7 This gesture of political camaraderie— and the fact that the song was composed specifically to be performed for the protesters—is partially undercut, however, by Cui Jian’s decision to use the term “opportunists.” As is true of its English equivalent, the Chinese term for opportunists, or toujifenzi, carries pejorative connotations, implying that one is tactically using a certain situation to further one’s own interests rather than acting strictly on principle. This suggestion of opportunism raises two issues. On one hand, Cui Jian’s gesture of rhetorically identifying with the protesters appears double edged, in that he is simultaneously criticizing them even as he appears to be celebrating their efforts. On the other hand, one might also argue that there is actually no necessary contradiction between the song’s title and its pronominal subject position—in that Cui Jian’s identification with the protesters actually does extend to the fact that he, too, was an opportunist, cannily capitalizing on fortuitous developments such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests so as to help further his own career. By this logic, in underscoring the protesters’ opportunism, Cui Jian is implicitly also drawing attention to his own—not only in terms of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Return of the Vagabond

317

his strategic alliance with the protesters in the Spring of 1989, but also his subsequent insistence that works like “Nothing to My Name” do not carry any political connotations.

“A Piece of Red Cloth” Only six months after the military crackdown that brought an abrupt end to the Tiananmen Square protests, Cui Jian was given permission to launch a new nation-wide tour. The tour was ostensibly to help raise funds for Beijing’s hosting of the next Asia Games, for which Cui Jian had promised to raise one million yuan, but in practice it functioned as a belated album tour to promote his New Long March album, which he had released in early 1989. After two performances in Beijing in January of 1990, Cui Jian began the tour proper in March with performances in Zhengzhou, Xi’an, and Chengdu. Mere weeks into the tour, however, authorities abruptly stepped in and cancelled it, ostensibly on the grounds that they had become increasingly uncomfortable with the unruly behavior of Cui Jian and his audiences. In particular, Cui Jian would frequently encourage his audiences to stand up and dance, and some would even try to climb up on stage—all of which were common at rock concerts in the West, but were considered unacceptable in contemporary China. A key factor in the authorities’ decision to cancel the tour, however, was Cui Jian’s practice of provocatively wearing a red blindfold while performing a song entitled “A Piece of Red Cloth,” which features the singer addressing a presumptive companion, describing his feeling a sense of contentment when the companion uses a piece of red cloth to cover his eyes:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“A Piece of Red Cloth” (lyrics, music, and performance by Cui Jian) That day you used a piece of red cloth To cover my eyes, and to cover the sky You asked me what I saw, And I replied that I saw happiness. This feeling truly made me comfortable. It allowed me to forget that I didn’t have anywhere to live You ask me where I want to go, And I reply that I want to follow your road.8

Like “Nothing to My Name,” “A Piece of Red Cloth” may be read as a romantic ballad. Red, for instance, is the color of weddings in China, and the description of having one’s eyes covered by a red cloth could therefore be

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

318

Sounds of Resistance

read as an allusion to the contemporary practice of covering the bride’s eyes with a red veil on her wedding day. Red, however, is of course also the iconic color of communism, and the ability of the red cloth to make the narrator feel happiness and to forgot that he has “nowhere to live” may therefore be seen as a commentary on the Chinese State’s attempts to limit its citizens’ access to potentially negative information. Cui Jian’s provocative act of wearing the red blindfold while performing this piece points suggestively to these censorship practices, and it is therefore ironically fitting that his act of bringing attention to this critique of censorship practices (by literally blinding himself) resulted in the government’s cancellation (i.e., censorship) of the remainder of his tour. If the connotations of the song’s opening reference to the “piece of red cloth” are potentially ambiguous, there is no mistaking the dark tone that characterizes the remainder of the work. The very next stanza, for instance, concludes with the speaker telling his companion that he wants him or her to be his “master”: I can’t see you, nor can I see the road My hand is held by yours You ask me what I’m thinking, And I reply that I want you to be my master. I feel that you are not made of iron, But are nevertheless as strong and resilient as iron. I feel, that you have blood on you, Because your hand is warm.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This feeling truly makes me comfortable It allows me to forget that I don’t have anywhere to live. You ask me where I want to go, And I reply that I want to follow your road, I feel that this is not a wilderness, But I can’t see that this land is already dried up I feel that I want to drink some water, But your mouth is covering mine. I cannot walk, and I cannot cry Because my body is already dried up. I want to accompany you like this forever, Because I understand your pain better than anyone.9

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Return of the Vagabond

319

While the references to the companion holding the speaker’s hand in his or hers, and covering the speaker’s mouth with his or her own, might, if read in isolation, be interpreted as conventional romantic motifs, the third stanza’s description of the speaker telling his companion that “I want you to be my master” implies a darker and more complicated layer of meaning. This reference to mastery, for instance, suggests that the song comments on a dynamic of dominance and complicity, in either erotic or political terms. As Nimrod Baranovitch puts it in his study of Chinese popular music:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“A Piece of Red Cloth” describes a violent experience of someone who is not only blindfolded, but whose hands are clasped and whose mouth is blocked by someone else so he cannot see, speak, drink, escape, or even cry. The speaker in the song turns into a subjugated creature who cannot think and make decisions, distinguish between right and wrong, true and false, and eventually loses even the ability to cry, thus the ability to feel and, by implication, his humanity. This frightening, violent, sensual nightmare, which becomes so concrete because of the mention of warm blood elsewhere in the song, was enacted several times on stage by Cui Jian, when he blindfolded himself during the performance of the song with a piece of red cloth.10

Andrew Jones, in an earlier analysis of this same piece, succinctly summarizes the song’s political implications when he notes that the song “is less a direct critique of the CCP than an exploration of the problematics of Cui’s own submission to power.”11 Some of the implications of this thematic of mastery and submission are raised in the couplet “I feel that I want to drink some water/But your mouth is covering mine.” These lines may be read as a commentary on Cui Jian’s position within the public sphere. That is to say, the public’s enthusiastic embrace of Cui Jian as a rock star (i.e., the public’s “kiss”) may undercut the political edge that his songs might otherwise have (i.e., preventing him from “drinking water,” and thereby leaving him figuratively “dried up”). The more Cui Jian is celebrated for his commercial success, the less listeners will be inclined to view his work in strikingly political terms. More specifically, the image of the narrator with someone else’s mouth pressed up against his implies the ventriloquistic politics within which Cui Jian’s performances are positioned. One of the reasons why Cui Jian has been granted relatively free reign to continue performing may well be because the government realizes that his significance as a dissident figure would be greater if he were to be silenced outright. By allowing him to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

320

Sounds of Resistance

continue performing, the government could therefore be seen as figuratively placing its mouth up against his—redirecting the politicized implications of his songs into a tacit reaffirmation of the authorities’ emphasis on wealth and development. As one of China’s most successful musicians, Cui Jian is a compelling symbol of the economic reform initiatives that made his career possible in the first place. In this way, the significance of his music is transformed into an affirmation of the government’s encouragement of economic development and capital accumulation.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Flying” To say that the Chinese authorities have been relatively tolerant of Cui Jian does not, however, mean that he has had complete free reign to perform as he wishes. In 1987, for instance, he was forbidden from hosting large-scale concerts in Beijing following what was perceived as an irreverent reinterpretation of a classic Yan’an communist tune as a modern rock song.12 This ban was lifted in 1989, when he was given permission to perform in the Beijing Exhibition Hall in March, but the performance ban was then reinstated the following year, following the cancellation of his New Long March tour in April. Even then, however, Cui Jian was still allowed to continue holding concerts in other Chinese cities, and he was tacitly permitted to hold small-venue performances even in Beijing, as long as they were not openly announced. In practice, therefore, the official ban on large-venue performances merely reaffirmed what was already conventional practice for the Chinese underground rock scene, in which most performances were held in small venues and advertised primarily by word of mouth. Indeed, Cui Jian’s career continued to thrive in the years during which the performance ban was in place. In 1991, for instance, he released his second album, The Solution, consisting of work he had written and composed before 1989, including the controversial “A Piece of Red Cloth.” In 1993, he and the influential sixth-generation director Zhang Yuan coproduced the film Beijing Bastards, in which Cui Jian plays a self-named underground rocker, and also contributed the film’s soundtrack. In 1994, he released his third album, Balls under the Red Flag, and in 1998 he released his fourth, and most explicitly political, album, Power to the Powerless. It was not until 2000, a full decade after the New Long March cancellation, that Cui Jian was again permitted to perform at a large-venue event in Beijing. The occasion, appropriately enough, was the Anti-Piracy concert in the Workers’ Stadium. Held on the eve of China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), this concert was clearly intended

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Return of the Vagabond

321

to help reassure the international community that China respects intellectual property law. At the same time, for Cui Jian and the other artists who participated, it was also an affirmation of their own position within the cultural marketplace, and their right to control the dissemination and value of their own works. The song Cui Jian performed was “Flying,” from his Balls under the Red Flag album. The song’s narrative persona describes feeling depleted and disoriented, unable to determine in what direction he is headed. He imagines himself as a heroic bird, soaring alone through the sky. He emits a piercing cry, but notices that everyone below him appears terrified by the sound, and therefore flies even higher: “Flying” (lyrics, music, and performance by Cui Jian) I have no need whatsoever for those gadgets I already feel dazed and depleted All around me there is the smell of human flesh It cannot but make me reflect on issues of mortality This dazed feeling is hazy and indistinct And my body imperceptibly begins to feel as though it’s floating Look, am I not different from the others? Like a red dot against a grey background?

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Everyone’s expression is hazy, Their eyes dart about, but I pay them no heed I can’t make out the direction I’m headed or even see the road, I begin to suspect that I might be completely disoriented All around me there is a smell of fire Burning between desperation and fury. I suddenly leap up, and my body starts floating. Alone, I’m flying. It as though I’ve suddenly become a heroic bird, Perpetually soaring between the sun and the clouds I open my mouth and my throat, And emit an unprecedented sound This sound is too piercing, and it terrifies the people below One by one, they stand up and shout out, “What on earth was that?” I also stare in amazement, Then soar even higher.13

Originally released in 1994 on his third album, this song was composed and released just as Cui Jian’s career was itself beginning to soar. It is

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

322

Sounds of Resistance

tempting, therefore, to find an autobiographical dimension to the song’s metaphorical presentation of its first person narrator as a flying bird. And yet, the narrator seems ambivalent, at best, about this prospect of flight. Already feeling “dazed” and “depleted,” the narrator appears frustrated by his inability to connect with those around him (“everyone’s expression is like mist/they circulate around but, but no one pays any attention”). In both of the first two stanzas, the narrator describes feeling as though his body is starting to float away, and in the third stanza he explicitly compares himself to a bird that has taken flight. Figuratively soaring high above the earth, the narrator feels even more alienated from “the people below,” who appear terrified by the sound he produces, even as he stares back at them in amazement. In the song’s final stanza, the speaker describes secretly returning home, where he finds everything just as he had left it. People there don’t notice his presence for a few days, after which he once again notices the smell of something burning. He wants to fly away again, but finds that now he is no longer able to do so:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

One night I secretly fly back in the dark I find I am surrounded by the same odor as before. That which I want is not up in the air And if it is not there, then it must be here. Several days later people finally notice me, But the expressions of everyone around me all appear somewhat odd Suddenly, that fire ignites the air again, I want to fly away, but find that I am no longer able.14

To the extent that the metaphors of “floating” and “flying” may be read as a commentary on the artist’s sense of the growing distance between himself and his fans, this final description of his return “home” suggests an attempt to reconnect with the people he had left behind. The result is rather equivocal, in that the narrator continues to feel alienated from those around him, and furthermore now he discovers that he has lost even the ability to fly away. If this reading of “Flying” suggests the artist’s dismay at the politicized reception of works, Cui Jian hints at another interpretation of the song’s avian trope in an interview he gave with the New York Times in 1995, in which he compares Chinese youth to caged birds barely able to fly. “They’re weak,” he concludes. “They’re not able to express themselves very easily.”15 The distanced, almost disparaging, way in which Cui Jian describes China’s youth here is reminiscent of his description, in “Flying,”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Return of the Vagabond

323

of the narrator peering down at the crowds far below. At the same time, however, there also seems to be a logic of displacement at work, in that the song’s suggestion of the narrator’s problems with self-expression (he opens his mouth and emits an “unprecedented sound,” but finds that it merely terrifies those below) are displaced onto the Chinese youth themselves (who are “not able to express themselves very easily”). The implication, therefore, is that even as Cui Jian sees himself as soaring on his audience’s behalf, helping Chinese youth articulate those sentiments that they are unable to express themselves, he is simultaneously projecting onto his audience (China’s youth) his own anxieties about the possibility of effective self-expression. Yet another dimension of the bird metaphor in “Flying” emerges if we consider the title of the album on which the song was originally released. The title, conventionally rendered in English as “Balls Under a Red Flag,” is Hongqi xia de dan in Chinese, with the final character, dan, being both a slang term for “testicle(s)” but the conventional term for “egg(s)” (the Chinese term can read as either singular or plural). The final lines of the album’s title song could be translated as:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reality is a stone, but the spirit is an egg [dan] Although a stone is hard, an egg is life Mother is still alive, while father is a flagpole If you ask me what I am—I’m balls/eggs under the red flag!16

The album’s cover art alludes to the meaning of dan in the sense of “egg,” with the bottom third of the image featuring a fetus inside the womb, or perhaps a virtual egg. The fetus in the cover image, moreover, appears wearing a red blindfold, provocatively alluding to Cui Jian’s controversial 1990 performances of “A Piece of Red Cloth.” One interpretation of the image, therefore, would be that Cui Jian’s music has a procreative dimension, engendering new material, new meaning, and new subjects. Alternatively, the image could be seen as a suggestion that the Cui Jian is figuratively reinventing himself as an innocent child—as one of those same Chinese youths whom he describes as being unable to express themselves, and unable to fly.

“Return of the Vagabond” In the decade since Cui Jian’s Workers’ Stadium concert in 2000, he has continued to consolidate his position as one of the most recognizable and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

324

Sounds of Resistance

most marketable figures in China’s contemporary pop music scene. In 2010 alone, for instance, he held a concert in Japan in March, began shooting a film (Blue Bone) that he himself wrote and directed, and rounded out the year with a New Year’s Eve performance with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra. The significance of the trajectory of Cui Jian’s career is perhaps articulated most poignantly in the title song of his first compilation, Return of the Vagabond. Here, as in “Flying,” the narrative voice describes his return home after a long absence. When he encounters his mother and sister, however, he finds himself too ashamed to even open his mouth: “Return of the Vagabond” (lyrics by Huang Xiaomao, music by Cui Jian, performed by Cui Jian) Once again pushing open the small gate in this fence, today I return. I don’t see the tears my mother has been shedding, nor do I recognize my little sister Yesterday, I hid twelve wishes, and a hundred regrets Today, I return to her side, but I am too ashamed to open mouth. Ah,. . . . I’m too ashamed to open my mouth.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Facing the mirror, I take a peek, and see the passage of time etched on my brow. I can’t resist looking again at my reflection in the mirror, but the past is already shattered. My sister calls out to me, but I don’t turn around. I don’t know whether or not she can see that my face is covered in tears. Ah,. . . . my face is covered in tears. Time rushes past like water, and once it is gone it will never return. I will never again have that painful dream, or those useless regrets I want to wash the dust off my body, and the tears from my face, I want to ride that stallion, chasing after lost time. Ah,. . . . chasing after lost time.17

While it is true that this early work is from the period before Cui Jian began writing his own lyrics, the fact that here he was performing a work written by someone else is actually quite appropriate, given that the lyrics revolve around a moment of alienated self-perception. Glimpsing his own reflection in the mirror, the narrator is startled by the deep wrinkles he finds etched into his brow, yet he can’t resist continuing to gaze at the reflection. Deeply fascinated by this sense of alienated self-reflection, what he

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Return of the Vagabond

325

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

sees before him is not so much his mirror image but rather the traces of time itself. To the extent that the speaker’s alienated self-perception in “Return of the Vagabond” may be seen as an inverted mirror stage moment—a prophetic anticipation, from the very beginning of Cui Jian’s career, of how he might come to perceive himself and his work when looking back from an indeterminate point in the distant future—we may similarly take this work as an opportunity to return to the questions posed at the beginning of this discussion. What may we make of the fact that one of China’s most iconic voices of political protest has been generally tolerated by the government throughout virtually his entire career? What may we make of the fact that one of the most recognizable symbols of China’s independent rock scene is now one of its most institutionalized figures? I suggest that the State has tacitly promoted Cui Jian’s career precisely in order to blunt his potential status as a symbol of political dissent. By encouraging Cui’s commercial success, the State is implicitly refashioning him as a cultural commodity, thereby blunting his status as a bona fide voice of protest. Ironically, though, it is precisely in the most visible acts of censorship of Cui Jian’s performance that we find a recognition of what he might have become. It is significant, for instance, that the catalyst for the authorities’ decision to cut short Cui Jian’s 1990 performance tour was not simply that his songs spoke about politically sensitive issues, but rather that he began performing a critique of the practice of governmental censorship itself. That is to say, the government began censoring Cui Jian precisely at a moment in which his performances began alluding in unmistakable terms to a practice of government censorship. The government’s goal, however, appears not to have been to silence him outright, but rather to redirect him to a more conventional career as a popular musician.

Coda In 2011, two trains travelling at high speed collided near the city of Wenzhou, leaving 39 dead and more than 200 wounded. The official Chinese media initially tried to play down the tragedy, but public outrage immediately spread via social networking sites. Among other things, Chinese netizens were suspicious that appropriate safety protocols may not have been followed, and they were particularly critical of government actions that seemed designed to block any quest for accountability—such as the bizarre decision to bury one of the rail cars shortly after the crash.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

326

Sounds of Resistance

One particularly iconic expression of this public outrage could be found in a video by an anonymous netizen featuring a song set to the music of Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name,” but with rhymed lyrics cleverly rewritten to speak to the suspicious issues underlying the Wenzhou crash. The video quickly went viral over China’s social media services, providing a touchstone for the public’s anger and their dismay at the government’s handling of the crisis: “Nothing to My Name (train version)” (lyrics by anonymous, music by Cui Jian, performed by anonymous) The public keeps asking, Why has the “Big Rail Brother” been so cocky? Why did they abandon rescue efforts After just a single day? The passengers needed your assistance, Not your excuses. But you’ve been constantly dodging, And offering nonsensical explanations. Oh. . . . You appear to be merely grandstanding, Oh. . . . Do you really feel any remorse?

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The ground under our feet is trembling! The tears are rolling down our cheeks Look at what was falling at the scene, It was all caught on camera! Why not disclose the list of names of those missing? Why did you have to bury the head train car? Is it possible that, for you, Human life is not worth as much as that of swine or dogs? Oh. . . . How much is a life worth? Oh. . . . So several hundred thousand RMB will be enough? I tell you that I’ve already endured this for long enough Let me tell you my final request. I’m going to clinch my fists, And track down those who are hiding behind the scenes. Right now heart is pounding, And my blood is flowing, In the end, how will you be able to console me, And my bereaved friends and relatives? Oh. . . . How much is a life worth? Oh. . . . So several hundred thousand RMB will be enough?18

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Return of the Vagabond

327

In this adaptation, the question of the political implications of Cui Jian’s work comes full circle. Here, a song that has been often interpreted as a transparent critique of the Chinese government—an interpretation that Cui Jian himself has consistently disavowed—is reappropriated by an anonymous fan and given new lyrics with an unmistakable political valence. A key issue raised by this contemporary adaptation of Cui Jian’s iconic song is that while it articulates a direct critique of the government’s handling of the train crash, it nevertheless spread virally over social media networks that are owned and overseen by the government itself. Particularly important in this regard was China’s new microblogging service, Sina Weibo, which was launched in 2009 and acquired more than 300 million registered users in less than two years. Despite being actively monitored, the site has increasingly come to provide a forum for public critique of government policies—as was particularly true in the aftermath of the Wenzhou train crash. This viral circulation of the “Wenzhou train” version of Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name,” therefore, dramatizes an issue that has haunted Cui Jian’s career from nearly the very beginning—if his works are as politically provocative as they often appear to be, why has the government allowed them to circulate as freely as it has? The influential blogger and media critic Michael Anti suggests that this apparent paradox may be explained by the possibility that the Chinese government is using quasi-independent Internet fora such as Weibo as a figurative safety valve, permitting a certain amount of dissent so as to forestall the possibility that popular frustration might erupt in what the government fears will be a more destabilizing fashion.19 If Anti is correct, then the circulation of the Wenzhou train adaptation of Cui’s “Nothing to My Name” concisely captures the political logic that has informed Cui’s own musical career. It appears that the government tolerates, and even encourages, the perception of Cui Jian as a symbol of political dissent precisely because in doing so they hope to lower the likelihood of the emergence of genuine protest. As an internationally celebrated performer, Cui Jian is permitted to perform a form of political protest precisely, the State’s reasoning apparently goes, in order to inoculate the body politic against the dangers of genuine dissent. To the extent that this anonymous appropriation of Cui Jian’s most famous song figuratively returns it to the spirit of political protest that informed it from the beginning, therefore, the “how much is a life worth” refrain in the revised lyrics may be read as a fortuitous commentary on the Mephistophelian pact that Cui Jian appears to have established, insofar as

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

328

Sounds of Resistance

he appears to have traded the potentially subversive edge of his early work for the comfort of popular acclaim and financial remuneration.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 186. 2. Chinese lyrics transcribed at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/ 8455848/ (accessed on December 20, 2012). Here and elsewhere, the translation from the Chinese is my own, unless specified otherwise. 3. Andrew Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 1992), 138. 4. Cited in ibid., 123. 5. Ibid., 138. 6. Chinese lyrics transcribed at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8455 848/ (accessed on December 20, 2012). 7. Jones, Like a Knife, 125. 8. Chinese lyrics transcribed at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8455 848/ (accessed on December 20, 2012). 9. Ibid. 10. Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), 238. 11. Jones, Like a Knife, 141. 12. Baranovitch, China’s New Voices, 51–52. 13. Chinese lyrics transcribed at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/845 5848/. 14. Ibid. 15. Seth Faison, “A Rock Star Allowed to Shine,” New York Times, August 19, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/19/arts/a-rock-star-china-allows-toshine.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. 16. Chinese lyrics transcribed at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/845 5848/. 17. Ibid. 18. A video of this performance can be found at http://www.ministryoftofu. com/2011/07/mv-chinese-netizen-sings-cui-jians-nothing-to-my-name- tomourn-7-23-train-crash-victims/ (accessed December 20, 2012). This version of the video has subtitles in both English and Chinese, but the lyrics cited previously are an original retranslation from the Chinese. 19. Mary Kay Magistad, “Chinese Online Anger over Train Tragedy,” PRI’s the World, July 29, 2011, http://www.theworld.org/2011/07/chinese-online-angerover-train-tragedy/.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 16

Afrobeat The Music of Fela Kuti Lindsay Michie and Ayoyinka Oriola

I will have my say. The King does not slay musicians. —Yoruba proverb1

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

They think I am going to change . . . They are making me stronger. —Fela Kuti, 19822

On February 18, 1977, a young boy badly beaten by the police was carried to a compound in the Mushin section of Lagos, Nigeria. The compound was called the Kalakuta Republic and was owned by the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti who had symbolically declared the republic’s independence from Nigeria in 1975. Soldiers later came to the door of the compound, demanding the release of the boy into their custody, and Fela refused, stating, “You can come with bazookas, rifles, and bombs if you want.”3 The soldiers left, but within a short space of time, a thousand police had surrounded the compound and set fire to the generator that fueled Fela’s electric fence. The police then stormed the compound, beating all those inside and raping many of the women. Fela’s brother, a doctor who ran the compound’s free medical clinic, was beaten so badly that he spent several months afterward in a wheelchair. Fela’s mother, the 78-year-old former anticolonial activist was thrown off the balcony, breaking her hip. She died a year later from complications due to her injuries. Fela was also beaten, dragged from the compound, and reportedly only saved from death by the intervention of a commanding officer. The soldiers then set fire to the compound and prevented firefighters from attempting to extinguish the flames, as well as attacking reporters who tried to cover the incident. The fire destroyed the Kalakuta Republic, including the clinic, recording studio, instruments,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

330

Sounds of Resistance

master tapes of Fela’s music, and the soundtrack to Fela’s autobiographical film The Black President. After Fela’s relentless challenge to Nigerian authorities through his music, his lifestyle, and his followers, the police had responded with a vengeance. To his African fans, Fela Kuti’s music went beyond the experience of Nigeria, because, to them, Nigeria’s experience of oppression was one that was shared throughout Africa. His music, like many African political messages of his time, was designed to break across the false borders set up by European colonialism. Born in 1938 to activist parents and coming of age in the era of postcolonialism, Fela and his original Afrobeat music challenged not only the legacies of a European Empire but also the corrupt residue that poisoned the independent development of Nigeria. His challenge was so arresting that it generated a large following throughout the continent and continues to attract the interest and study of musicians and scholars to this day. Numerous biographies and articles have been written about him and a musical about his life, produced by the artists Jay-Z and Will Smith, opened on Broadway in 2010. Throughout his life Fela was a deliberately controversial figure who represented both the admirable qualities of a musical champion for the oppressed, and the more notorious characteristics of a man openly flouting the standards of society with his alternative lifestyle. The thread of defiance that often dominates Nigerian—and, in particular, Yoruba—culture, was fired up and fed by Fela and his music. He has sometimes been compared with Bob Marley; but, while Bob Marley sang about both love and justice, Fela, especially in the later years of his career, focused primarily on justice. Although his songs were largely about the struggles of his own people, he performed for an international audience that made those struggles universal. Like a persistent flea biting on the body of the power structure, Fela was the traditional African storyteller or trickster, the griot that stayed home, and, just like the different versions of truth that weave their way in and out of African oral history, his music and especially his life lay themselves open to many different interpretations. The biographer Michael Veal who also performed with Fela, claimed that on stage Fela had the “bandleading style and dancing agility of James Brown, the mystical inclinations of Sun Ra, the polemicism of Malcolm X, and the harsh, insightful satire of Richard Pryor.”4 Another observer claimed Fela combined “the sauciness of Mick Jagger, the rebellious snarl of Bob Dylan, and the cool authority of John Coltrane.”5 “The government and elites think I’m crazy,” said Fela. “If I were a respectable professor at a university saying these things that would be something different. But no, to them, I’m just a musician, a crazy artist saying a lot

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

331

of crazy things.”6 Arguably, though, the power of the phenomenon of Fela Kuti lay as much in the increasing public and sometimes violent attacks carried out on him by the authorities as in his message and his music. It was a perverse symbiotic relationship: the more the government attacked him the more defiant he became. In many ways, to the successive, usually corrupt, and mostly military leaders that Fela lived under, he was increasingly a problem of their own making. In response to government attacks he eventually dropped his Anglicized middle name “Ransome” for the Yoruba name “Anikulapo,” which means “he who has death in his pocket,” indicating power over death and a way of expressing his fearlessness. At the same time Fela’s music represented his own brand of determinism. Fela was a musician but within that genre, in the tradition of his people, he was also a storyteller; and in order for a story to arouse people, it has to be told well. The determinism and popularity of Fela’s storytelling music, the political history of his country and Africa, Fela’s personal history, his musical and political awakening, and the subsequent response of the government all combined to create a volcano that erupted in what came to be known as the Kalakuta Massacre on February 18, 1977, and continued to smolder for the rest of Fela’s life. In the first 30 years of Africa’s postcolonial independence there were more than 70 coups. The African nationalists that had worked for independence and dreamed of a United States of Africa believed that real economic and political development would come once the detrimental control by Europeans was cut loose; but the lingering effects of that control—not least, the creation of boundaries that bunched disparate groups of Africans together and split others apart—played havoc with the new regimes. Nigeria was no exception. Created by the British in a way that combined many small ethnic groups and three large ones, the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, this newly independent state in the 1960s faced the challenge of uniting not only very different cultures but also different religions: Muslim, Christian, and indigenous. Publicly the idea was put forward of a balanced and stable democracy based on a federal constitution and regional governments; behind the scenes lay fierce competition between all the parties for power and economic benefits. Early on, the nationalist belief in a shared “Africanness” that had marked the independence movements of Africa gave way in Nigeria to a power struggle that rewarded the elected leaders and increasingly left the majority of the population poor and demoralized by the growing corruption of the elite. Compounding this situation was a strong reliance on foreign investment to pay for development projects. Such investment perpetuated the dependent relationship of Nigeria to foreign powers. In 1965, 110 companies in Nigeria were foreign owned, representing a capital value

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

332

Sounds of Resistance

of N28 million ($20 million). Only 52 companies were owned by Nigeria and made up a value of N4 million ($2.85 million).7 Machinery and technology were also obtained from overseas. The discovery of oil and the ensuing foreign involvement in its sale and distribution overseas further complicated these relationships. The continued dependency on the West, meanwhile, weaved its way into the society and culture of Nigeria and became a target for Fela’s music. While the large influx of wealth into the country was beneficial to the privileged and professional classes, semiskilled and unskilled workers found themselves left out and helpless observers of the new bridges, modern office buildings, new houses, and conspicuous consumption that bypassed their slum dwellings. There were no welfare programs or benefits for this population and frustration began to breed, especially among the youth. Fela became their spokesperson both through his music and by living in their environment. Nigeria, was, at the same time, building an identity and culture for itself that found expression in the arts. Chinua Achebe, Nigeria’s most famous author, published Things Fall Apart, in many ways considered to be the first real African novel, in 1958. The play A Dance of the Forests, a commemoration of Nigeria’s independence in 1960, was written by Nigeria’s most famous dramatist, Wole Soyinka, who happened to be Fela’s cousin. A tricky conversation, meanwhile, arose over the official language of this newly formed state. English had been declared the national language with independence, mainly because of its unifying effect, but, of course, this was the language of Nigerians’ former oppressor and so it carried unpleasant connotations. In the early 1960s, Achebe wrote, “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”8 Ten years later, however, he expressed some misgivings over the continued prominence of English and what this meant for his country.9 This was a conversation that informed Fela’s musical development in the 1970s, specifically his choice of language for Afrobeat. Three factors that strongly influenced Fela’s later political and musical development were the background of his Yoruba culture, the defiant tradition of his home town Abeokuta, and his family upbringing, including direct exposure to his parents’ activism. Fela’s family were Egba, a fiercely independent subgroup of the Yoruba that held onto their identity despite Christian and Muslim encroachment and contained many staunch adherents to traditional beliefs even after numerous others had converted

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

333

to either Islam or Christianity. By the time of Fela’s childhood, Abeokuta was made up of a mixture of westernized Christians, African Muslims, and those who stuck to traditionalism. This diversity, combined with a growing Western-educated elite, introduced a strain of vitality and progressivism into the city. In 1946, a newspaper editor complained, “Egba politics is highly combustible. It is by far and away the most explosive in Nigeria. Like enteric fever, political unrest in Abeokuta oscillates and scintillates. The pendulum is never at rest. The temperature is almost always at boiling point.”10 Olufela Olusegun Oludotun Ransome-Kuti was born in 1938, the fourth of five children, to Reverend Israel Oludotun Ransome-Kuti (known as “Daudu”) and Frances Abigail Olufunmilayo Thomas Ransome-Kuti (known as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti). His parents were second-generation Christians with strong opinions regarding colonialism and they both were instrumental in significant changes that challenged the system, particularly Fela’s mother. The Reverend is held to be one of the founders of higher education in Nigeria, and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was a leader in the Nigerian women’s rights movement, an activist for women’s suffrage, and a friend of Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah. They were strict parents, meting out severe punishment to their children, including Fela, who was remembered as well mannered but mischievous. One teacher recalled that he was “a rascal that everybody loved and couldn’t help loving.”11 While Fela’s father in particular carried out numerous beatings of Fela, outside the home, both parents battled authority. “What I liked about my father is that he kicked everybody’s ass,” Fela remembered.12 Apparently, the Reverend received a bayonet stab near the eye from a soldier trying to force him to remove his hat from head when he refused. Fela’s father complained so strongly to the British authorities that they eventually removed the soldiers’ barracks from the center of town. Both the Ransome-Kutis refused on principle to perform the Yoruba custom of kneeling or prostrating to an elder or titled person. They passed this on to their children and also refused to let anyone curtsey or kneel to them. This was in line with their promotion of an egalitarian world that rejected the customs of any tradition that contradicted that view. A few years after Funmilayo founded the Nigerian Women’s Union in the early 1940s, she began to take Fela with her in her car to her campaign meetings. Fela told biographer Carlos Moore, “You know, she was the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria, man. . . . Eventually I got to know what she was doing because she’d take me everywhere with her . . . And, ohhhhhh, I liked the way she took on those old politicians, all those dishonest

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

334

Sounds of Resistance

rogues.”13 In 1947, when Fela was nine, Funmilayo organized the beginning of a series of demonstrations in support of the Abeokuta market women against the colonial government and the Alake, who was the traditional leader of the city. More than 10,000 women brought the town to a standstill and a central feature of the protest was the singing of songs abusing the Alake, one of them describing him as having “the penis of a poison rat.”14 The musical element of the demonstration represented a complete subversion of the “praise song” tradition in Yoruba culture where poets and musicians would sing praises in a string of compliments to the leader. It later became a major feature of Fela’s music in the era of his political awakening in the 1970s. Although not recognized as a serious profession, music was a major part of Fela’s family life. His father taught Western-style music in his school, carrying out his lessons with the same amount of strictness with which he disciplined his children. Abeokutu’s diversity also offered Fela a wealth of exposure to the arts, including Engungun masquerades that involved music incorporating the “dundun” or talking drum, so called because it imitates the tones of Yoruba speech; as well as sakara and apala music of the Muslim Yoruba. While the Western tradition tends to compartmentalize music and separate it from other artistic forms or speech, the tradition throughout Africa (and also a strong element of African American culture) is more one of music weaving its way throughout all activities without necessarily any pause or introduction. In Nigeria, one example is that of a quarrel between neighbors. When one greets the other, the response might be singing a phrase that challenges or insults their neighbor who may then respond also with song. Fela’s Afrobeat music reflected this element in its call and response rhythms and chants, and in Fela’s speeches and lectures, sometimes chanted, sometimes sung, throughout his songs. During his youth, Fela led a school choir and played piano and percussion. He also displayed early on his streak of rebellion. Together with some friends, he formed a club called the Planless Club, the only rule of which was to have no plans. “Disobedience was our ‘law’ ” he stated.15 As a teenager, he was drawn to the nightlife of Lagos and the highlife music popular at the time, and he began singing with Victor Olaiya’s Cool Cats. Highlife music had begun as bands that incorporated variations of Western European music such as the two-step and the waltz, but in the 1940s, highlife began to combine elements of Afro-Cuban dance music, and newly formed European recording companies helped spread its popularity throughout Africa. Fela’s father had envisioned a career in medicine

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

335

for his son, but the Reverend died in 1955, and the last two years of secondary school for Fela were marked by time spent away from his studies and increasingly among the music crowd in Lagos. After finishing school, he worked for a while at the Ministry of Commerce while singing in the Cool Cats at night. Fela’s mother, worried about the direction her son was heading in, and not approving of popular music as a profession, struck a deal with her son: Fela would go to Trinity College of Music in London and return to Nigeria with a degree. London represented the beginning of a political and musical awakening for Fela. “At that time [the colonial government] only let us hear what they wanted us to hear. When you played the radio it was controlled by the government, and the white man played us what he wanted; so we didn’t know anything about black music. In England I was exposed to all these things.”16 Fela carried out his formal studies at Trinity, but his real interest continued to be in popular music, and when his Lagos friend J. K. Braimah came to London, the two formed a band initially called Highlife Rakers and later known as Koola Lobitos. Fela was now playing the trumpet, influenced initially by Louis Armstrong, who had performed in West Africa in 1956, and by Louis Prima. His exposure to jazz in London also strongly affected Fela’s musical development and jazz later become a potent ingredient in Afrobeat. The racism Fela experienced in London also affected him. He became more aware of himself as an African in contrast to white Europeans, and through his mother’s leftwing connections in Europe, he visited East Berlin, a trip that planted a seed of radicalism in Fela with respect to race and politics: “All the racist thing I experienced as a student in England wasn’t there. Ten happy days. So I took a different view on that whole shit about communism . . . I was thrilled.” As he admitted later, though, his focus was not on politics at this point: “Politics! Man, I was so fucking ignorant about world politics then, I didn’t know shit! And I didn’t give a fuck either! . . . I wasn’t even reading newspapers, man. Music. Music is all that interested me.”17 While in London, Fela had married Remilekun (Remi) Taylor, a British woman with Nigerian and African American heritage, and they had three children during the next three years. Fela graduated from Trinity in 1963 and came back to a newly independent Nigeria where he formed a new band, also called Koola Lobitos, which now included a crucial band member, the extremely talented drummer Tony Allen, who stayed with Fela’s band throughout its many fluctuations until 1979. On returning to Nigeria, Fela incorporated jazz into his highlife style of music and Allen represented

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

336

Sounds of Resistance

that addition, bringing an eclectic set of percussion instruments that lay a jazz feel over the highlife rhythms. Lekan Animashaun, a baritone saxophonist, joined the band in 1965, and remained with Fela until the end of his career. Still singing mostly in Yoruba, Fela declared the new sound to be revolutionary, with its more complex arrangements and sax and trumpet solos, and audiences responded enthusiastically. A change in Fela’s lifestyle also became apparent during this time. He was introduced to the seductive effects of marijuana and it became both a fuel for his creative ability and a symbol for his rebellion against convention, along with an increased outspokenness in interviews and a widening circle of girlfriends, while still married. His political views at this point, however, were still relatively unformed. In the late1960s, Nigeria was gripped by a civil war ignited by the sparring representatives of the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. An Igbo military coup in 1966 was quickly suppressed by a Hausa counter-coup that put Yakuba Gowan in charge. A wave of retaliatory massacres against the Igbo then swept through the north and over a million refugees fled east to their homeland. The Igbo leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu declared his region independent from the rest of Nigeria and for the duration of the war it became the Republic of Biafra. Biafra was, however, a region rich in oil and the Nigerian government, along with its foreign allies, was not about to let this economic plum secede. Nigerian forces, with the assistance of western European countries, responded by blockading the country, taking over Biafra’s major supply route, and starving its occupants into submission. The war ended with the surrender of what remained of the Biafran forces and a general amnesty was declared as the region again became part of Nigeria.18 One result of the Biafran war was the loss of many talented Igbo musicians from Lagos nightlife and more ethnic styles arose, such as juju, both to fill the gap and as a response to increasing negative associations of highlife music with the western-influenced elite. “Soul music” from the United States was beginning to take off in Africa, as was funk, and no African American musician was more popular in Africa at this time than James Brown. These influences affected the sensibilities of Fela’s “highlife jazz,” and after two tours of Ghana, Fela renamed the style of his band’s music “Afrobeat.” According to Fela, “Soul music took over. James Brown’s music, Otis Redding took over the whole continent, man. It was beautiful music . . . I said to myself I must compete with these people. I must find a name for my music, so I gave my music [the name] ‘Afrobeat’ to give it an identity.”19

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Afrobeat

337

In 1969, Fela was offered the chance to take his band to the United States. Inspired by the success of other African musicians such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela in the United States, Fela and the Lobitos arrived in New York City in June. This trip began the serious political awakening that informed Afrobeat and Fela’s subsequent lifestyle for the rest of his life. Initially, Fela’s music did not take off, and Fela’s band, desperate for money and in a bid for government sponsorship, recorded a patriotic song “Keep Nigeria One” that pleaded for unity and brotherhood during the Biafran War. Fela later regretted the song as mercenary and ignorant of the political situation in Nigeria, and expressed sympathy for the Biafran struggle, understanding the civil war to be a watershed in the separation of people and solidifying of corruption in his country: I thought the Biafrans were right . . . I said to myself, “This whole thing is a cheap, big hustle to put the Ibos in a bad light in the world.” And, in fact, what was happening was the beginning of corruption in Nigeria. That’s evident now. The Biafrans were fucking right to secede, man . . . From secession we could come together again. But by not seceding, we’re put together by force.20

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

A significant influence on Fela in the United States soon arose in the form of a young woman named Sandra Smith (later Sandra Izsadore) whom Fela met while playing at a party. This meeting and relationship caused a profound shift in Fela’s music and political thought. “Everything changed after America,” said Tony Allen later. “The music changed, the ideology changed, everything changed.”21 That change was undoubtedly a direct result of Fela’s relationship with Sandra. Sandra Smith described herself as very rebellious at that time: I was . . . willing to fight, willing to die. We had a saying: “By any means necessary.” I thought if we Blacks in American had to die for what we believed in, even if it meant your mother and father had to go, then let them go . . . I just rebelled against [my parents] because I felt that everything they had taught me was wrong.22

Sandra introduced Fela to the work of Nikki Giovanni, The Last Poets, Stokelely Carmichael, Nina Simone, and Miles Davis. He met renowned activist Angela Davis and was exposed to the Black Panther Party, of whom Sandra was a member. Sandra talked at length to Fela about politics and love, the Black movement, and her own connection to Africa. She also introduced Fela to the writings of Malcolm X and these had a profound impact on Fela. “This book [The Autobiography of Malcom X] I couldn’t

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

338

Sounds of Resistance

put it down,” stated Fela. “This man was talking about the history of Africa, talking about the white man . . . I never read a book like that in my life . . . Everything about Africa started coming back to me.”23 Unbeknownst to her, because she assumed that Fela was already aware of the issues she talked about, Smith was turning Fela on to Africa. He renamed his band Nigeria 70 and began to play music informed by his exposure to Black American jazz and politics. Regarding this transformation, Fela later told a Political Science student at the University of Lagos,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

I had to sit down and think about myself and say, “What am I really doing? Am I really playing African music?” . . . I had to re-think and re-analyze myself . . . think of African music in a real context. [When] I came back to Nigeria I was still trying to get it together . . . I lost a bit of ground because I didn’t know what I was doing.24

Although his music never completely took off in the United States, Fela returned to Nigeria with a musical construct that had a new sense of purpose, incorporating his and his band’s talent, his clever and sarcastic humor, his rebellion against authority, and his new political consciousness into his music: “Coming back from America in 1970, I then knew that I should not try to impress foreigners. I should impress my own people first. When my people accept me then foreigners will see a need to accept me. They will now appreciate my music.”25 The Nigeria that Fela returned to saw the rise of a new generation of musicians, including King Sunny Ade and Sonny Okosuns. Young middleclass Nigerians such as Fela had begun to travel and many brought back an enthusiasm for funk and rock music. The record companies EMI and Decca established the headquarters of their West African business in Lagos and the time seemed propitious for the launching of Fela and his band’s reinvented style. What the audiences were not prepared for, however, was the brand of African American brand of political consciousness that Fela brought back from the United States. When he raised his fist in a black power salute at a concert in Lagos, the audience responded with silence and confusion. While they had had an increasing amount of exposure to the music of the United States, they were not aware of threads of black radicalism in that country that ironically placed emphasis on African roots. Fela told the journalist John Darnton: It’s crazy; in the States people think the black power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Afrobeat

339

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

They don’t realize they’re the ones who’ve got it over there. Why, we were even ashamed to go around in national dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th street.26

Fela’s music now became the core of his activism and the mechanism through which he championed the rights of the oppressed. Having won the battle of self-realization, Fela now had to battle for the minds of his own people. He, therefore, began to advocate in his music a form of African nationalism that would raise the consciousness of his people, and expose them to a style of music that was clearly an attempt by a fellow African to create something both African and modern. He made the deliberate decision, for example, to sing in Nigerian pidgin English, the language of Nigeria’s poor and working class. Nigerian pidgin English, a mixture of Nigerian slang and broken English, broke lofty themes down into easily understood and appreciated messages and its rhythms meshed smoothly with the instrumentation of Afrobeat. The style and message of Afrobeat was also deliberately set apart from other forms of popular music in Nigeria from highlife to Afrorock, because Fela believed these other styles represented an unhealthy relationship with European colonialism. Fela called the ideological aspect of his music “blackism” as a way to emphasize this separation and he discontinued the themes of love and romance, which he also believed were not part of true African music. “In Africa, we don’t sing really about love,” he told New York Times reporter Peter Watrous. “We sing about happenings.”27 The music itself was tightly constructed and never, according to musicians who played in the band, sloppy or jam oriented. This ironically, reflects the classical Western music education Fela received at Trinity. The Nigerian population took a little while to warm to Afrobeat. Having experienced mixed reactions among the working-class audiences, Fela and his band decided in 1970 to try his music out on students at the University of Lagos. This audience also remained initially indifferent. A graduate from the university told scholar Justin Labinjoh, “We all thought that guy Fela was crazy; the music was funny and he and his boys looked like rascals. We decided never to invite him again.”28 Within a year, however, people from the working and middle classes were coming to see him and his band in droves and his records became immensely popular. Having created music out of his own determination, Fela was now viewed as the new African. He changed the band’s name from Nigeria 70 to Afrika 70 to emphasize the continental message and appeal of Afrobeat and the band shared the stage with numerous popular musicians in Lagos, as well as performing in London to an enthusiastic audience. Fela was now playing the saxophone

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

340

Sounds of Resistance

and his band made a recording at Abbey Road studios, increasingly known in the 1960s for the innovative recording styles of bands such as the Beatles. Back in Nigeria, Fela collaborated with former Cream drummer Ginger Baker on several records released by Afrika 70. Riding on the success of Afrika 70’s performances and recordings, the band moved to a new location that would be its home until 1977—the Shrine, a courtyard of the Empire Hotel in Idi-Oro conveniently located across the street from Fela’s house on Agege Motor Road. His songs had become revolutionary and defiant and the Shrine reflected this new consciousness. A corrugated tin roof partially covered the courtyard and painted flags of all the independent African nations surrounded it. The stage reflected a large neon map of Africa and go-go platforms sat in the interior. The band performed several times during the week, and the audience was eclectic, from young Lagos workers and students, to intellectuals and scholars, professionals, politicians and diplomats, and the occasional famous musician. The Shrine sold books by left wing writers and intellectuals and public figures such as Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Cheikh Anta Diop; as well as the writings of two primary intellectual influences on Fela: Kwame Nkrumah and Walter Rodney. The venue embodied Fela’s vision of informing his people through words, rhythm, and music and became a highly energized melting pot for the exchange of ideas (and of marijuana). Fela proclaimed himself “Chief Priest of the Shrine” (he ran a newspaper column called “Chief Priest Say”) and before each performance he would carry out a little ceremony at an altar that was hung with photos of prominent figures including Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, and the assassinated Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. Paul McCartney came to the Shrine while recording Band on the Run, and the exiled South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela was a recurring visitor. “Fela introduced me to his Afrobeat,” stated Masekela, “which I found magical. I had to be pulled away from the microphone; I literally could not stop playing with patterns his wonderful rhythm section wove behind me. From this experience, I found the gateway to West African culture.”29 While Saturday evenings at the Shrine hosted the “Comprehensive Show” with dancers, and Sundays marked the “Sunday Afternoon Jump,” Friday evenings at the Shrine were “Yabis Night.” Yabis was a form of music whose name was derived from the Nigerian pidgin English word “Yab” meaning to ridicule a person or thing, and Fela made this satirical style of music very popular; Yabis Night often had the largest crowd. The purpose of Yabis was to compose a song that mocked an atrocity committed by a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

341

person or institution in a society with the aim of correcting the crime. It was a modern style of music that was related to the Yoruba tradition of Efe where music, integrating performance, masks, and dance, provide a space for the artists to criticize or deride. In this tradition the perpetrators of the crimes are never named; instead numerous clues are given as to their identity through costumes, impressions, and dance. Also in this tradition, there is the understanding that artists cannot be arrested, and can therefore ridicule with impunity. Yabis took elements of this tradition to use satire and humor in such a way that people would be motivated into action against oppression. The energy and fascination of the Shrine were undeniable. John Darnton writes, “I liked going to the Shrine: the sweltering heat, the pounding music, the palpable anger in the air, the weapons search at the door, where it was hard to say if more weapons were going or coming. It was my education.”30 Tony Allen observed, “Many things happening there [at the Shrine]. You have to be sure of yourself to come there. Anything can happen.”31 Fela was now a compelling public figure and a celebrity with an expanding entourage that together with Fela formed the basis of a culture that challenged the norm. Unlike other successful musicians, however, he remained in the rough section of town, accessible to all people, and developed into a folk hero to the “underclass” who granted him a respect not easily won. According to writer John Collins, “Everywhere he goes people stop what they’re doing, shout his name, and give the Black Power salute.”32 During this time, Fela’s music challenged oppression and inequality, but, like the subtlety of Efe, he had yet to name names. The government and the elite, nonetheless regarded him as potentially dangerous. His songs blared out from music shops, his followers represented a counterculture that threatened conventional standards, and his music indirectly underlined the increasing unpopularity of government leaders. What made the phenomenon of Fela so appealing was the fact that the social and political messages that resonated with many sections of Nigerian and African society were expressed with a sly and engaging undertone and in an often explosive rhythm that got people dancing. Fela was also increasingly provocative in his lifestyle. Performing and receiving visitors at his compound, often dressed only in bikini-style underpants, he ran his Shrine in an authoritarian manner, but with undercurrents of fun, defiance, and waywardness. While the elite classes deplored the perceived depravity of Fela and his followers, the Shrine actually represented an almost logical outcome of the mishmash of foreign-generated wealth on top of poverty and crime. The culture of life it offered represented a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

342

Sounds of Resistance

fusion of reaction against the rising materialism that evolved as a legacy of Western imposition and continued Western social and economic imperialism, and the West African performance tradition of an expressed mischievousness with hints of danger toward leadership and accepted society. The years 1972–1977 marked in many ways the most vibrant musical era of Fela’s band, and these years also began to define the pattern of contentious relations between Fela and the authorities, apart from the brief interlude of Murtala Mohammed’s benign presidency. In 1974, 50 armed riot police raided Fela’s compound, claiming investigation of reports of drug dealing. When they attempted to plant a large joint on the property, Fela grabbed it and swallowed it. The police imprisoned him at Alagbon Close nearby, to wait for his eventual “evacuation” of the evidence. With the help of fellow prisoners and the use of a communal toilet, however, Fela was able to produce a clean sample for the police and they had to release him. Fela went on to record “Alagbon Close” and “Expensive Shit,” both songs that referred to the incident in both challenging and humorous ways. The front of the cover of the album, also called “Expensive Shit,” had Fela and 20 topless women at the Shrine with their fists raised, and the back had Fela smoking a enormous joint in a haze of smoke. Each time the authorities arrested or harassed Fela and his band, he came back with a song or an album that related, belittled, and defied the circumstances of the event. His son Femi states, “When they jailed my father, he came out shouting. When they beat him, he came out shouting.”33 Fela’s experience of imprisonment, also, affected his sensitivity toward those he viewed as oppressed and he challenged the mentality around what he called “That ‘law and order’ shit.” As he tells it, when he was put in a cell with “the people they call ‘criminals,’ I started thinking: ‘Who the fuck is Society? Who jails Society when it does horrors to people? Why Society does nothing to help beggars; to provide jobs and keep people from having to steal just to chop [eat]?”34 In 1975 Fela dropped his Western middle name “Ransome” and replaced it with “Anikulapo.” It was also in this year that he renamed his compound “Kalakuta Republic.” Fela had discovered, while held in a police cell in Lagos, that the cell was referred to as “The Kalakuta Republic” and that the word “Kalakuta” was Swahili for “rascal.” He stated, “If rascality is going to get us what we want, we will use it; because if we are dealing with corrupt people, we have to be ‘rascally’ with them.”35 A short period of relief from government harassment for Fela came in 1975 when General Murtala Mohammed took over the leadership of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

343

government in a bloodless coup. Mohammed’s main focus was correcting government corruption and his popularity among Nigerians rose as he also stressed greater self-determination with a subtext of anti-Americanism. M. D. Yusufu, the newly appointed Inspector-General Chief of Police, brought a humane element to dealings with Afrika 70 and the Shrine, a circumstance that opened a window of opportunity for unfettered creativity in Fela’s music. Mohammed, meanwhile, reorganized the plans for the second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) to be held in Nigeria, including postponing the event until 1977 to focus on more serious matters, including addressing corruption and clearing the congested ports. Fela, with his increased popularity throughout the African continent, was, in many ways, intended to be the centerpiece of FESTAC, but this expectation was crushed with the assassination of Mohammed in a failed coup in February 1976. Mohammed’s successor Olusegun Obasanjo promised to continue in the direction of Mohammed, but a closer relationship with the West was soon established and Obasanjo’s dealings with Fela quickly soured. Fela removed himself from the festival and joined the increasing mass of critics who viewed FESTAC as an expensive exercise in self-promotion and public encouragement of lingering colonial stereotypes of Africans. Fela instead held a counter-FESTAC concert at the Shrine, featuring performances by Stevie Wonder and jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp. Because of his much-publicized absence from FESTAC and through songs that challenged the authorities, highlighted severe social conditions in Nigeria and the global imbalance, and mocked the Nigerian elite, Fela became an increasingly troublesome element in the eyes of the government. In 1976, Fela publicly announced that he would run for president in the civilian elections scheduled for 1979. That same year he released the song that, in many ways sparked the raid and subsequent violence at the Kalakuta Republic of February 1977. The recording of “Zombie” was arguably a watershed event in the development of defiance in Fela’s music. It directly challenged the brute force and unthinking obeisance of the military, but in a typically mocking and satirical manner that seemingly touched a nerve in the police force and served as a catalyst for repressive reaction. Young boys would follow soldiers in the streets of Lagos singing the words to Fela’s song, mimicking their marching like robots and carrying sticks like guns. If “Zombie” sparked a reaction on the part of the authorities, however, the brutal behavior of the police in storming Fela’s compound in retaliation left a profound impression on the musician that affected both his music and his pattern of defiance:

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

344

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

On the day my house was burned and I was taken straight to the army barracks by the soldiers . . . and you know my mother was thrown out the window at that time and I saw my mother outside the army barracks . . . the way she was handled—oh, I couldn’t stand it man. I can never forget that day; the look on her face, saying “is this the nation we see being built and all?” . . . I will never forget her expression.36

After pressure from groups such as Amnesty International and a lawsuit brought by the Ransome-Kuti family, the government carried out an investigation of what Fela called the Kalakuta Massacre and eventually reported that the destruction of the compound was the unintended result of the actions of “an exasperated and unknown soldier,” a finding that further disillusioned Fela and his supporters. The death of Fela’s mother a year later from her injuries seemingly had a profound effect on Fela, and in 1979 he wrote and recorded the song “Unknown Soldier,” which recounted the violence of the raid and the death of his mother. In October of that same year, he led a procession of followers with a life-size replica of his mother’s coffin and deposited it at Dodan Barracks, which was then the seat of the Nigerian military government. When later asked in an interview what he considered to be the greatest achievement of his life, Fela answered, “The day I carried my mother’s coffin to the Dodan barracks.”37 The Kalakuta Massacre had introduced an embittered tone to Fela’s music that merged with his continued defiance, and seemed at times to have replaced the mischievous element of previous work. One observer who visited with Fela and his group just after the destruction of Kalakuta noticed “a change in the psychic state of the group. This was now a commune that had been badly mauled by the power of the society.”38 In many ways, his music and his overall direction after 1977 appeared to be motivated by avenging the death of his mother—a death that to Fela represented a personal and intense example of the massive wrongs done to his fellow Africans. Even as the band went into temporary exile in Ghana as a result of the destruction of the compound, Fela became more politically focused and launched an opposition party called the Movement of the People (MOP). His political concentration led to the breakup of the original band, including the loss of Tony Allen as drummer, as band members became frustrated with all the profits from performances going into Fela’s political activities. The original band’s performance at the Berlin Jazz festival of 1978 proved to be their last gig together, where the centerpiece of the show was the song “Vagabonds in Power”, which highlighted class division in Nigeria.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

345

It was also in 1978 that Fela married 27 women from his ensemble in a much-publicized and sensationalized wedding exactly a year after the Kalakuta Massacre. While many criticized the event as a publicity stunt and an example of Fela’s chauvinism, other explanations included a maneuver to make it easier for his entourage to enter Ghana, and an attempt by Fela to raise the status of these women who were often denounced as “whores.” In 1979, Fela and his band occupied the record label Decca’s Lagos offices in a dispute over Decca’s refusal to release the more controversial songs composed that year such as “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood,” a song relating the events of the Kalakuta Massacre, and “Observation No Crime,” which basically stated that love was no crime. The occupation effectively kept Decca from operating for about seven weeks until a resolution was found through the help of M. D. Yusufu. The dispute sparked a rancorous relationship between Fela and the Decca chairman Moshood Abiola that lasted through Abiola’s eventual political career, even after Abiola won what was considered the freest and most fair election in Nigeria in 1993, only to have the election annulled (Abiola died in prison in 1998). In the years immediately following the Kalakuta Massacre, Fela was able to remain publicly notorious even as he and his band were prevented financially and by the authorities from doing much performing. Events such as the Kalakuta trial, his public wedding, and the occupation of Decca had kept his profile high, and, even though the government had banned the recently released songs “Vagabonds in Power” and “Shuffling and Shmiling” from the radio stations they were still huge hits. As mentioned earlier, “Vagabonds in Power” focused on inequality in Nigeria, while “Shuffling and Shmiling” attacked both Christianity and Islam as artificial religions spread across Africa to exploit its people. “All Christians think like Europeans and Americans, and all Muslim people think like Arabs,” stated Fela in the 1983 documentary Music is the Weapon. “So they are just dividing African minds from their roots, that’s all.”39 In the elections of 1979, over 50 parties applied to register, but only five were cleared by the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO). Fela’s MOP was not one of the five. The election, after a protracted legal battle, eventually led to the ascendance of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) led by Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a party that initially looked promising as its leadership encompassed northern, Igbo, and Yoruba representation; however, an alliance with the Nigerian People’s Party (NPP) and the refusal to include in the election process students, civil servants, and labor union members,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

346

Sounds of Resistance

meant an inevitable return to the old system of patronage and control by the wealthy elite. High oil yields initially fueled the rise in corruption, but irresponsible government and the significant drop in oil prices in 1981 led to a recession in Nigeria that lasted until 1992. Throughout the 1980s Fela continued his defiant stance against the various governments of Nigeria in both his music and his actions, with often brutal consequences. Fela, seemingly, felt a strong responsibility to the people he represented as well as increasing confidence in publicly exposing the oppressive actions of the authorities at a time when there were relatively few channels for this type of expression. “At the time of my father,” recalls Femi Kuti, “there was nothing like human rights groups in Nigeria. He on his own solely fought the military dictators at that time and the civilians that they passed power through in the ’70s and ’80s.”40 Fela was able to perform successfully abroad, riding the wave of world music that had become increasingly popular in the 1980s and acting as a folk hero for the younger generation of Europeans, but, at home, he and his band—renamed Egypt 80 to reflect Fela’s increasing focus on African origins and spirituality— struggled to keep financially afloat. While other popular juju and fuji musicians could rely on the patronage of the wealthy Nigerian elite in an era when concerts were gradually being supplanted by discothèques, the recurring theme of corruption and decadence of the wealthy class in Fela’s music precluded him from this form of income. With each incident of harassment and government abuse, the celebration of defiance that marked Fela’s music and compound life of the 1970s, became a determined political strategy of the 1980s. He revived his weekly column “Chief Priest Say” and opened a new Shrine in Ikeja, one half hour away from the center of Lagos, again among the more crime-ridden elements of the city. Both were developments that buoyed his followers and continued to make him a target of the Nigerian authorities. The new Shrine experienced numerous police raids between 1981 and 1984. In 1981, Fela was arrested, and, in the new trend of government suppression of outspoken journalists, charged with armed robbery. The charges were eventually dropped, but during his detention he was severely beaten by soldiers, and the back cover of a subsequent album Original Sufferhead, showed his bare back with the fresh scars of his injuries. In 1983, when he tried again to campaign for president, his house was ransacked and he was thrown in jail. In 1984, just before leaving for a tour of the United States, Fela was arrested and charged with currency violation. The currency form he claimed to have filled out was mysteriously lost and the customs officials willing to verify Fela’s account were themselves arrested. A military tribunal sentenced him

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

347

to five years’ imprisonment and Capital Records and EMI cancelled their contracts with Egypt 80. Egypt 80 continued to perform, financed by his brother and led by Fela’s son Femi, while Fela became the center of an international outcry: he was adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and a Free Fela movement was launched by various human rights and left-wing organizations. The New York–based company Celluloid kept his recent music public and reissued some of his earlier work, and Hugh Masekela recorded a version of one of his earliest song “Lady” as a special tribute. Another military coup took place in Nigeria in 1985, and one almost immediate result of the regime change was that it was revealed that the judge in charge of the tribunal that sentenced Fela had privately visited him, apologized, and admitted that he had been forced to act as he did by the government. This revelation led to public pressure on the new government to release Fela and he was freed in 1986. He took part in a benefit concert arranged by Amnesty International, playing with the Neville Brothers, Rubén Blades, Yoko Ono, and Sean Ono Lennon at the Giants stadium in New Jersey, and took center stage in a hugely successful “comeback” concert in Lagos, introducing a new song “Beasts of No Nation” that attacked the oppression and brutality of governments worldwide and the support given by the British and U.S. governments to the apartheid government in South Africa. The album cover of Beasts of No Nation included images of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and the South African leader P. W. Botha with bloody rat’s teeth and the horns of wild animals. Fela’s 1986 European and U.S. tours brought him to the pinnacle of musical success on the international stage. Reviews in Paris noted the sophistication and maturity of the new band, while Fela and Egypt 80 played to sold-out audiences in Detroit, Michigan, and Austin, Texas, among others. November 14 was proclaimed Fela Day by the mayor of Berkeley, California, and the Nigerian press hailed the band’s success in the West, ironically undermining Fela’s consistent complaint that African musicians tried too hard to gain recognition from Western powers. Fela and his band returned to the United States in 1989 to play two benefit concerts for James Brown, imprisoned on charges of evading arrest. Brown and Fela had carried on a musical conversation in the 1970s, when Brown toured Africa and Fela was still aware of Brown’s strong influence on the early development of Afrobeat. The first benefit concert took place in New York at the Apollo Theater, and Fela’s rap session on “second slavery” as well as his music brought strong responses from a highly receptive audience. The second night’s concert in Newark, New Jersey, brought a more mixed reception because Fela

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

348

Sounds of Resistance

did not hold back on his political views and many of the audience members had come with an expectation of more entertainment, less politics. This was the case, again, the following year when Fela and Egypt 80 played at the International African Festival in Brooklyn. Several sections of the audience, particularly the Jamaicans, fully appreciated his yabis-style, profane humor, and political riffs. Other sections represented a middle-class element of African American culture that focused more readily on the finer elements of African culture and were put off by the streetwise sensibilities of Fela, as well as by his attacks on Islam. According to a fan, this did not phase Fela, who, the following year at a concert again at the Apollo, attacked Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for ignoring the common people in a visit to Lagos. “You think he cared?” the fan asked, referring to Fela. “He doesn’t care who he offends. Back home he does the same thing. He just likes abusing people—that’s his main thing!”41 Fela’s expressions of African American themes were rooted in his Black Power experiences of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had no patience with the romanticizing of all things African, especially of the African elite who were the prime target of his attacks, and this approach found a little more resonance in Europe with its more direct connection to colonialism and its aftermath, as Michael Veal argues, than it did in the United States, with its emphasis in racial discussions on slavery and African identity.42 Also, while Fela consistently upheld the rights of the poor in Africa, he did not believe that the answer to this oppression was Western economic development. What he promoted, which left his U.S. fans somewhat out of the conversation in the 1980s, was African solutions to African problems. The Nigerian public, on the other hand, were worn out by the pattern of corruption in their government and the decline in the 1980s of their economy, and were, therefore, no longer always in the mood to rise to Fela’s challenge. His confrontational style in pushing this agenda, the increased complexity of his music combined with his aversion to use of increasingly sophisticated electronic recording equipment, and the development of strong competition—internationally through world music popularity and domestically in the increasing popularity of fuji music—all contributed to the eventual movement of Fela and his music away from the limelight it had enjoyed since the 1970s. For a number of years, though, he remained a strong symbol of resistance, particularly during the regime of President Ibrahim Babangida, one of the most repressive and corrupt governments of postcolonial Nigeria. The influx of drugs into the streets of Lagos in the 1980s had, furthermore, infected the life of the Shrine, causing an uncontrollable element

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

349

to upset the equilibrium of the compound and a rift between Femi and his father that lasted until the early 1990s as Femi went off to pursue his own version of Afrobeat. Throughout, though, Fela remained unflinching in his opinions. After his release from prison, Fela divorced those wives who wanted to leave him and made this pronouncement about marriage: “[it] brings jealousy and selfishness . . . I just don’t agree to possess a woman.”43 Regarding family, he argued for “complete freedom for children . . . experience what is good and what is bad. [Fema] has to make his own self which I must not interfere with. He can listen to me—what I do—he can like what I do. What I do may inspire him; it may be his source of outlook to life . . . but I don’t guide him.”44 Fela’s music also remained fiercely political, although, in its later years, some of the humor that had diminished just after the Kalakuta Massacre returned. The song “Government of Crooks” focused on the corrupt use of oil by Nigerian leaders, while “Music Against Second Slavery” highlighted the relationship between Islam and Nigerian politics. “Don Don Overtake” attacked the constant succession of military governments in Africa and the austerity programs they imposed on the populace. At the Reggae Sunsplash Festival in Surulere he was requested by the tour’s promoters to omit “Don Don Overtake” from the program because of its direct and harsh descriptions of corruption in the military and police. Fela agreed, and then at the concert enthusiastically launched into the song as his opening number, receiving a huge response from the audience. In the song “Underground System,” a tribute to the Marxist leader of Burkina Faso and fellow musician Thomas Sankara, Fela described an underground system that eradicated or undermined all the progressive leaders of Africa such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and Nelson Mandela. Some critics took exception to the fact that Idi Amin was also included in this list, but the release of this song in 1992 helped revive general interest in Fela’s music. Similar to his white counterpart in South Africa P. W. Botha, Babangida mixed authoritarian oppression with a façade of progressivism. Fela and the Nigerian public were increasingly not fooled. One of the most egregious elements of his regime in the eyes of the Nigerian people, was the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Plan (SAP), a plan to reduce the debt, ostensibly on Nigeria’s own terms and without the interference of the IMF, but actually through the monitoring of the World Bank. The austerity measures that resulted from this plan brought severe hardship to Nigerians and the result was civil unrest and a rise in crime. Riots against the SAP took place throughout the late 1980s with brutal responses from the government. To send a message of intimidation

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

350

Sounds of Resistance

regarding the use of the Shrine as a mobilizing resource, police shot and killed a man outside the compound. Fela’s concert in his hometown of Abeokuta was cancelled by military forces as trucks surrounded the arena and soldiers threatened to shoot anyone attempting to enter; then Fela was arrested in January 1993 and charged with ordering the killing of a former employee. The arrest was generally viewed as an attempt by the government to get back at Fela, his brother Beko, and their followers due to their connection with the opposition movement Campaign for Democracy (CD). When civilian elections were held in 1993 and Moshood Abiola won, Babangida annulled the results and installed his own handpicked temporary government. (During this time, the charges against Fela were dropped.) The confusion and unrest caused by Bagangida’s move led to another coup and the military leadership of Sani Abacha, yet another brutal dictator. Fela continued his attacks on general oppression with songs such as “Chop and Clean Mouth Like Nothing Happened, Na New Name for Stealing,” which put a focus on the draining of Africa’s resources through the combined efforts of corrupt Nigerian governments and international organizations such as the IMF. Abacha, to begin with, left Fela alone, possibly because of rumors of the musician’s failing health, but in a strange move in 1996, his government arrested Fela on charges of use of marijuana and sent a drug squad to the Shrine to prevent young people from smoking pot. The move publicly backfired on the regime, mainly due to the irony of one of the most corrupt governments in the world with numerous officials implicated in the international heroin trade arresting a middle-aged musician for the use of marijuana. Fela was arrested several times between 1996 and 1997, and ordered to vacate the Shrine, which he refused to do, continuing instead to perform. By July 1997, however, Fela’s free sexual lifestyle had caught up with him and he became seriously ill and was rumored to be dying of AIDS. Fela had refused throughout his illness to be tested for AIDS, calling it a “white man’s disease,”45 but he had grown thinner and more frail with a persistent cough, and his skin had the numerous lesions associated with AIDS. On August 2, 1997, Fela died at age 57 of heart failure with AIDS-related complications, according to his brother. His death was met with tributes, concerts, constant play of his music on the radio, and many messages of condolence to his surviving family members. A day of mourning was declared and a commemoration held at Tefewa Balewa Square in Lagos, the largest ceremony ever held in the square with over a million people in attendance. The government remained removed from the event and said

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Afrobeat

351

nothing about Fela’s death, although many military men told the press that they never had a problem with him. Fela was buried in a simple grave on the grounds of Kalakuta to a great release of public emotion. Said one mourner, “No president in the world could witness this kind of affection at his burial and it just goes to show what Fela really means for the people of this country.”46 When asked by a student what his music does for people—“what is it?” Fela answered, “African. It’s just Africa, man. . . it’s not entertainment, it’s for listening and thinking.” When asked “What is its inspiration?” Fela replied, “The suffering of our people.”47 In 1986, questioned as to what Nigeria would look like if he were elected president, Fela responded, “People will see government as their own instrument for a better life, not that government has the last say.”48 In the same year, he called John Darnton, asking him to quit the New York Times and work for Fela as “minister of information.” Darnton asked, “What are you—some kind of country?” Fela laughed and responded, “Yes. And I’m bigger than all Nigeria.”49 In 1996, looking back at the achievements of his career, however, Fela arrived at a daunting conclusion:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The American government will shout to us that “democracy is the right thing to do.” But they themselves are not democratic at all . . . If the President is also the supreme commander of the armed forces, as it is in the U.S., then it is a military government . . . We have our own commander here, Sani Abacha, who also happens to be a president. What’s the difference? It’s just that one is wearing uniform and the other is not, that is the only fucking difference because without the soldiers, the guns, and the violence they cannot keep it going . . . Then you see the whole picture, you say, “Wow! All the time I was fighting for the struggle of the people I was only fighting for the white man.” That’s all it amounts to.50

There is strong evidence that Fela’s fans would disagree. The middle name chosen by Fela, Anikulapo, was not a literal defiance of death so much as a symbol of fearlessness that served to inspire the oppressed of his country and throughout Africa, and to challenge corruption and injustice. “Aniku” is a person that will not die—that “does not have death” and its derivation “Aiku” represents immortality. The elements of Fela’s chosen name became powerful messages after his death and serve to underpin the type of immortality he believed in as part of his spiritual approach to life and to Africa. These messages also apply to his music, a force that has not died in Nigeria, Africa as a whole, or internationally. According to Fela’s son Fema, “Afrobeat will always be the music for every generation, forever. Miles Davis said

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

352

Sounds of Resistance

it would be the music of the future, and he was right. Afro-beat is a music like reggae or funk or R&B or jazz; Afro-beat will always be there.”51 Like all powerful historical figures, Fela was a complex person with sometimes contradictory and always challenging views spoken or sung forcefully and unrepentantly. As to his own conclusion that he had only been a pawn of “the white man”; too much of his life, his music, and his message had affected and charged up his people to be dismissed completely as a lost cause, and his sons carry on that musical and political tradition to large and receptive audiences. Every year “Felebration” is held in Nigeria, a week long festival featuring African and international musicians. Fela’s daughter Yeni runs the New Afrika Shrine and it continues to serve as a mecca for fans of Fela and Afrobeat. It also still means something to the ordinary people of Nigeria that Fela never left Kalakuta even after his national and international success. The Shrine continued (and continues) to operate in one of the most dangerous spots in Nigeria, with an audience including workers, musicians, the unemployed, cops, thieves, and even government officials travelling incognito. People came to hear the music, but the expectation was always for something more, and Fela did not disappoint. As far as he was concerned, music was central to the message: “You don’t mess with music. If you mess with music you will die young . . . It must be well-used, for the good of humanity.”52 His son Femi Kuti echoes this sentiment in his own assessment of the role of Afrobeat: “It’s not about jiving. It’s about the truth. And when it’s about the truth, it cannot fail.”53

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Ayo Olukotun, “Traditional Protest Media and Anti-Military Struggle in Nigeria 1988–1999,” African Affairs 101, no. 403 (April 2002), 195. 2. Jean-Jacques Flori and Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, dir., Music Is the Weapon (Antenne 2-K.I.C.S.-Ministere de la Culture, 1982). 3. Carlos Moore, Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), 138. 4. Michael Veal, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000), 4. 5. John Darnton, “How Fela Landed Me in Jail,” New York Times, July 20, 2003, AR25. 6. Misani, “Commemorating Fela Anikulapo-Kuti during Black History Month,” The New York Amsterdam News 101, no. 5 (January 28–February 3, 2010), 18. 7. Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 164.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Afrobeat

353

8. Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975), 62. 9. Ibid., xiv. 10. “Another Disruption in Egba Politics?” Daily Service, January 31, 1946, cited in Veal, Fela, 23. 11. Femi Oyewole, quoted in Abdul Oroh, “I’m Still Scratching the Surface,” African Guardian, October 17, 1988, 20–23, cited in Veal, Fela, 25. 12. Moore, Fela, Fela, 37. 13. Ibid., 42. 14. Nina Emma Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1982), 101. 15. Raisa Simola, “The Construction of a Nigerian Nationalist and Feminist, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 8, no. 1 (1999), 107. 16. John Collins, Musicmakers of West Africa (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1985), cited in Veal, Fela, 40. 17. Moore, Fela, Fela, 64. 18. The Scene Discothéque in New York ran a series of benefit concerts for Biafra in 1968 that included performances by Joan Baez and Jimi Hendrix. John Lennon and Yoko Ono published a letter refusing Lennon’s OBE because of the “imperialist wars” of Vietnam and Biafra. 19. Gary Stewart, Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 118. 20. M. K. Idowu, Fela: Why Blackman Carry Shit (Lagos: Opinion Media, 1986), 76–77. 21. Interviewed by Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (New York: Ecco, 2011), 334. 22. Moore, Fela, Fela, 95. 23. Ibid., 85. 24. Video interview of Fela Kuti by a Political Science student at the University of Lagos (date not given), posted on Fela.net and radioshrine, http://www.youtube. com/user/radioshrine. 25. Fela, quoted in “I Write Music to Correct Evils,” African Concord (October 28–November 3, 1988), 12, cited in Veal, Fela, 75. 26. John Darnton, “Nigerian Soldiers Burn Home of a Dissident Musician,” New York Times, July 7, 1977. 27. Peter Watrous, “Pop/Jazz; Fela Offers A Mosaic Of Music And Politics,” New York Times, July 28, 1989. 28. Justin Labinjoh, “Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: Protest Music and Social Processes in Nigeria,” Journal of Black Studies 13, no. 1 (September 1982), 127. 29. Veal, Fela, 101. 30. Darnton, “How Fela Landed Me in Jail.” 31. Lynskey, 33 Revolutions per Minute, 334. 32. John Collins, West African Pop Roots (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), 69.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

354

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

33. Kelefeh Sanneh and Femi Kuti, “Here Comes the Son,” Transition 85 (2000), 125. Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute. 34. Moore, Fela, Fela, 119. 35. Collins, Musicmakers of West Africa, 120, cited in Veal, Fela, 143. 36. Video interview of Fela Kuti by a political science student at the University of Lagos. 37. Ibid. 38. Labinjoh, “Fela Anikulapo-Kuti,” 122. 39. Flori and Tchalgadjieff, Music Is the Weapon. 40. “Femi Kuti, Son of Famed Fela Kuti, Keeps Political Fire Alive in Disenchanted Nigeria,” The Canadian Press, October 27, 2010. 41. Veal, Fela, 218. 42. Ibid., 220. 43. Veal, Fela, 207. 44. Video interview of Fela Kuti by a political science student at the University of Lagos. 45. Bose Lapido quoted in Eze Anaba, “Fela Goes Off in a Blaze of Glory,” Vanguard, August 13, 1997, 2, cited in Veal, Fela, 240. 46. A large sign at the shrine now warns concertgoers that “AIDS is real” and Femi Kuti has appeared numerous times in AIDS awareness advertising. 47. Video interview of Fela Kuti by a political science student at the University of Lagos. 48. Fela Kuti interview, June 19, 1986. Accessed through “The Shrine,” www. afrobeatmusic.net/html/interview2.html. 49. Darnton, “How Fela Landed Me in Jail”. 50. Keziah Jones, “Chief Priest,” True (July–August 1996), 56–58. 51. Sanneh and Kuti, “Here Comes the Son,” 137. 52. Flori and Tchalgadjieff, Music is the Weapon. 53. Sanneh and Kuti, “Here Comes the Son,” 137.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 17

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory Paz y Baile Lori Oxford

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Arte es resistencia. He aquí algo que el gobierno quiere que olvides: Tienes una voz, ¿cómo la vas a usar? Di la verdad; el arte es testigo, el arte es comunidad. Serás escuchado. El arte es acción sin violencia. El arte cambia corazones sin romper cuerpos. He aquí algo que el gobierno quiere que olvides: ¡Puedes actuar! [Art is resistance. There is something that the government wants you to forget: You have a voice. How are you going to use it? Tell the truth; art is testimony, art is community. You will be heard. Art is action without violence. Art changes hearts without breaking bodies. There is something that the government wants you to forget: You can act!] —Message posted by Maldita Vecindad on its Facebook page, July 3, 2012

Scholars who examine current events in Mexico seem to have need of two Greek masks, the ones that represent tragedy or comedy: the joyful, smiling mask because every day brings more news, more fodder for analysis, and the grimacing, cheerless one because those same pieces of news often represent catastrophic events for millions of Mexican families, from natural or economic disasters to the drastic rise in violence related to drug trafficking. Despite this far-reaching sense of demoralization, the Mexican

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

356

Sounds of Resistance

rock/ska group known as La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio continues to search for and to find reasons for celebration. Maldita Vecindad, as it is usually called, or sometimes La Maldita for short, produces music that is frequently categorized as fusion, due to its blending of genres such as rock, ska, reggae, and punk with traditional Mexican styles like danzón or bolero. The group, deeply rooted in the working class, is a pioneer of the rock en español or rock en tu idioma movement, and its easily recognizable fusion rock as well as the pachuco fashions favored by the members have helped it to become of the most influential groups of contemporary Mexican rock music. In September 1985, an earthquake occurred off the coast of Michoacán, a Mexican state on the Pacific. Even though the epicenter was hundreds of miles away, the devastating quake left significant areas of Mexico City, the most populous city in the world at the time, in piles of rubble. The inhabitants of the city responded at once to the tragedy, helping to acquire and distribute necessary items such as food, water, and first aid materials. The earthquake weakened divisions between classes and assembled people of all social strata, which also led to the creation of a community of musicians of practically all genres, who collaborated in the organization of shows to benefit victims of the disaster. This action represented more than philanthropy on the part of participating Mexican artists; it also was a demonstration of solidarity with a social class that had never been so extensive in number in all of the nation’s history: the poor and hungry, the homeless, the orphaned, the wounded and diseased, the unemployed, many of whom found themselves for the first time in these groups owing to the havoc wrought by the quake. It was under these circumstances that Maldita Vecindad was formed by band members (who use only pseudonyms) Roco, Tiki, Aldo, Pacho, and Sax, who discovered that they shared not only a passion for expanding social consciousness but also an interest in using music to do so. They began by performing for free in the streets but soon began to collect entrance charges for the performances and to donate profits to disaster recovery efforts. Pacho, the group’s original percussionist, relates how they unexpectedly found themselves in the midst of a new cultural movement: “Suddenly we were in the middle of a big solidarity thing, a new cultural push. Members of our band were students of journalism, art, history. We never wanted to be rock stars.”1 The coming together of people from such diverse socioeconomic origins, combined with the synthesis of rhythms and traditional Mexican styles, resulted in the emergence of the type of modern/traditional fusion that best

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

357

characterizes Maldita Vecindad’s music. From the group’s very beginning, its members have drawn on their fame to make their fans more aware of leftist ideas or social causes, such as the need for actively participating in assistance efforts for events like the reconstruction efforts that followed the 1985 earthquake, political campaigns (in particular those leading up to the 1988 national elections), and raising consciousness about HIV and AIDS. The group’s most recent album, Circular colectivo, was released in the United States in March 2010, and the group members themselves explain that they chose this title in order to evoke “the universal symbol of unity, the cycle of life, information passed from one person to the next, peace and dance circles, blood circulating through the body, the movement of individuals, of communities, [ . . .] their expression, their lyrics and celebrations.”2 This description of deliberately symbolic rites evokes a sensation of the group’s having created and participated in rituals confirming their values and their identities. Elaborating on the significance of ritual, sociologist Hugo Reading explains its observance and general process as “sanctioned, symbolic behaviour [ . . .] aimed at controlling human affairs” and goes on to describe it as being “more rigid than is technically justified.”3 In my estimation, Reading’s view of the use and importance of ritual seems to reduce it to a mere authoritarian tool and not an action created and carried out by the people, while Maldita Vecindad understand that ritual is a process to be appreciated, performed, and even manipulated for the sake of their audience as well as their art. Néstor García Canclini, the Argentinean anthropologist and director of the Cultural Studies Program en the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) who has examined the phenomenon of pop culture from sociological as well as economic perspectives, suggests that some popular events, such as rituals or celebrations, not only serve to commemorate important events but also are evidence of certain cultural hegemony, principally in the Mexican context. In one of García Canclini’s best-known theoretical works, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Exiting Modernity (1990), he comments that the phenomenon of ritual exists for the purpose of imposing order and fixing social limits4; to some extent, this assertion coincides with Reading’s depiction above. At another point, though, he notes that the most accepted (up to that point, at least) theories regarding rituals refer to them as a manner of articulating the sacred versus the profane. He also says that it is rare for a ritual to openly recognize conflicts between ethnic groups, economic classes, or other categories created by social divisions.5 An undeniable influence here are the theories elaborated by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu concerning unequal access to cultural capital,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

358

Sounds of Resistance

legitimized by schools, universities, and even artistic fields themselves, despite their purported goal of providing equal opportunities to the extent possible. Alan O’Connor, a scholar who has examined García Canclini’s theories, proposes that their biggest problem on the topic of ritual is that the ideology put forward there does not consider that “fiestas [or other rituals] can be a space for conflict with hegemonic meanings or a memory of resistance or historical defeat.”6 Despite O’Connor’s criticism, though, García Canclini does articulate that, for him, the best recommendation for rituals is to use them to reinforce the process of becoming what one actually is: the recipients of the gift (or the legacy) of culture should simply be proud and show what they are—cultural heirs.7 For the Mexicans that were (and/or continue to be) the audience to whom the messages of Maldita Vecindad’s songs are directed, this piece of advice from García Canclini refutes the stereotypical fatalism of the Mexican working class. It contradicts that very Mexican expression, ni modo, to which Maldita Vecindad habitually makes reference when performing live some of their songs, such as “Solín.”8 The group’s motivation, starting with its very origin, has been to open the eyes of their audience and to encourage them to take an active part in the decisions that could affect their lives, specifically via participating in protests, strikes, and other types of demonstrations. For this reason, it should not be surprising that the group’s motto, with which they sign off on all their albums, web pages, and even Facebook announcements, is paz y baile (peace and dance), a perfect combination of social message with ritual.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

A Corrido of Protest In Circular colectivo appears a song that at first listening could seem somewhat disrespectful: “Corrido para Digna Ochoa.” The musical genre of corridos now often makes one think of narcocorridos (corridos that eulogize drug traffickers and their nefarious feats) as well as the extreme violence associated with them, but in fact corridos remain as popular and relevant as ever. The corrido is a type of lyrical folkloric ballad, appreciated especially among Mexican and Mexican American communities, and it typically recounts the story of cultural or political events that command certain historic importance, from natural disasters to tales of bandits. In general, corridos describe an event like these or the feats of certain (in)famous individuals, but it is not entirely uncommon for corridos to immortalize littleknown heroes or seemingly insignificant everyday events.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

359

Digna Ochoa y Plácido was an attorney and human rights advocate in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, as well as was an activist associated with groups opposing local politics and the corruption that had permeated positions of nearly all ranks. She advocated for peasant ecologists in central and southern Mexico and worked alongside Zapatista guerrillas who shared her aspirations for justice and recognition, not for herself, it should be noted, but for the victims of discrimination from the highest levels of government down. At the age of 24, Ochoa was kidnapped and raped after making public her discovery of a blacklist of people active in political protests and unions, but the Mexican police took no action when she attempted to report the crimes committed against her. No official investigation was ever carried out, and in an attempt to protect herself Ochoa first fled to the United States and then returned to Mexico to move into a Dominican convent, where she lived eight years in sanctuary even though she never actually joined the religious group by taking vows. After those eight years passed, however, she left the convent, reincorporated herself into secular life, and resumed her fight for human rights. Several death threats followed, and she was kidnapped again. In October 2001, Ochoa went to work at a Veracruz law firm, reporting abuses committed by several federal agents, while she was also working in defense of men accused of detonating bombs in Mexico City banks, protesting against globalization. Three days after Ochoa began her efforts to expose the abuse of power and to defend her clients, her body was found in her office with two gunshot wounds, along with a note threatening that the same fate would befall anyone who attempted to resume the reports of abuse where Ochoa had left off. Despite these pieces of clear evidence, Mexican authorities determined that her death was a suicide and refused to acknowledge any possibility that other parties could have been involved in Ochoa’s death, thus sparing themselves the obligation of carrying out an investigation, much less a search for suspects. Linda Diebel, a friend of Ochoa and author of The Assassination of Digna Ochoa, describes the events surrounding Ochoa’s death thus: It was her fame [ . . .] in human rights circles that made her a threat. [During the investigation] there was suddenly a cover-up. Suddenly they started to whisper that it was [ . . .] suicide, that she had, wearing great big red rubber gloves [ . . .] shot herself in the thigh, apparently trying to bleed to death, and then wrapped her arm around her head and with her wrong arm shot herself in the head. [ . . .] The judge who headed the final investigation had overseen a case in Mexico City a few years before. There had been a report done on

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

360

Sounds of Resistance

a man who had apparently committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the heart. [That] they ruled it as suicide with so many things, both from the physical evidence to the events of her life, [ . . .] was just preposterous.9

Diebel, obviously an admirer of her friend Ochoa, continues: “What was very important about Digna was that she took on the army. She’s the only lawyer that I’ve ever seen in Mexico who actually [ . . .] was able to interview soldiers in court, question soldiers in court who were charged with torture.”10 Kerry Kennedy, who wrote Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World, which contains a chapter dedicated to Ochoa, was also one of her friends. Kennedy describes a conversation they once had:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

[Ochoa] was such an extraordinary woman, just somebody with such vitality and life, and just a bright, cheerful look at the future. She approached her work under such difficult circumstances. First of all, to be a human rights defender in Mexico is an extremely dangerous job in and of itself, but in addition to that, she was a woman [ . . .] and she was an Indian. [ . . .] I talked to her one day about some of the human rights work that she did [ . . .]. And I said to her, “Where do you get that courage? Is that something that you’re born with? or is it something that you can develop?” And she said, “You know, I’m just so angry when I think about what they’ve done to me and to my family and to my country. And I take all of my outrage, and it gives me this extraordinary sense of strength with which I can confront anyone.”11

Maldita Vecindad’s “Corrido para Digna Ochoa” begins with the typical corrido introduction, in which the corridista, or singer, names the song’s protagonist and makes reference to the events that will be described therein, although in the case of this song in particular the singer includes an ironic literary intertextuality as well as a noteworthy social critique. Backed by a joyful-sounding music with a danceable and somewhat accelerated techno tempo, he sings: Voy a cantar un corrido para Digna Ochoa Crónica de una muerte que estaba anunciada Un 19 de octubre murió asesinada Por un sistema y un gobierno sin justicia ni verdad. [I’m going to sing a corrido for Digna Ochoa Chronicle of a death that was foretold12 On October 19th she was murdered By a system and government with no justice or truth.]13

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

361

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Until this point, this corrido does not stray from the traditional structure and content of others in the genre, in the sense that the singer reveals the background of the events that he is about to narrate; consequently, this corrido (like most others) functions as an informative medium more than simple entertainment. Even so, it has been suggested by Martha Sánchez that corridos do not merely serve as musical newscasts. Instead, in order to understand the references contained within the songs, the audience must already have at least minimal knowledge of the events reported there, according to Sánchez, and in this sense the corridos perform more like an editorial or opinion piece, given that the singer does not claim to recount the events impartially.14 This idea applies especially well to Maldita Vecindad’s corrido: it is evident that the group’s ultimate objective is not to record Digna Ochoa’s death simply for reasons of posterity; rather, they elevate their message to the level of social protest, even though that protest is ironically contained within a popular (as in “pop”) song and in a major key. In fact, if a listener were not familiar with Spanish and therefore were unable to understand the lyrics, it would be plausible that he or she mistake the song for a carefree Mexican dance number, since the cheerful-sounding music gives no indication of the tragedy chronicled within the song. Typical corridos conclude with a formal farewell from the singer, and “Corrido para Digna Ochoa” is no exception, although Maldita Vecindad also adapts this part into protest and critique: Ya con ésta me despido no sin antes agregar la versión que dio el gobierno: un suicidio, nada más. Vuela y canta el jilguero, lleva la noticia al Cielo, Digna Ochoa sigue viva en la memoria de su Pueblo. [And now with this I say farewell but not without saying first that the government’s story was “a suicide, nothing more.” The finch flies and sings, it carries the news to Heaven, that Digna Ochoa is still alive in the memory of her People.]15

In regards to using this type of medium to immortalize a martyr, García Canclini points out that “the colonels who had no one to write to them

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

362

Sounds of Resistance

[ironically, another intertextual reference to García Márquez16] now arrive with their stories via cinema; the testimony of the oppressed and the memory of the disappeared now appear in rock songs and videos. Historical dramas are hybridized more with today’s discourses in cultural movements than social or political ones.”17 If what sociologist Vartan Messier suggests is true, that “the spectacle is the site and means through which citizens [ . . .] inform and interact with one another,”18 then Maldita Vecindad’s translation of their performances to cultural rituals means that they have created and provided a forum of utmost importance, one from which Mexicans can extract information while simultaneously participating in a ritual. Both processes are significant, but it is particularly the latter, as well as the combination of the two, that make Maldita Vecindad’s cultural contributions so substantial, since, as we’ve seen earlier, participation in ritual is a virtually fail-proof creation of solidarity within a group.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Fútbol: The Quintessential Mexican Pastime Even those who are barely familiar with Mexican culture recognize that it is glutted with identity-defining rituals, from el grito to celebrate its independence from Spain, to picnics in cemeteries on the Day of the Dead. Fútbol, or soccer, for instance, is so much a part of Mexican culture that not following at least one team with zeal is a cultural sin akin to not liking tortillas or beans, Mexican gastronomic staples, and playing or watching fútbol is a quintessential Mexican ritual—not exclusively so, of course, since it is the most popular sport all over the world, but participating in some fashion in the fútbol world is a definitive part of popular culture in Mexico. There are few events that can catch the attention of a whole community (or nation) like an important soccer game, and few topics can bring together people of all socioeconomic classes like soccer can. There are those who view it as a demonstration of patriotism, of national affinity, of regional pride—in short, as an expression of identity. By far, the most popular sport in Mexico is association football (soccer), regulated by FIFA (the French Féderation Internationale de Football Association, or International Federation of Association Football). Several of Mexico’s top clubs are known worldwide for having won so many championships and Mexico has also produced several players (Hugo Sánchez, Antonio Carbajal, and Jorge Campos, among others) who have gained world renown. It is not only talent that makes Mexican soccer stand out, but also its commercial elements, since so many Mexican stadia have been used in World Cup games. The Estadio

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

363

Azteca, for example, one of the largest stadia in the world, is the only one ever to have accommodated two final games in the World Cup. With a history like this, it is not difficult to extrapolate the relationship between soccer’s popularity in Mexico and the economic clout it exerts over individuals, companies, and even entire industries. Needless to say, a sport as popular as soccer enjoys this status in countries all over the world, but I cite these examples to underscore the sport’s importance in Mexico specifically. One of the singles on Maldita Vecindad’s Circular colectivo is “Fut callejero,” an illustration of the simple joy of the sport and a hearty rejection of how it has become commercialized. It is to note that the album was released mere months before the 2010 World Cup, an ironic touch that Pato, the guitarist, explains thus: “You have to wear a certain brand of shoes, certain colors of clothes, and all that can lead to violence. With [‘Fut callejero’], we wanted to return to the fundamental origin of the sport.”19 One could argue that this is precisely what Maldita Vecindad does with their song, which begins with sounds of people playing in the street before any music can be heard, and then, the singer:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

El fútbol llanero es lo mío, es aburrido nomás verlo allá en la tele. Me lanzo a la cancha de palillo y con los compas de la cuadra jugaré mi propio mundial. [Everyday soccer is what I like, it’s boring just to watch it on TV. I run out to the field we’ve imagined and with my homeboys from the block I will play my own World Cup.]20

It is fitting here to remember Maldita Vecindad’s ever-present motto—paz y baile—upon examining the song’s chorus, accompanied by an upbeat guitar and a chorus of masculine voices: Fútbol llanero, fut callejero juego del barrio, pura diversión Fútbol esencia, fútbol conciencia aquí no hay violencia, pura diversión. [Everyday soccer, street soccer neighborhood game, just plain fun Soccer is essence, it’s consciousness there’s no violence here, just plain fun.]21

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

364

Sounds of Resistance

It is clear that with this song Maldita Vecindad’s main purpose is not protest in a political sense; instead, “Fut callejero” demonstrates frank resistance to a nearly universal (in Mexico, at least) ritual, one in which people participate in order to establish and reiterate who they are and how they identify themselves. The observation (or complaint) on the part of Maldita Vecindad, that football’s commercialization has lessened the sheer enjoyment of the sport is echoed by Uruguayan journalist and essayist Eduardo Galeano, who writes in the late 1990s:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

A medida que el deporte se ha hecho industria, ha ido desterrando la belleza, que nace de la alegría de jugar porque sí. En este mundo del fin del siglo, el fútbol profesional condena lo que es inútil, y es inútil lo que no es rentable. A nadie da de ganar esa locura que hace que el hombre sea niño por un rato, jugando como juega el niño con el globo y como juega el gato con el ovillo de lana: bailarín que danza con una pelota leve como el globo que se va al aire y el ovillo que rueda, jugando sin saber que juega, sin motivo y sin reloj y sin juez. [As the sport has become an industry, it has uprooted little by little the beauty that is born from the joy of playing “just because.” In this end-ofcentury world, professional soccer condemns that which is not useful, and that which is not profitable is not useful. No one profits economically from the madness that lets a man become a child again for a while, playing as a child plays with a balloon and as a cat plays with a ball of yarn: a dancer who handles the ball with grace, just like the balloon that moves through the air and the skein of yarn that rolls, playing without realizing he’s playing, with no motive, no clock, no referee.]22

As Galeano points out and laments here, soccer’s very popularity has allowed it to become transformed into a completely capitalistic (and therefore exclusive) pastime. “Fut callejero” rejects this transformation by celebrating fútbol llanero. This is the term used in Mexico to describe the games played informally, with no referees, no formal demarcations of space—it could be a vacant lot, an alley, or a low-traffic street—no specific number of players, as long as the teams are equally matched. Determinations of offsides or goals scored are often contested, as the limits and even goal spaces are imaginary. This is the type of soccer to which Maldita Vecindad refers in the song. The aspect of ritual, according to García Canclini, includes not only the reaffirmation of cultures but also protest and popular resistance. This is evident in Maldita Vecindad’s emphasis on going against the grain, on resisting the seduction that is inherent in the dazzling and overwhelming commercialization of the sport, and returning to the original spirit of the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

365

game. Although there is no denying the talent and grit of many female players across the globe, professional and otherwise, for the most part (and especially in Latin America) soccer fulfills the role of a homosocial malebonding ritual. When that ritual is deliberately reduced to bare bones—a patch of land and a ball—rather than the glittery uniforms, elaborate light displays, and roaring hordes of fans, then the plainer version of the ritual serves as another type of unifying element, one that establishes a bond between the players and affirms their existence and importance. A penalty kick that wins a national team a championship may be highlighted in all the sports media, but a scissor kick on a vacant lot that marks a winning goal for a neighborhood team may be the most memorable moment in the lives of every player in that game, affirming (to them, at least) their manhood, their importance in society. Maldita Vecindad knows this, and their tribute to the value of soccer—notably, the sport and not the industry—in their culture accentuates the role of fútbol llanero as much more than simple entertainment. The band’s celebration of fútbol llanero is not merely critical of what soccer has become as a cultural phenomenon, but it is also a slap in the face of the establishment that aspires to dominate Latin American (if not global) culture and usually succeeds. By rejoicing in the dirt, mismatched uniforms, torn soccer balls, and malleable field boundaries, Maldita Vecindad is defying what is arguably one of the strongest cultural forces in the world.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Resistance to Borders and Ethnic Divisions Questioning and simultaneously celebrating ritual, however, is not a primary focus of Maldita Vecindad; instead, drawing attention to current events regarding social justice is one of the band’s primary goals. For instance, one of the most openly maligned groups in U.S. society is the one made up of Latin American immigrants. Granted, the friction between North American residents and more recent immigrants, regardless of place of origin, has existed since long before the United States even existed as such and has never ceased to exist since then. Over the past few decades, groups of U.S. residents have elected to use immigrants as their scapegoat, especially Latin American immigrants, and most especially those from Mexico and Central America, even more so when these immigrants are labeled as “unskilled.” Myths on both sides of the border persist in fortifying divisions between the groups. Most of Mexico’s modern-day history books recognize and celebrate the mestizaje (mixture) of indigenous Americans and Europeans, particularly

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

366

Sounds of Resistance

after Mexico’s revolution (1910–1920), when the social and cultural movement called indigenismo began to recognize and in some cases even celebrate the contributions of Amerindians to Mexican society. Indigenismo reached a peak of influence during the late 1930s, thanks to the efforts of, among others, then-president Lázaro Cárdenas and famed muralist Diego Rivera, and some Mexican artists and intellectuals adopted typical indigenous dress and jewelry, gave their children names from languages such as náhuatl, quiché, and purépecha, and incorporated indigenous architectural styles and decorations into their homes. Indeed, although the word mestizo literally refers to an individual of mixed geographical ancestry, usually made obvious in that individual’s phenotype, in Mexico mestizo typically only implies the combination of the two groups mentioned above. It is significant to point out here that, while these two populations are generally the only ones popularly recognized, they are not the only ones present. Although their circle of social influence is smaller due to their reduced numbers, relative to the two main groups, there are communities of significant size of Afro-Mexicans that have managed to preserve African traditions, even though these are not typically valued (or even acknowledged) by society. On the contrary, just as in many other areas in Latin America to which Africans were brought as slaves, in mainstream Mexican culture the importance of the influences left by these individuals is not merely minimized but often even disavowed or scorned. Maldita Vecindad, however, pays tribute to this African presence on Circular colectivo with their song “Chacahua (El grito de luz),” in which they combine some of the instruments that produce the band’s characteristic sound (brass sounds in particular) and their most frequently used rhythms (rock and ska) with those of areas associated with Afro-Mexican culture and communities: villages on the coasts of the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. As an homage to archetypal African music, the song begins with layers of complex percussive beats, most with very organic sounds, although there are identifiable synthetic echoes that make it clear that the song is a modern one. The band gradually mixes in more strings and brass in the quick tempo for which it has become known, and the singer begins with “En Chacahua yo oí/el grito de luz” (In Chacahua I heard/the shout of light).23 The locale of Chacahua, the lagoons interspersed through the area, and the beaches there known as Costa Chica (in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca) are all areas inhabited by Afro-Mexicans, or Afro-mestizos, identified as such because their ancestry includes people originally from Europe, Mesoamerica, and Africa. The people of the region are very isolated; many of them speak Spanish only as a second language—if at all—and characteristics of African

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

367

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

phenotypes are easily recognizable. Chacahua lies on the southern Pacific coast, near the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It is on or near the Isthmus where most Afro-Mexican communities can be found, although they do tend to be concentrated in areas much closer to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, where the African slave trade has deeper roots. In fact, according to renowned anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, while Mexico was still New Spain (in other words, still a Spanish colony), there were times when black Africans even outnumbered white Europeans there.24 Given this, an inevitable question arises: where did the Africans go? Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán claims that they never left and that widespread miscegenation simply diluted their social and cultural influence as well as phenotype.25 Just as in other Latin American countries, people of obvious African ancestry have often experienced discrimination; for this reason, many Afro-Mexicans have historically attempted to conceal their link to Africa, denying this part of their heritage in an often futile effort to elevate themselves within the Mexican social hierarchy. In “Chacahua,” though, Maldita Vecindad celebrates the African connection to the more popularly recognized ethnic groups: Tierra mestiza celebra sus raíces negras Es mar y laguna besándose dulce y salado [ . . .] Al mar se le canta Ofrendas y danzas [ . . .] Sintonizando Radio Quinto Patio para todo el sureste desde Chacahua para el México negro, para toda la gente [The land of Mestizos celebrates its black roots Sea and lagoon kissing, sweet and salty [ . . .] One sings to the sea Offerings and dances [ . . .] Radio Quinto Patio broadcasting for the whole southeast from Chacahua for black Mexico, for all people]26

The emphasis in these verses on duality is apparent in the references to mestizos and “black roots,” “sea” and “lagoon,” and “sweet” and “salty,” all of which represent dichotomies that complement rather than oppose each other. The “offerings” and “dances” that are referred to here evoke both

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

368

Sounds of Resistance

African and Amerindian rituals acknowledging human connections with nature and the cosmos. Finally, the “Radio Quinto Patio” is an obvious allusion to the group’s full name, La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio, and by explicitly naming “black Mexico” as part of its intended audience, they offer an overt commemoration, even a celebration, of that group’s contributions to modern-day Mexico. In so doing, Maldita Vecindad challenges the almost universally held notion of a uniquely mestizo Mexico and demands that the Afro-Mexicans, heretofore ignored in official histories of the nation, be given the acknowledgement that they deserve for having contributed and, although to a lesser degree, maintained African rituals there. This action on the part of Maldita Vecindad is yet another instance of their efforts to spread “paz y baile,” regardless of origin. As has become typical for the group, with this song they champion the cause of yet another underdog, demanding recognition for Afro-Mexicans and demonstrating their own solidarity with the socially marginalized.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Modern-Day Resistance Maldita Vecindad’s efforts at raising social consciousness are not limited to the borders of Mexico. The group is also involved in movements that protest what U.S. immigration advocates decry as unconstitutional and unjust laws and policies within the United States that apply solely to immigrants there. For instance, the state of Arizona’s Senate Bill (SB) 1070 was one of the country’s most controversial topics in 2010 and 2011, given the provisions it made to deport immigrants and otherwise push them away, if not back to their countries of origin then at least into other states, attempting to shift the immigration “problem” to other shoulders. SB 1070 is considered by many to be little more than a blatant expression of anti-immigrant racism, as immigrants in Arizona, the vast majority of whom come from Mexico, would be convicted of misdemeanors if they were discovered at any time to not be carrying required identification documents on their person. SB 1070 also proposed to confer full authority of state law enforcement officers, regardless of training (or lack thereof) in immigration law, to determine based on their own reasonable suspicion whether an immigrant’s documentation, even if present, is sufficient. Despite nationwide protests against the proposed bill, it was signed into law, but constant efforts from opposition groups garnered sufficient awareness for the cause that even the U.S. Department of Justice became involved. Although the law did take effect and is on the books at the time of writing, the provisions of the law that have provoked the most controversy have been deemed unconstitutional

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

369

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

and were blocked in federal courts. Despite this, the state of Arizona continues to push for the full legislation to be recognized, regardless of the injustice inherent in the law’s treatment of what is arguably already the most severely marginalized group in the country. On May 16, 2011, in the esplanade of the Zócalo, the central plaza of Mexico’s capital, some of Mexican rock’s most well-known bands (e.g., Jaguares, Molotov, Bostich + Fussible, and Maldita Vecindad) as well as groups from all over Latin America (Topete y su Trova, Kike y su Aché, and Los Bunkers, among others) met to play and demonstrate their solidarity for those affected by SB 1070, or what they call the ley antiinmigrante (antiimmigrant law). In fact, Mexico City’s government (GDF) organized the concert to raise awareness among the Mexican population regarding the effects that the law would certainly have on them and on their family members in el norte.27 The free concert, which was attended by more than 85,000 people, represented a peaceful gathering (despite the sometimes violent dance styles by some of the performing groups) and was called “Sí” por la dignidad: todos somos Arizona (“Yes” to dignity: we are all Arizonans). The hard-rock group Molotov, known for their envelope-pushing antics and deliberately offensive lyrics, took the stage shouting that SB 1070 was “una pinche injusticia social” (a fucking social injustice), to which the crowd roared its agreement. Just prior to performing, la Maldita dedicated their part in the concert “a nuestros hermanos que están sufriendo por la discriminación en Arizona” (to our brothers who are suffering because of the discrimination in Arizona).28 The appearance of Maldita Vecindad is especially significant in a concert organized around this matter, since a number of their songs (including Sur del sur29 on Circular colectivo) deal with issues relating to immigration to the United States, and in the concert the group openly described SB 1070 as “fascista, nazista y retrógrada” (fascist, Nazi, and backward).30

Conclusion One could say that Maldita Vecindad’s latest album is many things—social protest, a call for the raising of social consciousness, an acknowledgement of the varied cultures that have fused to create contemporary Mexican culture(s)—but more than anything else it is a great celebration: a collection of songs to celebrate dance, peace, pride, discriminated minorities, the inextinguishable flame of those who work for social justice, and even soccer and the rituals surrounding it. In this chapter I have attempted to examine Maldita Vecindad’s album from a perspective that takes into consideration

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

370

Sounds of Resistance

both scholarly reflections on culture and the signifiers and the signified within it, as well as the pessimistic atmosphere of modern-day Mexico, hoping to prove that the scholars that I first mentioned in the chapter’s beginning, the ones in need of the double masks, should not divest themselves of the joyful mask just yet. Maldita Vecindad possesses a masterful grasp of the functional role of ritual—in art, music, society, or on the street— regardless of whether those rituals are used to maintain structure or to preserve collective memory, and nowhere is this understanding on their part more apparent or more adroitly demonstrated than in their appropriately titled album, Circular colectivo.31

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Anthony Wright, “Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del Quinto Patio: Mexico Culture and Arts,” MexConnect.com, last modified February 1, 1998, http://www. mexconnect.com/articles/393-maldita-vecindad-y-los-hijos-del-quinto-patio. 2. “Maldita Vecindad Página Oficial (Circular colectivo),” Maldita Vecindad, http://www.malditavecindad.net (accessed September 19, 2010). 3. Hugo Reading, Dictionary of the Social Sciences (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 1996), 179. 4. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Exiting Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 23. 5. Ibid., 134. 6. Alan O’Connor, “Consumers and Citizens: on Néstor García Canclini,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2003), 103–20. 7. Ibid., 135. 8. In Maldita Vecindad’s best-selling live recording, Gira Pata de Perro, the singer introduces “Solín” with “Esta canción la queremos dedicar especialmente a toda la imaginación, y la vida, y las sonrisas, y la gente [ . . .] sudando. Esto va para toda la imaginación, el sentido de ‘ni modo’, la vida callejera. Esto se llama ‘Solín’.” 9. “The Assassination of Digna Ochoa,” DemocracyNOW, http://www.democ racynow.org (accessed August 20, 2011). 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. It is interesting to note here that the verse “Crónica de una muerte que estaba anunciada” is a nearly verbatim reference to the title of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, Crónica de una muerte anunciada. Although the García Márquez novel has little to do with human rights causes and more to do with amorous scandals, the title is a perfect verse for a song commemorating the life and honoring the death of Digna Ochoa. 13. Maldita Vecindad, “Corrido para Digna Ochoa,” Circular colectivo (Nacional Records, 2010, MP3 file). All Maldita Vecindad lyrics are reprinted with permission.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Maldita Vecindad, Ritual, and Memory

371

14. Martha I. Sánchez, Corridos in Migrant Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 31. 15. Vecindad, “Corrido para Digna Ochoa.” 16. García Márquez’s novella El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, or No One Writes to the Colonel, is another of his well-known works. 17. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Exiting Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xviii. 18. Vartan P. Messier, “Consumerism after Theory: Globalization and the End of Transnational Discourse in Néstor García Canclini’s Cultural Empiricism,” Atenea 27, no. 1 (June 2007), 24. 19. Ed Morales, “Maldita Vecindad is Ready to Rock the Latin Alternative Music Conference,” NJ.com, last modified July 6, 2010, http://www.nj.com/ entertainment/music/index.ssf/2010/07/maldita_vecindad_is_ready_to_r.html. 20. Maldita Vecindad, “Fut callejero,” Circular colectivo (Nacional Records, 2010, MP3 file). 21. Ibid. 22. Eduardo Galeano, El fútbol a sol y a sombra (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2003), 2. 23. Maldita Vecindad, “Chacahua (El grito de luz),” Circular colectivo (Nacional Records, 2010, MP3 file). 24. Michael S. Warner, Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001), 4. 25. Ibid. 26. Maldita Vecindad, “Chacahua (El grito de luz).” 27. I. Longhi-Bracaglia, “El rock mexicano, contra Arizona,” ELMUNDO. es, last modified August 19, 2011, http://www.elmundo.es/america/2010/05/15/ mexico/1273930441.html. 28. Hugo Torres, “Concierto de rock, la manifestación más grande en contra de la ‘ley antiinmigrante’ de Arizona,” VivirMéxico.com, last modified May 17, 2010, http://vivirmexico.com/2010/05/manifestacion-en-contra-de-la-leyantiinmigrante-de-arizona. 29. “Sur del sur” begins with a description of the plight of many Mexicans, the joblessness or poor economy that motivates their immigration (in this case, undocumented) to the United States and then flows to a more self-assured declaration of rights: “si aquí no hay pa’ chambear/me dicen el ilegal/pero yo me voy a cruzar/me faltan papeles y me van a botar/[ . . .] muros, fronteras y retenes me hacen reír/balsas, camiones y los trenes me van a servir/[ . . .] hoy no voy a trabajar/primero de mayo/me voy a manifestar/tenemos derechos, mi voz se va a escuchar/somos millones y más/[ . . .] En New York, Chicago, San Pancho y L.A./[ . . .] salimos a protestar/ [ . . .] si nos preguntas: ¿Por qué estamos aquí?/Primero estuviste allá/Abriste las venas de una tierra ancestral/dictadura criminal, intervención militar, saqueo transnacional” (“there are no jobs here/they call me illegal/but I’m going to cross the border/I don’t have papers and they’ll kick me out/[ . . .] walls, borders, and police stops just make me laugh/rafts, buses, and trains will do for me/[ . . .] today I’m not going to work/May 1st/I’m going to protest/we have rights, my voice will be heard/there are millions of us, even more/[ . . .] In New York, Chicago, San Fran, and L.A./[ . . .]

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

372

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

we’re going to protest/[ . . .] if you ask us why we’re here/well, first you were there/ you slit the veins of ancestral land/criminal dictatorship, military intervention, transnational sacking”). Interestingly, here we find yet another intertextuality, this time to Las venas abiertas de América Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano. 30. Longhi-Bracaglia, “El rock mexicano, contra Arizona.” 31. At the time of writing, Maldita Vecindad is coming off a rigorous and ambitious tour and appears to be taking a well-deserved sabbatical. However, rumors abound in popular Internet spaces (particularly MySpace, Facebook, and comment sections in digital periodicals) that La Maldita is ending its 25-year journey together. Many fans take as evidence of this “breakup” a solo concert performed in the summer of 2011 by Roco Pachukote (again, an obvious pseudonym).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 18

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas The Bachata Genre as a Vehicle for Social Commentary—Past and Present

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Patricia Reagan

Bachata, a musical genre originating in the Dominican Republic, can be considered music of resistance both politically and socially. From the direct connection between the inception of the genre and the death of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, to the initial marginalization of the genre by the socially elite as well as the bachata genre’s relationship with the nueva canción (new song), a left-wing political movement, both the origins and rise to popularity of the bachata genre are linked to political and social conflicts. In the present day, bachata music’s wide popularity sets the music apart from its humble roots and resistant nature; however, a small number of songs with a strong social message suggests that bachata was and still is a music of the people. This analysis, therefore, will first examine the historical elements of resistance and marginalization as the nexus upon which the origins of the genre can be understood. Second, this chapter will analyze the social commentary in a small group of contemporary bachata songs,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

374

Sounds of Resistance

recorded after the late 1990s, that evidences the genre’s continued dialogue with its resistant origins. The origins of the bachata genre are not completely clear, although Deborah Pacini Hernandez, anthropologist and author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music, the landmark study of the genre, indicates that the origins of the rural music that would come to be known as bachata can be linked to the Cuban boleros. Bachata shares with boleros a guitar base while also including bongos and the güira,1 an instrument made from a sheet of metal with perforations upon which rhythms are brushed.2 Pacini Hernandez indicates that José Manuel Calderón recorded the first bachata songs on an album entitled Borracho de amor (Drunk with Love) in 1961, while also indicating that the music was played for many years before this first official recording and that in 1961 the music was not yet called bachata.3 It is not coincidental that 1961 is the same year that Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the tyrannical dictator of the Dominican Republic, was assassinated by insurgents. Trujillo, whose rule was characterized by violence and intolerance, controlled every aspect of the lives of the Dominican people, even music. El jefe (the boss), as he was nicknamed, was known to be a fan of Dominican merengue music and during the period of his rule, known as the Trujillo era (1930–1961), he censored musical production and limited it to his personal preferences, namely the Dominican Merengue genre.4 Thus, the post-Trujillo period immediately resulted in two phenomena that directly contributed to the growth of bachata: the increase in the migration of poor campesinos (rural farmers) from rural to urban areas and the broadening of cultural freedoms that spurred the growth of the music industry and decreased restrictions in radio play and recording.5 New cultural freedoms and mass migration allowed rural musicians, who are now known to be the founders of the bachata genre, to begin to record the guitar music they had been playing for some time but had not previously disseminated publically.6 As Pacini Hernandez indicates, the naming of the genre occurred sometime in the 1970s, although it is not entirely clear precisely when this happened.7 In various countries of the Spanish-speaking world, the term bachata refers to a lower class informal party, gathering, or get-together that includes music, drinking, and food. The Cuban writer, Fernando Ortiz, suggests in Nuevo catauro de cubanismos (New Load of Cubanisms) that the word originally derived from two African words cumbancha and cumbanchata, both of which share a similar meaning to bachata.8 Like Pacini Hernández, Darío Tejeda, author of La pasión danzaria about merengue and bachata music, also links the genre to Cuban boleros,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

375

and indicates that bachata groups were likely simplifying boleros as a result of their limited access to instruments and narrow musical education.9 In contrast to Pacini Hernandez and Tejeda, Euri Cabral, a Dominican journalist, links the inception of bachata music directly to the introduction of the accordion to merengue music in the 19th century. Cabral’s argument focuses on the very etymology of the word bachata as referring to a lower class party.10 Cabral cites the writer Ramón Emilio Jiménez, who establishes a difference between “baile, fiesta y bachata” (dance, party and bachata).11 According to Jiménez, a baile took place in a formal setting with the upper class sectors dancing the select and learned dances of the time, while the fiesta was a dancing celebration with a brass band, the güira and the accordion, where music such as merengue and other folkloric music were played. The bachata, on the other hand, was a relatively spontaneous celebration with guitars, bongo drums, sticks, and spoons among other informal instruments where boleros were danced by the poor.12 As Cabral reveals “These celebrations, that were called bachatas, began to be displaced socially, moving away from the sectors and places that merengue won over more and more.”13 The word bachata itself, marks the genre’s very marginalization as it was used pejoratively by Dominican elites to concur with the negative connotations of the lower class gatherings where this music was played. Indeed, even before the name bachata was used to describe the genre, other terms that similarly marginalized the music included boleros campesinos (rural farmer’s boleros), música popular (popular music), música para emborracharse (music to get drunk to), or música de guardia (music of the guards), which was derogatory in the assumption of the lower social class of guards, policemen, and soldiers who would listen to this type of music. Another term, música cachivache, which could be roughly translated to junk music, also served to trivialize bachata music.14 Furthermore, the attempt by some bachata artists to reverse the negative trend and change the genre’s name to the more descriptive música de amargue (music of bitterness) was largely unsuccessful at the time.15 Notably, in the present day, newspaper articles from the Dominican Republic frequently use the term amargue interchangeably with the term bachata to refer to the genre. Moreover, not only the music itself but also the singers of this guitarbased music were branded negatively. For example, the word bachatero, meaning bachata singer, was used by the upper class as synonymous to “low-downers” or the “worst” of society, according to bachata singer, Luís Días, in an interview for the film Santo Domingo Blues.16 Eladio Romero Santos, another bachata artist profiled in the film, reveals that bachateros were contemptuously called a come-sopa, meaning someone who only had

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

376

Sounds of Resistance

enough money to eat chicken soup, and pasa-cantando, meaning a vagabond with no future who only wastes his time singing.17 In addition to the contemptuous nomenclature surrounding bachata music, the social spaces where bachata music grew and flourished is significant in understanding the genre’s marginalization, as it became part of the public sphere. Early bachata musicians were from the poorest rural areas of the country. They were frequently uneducated, recording songs with incorrect grammar and rural slang, and they were predominately black, although discussions of race rarely enter into the conversation when discussing bachata music.18 This phenomenon may be a result of a social division so clear cut that the element of racial division is simply implied. As Tejeda indicates, the division of classes, which was primarily a racial division, was already manifested in music even as early as the 16th and 17th centuries.19 The themes of bachata songs included topics that the upper class associated with the lower class such as betrayal, bitterness, crime, deception, drinking, heartbreak, love and love lost, poverty, prostitution, rejection, sex, and vengeance.20 Ynmaculada Cruz Hierro, a Dominican journalist, reveals that many of the biggest stars of both bachata and merengue come from humble origins, and she attributes this to the fact that the poor “have the necessity to say things or denounce situations” and music gives them an outlet to do so.21 In addition, Días indicates that the themes predominant to bachata music allows the poor to “express their impotence” in society through their music.22 Furthermore, the social spaces where bachata music flourished were equally marginalized. The genre thrived in cabarets, brothels, and other places of ill repute, which adds to the social stigma that plagued the music.23 Furthermore, beginning in the late 1970s los Carwash as they were called, became popular gathering places with tables, chairs, beer, women, and live or radio-broadcasted bachata music.24 For the upper class, as the country progressed and modernized, bachata music, musicians, and listeners became a reminder of disparaging social differences. As Pacini Hernandez reveals, bachata music stood for all that the privileged classes wished to cover up in representing the country to the world at large: In response, the dominant classes created negative stereotypes with which to justify their indifference to the plight of those who were economically destitute . . . they charged that the poor were ignorant, violent, vulgar, tasteless drunkards and whoremongers, and they used their preference for bachata as proof of their degeneracy.25

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

377

Nevertheless, as bachatero, Teodoro Reyes affirms in Santo Domingo Blues, bachata music had listeners from the upper class, although enjoying the music was done secretly so as not to cause embarrassment or scorn for the listener.26 For many years, bachata music was not played on the radio, with the exception of Radio Guarachita, a station that catered to the lower classes.27 One unique aspect of this radio station was the free public service announcements that served the important function of communication between the rural migrants and their families. The messages transmitted by the radio station included news of “sickness, death, or other personal problems.” It is believed that many people listened to the station specifically for these announcements.28 In this way, Radio Guarachita represented much more for the Dominican poor than just a radio station that played the music that they liked. A DJ for Radio Guarachita, Jorge Sarit affirms the importance of the free announcements for the viability of the station by indicating that the popularity of Radio Guarachita declined when telephone lines finally connected the rural and urban areas in the Dominican Republic.29 Cabral draws attention to the fact that that this staunch marginalization began during the Trujillo era as the dictator’s love for merengue and his desire to establish it as the national music relegated bachata music to the “shadows of the bars, of the prostitute houses, of the side streets, of the patios, of the most abjectly poor, of the sectors that were most pushed away and excluded from a society that was so tightly controlled by Trujillo.”30 Even after Trujillo’s death, however, bachata music was forbidden from elite music halls while recordings of the music were not sold in many record stores.31 Notably, even during this period of marked prejudice against the genre, sales of bachata music often surpassed those of the well-accepted Dominican merengue music.32 Harsh detractors of the bachata genre commented on the musicians’ lack of education and poor vocabulary as well as the simplistic linguistic qualities of the music.33 Other critiques decry the improper grammar and poor spelling on bachata albums that were sold.34 In one notable occurrence, José Joaquín Bidó Medina, the rector of the Universidad Autónoma of Santo Domingo prohibited the bachata musician Luís Segura from playing for supposed “moral” reasons.35 The journalist Sergio Reyes responded that this decision evidenced a general feeling of “disdain” on the part of the upper classes toward the masses and a failure to acknowledge the humble origins of a high percentage of the university population. Reyes asserted that the poor, “will never relinquish this nostalgic rhythm that links them to their region, to their family and to those who were left there who can never come to get a college degree given their poverty-stricken economic

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

378

Sounds of Resistance

situation.”36 While this type of defense of the bachata genre can be found, blatant criticisms are much more common. Even some less overt comments reveal the depth of the social stereotype surrounding the genre. For example, a statement by the Dominican merengue singer, Dioni Fernández, reveals the disjunction between the poor and the wealthy class, and indicates that the latter simply cannot connect to the genre: “it is not that the people with important last names in this country do not have love problems; it is simply that they do not listen to bachata to embitter themselves like the masses do.”37 Clearly, Fernández shares the classist attitude and disdain of the privileged class toward the marginalized population of the Dominican Republic. It can be concluded that the freedom associated with the beginning of the bachata genre, as it is known today, is symbolically significant as it coincided with the end of Trujillo’s torturous rule and was a cultural reaction to his oppressive regime. Society’s marginalization of the genre, however, diminishes the impact of this opposing component of the music’s origin, while simultaneously allowing the genre to step into a position of confrontation, wherein producing, playing, or even listening to bachata music can be considered a form of resistance to upper-class hegemony. In spite of origins that represented freedom, the deep marginalization of the bachata genre by Dominican elites lasted until about 1990. The various socioeconomic, cultural, and thematic factors that branded the music so deeply are evident still today. Although bachata music, even initially, was infrequently used as a means of overt social or political protest there were a small quantity of social songs that emerged in the 1970s in tandem with the blatant decrying of political and social injustices of the nueva canción protest music that originated in Chile. These songs of protest in the Dominican Republic shared social viewpoints regarding Dominican poverty, racism, and corruption as indirect commentary on life under Joaquín Balaguer, a military leader who served as vice president under Trujillo’s rule but who was reelected and served as president for two more distinct periods including from 1966 to 1978 and again from 1986 to 1996. Unlike the characteristic songs of protest that formed part of the nueva canción movement, bachatas of social commentary were typically less overt, the social messages were less political, and the songs were more popular than typical songs of protest.38 Furthermore, bachata of protest was recorded by poor musicians on rudimentary equipment, while nueva canción songs were typically recorded by educated singers on sophisticated equipment.39

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

379

Pacini Hernandez cites various examples of bachata songs with political messages such as Ramón Torres’s “Hay que seguir protestando” (We Have to Keep Protesting); Los Macopejes’s “El concón” (Rice From the Bottom of the Pot); “Abra las rejas, Señor Gobierno” (Open the Bars, Mister Governor) by Expresión Joven; “Llegó la paz” (Peace Has Arrived) by El solitario (a pseudonym for Blas Durán); and “La teta” (The Teat) by Augusto Santos.40 Other political songs like Blas Durán’s “Ojo pela’o” (Keep an Eye Peeled) are less overt. “Ojo pela’o” is a metaphor “urging a baseball umpire or ampalla (Guzmán) to keep an eye out for dirty players (Balaguer).”41 Instead of outwardly rejecting social injustices, sometimes bachata music perpetrated these, for example, in male–female relationships. Nearly all bachata singers are male and an overwhelming percentage of bachata songs are disparaging of women.42 As Carlos Velázquez and Alejandro Ureña indicate in De Santo Domingo al mundo: El merengue y la bachata (From Santo Domingo to the World: Merengue and Bachata) the heightened level of emotions that men can express regarding women in bachata music is significant in that it is socially acceptable in music. In other words, showing emotion in Dominican society is considered a “weakness,” but, curiously, doing so in music is not considered a threat to masculinity.43 In the worst cases, women are portrayed in bachata music as deceptive cheaters, sex objects, servers of domestic needs, and depicted in vulgar and objectified ways.44 In contrast to this vast majority of male-dominated bachata music, there are really only two well-known female bachateras from the genre’s inception to roughly 1990: Mélida Rodríguez, who died after recording only a few songs, and Aridia Ventura.45 Many of Rodríguez’s songs portray a sexually promiscuous female who is drinking away her sorrow in a bar.46 The songs of Ventura, the only female bachatera featured in Santo Domingo Blues, are significantly different than Rodríguez’s in that they offer a critique of society.47 For example, in this song, which is considered one of her major hits, Ventura reproaches infidelity, drunkenness, and moral depravity among men.48 “Tú no eres varón” (You’re Not a Man); Singer: Aridia Ventura Tú eres el culpable de lo que me pasa Por abandonarme y manchar mi honor Tú eres una canalla, que no tienes alma

You are at fault for what happens to me For leaving me and staining my honor You’re a swine, you don’t have a soul

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

380

Sounds of Resistance

No tienes vergüenza, moral, ni valor Poco sentimiento existe en tu alma Tú eres un cualquiera sin corazón Y solo te empeñas en vivir borracho

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Brindando repletas copas de error

You don’t have shame, moral, or worth Little feeling exists in your soul You’re a nobody without a heart You’re only worried about getting drunk Toasting drink glasses filled with error49

Ventura indicates in an interview that various men who were abandoned by their wives blamed her and her music. She believes that her songs gave women strength, as this song in particular portrays a woman who refuses to be mistreated. Indeed, many individuals can relate to the experience detailed in the song and as a result are prompted to make a change, such as leaving the drunkard partner.50 As I mentioned previously, the bachata genre was almost completely marginalized until the 1990s, but some changes occurred in the 1980s that opened the door for the process of acceptance to begin. Some influential factors included Luis Segura’s wildly popular 1983 hit, “Pena por ti,” Blas Duran’s guitar–merengue–bachata mixes, and romantic songs by Leonardo Paniagua, as well as the conscious attempts by the progressive intellectualism of Luis Días, Sonia Silvestre, Víctor Víctor, and Juan Luís Guerra to diminish the stereotypes against bachata music.51 These artists, with the exception of Guerra, began their careers in connection with the nueva canción movement, which had no negative class stereotypes associated with it, and they began to record bachatas in the late 1980s followed a bit later by Guerra’s segue into the genre.52 For Tejeda, these four artists can be considered part of a movement called new bachata or neobachata, which paved the way for the genre’s growth.53 One song written by Días and recorded by Víctor Víctor called “Andrecito Reyna” is a social commentary against the potential dangers of drinking and gambling and the effect these vices have on one’s family. The singer directs an apostrophe to Andrecito trying to get him to turn away from vices and do what is right. As José Miguel Soto Jiménez, a Dominican journalist, notes, this song is not only a reproach of the vices of alcohol, gambling, and violence but also the sound and simple advice “you just don’t do that.” He adds: “To use this type of popular wisdom in bachata music, is an easy way to get to the people’s conscience, in the fastest way, making it fertile.”54 Soto Jiménez offers further insight in his article, adding that corrupt politicians contributing to the country’s poverty and other antagonistic figures should be told, “you just don’t do that.” Clearly, Soto Jiménez perceives the potential of bachata music for social critique and to advocate change.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

381

Many have credited Juan Luís Guerra’s 1991 album Bachata Rosa as the most influential in changing the reception of bachata music.55 Guerra is an internationally known marker of Dominican identity and a superstar of music.56 As Cabral indicates, with Bachata Rosa, Guerra stylized the “romanticism,” “percussion,” and “danceable nature” of the bachata genre making it more “poetic,” “diverse,” and less “vulgar.”57 As Cruz Hierro similarly indicates, it was Guerra’s “aesthetic presentation” of bachata that “catapulted” him to international acclaim.58 The bachata songs on Guerra’s albums are romantic and metaphorical poems. For example, the four bachata songs from the album Bachata Rosa glorify and sensualize love relationships including the popular song “Burbujas de Amor” (Bubbles of Love) in which the singer admits his desire to be fish and “touch his nose” in the beloved’s “fish tank.” Areíto, another name for the Taíno Indians native to the Dominican Republic, is Guerra’s next album (1992). Areíto contains songs with strong and overt social messages, from the album title itself that honors the indigenous group obliterated by Spanish conquerors, at the 500-year anniversary of the conquest, to a song directly criticizing the lack of access to education in the Dominican Republic.59 Guerra is even criticized for being too political in this album, although it is significant that the four bachata songs on Areíto follow the pattern established in his 1991 album; all four are poetic love songs. In an interview in the mid-1990s, Guerra indicates in response to the critique of the social messages on the album Areíto, “I know that I would get greater economic benefits if I abandoned the songs of social denouncement, but I can’t spend my life writing only ‘Bubbles of Love.’”60 In considering Bachata Rosa and Areíto it becomes clear that Guerra sees bachata music as an outlet for popular poetic messages of love and he chooses to express less popular social messages with other genres of music, although he never specifically justifies his reasoning. Recent interviews with Guerra reveal the role of inspiration in his music, which could explain this disconnect between bachata music and social commentary. In a 2009 interview with CBS News regarding his album La llave de mi corazón (The Key to My Heart; 2007) Guerra commented that “You can’t force inspiration” in regards to the fact that there are no social songs on the album. He indicated, “When I tried to write anything social, I kept going toward the romantic.”61 In the same interview, Guerra also reveals, “I remember my uncle, when he would take me to school, he always listened to a radio station that only played bachata. I was a boy of 8 or 9, but it stuck in my consciousness.”62 The bachata music that Guerra listened to as a child in the late 1960s, most certainly on Radio Guarachita consisted only of love songs at that time. It would seem that the equating of bachata songs with messages of love

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

382

Sounds of Resistance

also stuck in his consciousness. Guerra explains the role of inspiration in another interview with fellow alumni of the Berklee College of music, Mark Small. He reveals: “When I write songs, I always finish the music completely before I begin to work on the lyrics. You’ve heard the saying that composing music is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration. Well, for me, the balance is tipped more toward inspiration.”63 It would seem that when Guerra writes a bachata track the romantic words that inspire him are linked to bachata’s origins as music of love. On Guerra’s next two albums Fogaraté (1994), which is a prickly Dominican plant, and Ni es lo mismo ni es igual (It’s Neither the Same Nor Equal; 1998) there are three and two bachatas, respectively, all romantic, rhythmic, and poetic. Guerra crossed over into production of Christian music and then later returned to secular music producing the aforementioned, La llave de mi corazón in 2007 and A Son de Guerra (To the Rhythm of War/Guerra; 2010) with three and two bachata songs, respectively. All five of these bachata songs develop metaphors for love that the listener has come to expect from Guerra’s bachatas. To the present day, although Guerra’s dedication to the diffusion of socially charged messages and commitment to social justice is evident in his lifestyle and in many of his musical productions, it is clear that in his mind bachata music is not for social messages. Guerra’s classification in the bachata genre can be considered problematic. The bachatero Paniagua recognized and lauded Guerra’s musical accomplishments but stated in an interview of Guerra, “he doesn’t know about bachata and he has never recorded bachata.”64 Paniagua indicates that Guerra’s music is too refined and is lacking the correct instrumentation and structure to be considered bachata.65 While Paniagua is not alone in his sentiments of Guerra as a bachata artist, many believe that Guerra’s music opened the door for greater acceptance for traditional bachata musicians. After Juan Luís Guerra’s Bachata Rosa, many other artists have been recognized as important to the growth of the genre from the 1990s to the turn of the century including Luis Vargas, Antony Santos, Raulín Rodriguez, Elvis Martínez, Frank Reyes, Joe Veras, Yoskar Sarante, Zacarias Ferreira, Monchy y Alexandra, and El Chaval, among many others who contributed to the evolution of and popularization of the genre. After the year 2000, the bachata genre exploded among Latinos in the United States, which lead to the formation of bachata groups comprised of individuals of Dominican origin living in the United States or those born in the United States to one or both Dominican parents. Reyes affirms in Santo Domingo Blues that the immigrant population is largely responsible for bachata’s contemporary popularity, as the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

383

Dominican immigrants to the United States were among the poorest of society and the music that accompanied them on their journey to the United States was one of very few things that connected them to their beloved Dominican Republic.66 Similarly, the owner of Ritmo Latino Record Shop in New York, interviewed for Santo Domingo Blues indicates that the buying power of Dominican immigrants helped the genre to grow even more. In the film, Luis Vargas draws attention to another remarkable phenomenon that changed the perception of the social class of bachata: various Dominican immigrants return to Santo Domingo with fancy cars and oversized stereo equipment that is blaring bachata music. As a result, according to Vargas, these individuals, “Went on doing away with the taboo that existed . . . that people thought that bachata was just . . . for the poor.” As Vargas asserts, these expensive cars playing bachata music and the increased buying power of bachata musicians, allowed the prejudices from rich people against bachata music to diminish.67 Darío Tejeda’s research on the bachata genre affirms that capitalism converted “certain traditions (cases of merengue and bachata) previously abhorred by the hegemonic elites, into signs of national identity).”68 Undoubtedly, the single most important bachata group formed in the United States and that aided in bachata’s popularization is Aventura, comprised of four Dominican Americans. Based out of New York, Aventura has been the most popular bachata group since its fast rise to stardom in 1999, making the group’s name practically synonymous with the genre in the United States. One of the most important innovations of Aventura included the fusion of the traditional local Dominican genre with other genres, such as the mixing of bachata and North American urban/hip-hop/R&B music, which is called bachata urbana and the blending of bachata with reggaeton, a kind of Latin rap into a fused style that has come to be known as bachateo or bachatón. Indeed, Aventura’s first hit song “La Obsesión” (The Obsession) included a female voice and capitalized on the popularity of the urban music genre in North America. An article from the New York Times of August 2010 highlights a bachata festival and comments on the stark differences in programming of the two sponsoring radio stations, one playing primarily Latin reggaeton and the other Latin ballads. According to Jon Caramanica, this “range is attributable to the superstar group Aventura, which sold out several nights at Madison Square Garden this year and has given the several-decades-old genre a sheen borrowed from contemporary R&B and pop.”69 The members of the band are Anthony “Romeo” Santos, Lenny Santos, Max Santos, and Henry Santos Jeter. In spite of their stateside popularity,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

384

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

some fans of traditional bachata do not recognize the group as their urban style of music and dress do not reflect the social connotations attributed to the genre and that some listeners necessarily associate with the music.70 Furthermore, the trend to separate bachata music into island music and stateside music is perpetuated by the discography. For example, the World Music Network’s The Rough Guide to Bachata, a compilation of popular bachata music, makes no mention of Aventura.71 It is evident, however, that Aventura has become a symbol of pride for many island Dominicans, as the group represents not only the Dominican Republic but also a genre that has grown to be loved by Latin America as a whole. Ibeth Guzmán, a Dominican journalist indicates: “Aventura, some kids, some would say half-Americanized, were able to make a genre that came from the depths of Dominican society, into a genre that is in touch with the feelings of Latin American youth.”72 Velázquez and Ureña reveal that in the case of Aventura, the complicated nature of identity is actually “clarified.”73 In addition to representing Latin American youth as a whole, and using stylistic innovations that fuse genres to blend bachata with other styles of music, the group takes the lead in another twist to the genre in the United States, which is the use of Spanglish, first, in the popular song “¿Cuándo volverás?” (When will you come back?). The use of Spanglish appeals to many immigrants who use both languages and is directly connected to an increase in fan base and popularity.74 While most of Aventura’s songs share the traditional love theme, a review of Aventura’s music reveals that some of their popular songs have strong social messages that contrast greatly with the traditional themes of the genre. For example, Aventura’s first album, Generation Next from 1998 contains an array of songs with typical bachata themes, but one song in particular, about abortion, stands out. The song is a fierce denouncement of the male singer to his ex-girlfriend for killing his baby: “No lo perdona dios” (God Does Not Forgive It); Singer: Aventura Dios debe mandar castigos A esas mujeres como tú No saben valorar un hijo Y el nuestro lo mataste tú

God should send punishments To those women like you They don’t know how to value a child And ours was killed by you75

He laments that he will never know if his son would have been a pelotero (ball player), bachatero (bachata singer), or algo más (something more). Aventura’s next album, We Broke the Rules, from 2002 contains one song that tells a complex story about dire poverty. The song centers on a woman

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

385

who was abandoned during her sixth month of pregnancy, then prostituted herself in order to support her child. When her son is 23 years old, he is involved with bad friendships, uses drugs, is accused of murder, and jailed. “Amor de Madre” (Mother’s Love); singer: Aventura

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Esta es la historia De una madre insaciable Que criando su hijo Cometía un error No oyó consejos Siguió sus sentimientos Y aunque vendió su cuerpo Por su hijo luchó Amor de madre Es un amor infinito Ese fruto en el vientre Es un regalo de Dios Algunas veces cometemos errores Y esa pobre mujer No tuvo otra opción

This is the story Of an insatiable mother Who, in caring for her son Made a mistake She didn’t listen to advice She followed her feelings And although she sold her body She fought for her son A mother’s love Is an infinite love This fruit in the womb Is a gift from God Sometimes we make mistakes And this poor woman Had no other option76

This song reveals a cruel and inescapable reality of hardships that lasts for multiple generations. The song calls prostitution a “mistake” and indirectly relates the son’s later errors to his mother’s dark past while at the same time recognizing the mother’s difficult situation in having no other option in order to provide for her son. Aventura’s third album, Love & Hate, from 2003 is the peak album with songs with social messages including a song about domestic violence in which the male voice talks to his little sister about her abusive relationship and his sadness at seeing her bruised face and from imagining his nieces and nephews witnessing her violent relationship. “Hermanita” (Little Sister); singer: Aventura Otro golpe en la cara Esto es cada semana Y como siempre una excusa Que tú ganas al fin Que él se burle de ti Pero, ¿que hago yo aquí? Aunque quiera ayudarte Tú lo aceptas así

Another bruise on your face This is every week And always with the excuse That you win in the end That he makes fun of you But what am I doing here? Even though I want to help you You accept it like this77

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

386

Sounds of Resistance

This song has a strong message that may potentially empower women, and may encourage them to walk away from abuse. The music video, however, goes to the opposite extreme by prompting killing and violence as the older brother gives his sister a gun and it is suggested that she kills the abusive husband. Notably, this song strongly contrasts with a song from a later album that is called “Mujeriego” (Womanizer), which is a song about a man who “possesses” various women. “Mujeriego” objectifies women and displays the same machismo of other songs of the bachata genre that is so strongly denounced in “Hermanita.”78 In “Mujeriego,” the male figure indicates that it is not his fault that he needs and wants various women, because he is both Dominican and a man. This same man could very well be the antagonist of “Hermanita,” who has “like 20 women.” Another song on the album Love & Hate, “Mi niña cambió” (My Girl Changed) is about social class in which the beloved of the male speaker goes to Europe and returns permanently changed. This song also draws attention to issues of social class. “Papi dijo” (Daddy Said), the third song of the album with a strong social message focuses on parents who disappoint their children by promising to be there for them or to pick them up from an activity, but do not follow through with their promises: “Papi dijo” (Daddy Said); singer: Aventura Él no cumple con lo que promete

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Y falla en toda ocasión Nunca prometas Lo que no puedes cumplir Los niños no olvidan Aunque les quieras mentir

He doesn’t follow through with what he promised And he fails on every occasion Never make a promise That you can’t keep Kids don’t forget Although you want to lie to them79

If problems of class, illegal activities, domestic violence, and abortion are not strong enough social themes, Aventura’s boldest social song is “La niña” (The Girl), the only song with a social message from the group’s 2005 album God’s Project. The end of the song reveals the shocking truth about who violated the subject of the song, a nine-year-old girl: “La niña” (The Girl); singer: Aventura Ya son las 3 de la mañana Y la niña en llanto se duerme por fin Y volvió-

It’s already three o’clock in the morning And the crying little girl finally falls asleep And he returned-

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

El mismo desgraciado sin corazón Pero, ¿cómo de nuevo entró? No se imaginan como lo hizo Nunca hubo una puerta abierta Y esta vez la niña despertó: (Hablado-voz de la niña) Papi, ¿Qué tú haces?

387

The same vile man without a heart But, how did he get in again? They can’t imagine how he did it There was never an open door And this time the little girl woke up: (Spoken-voice of the little girl) Daddy, what are you doing?80

In Aventura’s last three albums, K.O.B. Live (2006), Kings of Bachata: Sold Out at Madison Square Garden (2006), and The Last (2009) many of the songs are from previous albums or remixes and only one other song from the 2006 album has a strong social message, “José.” The end of the song includes the spoken dedication: “This one goes out to all those fallen soldiers, the heroes that go to battle for us . . . May they rest in peace.” At the core of this song is yet another love story about a soldier standing at his doorstep just before leaving his family to go off to war: “José” (José); singer: Aventura

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

¿Quién nos cuida, y nos protege Como tú siempre lo has echo? ¿Cómo duermo si dormía Acostadita en tu pecho? ¿Quién despierta mis mañanas Con chulería y besitos? Ah, en esta navidad ¿Quién alumbra el arbolito? Y aunque tengo la esperanza De que Dios sigue tus pasos Hoy se sabe que Un soldado fácil puede fracasar.

Who will care for us and protect us Like you have always done? How do I sleep if I used to sleep Lying on your chest? Who will wake up my mornings With cuteness and kisses? Oh, this Christmas Who will light up the little tree? And although I have hope That God will follow your steps It is known today that A soldier can easily fail81

Although the majority of Aventura’s songs are similar in theme to most bachata songs, it is noteworthy that the group has this sizeable handful of songs with strong social message that connects the group to the littleknown origins of resistance in a completely popular way. Aventura broke up at the end of the 2010, but the band members are each still involved individually in the production of bachata music. Apart from these songs by Aventura, among the scores of bachata songs recorded after the year 2000 only a few stray from standard bachata themes. Among these, most socially charged music focuses on the immigrant experience, which is likely due to the listening base in the United States. For example, one song by Joe Verás highlights the perils of border crossing and the cruel realities that await immigrants.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

388

Sounds of Resistance

“La travesía” (The Crossing); singer: Joe Verás

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Cada día que pasaba Era mas difícil la travesía, Los guardias, los perros, todo el día Nos perseguían Y varios de mis compañeros Se quedaron flotando en ese sueño Y nunca lograron su fantasía De los diez llegamos tres A las calles de Manhattan Mire usted y yo que pinté Rascacielos de colores frescos Y ya usted ve Hambre, frío, sueño El viaje parecía eterno Gritos de mis compañeros Que estaban extrañando su pueblo

Every day that passed The crossing was more difficult The guards, the dogs, all day Would pursue us And many of my companions Were left floating in this dream And they never achieved their fantasy Of the ten of us three arrived To the streets of Manhattan Look sir, and I that painted Skyscrapers of fresh colors And now you see, sir Hunger, Cold, Tiredness The trip seemed eternal Screams of my companions That were missing their hometowns82

Another song by Luís Vargas called “New York” breaks the idealization of the United States as the singer portrays the cruel realities of leaving one’s country behind. “Hoja en blanco” (Blank Page) originally recorded in a Colombian vallenato version, was popularized in 2002 by the bachata duo Monchy and Alejandra who split up in 2008. The song is about a lover who discovers that his girlfriend did not wait for him when he returns after migrating. The Mexican American market quickly embraced this song and according to one poll, it was played 468 times in six-month time-period on a Houston radio station in 2002.83 This fact also supports the thesis that one of the major reasons for the bachata boom after the year 2000 is the pancultural embracing of the genre by U.S. Latino immigrants. Other songs like Raulín Rodríguez’s “Navidad, Navidad” (Christmas, Christmas) and Davicito Paredes’s “No Speaky Spanish” speak to immigrants about missing one’s family and a love relationship with language barriers, respectively. Without the buying power of Latino immigrants and the need among Dominicans to express and reflect on their identity in tangible terms, the genre would not likely have grown to its current level of popularity in the United States or the Dominican Republic. Nevertheless, as Cabral indicates the genre continues to be more marginalized by Dominican society than merengue, which reveals the lasting effect of social connotations in considering music to be an element of cultural identity.84 As recently as May 30, 2012, the declared 50th

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

389

anniversary of bachata celebrating the recording of José Calderón’s “Borracho de amor,” Listín Diario, a Dominican newspaper, acknowledges that some sectors still vehemently reject the genre.85 Similarly, Días in Santo Domingo Blues sends a mixed message about the genre’s rejection and acceptance in social spaces. He indicates, “Bachata was . . . and is . . . the music of those places . . . still. It has not abandoned its place of origin.”86 This odd acceptance–rejection relationship with the bachata genre is clear in may other newspaper articles, as well, which reminds us that although bachata music has come a long way since 1960, it still is far from escaping its marginalization. For example, the history of bachata concerts in the Hard Rock Cafe, Santo Domingo, which opened in 2006, reveals that a problematic public view of the genre continues in the Dominican Republic. Ramón Almánzar writes on November 7, 2010, in the Listín Diario, that Frank Reyes will be the first “genuine bachata musician” to take the stage of the Hard Rock Café scheduled for December 1, 201087; however, various other bachateros played there before. When Víctor Víctor played there in October 2009 with Fernando Echavarría, their concert was described as bringing together two stars of “fusion” “bachata” and “musical colors of the Caribbean.”88 Luis Vargas launched his bachata album there in May, 2010,89 and a Juan Luís Guerra tribute was played in August, 2010, with popular bachata songs like “Bachata en Fukuoka,” and “Bachata Rosa” being played.90 Furthermore, in November, 2010, when a group called Truhanes played at the Hard Rock, the newspaper headline read: “Bachata Arrives to a Grand Stage.”91 This announcement of bachata “arriving” describes a seemingly unknown musical genre making its debut in a well-known venue, when bachata has been cited in numerous articles to be the most popular genre for Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and among U.S. Latino immigrants.92 Is the social class of Guerra and Víctor Víctor the reason that they are not considered genuine or even bachateros? Luis Vargas would seem to be a “genuine” bachata artist but did his classification change when he achieved stardom and moved to Miami? When I attempted to contact the various reporters of these articles at Listín Diario by e-mail, to hear their perspective on this contradiction, I did not receive a response. Further solidifying that the social perspective of bachata is the impetus for the contradictory news coverage is the statement by Miguel Cunillera, the executive director of the Hard Rock Cafe of Santo Domingo. Cunillera indicates during an interview regarding Frank Reyes’s show that the Hard Rock has been: “opening its programming to concerts of new musical genres,” but Reyes contradicts this idea of “new genres” by indicating that

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

390

Sounds of Resistance

bachata is renowned internationally.93 Another indication of the prejudice against the bachata genre is the case of the Festival Presidente de Música Latina that took place from August 27 to 29 of 2010 in Santo Domingo. At first, the three-day music festival with a focus on Latin Music, had no bachateros included in the lineup, according to one article. It is noteworthy that the lineup always included Juan Luis Guerra. Tony Mojena, the producer of the event indicated in an interview “And because the people asked for it, that’s why we are taking bachata into account.”94 Mojena also added, “Everyday we have a national proposal and on Friday . . . we were missing something and because of that we put Luis Vargas and Luis Miguel that day.”95 It seems absurd that Mojena and other festival organizers needed a special request to include the highly popular bachata in a Latin Music Festival with a specific purpose of highlighting a different national Dominican music every day. One bachatero, Elvis Martínez decided not to accept the offer to participate in the festival because it was rumored that he did not want to be “a filler” in an event that had purposely set out to exclude bachata.96 Although the Festival Presidente (Presidente is a Dominican beer) has rejected the genre, the president of the country has not. The president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández (1996–2000 and 2004–2012), accompanies his celebrations with bachata music; for example, he announced his candidacy for reelection in 2007 “[t]o the rhythm of merengue and bachata”97 and the public ceremony of the initiation of his third term as president in 2008 with the bachata music of Frank Reyes.98 It would be hard to speculate if this is a political move to gain popularity or if Fernández just enjoys bachata music. The connection between bachata music and social issues goes beyond contemporary music as recent novels and films use the genre to portray a specific social message and connect the music and people of the Dominican Republic. Pedro Antonio Valdez’s award-winning first novel of 1999, Bachata del ángel caído (Bachata of the fallen angel), published by the wellrespected Alfaguara Press, portrays lower class life in La Vega accompanied by the bachata music that plays in the background.99 As Kathleen Costello indicates regarding the novel, Valdez “feels that bachata music is in some ways still in touch with the pueblo dominicano, describing their anxieties and their reality.”100 Nevertheless, as Costello asserts, Valdez’s use of music in the novel perpetuates aggressiveness toward women through bachata music, which like “other popular music in Latin America, provides a forum for men to express their emotions that does not threaten their sense of masculinity and may, in fact, foster a hypermacho aggressiveness that finds an

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

391

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

outlet in the oppression of women.”101 In addition, a new Dominican film called I Love Bachata (the title is in English) opened in October 2011, and while it is not yet available at the time of this writing on DVD, according to the director, Roberto Ángel Salcedo, this film has the deepest social message of all the films he has directed.102 Similarly, the Dominican neighborhood of New York City, Washington Heights, enjoyed a show about the musical genre called Bachata, el musical in December 2010.103 The musical director, Juan Luis Ogando indicates that the show revolves around the bachata genre by focusing on the lives of immigrants dreaming for a better life, while the executive producer, Laura Ajedrejczyk indicates the show touches the memories and nostalgia of the lives of the spectators.104 The Dominican journalist, Emelyn Baldera indicates that bachata fever has spread throughout the world citing non-bachata artists who have begun to sing the genre, and record companies that indicate a high volume of sales in bachata music.105 The trajectory of the genre to present day popularity has not been easy. It first evolved from the poorest sectors of Dominican society after the death of Trujillo, crossed the Caribbean to the United States, where it was embraced and most importantly purchased by the immigrant population, which made it a viable and sustainable genre of music. The upper class in the Dominican Republic has been continually forced to consider and include the music per the persuasion of the people. Although most songs of the bachata genre do not offer significant social commentary, a handful of recent songs connect the theme to the resistant nature of the music as a whole and the problems and concerns of a Latin American immigrant audience. In no simple terms, bachata music has evolved into one of the most significant genres of Latin music, which reveals the power of music to shape and mold cultural identity, even when met with resistance.

Notes 1. The maracas of early bachata music have been substituted in the modern day with the güira according to Darío Tejeda, La pasión danzaria: Música y baile en el Caribe a través del merengue y la bachata (Santo Domingo: Amigo del Hogar, 1995), 18. 2. Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Bachata: A Social History of Dominican Popular Music (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 5. 3. Ibid., 83. 4. Ibid., 76–78. 5. David Wayne, “The History of Bachata,” www.iasorecords.com/bachata/ cfm (accessed July 20, 2011); Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 80–81.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

392

Sounds of Resistance

6. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 82–87. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Fernando Ortiz, Nuevo cantauro de cubanismos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), 64, 182. 9. Tejeda, La pasión danzaria, 13. 10. Euri Cabral, El merengue y la bachata: Orígenes, etapas y líderes (Santo Domingo: Producciones Ella y El, 2009), 131. 11. Cabral, El merengue y la bachata, 129–30. 12. Ramón Emilio Jiménez, cited in Cabral, El merengue y la bachata, 129–30. 13. Cabral, El merengue y la bachata, 133. Translations of all texts in Spanish are mine. 14. Salvador Torres, “Que es la Bachata,” Listín Diario, February 10, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/zona-de-contacto/2010/2/10/131171/Que-es-la-Bachata (accessed July 20, 2011); Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 11–12. 15. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 14. 16. Luís Días was born Luís Díaz Portorreal but the spelling of his name as an artist was changed to Días. 17. Alex Wolf, dir., Santo Domingo Blues: Luis Vargas-The Bachata Story (Mambo Media, 2006, DVD). 18. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 135. 19. Tejeda, La pasión danzaria, 47. 20. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 159; Wayne “The History of Bachata.” 21. Ynmaculada Cruz Hierro, “¿De dónde son los cantantes?,” Listín Diario, January 25, 2009, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2009/1/25/88947/ De-donde-son-los-cantantes (accessed July 20, 2011). 22. Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 23. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 12–13. 24. Carlos Velázquez and Alejandro Ureña, De Santo Domingo al mundo: El merengue y la bachata (New York: Galos Publishing, 2004), 157. 25. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 197. 26. Luis Manuel Brito Ureña, El merengue y la realidad existencial de los Dominicanos: Bachata y Nueva Canción (Moca, Dominican Republic: Impresión Unigraf, 1997), 203; Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 27. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 91; Cabral, El merengue y la bachata, 150. 28. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 92. 29. Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 30. Cabral, El merengue y la bachata, 137. 31. Torres, “Qué es la bachata.” 32. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, xiv. 33. Brito Ureña, El merengue y la realidad existencial de los Dominicanos, 204–5. 34. Ibid., 206. 35. Velázquez and Ureña, De Santo Domingo al mundo, 162. 36. Cited in Brito Ureña, El merengue y la realidad existencial de los Dominicanos, 208. I was unable to access the original article but Brito Ureña cites “El periódico ‘Fuero’ editado por Asodemu. De fecha Julio-agosto 1983, año 1, No. 8, pág. 9, Sergio Reyes.”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

393

37. Ynmaculada Cruz Hierro “La bachata aún no penetra en ciertos círculos sociales de RD,” Listín Diario, December 11, 2007, http://www.listin.com. do/entretenimiento/2007/12/11/40220/La-bachata-aun-no-penetra-en-ciertoscirculos-sociales-de-RD (accessed July 20, 2011). 38. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 122–24. 39. Ibid., 126. 40. Ibid., 123–26. 41. Ibid., 137–38. 42. Ibid., 12–13. 43. Velázquez and Ureña, De Santo Domingo al mundo, 187. 44. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 158–72. 45. David Wayne, “The Women of Bachata,” http://www.iasorecords.com/ bachata-women.cfm (accessed July 20, 2011). 46. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 179–81. 47. Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 48. Wayne, “The Women of Bachata.” 49. Aridia Ventura, “Tú no eres varón,” Disco de Oro: Aridia Ventura (José Luís Records, 1997, MP3). All Ventura lyrics are reprinted with permission. 50. Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 51. Tejeda, La pasión danzaria, 18; Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 203. 52. Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 202–4 53. Tejeda, La pasión danzaria, 135–36. 54. José Miguel Soto Jiménez, “Eso no se hace Andrecito Reyna,” Listín Diario, July 1, 2009, http://www.listin.com.do/puntos-de-vista/2009/7/1/106644/Eso-nose-hace-Andrecito-ReynaEso-no-se-hace-Andrecito-Reyna (accessed July 20, 2011). 55. Euri Cabral, Juan Luís Guerra y 4–40: Merengue y Bachata a ritmo de poesía y compromiso (Santo Domingo: Producciones Ella y El), 175; Pacini Hernandez, Bachata, 3. 56. Tejeda, La pasión danzaria, 156–57. 57. Cabral, Juan Luís Guerra y 4–40, 176. 58. Ynmaculada Cruz Hierro, “No todos los merengueros son bachateros,” Listín Diario, February 6, 2011, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2011/2/6/176388/No-todos-los-merengueros-son-bachateros (accessed July 20, 2011); Torres, “Qué es la bachata.” 59. Cabral, Juan Luís Guerra y 4–40, 224. 60. Juan Luís Guerra in an interview with Asela María Lamarch, a Dominican journalist as cited in Cabral, Juan Luís Guerra y 4–40, 229. 61. Laura Wides-Munoz, “Juan Luis Guerra Embraces Musical Journey,” CBS News, February 11, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-207_162-4261282.html (accessed June 8, 2012). 62. Wides-Munoz, “Juan Luis Guerra Embraces Musical Journey.” 63. Mark Small, “Juan Luis Guerra: Tropical Music Superstar,” Berklee College of Music, http://www.berklee.edu/bt/171/coverstory.html (accessed June 8, 2012). 64. “Paniagua: ‘Juan Luis Guerra no sabe de bachata’,” Listín Diario, November 16, 2008, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2008/11/16/81389/PaniaguaJuan-Luis-Guerra-no-sabe-de-bachata (accessed July 20, 2011).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

394

Sounds of Resistance

65. Ibid. 66. Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 67. Ibid. 68. Tejeda, La pasión danzaria, 15. 69. Jon Caramanica, “The Subject Is Heartache, but the Music Is Sweet and Light,” New York Times, August 16, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/ arts/music/16bachata.html (accessed July 20, 2011). 70. “Aventura,” IASO Records, http://www.iasorecords.com/es/artists/aventura (accessed June 8, 2012). 71. Rough Guide to Bachata (World Music Network, 2006, CD). 72. Ibeth, Guzman, “Lírica popular,” Listín Diario, January 28, 2011, http://www. listin.com.do/ventana/2011/1/28/175223/Lirica-popular (accessed July 20, 2011). 73. Velázquez and Ureña, De Santo Domingo al mundo, 176. 74. Laura Wides-Munoz, “More US-born Latin Artists Win Fans in Spanglish,” Yahoo News, April 26, 2012, http://news.yahoo.com/more-us-born-latin-artistswin-fans-spanglish-134229256.html (accessed June 8, 2012). 75. Aventura, “No lo perdona dios,” Generation Next (Premium Latin Music, 2000, MP3). All Aventura lyrics reprinted courtesy of Premium Latin Publishing, Inc. All songs composed by Anthony “Romeo” Santos. 76. Aventura, “Amor de Madre,” We Broke the Rules (Sony U.S. Latin, 2002, MP3). 77. Aventura, “Hermanita,” Love and Hate (Premium Latin, 2003, MP3). 78. Velázquez and Ureña, De Santo Domingo al mundo, 178. 79. Aventura, “Papi dijo,” Love and Hate (Premium Latin, 2003, MP3). 80. Aventura, “La niña,” God’s Project (Sony U.S. Latin, 2005, MP3). 81. Aventura, “José,” K.O.B. Live (Premium Latin, 2006, MP3). 82. Joe Verás, “La travesía,” La travesía (Sony U.S. Latin, 2006, MP3). 83. Seth Kugel, “A Latin Dance Music Sings the Blues,” New York Times, June 16, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/16/arts/music-a-latin-dance-musicsings-the-blues.html (accessed July 20, 2011). 84. Cabral, El merengue y la bachata, 133. 85. Emelyn Baldera, “La bachata celebra medio siglo de amargue,” Listín Diario, May 30, 2012, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2012/5/29/234287/ La-bachata-celebra-medio-siglo-de-amargue (accessed June 8, 2012). 86. Wolf, Santo Domingo Blues. 87. Ramón Almánzar, “En busca de la novedad musical,” Listín Diario, November 7, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/11/7/165587/ En-busca-de-la-novedad-musical (accessed July 20, 2011). 88. “Víctor Víctor y Echavarría, hoy en Hard Rock,” Listín Diario, October 28, 2009, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2009/10/28/119646/VictorVictor-y-Echavarria-hoy-en-Hard-Rock (accessed July 20, 2011). 89. Laura Núñez, “Luis Vargas dice ‘Anthony Santos es un mentiroso,’ ” Listín Diario,May 19,2010,http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/5/19/142642/ Luis-Vargas-dice-Anthony-Santos-es-un-mentiroso (accessed July 20, 2011). 90. “Tributo a Juan Luis en HRC,” Listín Diario, July 18, 2010, http://www. listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/7/18/151061/Tributo-a-Juan-Luis-en-HRC (accessed July 20, 2011).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Insolent Origins and Contemporary Dilemmas

395

91. Natalí Faxas, “La bachata llega a un gran escenario,” Lístin Diario, November 15,2010,http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/11/15/166609/ La-bachata-llega-a-un-gran-escenario (accessed July 20, 2011). 92. See for example “PR se prepara a celebrar el Día de la Bachata,” Listín Diario, April 20, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/4/20/139125/ PR-se-prepara-a-celebrar-el-Dia-de-la-Bachata (accessed July 20, 2011); Emelyn Baldera, “Se expande fiebre bachatera,” Listín Diario, February 21, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/2/21/132359/Se-expandefiebre-bachatera (accessed July 20, 2011); and Ramón Almánzar, “Bachata se pone de moda,” Listín Diario, June 11, 2011, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2011/6/11/191768/Bachata-se-pone-de-moda (accessed July 20, 2011). 93. Almánzar, “En busca de la novedad musical.” 94. Emelyn Baldera, “Faltan 8 días para la descarga musical: También habrá bachata,” Listín Diario, August 18, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/ 2010/8/18/155239/Tambien-habra-bachata (accessed July 20, 2011). 95. Ibid. 96. “La bachata como ‘Relleno’,” Listín Diario, August 12, 2010, http://www. listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/8/12/154503/La-bachata-como-Relleno (accessed July 20, 2011). 97. Dayanira Polanco, “Leonel oficializa precandidatura con miles de seguidores,” Listín Diario, March 25, 2007, http://www.listin.com.do/ la-republica/2007/3/25/7391/Leonel-oficializa-precandidatura-con-miles-de-seguidores (accessed July 20, 2011). 98. Dayanira Polanco, “Inician proclamación de Leonel a ritmo de merengue típico, de calle y bachata,” Listín Diario, January 27, 2008, http://www.listin.com. do/la-republica/2008/1/27/45840/Inician-proclamacion-de-Leonel-a-ritmo-demerengue-tipico-de-calle-y (accessed July 20, 2011). 99. Pedro Antonio Valdez, Bachata del Ángel Caído (San Juan: Isla Negra Editores, 1999). 100. Kathleen Costello, “The Same Old Song?: Gender, Subjectivity, and Dominican Popular Music in Bachata del angel caído,” Voces del Caribe 1, no. 1 (2009), 2. 101. Ibid., 5. 102. Emelyn Baldera, “ ‘I love bachata’ es el Nuevo filme local,” Listín Diario, April 4, 2011, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2011/4/4/183527/I-lovebachata-es-el-nuevo-filme-local (accessed July 20, 2011). 103. “Bachata, el Muscial,” Teatro las Tablas, http://teatrolastablas.webs.com/ bachataelmusical.htm (accessed July 20, 2011); “La bachata se prepara para ir a un musical,” Listín Diario, February 3, 2011, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/2/3/130341/La-bachata-se-prepara-para-ir-a-un-musical (accessed July 20, 2011). 104. “La bachata se prepara para ir a un musical,” February 3, 2011. 105. Baldera, “Se extiende fiebre bachatera, Listín Diario, February 21, 2010, http://www.listin.com.do/entretenimiento/2010/2/21/132359/Se-expandefiebrebachatera (accessed July 20, 2011).”

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 19

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Stephen Silverstein

In 1965, Pablo Milanés, one of the most influential musicians of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world, composed what is considered by many to be the nueva trova or Cuban new ballad movement’s first song, “Mis veintidós años” (My Twenty-Two Years).1 Forty-three years later, in 2008, Milanés invited the hardcore “underground” rap group Los Aldeanos (The Villagers) up on stage with him and proclaimed them the new generation of nueva trova.2 As Milanés’s words indicate, Cuban hip-hop has come to be viewed as a sort of new nueva trova. This may not be entirely coincidental. As Geoffrey Baker makes clear, “[i]n forging a space for protest music, rap’s spokespeople were able to draw on lessons learned nearly three decades earlier by the musicians of the Cuban nueva trova movement.”3 Nevertheless, if state approval and the subsequent acclaim won by rap toward the new millennium are linked in some measure to the manner in which its image and message were modeled upon the nueva trova, it stands to reason that rap’s decline in popularity after 2003 might also parallel some of the factors that led to a decreased interest in the nueva trova in the 1990s. This chapter will outline the strategies by which these two types of protest song have articulated dissent within Cuba, and how the state ultimately found it more productive to incorporate these sounds of resistance “within the Revolution” than to suppress them. Initially, working from within-state institutions offered both nueva trova and rap cubano certain advantages; later, however, disillusion with the Revolution would contribute to the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

398

Sounds of Resistance

diminished esteem of trovadores and raperos alike, now perceived by some segments of the public as icons of a dishonest regime. The chapter will conclude with a brief look at the new generation of rap which, having witnessed the entanglements of its predecessors, is decidedly independent of state-run organizations and outspoken in its criticisms. In Latin America, as a consequence of the exacerbation of social conflicts and of a certain political mobilization of the continent’s peoples, a folk song movement whose initial interest was to rediscover vanishing traditional music forms began, around 1966, to tackle political and social problems.4 This movement came to be known as the nueva canción or New Song. Among the musicians of the nueva canción are Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara in Chile, Mercedes Sosa in Argentina, Oscar Chávez and Amparo Ochoa in Mexico, and Roy Brown in Puerto Rico—not to mention protest singers of a similar vein from other parts of the world, such as Joan Manuel Serrat, Paco Ibáñez, Lluís Llach, and Raimon in Spain, and Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez from the United States, to name just a few.5 Many of these singers identified with the ideals of the Cuban revolution, which saw Fidel Castro oust Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959. Thus, it was in Cuba that the Encuentro de la Canción Protesta (Gathering of the Protest Song) took place in 1967, where the title nueva canción was first publicly adopted.6 Among the 50 musicians from 18 countries invited to the Gathering were the Cuban artists Carlos Puebla, Alberto Vera, and Rosendo Ruiz Quevedo. The Gathering’s Final Resolution embodies the ethical and artistic principles of its participants:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

song is a weapon at the service of the people, not a consumer product to be used by capitalism to alienate them [. . .]. The duty of the Protest Song singers should proceed from taking a definite position together with the people in order to face the problems of the society in which they live [. . .].7

Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodríguez, key figures of what was to become the nueva trova genre, followed the happenings of the Gathering in the press.8 In that same year, 1967, Milanés and Rodríguez, along with Martín Rojas and Eduardo Ramos began to meet up and play music. The young musicians deliberated the need to remedy the much-discussed “crisis” of Cuban music, which a young Rodríguez described as banal and backward due to the invasion of music from the United States.9 As such, the artists sought out a new style, one that more closely corresponded with the revolutionary reality.10 Of this group of innovators, Milanés was the only one to be well known as both a songwriter and a performer.11

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

399

In Manzanillo, Cuba, the Primer Encuentro de Jóvenes Trovadores (First Gathering of Young Troubadours) took place in 1972. Other principle founding members of the movement, in addition to those mentioned above, include Noel Nicola, Vicente Feliú, and Augusto Blanco. Later members to join this first generation of troubadours include Amaury Pérez, Alejandro García (known by the nom de guerre Virulo), Pedro Luis Ferrer, Mike Porcel, Angel Quintero, and Sara González. It was at the First Gathering where the Cuban artists chose to name their movement nueva trova rather than nueva canción or canción protesta (protest song) because, according to Jan Fairley, they “wished to distinguish Cuba’s movement from those in Latin America and Spain at the time in which musicians and music took the roles of critic, opposition, and later resistance to governing political regimes.”12 Fairley continues: “They also wished to locate the roots of nueva trova within the national song tradition, that is, as a modern rendering of vieja trova, registering in this way certain elements of continuity.”13 Alternately, Robin Moore argues that dubbing the music nueva trova should be viewed as a stratagem of authorities to connect what in many instances was an oppositional art form to Cuban artists and genres of the past:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Calling rockeros like Vicente and Santiago Feliú trovadores linked them discursively to Sindo Garay and Alberto Villalón, staunch supporters of the Communist Party whose compositions had never been controversial. It obscured the fact that canción protesta actually represented a form of rebellious counterculture heavily influenced from abroad.14

It may very well be that neither Fairley nor Moore is incorrect on this point, that is to say that both the musicians and the state had an interest in implying the genre’s cubanía (Cubanness) by linking it with the traditional trova—the cantautores (singer–songwriters) hoped to lessen the persecution they were experiencing at the time, while the authorities aimed to harness the strength of a voice they proved unable to silence. According to Rodríguez, the trova is defined by the triad “man-guitarpopular poetry.”15 This basic structure, Rina Benmayor explains, “has national roots in a song tradition that appeared in Cuba at the turn of the century,” and consists of a variety of forms such as the bolero, guaracha, canción, guajira, criolla, bambuco, and son.16 The nueva trova recuperates this earlier tradition, and combines it with diverse elements. The 1950s fusion of Cuban canción and North American jazz known as feeling developed in part out of the trova tradicional, and was influential in the genesis of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

400

Sounds of Resistance

nueva trova.17 The Cuban New Song also drew on traditional music from throughout the Spanish-speaking world.18 The new troubadours integrated classical music as well as “international, contemporary trends into their music,” such as rock and folk rock from the United States and Britain.19 The commixture of these disparate elements results in “a cosmopolitan and eclectic sound,”20 one that some argue defies characterization as a particular style, and is better understood as belonging “more to a certain ideology and way of life.”21 Even so, most songs “are in the singer–songwriter vein of international balladeers.”22 Nueva trova lyrics deal with daily life, childhood memories, adolescent love, work, death, patriotism, social problems, the evocation of a birth place, poetry, and even the nueva trova song itself and its musician.23 Despite the wide range of topics, the fundamental leitmotifs of the nueva trova are love and country.24 In addition to traditional Cuban décimas (a poetic form consisting of 10-line stanzas), these texts were nourished, according to Leonardo Acosta, on Latin American folk music.25 Other important influences include Cuban poets, such as José Martí and Nicolás Guillén, as well as the colloquial poetry of the Cuban literary vanguard. Latin American and Spanish poets, such as César Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, and the poet–singer Atahualpa Yupanqui, were also of influence upon the lyrics of nueva trova. In order to overcome the crisis of Cuban music as described by Rodríguez in 1967,26 the new troubadours also turned to the poetic movements of symbolism, modernism, surrealism, ultraism, and in the words of Acosta, “all the ‘-isms’ one could want.”27 Above and beyond these musical and lyrical innovations, the defining feature of the nueva trova is its adoption of social and political consciousness.28 Moore points out that players strove to challenge the past both musically and textually, as well as to interpret and express their own experiences with the Cuban Revolution.29 As Pablo Menéndez states: “We are free to be controversial; we do songs about housing shortages, pollution, how vacation spots give priority to foreigners.”30 Nevertheless, Peter Manuel observes that most songs implicitly endorse the ideals of the Revolution; they generally avoid vulgar slogan mongering, preferring the pensive yet committed affirmation of Pablo Milanés’s “I Don’t Live in a Perfect Society” or Silvio Rodríguez’s “Little Daytime Serenade,” a subtle, poignant tribute to the martyrs of the Cuban Independence Wars and the Cuban Revolution.31

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

401

Many songs, such as César Portillo de Luz’s “Oh, Valorous Vietnam, indict the U.S., accusing it of imperialism, neocolonialism, racism, and of committing atrocities in Vietnam.” Just as nueva trova artists began their musical explorations of the nature and substance of Cuban socialism, the country moved in the direction of an orthodox, Soviet-oriented phase that saw governmental intolerance for anything deemed counterrevolutionary.32 Earlier, in June 1961, Castro put forth the ideological and cultural guidelines to be followed by the writers and artists of the Revolution in “Words to the Intellectuals.” Castro made clear in this pivotal speech that dissent would not be tolerated, famously proclaiming: “This means that within the Revolution everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”33 According to Thomas F. Anderson Castro’s words underscored the fact that in Cuba neutrality was not permissible in politics or in literature. In other words, one was either for the Revolution or against it, and works of art or literature that did not directly support the Revolution and its goals would therefore be deemed counterrevolutionary.34 Later in the decade, an economic offensive on the part of the Cuban government metamorphosed into a moral and ideological battle that served to further restrict artistic freedom.35 Liliana Martínez Pérez explains that the consequence of greatest impact of this declared Revolutionary Offensive was that it normalized the intolerance and persecution of “all efforts of intellectual critique, reflection, and/or analysis of the social reality.”36 Moreover, it was during this very period that the CIA attempted on numerous occasions to destabilize the country’s socialist government and assassinate its leader, while the right-wing Cuban community of Miami carried out bombings, assassinations, and raids on the island. These events led to a “siege mentality” among party leaders, who insisted that “no internal division or criticism be permitted until such aggression ends.”37 The Cuban writer Ambrosio Fornet coined the term quinquenio gris (five grey years) to refer to the first half of the 1970s and the restrictions on expression suffered during these years in the intellectual and artistic spheres.38 According to Baker, this “was probably the toughest phase of the revolution for artists and intellectuals.”39 Party officials viewed rockinfluenced music as implicitly subversive due to its association with the United States and other capitalist countries, English lyrics, and alternative dress and lifestyles.40 Many nueva trova musicians were subjected to public condemnation, loss of party membership and employment, blacklisting, incarceration, and detention in labor camps.41 Milanés was jailed for over a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

402

Sounds of Resistance

year in 1965–1966, accused of being a homosexual.42 The growing popularity of Milanés’s songs “Para vivir” (To Live), “Ya ves” (Now You See), and “Mis veintidós años” (My Twenty-Two Years) led to his early release from one of the forced-labor camps euphemistically called Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP; Military Units of Production Aid), as visiting intellectuals at the Casa de las Américas repeatedly requested to meet the composer of these pieces, which were recorded and promoted by Elena Burke and Omara Portuondo.43 Rodríguez too was detained by police on several occasions during these years. Juan Manuel Cao writes that Rodríguez seemed to love the Revolution, whose ills he naively tried to remedy by pointing them out. Be that as it may, the leaders of the system were not pleased, and Rodríguez was openly persecuted: he was prohibited from singing on television and was later, like Milanés, confined to a UMAP.44 In 1969, Rodríguez was forced to work on a fishing boat at Playa Girón for five months.45 Despite this punishment, it was here that he wrote 72 songs, sometimes three or four in a single day, including many of his most beautiful, famous, and openly critical pieces, such as “Ojalá” (I Hope), “El rey de las flores” (The King of Flowers), “Cuando digo futuro” (When I Say Future), “Al final de este viaje en la vida” (At the End of Life’s Journey), and “Playa Girón” (Girón Beach).46 Both singers were somewhat shielded from further trouble with authorities due to the intervention of Haydée Santamaría who, as a participant of Castro’s 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks, laid claim to unimpeachable Communist bona fides.47 Santamaría, founder and director of the Casa de las Américas, publicly sponsored the movement and its young singers by establishing, in 1967, the Centro de la Canción Protesta (Center for Protest Song) within the cultural institution that she presided over until her death in 1980. The original invitees were Milanés, Rodríguez, and Nicola. The group offered its first joint concert at the Casa de las Américas in 1968, and was joined on stage by Ramos and Rojas.48 Cao explains that “she gave the group an alibi, an appearance of revolutionary song. Their poetic language permitted this, as it suggested and never stated directly, and in so doing it more easily escaped censure.”49 Nevertheless, Cao notes that most of this generation, including Pablo and Noel, “abandoned their rebellion and dedicated themselves to creating a song that was strictly apologetic [of the Revolution].”50 Much like the television programs Mientras tanto (In the Meantime) and Encuentro con la Canción Protesta (Encounter with the Protest Song),

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

403

which would air briefly in 1967 and 1968, the Center for Protest Song offered only an ephemeral means for the trovadores to communicate with the Cuban people, shutting its doors after two years, in 1969.51 Thus, notwithstanding the protection offered by Santamaría and the change in orientation of many of the troubadours, they continued to face severely limited access to mass media outlets within Cuba, and their lyrics were closely monitored by agents of the National Culture Advisory and the Ministry of the Interior.52 Even so, the music form continued to gain in popularity, despite these attempts to stifle it. Cuban officials recognized that a change of tactics was needed. As Moore makes clear, the state saw that by co-opting these singers it could convert them from subversive element into the very spokespersons of the Revolution.53 Once considered counterrevolutionary, Rodríguez, within a few short years “seemed to have followed in the steps of José Martí and taken on the mantle of national poet.”54 These lessons were not lost on the governmental officials that oversaw the institutionalization of the ensuing incarnation of Cuban protest song: rap. Between 1969 and 1978, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC; Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) brought several of the young musicians together to create film scores, under whose auspices they also recorded albums and offered concerts. Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (Sound Experimentation Group) was the name given to the collective, constituted in its initial period by Silvio, Pablo, Noel, Ramos, Sergio Vitier, and Leonardo Acosta. Later, Emiliano Salvador, Pablo Menéndez, Sara González, and Amaury Pérez were to join.55 The objective of the group, according to Clara Díaz, was to “realize a collective, analytical, profound, political, and social elaboration of popular music.”56 The artists were to undertake “a period of training and intensive study, for which a special course of a year and a half was created, with the goal of technically preparing the young musicians,” reveals Díaz.57 Three decades later rappers would receive similar musical instruction. As Baker contends, institutionalized rap artists were encouraged to participate in music courses, such as those at the Ignacio Cervantes “professional improvement school,” for example, which at once allowed them “to deepen their formal music skills and knowledge of Cuban musical traditions, but also facilitat[ed] the incorporation of these artists and their music into hegemonic constructions of national culture.”58 In this way, nueva trova and rap alike were disciplined and subsumed within the Cuban power structure.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

404

Sounds of Resistance

In 1973, the Second National Gathering of the Nueva Trova Movement took place, again in Manzanillo, marking the official inception of the organization of artists thereafter known as the Movement of the Nueva Trova (MNT), which eventually dissolved in the mid-1980s, although the musical genre endures.59 Institutionalization of the nueva trova brought with it certain benefits, such as state funding and promotion, while at the same time it resulted in MNT officials’ increased scrutiny and ascendancy over lyrical content. Ever fearful of losing the support of the Ministry of Culture, “[a]rtists that had once sung about housing shortages and restrictions on artistic freedom now adapted traditional trova or other folkloric texts, referred to Cuba’s revolutionary struggle, nationalism, commentary on international politics, or personal relationships.”60 Another important driver of nueva trova’s official acceptance was undoubtedly the socialist government’s desire for closer political relations with Salvador Allende’s Chile and other Latin American governments where protest music was widely recognized and an organized political force.61 The trovadores were invited with increasing frequency by the Party to represent Cuba at international events, carrying the revolutionary message the world over.62 Their new role as sorts of unofficial ambassadors is made clear by the Cuban critic Díaz, who proclaims that the nueva trova “has been one of the most effective vehicles of the Revolution to break the blockade imposed by imperialism, and to transmit the frank, solidarity, and revolutionary message to our people and to the rest of the world, and especially to Latin America.”63 Once considered counterrevolutionary, the new troubadour had become Cuba’s emissary. Nevertheless, up until the early 1980s the cantautor continued to be marginalized within Cuba, even as s/he traveled far and wide on behalf of the Party. Díaz is forced to admit that aside from the ICAIC, “other mediums of mass communication offered very little support during this time by way of offering the people more contact with the creative work of these musicians.”64 As Cao explains, it was only in 1980 that Rodríguez gave his first concert in an official theater.65 The internationally recognized and prolific author of more than 1,000 songs was yet to release a single album within Cuba.66 This all changed after a hugely successful Latin American tour in 1984–1985, after which Rodríguez, together with Milanés, met personally with Castro. Cao writes that following this reception, “[t]he doors of the record labels, of the theaters, and of television open[ed] definitively.”67

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

405

The second half of the 1970s through the first half of the 1980s was the high point of the nueva trova’s popularity. In the 1980s, a second generation of troubadours developed, including the artists Frank Delgado, Santiago Feliú, Donato Poveda, Alberto Tosca, José Antonio Quesada, Anabel López, Xiomara Laugart, Carlos Varela, Gerardo Alfonso, and Polito Ibáñez.68 The novísima trova (newest song), as the song form of these artists has been termed, “is characterized by its politically charged lyrics and social commentary.”69 Varela’s song “Guillermo Tell,” depicts William Tell’s son asking his father to switch places with him—to give him the bow and arrow and put the apple on his own head. Cuban audiences know well how to interpret the conceit.70 Pedro Luís Ferrer likewise pushes the boundaries of the permissible with his song “El abuelo Paco” (Grandpa Paco):

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Be patient with grandpa, remember how much he’s done. . . Don’t forget that he has a revolver and a knife And as long as they’re not taken away, he poses a threat Even if you know the answer is no, say yes, If you contradict him, it will go badly for you.71

Frank Delgado is another artist that “has managed to keep his critical voice heard, humorously commenting on the shortages and restrictions imposed on the Cuban people.”72 Despite the huge popularity of Varela both within Cuba and abroad, and the biting criticism of artists such as Ferrer and Delgado, the 1990s saw the mantle of Cuban protest song pass to hip-hop. While Cuba’s economic and political success during the 1970s and 1980s saw musicians orient their creations, by and large, toward a pro-revolutionary repertoire, a change took place in the 1990s.73 The Soviet Union’s collapse and the end of its subsidies to Cuba occasioned an economic crisis on the island that deepened through the early 1990s.74 In August 1990, the government announced the implementation of the so-called “Special Period in a Time of Peace,” a framework that established a new series of austerity measures and rationing schedules to meet the worsening economic crisis.75 Conditions across the island deteriorated throughout the decade and Cubans faced “unrelieved hardship and adversity in the pursuit of even the most minimum needs of everyday life.”76 At a time of great disillusionment on the island with the Revolution and its policies, Milanés and Rodríguez were viewed as representatives of the socialist power structure. Moore goes further, noting the affluence of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

406

Sounds of Resistance

the two superstars at a time when “many families still live on inadequate rations of rice and beans and can’t afford to buy enough hand soap.” Their newfound status as bourgeois “compromises their ability to act as a ‘voice of protest’ ” for much of the public.77 The genre’s decline in popularity witnessed in the 1990s should also be considered in light of its lyrics’ inaccessibility. Faya explains that, when faced with the official delineation of conformist and triumphalist norms, some nueva trova artists “wrapped [their lyrics] in a difficult, obscure rhetoric in which certain words and postures found trained receptors only in small social groups.”78 Such is the case of Rodríguez, who has proven able to maintain a state of nonconformity even as he became an idol of the Revolution thanks to lyrics that never surrender themselves completely to interpretation.79 Take Rodríguez’s famous “Ojalá,” for example, whose addressee may be read to be Castro or, just as easily, the object of unrequited love.80 Frank Delgado charges Rodríguez’s texts with being “opaque, difficult and vallejiano,” referring to the notoriously demanding poetry of the Peruvian César Vallejo. Delgado offers a line from “Como esperando abril” as an example: “a clock becomes a crab and an old man’s coat finds a storm of termites.”81 Rap would redress such lyrical cryptography with, in the words of Marc Lacy, “language that is as blunt as the accompanying beat is loud.”82 In noting the shift in the mid-1990s from nueva trova to rap as the Cuban song of protest, Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Reebee Garofalo pose the following question: “if young Habaneros felt the need to express their views on social issues, why didn’t they turn to nueva trova, Cuba’s own, well-established genre specifically associated with social and political commentary?”83 The critics comment that the nueva trova’s lyrics “were self-consciously literary, formal and schooled,”84 revealing to some extent the appeal of rap, which avoids the many “-isms” that, according to Acosta, characterize the nueva trova text. Aldo Roberto Rodríguez Baquero, one half of the rap duo Los Aldeanos, comments similarly: “All I know is that I see wrongs. And I try to explain them in a way that can be understood by those that have studied and by those that haven’t.”85 Further, the interviews conducted by Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo with moñeros (hip-hop aficionados) suggest that rap touches on themes important to young afro-Cubans which the nueva trova does not address.86 This is surely due in part to the generational and class differences between the troubadours and hip-hoppers.87 Afro-Cubans have disproportionately suffered the travails of the Special Period. This is due, in large part, to the economy’s “dollarization.”88 The socialist government adopted several new initiatives in order to

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

407

boost revenue and stem the economic crisis, including the legalization of dollars. Cubans receive dollars from two main sources: family remittances and the tourist sector. Because the Cuban diaspora consists in its majority of whites, while abiding racial prejudice has resulted in an underrepresentation of nonwhites in the tourist sector, white Cubans have found access to the powerful U.S. currency, whereas Afro-Cubans have not.89 The dual monetary system has led to severe hardships for the majority of Afro-Cubans, who were left out of the dollar economy. Many consumer goods are only available on the black market which transacts in dollars (and in convertible pesos, pegged to the dollar, as of 1994). All the while, the street value of the Cuban peso (moneda nacional) declined throughout the Special Period. Between 1992 and 1993, the black market exchange rate increased from 10 pesos to the dollar to more than 100, resulting in a situation that continues to plague Cubans, where “a monthly salary of 300 pesos, for example, was often equivalent to $3, or the black market price of four bars of soap, a two-pound chicken, or four liters of milk.”90 Those lacking access to dollars, living entirely off their salaries paid in Cuban pesos, have found “[t]heir purchasing power deteriorated even as the available supply of goods and services dwindled.”91 In “Nuestra América” (Our America), the Cuban poet and national hero José Martí famously proclaims: “There is no race hatred, because there are no races.” Afro-Cubans living in Havana during the Special Period may not have faced race hatred, but they certainly did experience racially predicated material and social exclusions. The revolutionary government’s claim, echoing Marti’s famous words, that with socialism Cuba had become a classless and raceless society, only compounded this problem according to Alejandro de la Fuente: “The official silence on race contributed to the survival, reproduction, and even creation of racist ideologies and stereotypes.”92 If the revolutionary government failed to concern itself with the reemergence of racial inequalities during the Special Period, young AfroCubans did not.93 Cuban rap developed in the early 1990s as “a response to the rapid socio-economic changes resulting from the end of Soviet subsidies and the subsequent crisis.”94 Through rap lyrics, young Cubans began to speak out publicly about the hardships they faced: scarcity, inequality, corruption, racism, illegal emigration, booming tourism, and prostitution.95 Two decades earlier, in the late 1970s, American rap music first made its way onto the island via the eastern outskirts of Havana, in Alamar.96

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

408

Sounds of Resistance

Located 20 miles from the capital, Alamar is one of the world’s largest housing projects, with some 110,000 residents.97 It was here that U.S. rap first reached the island’s shores and where Cuban rap developed in the early 1990s. Eugene Robinson explains that Alamar possessed two distinctions relevant in the birth of Cuban hip-hop:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

First, since the need for decent housing had been particularly acute among blacks before the revolution, and since this disparity had proved tough to eradicate, it ended up that a high percentage of the families who moved into Alamar’s just-completed apartment blocs were black. Second, the beachside location away from Havana’s congestion and clutter meant that residents often were able to get decent radio and television reception from Florida.98

Innovative young Alamar residents listened to American rap music from Miami radio stations such as 1040 AM and 99 Jams FM by means of antennas that they erected from the seemingly endless blocks of Soviet-style cement buildings.99 In the late 1980s, people would record the music pirated from Miami radio to play at parties, and these cassettes would pass from hand to hand.100 Of hip-hop’s four elements (breakdance, rap, turntablism, and graffiti), it was dance that was first dominant. Cuban rapping began later, sometime around 1990, accompanying Cuba’s economic crisis. Cuban rappers, lacking specialized recording equipment, began composing lyrics of their own to popular U.S. rap songs that they had taped from the radio.101 The most devoted rap fans congregated in private gatherings called bonches which are “the seeds of today’s Cuban rap community.”102 In 1995, an East Havana hip-hop collective called Grupo Uno, led by the cultural promoter Rodolfo Rensoli, organized the first Festival de Rap Cubano (Festival of Cuban Rap). The festival, which became an annual event through 2005, was billed as a contest, and “offered young wouldbe rappers a socially-sanctioned public venue for displaying their talents, thereby stimulating the creation of ‘professional’ groups.”103 Rap groups of the 1990s include Amenaza, Reyes de la Calle, Primera Base, Junior Clan, Doble Filo, Hermanos de Causa, Anónimo Consejo, Explosión Suprema, EPG&B, and 100% Original. Two styles of rap developed on the island. The first, known as “commercial” rap, is characterized by Alan West-Durán as “spout[ing] forth endless paeans to partying, sex, and hanging out (S.B.S.’s “Mami dame carne” [Baby Give Me Some Ass] comes to mind).”104 Another tendency of so-called

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

409

commercial rap is to fuse hip-hop beats with traditional Cuban instrumentals, as exhibited in the Orishas’s hit album, A lo Cubano, which samples Compay Segundo, the Orquesta Aragón, guaguancó, chachachá, punto guajiro, and rumba.105 As of 2004, commercial rap has come to be synonymous with reggaetón. The other mode of Cuban rap, dubbed “underground,” is typified by music that does not incorporate traditional genres, and lyrics that aim to raise the consciousness of its listeners regarding social and political concerns. In a much-discussed polemic between the two styles, underground rappers express their disapproval of commercial rap, which they lambast as “trite and mindless,”106 witnessed in the Los Aldeanos song “Repartición de bienes” (Distribution of Goods): Reggaetón for shaking your ass Or rap for maturing The mind of the immature.107

The accepted logic has until recently described underground Cuban rap as strongly influenced by the political and conscious branch of U.S. hip-hop of the 1980s and 1990s that Halifu Osumare discusses with the following:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Groups and artists from that era like Public Enemy, Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers, Queen Latifah, and A Tribe Called Quest popularized probings connected to Afrocentricity and the Nation of Islam and were laced with streetwise allusions that spread social critiques of America globally.108

While it remains clear that Cuban rap of the late 1990s through to about 2003 shares affinities with “old school” U.S. hip-hop, Baker problematizes the numerous scholarly accounts that explain this semblance in terms of young Cubans first listening to and then emulating U.S. message rappers.109 Instead, Baker points out that converging on the Havana rap scene and its annual festival beginning around 1997 were a coterie of U.S. activists, musicians, journalists, political sympathizers, academics, and documentary makers, whose nostalgia for an authentic and noncommercial music in the face of the hyperconsumerism of U.S. rap, along with a conceptualization of hip-hop as a black movement defined according to North American racial categories, were fed into the underground rap genre and this proved instrumental in cultivating a certain discourse. In “a first-world search for lost purity and authenticity in the music of other times and places,” the Cuban rap scene was discursively constructed as the “idealized Other of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

410

Sounds of Resistance

New York hip hop.”110 On account of the absence of a domestic recording market, these foreign visitors became the market for Havana hip-hop “by interviewing, filming, and recording; sometimes paying; helping to resolve problems; and bestowing prestige.”111 Due to the disproportionate power wielded by U.S. academics, filmmakers, and delegations, they effectively transformed Cuban hip-hop “into something they wanted it to be,” while reggaetón and timba have gone largely ignored by scholarship despite the ascendancy of these styles with young Cubans.112 Such international interest in rap cubano is partly responsible for the state’s support of the genre that arose after an initial period of suspicion. During its first few years, “police regularly shut down hip hop shows and labeled rap as ‘imperialist’ music.”113 This began to change in 1997—the same year, notably, that U.S. activists and journalists began attending the festival—when the Asociación Hermanos Saíz (AHS), the cultural wing of the Union of Young Communists, took over management of the annual event. In 1999 the Minister of Culture Abel Prieto declared rap an authentic expression of Cuban identity, who then “[w]ith Castro’s blessing, funneled about $32,000 of audio equipment to rappers” through the AHS.114 Annelise Wunderlich reports that “[e]ven Fidel himself rapped along with the group Doble Filo at the national baseball championship” in 1999.115 The state created the Cuban Rap Agency (ACR) in 2001 which, at the time, incorporated 10 groups into its catalogue.116 In 2003, the ACR created and launched Movimiento: La revista cubana de hip hop (Movement: The Cuban Hip Hop Magazine). Sujatha Fernandes maintains that state support has deprived rap of autonomy, and that the AHS “seeks to encourage a relationship of dependency” in order to weaken hip-hop’s revolutionary potential (ironically enough).117 This perspective is shared by several critics,118 and is consistent with how institutionalization functioned to suppress the subversive content of nueva trova, as discussed earlier. Rapper Yrak Sáenz of the duo Doble Filo, admits that there are contradictions to having an affiliation with the ACR: “It does limit our creative freedom [. . .] The [ACR] has an agenda that goes with the government’s agenda. It doesn’t limit me but it does force me to be creative in how I express my ideas.”119 Still, the government’s role in hip-hop has not been purely one of restraint. The state’s patronage must be considered in light of the fact that the themes dealt with in underground hip-hop dovetail with the “ ‘codes’ that underpin Cuban nationalist ideology.”120 Baker explains that the AHS leadership interprets rap “as the resistance of the marginalized against oppression and exclusion by the forces of capitalism and imperialism as

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

411

embodied by the U.S. state.”121 In stressing these critiques over others, the AHS attempts to “keep the focus of critique on the U.S. government and its policies, rather than adapting to local circumstances, where the Cuban state might then become the object of criticism.”122 Leading figures of the Havana rap scene, eager to win the backing of authorities, also strategically fomented a genre whose discursive tropes and moral positions were compatible with the state’s Revolutionary ideology.123 As is evident above, a rapprochement with the state was actively sought out by rap’s early spokespersons. These figures looked to the nueva trova as “an important model for the incorporation of protest music within the Revolution.”124 Official censure of the nueva trova was relieved upon the genre’s institutionalization and the backing of the Union of Young Communists. Rap’s intermediaries, learning from this experience, pursued official sanction. It is for this very reason that Rensoli approached the AHS and sought to gain institutional support for rap and its annual festival.125 Wunderlich records the publicity campaign waged by rap’s other apostles, Ariel Fernández and Pablo Herrera.126 Another stratagem of these figures consisted of citing hip-hop’s parallels with nueva trova, now a paragon of the Revolution. This move is emblematized by Fernández’s landmark article “Cuban Rap: Urban Poetry or the Nueva Trova of the Nineties?” Thus, in a maneuver reminiscent of the protest singers’ terming their song nueva trova in order to draw connections with an officially accepted and celebrated genre, rap’s spokespersons and rappers themselves emphasized rap’s affinity to the nueva trova. The late 1990s witnessed a high point for Cuban rap, occasioned by state support in the form of funds and performance opportunities, as well as national and international acclaim. Cuban hip-hop’s arrival on the world stage was sealed with the hugely successful debut album of the group Orishas, A lo Cubano, on the record label EMI in 1999. Orishas, known as Amenaza before emigrating to France, would go on to win the Latin Grammy for Best Rap/Hip-Hop Album in 2003 for their second release, Emigrante. The year 1999 also saw the first compilation of Cuban rap for international distribution The Cuban Hip Hop All Stars, Vol. 1. In 2001, the groups RCA, Anónimo Consejo, and Obsesión participated in the International Hip-Hop Exchange in New York City. Obsesión returned in 2003, along with Doble Filo (although half of the latter duo, Yrak Sáenz, was denied a visa and did not make the tour). The two-group musical project, known as La FabriK, played at the Gusman Center in Miami and at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem. Joining them onstage in New York were The Roots, Common, and Harry Belafonte.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

412

Sounds of Resistance

Despite the overseas success of ventures such as these, underground hiphop artists within Cuba found little opportunity to make money, as the national media and music industry remained hesitant to open their doors to message rap.127 For this reason, many underground groups have chosen either to adopt the more commercially viable form of reggaetón or to emigrate. Melisa Rivière lists a considerable number of groups and individuals that chose to leave the underground rap scene for one of these two alternatives during the years she conducted research in Cuba.128 Such an exodus, in addition to other factors including the cessation of the annual rap festival and the divisive effects of the rivalry between underground rap and its so-called commercial sibling, reggaetón, caused Havana hip-hop to start to “go downhill” around 2002, according to Baker.129 Further insight into rap’s decline is offered by recalling that of nueva trova in the 1990s. As was the case with nueva trova, institutionalization obliged rappers to accommodate their lyrics to satisfy officials at the Ministry of Culture. Rivière indicates that “although their lyrics addressed social critiques, they did so in a metaphorical and poetic prose that was complacent to revolutionary ideals. Their repertoires spoke to everyday struggles but did not directly signal them out.”130 As Robinson sustains, lyrics such as “ ‘Nigga, nigga, open your eyes!’ ‘Fight!’ ‘Criticize!’ ‘Make a stand!’ ” offer no direct challenge to the fundamental tenets of Castro’s socialism.131 Rappers were wary to be located “within the Revolution,” and so, as the troubadours had done a generation earlier, they incorporated official rhetoric into their lyrics, typified by the ubiquitous slogan “Hip hop revolution!” coined by Anónimo Consejo. Rap was transformed into the mouthpiece of state ideology at a time when, as stated then, “the state-run economy [is] more inefficient than ever, black-marketeering has become pervasive, and a spirit of cynicism and opportunism has largely replaced the Revolutionary ideals of earlier decades.”132 Perceived less and less as revolutionary and increasingly as the apparatus of a distortion of their Revolution, this generation of rap, like the nueva trova before it, lost appeal. In this milieu, many young Cubans reject message music altogether, and have turned in ever increasing numbers since 2004 to reggaetón.133 Others have resorted to a new generation of rap that rejects any state involvement in their art, and whose lyrics train unyielding critiques at society and at the Communist government. This generation of artists has drawn together around the underground, illegal home recording studio of Papá Humbertico (Humberto Joel Cabrera Santana) known as Real 70. Named for its street address in the town of Barrera, Real 70 began in 2001 on the computer of Humbertico’s mother and has since evolved into a mecca for Cuban rappers

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

413

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

and fans alike. Los Aldeanos is the most famous group to come out of Real 70 and is the undeclared leader of hip-hop’s new generation. The members of Los Aldeanos, Aldo Roberto Rodríguez Baquero and Bian Oscar Rodríguez Galá, known, respectively, as El Aldeano and El B, are both from the Nuevo Vedado neighborhood of Havana. The duo first performed together in 2003 at a peña (an informal performance in which several musicians take turns on stage), and later that year they recorded their debut album Censurado (Censored). As of 2011, Los Aldeanos has 20 independent albums catalogued.134 Riviére argues with good reason that no other hip-hop group, Cuban or otherwise, is producing music at the speed and with the same level of quality as Los Aldeanos.135 Subsequently, they have become the most popular Cuban rap group both on the island and abroad. Their official webpage receives about 200,000 views a month,136 and as of May 2012, some 375,000 people “like” the most popular of Los Aldeanos’s several Facebook pages.137 The duo gained international recognition in 2006 with a feature article on the front cover of the New York Times’s entertainment section titled “Cuba’s Rap Vanguard Reaches Beyond the Party Line.” Soon after, a Univisión feature labeled them “Revolutionaries of the Revolution.”138 In addition to the several awards they have earned as a group,139 El B won the Batalla de los Gallos (cockfight), a freestyle rap competition sponsored by Red Bull, in both 2007 and 2008. On both occasions he was denied permission to leave the country and therefore could not represent Cuba at the international round of competition, first in Venezuela (2007) and then in Mexico (2008). His song “La naranja se picó” (The Orange Rotted) is his angered response to Cuban emigration: Venezuela 2007 Mexico 2008 Frustrated victory under Pinocchio’s dictatorship That fills us with the idea of a cultured and socialist society but gags the people and violates the civil rights of the artist ... I’ll keep saying what I live in each song and why not long live the Revolution! But this situation is unbearable In conclusion, you are a bunch of fuckers and this country is a prison.140

According to Rivière, “ ‘La naranja se picó ’ gained international attention beyond the scope of any rap song before in Cuba’s history.”141 A music video, filmed by the Puerto Rican director Tito Román, has been viewed

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

414

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

1,813,610 times on YouTube as of May 2012.142 Such international interest coupled with forthright lyrics has, not surprisingly, resulted in several brushes with the law and brief incarcerations.143 If rappers of the previous generation required government-run organizations to connect with audiences, which in turn necessitated a certain level of artistic compromise, advancements in CD copying technology and the Internet allow Los Aldeanos to produce and distribute its music independently. Such self-determination empowers Los Aldeanos to articulate a discourse that is, according to Roberto Zurbano and attested to by El B’s lyrics above, more critical than that heard previously from hip-hop.144 Zurbano further notes that from this position marginal to state institutions and the nonexistent official market, Los Aldeanos has created its own language.145 Baker likewise observes the manner in which Los Aldeanos is reterritorializing terms that are commonplace in official rhetoric: the “linguistic negotiation” of earlier hip-hop “has turned increasingly to contestation,” as Los Aldeanos disputes “the meaning and ownership of key terms employed by the Cuban state—revolutionary, communism, counterrevolutionary, gusano (literally ‘worm,’ used to mean dissident or traitor).”146 The song “Aldito el gusanito” (Little Aldo the Little Traitor) illustrates how El Aldeano responds to those that label him counterrevolutionary by reconceptualizing the sign gusano (traitor): I would be a gusano if I were to take advantage of a supposed position and rob my people, if I were to repress and silence an entire generation ... if I were to speak of revolution and violate rights and change laws at my own convenience. I would be a gusano if I were to pretend to be happy and then leave for Miami to talk shit about my country147

In these two stanzas El Aldeano does not attack the Revolution, but rather those that dishonor it: the Cuban regime and Miami’s exile community. He legitimates his right to air these grievances by juxtaposing his own

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

415

constructive criticism, made from within Cuba, with those that detrimentally “talk shit” from the safe and comfortable distance of Miami. Aldo thus locates himself “within the Revolution,” as a true revolutionary, in contrast to the actual gusanos that pervert the Revolution from positions of power in Havana and that malign the country from abroad. Baker is again to the point in sustaining that the members of Los Aldeanos do not see themselves as counterrevolutionary, but rather as hyperrevolutionary: “They consistently seize the revolutionary initiative rather than contesting its ideological basis; they challenge their listeners not to overturn the revolution but to revitalize it by taking it back to first principles.”148 An example of their desire to return to “first principles” is heard in the homage the group pays to martyrs of the Revolution, such as Camilo Cienfuegos, who did not live to see Castro’s persecution of dissenters and the contradictions of the sociocapitalist policies adopted in the Special Period—both of which are relentlessly denounced by the rappers. El Aldeano questions the direction taken by the regime in the song “El chico pillo” (The Naughty Boy), for example: I want to know what’s the basis of Communism: Is it equality or keeping the best for tourists?149

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Here Aldo criticizes the divergence between Communist ideology and practice that is exemplified by Cuba’s recent tourism boom. Louis A. Pérez Jr. considers several of the injurious effects that “dollar tourism in a peso economy” have for the Cuban people,150 however, he fails to mention the misdeeds of European vacationers that exploit Cuban poverty for their own sordid gratification as Los Aldeanos does in songs such as “Mangos bajitos” (Easy Pickings): paying for sex with leftovers and disease you invade our city as if it were your party.151

As this stanza demonstrates, Los Aldeanos’s denunciations are not limited to the Cuban government; rather, they assail any source of “Human Misery,” the title of Aldo’s 2008 album and song: racial, sexual, and gender prejudice, materialism, violence, war, U.S. foreign policy, prostitution, and so on. If Anónimo Consejo’s catchphrase “Hip hop revolution!” became the moniker of rap’s first generation—exposing the entanglement of artist and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

416

Sounds of Resistance

official dogma—Los Aldeanos’s “Not one more lie!” is that of the second. When asked about Los Aldeanos, Pablo Milanés responded: “Excellent, they are doing excellent work. It seems to me that of all the rappers I have seen they are the best.” Milanés continues: “I believe that the trova must be identified with them because they are a new movement that is emerging and expressing something new.”152 The novelty that Milanés references is also what has led to the public’s esteem of Los Aldeanos, and consists of the duo’s discerning and straightforward diagnoses of Cuban ills. By reappropriating terms that have been colonized by the authoritarian power structure, Los Aldeanos both challenges the status quo and justifies its right to voice such protestations. Therefore, while the new generation of rap may be less crowded than the last, we have yet to hear the bell toll for Cuban protest music.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes This chapter has benefitted greatly from Robin Moore’s work on nueva trova and from Geoffrey Baker’s work on Cuban rap. 1. Jan Fairley, “Trova and Nueva trova,” in World Music: The Rough Guide, vol. 2, ed. Mark Ellingham, Orla Duane, and James McConnachie (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 409; Clara Díaz, La nueva trova (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1994), 15. 2. Melisa Rivière, “Son dos alas: A Multimedia Ethnography of Hip-Hop Between Cuba and Puerto Rico” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2010), 312. 3. Geoffrey Baker, “¡Hip Hop, Revolución! Nationalizing Rap in Cuba,” Ethnomusicology 49, no. 3 (2005), 378. 4. Clara Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz: Una historia de la nueva trova cubana (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1994), 106–7. 5. Lauren E. Shaw, “The Nueva Trova: Frank Delgado and Survival of a Critical Voice,” in Cuba Today: Continuity and Change Since the “Período Especial,” ed. Mauricio A. Font (New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 2005), 41. 6. Jan Fairley, “La Nueva Canción Latinoamericana,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 3, no. 2 (1984), 108. 7. Quoted in Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 127. My translation. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 8. Ibid., 133. 9. Quoted in Díaz, La nueva trova, 18–19. 10. Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 173. 11. Leonardo Acosta, “La nueva trova: ¿Un movimiento masivo?,” in Panorama de la música popular cubana, ed. R. Giro (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1995), 345. 12. Fairley, “La Nueva Canción Latinoamericana,” 108.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

417

13. Ibid., 108; Peter Manuel, Kenneth M. Bilby, and Michael D. Largey note the same: “nueva trova singers often stress the continuity of their art with traditional trova,” in Caribbean Currents:Caribbean Music From Rumba to Reggae (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 173. 14. Robin Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” Ethnomusicology 47, no. 1 (2003), 22. 15. Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 184. 16. Rina Benmayor, “La ‘Nueva Trova’: New Cuban Song,” Latin American Music Review/Revista de Música Latinoamericana 2, no. 1 (1981), 12. 17. Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 70; Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 6. 18. Fairley, “Trova and Nueva trova,” 409. 19. Benmayor, “La ‘Nueva Trova’: New Cuban Song,” 13; Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 7. 20. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 8. 21. Shaw, “The Nueva Trova,” 41. 22. Manuel, Bilby, and Largey, Caribbean Currents, 57. 23. Leonardo Acosta, prologue to Canciones de la nueva trova, by Leonardo Acosta and Jorge Gómez (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1981), 16. 24. Alberto Faya, “Nueva trova y cultura de la rebeldía,” in Panorama de la música popular cubana, ed. R. Giro (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1995), 356; Noel Nicola, “¿Por qué nueva trova?,” in Panorama de la música popular cubana, ed. R. Giro (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1995), 336. 25. Acosta, Canciones de la nueva trova, 12. 26. See Díaz, La nueva trova, 18–19. 27. Acosta, Canciones de la nueva trova, 13. 28. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 10. 29. Ibid., 10. 30. Manuel, Bilby, and Largey, Caribbean Currents, 57. 31. Ibid., 57. 32. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 14. 33. Quoted in Thomas F. Anderson, Everything in its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 103. 34. Ibid., 103–4. 35. Liliana Martínez Pérez, Los hijos de Saturno: Intelectuales y revolución en Cuba (Mexico City: Flacso Mexico, 2006), 332. 36. Ibid., 332–33. 37. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 16. 38. Sergio Guerra and Gallardo A. Maldonado, Historia de la Revolución Cubana (Tafalla Nafarroa: Editorial Txalaparta, 2009), 130. 39. Geoffrey Baker, “The Politics of Dancing: Reggaetón and Rap in Havana, Cuba,” in Reggaetón, ed. Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 179. 40. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 17. 41. Ibid., 15–16.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

418

Sounds of Resistance

42. Ibid., 18. 43. Ibid., 19. 44. Juan Manuel Cao, “Silvio Rodríguez: ¿será o no será?,” Guángara 13 (1992), 21. 45. It is interesting to note how Cuban critics account for the state’s persecution of singers now considered icons of the Revolution. Díaz Pérez discusses Rodríguez’s confinement to the fishing boat as the troubadour’s personal choice to wander the land and bring music “to the street, toward the country, the schools, the factories, the fishing boats,” and so on (Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 201). 46. Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 202; Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 19. 47. Ibid., 14–15. 48. Ibid., 145–46. 49. Cao, “Silvio Rodríguez,” 21. 50. Ibid., 21. 51. See Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 137. 52. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 20. 53. Ibid., 20. 54. Fairley, “Trova and Nueva trova,” 410. 55. Díaz, La nueva trova, 26. 56. Ibid., 26–27. 57. Ibid., 27. 58. Baker, “The Politics of Dancing,” 173. 59. Shaw, “The Nueva Trova,” 42; Faya, “Nueva trova y cultura de la rebeldía,” 351. 60. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 23. 61. Ibid., 21. 62. Díaz, La nueva trova, 32. 63. Ibid., 34. 64. Díaz Pérez, Sobre la guitarra, la voz, 200. 65. Cao, “Silvio Rodríguez,” 22. 66. Ibid., 22. 67. Ibid. 68. Shaw, “The Nueva Trova,” 42. 69. Philip Brenner, A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 413. 70. Manuel, Bilby, and Largey, Caribbean Currents, 59. 71. Translation by Manuel, Bilby, and Largey, Caribbean Currents, 59. See note 13. 72. Shaw, “The Nueva Trova,” 44. 73. Rivière, “Son dos alas,” 63. 74. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 383. 75. Ibid., 383–84. 76. Ibid., 384, 387. 77. Moore, “Transformations in Cuban Nueva trova, 1965–95,” 24. 78. Faya, “Nueva trova y cultura de la rebeldía,” 361.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

419

79. Cao, “Silvio Rodríguez,” 22. 80. Ibid., 22. 81. Quoted in Shaw, “The Nueva Trova,” 44. 82. Marc Lacy, “Cuba’s Rap Vanguard Reaches Beyond the Party Line,” The New York Times, December 15, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/world/ americas/15cuba.html. 83. Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Beebee Garofalo, “The Emergence of Rap Cubano: An Historical Perspective,” in Music, Space and Place, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, and Stan Hawkins (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 99. 84. Ibid. 85. Quoted in Laura García Freyre, “Aldo Rodríguez Baquero: ‘El hip hop me quitó la venda de los ojos’,” Revista Encuentro 53–54 (2009), http://www. cubaencuentro.com/entrevistas/articulos/el-hip-hop-me-quito-la-venda-de-losojos-177231. 86. Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo, “The Emergence of Rap Cubano,” 99. 87. Tanya L. Saunders, “The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 155. 88. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 318. 89. Ibid., 318–21. 90. Pérez, Cuba, 391. 91. Ibid., 393. 92. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 322. 93. Saunders, “The Cuban Remix,” 261. 94. Baker, “¡Hip Hop, Revolución!,” 369. 95. Geoffrey Baker, Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. 96. Ronni Armstead, “Las Krudas, Spatial Practice, and the Performance of Diaspora,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 1 (2007), 137. 97. Mauricio Vicent, “El ‘rap’ cubano sabe a descontento,” El País, August 21, 2002, http://elpais.com/diario/2002/08/21/opinion/1029880808_850215.html; Eugene Robinson, Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution (New York: Free Press, 2004), 110. 98. Robinson, Last Dance in Havana, 112. It should be pointed out that Robinson’s use of the racial category “black” is problematic as racial categorization in Cuba differs from the black–white binary prevalent in the United States. See Saunders, who discusses Cuba’s “three-tier racial classification system, with about seventeen intermediary categories” (“The Cuban Remix,” 209). 99. Ariel Fernández, “Rap Cubano: ¿Poesía urbana o la nueva trova de los 90?,” El Caimán Barbudo 33, no. 296 (1999), 4–14, http://www.lajiribilla.cu/ paraimprimir/nro15/326_15_imp.html. 100. Ariel Fernández interview in Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi, Inventos: Hip-Hop Cubano (Clenched Fist Prod., 2003); Sujatha Fernandes, “Fear of a Black Nation:

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

420

Sounds of Resistance

Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings, and State Power in Contemporary Cuba,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003), 578. 101. Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 9; Armstead, “Las Krudas, Spatial Practice, and the Performance of Diaspora,” 137. 102. Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo, “The Emergence of Rap Cubano,” 92. 103. Ibid., 92–93. 104. Alan West-Durán, “Rap’s Diasporic Dialogues: Cuba’s Redefinition of Blackness,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16, no. 1 (2004), 16. 105. Grizel Hernández Baguer, “Tras los avatares del rap en la música popular cubana,” paper presented at VII Congreso IASPM-AL, Havana, June 19–24, 2006, 6, http://www.uc.cl/historia/iaspm/lahabana/articulosPDF/GrizelHernandez.pdf. 106. Baker, “The Politics of Dancing,” 166. 107. Translation by Geoffrey Baker in “The Politics of Dancing,” 166. See note 39. 108. Halifu Osumare, “Global Hip-Hop and the African Diaspora,” in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, ed. Harry Justin Elam Jr. and Kennell A. Jackson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 267. 109. Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 249. 110. Ibid., 263. 111. Ibid., 289. 112. Ibid., 331. See also Baker, “The Politics of Dancing.” For an introduction to timba, see Manuel, Bilbey, and Largey, Caribbean Currents, 60. 113. Annelise Wunderlich, “Cuban Hip Hop: Making Space for New Voices of Dissent,” in The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalization of Black Popular Culture, ed. Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), 173. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Susana García Amorós, “Agencia cubana de rap,” Movimiento: La revista cubana de hip hop 1 (2003), 48. 117. Fernandes, “Fear of a Black Nation,” 598. 118. For example, see West-Durán, “Rap’s Diasporic Dialogues,” 11. 119. Quoted in Mark Tutton, “How Hip Hop Gives Cubans a Voice,” CNN Travel, April 1, 2009, http://articles.cnn.com/2009-04-01/travel/cuba.rap_1_hip-hop-cuban-culture-rappers?_s=PM:TRAVEL. 120. Baker, “¡Hip Hop, Revolución!,” 388. 121. Ibid., 390. 122. Ibid., 391. 123. Ibid., 387. 124. Ibid., 378–79. 125. Pacini Hernandez and Garofalo, “The Emergence of Rap Cubano,” 95–96. 126. Wunderlich, “Cuban Hip Hop,” 173. 127. Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 13. 128. Rivière, “Son dos alas,” 167–68. 129. Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 16.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

The Cuban Protest Song from Pablo Milanés to Los Aldeanos

421

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

130. Rivière, “Son dos alas,” 227. 131. Robinson, Last Dance in Havana, 106–7. 132. Manuel, Bilby, and Largey, Caribbean Currents, 59 133. See Baker, “The Politics of Dancing.” 134. Rivière, “Son dos alas,” 311. 135. Rivière interview in Mayckell Pedrero Mariol, Revolution (Cuba, 2010). 136. Rivière, “Son dos alas,” 344. 137. Los Aldeanos’s Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= 100002107382923&sk=wall#!/pages/Los-aldeanos/44188947405 (accessed May 14, 2012). 138. Rivière, “Son dos alas,” 177. 139. See “Siete Años con ‘La Aldea’: bitácora de la utopía hecha realidad,” on the group’s former official website, http://www.los-aldeanos.com/ (accessed July 26, 2011). 140. Translation by Melisa Rivière in “Son dos alas,” 235. 141. Ibid., 236. 142. Music video of El B’s song “La naranja se picó,” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TRlAePTmb4Y&feature=related (accessed May 14, 2012). 143. See Rivière “Son dos alas,” 133. See also Juan Tamayo, “Rappers ‘Los Aldeanos’ Clash with Police in Cuba,” Miami Herald, February 21, 2011, http:// www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/21/2078379/losaldeanos-involve-in-melee. html#ixzz1LF8wKcD3. 144. Zurbano interview in Pedrero Mariol, Revolution. 145. Ibid. 146. Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 30. 147. Translation by the author. 148. Ibid., 51. 149. Translation in Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 50. See note 95. 150. Pérez, Cuba, 391. 151. Translation by the author. 152. Milanés interview in Pedrero Mariol, Revolution.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 20

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression Lluís Llach’s Catalan Nationalism from Dictatorship to Democracy Eunice Rojas

Cantar en catalán es resistir. Singing in Catalan is resisting.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

—Joan Améric1

In 1967, when 18-year-old Catalan singer–songwriter Lluís Llach first began to sing in public, General Francisco Franco’s 36-year military dictatorship in Spain was in its final decade. After defeating the Republican army in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Nacionales, headed by Franco, set up a conservative, traditional, and authoritarian single-party State in which noncentrist cultural identities and activities were harshly suppressed. While bullfighting and Flamenco dancing were adopted and promoted as representative of Franco’s Spain, traditions associated with the Catalan, Basque, or Galician regions of Spain were often prohibited. Each of these three regions possess a national identity separate from that of the centrist state, and many of their people speak languages other than Spanish. Viewing these regional nationalisms as elements that were potentially subversive toward the dictatorship, Franco outlawed the legal usage of any language other than Spanish, continuing a long history of linguistic proscription that in fact predated Franco by several centuries. Under Franco

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

424

Sounds of Resistance

the prohibitions were particularly harsh. In Catalonia, for example, the use of the Catalan language was forbidden in schools, in advertising, on any official documents, and on any public signs. Although many people continued to speak Catalan in private, its public use was strictly controlled. In addition, at the end of the Civil War, Franco kept in place a law of the press that had been passed during the course of the war and that provided for severe censorship of any publications that did not clearly support the State. By the latter half of the 1960s, however, the regime’s control of cultural production and expression in Spain was already starting to loosen. A new printing and press law in 1966, which promised increased freedom of expression, ostensibly ushered in an era touted as apertura (openness). On its face, this new law guaranteed freedom of expression, shifted the industry of journalism from the public to the private sphere, and abolished the requirement that all publications submit to prior censorship. Nevertheless, the law set out certain vague exceptions and limitations to the newly established freedoms. In addition, although required prior censorship was abolished, the law encouraged authors and journalists to submit to voluntary consultation with the government to assure that the content to be published or diffused did not violate the required respect for morality and compliance with the principles of the national movement. Direct or indirect criticism of the National Movement was, therefore, still not to be permitted, and the new expanse of alleged openness in the field of expression was, in fact, often a mine field. Works written in languages other than Castilian Spanish, such as Catalan, Basque, or Galician, were subject to even greater scrutiny. In 1967, for example, a year after the new law was passed, the government denied the town of El Vendrell from rendering homage to the Catalan cellist, Pau Casals, probably as a result of the musician having announced after the end of the Spanish Civil War that he would never return to Spain so long as Franco was still in power and for his continued protest against the oppression under the dictatorship. In that same year the Catalan periodical Destino was sanctioned with stiff monetary fines and two months of suspension for publications in favor of Catalan identity that the central government perceived as separatist. It was into this atmosphere of ostensible openness and underlying intolerance that a young Lluís Llach emerged on the scene as both musician and staunch supporter of Catalan nationalism. Born in 1948, in the Catalan province of Girona, as a child Llach was swept up by Francoist discourse. In an interview with his childhood friend Josep Miquel Servià, Llach states,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

425

I was what you could call a fascist boy, maybe not directly as far as ideology is concerned, but rather in terms of how fascism is based primarily on the magnification of falsehood, and I magnified all that was false. Words such as “empire,” “flag,” “homeland,” “nation,” “duty,” “order,” exalted me passionately.2

His childhood fascism, however, was short lived. At the age of 15 Llach moved to Barcelona to attend the university and there he came into contact with the anti-Franco student movement and the related musical movement known as Nova cançó (New Song).

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Nova Cançó and Els Setze Jutges Nova cançó was a musical, social, and political movement of 1960s Catalonia that defended the use of the Catalan language in singer–songwriter compositions, both as a means of fomenting Catalan cultural identity and as a peaceful avenue of opposition to Francoism. According to José Colmeiro, “its guiding principles included the recuperation of the Catalan language as the normal vehicle of expression, the consolidation of an autonomous poetic/musical tradition, and the participation in the common cause of resistance against Francoist oppression.”3 In 1959, a year after the first recordings of contemporary music in Catalan since the end of the Civil War, lawyer turned singer–songwriter Lluís Serrahima published in the journal Germinabit what was to become a manifesto for the Nova cançó movement. With the title, “Ens calen cançons d’ara” (We need songs from now), Serrahima exhorted young Catalan musicians to write and sing songs in Catalan despite the difficult political circumstances of the time. In December of 1961 the three Catalan singer–songwriters Miquel Porter, Remei Margarit, and Josep Maria Espinàs answered the call and, in response to Serrahima’s article, performed a concert consisting of their own original compositions in Catalan at a modest locale in Barcelona.4 This concert not only marked the official beginning of the Nova cançó movement, but it also launched the career of the group of Catalan singer–songwriters known as Els setze jutges (The Sixteen Judges). Over the next several years, Els setze jutges added members to their group one by one until 1967 when Lluís Llach became the 16th and final jutge. The setze jutges did not always perform together as a group, but instead four or five of them would perform individually at any given gathering. After having been prodded for several months by his friend Lluís Zayas to perform for the public and not just for himself, Llach finally agreed to go to a studio to record an audition tape for Els setze jutges. To Llach’s surprise,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

426

Sounds of Resistance

a few days later the group asked him to perform a live audition on the stage of the small Barcelona pub La cova del drac. Shortly after that Llach was invited to the studio to create an album entitled Lluís Llac canta les seves cançons (Lluís Llach sings his own songs), and on March 22, 1967, with his legs shaking and his eyes closed, he performed on stage in Terrassa for the first time as the one of Els setze jutges, officially launching his career.5 As he transitioned from university student to full-time musician, the years of 1967 and 1968 were also ones of great transformation in Llach’s political views, and these changes were evident in the music that he produced. Brigitte Baudriller, in her biography of Lluís Llach, states that in 1966 he was a Christian democrat with fascist inclinations, but that by 1968 he was raising his fist as he sang protest songs.6 Joining Els setze jutges gave a timid and private Llach both the platform and the contacts to develop a strong sense of Catalan nationalism and activism that would long outlast the jutges. His self-titled first album from 1967 included songs of a bucolic nature and nostalgic tone like “Que feliç era, mare” (How happy I was, mother) and “El parc” (The park). His second record, released early in 1968 evidenced Llach’s burgeoning sense of nationalism with songs such as “La meva terra” (My land) that contain lyrics that, without mentioning the Catalan people by name, reflect a sense of oppression at the hands of the central government.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

some people want to carry us forward, live sparks in solitude; others want us always halted, the ashes weigh heavy on the tired.7

The solitary sparks of resistance against oppression that are present in “La meva terra” burst into flame in Llach’s next album, released later in 1968, which contained two influential resistance songs: “Cop de destral” (Hachet Blow) with the line “fort, fort, cop de destral/la vella fusta tallar-la cal” (powerful, powerful hachet blow/the old wood must be cut) and what would later become his most emblematic as well as his most censored song, “L’estaca” (The Stake), which essentially describes a rotted wooden stake to which people are bound and exhorts communal effort to bring the stake down.

“L’Estaca” Originally titled “La Columna” (The Column), “L’Estaca” evokes a grandfather figure named Siset who hears the complaints of the young and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

427

encourages them to work together to bring about change. The bleak grievance of the young suggests a sense of hopelessness. “Siset, can’t you see the stake that we are all tied to? If we can’t free ourselves from it, we’ll never be able to walk!”8

The grandfather Siset’s response offers hope through collective action.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

If we all pull, it will fall, and it can’t last for long, It will surely fall, fall, fall, as it’s all rotted out already. If I pull it hard over here, and you pull it hard over there, It will surely fall, fall, fall, and we can free ourselves.9

Llach recounts that he first showed the lyrics to his friend Josep Miquel Servià at the university cafeteria with the words, “Here, didn’t you want a protest song?” Inspired by the protests of May 1968 in Paris, Llach states that “the intention of ‘L’Estaca’ was not to attack Franco but instead the political and social system that permitted the existence of Francos.”10 “L’Estaca,” therefore, was in Llach’s mind, just a small piece of the overall purpose of the Nova cançó movement, which Llach stated was to “look for a way of expressing a series of circumstances and make them available to the public.” In any case, the political and social system headed by Franco was uncharacteristically not attentive enough to censor the song from first being recorded or performed, but Llach describes that after a few short months “the censorship ‘intelligence’ discovered the true intentions of the song, and prohibited it unequivocally. They did not even allow it to be played on the radio; they scratched the records with a knife!”11 Llach’s prohibition from performing the song only caused his fans to demand it more vigorously. According to Llach, it was precisely the censorship of the song that began the process of its mythification, and when the audience at his recitals clamored for “L’Estaca,” he responded with an explanation that it had been prohibited. At a large concert at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música in 1969, though, when the audience called out for the censored song, Llach suddenly had a new thought. In his commentary to the song he recounts: I had one of those vagaries that I don’t know where they come from, a desire to not give in, I guess. They prohibit me from singing the lyrics? That’s alright; I’ll play the music . . . There was very little premeditation involved— two or three minutes—and this was the first time that the people, after hearing the music, joined in and began to sing. It was recorded in an album,12

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

428

Sounds of Resistance

and I think that for the people that was very important. The truth, the real truth, is that I didn’t expect the audience to sing it because that had never happened to me before.13

This moment inaugurated a tradition repeated at every subsequent concert where “L’Estaca” was disallowed. According to Llach, the audience’s demands to hear the song constituted an act of protest in and of themselves. “When they prohibited me like that, it was as if we, ourselves were saying: ‘This doesn’t work; they are prohibiting things; we are in a dictatorship.’ It was a kind of ritual.”14 A reviewer for the Catalan newspaper, Presència, writes that, “Llach’s songs create embers. We all sing. Lluís’ voice comforts us. Later, when he announces “L’Estaca,” his voice is silenced, and ours is made strong, firm, and potent.”15 Llach recalls that by the time he sang the song for the second time it seemed so familiar to him that it no longer felt like his own song. It was precisely the universal and timeless quality of “L’Estaca” that made Llach feel dispossessed of his own creation, but also made countless of his listeners adopt it as their own.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Concerts Near and Far After joining Els setze jutges and beginning to perform in public, Llach’s popularity quickly soared. As he started to make a name for himself, he also began to make important decisions regarding the direction of his career. Shortly after receiving second place recognition at the Barcelona Song Festival in 1968 Llach was approached by the CBS Spain record label, which offered him a lucrative contract in return for signing with them to sing in Castilian Spanish, not in Catalan. Llach turned down this offer in favor of signing with Concèntric, a small Catalan label dedicated to maintaining the Catalan language and culture. His first LP with Concèntric, Els éxits de Lluís Llach, including the song “L’Estaca,” sold over 100,000 copies, a staggering number for such a young new artist with a small regional lable.16 Within a year, though, Llach decided to leave Concèntric for the Madrid-based label, Movieplay where he was also able to produce his own records. In a 1969 interview Llach explained the change in this way: “The change of label was motivated, basically, by the desire to widen the market. I think that I am ready to reach the Castilian public even while maintaining myself true to my own language, which is Catalan.”17 Implicit in Llach’s statement that by continuing to sing in Catalan he was remaining true to himself was a criticism of another of the most well known of the setze jutges, Joan Manuel Serrat, who had achieved great

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

429

popularity all over the Spanish-speaking world after he had begun to sing in Castilian Spanish rather than in Catalan. Llach’s attitude toward Serrat’s switch of languages appears to be that while it was a commercial success, it nonetheless constituted an abandonment of the social cause advanced by Els setze jutges.18 As for himself, Llach stated, I sing in Catalan because of some circumstances that I consider to be abnormal. The day that they disappear I will have no issue with singing songs in Castilian. But now, singing in Castilian indicates an avoidance of the cultural and social problem of a region, the problem of renouncing a tradition and a culture that many have attempted to defend.19

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Shortly after switching to the new label, and after sold out concerts at key venues in Barcelona and Girona, (with certain songs such as “L’Estaca” still unauthorized by the censors) Llach reached out to the Castilian-speaking public in person, performing both in Cuba and in Madrid. In November of 1970, Llach traveled to Cuba at the invitation of Fidel Castro to participate in the Festival de la Canción Popular (Folk Song Festival) in Varadero. While there he was able to meet Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, the two most important figures of the Cuban nueva trova movement, and he also made political statements with far-reaching effects for his career. Llach’s turn on stage at one of the performances followed that of a singer named De Raymond from Barcelona who spoke in praise of Franco. Llach describes his reaction to De Raymond in this way: It seemed Dantesque to listen to what he was saying from the stage; he spoke of the motherland and sent regards from Generalissimo Franco and I don’t know what other ridiculous statements . . . My reaction was to exchange my pants with some old jeans that one of the Cuban singers near me had in order to go out identifying as much as possible with the people there, and when I stepped out on stage I said that I had come from the last dictatorship inherited from fascism and Nazism in Europe and that I was very ashamed of what De Raymond had said.20

The Spanish Ambassador to Cuba was in the audience that night, and upon hearing Llach’s words he promptly stood up and left. On December 7, 1970, shortly after returning from Cuba, Llach was able to give his first concert in Madrid at the Teatro Español, where he once again sang completely in Catalan in front of a non-Catalan-speaking audience. In order to aid the audience in understanding the lyrics they were about to hear, Llach’s manager had prepared a program in Castilian Spanish, but the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

430

Sounds of Resistance

police disallowed its distribution. Instead, Llach gave a brief introduction to each song in Castilian until the head of security approached Llach’s manager during the intermission to inform him that he planned on inflicting bodily harm to Llach if he made any more comments to the audience. This news that Llach was not allowed to present his songs spread like wildfire through the audience, who as a result, began to chant, “¡Preséntalas! ¡Preséntalas!” (Present them!).21 A few weeks after the Madrid concert Llach declined an invitation to perform at the International Festival of Song in Barcelona because he found it to be overpriced for the public. He wrote a letter to numerous members of the press in Barcelona stating, “I don’t think that I should participate in a show at which only those people prepared to pay an elevated price are able to attend . . . I will participate for free in any similar act as long as it is free to the public or offered at reasonable prices.” Not long after that, though, the repercussions of his political remarks in Cuba began to make it difficult for him to perform back in his native Catalonia or in the rest of Spain at any price.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Musical Exile The success of Llach’s concert in Madrid in December of 1970 raised the public demand for him to perform in other non-Catalan-speaking portions of Spain, but over and over again Llach was unable to secure permission to perform in these locations. The fallout from Llach’s political comments about Franco in Cuba was obvious, and Llach would pay for that act of defiance and insubordination with prohibitions from performing. De Raymond, on the other hand, received from Franco a signed photograph as a token of gratitude for his patriotic remarks.22 Llach was only allowed to sing on stage at a handful of small locales in his native province of Girona. During a short interview after a concert in the coastal town of Lloret, Llach stated that he had been silenced involuntarily. When asked whether he would continue singing, he answered, “I don’t know; it doesn’t depend on me. I would very much like to.”23 Frustrated at his inability to perform to a public that was clamoring for him, Llach made the decision to relocate temporarily to France, where his performances were unencumbered by the bureaucracy of censorship. In a 1971 interview with Jaume Reixach, Llach states simply, “they are not letting me perform. Therefore, I’m leaving.”24 He did not, however, leave dejected and defeated. Joan Molas, Llach’s friend and manager who accompanied him to France, states, “we went to Paris to wage war, thinking that we were going to sing and come back later without any spirit of defeat.”25

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

431

His departure was swift and decisive. Only a few weeks after Llach’s concert in Lloret, the newspaper Los sitios de Gerona published a letter from Llach’s manager, Núria Batalla, announcing upcoming concerts in Montpelier, Toulouse, and Paris as well as ones in Bulgaria and Poland, adding that Llach would welcome any opportunity to perform back home as well.26 A month later, at the end of April 1971, Batalla once again wrote to the newspaper to announce the success of Llach’s concerts in France including three successive sold out performances in Toulouse and an informal appearance in front of 2,000 spectators at the law school in Paris.27 Notably, Llach’s French audience continued the tradition of singing “L’Estaca” in chorus, despite the fact that it was not prohibited in France. Added to his repertoire at this time was a new song entitled, “Silenci” (Silence), that Llach states that he wrote while on the trip out of the country. The lyrics of the song reflect Llach’s defiant attitude toward the censorship that forced him to perform outside of Catalonia or the rest of Spain. The first and third stanzas state the following: If you have to make me be quiet may it be now, now that I can say no, and you have nothing with which to buy me.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

I doesn’t bother me at all to keep my mouth shut; it is you who have made words from the silence.28

These lines echo Llach’s previous statement regarding “L’Estaca” that it was precisely the censorship of the song that made it so powerful. In his commentary to the song Llach writes that people sang this song frequently, especially during the final years of the Franco regime.29 The song resonated with the public because it not only described Llach’s inability to perform his music in his native land but also the repression of the Catalan language in general. The censorship of Llach’s music, which “Silenci” represented, was a reminder to the Catalan-speaking public that their language was still under attack. During the rest of 1971, Llach continued to create a sensation in France while still censored back home. On a trip to Germany Llach met and began to perform with Elisa Serna, a militant communist singer–songwriter from Madrid. Serna recalls the first half of the 1970s in Spain as a time of severe

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

432

Sounds of Resistance

repression, social control, and governmental corruption. She describes a situation in which more than four people could not walk together on the street out of fear of being considered to be carrying out an illegal meeting.30 It was due to this atmosphere of fear and repression that Serna ended up, like Llach, settling temporarily in Paris. Together, the two singers also traveled to Switzerland and Italy to perform for groups of Spanish immigrants. Although Serna and Llach sang in different languages, the two shared a great deal in common both in their political views and in the way that they used their music to further those views. Serna recalls the similarities of their musical and political origins:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

In Madrid, in 1967, there was a song movement similar to Nova Cançó that was called Canción del Pueblo (Songs of the People). We were in a dictatorship and we had to get out from under it, and singing was a way of communicating with the people and criticizing the atrocities of the Regime.31

It was in that climate, Serna states, in which singer–songwriters began to use the protest song to “wage guerrilla warfare with guitar in hand.”32 By 1970, Serna had already been arrested for inciting a strike at a concert in Villaverde, a small city south of Madrid, and was facing a level of censorship akin to the one that Llach was up against in Catalonia. In an interview given in 1996 she stated that she still had in her possession hundreds of applications for authorization of concerts and songs stamped with the word “denied” in large red letters. Serna goes on to explain how one of their mutual singer–songwriter friends, Ovidi Montllor, had once asked for authorization for 20 songs for an upcoming concert, only one of which was not denied. According to Serna, he reacted by singing just that one song over and over again for the entire concert.33 With so much in common, Llach and Serna shared a bond of solidarity during their travels together. They both recount how when Llach took the stage and began to sing in Catalan in front of audiences who did not speak his language, some people would shout out angrily for him to sing in Castilian. When this would happen, Serna would come out on stage and chastise the audience for not understanding and accepting that Spain is country made up of several different nations with their own language.34 By mid-1972, Llach was able to perform sporadically in Catalonia, but permission tended to be granted or denied—usually denied—arbitrarily. Josep Miquel Servià writes that during this time youth groups and cultural centers of many different villages, towns, and cities all over Catalonia requested authorization to have Llach perform for them. The application

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

433

came at a somewhat hefty cost, but they were willing to pay it even though they knew the likely outcome because “in this way they managed to put into public evidence the repressive character of the Franco regime by obliging it to say ‘no’ everywhere.”35 Likewise, week after week, Llach’s managers continued to publicize in the Catalan press upcoming concerts that they would later announce had been cancelled due to authorization having been denied.36 When concerts and songs were authorized, the censors often still had issues with certain words. In a song entitled “La gallineta” about a hen who gets fed up and refuses to lay more eggs, the chorus states, “La gallina ha dit que no/visca la revolució” (The hen has said no/Long live revolution). Llach recalls that the word revolució was generally marked out until somebody had the idea of replacing it with revulsió (revulsion), which appeased the censors and was nearly indistinguishable from the original word when sung in the fast-paced song. In addition, as “La gallineta” was a song generally chorused by the audience, it was often the case that Llach was the only one singing revulsió while hundreds or thousands of fans sang revolució.37 On January 21, 1973, Llach became the first native of the province of Girona to perform at the prestigious Olympia concert hall in Paris where notable French singers such as Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel had performed before him to great acclaim.38 The Catalan press took full advantage of the successful concert at the Olympia in order to break the relative silence regarding Lluís Llach that had gone on for two years. Servià writes that two days after the concert, the government-run television station, Televisión Española, unexpectedly offered a special introducing some of Llach’s new songs during an hour of programming dedicated to regional audiences. The program was broadcast to the Catalan-speaking area of Spain.39 With the ice broken by this tacit approval from the central government, Llach began to receive more and more authorizations to perform although he was still frequently denied permission. When given permission to hold the event, he was often forbidden from singing certain songs.40 The arbitrary nature of the censorship is highlighted by the fact that on some occasions the censors disallowed some of Llach’s bucolic early songs while allowing him to perform “L’Estaca.”41 Even when he received permission to perform “L’Estaca,” however, he refused to do so, and continued to play the music and have the public sing it.42 The song’s power increased exponentially when sung in chorus by the audience. Nevertheless, despite the fact that songs and concerts were being allowed here and there, the censorship and the repression continued. According to Llach, the process of unprohibiting his performances followed a geographic pattern of concentric circles

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

434

Sounds of Resistance

in which he was slowly allowed to perform closer and closer to Barcelona.43 The permission to hold a concert in Barcelona was finally granted for two appearances at the Palau de la Música on February 2 and 3, 1974. Several months after his return to the Palau in Barcelona, Llach and his managers received the good news that he had been granted authorization for a concert at Barcelona’s Theatre Grec and that Televisión Española would record the concert and transmit it later as part of a program entitled, “A su aire” (His way). The concert was held as planned and received rave reviews in the Catalan press. One article stated that connection between artist and audience was extraordinary and the applause lasted for many minutes, but that the television cameras would be more eloquent than the reporter’s words. The resulting silence on the part of Televisión Española, though, might not be termed “eloquent,” but it did speak volumes. When the date in September came for the transmission of the program, the press service for Televisión Española announced that Lluís Llach’s concert would not be broadcasted because of technical difficulties.44 In an interview given a month later, though, Llach revealed that the decision had been political and not related to any technical issues. The rationale that Televisión Española gave to Llach’s manager was that while it was fine for Llach to appear on television singing in Catalan, that it would be considered an act of defiance for him to appear speaking to the audience in Catalan. Llach’s offer to have his introduction to each song subtitled in Castilian Spanish was rejected, as was the offer to cut out portions of the concert. Llach summed up his reaction to the entire ordeal with the exclamation, “This thing called apertura (openness), they are going to have to explain it to me!”45 Llach is referring, of course, to the supposed freedom of expression brought on by the 1966 law. In May 1975, Llach once again butted heads with the censors. After giving a concert in Barcelona’s Palau de la Música the singer was driven to the Police station and interrogated for two hours regarding statements that he made at the recital. He was later fined 100,000 pesetas under a 1935 public performance law that prohibited speaking to the audience. Additionally, he was denied permission for two upcoming concerts at the same venue. The so-called apertura, however, did allow Llach to speak about the censorship of his songs in interviews in Catalan newspapers. Shortly after being fined, and in response to a question about the restrictions he faced with his lyrics, Llach stated that censorship has contributed to the creation of a parallel vocabulary in which we can all understand each other perfectly . . . Songs are just one means of communication of many in a community . . . What happens is that in our community the rest of the means of communication are so controlled and messed up that songs play a role that in reality they should not have.46

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

435

He goes on to explain that instead of speaking of a “silent majority” it is more accurate to speak of a “silenced majority.”47 Llach was not the only silenced artist of the time, though. In October 1975, the Catalan newspaper Presència published a three-page article listing 96 news stories relating to difficulties with freedom of expression that had taken place in Catalonia during the three months of summer, including prohibited or suspended concerts or conferences, fines imposed on reporters or newspapers, and confiscations of publications of different sorts. Nine of the 96 items reported were concerts in which Llach was to perform, confirming the caption for his photograph in the article that describes him as holding the record for suspended events.48

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Death of Franco and Transition On November 20, 1975, six weeks after the publication of the Presència article, Franco died in his sleep after a long illness, marking the beginning of Spain’s transition to democracy. Franco’s death, however, did not automatically open the doors for Llach to perform without restrictions. Instead, the authorities continued to prohibit Llach’s concerts, prompting many people to publicly demand answers by writing editorials or articles in newspapers or magazines or, in the case of several of his fellow Catalan singers, to host a recital dedicated to Llach in late December 1975. Finally, for the first time since ending the concert with police interrogations six months before and for the first time since the death of Franco, on January 15, 1976, Llach was able to return to the stage in Barcelona to perform in front of an emotionally charged and sold-out crowd of nearly 9,000 people at the Palau dels Esports followed by additional concerts on the subsequent two days. Llach himself later dubbed that night the most intense and happy moment of his life and stated that he was often so overcome with emotion that he had to stop singing. The crowd thought that his silence was a sign for them to sing, and so they did, confirming a total connection between artist and audience.49 Following the concerts, the press exploded with reports of the political implications of the performances. Filling the front rows of the audience were over 30 representatives of the Catalan political movement.50 Sitios de Gerona wrote up the concert as a “veritable political demonstration” as evidenced by the Catalan flags that waved in the crowd throughout the concert.51 The Madrid based El Mundo reported that the political force of the concert was such that the extraordinary performance of Lluís Llach as a singer was pushed to a second plane.52 El Correo Catalan stated that the concert had been one of the most eloquent testimonies of the democratic

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

436

Sounds of Resistance

expectations of the time.53 According to Antonio Alvarez Solís, the event constituted a trial run of a democratic society in which thousands of people were able to express themselves freely.54 After one of the three concerts at the Palau dels Esports Llach was asked to give his thoughts on why the government had censored him for so long and why they had now decided to authorize his concerts. In response to the first question, Llach stated that his guess was that he was prohibited from performing merely for being part of the cançó catalana movement and that the real reason was that cançó catalana was an artistic and political social phenomenon that swept up many people because it offered them a way of communicating certain ideas and preoccupations in political and social circumstances that publicly displaying ideological attitudes did not. As to the question of why he had been allowed to give the concert at the Palau dels Esports, Llach answered that it was an attempt on the part of the government to clean up its image.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

As for the why, well, it’s a measure that ultimately is very easy to take. It’s permitting a singer to sing; it’s not as dangerous as all that . . . and because [letting me sing] has public repercussions of telling the people . . . making the people think that the country is moving towards a state of apertura.55

Llach’s implicit lack of confidence in the government’s intention of maintaining a state of true freedom of expression was confirmed one month later, in February 1976, when three days of already sold-out concerts in Girona were suddenly prohibited. The last minute cancellation provoked passionate protests both in the local papers and on the streets. At the time the first concert was to have taken place, groups of angry fans gathered at City Hall and at the concert venue to sing Llach’s songs in protest of the government’s prohibition. The improvised concert was broken up by the police despite the efforts of Joan Paredes, an alderman in the city government of Girona who, unlike many of the other officials, was outspoken in defense of Llach being able to perform. Following the demonstration, Paredes delivered a letter to the civil government regarding the cancelled concerts stating, I would like to make known my vigorous protest against a measure such as this one that violates our collective right to freedom of expression. In addition, I understand that the deep disappointment and indignation that this act has produced in the spirit of many of the people of Girona requires, at a minimum, a public and convincing explanation of the motives that have provoked the suspension of the recitals.56

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

437

Unsurprisingly, neither Joan Paredes, Lluís Llach nor the public of Girona ever received any explanation of the reasons for the cancelation, convincing or otherwise. By the summer of 1976 a number of Catalan institutions had banded together to organize a Congreso de Cultura Catalana (Conference on Catalan Culture) with the purpose of encouraging the pursuit of a Catalan national identity separate from that of Spain. One of the events proposed by the organizers to promote and help finance the Congreso was a music festival in which Lluís Llach was to perform along with fellow Catalan singer, Raimon, and foreign singers such as Pete Seeger and Isabel Parra. The festival was, however, prohibited by the government. In the Madrid-based newspaper, El País, Xavier Folch wrote an opinion piece denouncing the prohibition, stating,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the current context the festival possessed an inevitable political connotation: it would have been, without a doubt, an act of Catalan affirmation by the people. But if this is still considered subversive, it is clear that we Catalans are not interested in the model of Spanish style democracy that they want to impose on us. The incident shows us . . . that any perspective of a civilized future must come not from reformist promises, but from democratic reality, that is, in abbreviated terms, by freedom, amnesty, and the Statute of Autonomy.57

Despite the transition to democracy, the government still feared Llach’s political use of his music. In 1977, Llach sued the city government of Granada for suspending a second concert after a first one was found to have a political purpose.58 In 1980, Llach was fined for having read a statement about freedom of expression during one of his concerts in Salamanca.59 Despite setbacks such as these, with Franco’s death Llach was gradually finding more opportunities to perform and engage in dialogue with his fans. In May of 1976, he performed in front of a group of 15,000 university students in Barcelona. The crowd responded to Llach with the popular chant that Xavier Folch would soon echo, of “Freedom, Amnesty, and Statute of Autonomy.”60 “Amnesty” referred to the call for pardons for the over 600 political prisoners who had been imprisoned during the Franco regime. The Statute of Autonomy that the public was demanding referred to a constitution that would set out the rights and obligations of the Catalan people as well as the powers of their political institutions. Catalonia’s first Statute of Autonomy, approved and passed in 1932, had been abolished by Franco. As part of the transition to democracy following Franco’s death,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

438

Sounds of Resistance

in 1979 the Catalan people approved by way of referendum a new Statute of Autonomy that recognized Catalonia as an autonomous nation within Spain with its own culture, history, and language. Although many Catalan politicians touted the Estatut (Statute of Autonomy) as a major victory, for Llach the language of the new law did not go far enough, and for that reason he publicly described it as “an embarrassment and deficient in many aspects.”61 In the same 1979 interview in which Llach gave his opinion on the newly passed Estatut, the singer was asked if he had noticed any difference in the audiences that attended his concerts now that the transition to democracy was fully underway. In response, Llach stated, “Yes, it used to be that going to a concert practically became an act of protest, and for that reason the people went as if they were participating in a political act. Now people go to listen to the concert and that’s it.”62 This statement by Llach about the changes that he had perceived in his audience reflects a change in Llach’s activism as a result of the transition to democracy. While fully under the oppression of the Franco regime, practically the only voice that Llach had to communicate with a wide audience was through his singing, and even then he was often unwillingly silenced. Singing and having his songs sung by the people were in large part his only means of resistance. As the transition progressed, however, singing alone began to lose its power of protest, and Llach, began to take part in acts of resistance that did not directly involve his music. Before reaching this point, however, the transition brought with it several reasons to continue to use music as a means of resistance. One of the most noteworthy of the causes that Llach took up during the transition involved defending and supporting Albert Boadella, the director of Els joglars, a Catalan independent theater group that in 1977 produced and performed a parody of the execution by garrote of a German man known as Heinz Chez. Chez, whose real name was Georg Welzel, was executed in a city an hour south of Barcelona in 1974 on the same day and almost at the same time as the execution in Barcelona, also by garrote, of Salvador Puig Antich, a 25-year-old Catalan anti-Franco anarchist. Although both men had been found guilty of murder, popular opinion in Catalonia held that the German’s garroting was effectuated in order to distract the public from the execution of Puig Antich, whose case was much more political in nature. Several days after the parody was performed by Els joglars, Albert Boadella was arrested by the military police along with other members of his comedy troupe because their performance was found to be insulting to the military forces. Theaters in Barcelona quickly banded together to go on strike in support of Boadella’s

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

439

right to freedom of expression. Hundreds of theaters, movie theaters, show halls, and actors’ groups from all parts of Spain quickly joined the strike. Llach took his solidarity with Boadella a step further by publicly criticizing the newly formed Catalan government for not making overtures of support toward Boadella.63 Less than a week later, a festival entitled Por la libertad de expresión (For Freedom of Expression) in which Llach was to perform, and which was organized in order to raise funds and awareness for Boadella’s cause, was prohibited by the government.64 Another concert was organized at Barcelona’s Palau dels Esports, in which Llach and other Catalan singers performed amid Catalan flags and cries for amnesty for Boadella. Llach later also participated in a sit-in with 70 other singers, artists, actors, and politicians at the Ateneo de Madrid to protest the court marshal of some of the members of Els joglars.65 Boadella, meanwhile, escaped from prison while hospitalized for a gastric disorder and fled to France in exile. Despite the efforts of the protesters, the remaining members of the troupe were sentenced to two years in prison, though they were later pardoned when Pablo Picasso’s daughter, Paloma, demanded it as a condition for her granting permission for her father’s famous painting Guernica to be returned to Spain. Boadella was not officially exonerated until 1985.66 During the transition Llach’s activist voice was prominent enough that rumors periodically arose that he was seeking political office as a candidate for the Catalan nationalist party, Nacionalistes d’Esquerra.67 Although Llach never ran for political office, he did publicly declare his support for the Nacionalistes d’Esquerra, performed at their political rallies, and allowed the title of one of his recently written songs to be used on the party’s promotional posters.68 “Companys, no és això” (Comrades, it’s not this) was written in 1977 or 1978 and was inspired by the events surrounding the arrest of Boadella and the other joglars.69 Llach recounts that after the emotionally charged and triumphant concerts in Barcelona in January 1976, he became wary of the possibility of abusing his power. Wanting to believe in the idea that other means of political expression were now possible, Llach wished to step back from his role as critic. With the court martial of Els joglars, though, Llach was disturbed both by the power that continued to be wielded by the military and the cowardice of the political class to take a stand against it. “Companys, no és això,” written in the space of 10 minutes after Llach attended a meeting of artists of all sorts to discuss situation with Els joglars, was Llach’s first public criticism of post-Franco reality.70 The song expresses indignant disappointment with the reality of the newly forming democracy.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

440

Sounds of Resistance

It wasn’t this, comrades, it wasn’t this For which so many flowers died For which we cried so longingly Maybe we must be brave once again And say no, my friends, it’s not this.71

Llach found this first stanza to be particularly poignant because “there is a patrimony of sacrifice, of resistance, that has not been corresponded with the results of the political reality.”72 He also noted that people later used this song to express their disconformity with the ways in which power was wielded. Llach himself soon found a new reason to sing “Companys, no és això.” In January 1981, over 2,300 professionals and intellectuals living in Catalonia signed a document known as the Manifiesto de los 2.300 in which they criticized a growing movement to make Catalan the only official language of Catalonia. Catalan nationalists quickly responded and within two months organized a movement known as Crida a la Solidaritat en Defensa de la Llengua, la Cultura i la Nació Catalanes (Call for Solidarity in Defense of the Language, the Culture, and the Nation of Catalonia). On June 24, 1981, the Crida organized an event at the Camp del Barça stadium in defense of cultural and linguistic autonomy for Catalonia in which Lluís Llach performed “Companys” as well as “L’Estaca.” To the 2,300 signers of the anti-Catalan Manifiesto, the Crida responded with close to 100,000 Catalan nationalists chanting, “Som una nació” (We are a nation).

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Democracy As evidenced by the tension between the signers of the Manifiesto and the participants of in the activities of the Crida, the newly formed democracy of the early 1980s by no means resolved all the issues regarding language and freedom of expression in Catalunya. In February of 1981, Llach entered into a contract with RTVE, the Spanish television corporation, to give a concert that would be recorded and broadcasted on national television in return for compensation of 300,000 pesetas. When RTVE backed out of the contract claiming to not have enough money in their budget to cover the costs, Llach sued RTVE for breach of contract, eventually winning a judgment of 5 million pesetas in damages. Before the trial RTVE rejected Llach’s offer to withdraw the lawsuit in return for broadcasting the concert at another date.73 After the sentence was handed down, the lawyer for RTVE filed an appeal based on the fact that Catalan was spoken during the trial, despite the fact that he had rejected offers to have the Catalan translated

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

441

into Castilian because he claimed to understand it perfectly.74 In 1985, RTVE proposed broadcasting a Lluís Llach special, but before the project was able to go forward, RTVE once again claimed to have budgetary issues that prevented producing such a program. Llach expressed his frustration in a letter to the president of the government, Felipe González. Assigning responsibility in the issue to González himself, Llach wrote harshly, “I will continue to be a tireless critic against the forces of power, I will call for selfdetermination for all of the people of Spain, and I will continue with all of my strength and capabilities, to fight against these politics of surrender that place us within the balance of terror, and consequently will be against becoming part of NATO.”75 The entry of Spain into NATO had long been a contentious issue. Despite vigorous protest from the political left, Spain joined NATO in May 1982. Later that year the Socialist party, headed by Felipe González, outspoken against NATO, made a campaign promise to hold a referendum to allow the people to decide if they wanted to withdraw from the alliance. After being elected, though, González began to have second thoughts about the referendum, and by the time it took place four years later in 1986, the Spanish president was publicly advocating maintaining membership in the organization. Once again frustrated with Spain’s leadership, Llach filed a lawsuit against González and the Socialist party alleging that they had breached a contractual promise to follow a policy of international neutrality that opposed the arms race. Parallel to the lawsuit, Llach expressed his irritation by writing the song, “No.” According to Llach this is a strictly militant song that he wrote after telling himself, “Fine, I’ll write a song against NATO.”76 Given Llach’s anti-arms stance, it is not surprising that the members of two civil disobedience groups who objected to Spain’s obligatory military service approached Llach to perform in a concert in support of their cause. Although the government had in 1988 partially acceded to the demands of a movement of conscientious objectors to the military service and had instated an alternative service option, many people felt that the alternative service, which lasted 18 months as opposed to the traditional nine, constituted an unjust punishment for those young men with a political or moral objection to military service. Given their dissatisfaction with the new law, conscientious objectors began to reject the amnesty offered by the government for refusing to perform military service. The insubmisos (unsubmissives), as they called themselves, were subject to a year to two and a half years in prison for their refusals. Once the insumbmisos presented their cause to Llach he fell in love with their ideas.77 Llach was so taken with the cause that he not only performed at the concert on February 9, 1990, at

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

442

Sounds of Resistance

the Palau dels Esports in Barcelona, but afterward he wrote a song entitled “Insubmís” with the collaboration of the objectors both in the writing and in the singing of the song. Llach even goes as far as to say that he has adopted the word insubmís as his own and would like to be remembered with the label “unsubmissive.”78 In 1992, Llach took his identification with the cause a step further by appearing at the courthouse where an insubmís was awaiting trial for refusing to perform military service. In an act of solidarity with the cause and with Anselm Díaz, who was awaiting trial, Llach and two other public figures accused themselves of inciting insubmission.79 In 2001, the efforts of the insubmisos paid off, and the obligatory military service in Spain was abolished. Llach was so moved that the campaign had ultimately succeeded that he stated, “One of the most beautiful experiences that one can have is when utopias become reality.”80 While Llach was fully immersed in the cause of the insubmisos, he was feeling the need to reinvent or at least rearrange himself musically because singing in Catalan was no longer considered simpático. According to Llach, when the socialist party was elected to power in 1982, nationalism ceased to be understood as collective liberation, but instead as a retrograde affirmation of certain groups over others.81 In the album Ara (Now), released in 1992, Llach presented new arrangements of many of his emblematic songs, each one recorded at a different live performance in one of Catalonia’s many small towns. According to Llach, “songs such as ‘L’Estaca’ have been sung serving different needs: anti-Franco in 1979, defense of identity in 1976, and now sixteen-year-olds also have their estacas that worry them.”82 While it is natural that songs such as “L’Estaca” have found new uses over the years, what is surprising is how many of the new uses are, in fact, very similar to the original ones, despite the dramatic change in the political system that has taken place since Llach first began to perform and compose. During the first decade or so of the 21st century Llach and his music have fought new versions of many of the same old battles of the 1960s and 1970s. In 2000, the city government of Valencia refused authorization for a group called Acció Cultural to hold a megaconcert in which Llach was to perform in the bullfighting stadium of the city. The head of Acció Cultural and several nationalist politicians accused the Valencia government of acting on political grounds.83 Amid the public outcry over the controversy, the Valencia government decided to authorize the concert after all.84 Llach later thanked the government for the invaluable publicity the controversy had given the concert.85 Even more recently, four years into his official retirement from the stage, Llach participated in a demonstration in Valencia to protest the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

443

governmental shutdown of the Catalan television channel in Valencia. The emotional two-song performance that Llach gave in April 2011 on a makeshift stage on top of a trailer because the municipal government denied the requested permits was introduced by the singer with the words: “Years ago these songs served to fight against the fascists of those times. I hope that they are now used to fight against the fascists of today.”86 The eight-minute concert ends, as so many of them had done, with the crowd on the street first clamoring for more and then spontaneously breaking into the chorus of “L’Estaca.” Events such as this are evidence of the fact that despite the passage of several decades of democracy, Llach and his music still fuel the passion of resistance against a centralist state that is often unsupportive of Catalan language and culture.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Salvador Enguix, “Joan Améric: Cantar en catalan es resistir,” La Vanguardia, January 26, 2009. 2. Josep Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach: un trobador per a un poble (Barcelona: Puntual Edicions, 1982), 37–38. 3. José Colmeiro, “Canciones con historia: Cultural Identity, Historical Memory, and Popular Songs,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003), 37. 4. Pepa Novell, “Cantautoras catalanas: de la nova cançó a la Nova cançó d’ara. El paso y el peso del pasado,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 10 (2009), 135–47. 5. Brigitte Baudriller, Lluís Llach (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2000), 23. 6. Ibid., 110. 7. Lluís Llach, Lluís Llach canta les seves cançons, © 1967 by Concèntric, 6052-UC, EP. As is the case with all of the lyrics in this chapter, translation from the original Catalan is mine. 8. Lluís Llach, Els èxits de Lluís Llach, © 1969 by Concèntric, 5711-UL, LP. 9. Ibid. 10. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on L’Estaca,” purchased from www.lluisllach.cat. All translations are mine. 11. Ibid. 12. Llach is referring to the album Ara I aqui (Movieplay, 1970), recorded at the Palau de la Musica in 1969. 13. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on L’Estaca.” 14. Ibid. 15. “Cançó Catalana a Roses,” Presència, April 10, 1971, 13. 16. Lluís Llach official website, “Biografía,” http://www.lluisllach.cat/ (accessed June 24, 2011). 17. “Lluís Llach—La ‘nova cançó’ casi en la agonía,” Los sitios de Gerona, September 21, 1969, 9.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

444

Sounds of Resistance

18. “Los cantantes regionales de 1970,” ABC, July 26, 1970, 111. 19. Ibid. 20. Omar Jurado and Juan Miguel Morales, Lluís Llach: Siempre más lejos (Tafalla: Editorial Txalaparta, 2007), 114. 21. Brigitte Baudriller, Lluís Llach (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2000), 100–101. 22. Ibid., 101. 23. “Eloqüent silence d’en Lluís Llach,” Presència, March 6, 1971, 19. 24. “Cançó catalana a Roses.” 25. Jurado and Miguel Morales, Lluís Llach, 133. 26. “Nos escribe Lluís Llach,” Los sitios de Gerona, March 28, 1971, 7. 27. “Made in France,” Los sitios de Gerona, April 25, 1971. 28. Lluís Llach, Barcelona. Gener de 1976, © 1976 by Movieplay, S-32.783, LP. 29. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on Silenci,” purchased from www.lluisllach.cat. 30. “Entrevista: Elisa Serna,” Revista de orientación e información 42 (2007), 3. 31. Jurado and Miguel Morales, Lluís Llach, 136. 32. Alex Niño,“Las armas de la voz,” El País, March 6, 1996, http://www.elpais.com/ articulo/madrid/SERNA/_ELISA/MADRID__/COMUNIDAD_AUTONOMA/ MADRID_COMUNIDAD_AUTONOMA/CUERPO_NACIONAL_DE_POLICIA/ armas/voz/elpepiautmad/19960305elpmad_12/Tes (accessed June 28, 2011). 33. Ibid. 34. Josep Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach: un trobador per a un poble (Barcelona: Puntual Edicions, 1982), 124–28. 35. Ibid., 130. 36. Jurado and Miguel Morales, Lluís Llach, 133. 37. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on La gallineta,” purchased from www.lluisllach. cat. 38. This concert was recorded and released by Movieplay as the album Lluís Llach a L’Olympia in Spain. 39. Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach, 129. 40. Unlike Elisa Serna, Llach has no written evidence of any of governmental censorship, as the decisions regarding authorization were always given orally. 41. Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach, 130. 42. Ibid., 140. 43. Llach, “Commentary on Silenci.” 44. Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach, 140. 45. “No pot creure en l’apertura,” Presència, October 5, 1974, 5. 46. “Lluís Llach, al Palau,” Presència, May 17, 1975, 26. 47. Ibid. 48. “No tota cuca viu a l’estiu,” Presència, October 4, 1975, 22. 49. Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach, 167. 50. “Lluís Llach després del silence,” Presència, January 24, 1976, 23. 51. “Multitudinaria actuación de Lluís Llach en Barcelona,” Los sitios de Gerona, January 17, 1976, 5. 52. Quoted in Josep Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach, 170. 53. Ibid., 171.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Pulling at the Stake of Oppression

445

54. Miquel Servià, Lluís Llach, 173. 55. “Entrevista a Lluís Llach 1976—“Per què et van prohibir? Per què t’han autoritzat ara?,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X38V4LCN89M (accessed July 12, 2011). 56. “La carta de Joan Paredes,” Presència, February 21, 1976, 11. 57. “El Congreso de Cultura Catalana, vieja aspiración de la oposición democrática,” El País, July 7, 1976. 58. “Lluís Llach se querella contra el gobernador civil de Granada,” El País, March 12, 1977. 59. “Multa a Lluís Llach,” El Punt, February 19, 1980. 60. “Quince mil personas en un recital de Lluís Llach,” El País, May 7, 1976. 61. “L’Estatut no s’havia de presenter com una victoria,” El Punt, October 28, 1979, 10. 62. Ibid. 63. “Críticas a la Generalitat por no intervenir en el proceso de ‘Els Joglars’,” El País, January 14, 1978. 64. “El Gobierno Civil de Barcelona prohíbe una colectiva de arte,” El País, January 20, 1978. 65. “Encierro en el Ateneo de Madrid,” El País, March 7, 1978. 66. Gijs Van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004), 287–88. 67. “Llach no vol parlar de la seva participació a les eleccions,” El Punt, January 18, 1980, 24. 68. Political ad, El Punt, March 9, 1980, 24. 69. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on Companys, no és això,” purchased from www.lluisllach.cat. 70. Ibid. 71. Lluís Llach, El meu amic el mar, © 1978 by Ariola, 25–630 I, LP. 72. Llach, “Commentary on Companys, no és això.” 73. “RTVE, condenada a indemnizar a Lluís Llach con 5 millones de pesetas,” El País, July 8, 1982. 74. “Lluís Llach,” El País, October 9, 1982. 75. “Lluís Llach se queja por no dejarle actuar en TVE,” Los Sitios de Girona, February 10, 1985, 39. 76. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on No,” purchased from www.lluisllach.cat. 77. “Lluís Llach define su ultimo disco como ‘de alta exigencia’,” El País, April 24, 1991. 78. Lluís Llach, “Commentary on Insubmís,” purchased from www.lluisllach. cat. 79. “Lluís Llach va al jutjat I s’autoinculpa d’haver induït un jove a la insubmissió,” El Punt, May 30, 1992, 35. 80. Llach, “Commentary on Insubmís.” 81. “Lluís Llach dice que cantar en catalán ha dejado de ser simpatico,” El País, April 12, 1992. 82. Ibid.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

446

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

83. Ribó acusa al PP de sufrir ‘histeria anticatalanista’ con el 25 de abril,” El País, April 28, 2000. 84. “Giner rectifica y autoriza el recital de Lluís Llach en la plaza de toros,” El País, April 27, 2000. 85. “Llach agradece al PP la publicidad por tratar de impedir su concierto,” El País, May 6, 2000. 86. “Actuació de Lluís Llach a la Porta de Serrans de València—Manifestació SÍ a TV3,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZovSOv77xO0 (accessed August 16, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 21

Reading and Sounding Protest Musical and Lyrical Markers in Brazilian Tropicália and Canção Engajada

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Chris Stover

Composer, singer, instrument-builder, and provocateur Tom Zé describes his 2006 concept album Estudando o pagode (Studying the Pagode) as “a feminist opera in three acts,” each of which unfolds as a series of tableaus that takes us through a deterritorialized space that shifts between the Garden of Eden, the Vatican, the United Nations building in New York City, Bahia, and more, and which challenges temporal, spatial, and semantic boundaries. The songs that comprise Estudando o pagode address gender roles and identities and shifting power dynamics, using the playful, improvisational, and communal (but notoriously misogynist) pagode samba as its ground. For example, “Proposta de amor” from Act I involves “an imaginary pagode group” engaging in “a love proposal to the eternal feminine,” while in “Pagode-enredo dos tempos do medo” the pagode musicians claim to be “just as segregated as the women,” but later in “Vibração da carne” (Vibration of flesh), “boys and girls learn to equate feminine bodies with merchandise.”1 All of this is framed as a complex, only loosely linear narrative, and its overarching theme is explored from multiple shifting perspectives. Estudando o pagode reinvents themes from Zé’s earlier works, including his 1998 “Com defeito de fabricação” (Fabrication defect), which by

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

448

Sounds of Resistance

suggesting that the workers of Brazil are actually androids controlled by “third world bosses” offers a pointed indictment of class relations and economic boundaries, and especially his much earlier (1976) similarly titled work Estudando o samba (Studying the Samba), which deconstructs samba and bossa nova in a critical commentary on Brazilian identity and tradition and the ways in which a contemporary artist might engage with it.2 Estudando o samba brings together newly composed material with disparate “found” sources, such as heard in Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Morais’s “A felicidade,” Zé’s arrangement of which problematizes its bossa nova frame by layering an additional metric stratum (only at the end does the samba topos emerge clearly, at which point the listener realizes it was there all along), and by introducing found musical objects, including most notably a quote from “O teu cabelo não nega,”3 a Carnaval marcha from 1932, played by a spirited brass band.4 In Com defeito de fabricação, Zé goes further to suggest that “we are at the end, thus, of the composers’ era, inaugurating the plagio-combinator era,”5 in which found objects are not used and reassembled in an ironic postmodern manner, but are combed through, pillaged, and (perhaps violently) repurposed, and that we must consider the fate of the original object when such a radical transformative gesture is applied to it.6 Why is a brief summary of the ways in which Tom Zé has manipulated, deconstructed, and repurposed found musical objects and iconic Brazilian musical genres relevant to a chapter on protest and resistance music? Zé’s engagement with Brazilian identity and history and the relationship between popular culture, folklore, and avant-garde epistemologies turns out to be a remarkable reflection of and commentary on Brazil’s own sense of identity and history, as well as its complex and problematic relationship with the rest of the world, in particular Portugal and the United States. Moreover, a significant part of Brazil’s artistic identity and history has been the way in which artists, including Zé and many others that will be discussed below, negotiate racial identities, class distinctions, geographic centers and movements, real and manufactured traditions, political hegemony and censorship, and more.

É Proibido Proibir (It Is Prohibited to Prohibit)7 In 1964, the then-President João Goulart’s leftist government was overtaken in a quick and surprisingly efficient military coup; a direct response to right-wing concerns about the growing power of unions and their ability to mobilize and empower workers, to Goulart’s communist sympathies and criticism of corporate multinationalism and U.S. imperialism, and

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 449

to ongoing economic concerns.8 A military regime, led by General Humberto Castello Branco, was installed, which like most such movements9 was expected to remain for a few months before establishing a sympathetic civilian government, but ended up lasting 21 years, intimidating unions, suppressing student activist movements, and dramatically increasing the income disparity between the upper class and working class.10 From the opening days of the military regime, dissenting voices were censored and silenced, and outspoken critics were imprisoned, tortured, or exiled. The situation escalated in 1968 with the installment of Artur da Costa e Silva as President, who in response to increasing strikes and public protests from union workers, students, and artists, enacted the Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5), a decree that, in addition to shutting down Congress and giving exclusive, dictatorial power to the president, suspended many civil liberties for Brazilian citizens, including free speech rights and the right to habeas corpus. One of the articles of AI-5 prescribed imprisonment for “ ‘moral offense to anyone in authority, for reasons of factionalism or socio-political differences,’ the sentences to be increased by half if the offense were committed by means of the press, radio, and television.”11 We will soon see the effect AI-5 had on Brazilian popular music, as artists struggled to navigate between fulfilling their roles as voices of populist dissent and the silencing power of government censorship and the looming threat of exile, imprisonment, torture, or disappearance. Even prior to the enactment of AI-5, protest against the military dictatorship had been perilous, and artists were seeking out covert ways to convey activist messages through song, story, and stage. Theatrical productions like Augusto Boal’s Show Opinião engaged a wide spectrum of populist concerns—race and Brazilian mestiço identity, class, and economic condition (often using the people and culture of the northeastern sertão as a metonym for underrepresented locales and cultural groups across Brazil), the social position and treatment indigenous peoples, and equitable presence of subaltern voices, all framed as avant-garde theater. Beginning in 1964, Show Opinião featured, among others, bossa nova singer Nara Leão,12 black sambista Zé Keti, and the music of rural northeastern songwriter João do Vale, and is considered to be the first high-profile political response to the new regime, “signaling a conscious effort on the part of left-wing artists to reaffirm their alliance with the povo.”13 As Dunn describes, the cast of Show Opinião used nuanced cultural references and metaphors based in folkloric themes to protest covertly—he cites, for example, João do Vale’s song “Carcará” (a northeastern bird of prey) and the way it alludes to the punishing poverty of the sertão without explicitly referencing the economic

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

450

Sounds of Resistance

conditions that encouraged that poverty.14 Zé Keti’s samba de morro “Opinião” was more overt, however, with direct references to an (albeit unnamed) oppressor: “you can imprison me/you can beat me/you can even leave me without food/I won’t change my opinion.”15 But AI-5 formalized and intensified the scope of government censorship, and by 1968 a song as overtly critical of the regime would never pass the censor’s tightening filter. We will revisit some of the ways in which protest singers subverted the eyes and ears of the regime, but first let us contextualize one of the most important grounds upon which that activity took place. Through the latter part of the 1960s, the principal terrain upon which government censorship met popular music was a series of annual televised festivals sponsored by the top television networks in Brazil (TV Excelsior, TV Record, TV Rio, and TV Globo, each of which produced a series of popular music festivals in which artists would compete for popular attention and cash prizes), which quickly emerged as “the most important venue for MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) musicians to promote their music and, in some cases, to register some form of protest.”16 The festivals were an important launching point for many artists, including Elis Regina (who won the first TV Excelsior festival in 1965, singing Edu Lobo and Vinícius de Moraes’s “Arrastão”), Chico Buarque (whose “A banda,” itself something of a nuanced critical song with populist themes and musical indices that channeled rural culture and marked o povo as authentically Brazilian, won the 1966 TV Record festival), and Geraldo Vandré (one of the leading figures in the emerging scene of Brazilian protest song (canção engajada), to which we’ll return shortly), and also reified the cultural significance of more established artists like Dori Caymmi and Baden Powell. The winners of the 1967 TV Record festival were Edu Lobo and Marília Medalha, whose baião17-inspired “Ponteio” “claimed popular music as a vehicle for redemption in the face of intimidation and repression.”18 Like many covert protest songs, the lyrics to “Ponteio” point to an imagined future where political circumstances have changed.19 Also at the 1967 festival there were two young upstarts: the Bahian singer–songwriters Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who were soon to transform the terrain of Brazilian popular music. Veloso performed his new song “Alegria, alegria,” which channeled North American and British Invasion pop styles, synthesizing them with the lively Brazilian marcha to frame a disjunctive narrative that pitched its narrator as strangely detached from the images unfolding around him (as the recurring refrain “Eu vou, porque não?” (I go, why not?) clearly suggests).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 451

“Alegria, alegria” was striking in many ways. Its lyrics weave together sensitive political issues (leftist guerilla uprisings; the oft-cited “sem lenço, sem documento” (without handkerchief, without papers), a reference to the requirement that Brazilian citizens must carry identifying papers—this would soon become a rallying cry for subaltern voices among Brazilian youth20), U.S., and European pop culture iconography (Coca Cola, Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale, the bomb) and an overarching theme of saudade, the famously elusive but crucial word in Brazilian cultural identity that describes a wistful, loving nostalgia. But saudade for what? Part of the message that “Alegria, alegria” evokes is one of resigned detachment, but Veloso’s delivery suggests a biding of time, a stance somewhere above the fray, a willful turn from the turmoil and sensory overload that he is passing by. Rather than engaging in direct protest (or even direct commentary of any kind), Veloso sought to bring into focus “the importance of aesthetic considerations in musical production and criticism, and the need to rework and rearticulate traditions to produce contemporary forms of musical expression.”21 Equally apparent were the striking musical indices that unfold through “Alegria, alegria.”22 Its use of organ and tambourine, and the fuzz-tone guitar at the outro, its unusual harmonic motion, and the overall psychedelic mood instilled by its tempo changes, reverb-heavy production, and use of repetition all contribute to the particular thrust of its message. The fact that these musical characteristics also consciously index North American popular music styles (rather than the contemporaneous Brazilian rock of jovem guarda artists like Roberto Carlos) foreshadowed important artistic moves that Veloso and his tropicalist colleagues would soon make. Veloso suggests that “Alegria, alegria” is not entirely successful as a musical composition but rather that it was the first attempt to meld together all of these disparate sources.23 The day after “Alegria, alegria” premiered at the 1967 festival, Gilberto Gil presented his own new song “Domingo no parque” (Sunday in the park) accompanied by a large ensemble comprised of the young psychedelic rock trio Os Mutantes, an Afro-Brazilian berimbau, and a small orchestra with strings and woodwinds.24 Gil’s new song brilliantly blended popular rock, the rural northeastern baião, capoeira rhythms, film music, and more. The result was a fascinating postmodern pastiche that framed a text that related a familiar story but that also hinted at an unspoken social unrest. “Domingo no parque” begins with an orchestral fanfare that invites the action that is about to occur—it is easy to imagine that when the driving

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

452

Sounds of Resistance

full orchestra filters down to a simple woodwind ostinato, then it gives way to the traditional capoeira rhythm and instrumentation (including especially the iconic berimbau that is a crucial part of capoeira performance) that Gil and arranger Rogerio Duprat are offering the musical equivalent of a cinematic introduction, in which a wide pan quickly focuses on the action that is to be the focus of the narrative.25 That is exactly what happens: the song itself then begins, introducing its three protagonists (João, Jose, and Juliana) and their situation. The narrative takes the form of a call and response with Gil singing the main lyric and a chorus answering with a repetitive refrain; importantly, the response calls out to both José and João, while Juliana remains objectified in the third person. As the song unfolds, tensions arise between the two male protagonists, who are vying for Juliana’s attention—this is made evident by the way in which iconic images are transformed, as in the red rose alluding to the blood that is soon shed, or to the playful spinning (capoeira) that increases in frantic energy as the song points toward its dramatic climax. By the time the knife appears (“Olha a faca!”—watch out for the knife!), the listener has been thoroughly prepared, and no one should be surprised when it becomes evident that Juliana is the unintended victim. Perhaps the most significant line in “Domingo no parque” is its closing sentiment, “não tem mais construção, não tem mais brincadeira, não tem mais confusão” (no more construction, no more playing, no more confusion), sung to a melancholy string and oboe accompaniment. Here the localized action transforms into a metonym for the increasing violence and despair experienced on a daily basis by the people of Brazil, and as the camera pans out we realize that the scene we have just experienced represents just one slice of a long and unending ongoing narrative. “Alegria, alegria” and “Domingo no parque” marked the beginning of a radical musical movement that came to be known as Tropicália. Tropicália took its name from an interactive installation by visual artist Hélio Oiticica, which recycled found objects and recontextualized them literally on a new terrain of fine white sand from the Rio de Janeiro beach, juxtaposing the natural beauty of Brazil with its own discarded trash in a commentary on what was taking place in the favelas at the time (where ramshackle homes and other structures were built by cobbling together pieces of discarded building material). The tropicalists were equally influenced by the Brazilian cinema novo (particularly the films of Glauber Rocha26), the concrete poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari,27 Brazilian modernist artists writers from the 1920s and 1930s (especially Mário de

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 453

Andrade and Oswald de Andrade; about whom below), and erudite and popular culture from North and South America and Europe. The tropicalist epistemology was a reaction to several existing mindsets. The oppressive actions of the right-wing government were of course a key target (although due to its oppressive nature the performers had to take great care with what was said publicly as the intensified censorship of sedulous words brought about by the enactment of AI-5 was imminent). Equally important was the prevailing attitude among the Brazilian people of a kind of provincialism and resistance to outside influences.28 This was in many ways a justifiable attitude as the specter of U.S. imperialism had long been casting its shadow on the Brazilian economic and cultural landscape. But at the same time it reflected a perhaps unhealthy resistance to change and adaptation, at least in the minds of the Tropicália artists. The tropicalists also resisted what they considered to be an equally destructive hegemony emerging from the left, which manifested most powerfully in an oft-cited speech that Veloso gave in response to a heckling crowd during the 1968 TV Radio festival, in which he begins by imploring to the crowd, “So these are the young people who say they want to be in power?”, continued by comparing the audience to the savage crowd from Zé Celso’s play Roda Viva, and concluded with “[i]f you have the attitude to politics that you have to aesthetics, then we’re done for! God’s on the loose!”29 Veloso’s indicting words were mostly lost on the audience, but they were profoundly influential on the emerging tropicalist message. Like many of its contemporaneous cultural movements throughout the world, Tropicália engaged in a complex relationship with history and tradition. The tropicalistas were hyper-aware of the tradition in which they were located, and they addressed that tradition with both deep respect and a sense of ironic detachment; in other words, they sought selfconsciously to define their position through a dialectic stance that engaged the trajectory of tradition even while breaking from it.30 The tradition in question was on one hand a musical one—carving out a place in the tangled lineage of Brazilian music, and especially samba. But it was also an engagement with racial identity, with postcolonial identity, and with a self-consciously Brazilian artistic identity that absorbed and interpenetrated with literature, film, theater, and visual art. As early as the 1920s, author Mário de Andrade wrote extensively of the importance of creating a national artistic identity (and a national racial identity)—his novel Macunaíma explores these themes in suggestive, allegorical ways, while his 1928 treatise Ensaio sobre a música brasileira (Essay on Brazilian music)

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

454

Sounds of Resistance

offers a more direct entreaty that subtends engagements with racial and cultural identities and progressive, avant-garde epistemologies.31 The blueprint was laid out most fully though by Oswald de Andrade and his well-known Manifesto antropófago, or Cannibalist Manifesto, in which he proposes a model that deliberately contradicts the romantic notion of the “noble savage,” replacing it with a grotesque caricature of primitive, flesheating wild men. The Manifesto begins with the myth, pervasive in colonial portrayals of indigenous Tupi culture, of the practice of ritual cannibalism in which the soul of the victim is absorbed by the cannibalizer in order to strengthen the latter. Andrade begins: “Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The world’s single law. Disguised expression of all individualism, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.” He offers a deterritorialized text: “But those who came here weren’t crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization we are eating, because we are strong and vindictive like the Jabuti.” He gives us echoes of Freud and premonitions of Lévi-Strauss: “The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Creation—illustrated by the permanent contradiction between Man and his Taboo. Everyday love and the capitalist way of life. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. . . . What result[s] is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometrical scale of the cannibal instinct.”32 Like Mário de Andrade did, and like Gilberto Freyre would do a few years later (albeit for different political reasons33), Oswald de Andrade was moving toward a model of Brazilian racial identity that would sublimate African, European, and Indigenous racial roles, practices, and histories into a New World, postcolonial, syncretic, and in this case anthropophagic, model. Tropicália was also concerned with foregrounding, and carefully negotiating, dichotomies and juxtapositions. Leu and others have pointed out the self-conscious deployment of rural and urban (“savage” Bahia, where many of the tropicalists hailed from, opposed to hypermodern, even postmodern São Paulo34), modern and ancient, nationalist and imperialist, left and right, male and female (and straight and gay—Veloso was particularly adept with his playful exploration of the liminal spaces in between those poles), and more focused dualities like the alternating pride and shame Brazilians have felt about the role Carmen Miranda has played in emergent Brazilian identity as viewed from abroad.35 These polarities weave their way as discursive themes through the tropicalists’ songs, through the musical and cultural artifacts that were appropriated and cannibalized, and through the visual ways in which they presented themselves. In Veloso’s

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 455

song “Tropicália,” he explores some of these juxtapositions in striking ways: rhyming the sophisticated urban bossa with the poor rural palhoça (straw hut), erecting a monument only to later claim it’s made of papier-maché, and valorizing the green eyes of the mulatta, Freyre’s ultimate index of Brazilian postracial identity. Christopher Dunn points out that “[a]gainst the essentialisms of [both] the regime and its opposition, the tropicalists proposed an allegory of Brazil that was contradictory and fragmentary.”36 As mentioned earlier, the tropicalists have been pitted very importantly against not only the rightwing regime, but also against the protest singers of the left, with a discursive move that emerged (fittingly, we’ll see) from concerns about dogmatic adherence to ideology. More important, though, is that the tropicalists were reimagining protest as cultural rather than merely political, and as personal rather than as ideological. As Leu observes, “Tropicália aimed to elevate the question of individual choice to central importance, as a way of reacting to social and political events of the time.”37 In other words, the tropicalist stance could be considered to be one of meta-protest—getting deeper into the codes and behaviors that engender the types of radical stances that allowed both the state-enabled right-wing and counterculture left-wing hegemonies to unfold in a complex and fraught dialogue. The previously discussed dichotomies (urban vs. rural, Brazilian vs. imperialist (or merely foreign), straight vs. gay, left-wing vs. right-wing, and so on) are actually complexly interpenetrating and emergent terrains, and the “semiotic guerilla warfare”38 of the tropicalists was primarily a radical re-reading of all of these codes, which the tropicalists effectively recoded, not for ideological reasons but in order to mark a new discursive terrain upon which to comment on social and political conditions. That no small degree of (at least) metaphoric violence was necessary for this project was perhaps inevitable given the intentionally problematizing nature of how the tropicalists strove to redefine tradition itself—tradition as change (and change as tradition), difference as identity.39 In addition to Veloso and Gil, the tropicalists included Veloso’s sister Maria Bethânia, who in 1965 had taken Nara Leão’s place in Show Opiñiao, vocalist Gal Costa, Tom Zé, poet and lyricist Torquato Neto, composer and arranger Rogério Duprat, and Os Mutantes (bassist Arnaldo Baptista, vocalist Rita Lee, and guitarist Sérgio Dias). Nara Leão and songwriter Jose Carlos Capinam were also peripherally involved. Leão and Bethânia were already stars by 1968; Gil, Veloso, and Costa were quickly emerging; Torquato and Duprat were fixtures in intellectual circles, and Zé and Os Mutantes were gaining notoriety as iconoclastic innovators.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

456

Sounds of Resistance

In the constantly evolving landscape of Brazilian music, one of the richest musical legacies in the world, the relatively short-lived Tropicália movement plays a crucial role. Tropicália had at least one foot in bossa nova, which in turn derived from samba and which a decade earlier had encountered the same resistance from traditionalist sambistas.40 The particular nature of the tropicalist project involved a more severe departure from the safe, familiar music that had preceded it, but they sincerely believed themselves to be the next step in the evolution of Brazilian music. Veloso states that he “was aware that we were being faithful to bossa nova in doing something that was its opposite.”41 In a Kantian turn, Veloso is inscribing the spirit of the bossa nova innovators by discarding (or occasionally cannibalizing) the specific musical trappings of bossa nova and focusing instead on engaging the spirit of discovery, newness, and synthesis that bossa nova represented: “[w]e believed that bossa nova represented a much more powerful and profound force in the history of Brazilian music. We wanted to be better disciples than those who were merely imitating it or perpetuating it.”42

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Made in Brazil The innovative and highly experimental 1968 concept album Tropicália: Ou panis et circensis (Bread and circuses) was the manifesto of the tropicalists.43 Beginning with Gil and Capinam’s “Miserere nobis,” and continuing through an asynchronous bricolage of traditional songs (like Veloso’s reading of Vicente Celestino’s famous bolero “Coração materno” (Maternal Heart)) and striking new compositions like “Bat macumba,” Os Mutantes’s homage to the concrete poets, and Zé’s “Parque industrial” (Industrial Park). “Parque industrial” is emblematic from lyrical, musical, and performance perspectives of the designs of the tropicalists. Composed by Tom Zé, it features Gil, Gal Costa, Veloso, and Zé himself alternating singing verses, and all join together (with Os Mutantes singing as well) for the rousing chorus. “Parque industrial” satirizes the rapid industrial growth of Brazil, and especially the nationalistic pride that such growth engendered. With references to the redemption that progress brings, readymade smiles that come prepackaged in bottles, and the pomp and circumstance that accompanies liturgical rites and political rallies, “Parque industrial” playfully but pointedly critiques the blind nationalism of the hegemonic right. But there is also a careful personal turn in the performance. “The different timbres of the individual vocal parts suggest . . . a more complicated set of reactions

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 457

and attitudes: Gil’s is exultant, Gal Costa’s wistful, Veloso’s vulnerable, and Tom Zé’s wry, while the repeated refrain ‘Porque é made, made, made/made in Brazil!’ . . . is proclaimed exuberantly in unison.”44 The boisterous unison refrain “made in Brazil” is sung in English, and accompanied by a sudden shift in musical texture to a backbeat-driven glitzy pop texture, with trumpets, French horns, and clarinets trading exuberant martial response figures. The instrumental riff repeats and then shifts back to minor for Gil’s next verse, which returns to Portuguese and continues the narrative where it left off. Leu also points out that Zé and arranger Duprat quote the Brazilian national anthem as well as a song from an advertising jingle for Melhoral, a well-known painkiller.45 What did it mean to be “made in Brazil” for the tropicalists? As Vianna describes, Brazilian identity was an ephemeral thing, subtending elements of a celebratory mestiço pluralism, collective postcolonial memories of Portuguese rule (which navigated between pride and a feeling of cultural isolation as the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas), and of course a careful negotiation of the role of “other” in defining that identity. Vianna describes how Brazilian social theorists are constantly, and necessarily, “in the process of defining Brazilian identity,” suggesting that that process is part of the definition itself.46 Vianna was writing about the emergence of samba in the 1930s as the authentic marker of Brazilian identity, but his location of samba within a pluralist world of Brazilian (and foreign) music was just as relevant 30 years later. Especially germane for the tropicalists would be Vianna’s assertion that “the detritus that comes to us from the US and Europe, we gulp it right down!”47 Questions of Brazilian, and Latin American, identity surface elsewhere on the tropicalists’ manifesto album. In “Três caravelas (Las trés carabelas),” Veloso alternates between verses in Portuguese and Spanish as he recounts the popular story of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. In doing so he subtends aspects of Brazilian identity and that of Latin America writ large, a conflation that he attempts to tease apart in his autobiography 30 years later: As children we learned that Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvarez Cabral on April 22, 1500. All other American nations consider it enough to have been discovered together by Christopher Columbus in 1492. It was only Brazil that had to be discovered later, separately. From the earliest age, . . . I had to ask: “Why?” They could have said, for example, that Columbus did not sail farther than the Caribbean islands and that the continent proper was only arrived at

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

458

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

by the Portuguese eight years later; they could have told us that what Cabral discovered was . . . South America, of which the Spaniards had not the slightest idea. . . . That such a vaguely defined event should be situated so precisely in the middle of the second millennium serves to force upon Brazilians a sense of themselves as a nation both unsubstantiated and exaggerated.48

Also noteworthy in this regard is the use on Ou panis et circensis of popular Cuban rhythms, but very specifically as filtered through North American ballroom styles: the rhumba (or beguine) that forms the backdrop for Veloso’s “Lindoneia” and the lively cha-cha-chá that frames “Três caravelas” are two examples. Veloso and the tropicalists were beginning to use nonBrazilian musical indexes in increasingly sophisticated ways to continue the kinds of important critical statements that had begun with “Alegria, alegria,” and as both “Parque industrial” and “Três caravelas” demonstrate, they were using linguistic indexes as well (Veloso’s “Baby” and Gil’s “Soy loco por ti América” are two further examples, channeling English and Spanish, respectively). As Veloso later describes, the tropicalists were “interested in the kind of . . . popular music that most people [in Brazil] considered to be of lesser quality—in the Argentine tango, in Cuban music and Mexican boleros. We did something similar to what pop artists in the U.S.A. were doing in the visual arts: we took what was kitsch—what was considered bad taste—and we placed it in a more sophisticated repertoire. And that jolted the musical establishment.”49 “Soy loco por ti América” “provoked a wave of criticism from conservative elements of society and cultural purists, both for its reference to guerillas and freedom fighters, and for its use of ‘Portunhol,’ a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish.”50 While none of the songs that comprise Ou panis et circensis might technically be considered protest songs, all of the songs cited above offer important statements that challenge hegemonic ideals and question populist notions of Brazilian identity. The tropicalists were critically engaging both the official right-wing hegemony and its leftist opposition, and by doing so (and by using the complex frame of Brazilian identity as defined by its own hybridity) they were offering a very nuanced and sophisticated metacritique that still resonates over 40 years later.

In Spite of You (Indirect Protest) By 1968, the TV Record festival had clearly emerged as one of the most significant spaces for the expression of protest, and as Veloso’s diatribe cited above suggests, the dominant leftist concentration within the audience had little tolerance for music that did not speak of their social and political concerns. One of the stars of the left was Geraldo Vandré, and an

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 459

uproar occurred when his “Caminhando (Pra não dizer que não falei das flores)” placed second to “Sabiá,” the new collaboration by Chico Buarque and bossa nova icon Tom Jobim. There is a certain irony to the overwhelming displeasure of the 1968 audience, since Buarque was proving himself to be a songwriter with a particularly nuanced and carefully hidden way of conveying antiauthoritarian messages, and because “Sabiá” was itself a song that invoked saudade and a promise to return to unfinished plans as a covert way of critiquing the dictatorship. The enactment that year of AI-5, and its intensification of censorship, was soon to necessitate a new approach to voicing critical dissent. And Chico Buarque was to prove one of the very most adept at disguising critique in veiled allegory (but, as we will see, not so veiled that his intended audience didn’t understand the message), and he channeled and deftly repurposed iconic Brazilian musical genres like samba and bossa nova to do so. First, though, we should further contextualize Brazilian protest music (canção engajada) in the mid-1960s. A casual listen to the music of Geraldo Vandré (for example) suggests sonic and rhetorical similarities to parallel musical streams in North America, particularly of the protest music heard in Greenwich Village coffee shops—that of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Ritchie Havens, and many others. This suggests an attitude, corroborated by Leu, that music was being employed merely as a frame within which to present the message of the song, and that maximum clarity was an overarching goal of the performance.51 Protest music was associated with student movements like the CPC (Centro Popular de Cultura) and leftist labor movements, and subtended songs with messages of cultural nationalism as well as those of a more revolutionary bent. Part of the position of the tropicalists was in reaction to what they considered to be an authoritarian counter-hegemony on the part of the left, which they considered to be as equally destructive to free expression as the official mandate of AI-5 was52: Schwartz observes that “[d]espite the existence of a right-wing dictatorship, the cultural hegemony of the Left [was] virtually complete.”53 An important example of canção engajada was Geraldo Vandré’s “Caminhando (Pra não dizer que não falei das flores)”54 (not to say I did not speak of flowers), which was banned shortly after it premiered at the 1968 TV Globo festival, but not before it had become something of an anthem of resistance. As Perrone relates, “Caminhando” was banned for its “subversive lyrics, offensiveness to the armed forces, and Mao Tse-Tung like “cadence” and because of the fear that it would be co-opted as a slogan for student demonstrations.55 That offensiveness to the armed forces is clearly voiced in the last verse of the song, where Vandré suggests that the soldiers are lost souls with guns in hand: “in the quarters they are taught/an old lesson/of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

460

Sounds of Resistance

dying for the nation/and living without reason.”56 Vandré’s message subtended the primary populations that embodied the left, bringing students and workers together in solidarity: “We are all the same, if we join hands or not/in the schools, streets, fields, construction sites.”57 And most important, “Caminhando” is a call to arms—its poignant refrain, “Come, let’s go/for to wait is not to know,/One who knows makes the hour,/doesn’t wait for it to happen,”58 is not a commentary, it is a clear and direct call to action. Like Veloso and Gil, Vandré was exiled in 1968, and returned only in 1973, and rumors persist that he was imprisoned and tortured during at least a part of that time. “Caminhando” offers an explicit message of protest, probably the most explicit of its time, and even 11 years later when MPB star Simone recorded it (and soon after, when Vandré sang it at a famously documented concert), the censors’ fears were proven correct: “Caminhando” had indeed become a slogan for revolutionary action, even if that action remained on the fringe of political discourse for fear of retaliation.59 Another important document of canção engajada was the 1968 U.S. release of a record by Zelia Barbosa, titled Brazil: Songs of Protest (Zelia Barbosa Sings of the Sertão and Favela).60 Beginning with Zé Keti’s “Opinião,” Barbosa sings a varied cross-section of well-known songs from contemporary composers including João do Vale (“Carcará,” cited above), Carlos Lyra and Vinícius de Moraes (“Pau de arará”), Chico Buarque (“Pedro Pedreiro”) and more. Barbosa’s interpretation of “Opinião” is starkly different from Zé Keti’s recording, featuring a jazzier bossa nova rhythm section and a reverb-heavy production (especially on her voice) that aligns it sonically with North American protest music. Other songs on the record channel Cuban “Afro” style (Edu Lobo’s “Canção da terra”), soul music (“Carcará” and “Funeral do lavrador”), and U.S. pop music (“Pau de arará”). The subtitle of Barbosa’s record is revealing: the sertão61 represents metonymically the disenfranchised rural communities of Brazil and their cultural (and musical) practices, while the favela refers to the devastatingly poor shantytown neighborhoods that cover the hills of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and other Brazilian urban centers. The economic climate of the 1960s caused many thousands of rural workers to migrate to urban centers in (often futile) search of work, and by bringing these two populations together semantically, Barbosa was inventing at the album level a parallel to Vandré’s unifying turn (in schools, streets, fields, construction sites).62 Barbosa’s negotiation of rural and urban locales and subcultures is reflective of a prevailing attitude among protest musicians through the 1960s. As Perrone articulates, a second generation of bossa nova singers was repurposing bossa nova to focus lyrically on issues of “underdevelopment,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 461

human conditions, and political consciousness.”63 Other songwriters and performers were turning from bossa nova in order to focus on “deliberate stylizations of traditional urban or rural genres.”64 This involved engaging rural music styles like baião, toada, or frevo, or consciously Afro-Brazilian practices like candomblé or capoeira, or some of the emerging urban offshoots of samba like Jorge Ben’s samba-soul syncretism. It also involved incorporating folkloric instruments into popular music textures, and singing using accents or inflections that channeled lower class urban or rural communities. It is a challenge to reconcile the degree to which the radical left privileged nationalistic sources with the move on the part of some of its most prominent figures toward appropriating North American musical indices, but that speaks more to the complexity of the issue and its resistance to essentializations of any kind than to any kind of problematic contradiction. The tropicalists considered the use of nationalism by the left to be “naïve and defensive,” holding that the left “thought we should defend Brazilian music from all foreign influence,”65 a stance that was intended to problematize the still widely held belief (following Freyre) in the concept of Brazilian identity as hybrid, as necessarily other. The overarching epistemological frame of the tropicalists, on the other hand, involved engaging U.S. and British popular music styles as a valorization of Brazilian identity in order to reify that hybridity. That canção engajada figures like Barbosa also engaged U.S. and British pop styles again speaks to the danger of defining epistemological borders too narrowly—it is important to remember that all of these labels and frames are fluid, porous, and interdependent. After returning from a self-imposed exile that followed the enactment of AI-5, Chico Buarque recorded what would become one of his most famous, and most-discussed, songs, “Apesar de você” (In Spite of You).66 Buarque released “Apesar de você” in 1970, and the single sold over 100,000 copies before the censors deemed it problematic. It was pulled from the shelves, but not before it had made it into the hands of Buarque’s fans and deeply into public consciousness. Several sources describe how “Apesar de você” cloaks critique in the voice of spurned lover’s pronouncement that “in spite of you tomorrow will be another day” (“Apesar de você/amanha vai de ser outro dia”). But the critique is really not veiled very well—besides the beautiful and pained allegorical references (“you who invented sin/forgot to invent forgiveness,” “you who invented sadness/please have the kindness to uninvent it”67), there are unequivocal critiques: “you who invented this state/invented by inventing total darkness,” “how will you prohibit/when the rooster insists

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

462

Sounds of Resistance

on crowing?”, and in a boldly defiant gesture, “how are you going to stifle/ our chorus singing right in front of you?”68 In what might be considered another defiant gesture, Buarque frames “Apesar de você” with a rousing samba—exactly the marker of Brazilian identity that the right was using, and which decades before had been established as the national music of Brazil, which both the left and the tropicalists were carefully countering. In a deft rhetorical move, however, Buarque chose to co-opt samba from the right and refashioned it to deliver his own nuanced message. The irony of this use of samba parallels the irony of the message itself and the particular way in which Buarque holds the subject of his inquiry responsible for the sin, darkness, and so on that have been “invented.”

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

O Hermão de Henfil (The Brother of Henfil) An important rhetorical device that turns up again and again in Brazilian protest music is its presumption of timelessness, where some aspect of the music, the lyrics, or both gives the listener a sense that what is being experienced or shared is a small slice of an ongoing narrative. In “Apesar de você,” Buarque introduces the samba via studio fade-in: the effect is that the batería has been playing for some time by the time we are invited to join and listen in. And the ironic “etc. e tal” leading into wordless vocals as the song fades out betray some of the optimistic message of the song: in spite of Buarque’s proclamation that there will be another day, that day is still somewhere far off on the horizon. Likewise, Gilberto Gil frames “Domingo no parque” with a cinematic prelude and postlude, and as the camera is panning out we become aware that this is just another day in the park, and that many days like it are to follow. João Bosco and Aldir Blanc’s “O bêbado e a equilibrista” (The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker) follows a similar narrative path. In Elis Regina’s famous recording from 1979, we hear a melancholy waltz give way to a gentle MPB-style bossa nova, which ultimately transforms into a driving partido alto as the song unfolds.69 When Regina finishes her story, the organ returns and trails off in yet another “etcetera” moment, launching the story into something like an allegorical infinity. Bosco recorded “O bêbado e a equilibrista” himself for his 1979 recording Linha de passe, in a version that is markedly different from Regina’s.70 Bosco’s version is a very spirited pagode samba, with sing-along chorus and a vibrant percussion batucada accompanying Bosco’s spirited reading of the text. Bosco adds a significant new layer of meaning to the text when, after completing the final lyric, he loops back around to begin again at the

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 463

beginning, enacting a circularity that suggests that a certain timelessness that the song’s lyrics hold. In a manner that recalls Gil’s framing of his story in “Domingo no parque,” Bosco’s arrangement asserts that the concerns outlined in “O bêbado” are enduring problems, and this reflects the details of Blanc’s narrative, which by returning to themes and events from 10 years earlier, frames them as contemporary (and continuing) concerns. The message of “O bêbado” is complex and multilayered, beginning with the tone of the presentation (both Regina’s and Bosco’s), which exhibits a vibrant dynamism that belies the content of the text. The line “Que sonha com a volta/Do irmão do Henfil” (I dream of the return of Henfil’s brother) refers explicitly to the disappearance of the brother of the famous cartoonist— Betinho (Herbert de Souza), an important sociologist and political activist who was exiled on numerous occasions between 1968 and 1979.71 There are also allegorical references to torture (“chupuvam manchas torturadas”— “sucking at tortured spots”—it is hard not to recognize the nod to torture in this otherwise ambiguous line) and to the sorrow of the Brazilian people (“Marias and Clarices crying on the soil of Brazil”—like in “Apesar de você,” a pointed critique without direct reference to the cause of the sorrow, and Bosco and Blanc go further to suggest that “a pain this sharp cannot be pointless”), and the framing theme of the tightrope walker (“Hope dances on the tightrope”; “With each step on the line you can injure yourself ”) points to the danger and frailty of existence as well as the delicately tenuous nature of the slow progression at the time toward democracy.72 “O bêbado e a equilibrista,” “Apesar de você,” and “Domingo no parque” draw upon and repurpose Brazilian music traditions in ways that present stark semiotic conflicts. At the same time, they offer rhetorical frames that locate their individual stories along a historical spectrum in a way that suggests that each is a slice of an ongoing narrative, pointing toward the fear that protest might be in vain, that change might be impossible, and that redemption might remain elusive. At the same time, though, all three songs were adopted as anthems in celebration of the possibility that protest might be useful, that change might be achievable, and that redemption may be found.

Fabrication Defects The military dictatorship in Brazil finally ended in 1985, following a gradual relaxation of the more extreme aspects of its censorious position against dissent.73 But remnants of military rule remained, including an economy that had been driven by multinational corporate interests toward increasing

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

464

Sounds of Resistance

inequality between the upper and lower class, issues of race that permeate the harsh reality of life in the favelas (as evidenced in films like Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Cidade de deus [City of God], which chronicles in modern mythological fashion the rise to power and eventual demise of a young drug lord in one of the most dangerous Rio de Janeiro favelas), and rampant environmental destruction, often at the hands of multinational corporations and foreign interests, and including large swaths of the Amazon rainforest. When Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil reunited in 1994 for Tropicália 2, they invoked the country of Haiti (and channeled rap and the Afro-Brazilian samba reggae of Bahia) as a metaphor for both how bad things in Brazil could be, and how bad they had become (“Haiti é aqui, Haiti não é aqui”—“Haiti is here, Haiti is not [yet] here”).74 In this context, Tom Zé returned for a new reading of Oswald de Andrade’s antropofagia to his 1998 Com defeito de fabricação. For this album Zé made two manifesto-like proclamations: first, that we have left the age of the composer and entered the age of the plagio-combinator (plagicombinador, his syncretic word), and second, that we can use a new tool to achieve this end: arrastão. Arrastão is the Portuguese word that refers originally to an environmentally destructive form of fishing in which a heavy net is dragged across the seabed with no regard for the obvious damage that it is doing to the surrounding ecosystem. In the parlance of urban São Paulo arrastão has been appropriated to refer to a technique for robbing tourists practiced by young hoodlum—a large group of young boys will descend upon a group of tourists, creating a great commotion and essentially grabbing anything that they can get their hands on in the span of a few seconds and then run off, leaving their prey confused, bewildered, scared, and hopefully not hurt. As in his earlier The Hips of Tradition,75 Zé cites his sources for Com defeito de fabricação, but this time it’s not “inspired by . . . ” but rather “arrastão de,” as in “Arrastão de Santo Agostinho,” for “O gene,” “Arrastão de Martinho da Vila e do estilo pagode” (“Dragging through Martinho da Vila and the Pagode style”) for “Onu, arma mortal,” and “Arrastão dos baiões da roça” for “Esteticar.” He also drags his net through Tchaikovsky, RimskyKorsakov, Jorge Luis Borges, the concrete poets, and even his former Tropicalista colleagues Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. “Esteticar” is of particularly interest to the current investigation, since in it Zé essentially enumerates the details of his new aesthetic. Subtitled “Estética do Plágio” (The Aesthetics of Plagiarism), and interspersed with the refrain:

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Reading and Sounding Protest 465

I think the mule dispenses with its perspective now go lick me, inter-semiotic translation. It’s safe, milord, where the mulatto baião (that’s if he’s in black tie) smokes up the whole aesthetic of arrastão

Zé says look out, this foolish country cabloco, this mongoloid mongrel mameluke, this mad android laborer, is tuxedo-izing his mulatto baião in the aesthetics of arrastão. The text is playful and ironically self-deprecating, playing on the urban stereotype of the northeastern hick. Zé is also playing on the science-fiction theme that informs much of Com defeito de fabricação, which is that the poor laborers of Brazil are merely androids working at the whim of “First-world bosses.” Like Gil’s “Domingo no parque,” “Esteticar” uses the rural baião as its frame, which again Zé refers to as his “mulatto baião,” which in turn of course again points toward a syncretic notion of Brazilian racial identity, but in this case it is a pejorative identity and not the post-Freyre theme of mestiço unity valorized by political architects and social commentators over the years.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Postlude Interest in Tropicália has not waned in the 45 years since the original installation of Hélio Oiticica’s interactive work. The original exhibit toured the United States in 2006 to rave reviews. David Byrne’s “discovery” of Tom Zé (and release on his U.S.-based Luaka Bop label of a collection of Zé’s early music, ironically titled The Best of Tom Zé: Massive Hits) brought Zé’s music and iconoclastic epistemology to an enthusiastic new audience. Veloso’s 1997 autobiography, as well as monographs on Tropicália by Christopher Dunn and Lorraine Leu (not to mention an important earlier volume published in Brazil by Celso Favaretto) are just some of the more visible accounts of the movement and what it stood for.76 The most recent addition to the narrative on Tropicália is Marcelo Machado’s new film of the same name, which brings together original footage (including a good deal of previously unreleased video) and interviews with key tropicalist performers. Perhaps most important for the present study, Machado’s film does a fine job of locating the tropicalist movement as simultaneously within the political discourse of its time, negotiating the right–left nexus described herein and influencing the thought, especially, of its young radicalized audience, and also observing from without, providing an overarching meta-commentary on what political engagement and protest means on a personal level. By inventing what was essentially a new discursive stratum,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

466

Sounds of Resistance

and by historicizing (in the sense of engaging Brazil’s history at a plurality of levels and from many, even conflicting, epistemological vantage points) and globalizing (in the sense of interrogating accounts of Brazilian identity as manufactured and “other,” and what that means with regard to Brazil’s relationship with the rest of the world) protest in the way they did, the tropicalists opened up a new ground for protest—one that also allowed for more conventional terrains, like Buarque’s and Bosco’s use of samba, to situate alongside complexly layered allegorical narratives.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. “Love Proposal”; “Pagode-Song in the Time of Fear”; “Vibration of Flesh.” Tom Zé, Estudando o pagode: na opereta segregamulher e amor (Luaka Bop, 2006). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the author. 2. In his 1968 song “Quero sambar meu bem,” Zé states that “I want to samba too/but I don’t want/to walk in the pit/cultivating embalmed tradition” (“quero sambar tambén/mas eu não quero/andar na fossa/cultivando tradição embalsamada”). Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), discusses this and other contemporaneous songs as formative of Zé’s evolving stance vis-à-vis tradition (pp. 197–98). 3. “Your Hair Does Not Deny,” an early, popular, valorization of Brazilian identity as blended and hybrid. The original recording by Castro Barbosa can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C36_dl1W72Q (accessed December 7, 2012). 4. In its original incarnation, “A Felicidade” itself offers a pointed commentary on social conditions in lower class Brazil. As the theme song to Marcel Camus’s Orfeo Negro (“Black Orpheus,” a rereading of the classic Greek myth, recontextualized in a Rio de Janeiro favela during the days leading up to Carnaval), and acting as something of a leitmotif, the hopeful message of “A felicidade” becomes, in a manner similar to “Summertime” in Gershwin and DuBose’s Porgy and Bess, increasingly ironic and tragic—its promised happiness becomes a more and more elusive thing as the film progresses. 5. Tom Zé, liner notes to Com defeito de fabricação (Luaka Bop, 1998). Translation (in liner notes to the U.S. release) by Alex Ladd. 6. There is a direct connection between what Zé refers to in Com defeito de fabricação as arrastão and the very influential philosophy of Oswald de Andrade, whose Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto) we will return to shortly. 7. “It is prohibited to prohibit,” an earlier revolutionary slogan and the title of a 1968 Caetano Veloso composition. 8. See Robert M. Levine, The History of Brazil (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1999), 125–29. The U.S. State Department was also complicit in the coup, fearing another Cuba-style revolution (p. 125).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 467

9. Indeed, there had been three military takeovers in the previous four decades, in 1930, 1937, 1945, with a fourth one planned in 1954 before President Getúlio Vargas took his own life. 10. Levine credits the influx of foreign investment, “generous tax and other concessions” and “a docile labor force paid pathetic wages and stripped of the right to strike” as primarily contributors to the perceived economic boom that resulted in stretching the “gap between rich and poor . . . until Brazil became one of the least equal countries in the world with respect to income equality” (The History of Brazil, 131). 11. Peter Flynn, Brazil: A Political Analysis (London: Westview Press, 1978), 424. 12. Leão was soon to prove to be an important conduit between bossa nova and the emerging Tropicália movement. As Leu points out, Leão and Carlos Lyra were instrumental in effecting a move within bossa nova in what they considered to be more substantive lyrical directions, which in turn helped usher in a new era of protest song to which, we’ll see, the tropicalists responded in complex and problematizing ways. See Lorraine Leu, Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 8. 13. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 53. 14. Ibid., 53–54. 15. “Podem me prender/podem me bater/podem até deixar-me sem comer/ que eu não mudo de opinião.” On Sucessos de Zé Keti (InterCD, 2001). 16. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 61. 17. Baião is a popular style from rural northeastern Brazil, which draws its name from Luis Gonzaga’s influential eponymous 1946 song. See Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha, The Brazilian Sound: Samba, Bossa Nova, and the Popular Music of Brazil (Philadelphia, PA: Temple Music Press, 1998), 141–42. 18. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 63. 19. This particular form of protest, pointing to a better future without directly targeting the source of what needs to be improved upon, was a very typical rhetorical strategy. A powerful example by Chico Buarque is investigated further on in the chapter. 20. Dunn describes how in 1992 “Alegria, alegria” “was unexpectedly revived as a protest song by middle-class urban youth who took to the streets to denounce a corruption scandal involving [then-President] Fernando Collor de Melo” (Brutality Garden, 206). 21. Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 9. 22. On O melhor de Caetano Veloso: sem lença, sem documento (Universal Music, 1990). Video footage of the 1967 festival performance can be seen at http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=xMZ5gtVDtBc (accessed December 3, 2012). 23. Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 102–3. Veloso also acknowledges his “reading” of the Beatles in “Alegria, alegria”: what the Beatles did was “an alchemical transformation of commercial trash into an inspired and free creation, as a way of reinforcing the autonomy of the creators—and of the consumers” (p. 103).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

468

Sounds of Resistance

24. On Gilberto Gil (Universal, 1968/1998). Video footage of Gil’s performance at the 1967 festival can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl7xHuEtlyg (accessed December 3, 2012). 25. Perrone attests to the cinematic qualities of “Domingo no parque” by describing its “litero-cinematographic techniques (close-ups, fusions, and montage)” (Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song: MPB 1965–1985 [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993], 98). 26. Rocha’s Deus e o diablo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964) and Terra em transe (Land in Anguish, 1967) were particularly influential in their depictions of poor, rural Brazilians from the northeast as markers for critical commentary. 27. The concrete poets were equally influenced by the tropicalists; see especially the collection of essays by Augusto de Campos in Balanço da Bossa e Outras Bossas (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1978). 28. While the leftist protest movement “denounced urban and regional poverty, called for land reform, and rejected imported cultural forms and with them cultural and economic imperialism, . . . its traditionalist ideology became increasingly belligerent in its rejection of foreign influences in Brazilian music” (Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 8). 29. A transcription of Veloso’s speech is provided in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 36. 30. In a 1966 interview, Veloso uses the phrase “linha evolutiva” (evolutionary line) to describe his intentions with the new music (see Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 9). 31. Mário de Andrade, Macunaima: o héroi sem nenhum caráter (Rio de Janeiro: Livros Técnicos e Cientificos, 1978), and Ensaio sobre a música brasileira (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editôra, 1962). 32. English translation from Leslie Bary, “Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’,” Latin American Literary Review 19 (1991), 38–43. Also see Oswald de Andrade, Do Pau-Brasil à Antropofagia e às Utopias: manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: Civilação Brasileira, 1978). 33. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 34. Brazil in the 1960s offered a particularly clear terrain upon which to ascribe a postmodern epistemology, following the radical acceleration of development enacted by Juscelino Kubitschek’s administration (1956–1961), which promised “fifty years of progress in five.” The most obvious symbol of this hyperprogress was the development of Brasília as the new capital of Brazil, a brand new, planned city built in the Planalto central in the then-undeveloped middle of the country. Architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Neimeyer were commissioned to design much of the city, which was built in record time as serves as a monument to Brazilian progress (Veloso challenges this in his song “Tropicália,” which we’ll see further on).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading and Sounding Protest 469

35. See Dunn’s interview with Caetano Veloso in “The Tropicalist Rebellion,” Transition 70 (1996), 133–35. Veloso also wrote extensively about Carmen Miranda’s complex meaning in “Carmen Mirandadada,” in Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, ed. Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39–45. 36. Dunn, Brutality Garden, 212. 37. Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 11. 38. Ibid., 37. Here Leu cites Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1997), 105, who in turn borrows the phrase from Umberto Eco. 39. As early as 1966, Veloso stated this outright in an interview: “If we have a tradition and we want to create something new within it, we have to have more than just a sensibility for it, we need to have a knowledge of it. And it is this knowledge that will offer us the possibility of creating something new and coherent with it. Only a return to [music’s] evolutionary path will make us aware of the whole picture and able to make informed creative choices and judgments” (cited in Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 9). 40. Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 58. Vianna quotes Freyre, who in turn is accusing Mário de Andrade of mere imitation, which Vianna compares with later accusations against both bossa nova and Brazilian rock as being “imitative rather than authentic.” 41. Veloso, Tropical Truth, 102. 42. Dunn, “The Tropicalist Rebellion,” 121. 43. Tropicália, ou panis et circensis (Universal/Polygram, 1993). 44. Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 67–68. 45. Ibid., 68. 46. Vianna, The Mystery of Samba, 37. 47. Ibid., 61. 48. Veloso, Tropical Truth, 3. 49. Dunn, “The Tropicalist Rebellion,” 121. 50. Leu, Brazilian Popular Music, 33. 51. Ibid., 85. Leu describes how Vandré and others stripped down the melodic and harmonic complexity of bossa nova to essentialize the political content of the message. 52. But in an alternative reading, Marcelo Ridenti (Em busca do povo brasileiro: artistas da revolução, do CPC à era da tv, Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo, 2000) has identified the tropicalist project with an even more radical left, citing, among other clues, an unequivocal admiration for Che Guevara in “Soy loco por ti América” and violently transformational images in Veloso’s lyrics (Ridenti cites “Divino, maravilhoso,” from Ou panis et circensis, as an example, 278–79). 53. Roberto Schwartz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (New York: Verso, 1992), 135. Dunn, commenting on this statement by Schwartz, adds that

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

470

Sounds of Resistance

“[it must be kept in mind that the cultural hegemony of the Left was limited within a relatively small urban social milieu” (Brutality Garden, 44), and that one of the reasons that the authorities allowed it to continue was that its audience was primarily limited to upper-middle-class students, artists, and other progressives. 54. Available on Geraldo Vandré, Serie Pérolas (Som Livre, 2000). 55. Charles Perrone, “Nationalism, Dissension, and Politics in Contemporary Brazilian Popular Music,” Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 1 (2002), 73. Perrone cites an untitled document by Tárik de Souza from Jornal do Brasil 26 (1979). 56. “Nos quartéis lhes ensinam/uma antiga lição/de morrer pela pátria/e viver sem razão.” 57. “Somos todos iguais, braços dados ou não/nas escolas, nas ruas, campos, construções.” 58. Geraldo Vandré, Serie Pérolas (Som Livre, 2000). 59. A version can be heard on Simone, Ao Vivo (EMI/Odeon, 1980). Vandré’s live version is available on Serie Pérolas. 60. Zelia Barbosa, Brazil: Songs of Protest (Zelia Barbosa Sings of the Sertão and Favela) (Smithsonian Folkways Archive/Monitor Records, 2012). 61. The flat, arid, hardscrabble interior of northeastern Brazil. 62. The migration of northeastern workers to São Paulo, and especially their music, is documented beautifully in Cesar Paes’s 2001 film Saudade do futuro. 63. Perrone, “Nationalism, Dissension, and Politics,” 66. 64. Ibid., 67. 65. Dunn, “The Tropicalist Rebellion,” 123. 66. On Chico Buarque (Universal Portugal, 1993). 67. Tom Zé channels this linguistic turn in a song that is actually a lover’s rebuttal, in a song that also recalls Leonard Cohen’s “Is This What You Wanted”: “Você inventa o luxo/eu invento o lixo/você inventa amor/eu invento a solidão” (You invented luxury/I invented garbage/You invented love/I invented solitude). On Tom Zé, Estudando o samba (Gel Continental, 1976). 68. “Você que inventou o pecado/esqueceu-se de inventar o perdão”; “Você que inventou a tristeza/ora, tenha a fineza de desinventar”; “Você que invento esse estado/e inventou de inventar toda a escuridão”; “Como vai proibir/quando o galo insistir em cantar?”; “Como vai abafar/nosso coro a cantar na sua frente?” 69. Elis Regina, Essa mulher (WEA Latino, 1988). 70. João Bosco, Linha de passe (RCA Victor, 2001). 71. Henfil frequently framed his work with references to his family, especially with the recurring question “when will my brother be coming home?” See Roberto Bissio, “Betinho: The Conscience of a Society,” http://twnside.org.sg/title/betin-cn. htm (accessed December 4, 2012). 72. Charles Perrone offers a brief commentary on “O bêbado e a equilibrista,” illustrating how Blanc’s narrative subtends multiple social and political issues, like “mourning, prostitution, exploitation, torture, darkness, and lack of respect for the state.” He focuses on the line “Que sufoco” (how stifling), “an idiomatic phrase commonly used in difficult circumstances, which evokes o sufoco, [“the suffocation”], the noun Brazilians employ to denote the harshest period of the Brazilian dictatorship” (1993, 198).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Reading and Sounding Protest 471

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

73. See Perrone, Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song, for a brief prècis on how this affected the more politically motivated MPB artists. 74. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Tropicália 2 (Nonesuch, 1994). 75. Tom Zé, Brazil Classics 5: The Return of Tom Zé—The Hips of Tradition (Luaka Bop, 1992). Each song on The Hips of Tradition is “inspired by” a particular literary, musical, or historical source. Of particular interest to the current study is “Tatuarambá,” “inspired by ‘The Provisional Character of the Aesthetic’ by Haroldo do Campos, in A arte no horizonte do Provável,” and the title of which is a portmanteau that fuses the infinitive “to tattoo” with “samba,” and which engages with samba in a rather violent and erotically charged way. 76. Dunn, Brutality Garden; Leu, Brazilian Popular Music. See also Celso Favaretto, Tropicália: alegoria, alegria (São Paulo: Kairós, 1979).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

This page intentionally left blank

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 22

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho Alexandro D. Hernández

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

A History of the Son Jarocho Out of a combination of African, indigenous, and European musical– cultural elements, the son jarocho [hah-ROH-cho] music genre began to emerge in New Spain’s (present-day Mexico) sotavento region in the 17th century. El sotavento, encompassing the southern region of Veracruz into segments of Oaxaca and Tabasco, is a cultural zone where the son jarocho is a musical–cultural practice in rural and urban centers. An important component to the rural son jarocho is the fandango, a gathering where musicians and dancers perform on and around a tarima (a wooden platform used for percussive dance) during festivities. Emphasizing the African root of the fandango, son jarocho musician/poet Patricio Hidalgo states, “Hay fragmentos de Africanidad en el mundo. Fandango es una palabra Angola, el cual significa ‘el ordenamiento del caos’ ” (There are fragments of African heritage in the world. Fandango is an Angolan word, which means, ‘to bring order to chaos’ ”).1 In New Spain, fandango became transformed as a communal festivity, an enclosed gathering and ordering of percussive sounds, poetry, vocals, and musical instruments. Sones and dances were banned during the Holy Inquisition in New Spain because the once highly expressive zapateado (percussive dance) was considered indecent and hyper-sexualized.2 Fandangos remained underground until the late 1970s, and the zapateado was modified by restricting movement of the upper body and centering action on legs and feet.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

474

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Instrumentation The rural son jarocho includes key instruments such as the jarana (an eightstringed lute used primarily for harmonic accompaniment) family, which come in sizes from small to large, and are the chaquiste, mosquito, jarana primera, segunda, tres-cuartos, tercera, and tercerola. The guitarra de son3 family includes the requinto primero, medio requinto, requinto jarocho, and two bass instruments, the león and leona.4 The Veracruz arpa (harp) is occasionally used in professional jaranero5 ensembles such as Grupo Mono Blanco, Son de Madera, and Los Cojolites. The Veracruz arpa, however, is the leading melodic instrument of the urban son jarocho style made popular by son jarocho musicians who migrated to urban centers for better work opportunities. These musicians professionalized the son jarocho by playing at restaurants, appearing on film, radio, and recordings, as well as performing concerts. The music displayed fast virtuosity on the arpa, requinto jarocho, and the jarana. The son jarocho’s first wave of commercialization was spearheaded by the professional ensembles Andrés Huesca y los Costeños in the 1930s–1940s and El Conjunto Medellín de Lino Chávez in the 1950s–1960s.6 The next sets of popular instruments in the rural-rooted son jarocho are struck or friction drums,7 which include the quijada, marimból, and tarima. The quijada is the mandible of a horse or a cow. The teeth are loosened to create a clattering effect when struck. One side of the quijada’s teeth, usually the right segment, is scraped with a stick or bone. The marimból is a large wooden box-resonator with lamella used as bass notes, located in the middle of the main face of the box. Behind the lamella is a sound hole that projects and captures bass notes inside the resonator. Its size must be large enough for the musician to sit on or reach around, slightly bent over, and pluck the lamella. A standard drum with a skin membrane is the octagonal pandero with two, small clashing cymbals on each of its eight segments. The skin of the pandero is struck with movement between the thumb and remaining four fingers. The pandero’s edge is scraped with the thumb, which causes friction on the skin membrane and creates a rippling effect on the cymbals. Son jarocho instrumentation was discussed in detail because they represent the current sounds used for protest and celebration. Beside the way the instruments are performed, their sonic power accompanies the poetry of resistance of many jaraneros and jaraneros in Mexico and in ChicanaChicano communities in the United States. However, the son jarocho, a music and culture with over four centuries of existence, is imbued with a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

475

long course of struggle and protest, both codified and explicit in its sounds and poetry.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Three Hidden Histories of Resistance in the Son Jarocho The son jarocho embodies tradition in many cultural practices of society, such as its presence at social rites and at fandangos. However, there exist hidden histories, transcripts of resistance8 not accounted for in Mexico’s official history, of the son jarocho as music of struggle and protest. From censorship, punishment, and imprisonment of son jarocho musicians and dancers during the Holy Inquisition of 18th- and 19th-century New Spain (Mexico), to solidarity exchanges in Zapatista rebel camps in the 1990s, the son jarocho functions as a musical demand for social justice and lyrically picaresque resistance. In this chapter, I discuss three hidden histories of resistance pertaining to the son jarocho in colonial New Spain into Mexico. Furthermore, this chapter provides a link between Veracruzano (the people of Veracruz, Mexico) cultural practices and the son jarocho as a demand for social justice. For example, “El chuchumbé” foregrounds the emerging son jarocho with lyrically codified strategies of protest in 18th-century New Spain. The dance component of “El chuchumbé” was in itself an expression of resistance from severe policing during the Holy Inquisition. The transfer of the conga from Cuba into the sotavento region of Veracruz adds another hidden history of resistance within jarocho cultural expression. The conga provided an expression of struggle for shipyard workers, which remained codified in the chorus of “La conga del viejo” (The Old Man’s Conga). Finally, the organization strategies of the Zapatista Insurgency in 1994 not only attracted social justice advocates around the world, but also a group of jaraneros, son jarocho musicians who sought to create solidarity with the ski masked rebels in Chiapas, Mexico.

“El Chuchumbé” According to ethnomusicologist Antonio Robles-Cahero, out of frequently danced sones in 18th- and 19th-century New Spain (Mexico), only three were banned during the Holy Inquisition: “El animal” and “El chuchumbé” in 1767 and “El jarabe gatuno” in 1802.9 From approximately 1571 until the end of the Spanish colonial period in the early 1800s,10 the Holy Inquisition in New Spain brutally punished anyone believed to be subversive to the Catholic Church. Intolerance of religious and ethnic diversity was extensive

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

476

Sounds of Resistance

during the Holy Inquisition. Accused practitioners of sorcery, heresy, and blasphemy were burned to death.11 Lesser crimes against the Church were punishable by strangulation.12 In regard to music censorship, the Holy Inquisition attempted to silence the subversive dance, poetry, and some instrumentation of son during the colonial period. Jaranero Patricio Hidalgo adds that hand drums were taken away from people of African heritage during the Holy Inquisition. Hidalgo states, “todo lo que se hacía con las manos, se lo llevaron a la tarima” (all rhythms once played by hand were transferred to the tarima).13 In other words, rhythms once performed on hand drums were reconfigured to the lower body. The legs and feet replaced the percussive movement of the hands and the tarima became the source of percussion, which shaped the zapateado (percussive dance) of the son jarocho in particular, but also of Mexico’s son music in general. Those who sang, played, or danced banned sones were punished and jailed during this time. “El chuchumbé” is colloquially referred to as “the area four to five inches below the belly button of a male.”14 Scholar and zapateado dancer Micaela Díaz-Sánchez connects its etymological roots with the West African word, “cumbe,” which translates to “ombligo” or “barriga” in Spanish and “belly button” or “belly” in English.15 “El chuchumbé,” as mentioned previously, is currently a popular son from the sotavento region of the Gulf Coast, a cultural zone covering the southern portion of the Mexican state of Veracruz into Oaxaca and Tabasco where the son jarocho is its traditional music. However, “El chuchumbé” originated as a dance in Cuba and transported to Veracruz in the late 1700s. According to Cuban musicologist Alejo Carpentier, “In 1776, a European fleet that had made a long stopover in Havana transported some immigrants ‘of irregular color’ to Veracruz. The newcomers brought from Cuba a dance known as El chuchumbé; once seen, it spread with incredible speed.”16 “El chuchumbé” came from a family of rhythms and dances known as paracumbees, cachumbas, gayumbas, and zarambeques.17 It was a courtship dance with the male in pursuit of the female. Its choreography included coquettish moves such as the “kicking of the apron” and “lifting of skirt.”18 An informer of New Spain’s Inquisition describes “El chuchumbé”: “The verses are sung while others dance, a man with a women or four women and four men; the dance is performed with gestures, shaking, and swaying contrary to all honest intentions . . . because in it they embrace one another and dance belly to belly.”19 According to Díaz-Sánchez, “the dancing of ‘El Chuchumbe’ represented not only the possibility of actual slave

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

477

revolts but operated as a form of larger social revolt against fundamental colonial power structures.”20 Public demonstration of sexually provocative movement is a form of protest with the body. The sexually suggestive dancing of “El chuchumbé” was a creative expression of resistance during the Holy Inquisition. Research on “El chuchumbé” mentions minimal details about its musical properties beyond dance and vocals, especially in its early manifestation in 18th century-Cuba and Veracruz. Absent is the description of son jarocho instrumentation such as the tarima, jarana, guitarra de son, leona, or arpa. In the 18th century, the music itself did not have the title “son jarocho,” but certainly contained the elements of son.21 The recovery work of son jarocho musician Gilberto Gutiérrez sparked a new interest in the hidden history of “El chuchumbé.” Upon finding documentation in Mexico’s national archive, Gilberto Gutiérrez, director of Grupo Mono Blanco, was able to recover verses of “El chuchumbé” that were banned during the Inquisition:22 En la esquina está parado un fraile de la merced Con los hábitos alzados enseñando el chuchumbé [A friar from La Merced is “standing” there on the corner With his religious garb pulled up, showing the “chuchumbé”] Que te vaya bien, que te vaya mal el chuchumbé te va gustar

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

[Whether things are going well, whether things are bad, you will like the chuchumbé]23

The text of “El chuchumbé” is both picaresque and full of strategic resistance. This proto-son was banned due to its double-entendre sexual references directed at the Spanish Catholic clergy of New Spain. The verses uncover the sexual liberties of the clergy despite their mandatory vow of abstinence. “El chuchumbé” also reveals how humor through doubleentendre verse makes a dangerously subversive statement, which consequently led to serious punishment.24 “El chuchumbé” and other sones with similar double-entendre verses and complex metaphors became trademarks of the son jarocho.25 Gutiérrez added a I-IV-V chord progression in C major to selected verses of “El chuchumbé.” His ensemble Grupo Mono Blanco recorded

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

478

Sounds of Resistance

“El chuchumbé” as a son jarocho in the 1990s. The documentation of banned verses of “El chuchumbé,” and the fact that its dance was censored in the sotavento (the cultural zone of the son jarocho) serves as an early example of foundation for an emergent son jarocho. However, it can be generalized that people of African, indigenous, and mestizo (mixed) heritage, most expressed their resistance to the Church. To be specific, the Mandiga in Veracruz, an ethnic group originally from West Africa, wrote many versos against the Church.26 Grupo Mono Blanco’s reimagining of “El chuchumbé” as a son jarocho revived the story of resistance during the Holy Inquisition. “El chuchumbé” is now part of the standard repertoire of sones jarochos at fandangos and performances. Today, several Veracruz son jarocho and Chicano-Jarocho ensembles in the United States include their own renditions of “El chuchumbé” as a way to narrate struggle and protest. For example, on the album It’s Time (2012), East Los Angeles group Las Cafeteras use “El chuchumbé” to denounce current anti-international migrant fervor in Arizona. In the late 1990s, the ensemble Chuchumbé also reinterpreted the hidden history of struggle during the Holy Inquisition in Veracruz and Cuba. On ¡Caramba niño! (1999), Chuchumbé, the son jarocho ensemble, retells the censorship of “El chuchumbé” during the Spanish Inquisition: El chuchumbé fue penado por la Santa Inquisición Pero ellos se olvidaron que es un ritmo sabrosón [The Holy Inquisition punished the chuchumbé, But they forgot that it is a joyous rhythm]

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

El Papa llegó a la Habana pero el Diablo lo tentó Al mirar a una cubana el chuchumbé se le alzó [The Pope arrived at Havana but the Devil tempted him Once he saw a Cuban woman, his “chuchumbé” arose]27

Chuchumbé’s verses combine historical data with sexualized doubleentendre. “Penado” has double meaning, which references both punishment (pena) and the phallus (pene). The second verse refers to a Pope’s sexual desires in Havana, Cuba, perhaps invented or historical. Nonetheless, the narrative reconnects “El chuchumbé” to its Cuban origins through the sounds of the son jarocho in Veracruz. In comparison to the strategic resistance found in “El chuchumbé,” because overt protest had severe consequences during the Holy Inquisition, only a few examples of explicit protest survive, for example, the legacy of the conga in Veracruz.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

479

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Conga’s Legacy of Struggle and Protest in Veracruz The conga is a standard rhythm of comparsas (street bands) during Carnaval in Santiago de Cuba. Carnaval emerged in the 19th century as a festival for enslaved Africans, who were given liberty for one day during Día de los Reyes (Three Kings Day) or Epiphany on January 6, which was approved by the Church.28 Comparsas in the 19th century, into the 20th century, were also referred to as congas. Instruments played by comparsas are often made at home or furnished from inexpensive materials, which include plank drums of different shapes and sizes, bells, frying pans, tire rims, trumpets, and the corneta china.29 Indentured servants from China brought the corneta, a double-reed horn, to Santiago de Cuba in the late 19th century.30 The corneta china is a staple instrument of the comparsa and considered indispensible to the tradition. Comparsas during Cuba’s colonial period were often mistaken as slave rebellions headed by Cabildos de nación. Cabildos were influential groups that owned land, distributed inheritances to slaves, provided neighborhood police services, and promoted ethnic solidarity.31 Cabildos de nación were based on African nation of origin. In the 19th century, cabildos helped organize uprisings, which led to their barring from participation at Día de los Reyes festivities in Havana in 1823.32 By the time the conga rhythm migrated to Veracruz, it traveled with a rich trajectory of social struggle and protest. Similar to the dissemination of “El chuchumbé,” the conga rhythm and dance transferred to Veracruz by way of Cuba. Most congas were performed as protest songs in the streets of Veracruz, and often amounted to demands for social justice on behalf of the lower classes. The Catholic clergy was scandalized by the sexually suggestive dances of the conga. Like “El chuchumbé,” congas in Veracruz had chants that denounced the duplicitous morals of those in positions of authority. However, “La conga del viejo” (The Old Man’s Conga) was able to strategically survive the Holy Inquisition of New Spain. Due to its syncretic symbolism of renovation and good wishes for the New Year, “La conga del viejo” was tolerated and able to survive religious and political scrutiny.33 “La conga del viejo” also survived through its incorporation in annual festivities to welcome the New Year in Veracruz’s sotavento region. “La conga del viejo” is a musical and cultural ritual performed in the days surrounding New Year’s Eve in southern Veracruz. Diverse ensembles of the son jarocho, cumbia, Brazilian inspired batucada, Afro-Cuban percussion, and bricolage troupes using household appliances as instruments participate by taking to the streets in this annual ritual. Loud brass

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

480

Sounds of Resistance

instruments also accompany this musical uproar during this New Year festivity. Ethnomusicologist Antonio Robles-Cahero provides a good metaphor for rituals of overpowering sound as “la guerra de los sonidos,”34 a war of sounds, which is a reinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “wars of maneuver,”35 a counter-hegemonic method that involves physically overwhelming the coercive system of the State.36 The sonic power of loud music performed by people with social grievances is a command for basic human rights. The diverse representation of ensembles that parade the streets of Veracruz is a guerra de los sonidos, and constitutes a creative demand of recognition from a historically aggrieved community.37 “La conga del viejo” is performed as a communal ritual in neighborhoods of the working poor. The chorus “una limosna para este pobre viejo” (an alm for the poor old man [my translation]) includes a line asking for monetary donations during the procession. As the chorus suggests, the costumed portion of the ritual includes predominantly male participation. However, the issue of gender representation becomes complex with the costumed depiction of la viuda, a widowed woman portrayed by a crossdressed male. El viejo (the old man) is performed in a joyful and raucous manner in order to excite participants. One final installment of the family trilogy includes a man dressed as a baby, who represents the New Year. At midnight, a viejo (old man) doll made of cloth—or other materials—is burnt to symbolically let go of the past and enter the New Year. The burning of objects is also a visual metaphor for purification. After being passed around the neighborhood gathering, the viejo doll is either seated or hung and burnt as part of the ceremony. Every neighborhood street or block claims its own doll, for example, “el viejo de Zapata,” or the “old man of Zapata Street.”38 The burning of el viejo in the New Year extends itself to parts of Latin America and Spain. However, “La conga del viejo,” has another hypothesis in regard to its origin and practice; one rooted in a hidden history of resistance. A hidden history of “La conga del viejo” dates back to shipyard worker social unrest at the astilleros (shipyards) of Veracruz around 1920.39 According to Francisco Rivera Ávila, shipyard workers collectively wrote “La conga del viejo” as an act of protest at the Port of Veracruz.40 Workers marched to the shipyards around mid-December to the beat of the conga. The shipyard workers, as organic bricoleurs, took pots, pans, crates, and old instruments, creating an impromptu ensemble of protest music.41 Hatton states, “the bricoleur’s response to the task at hand is limited to a rearrangement, understood as including new uses, of the existing set of means. This rearrangement involves a reorganization or improvisation

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

481

with existing elements to create new structures as an ad hoc response to the environment.”42 Comparable to the bricolage assembly of comparsa instrumentation in Cuba, the shipyard worker’s use of household items provides an example of the improvised gathering of materials due to urgency of the situation; the struggle for better living and working conditions. Shipyard workers disputed their social situation by improvising verses and singing choruses such as “una limosna para este pobre viejo que ha dejado hijos para el año nuevo” (an alm for the poor old man who had to leave his children for the New Year).43 The chorus became a powerful statement of the will to struggle for social change. According to the current hypothesis, the hidden history of resistance of “La conga del viejo” was obfuscated within present New Year festivities in Veracruz. For many years it became known as a song performed once a year to celebrate renewal and the New Year. As previously noted, “La conga del viejo” is rooted in a moment of shipyard worker protests during the Christmas holidays into the New Year. The ensemble Chuchumbé considered the conga integral to the musical heritage of the sotavento region. The conga survived in Veracruz with a limited repertoire, however, the work of Chuchumbé and Patricio Hidalgo spearhead the creation of new compositions bearing the rhythm. According to Hidalgo, since the 1970s, “La conga del viejo” lost its poetic sense and conga rhythm.44 In the 1990s, Hidalgo’s former group Chuchumbé reimagined “La conga del viejo” by writing new verses and applied the conga rhythm to standard son jarocho instrumentation such as the jarana, guitarra de son, pandero, quijada, and marimból. As a professional ensemble that emerged during the second wave of the jaranero movement, Chuchumbé found new ways to understand the son jarocho as a genre. Chuchumbé put the concept of Blackness, considered the third root of the son jarocho, at the forefront of their sound and discourse. The sound of Chuchumbé is best described as Afro-Diasporic son jarocho. Elements of Cuban son, African rooted call and response vocals over percussion, and recovery work of the conga jarocha are examples of creative expression of Black roots in Veracruz. On their album ¡Caramba niño! “Conga de San Benito,” claims “Santo San Benito, patrón de los Negros” (Saintly St. Benito, patrón Saint of Black people), and is call for divine protection of the Black population.45 Members of the ensemble also aligned themselves with social movements happening within Mexico. In 1996, members of Chuchumbé accompanied Grupo Mono Blanco’s César Castro to participate at the Intergaláctico meeting with the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

482

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“This Wasn’t a Zapa-Tour”: Reflections of Jaraneros Crossing into Zapatista Territory On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN [Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional] or “Zapatistas”)46 rose up in arms in the primarily indigenous Mayan regions of Chiapas, located in southern Mexico. The uprising served as a resistance against the neoliberal policies of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Zapatista believed that NAFTA would affect the livelihood of indigenous and marginalized people in Mexico. The EZLN presented 11 demands in the First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle47: “work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace.”48 The 11 demands function as emblematic declaration of rights that were denied under mainstream Mexican political power. The EZLN fought for autonomy of indigenous lands and coexisted within the larger corporatistdemocracy of the Mexican Nation. The aforementioned event on New Years Day 1994 was a calculated and highly organized rebellion. The EZLN figured that a surprise attack would be most effective while the wealthy were celebrating the New Year. A segment from the Sixth Declaration from the Lacandón states, “we prepared ourselves well politically and learned how to use arms and all of the sudden, when the rich were having their big New Year’s Eve fiestas, well, we fell upon them in their cities to let them know that we are here, that from now on they had to take us into account.”49 The result came from almost a decade of underground organizing of Chiapas’s indigenous communities that had endured an historical trajectory of disenfranchisement since the colonial period. This included the appropriation of land, lack of solid educational resources, and exploitation. The Zapatista rebellion served as a demand of recognition of historically aggrieved communities and their agency, struggle for autonomy, and work for basic human rights. In April 1996, the EZLN invited activists, cultural workers, journalists, and musicians to the Internacional (International) meeting in the municipality of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. Thousands of people from Mexico, Central America, South America, Europe, and the United States gathered for this occasion. The event’s overarching theme, “against neoliberalism and for humanity,” served as a welcome banner to the Internacional.50 The diversity of participants included women struggling for gender rights, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) members, a diversity of indigenous peoples, punks, police in civilian disguise, and journalists.51 Amongst this grouping of participants, a couple

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

483

of jaraneros, son jarocho musicians from Veracruz included César Castro from Grupo Mono Blanco. César Castro is a young master jaranero and laudero (luthier) originally from the humble neighborhood of La Huaca in the city of Veracruz. At 13 years old, Castro officially became a member Grupo Mono Blanco, an ensemble dedicated to the dissemination of the new jaranero movement and the fandango. Since 1978, the new jaranero movement sought to restore the son jarocho to its traditional sound and reestablish the fandango as its central practice.52 Now a resident in Los Angeles, California, Castro dedicates his life to the dissemination of the son jarocho and fandango in cultural centers, progressive spaces, universities, and public schools; transnational dialogue and workshops between son jarocho musicians in the United States and Mexico; and works daily on crafting son jarocho instruments as a laudero. César Castro became my mentor on the requinto jarocho after being awarded the Durfee Foundation Master-Apprentice Grant in Los Angeles, California. I have shared many performances with Castro as a member of his ensembles Zócalo Züe and Cambalache. As an occasional guest lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, Castro would briefly mention the presence of the son jarocho in social movements in the United States and Mexico. He shared recollections of his time in Grupo Mono Blanco and mentioned traveling to Chiapas to visit the Zapatista Insurgency. Castro’s young adult life in Mexico amidst a popular uprising served as an awakening of social consciousness. In 1996, Castro took two trips to the Zapatista areas of armed decolonialization, which contributed greatly to his organic process of political awareness. Castro and a fellow jaranero/journalist drove for many hours to reach an Aguascalientes in Chiapas. According to Conant, Aguascalientes are “symbolic and real centers of resistance, with meeting rooms, public amphitheaters, command structures, and guest lodging.”53 Castro visited the Aguascalientes of San José del Río as a photographer for the newspaper Imagen de Veracruz. Both travelers brought a jarana in case an occasion called for music. The dirt road to Chiapas provided vivid and surreal scenes of war for Castro. After long hours traveling along a narrow road, the realization of entering a war zone became evident when a tank suddenly crossed the way through the jungle. Frequent military outposts checked every vehicle and passenger for identification and purpose of travel. Another vivid memory that Castro recalls includes an Aguascalientes taken over entirely by the Mexican military. The area was deserted of local inhabitants with only men

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

484

Sounds of Resistance

in green military fatigues. As a hired newspaper photographer, Castro captured these moments with his camera into the destination of San José del Río, Chiapas. Castro recalls feeling overwhelmed by the Mexican military presence throughout the long travel into the Lacandón jungle of Chiapas. Reflecting on the perspective of the resistance, the highly organized methods of the Zapatista army made Castro realize the determination of the uprising. Castro explains, “This wasn’t a ‘Zapa-tour.’ It was like crossing a border into a war zone.”54 Chicana queer scholar Gloria Anzaldúa states, “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people from different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrink.”55 Anzaldúa’s borderland philosophy allows for an understanding of counter-hegemonic maneuvering through intercultural conflict. A border is not only a geopolitical zone, but also an ideological, sexual, or even contested space between a community in resistance—like the Zapatistas—and a repressive government or military force. In Chiapas, there exists a classic binary of an upper class with mainstream political power subjugating a group of indigenous people. In the case of the Zapatistas, the answer to oppression was an uprising that declared an autonomous space—a well-defined border—between what they viewed as despotic neoliberal policies such as NAFTA and self-determined liberation. Sophisticated Zapatista organizing tactics proved a threat for multinational business and mainstream Mexican politicians. The Mexican government sent infiltrators to Chiapas. Castro recalls, “Y como en la frontera regresan a gente, igual allá ya regresaban . . . me tocó ver a uno que detectaron como infiltrado del gobierno. Regresaban caminando, ‘¡y órale güey, vas para atrás’ ”! (Just how people are deported on the [United States–Mexico] border, the Zapatistas would [physically] deport people from their territory . . . I got to witness someone they detected as an infiltrator. They sent this person out walking and said, “Come on you idiot, you’re going back!”).56 The EZLN territory versus the Mexican State was a constant battleground and contested borderland amidst insurrection. Despite the constant threat or fear of violence, the Zapatistas and Internacional participants valued daily time of solidarity through leisure. After meetings and workshops at the Internacional, small fiestas were held every evening. Zapatista men, women, and children of Mayan heritage performed popular songs on the marimba, including the popular cumbia “La de la mochila azúl.”57 From the start of the Internacional, Castro and his

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

485

fellow jaranero shared sones with the Zapatistas and held intensive workshops of the zapateado.58 César Castro inspired Zapatista children to dance “Los enanos” (the little people). “La tuza” (the gopher) also became a favorite of the EZLN, so much that it supplanted the original hit “La de la mochila azúl.”59 An attendee of the Internacional and jaranero in the making, Fernando Guadarrama Olivera adds, “Poco a poco, con timidez al principio y después con un entusiasmo inesperado, la gente del EZLN zapatea descalza sobre la tierra. Con pasos suaves y cadenciosos bailaron todos y cada uno de los sones que los jarochos interpretaban” (little by little, yet shy at first, and gradually with much enthusiasm, members of the EZLN began to perform the zapateado with their bare feet stomping the ground. All of them danced with a smooth cadence to every son that the jarochos performed).60 In this case, the minifandango, colloquially termed fandanguito,61 proved to create a celebratory space of solidarity between jarocho musical–culture and the indigenousZapatista culture of resistance. In July of 1996, the global Intergaláctico (Intergalactic) meeting was held in Chiapas. The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle describes the general purpose of the Intergaláctico, stating, “we conducted an international survey, that is, we met to talk with people of America and Asia and Africa and Europe and Oceania and came to know their struggles and their ways.”62 Finding what George Lipsitz calls “families of resemblance”63 between the jaranero movement and the Zapatista uprising, several jaraneros attended the Intergaláctico as a cultural exchange. Castro returned with fellow heavyweight jarocho musicians from Grupo Mono Blanco, Gilberto Gutiérrez, and Octavio Vega; from Son de Madera, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Laura Rebolloso; and members of the ensemble Chuchumbé, Patricio Hidalgo, Zenén Zeferino, Ricardo Perry, and Andrés Flores. The participation of a larger group of jaraneros leaned toward a symbolic exchange of solidarity with the EZLN. Castro recalls being on the sidelines from meetings and general dialogues between Intergalático participants and the Zapatistas. However, the call for sharing the son jarocho with the EZLN was a primary role of the jaraneros at the Intergalático. Subcomandate Tacho, an EZLN leader, occasionally accompanied the jaraneros with a guitar. However, Subcomandate Tacho only spared all the time he could before receiving urgent calls to meetings. The jaraneros and jaranera (Laura Rebolloso) were asked to perform for the EZLN at the Intergaláctico. Immediately facing the stage were comandantes, the male and female leadership of the EZLN. Castro recalls:

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

486

Sounds of Resistance

Y ahí fue la única ocasión en que podíamos llegar cerca de ellos y a saludar, y nos pusimos a tocar . . . y tocábamos todos, éramos todos y cantábamos y tocábamos: Zenén, Patricio . . . Gilberto se echaba sus versos “chingones”. Ya más tarde se hacían las fiestas y acabamos haciendo un relajo buenísimo. Llovía y se hizo un lodo increíble. Estaban contentos ya del trabajo que se había cumplido. Eso era nuestro que hacer. It was the only occasion that we were close to the Zapatista leadership and were able to greet them; and we immediately began to perform. . . and all [jaraneros] performed together. All of us sang and played together; Zenén [Zeferino], Patricio [Hidalgo] . . . Gilberto [Gutiérrez] recited awesome verses. Fiestas were held later on and it was a great time! It rained and mud began to form everywhere. Everyone was thrilled about the all the hard work that was accomplished. Our duty was to bring joy.64

Serious play in pressing times of revolution was another way to celebrate the uprising in Chiapas. It is not an escape, but a way to honor the difficult and sometimes underappreciated work of social justice. At the Intergaláctico, the presence of the son jarocho brought an immediate understanding of valuing culture as resistance. During a conversation with a Zapatista leader, César Castro recalls a quick exchange of mutual recognition between the work of jaraneros and the Zapatistas. The EZLN Insurgency, which is still active today, inspired social justice activists to look at internal issues in their own respective communities.65 I credit the Zapatista Internacional and Intergalático meetings for embedding progressive ideologies, dialogue, and transnational organizing in son jarocho practitioners.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Conclusion The trajectory of the son jarocho as music of struggle and protest continues today. The son jarocho serves as a creative and shared expression of struggle at marches, protests, and demonstrations in Mexico and the United States. Still there are stories to write about such as jaranero Arcadio Hidalgo’s participation as a son jarocho musician and people’s soldier during the Mexican Revolution. Hidalgo’s words have influenced many son jarocho musicians to understand poetry and music as a tool for social justice; and the role of music, poetry, and dance as a reflection of collective struggle. Hidden histories of “El chuchumbé,” “La conga del viejo,” and jaranero cultural exchange with Zapatistas foreground a long fetch of the son jarocho’s presence in communal resistance. These three episodes reveal stories of struggle through migration in times of repression. In the case of “El chuchumbé” and “La conga del viejo,” both musical expressions are

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

487

rooted in Afro-Cuban struggle and emerge in Veracruz, Mexico to create a new culture of resistance during the Holy Inquisition. Son jarocho ensembles from the new jaranero movement research and revisit the stories of “El chuchumbé” and “La conga del viejo” in the 1990s. Both narratives are recommunicated through the contemporary sounds of the son jarocho. Finally, jaranero solidarity with the Zapatista Insurgency reveals the importance of sharing culture and exchanging ideals of social justice. Participants of the East Los Angeles Chicana and Chicano arts and music scene attended the Zapatista meetings in 1996. The organizing strategies of the Zapatistas became important tools for Chicana and Chicano civil rights activism in the 1990s. Cultural exchange and dialogue with the Zapatistas provide a foundation for organizing strategies between son jarocho musicians in the United States and Mexico. Chicana and Chicano activists and jaraneros who attended the Intergalático in Chiapas would later meet and establish the son jarocho as music of struggle and protest in the United States. Solidarity work within the son jarocho blurs the meaning of Nation and its borders.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. Patricio Hidalgo, personal communication with the author, August 17, 2012. My translation. 2. See Alejo Carpentier, Music in Cuba, trans. Alan West-Durán, ed. Timothy Brennan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 3. The guitarra de son is a four- or five-stringed plucked lute with a plectrum called púa or espiga. The guitarra de son primarily functions through musical scales and melodies. 4. Francisco García Ranz and Ramón Gutiérrez Hernández, La guitarra de son: Un método para su aprendizaje en diferentes tonos (Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, 2002). 5. Literally, someone who plays the jarana. However, jaranero also identifies musicians, dancers, and poets involved in the jaranero movement from the late 1970s onward, a movement that reinstated the fandango and communal gathering at the forefront of the son jarocho. 6. José Gutiérrez and Los Hermanos Ochoa, La Bamba: Sones Jarochos from Veracruz (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2003). Liner notes by Daniel Sheehy. 7. Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, “An Explication of the Hornbostel-Sachs Instrument Classification System,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 8 (1990), 91–93. 8. James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 9. José Antonio Robles-Cahero, “Cantar, bailar y tañer: Nuevas aproximaciones a la música y el baile populares de la Nueva España,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación 8 (2005), 63. According to the Cultural Institute of Veracruz

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

488

Sounds of Resistance

(IVEC) son jarocho research website, a larger group of sones and dances banned between 1571 and 1820: “El catatumba,” “El currimpamplí,” “El fandango,” “El pan de jarave,” “El pan de manteca,” “El mambrú,” “El saranguandingo,” “El temor,” “El toro,” “El toro nuevo,” “El torito,” “El zacamandú,” “La cosecha,” “La maturranga,”“Las boleras,”“Las lloviznitas,”“Las pateritas,”“Las seguidillas,”“Las teranas,” “Los chimisclanes,” “Los garbanzos,” “Los merolicos,” “Los panaderos,” and “Los perejiles”; http://www.musiquesdumonde.net/La-Inquisicion-en-la-musica.html (accessed October 8, 2012). 10. Leslie Katz, “Rare Documents Shed Light on Grisly Mexican Inquisition,” Jewish Bulletin of Northern California 29 (1996), 1–5. 11. Arthur Howard Knoll, “The Inquisition in Mexico,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 16, no. 95 (1890), 483. 12. Knoll, “The Inquisition in Mexico,” 483. 13. Patricio Hidalgo, personal communication with the author, August 17, 2012. My translation. 14. Marco Amador, personal communication with the author, August 2009. 15. Micaela Díaz-Sánchez, “(In)Between Nation and Diaspora: Performing Indigenous and African Legacies in Chicana/o and Mexican Cultural Production” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2010), 124. 16. Alejo Carpentier and Alan West-Durán, “Music in Cuba,” Transition 81/82 (2000), 191. 17. Ibid., 193. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Díaz-Sánchez, “(In)Between Nation and Diaspora,” 127. 21. Daniel Sheehy, personal communication with the author, October 1, 2012. 22. Gilberto Gutiérrez, personal communication with the author, July 2004. 23. Grupo Mono Blanco, “El chuchumbé,” Fandango (Urtext 2004). My translation. 24. Patricio Hidalgo, personal communication with the author, August 17, 2012. 25. Díaz-Sánchez, “(In)Between Nation and Diaspora,” 121. 26. Patricio Hidalgo, personal communication with the author, August 17, 2012. 27. Chuchumbé, “Pascuas, justicias, y fuga,” ¡Caramba niño! (Producciones Alebrije 1999). My translation. 28. Judith Bettelheim, “Negotiations of Power in Carnaval Culture in Santiago de Cuba,” African Arts 24, no. 2 (1991), 67; Andrew Schloss, Carnaval in Cuba (Folkways FW 04065), liner notes. 29. Robin D. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 1997), 64. 30. Ibid., 252. 31. Bettelheim, “Power in Carnaval Culture,” 67–68. 32. Ibid., 69.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Hidden Histories of Resistance in Mexico’s Son Jarocho

489

33. Paraphrasing “De nuevo el viejo,” http://www.musiquesdumonde.net/ De-nuevo-El-Viejo.html. 34. Robles-Cahero, “Cantar, bailar y tañer,” 65. 35. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 36. Paraphrasing E. Colin Ruggero’s “Gramsci: A War of Position,” http://www. warofposition.com/?page_id=94. 37. “Aggrieved communities” is a concept introduced by George Lipsitz, “Chicano Rock: Cruising Around the Historical Bloc,” Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, ed. Reebee Garofalo (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2009), 267–79. 38. César Castro, personal communication with the author, October 25, 2012. La calle Zapata is a local street in La Huaca, a neighborhood in the city of Veracruz. 39. Patricio Hidalgo, e-mail message to the author, November 15, 2012. 40. Citing the documentary Patricio Hidalgo y el Afrojarocho (SacBé Producciones, 2012). 41. Ibid. 42. Elizabeth Hatton, “Levi Strauss’s ‘Bricolage’ and Theorizing Teachers’ Work,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1989), 76. 43. Citing the documentary Patricio Hidalgo y el Afrojarocho (2012). My translation. 44. Paraphrased from the documentary Patricio Hidalgo y el Afrojarocho. 45. Chuchumbé, “Conga de San Benito,” ¡Caramba niño!, my translation and interpretation. 46. I will use the term “Zapatista” and the acronym “EZLN” interchangeably. Both reference the same revolutionary group from Chiapas. 47. La selva Lacandón is a jungle in Chiapas and central operating area of the EZLN. 48. Jeff Conant, A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 12. 49. John Ross, ¡Zapatistas!: Making Another World Possible. Chronicles of Resistance: 2000–2006 (New York: Nation Books, 2006), 2. 50. Fernando Guadarrama Olivera, “ ‘Para Todos Todo’: Anécdota de un Fandango Zapatista,” e-mail message, January 5, 2010. 51. Ibid. 52. Martha González, “Zapateado Afro-Chicana Fandango Style: Self-Reflexive Moments in Zapateado,” Dancing Across Borders: Bailes y Danzas Mexicanos (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 365. 53. Conant, A Poetics of Resistance, 106. 54. César Castro, personal communication with the author, October 25, 2012. 55. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books 1999), 19. 56. César Castro, personal communication with the author, October 25, 2012. My translation.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

490

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

57. Guadarrama Olivera, “ ‘Para Todos Todo’.” 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., my translation. 61. Meaning “little fandango” or “small fandango.” My translation. 62. Ross, ¡Zapatistas!, 4. 63. “Families of resemblance” is a concept introduced by Lipsitz, “Chicano Rock.” 64. César Castro, personal communication with the author, October 25, 2012. My translation. 65. Ibid.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Chapter 23

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” The Changing Voices of Anticolonial Puerto Rican Protest Music

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eunice Rojas

Spain’s defeat in the Spanish American War of 1898 ultimately resulted in independence for Cuba, but the neighboring island of Puerto Rico was left with its own aspirations of sovereignty dashed as it passed from being a Spanish colony to a U.S. territory. Since that time the political status of the Caribbean island nation has undergone slight changes, but its colonial identity has remained untouched. The question of status has been an ongoing source of controversy, though, as both a small group of advocates for independence and a much larger segment of the population in favor of statehood have long complained of disenfranchisement from the federal government. Puerto Rican protest music capturing this anticolonialist sentiment has been sparked by three sets of actions taken by the U.S. military and intelligence services in Puerto Rico. In the late 1960s and early 1970s University of Puerto Rico students protesting the presence of the U.S. military Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) on the university campus produced almost regular riots and generated music that became a symbol of the fight against military power and police brutality long after the riots had ended. Antimilitary protests and accompanying music returned to popularity at the peak of the movement against the U.S. Navy’s bombing practice on the Island of Vieques in the late 1990s. Finally, in 2005 the FBI’s killing of

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

492

Sounds of Resistance

Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the 72-year-old former leader of the Puerto Rican revolutionary group Los macheteros, inspired a controversial song by a breakout group named Calle 13, quickly launching them to fame. Since 1967 the question of whether to change Puerto Rico’s status has been put to vote several times in a series of plebiscites that until recently have failed to establish a consensus toward any one solution to alter the status quo. Alongside widespread dissatisfaction among the Puerto Rican population with regard to the island’s colonial status, there has also been a strong movement to maintain the current commonwealth status, as some of the benefits of being a territory are clear to many of its citizens. Puerto Ricans, who were granted full U.S. citizenship in 1917, are not obligated to pay federal income tax on wages earned on the island. Nevertheless, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2009 Puerto Rico, despite its small size, received more federal aid in the form of food and nutrition services than any state in the union other than California and Texas.1 The data also reveal that the island also benefits greatly in the form of federal housing and unemployment assistance. With such a generous federal government payout in return for Puerto Ricans not having to pay in to the system, it is understandable that many Puerto Ricans have eschewed both the option of statehood as well as that of independence. In a November 2012 nonbinding referendum almost 54 percent of the population voted against maintaining the current colonial status, and 61 percent of those who answered a second question regarding which status they would prefer chose statehood.2 Although Puerto Ricans have had trouble agreeing on a definitive political status, public outcry against acts of violence by the U.S. military and intelligence forces has been widespread, and the protest music that has resulted from these acts has been immensely popular.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Roy Brown and the University of Puerto Rico Riots During the latter half of the 1960s, as anti–Vietnam War demonstrations proliferated around U.S. university campuses, Puerto Ricans, whose U.S. citizenship made them eligible for the draft, also began to hold protests at the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. In Puerto Rico the resistance to the war and the draft was inextricably linked to a denunciation of U.S. colonialism as “the fact that island youths were being drafted into the U.S. armed forces while island residents had no representation in Congress or vote in presidential elections struck many as incompatible with one of the classic tenets of U.S. democracy.”3 In Puerto Rico the antiwar movement was inherently an anticolonial movement as well. The antimilitary protests often targeted the closest visible and tangible

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 493

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

extension of the U.S. military forces: the University of Puerto Rico’s ROTC. According to Puerto Rican Studies scholar Manuel Maldonado Denis, “Although Puerto Rico had neither voice nor vote in the passage of [the Land Grant Acts], in the armed forces to which these young people will later belong, or even in the subjects which are to be taught to the cadets, an ROTC program was instituted at the University of Puerto Rico.”4 Several years of clashes began to reach their peak in September 1969 when protesters set fire to one of the ROTC buildings on campus after a UPR student was sentenced by a U.S. court to a year in prison for refusing to serve in the military after having been drafted.5 A few months later in March 1970, an anti-ROTC student protester named Antonia Martínez was shot and killed by the police during a demonstration. A natural accompaniment to these protests was nueva trova, a musical genre that emerged in the 1960s on the neighboring island of Cuba that combined a folk style of music with sociopolitically charged lyrics. In the rest of Latin America a similar movement had arisen known as nueva canción (new song). The anti-U.S. and prorevolution songs coming out of Cuba were a perfect inspiration for Roy Brown, a young student at the University of Puerto Rico who lent his voice and his guitar to the protests on campus.6 In 1969, under a small independent label, 24-year-old Roy Brown released his first album, a collection of powerful and critical protest songs with the unambiguous title, Yo protesto (I Protest). The cover is a photograph from one of the university demonstrations showing a picket line of students facing a string of armed police officers. One of the most well-known songs from the album, “Míster con macana” (Mister with a night stick), describes the scene of one of these demonstrations from the point of view of a protester, possibly Roy Brown himself. The chorus of the song states, There are situations that work us up And others that kill. How do you think, friend, That my mother felt When a mister with a night stick Hit me and hit me hard? Run, run Everybody run Here comes the mister with a night stick7

Video footage of riots sparked by confrontations between police and antiROTC protesters confirms liberal and vigorous clubbing perpetuated by police in riot gear.8 These beatings were often met with crowds of protesters singing Brown’s lyrics.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

494

Sounds of Resistance

The use of the anglicism míster in the Spanish lyrics clearly establishes an association between the local police forces and the United States. The last three lines reinforce this association and tie Puerto Rico’s dependence on the United States to one of the most well-known symbols of American capitalist cultural imperialism. A míster with a ramrod Takes out a pistol And all this for Coca-Cola.

Brown continues his attack on imperialist capitalism in another song from the Yo protesto album. “Señor inversionista” (Mister Investor) warns potential investors of the dangers presumably of investing in U.S. products. Mr. Investor Be careful: Instead of your profits You’ll have something burnt. ... Because the borinquen people Are soon to awake. It’s the eve for the people Who will soon cry out. . . Be careful.9

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The fire imagery of the burnt profits is best explained in conjunction with the lyrics of “Monón,” the first song on Yo protesto. Well the man of destiny —the one that never came— Is throwing bombs, Is digging graves With his electronic forces. With his nuclear mind They dig wells in Lares, Drop bombs in Vietnam, . . . and a penitent young man Indignantly shouts out: “Fire, fire, fire, The world is up in flames! Fire, fire, The Yankees want fire!”10

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 495

Roy Brown’s entrance into the world of activism was somewhat unusual. Brown recounts that at first as a university student he composed and sang songs that he felt compelled to write, but he did not see himself as a protest singer by profession nor did he see himself getting directly involved with politics. Instead, he was recruited by the protest movement when activists heard him singing and playing the guitar in the cafeteria and told him that he was going to sing and compose for the movement. An amenable young Brown quickly agreed and began to attend meetings and demonstrations on campus.11 Soon, he was so immersed in the movement that he was fired from his job as a student worker for singing at an anti–Vietnam War protest.12 Brown credits his continued existence as a singer–songwriter of protest songs to the pro-independence weekly paper, Claridad. “Since Claridad existed I had the freedom—since Claridad fought for freedom of expression—well, I had support . . . I could be the type of artist that I envisioned.”13 Not only did Claridad publicize Roy Brown by being the first paper to write about him, but the annual Claridad Festival gave Brown and other similarly minded musicians a forum for performances. The annual festival, which began as a fundraising event for the paper in 1973, has become a showcase for the island’s musical talent attracting crowds in the tens of thousands every year, and Roy Brown has been a regular crowd pleaser. On March 4, 1970, the president if the University of Puerto Rico called in the riot police during anti-ROTC protests on campus and in the surrounding neighborhood of Río Piedras. A fellow student present at the time recounts that while an officer clubbed another demonstrator on the street below, a 21-year-old education student named Antonia Martínez looked down from the balcony of her apartment and yelled, “¡asesinos!” (murderers!) at the offending officers. Her shouts were promptly silenced by a police bullet through the head, and Antonia died in the hospital soon after.14 Antonia’s death quickly became a symbol of the struggle for freedom from colonial rule and against police brutality. Her photograph was even used in a poster put up by the Federación Universitaria pro Independentistas (University pro-Independence Federation) with the caption: Mártir de la lucha estudiantil (Martyr of the student struggle).15 Although a police officer was tried and absolved of her killing, later investigations revealed a police and FBI cover-up that put an innocent officer on the stand instead of the true perpetrator of the crime who has remained unidentified and unpunished for his actions.16 At least two songs have been written about the death of Antonia Martínez. One was “Antonia” by Antonio Cabán Vale, a contemporary of Roy Brown known by the nickname, El topo. Roy Brown himself also penned

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

496

Sounds of Resistance

a song about the incident titled “Antonia murió de un balazo” (Antonia died from a gunshot) and included it on his second album, emphatically entitled, Basta ya . . . Revolución (That’s Enough . . . Revolution). Starting in a somber tone and picking up increasing urgency, Brown’s song retells the story and universalizes it to other parts of the world. Antonia Died from a gunshot. Raise your fist Young fighter. Do not ask, Do not ask where. It is here, it is in Laos, Uruguay, Paraguay, Everywhere; The dead do not wait. She was a martyr Your classmate She fell in innocence, She just cried out:

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Do not hit him, do not hit him, do not hit him, Murderers.17

Roy Brown’s third album, the self-titled Roy Brown III, released in 1973, contains a song in honor of Pedro Albizu Campos, a prominent figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement until his death in 1965. Albizu Campos, who had also served for a time as president of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico and had been imprisoned several times for alleged acts of violence against the government, “managed to personify the spirit of resistance to colonialism [and] the fight against cultural assimilation.”18 A graduate of Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was known for his oratorical skills and his outspoken defense of Puerto Rican nationalism. Roy Brown’s “Canción a Pedro” (Song for Pedro) alludes to Albizu Campos’s talent as a speaker and his dogged fight for independence in the following lyrics: Pedro, fire in his gaze, Pedro, fist, And a revolver in each word,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 497

Pedro, friend to all, The one who fought19

While Brown’s songs were immensely popular among young protesters, they were often censored and for this reason not a reliable source of income, and the singer’s financial woes and his protest singer lifestyle created tension for Brown and his family. “My economic life was a disaster,” Brown recounts, I had nowhere to live, I had no money, and I had a very bad relationship with my father. My mother committed suicide. I’m not saying that it was because of me, but her suicide was during the whole conflict with my father. She had nightmares that I was going to get killed in the street, she saw me bleeding.20

Brown’s troubles culminating in his mother’s death led him to leave the island for over a decade of self-exile. Although he has continued to compose and record music over the last four decades, his time as a young protester leading the crowds with his guitar was over.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Fight for Vieques Beginning in 1923 the U.S. Navy used Culebra, one of the small islands off the coast of Puerto Rico, for amphibious landing practice, and during Second World War the United States converted Culebra, along with the neighboring smaller island of Vieques—also known as la isla nena—and a base on the main island into a vast military complex. Since the 1940s, Viequenses who had chosen to not to emigrate off the island had been progressively squeezed into a civilian area only a third of the size of the island as a whole. In 1961, the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, wrote to President Kennedy to protest the U.S. government’s plan to expropriate the entire island and remove all Puerto Ricans, whether alive or dead, from the island. There are about 8,000 people in Vieques. They and their ancestors have lived there for many generations. Their roots have grown around family, neighbors, schools, churches, houses, land and jobs. The project involves forcible uprooting of these people—even removal of the bodies from the cemeteries because, we are told, the people of Vieques will not be allowed to return to visit the graves.21

The negative publicity that such a proposal would have—as it was already mockingly referred to as the Dracula Plan—convinced Kennedy to back

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

498

Sounds of Resistance

down, though the Department of Defense secretly attempted to revive the Dracula Plan after his death.22 Having long resented the military takeover of these small islands, and further inflamed by the Vietnam War and the ROTC presence at the University of Puerto Rico, in 1971, prominent political activists ferried over to Culebra and occupied the Navy-held land. Despite numerous arrests at this time, protests continued until 1975 when President Ford ordered the Navy out of Culebra. Undeterred, the U.S. Navy compensated for its loss by intensifying its bombing practice on the island of Vieques. Protests over the bombings and occupation of Vieques took place throughout the next quarter century led by fishermen and local protesters from the small island and bolstered occasionally by proindependence activists from the main island. In 1978, Viequense fishermen, protesting a three-week-long fishing prohibition due to Navy and NATO exercises in the island, attacked the military vessels with slingshots and, at least temporarily, David managed to hold back Goliath. The fishermen’s efforts caught the media’s attention and sparked further mobilization and inspired the 1978 song “Isla Nena” by the folk group Haciendo Punto en otro Son. The lyrics of the song wistfully state “there are thousands of pieces of this land/with thousands of occasions for injustice./There is a little island on which war/steals time from love and from caresses.”23 By the mid-1980s a sharp increase in the rates of cancer, heart disease, and cerebral vascular diseases on the isla nena were linked to the pollution caused by the Navy’s exercises on the island.24 Still, though, Puerto Rican protests of the U.S. military’s activities in Vieques did not reach a climax until 1999 when David Sanes, a civilian guard, was killed by a navy F-18 that had missed its target. Thousands of protesters occupied the island on and off, climbing the fences into the restricted area in order to force temporary halts to the bombings by acting as human shields, and even pro-Statehood Governor Pedro Roselló called for the Navy to withdraw. In February 2000, President Clinton offered to hold a referendum in Vieques to ask the residents whether they wanted the Navy to withdraw. On February 21, 2000, protesters organized a march in San Juan, and an estimated 150,000 people came out to demand that the Navy leave Vieques. Finally, on June 14, 2001, President Bush, promised to leave Vieques by May 2003, but until then, the Navy would have three more years of bombing practice. Between the time of David Sanes’s death in 1999 and the Navy’s ultimate withdrawal from Vieques in 2003, the public outcry against the U.S. military’s presence on the isla nena was widespread, and musicians of different

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 499

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

genres both from Puerto Rico and from off the island played a major role in the protests. While some folk protest singers such as Roy Brown participated in demonstrations and benefit concerts, the Vieques situation brought to the surface a fresh wave of activist musicians. “The new generation of Puerto Rican artists . . . has refreshed the old protest song by using styles more relevant to its generation, including rap and rock.”25 Most notably, perhaps, because of the collaboration of so many different artists, was Tito Auger and Ricky Laureano’s “Canción para Vieques” (Song for Vieques), which has been hailed as “one of the most effective contributions to the struggle against the Navy’s contined bombing.”26 Auger and Laureano, members of a popular Puerto Rican Rock en español (Spanish language rock) group named Fiel a la Vega, gathered the voices of over two dozen well-known Latin music artists to sing the six-minute anthem that they had penned in order raise awareness and support for the Vieques cause. Sung by an all-star cast of international musical celebrities such as the Cuban nueva trova artists Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, Panamanian salsa singer Rubén Blades, and Argentine nueva canción icon Mercedes Sosa, the song highlights the exploitation of the island by the U.S. military, the health and environmental issues that have arisen, and the struggle on the part of the protesters attempting to force the Navy to withdraw. An island tells its story Enveloped in waves of fire ... Sixty years awakened By “peaceful bombs” in the night ... Sixty years with rains Of uranium and munitions Cleaning the windows with gunpowder Waiting for the cancer to react. And this is why the fishermen . . .drop anchor from their cabinless boats In front of the aircraft carriers. And that is how it grew with your voice And by loving the same things Today we are together in song. ... Sixty years of insomnia In order to train citizens

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

500

Sounds of Resistance

Who go to fight for world peace Enjoyed by other human beings. And this is why women and men Turn themselves into human shields And occupy forbidden beaches. . .27

Auger and Laureano, along with all the other artists who lent their voices, completed and distributed the entire project for free. According to Auger, “We were lucky, because we knew many people who wanted to do something about Vieques but didn’t know how to help . . . The majority of things were free: the studio, the engineers, the artists, and musicians. That’s why we can’t sell it.”28 Auger and Laureano’s group Fiel a la Vega had since its inception adopted an anticolonial message. According to José Anazagasty Rodríguez’s article on colonial capitalism and Fiel a la Vega, “The band is . . . concerned with the persistence of the colonized mentality or the internalized colonizer that works as a constant reminder of the inferiority, helplessness, failure, and utter dependence upon the resources and knowledge of the colonizer.”29 The Fiel a la Vega song, “Un pueblo durmiendo” (The sleeping people), for example, contains a clear allusion to a politically unconscious Puerto Rican public sleeping through five centuries of colonial exploitation.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

I have lies in my blood I have poverty and destruction I have an interesting heritage Of 500 years of submission . . . There is a sleeping people30

According to Anazagasty, not only are Fiel a la Vega’s individual songs political in nature, but their concerts as a whole are patriotic events where fans wave the Puerto Rican flag and celebrate nationality. Having attracted the attention of Puerto Rican youth, during the same time as the Vieques crisis Fiel a la Vega lent its popularity to another social cause and participated in a two-day live music show organized by the nonprofit environmental organization Yo Limpio a Puerto Rico (I Clean Puerto Rico) to raise awareness of the solid waste problem on the crowded island. Fiel a la Vega was not at all alone in using music to promote the defense of Vieques. According to Agustín Gurza of the Los Angeles Times, “The Vieques issue has rallied Puerto Rico’s artistic community and sparked a renewal of the old spirit of music with a cause.”31 A Puerto Rican reggae group named Cultura Profética penned the song “Bieke” using a phonetic spelling

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 501

of the island’s name. Released on the album Diario in 2002, the song is a call to continue to fight for Vieques. On November 30, 2000, Cultura Profética joined Fiel a la Vega, Roy Brown, and other artists for a benefit concert held to raise money to fund the fight to end the Navy’s activities on the island of Vieques. According to Rubén Gaztambide Fernández, “This event represented an expansion of the usual artists and styles involved in this type of artistic–political event; moreover, the organization of the concert itself embodied a new approach to political/cultural events” because of the musical interaction among the different artists and all of their different genres.32 Cultura Profética was no stranger to the power of music to advance social causes, even before the Vieques issue came to the forefront in 1999. In their 1998 album, Canción de alerta (Song of Warning), the group put to music a poem named “Por que cantamos” (Why we sing) by the Uruguayan poet, Mario Benedetti. According to the poem sung by Cultura Profética,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

We sing because yelling is not enough And crying and fighting are not enough We sing because we believe in our people And because we will conquer the defeat. We sing because it’s raining in the furrow And we are militants of life, And because we do not want nor can we Allow song to become ashes.33

Alongside the Vieques related songs by Fiel a la Vega and Cultura Profética, in 2001 Puya, a rap metal band from Puerto Rico, released a song named “Pa’ ti pa’ mi” (For you for me) about the situation in Vieques. The song states “the sea is for the fish/the Navy out of Vieques” and repeatedly calls for “power to the people”34 Outside Puerto Rico, the Venezuelan group King Changó also took up the Vieques cause and included a message of “Peace for Vieques” in their concerts and recorded the song “Al rescate de Vieques” (To the rescue of Vieques). In the United States, Ricky Martin, a Puerto Rican pop artist singing in both Spanish and English and immensely popular both on and off the island, brought the Vieques message to a wide non-Spanish speaking audience in the United States in his acceptance speech for the MTV music awards in 2001. Martin dedicated his award to “some kids that wake up every morning in a little island in the Caribbean called Vieques listening to explosions due to some military exercises.”35 These comments echoed a similar speech that Martin had given when accepting a Billboard Music Award in 1999 when he proclaimed, “Vieques, estoy contigo” (Vieques, I am

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

502

Sounds of Resistance

with you).36 Also bringing the Vieques cause to light in the United States was the Puerto Rican group Plena Libre. In 2001, this bomba and plena band “rode in Chicago’s Puerto Rican parade on a float decorated with protest banners. Along the route, it played songs calling for the Navy to get out of Vieques, to the bouncy native rhythms of the bomba and the plena.”37 Not only were Puerto Rican musicians helping the Vieques cause with their words and their voices, several were actively participating in the organized acts of civil disobedience, acting as human shields to stop the Navy’s bombings. Among the many Puerto Rican musicians arrested at these events were Fiel a la Vega’s Tito Auger, singer–songwriter Robi Draco Rosa, and Danny Rivera, a singer and poet known throughout his career for his political activism. In 2002, after his 30-day stint in prison, Rivera published his diary and poems from that time in a book entitled Enamorado de la Paz (In Love with Peace). Similarly, on December 7, 1999, Panamanian singer and activist Rubén Blades was arrested in New York for his participation in a day of civil disobedience in support of Vieques outside the headquarters of the United Nations.38 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, author of “Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias,” compares Fiel a la Vega’s collaborative anthem to “We are the World,” the song produced by the supergroup USA for Africa (United Support of Artists for Africa) to raise money and awareness for the relief of famine and disease in Africa. According to Paravisini, the “We are the World” collaboration has been criticized as a narcissistic and colonial “project through which pop music royalty celebrated itself while showing their inability to reflect upon how the people they are seeking to help can ‘hear’ them.”39 “Canción para Vieques,” on the other hand, emerged from a position of subalternity and reflects a grass-roots effort intended to reveal and condemn the often ravaging effects of colonialism. As Carmen Lugo-Lugo points out in “An Island in Raw Skin: Vieques and the Transnational Activist Challenge to Puerto Rico’s Colonial Invisibility,” the struggle over Vieques was the result not only of colonialism but of racism as well. According to Lugo-Lugo, “there is no doubt that military officials were able to treat Vieques the way they did (both before and after [the death of David Sanes]) because of racism and social class, issues that are, to a certain extent, tightly linked to Puerto Rico’s colonial status.”40 Governor Pedro Rosselló alluded to the racial motivation behind the Navy’s insistence on using Vieques as a training ground in his remarks that “if this were happening in Manhattan, or if this were happening in Martha’s Vineyard, certainly the delegations from those states would make certain that this would not continue.”41 In picking Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard,

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 503

prominent white and upper-middle class localities, to compare to Puerto Rico, Rosselló clearly was painting a picture in black and white. In May 2003, as promised, the Navy withdrew from the island of Vieques and the bombing practices on the isla nena ceased. Nevertheless, the twothirds of the island that had been usurped by the U.S. military were not turned back over to the Puerto Ricans. Instead, those lands were designated a wildlife preserve and have remained under Federal U.S. control closed off to the local population.42 Cleanup has proceeded slowly and cancer rates on the island remain sky high. According to Paravisini, “the land’s high level of toxicity renders the political victory meaningless, at least insofar as the aim of the protests was to restore/create a sustainable agrarian space.”43

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Calle 13’s Urban Anticolonialism On September 23, 2005, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, the well-known leader of the Ejército Popular Boricua (Boricua Popular Army), a revolutionary proindependence guerilla group known more commonly as Los Macheteros (The Machete Wielders) was killed by a bullet through the lung during an FBI raid on his house in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico. A fugitive from the law for over 15 years and wanted by the FBI for his involvement in the Macheteros’ robbery of a Wells Fargo facility in Connecticut to help fund the Puerto Rican independence movement, Ojeda had repeatedly, publicly, and unabashedly taken responsibility for crimes committed by the Macheteros and had even threatened action against the U.S. Navy during the Vieques crisis.44 Although there was little doubt on the part of most of the Puerto Rican public that Ojeda should be subject to the criminal justice system, the questions raised by Ojeda’s killing at the hands of the federal government in a raid that seemed plagued with irregularities immediately raised the suspicions of Puerto Ricans already mistrustful of U.S. authorities. The date on which the FBI undertook its raid was the first detail that understandably made conspiracy theorists out of already-wary ordinary citizens. September 23, though not recognized by the Puerto Rican government as an official national holiday, is celebrated throughout the island as the anniversary of the Grito de Lares (The Cry of Lares), a revolutionary revolt against Spanish rule that began on that date in 1868 in the small town of Lares in central Puerto Rico. Despite a proclamation of a Puerto Rican Republic on the part of the revolutionaries, the rebellion ultimately failed. The date of this short-lived sovereignty is particularly meaningful to members of the Puerto Rican independence movement. On the anniversary of the Grito in 1990 Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, who was out on bond in connection

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

504

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

with the Wells Fargo incident, had become a fugitive by cutting off his ankle bracelet45 and, while in hiding, Ojeda had often used that same date to give clandestine interviews.46 Although the public outcry included accusations that the FBI had chosen the date deliberately in order to intimidate supporters of the independence movement, a review of the incident conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that the date on which the raid took place was coincidental. Whether deliberate or accidental, the death of the well-known figurehead of Los Macheteros on the anniversary of the Grito was foolish. According to Eduardo Bhatia, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration in Washington at the time, “they have created a martyr of this man.”47 The date of the raid along with questions regarding who had fired first and the fact that Ojeda had been left to bleed to death and his body was not recovered by authorities until the next day, “outraged Puerto Ricans of all political stripes—not just the small fraction who support independence, but also those who embrace the island’s status as an American commonwealth and even those who want it to be a state.”48 Among the outraged were stepbrothers René Perez Joglar (Residente) and Eduardo Cabra Martínez (Visitante), members of the as yet relatively unknown Puerto Rican reggaetón duo, Calle 13 (13th Street), which also includes Perez and Cabra’s half-sister Ileana. On September 23, 2005, the duo were in the middle of recording their first album, but were so incensed by the actions of the FBI that they requested permission from White Lion, their record label, to release a song on the Internet just 30 hours after Ojeda was found dead “Querido F.B.I.” (Dear F.B.I.) is a rap written in the form of a letter accusing the FBI of having assassinated Ojeda.49 This is a message From Residente and Calle 13 For the entire government And for all Puerto Ricans ... Dear compatriots Lawyers, teachers, firefighters, nurses, Accountants, drug dealers, partiers, everybody I swear by my mother that today I’m dressing up as a machetero And tonight I’m going to hang ten Marines ... Our flag they’ve filled with piss He bled to death, he bled to death

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 505

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Never on his knees, they’re going to have to bury him standing up With his machete by his side ... The F.B.I. has gotten themselves into a mess They’re fucked. The White House is fucked Now I’m going to explode with style In the name of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos They collapsed my right lung but I still breathe ... I’ll throw rocks at the federal agents And if there aren’t any rocks then I’ll use a güiro ... Fucking asshole government that permits this ... And because of this I protest I protest a massacre in Ponce I protest because of Cerro Maravilla ... To explode the teeth of those assholes There are 3.9 million knives This is simple, I’ve figured it out What we have to do is activate the people Instead of aiming at our own projects Aim higher, up where it’s cold To the north, to hell with the radio and sales White Lion gave me permission to cut this track. . .50

Despite the threats to hang 10 Marines, throw rocks at federal agents, and aim knives up north toward the United States, the duo maintain that the song was not meant to endorse violence.51 Instead, a look at the line “And if there aren’t any rocks then I’ll use a güiro” demonstrates Calle 13’s desire to use music as a weapon, considering a guiro is a Latin American percussion instrument popular in Puerto Rico commonly used by singers to accompany their own voices and often heard during public protests. The use of the reggaetón genre for political protest also constituted an important shift in the type of topics typically covered by the genre. Born in the housing projects of Puerto Rico as a mixture of reggae and rap in Spanish, in the mid-1990s reggaetón was known for sexually explicit and violent lyrics. According to Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Raquel Z. Rivera, of the North American Congress on Latin America, “Running contrary to middle-class values, reggaetón has been attacked as immoral, as well as artistically deficient, a threat to the social order, apolitical, misogynist, a

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

506

Sounds of Resistance

watered-down version of hip-hop and reggae, the death sentence of salsa, and a music foreign to Puerto Rico.”52 Such was the fear of reggaetón that in 1995 Puerto Rican police brought in the National Guard to help confiscate reggaetón tapes and CDs from music stores.53 This effort to clean up or ban the music only succeeded in backfiring doubly as cleaner reggaetón now appealed to middle-class youth and prohibited reggaetón was only made more attractive for having been censored. When Calle 13 burst on the scene in 2005 reggaetón had already achieved international popularity, but the duo’s use of the genre (that they would later distance themselves from) marked a departure from the norm.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Calle 13 redefined what a reggaeton vocalist’s relationship to Puerto Rico should be. Although Calle 13, like other reggaeton performers, typically comment on sexuality, gender relations, and the racism and violence of barrio life, Residente has fashioned himself as the nation’s digestive system, transforming the garbage of desire, politics, and violence into a usable language to criticize the status quo. “It bores me to talk about the system,” he raps in “Tributo a la policía,” a recent song protesting the shooting of an unarmed civilian by a police officer. “The system bothers me like an enema/ So I give the middle finger to the system/And I spit phlegm on the system.”54

Part of spitting phlegm at the system in “Querido F.B.I.” includes reminding their audience of two famous massacres in the island’s history in which proindependent protesters were killed by police under questionable circumstances. With the lyrics “I protest a massacre in Ponce/I protest because of Cerro Maravilla,” the duo is referring first to the Ponce massacre of 1937 in which police fired on protesters and bystanders at a march organized by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to commemorate the end of slavery on the island and to protest the imprisonment of Pedro Albizu Campos by the U.S. government. Protesting because of Cerro Maravilla refers to the 1978 murder of two proindependence activists in a police ambush and the subsequent alleged cover-up of high-level governmental involvement in the incident. According to Oscar López Rivera in “A Century of Colonialism: One Hundred Years of Puerto Rican Resistance,” the 1983 hearings regarding the Cerro Maravilla controversy demonstrate the reasons why colonialism was declared a crime against humanity, alluding to the United Nations’ 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples that condemns colonialism.55 The 1983 hearings revealed that “the colonial justice department and the federal justice department had colluded to cover up the massacre.”56

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 507

The album that Calle 13 was preparing when Filiberto Ojeda Ríos was killed did not disappoint, winning three Latin Grammy awards in 2006, including one for Best Urban Album. Although not all of their songs are political in nature, in 2007 the duo once again turned to music to protest actions by the authorities. “Tributo a la policía” (Tribute to the police) was written to denounce police brutality just 10 days after Miguel Cáceres, an unarmed father of two, was killed by police as bystanders videotaped the incident. According to Residente, “I wanted to leave a testimony about the killing of all these people. I wanted the song to be part of the case files.”57 As with “Querido F.B.I.,” the duo cared more about disseminating their message than possible profits as the group stood outside the San Juan police headquarters to give out 2,000 free copies of the song. They also offered the song for free through their official MySpace page, and over 100,000 fans downloaded it in the first week.58 In addition to the line quoted above about spitting phlegm at the system, “Tributo a la policía” mentions Miguel Cáceres by name along with Antonia Martínez, the university student about whom Roy Brown had sung three decades earlier, and someone referred to as “my brother Christopher,” an allusion to Residente’s close friend, Christopher Rojas, who died after a routine traffic stop. While police blamed the death on a drug overdose, an autopsy revealed that he had died from blunt force trauma. In commenting on the song Residente has stated, “I just want to bring people in Puerto Rico closer together so that when things like [the Cáceres killing] happen, people in Puerto Rico rise up. The idea is to create such a dynamic that when people are wronged, they fight back.”59 While recording their second album, Residente o Visitante, the duo toured in Latin America, giving concerts in all the typical big cities, but they also took a separate trip within Latin America to explore the communities of the continent’s indigenous and African-descended minorities. While on that trip the members of Calle 13 connected with local artists, searched out new instruments used by the indigenous population, and recorded footage for a documentary film entitled Sin mapa that was released in 2009.60 The band’s popularity throughout Latin America, coupled with their efforts to gain an understanding of the many varied aspects of the people of the entire continent helped to expand Calle 13’s political and social focus outside of Puerto Rico. According to a writer for Claridad, “2009 was the year in which Calle 13 established themselves as the voice of the Latin rebellion because their lyrics about inequality, humiliation, and injustice, about unabashed sex, violence, hypocrisy of those in power resonated in every nook

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

508

Sounds of Resistance

and cranny of Latin America.”61 In 2011, Calle 13 released a continuation of their work in Sin mapa in the form of a music video and song entitled “Latinoamérica” that includes footage from their original trip. According to Residente, the idea behind the video was to show “how different groups, countries, races, beliefs connect—there are indigenous people, peasants and in the end we are all the same.”62 On October 15, 2009, while serving as host of the Premios MTV Latinoamérica (Latinamerican MTV Awards), where Calle 13 won the award for Best Urban Artist, Residente, wearing a shirt that read “Viva Puerto Rico Libre” (Long live Free Puerto Rico) took the opportunity to insult Puerto Rican governor Luis Fortuño for his controversial actions in laying off over 10,000 public workers as a result of the economic crisis. Residente’s comments came on the same day that government workers and supporters on the island gathered for a general strike to protest the cuts. Although Residente faced strong criticism for having chosen to call the current governor an “hijo de la gran puta” (son of a bitch) on international TV, the lead voice of Calle 13 defended his choice of words by claiming, “I insulted the governor not only because he was insulting all the [Puerto Rican] people but also because it seemed to me a way to let the world know what he was doing.63 Reflecting on the event two years later, Residente stated that Fortuño was not a true leader and that “a true leader understands that when I said what I said in the moment in which I said it, the words that I dedicated to him were not really an insult but instead a plea from an artist that is advocating for the people and their needs. A true leader would have called me in for a dialogue.”64 Instead of a dialogue, the government cancelled an upcoming Calle 13 Halloween concert in San Juan.65 In a 2012 interview Residente was asked the question: “Does Calle 13 start a musical revolution wherever it goes?” Though Calle 13’s musical style and choice of words is often very different from that of other proIndependence Puerto Rican acts that came before, such as Roy Brown and Fiel a la Vega, Perez’ answer expresses a sentiment that is certainly shared by Brown and Tito Auger, who both also faced difficulties with the authorities as a result of their music and activism. According to Residente, We do what we genuinely believe—it is not what the music industry or even the people want. This causes you to sail against the tide because we’re not looking to sell records or to be heard on the radio. We go out in favor of what we want to do; we want to cause problems. You can’t imagine the number of problems that I get into for saying what I think and assuming a political position.66

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 509

Puerto Rico’s independence movement may be small, but the voices of artists and groups such as Roy Brown, Fiel a la Vega, and Calle 13 have spread the message far and wide. The issues they have helped bring to light, such as police brutality and overreach, military exploitation of a colonial territory, and governmental corruption, strike a chord with many people both on and off the island regardless of their views on the political status of the island nation.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Notes 1. United States Census Bureau, “Table 434. Federal Aid to State and Local Governments—Selected Programs by State: 2009,” U.S. Department of Commerce, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0434.pdf (accessed October 15, 2012). 2. Puerto Rico Decide, “Resultados Plebiscito 2012,” El Nuevo Día http:// resultados.puertoricodecide.com/2012/elecciones/Plebiscito.aspx (accessed October 15, 2012). 3. César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 230. 4. Manuel Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation (New York: Random House, 1972), 225. 5. Ibid., 283. 6. Edna Frese, “Sobre Roy Brown Ramírez,” http://www.roybrown.com/ historia.html (accessed November 15, 2012). 7. Roy Brown, Yo protesto, © 1970 by Vanguardia, VR 1001. As is the case with all of the lyrics in this chapter, translation from the original Spanish is mine. 8. “Roy Brown—Mr. con macana,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMC4tVBMdo&feature=related (accessed November 18, 2012). 9. Cancioneros.com, “Señor inversionista,” http://www.cancioneros.com/ nc/8914/0/senor-inversionista-roy-brown (accessed November 18, 2012). 10. Cancioneros.com, “Monón,” http://www.cancioneros.com/nc/8905/0/ monon-roy-brown (accessed November 18, 2012). 11. “Roy Brown—Mr. con macana,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMC4tVBMdo&feature=related (accessed November 18, 2012). 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. “Antonia Martínez Lagares (1950–1970),” Repeating Islands: News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature, and the arts, http://repeatingislands. com/2011/03/05/antonia-martinez-lagares-1950-1970/ (accessed November 19, 2012). 15. “Antonia Martínez Lagares,” official webpage of the Federación Universitaria Pro Independencia, http://www.fupistas.org/antonia-martiacutenez-lagares. html (accessed November 19, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

510

Sounds of Resistance

16. “Antonia Martínez Lagares (1950–1970).” 17. Roy Brown, Basta ya . . . Revolución, © 1971 by Disco Libre, LP 002. 18. Maldonado-Denis, Puerto Rico, 128. 19. “Canción a Pedro,” Cancioneros.com, http://www.cancioneros.com/nc/ 8928/0/cancion-a-pedro-o-cancion-de-pedro-roy-brown (accessed November 19, 2012). 20. “Estas brasas de aquellos fuegos,” El Nuevo Día, March 18, 2008, Estilos de vida. 21. Quoted in Marie Cruz Soto, “Inhabiting Isla Nena: Imperial Dramas, Genered Geographical Imaginings and Vieques, Puerto Rico,” Centro Journal 20, no. 1 (2008), 178. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 180. 24. Ibid., 181. 25. Agustín Gurza, “Navy Bombings of Vieques Re-Energize Political Protest Songs,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2001. 26. Lisabeth Paravisini Gebert, “Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias: The Emergence of the Environmental Author and Artist,” The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings, ed. Adrian Taylor Kane, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2010), 127. 27. Cancioneros.com, “Canción para Vieques,” http://www.cancioneros.com/ nc/4074/0/cancion-para-vieques-tito-auger-ricky-laureano (accessed November 30, 2012). 28. Randy Luna, “All-star Single Highlights Problem in Vieques,” Billboard Magazine, August 18, 2001. 29. José Anazagasty-Rodríguez, “Colonial Capitalism, Hegemony, and Youth Praxis in Puerto Rico: Fiel a la Vega’s Rock en Español,” Latin American Music Review 23 (2002), 84. 30. Quoted in Anazagasty-Rodríguez, “Colonial Capitalism, Hegemony, and Youth Praxis in Puerto Rico,” 88. 31. Gurza, “Navy Bombings of Vieques Re-Energize Political Protest Songs.” 32. Rubén Gaztambide Fernández, “Profetas de la cultura: Notes on the Puerto Rican Reggae of Cultura Profética,” Centro Journal 16, no. 2 (2004), 240. 33. Ibid., 241. 34. Puya, Unión © by MCA, R 537932. 35. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M07pWJMuwkc. 36. Carmen Lugo-Lugo, “An Island in Raw Skin: Vieques and the Transnational Activist Challenge to Puerto Rico’s Colonial Invisibility,” Latino(a) Research Review (2012), 218. http://www.academia.edu/2132198/An_Island_in_Raw_Skin_Vieques_ and_the_Transnational_Activist_Challenge_to_Puerto_Ricos_Colonial_Invisibility. 37. Gurza, “Navy Bombings of Vieques Re-Energize Political Protest Songs.” 38. Lugo-Lugo, “An Island in Raw Skin,” 220. 39. Paravisini Gebert, “Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias,” 129. 40. Lugo-Lugo, “An Island in Raw Skin,” 224.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Spitting Phlegm at the System” 511

41. Quoted in Ibid., 225. 42. Paravisini Gebert, “Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias,” 132. 43. Ibid. 44. “Puerto Rican Guerrilla Warns U.S.,” Associated Press, December 7, 1999, http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/puertorico/warns.htm (accessed November 30, 2012). 45. “El independentista puertorriqueño Filiberto Ojeda Ríos muere en un tiroteo con agentes del FBI,” El Mundo, September 25, 2005, http://www.elmundo.es/ elmundo/2005/09/25/internacional/1127600191.html (accessed November 30, 2012). 46. “Filiberto Ojeda Ríos,” The Economist, September 29, 2005, Obituaries. 47. Abby Goodnough, “Killing of Militant Raises Ire in Puerto Rico,” New York Times, September 28, 2005. 48. Ibid. 49. Jasmine Garsd, “Alt.Latino: Special Guest Calle 13,” NPR Music, http:// www.npr.org/2010/11/19/131444760/special-guests-calle-13 (accessed December 1, 2012). 50. “Querido F.B.I.,” http://www.musica.com/letras.asp?letra=837726 (accessed December 1, 2012). 51. Larry Rohter, “Continuing Days of Independence for Calle 13,” New York Times, April 11, 2010, 23. 52. Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Raquel Z. Rivera, “Reggaeton Nation,” Upside Down World: Covering Activism and Politics in Latin America, December 19, 2007, http:// upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1049/45/ (accessed December 1, 2012.) 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Oscar López Rivera, “A Century of Colonialism: One Hundred Years of Puerto Rican Resistance,” in Warfare in the American Homeland, ed. Joy James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 207), 185–86. 56. Ibid., 186. 57. Margarita Díaz, “Reggaeton Artists React to a Police Shooting in Puerto Rico,” New York Daily News, September 12, 2007, http://www.nydailynews.com/ latino/reggaeton-artists-react-police-shooting-puerto-rico-article-1.247290 (accessed November 30, 2012). 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ed Morales, “Calle 13, in Search of the Real Latin America,” Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/02/entertainment/ca-calle2 (accessed November 30, 2012). 61. “Calle 13 se convirtió en 2009 en incómodo portavoz de la rebelión latina,” Claridad, January 3, 2010. 62. María de Lourdes Torrano, “Calle 13 eleva la voz por Latinoamerica,” Milenio, August 22, 2011, http://www.milenio.com/cdb/doc/noticias2011/1e8c1391d 6d8c8a64ec0912c534df6ef (accessed November 30, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

512

Sounds of Resistance

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

63. “Calle 13 rechaza que se le encasille como un ‘grupo político’,” Terra, http:// entretenimiento.terra.com.co/musica/calle-13-rechaza-que-se-le-encasille-comoun-grupo-politico,7720c32df4d78310VgnVCM4000009bcceb0aRCRD.html (accessed November 30, 2012). 64. Marcos Billy Guzmán, “Calle 13: Fortuño no es un líder,” El Nuevo Día, November 11, 2011, http://www.elnuevodia.com/calle13fortunonoesunlider1118564.html (accessed November 30, 2012). 65. Rachel Lee Harris, “Puerto Rico Cancels Calle 13 Concert,” New York Times, October 18, 2009, C2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/arts/music/19artsPUERTORICOCA_BRF.html?_r=0. 66. Gabriela Acosta Silva, “Calle 13: ‘Nos gusta buscar problemas’ ” Publimetro, November 25, 2011, http://showbiz.publimetro.cl/calle-13-nos-gusta-buscarproblemas/showbiz/2012-11-26/103313.html (accessed November 30, 2012).

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index Abernathy, Ralph, 9, 116 Abolition, 2, 175 Achebe, Chinua, 332 Acker, Kathy, 218 – 19 Acosta, Gal, 455 – 57 Acosta, Leonardo, 400, 403, 406 Adams, Hank, 33 Ade, King Sunny, 338 Africa: apartheid in South Africa, 251 – 67; Hausa ethnic group, 331, 336; Igbo ethnic group, 331, 336, 345; imprisonment of Mandela, 252; influence on Mexican son jarocho musical genre, 473; musical structures of, 2; 1950s Defiance Campaign, 252; “racial self ” contributions of, 1; Treason Trial of Mandela, 254; Yoruba ethnic group, 329 – 34, 336, 341, 345. See also Afrobeat music; Kuti, Fela; Nigeria; South Africa African American Environmental Thought (Smith), 164 African American hip-hop music, 86 – 87, 96, 102, 104, 107 African American music: Afro-Indian intersections, 102 – 9; antiwar music, 148; Bad Brains band, 286; blues and jazz development, 8; gospel and freedom songs, 8 – 14; history of resistance in, 2 – 4; singer Billie Holiday, 208 – 9; singer Marian Anderson, 207 – 8; slave songs, 4 – 8, 16, 187; soul and funk music, 336;

spirituals (religious songs), 2 – 8, 16, 124, 147; spirituals anthology, 6 – 7; Tower of Power multicultural band, 168. See also Hip-hop music; Rap music “African Influences in North American Indian Music” paper (Herzog), 105 African music: Mandela on the beauty of, 251 African National Congress (ANC): apartheid opposed by, 252; Mkhonto We Sizwe military wing of, 256; passage of Freedom Charter, 253; support for Amandla Cultural Ensemble, 260 – 61; Youth League, 253 Afrika Bambaataa: founding of hiphop by, 88, 238; Kevin Donovan’s name change to, 238 – 39; Zulu Nation of, 88 Afrobeat music, 329 – 52; call and response rhythms and chants, 334; as challenge to legacies of European Empire, 330; choice of language for, 332, 339; James Brown’s influence on, 347; jazz influences on, 335; Kuti’s naming of, 336; Miles Davis’s comments about, 351; political influences, 337; style and message choices, 339. See also Kuti, Fela Afro-Brazilian berimbau (small orchestra), 451 – 52 Afro-Indian intersections, 102 – 9

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

514

Index

Aguilera, Cristina, 205 AIM Song (song), 21 – 23, 35, 40, 42; as American Indian Movement anthem, 21; male vocal range, drumbeats featured in, 22 – 23; Plains singing typified by, 22; powwow song structure typified by, 22; vocables used in, 23 Alabama demonstrations, 114 Alcatraz Island occupation (by AIM), 34 – 36 Los Aldeanos “underground” rap Cubano group, 397, 406, 409, 413 – 16 “Alegria, alegria” song (Veloso), 450 – 52, 458 Ali, Muhammad, 15 “Alice’s Restaurant” (Arlo Guthrie), 155 Alim, H. Sami, 108 Almanac Singers, 71 Amandla Cultural Ensemble, 260 – 61 American Environmental History (Warren), 163 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 49 American Federation of LaborCongress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), 56, 59 American Indian Chicago Conference (1961), 32 American Indian Dance Theatre (AIDT), 38 American Indian Movement (AIM), 21; founding of, 32; growth of, in Minnesota, 22 – 23, 34 – 35; intertribal powwows, 21 – 23, 34; name derivation, 35; 1970s militant stance, 36; North American growth, 36; occupation of BIA headquarters, 36, 37; Plains Indians music, 21 – 23; reasons for Native activism, 21; roots of Native activism, 24; Southern Indians music, 23; UCLA Native American music classes, 22

American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA), 37, 38 American Indian Studies programs, 36 American Nazi Party, 147 American Rock and Roll music: church setting origins, 13 “America Singing” article (New York Times), 75 “America” song, 292 Amnesty International, 344, 347 “Ancestors of Africa” cultural group, 257 Anderson, Marian, 139 Andrade, Mário de, 453 Andrade, Oswald, 454, 464 Andrés Huesca y los Costeños son jarocho ensemble, 474 Andrews, Eliza Frances, 4 Anglican Christian slave society, 2 – 3 Animal Liberation (Singer), 172 Animal rights activism, 172 Anticolonial protest music. See Puerto Rican anticolonial protest music Antifascist coalition (U.S.), 53 Antilynching movement, 203 Anti-Piracy concert (China), 320 – 21 Anti-Vietnam War protest music, 145 – 60; of Bob Dylan, 151 – 56; folk rock, 153 – 54; Greenwich Village, NYC, 148, 151 – 53; 1963-1971 years, 155 – 59; of Phil Ochs, 151, 155, 157; of Tom Paxton, 151 – 52, 155, 157; “What’s Goin’ On” song, 148 Antiwar music: 1960s roots of, 147 – 48 “Apache (Jump on it!)” song (Sugar Hill Gang), 103 “Apache” song (Incredible Bongo Band), 103 Apartheid in South Africa, 251 – 67; exile of musicians, 256 – 57; hanging of Mini, 254; launch of Defiance Campaign, 252, 253; Mandela’s opposition to, 256 – 57; Mini’s

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

activism against, 254 – 55; music of antiapartheid, 255 – 57, 259 – 66; organizations in opposition to, 251 – 53; “Program of Action,” 253; Sharpeville Massacre, 252, 256 – 57; Verwoerd’s creation of, 254 Areíto bachata album (Guerra), 381 “Are You a Scabby?” song, 48 Armstrong, Louis, 140, 335 “Arsenal of Democracy” slogan (of Roosevelt), 72 Asociación Hermanos Saíz (AHS) (Cuba), 410 – 11 The Assassination of Digna Ochoa (Diebel), 359 – 60 Assimilation and allotment era (18711934) (Native Americans), 24 – 29; Circular 1665 federal dance ban, 28; diffusion of Ponca tribe’s Hethuska Society to the Osage, 24 – 25; founding of Society of American Indians, 27; Homecoming Powwow (1926), 28 – 29; “Kill the Indian and Save the Man” mandate, 25; Oklahoma tribes, 24; sanitizing of tribal music, 26 Athens Georgia Inside/Out indie documentary, 221 Aventura (bachata) musical group, 383 – 87 Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (Hernandez), 374 Bachata el musical, 391 Bachata musical genre, 373 – 91; artists associated with, 382, 386 – 88; Aventura’s popularization of, 383 – 87; Borracho de amor (Drunk with Love) album, 374; comments of detractors of, 377 – 78; description, 375; female bachateras minority, 379; freedom associated with, 378;

515

growth of, 376; guitar as basis of, 375, 380; Hard Rock Cafe (Santo Domingo) concerts, 389 – 90; I Love Bachata film about, 391; international spread of, 391; links with Cuban boleros, 374; links with social issues, 379, 390 – 91; male domination of, 379; marginalization of, 375, 380; origins of, 374; prohibitions against, 377; relationship with nueva canción (new song), 373; Reyes’ defense of, 377 – 78; Santa Domingo Blues film about, 375, 377, 379, 382 – 83; Tú no eres varón (You’re Not a Man) bachata song, 379 – 80; upper-/lower-class themes of, 376 Bachata of the Fallen Angel novel (Valdez), 390 Bachatero (singer of bachata music), 375 Bachatta Rosa album (Guerra), 381 Bad Brains (African American band), 286 Baez, Joan, 12, 297, 459 Bahian songwriters, 450 – 60, 462, 464. See also Gil, Gilberto; Veloso, Caetano “Bahleli Bonke” song (Makeba), 257 Baker, Houston, 133 Baker, Josephine, 140 Balaguer, Joaquín, 378 Baldwin, James, 146 – 47 “Ballad for Americans” song, 53 “The Ballad of Janek Wisniewski,” song (Cholewa), 300 – 301 Balls under the Red Flag album (Cui Jian), 320 – 21 Banfield, William C., 15 Bantu Education Act (South Africa), 253 Baranovitch, Nimrod, 319 Barbosa, Zelia, 460 – 61

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

516

Index

Bargaining rights, for farmworkers, 116 Barnes, Sandra L., 17 Basta ya . . . Revolución (That’s Enough . . . Revolution) (Roy Brown), 496 Batista, Fulgencio, 398 “Battle of Little Big Horn” song, 99 Beach Boys, 153 – 54 Beat Happening, 217 Beatles, 153, 274, 279, 284, 314, 340 “Bedroom singers,” 205 “Behind the Bars” song (Mbuli), 262 Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra, 314 Belafonte, Harry, 117; Belafonte at Boston Garden image, 121; friendship with King, 119 – 20, 141; memory of King, 120; Paul Simon’s consultation with, 263 Belafonte at Boston Garden image (Houston), 121 Beltrán, Gonzalo Aguirre, 367 Berlin Jazz Festival, 141 Berry, Chuck, 153 – 54 The Best of Tom Zé: Massive Hits album, 465 Bethânia, Maria, 455 BIA. See Bureau of Indian Affairs Biafran War, 336 Bidó Medina, José Joaquín, 377 “Big Yellow Taxi” song (Mitchell), 171 Bikel, Theodore, 139 Bikini Kill, 205, 217 – 21 Bilingual Education Act (1968), 35 “Billy Jean Left Hand” song, 99 Bird, Christopher, 172 Black activism: in the 1960s and 1970s, 3 Black August Hip-Hop project, 194 Black Consciousness (BC), antiapartheid organization, 252 Black empowerment, 13 The Black Eyed Peas (music group), 163

Blackfire (Dine/Navaho), alternative punk rock band, 42 Black Flag, 285 Black Leggings Society, 39 Black Nationalism, 14 Black nationalist identity, 12; civil rights movement and, 13 Black Noise (Rose), 185 Black on Earth (Ruffin), 164 Black Panther Party, 3, 147, 175 – 76, 337 The Black President film, 330 “Black Sunday” dust storm (Texas), 68 Blades, Rubén, 347, 499 Blanc, Aldir, 462 – 63 Blank Generation, 275 Blatchford, Herb, 33 Blondie, 283 “Blowin’ in the Wind” song (Dylan), 151, 154, 155 – 56 “Blue Magic” rap (Jay-Z), 231 Blues and Guitar images (Houston), 134 – 36 Blues music: King’s “blues transformation,” 136 – 39; as resistance, 130 – 36; 20th century popularity of, 8 – 9 Boal, Augusto, 449 Bob Dylan album, 152 Boleros campesinos (rural farmer’s boleros), 375 Boleros musical genre, 374 – 75, 459 Bonneville Dam, 76, 78, 79, 80 Boogie Down Productions (rap group), 231 “Boomtown Bill” (Guthrie), 71 “Born in the U.S.A.” song (Springsteen), 57 Borracho de amor (Drunk with Love) bachata songs album, 374 Bosco, João, 462 – 63, 466 Bossa nova music, 448 – 49, 456, 459 – 62

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

Bostitch + Fussible (Mexican rock band), 369 Boulder Dam, 78 “Boulevard Knights” song, 99 Bound for Glory (Guthrie), 65 – 66, 72, 74 – 79, 81; banding together of migrants theme, 79; Bonneville Power Administration description, 76; contrasting portrait by Guthrie in, 66; dam system glorification, 78; depiction of music in migrant camps, 75; environmental blind spots in, 79; Faidman’s review of, 65; populist environmentalism of, 81; reaffirmation of citizen’s rights in, 76; reasons for writing, 72; role of central character, 74 – 75; voice narrative of migrant workers in, 77 – 78 Bourdieu, Pierre, 357 – 58 Boyd, Todd, 186 Bragg, Billy, 58 Brand, Dollar (Abdullah Ibrahim), 255 Brand Nubian rap group, 409 Branson, Richard, 279 Bratmobile, 205, 220 – 21 Brazil, 447 – 66; “Alegria, alegria” song (Veloso), 450 – 52, 458; Bahian songwriters, 450 – 60, 462, 464 – 65; bossa nova music, 448 – 49, 456, 459 – 62; Branco’s military regime, 449; canção engajada protest song, 450, 459 – 61; capoeira rhythm and instrumentation, 451 – 52, 461; Chico Buarque, 450, 459 – 62; cinema novo (films) of, 452 – 53; Costa e Silva’s presidency, 449; CPC student movement, 459; end of military dictatorship, 463 – 64; Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5), 449 – 50; Geraldo Vandré (protest singer), 450, 458 – 60; Goulart’s leftist leadership,

517

448 – 49; indirect protests, 458 – 62; João Bosco, 462 – 63, 466; Os Mutantes (psychedelic rock trio), 451, 455 – 56; “presumption of timelessness” rhetorical device, 462; Show Opinião theatrical production, 449 – 50; Tropicália music movement, 452 – 56, 464 – 65; Tropicália: Ou panis et circensis (Bread and circuses) album, 456 – 58; tropicalists, 451 – 59, 461 – 62, 464 – 66; TV Record Festival, 450, 458; Zelia Barbosa, 460 – 61 Brazil: Songs of Protest (Zelia Barbosa Sings of the Sertão and Favela) album, 460 – 61 “Bread and Roses” song, 58 “Brenda’s Got a Baby” hip-hop rap (Tupac), 196, 197 “Bring Back Nelson Mandela” song (Masekela), 264 “Bring the Boys Home” song (Payne), 159 British rock groups, 153 Brown, Dee, 36 Brown, James, 13 – 14, 15, 330 Brown, Oscar, Jr., 140 Brown, Pearly, 127 Brown, Roy, 398, 492 – 99, 501, 507 – 9; Basta ya . . . Revolución (That’s Enough . . . Revolution) album, 496; “Canción a Pedro” (Song for Pedro), 496 – 97; Roy Brown III album, 496; Vieques island protest participation, 499. See also Puerto Rican anticolonial protest music Browner, Tara, 22, 26, 39 – 40 “Brown Sugar” song (Rolling Stones), 153 Brubeck, Dave, 106 Brygada Kryzys (“Crisis Brigade”) (Polish punk band), 305 Buarque, Chico, 450, 459 – 62

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

518

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Buffalo Springfield (music group), 157 Bullard, Robert, 163 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 28; AIM occupation of headquarters of, 36, 37; Indian Adoption Project, 30; Voluntary Relocation program of, 30; worldview differences with Natives, 31, 34 Burke, Charles, 28 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Brown), 36 Bush, George H. W., 230, 231 Bush, George W., 230 Byrds (music group), 152 – 54, 156 Cabán Vale, Antonio, 495 – 96 Cabral, Euri, 375 Calderón, Jose Manuel, 374 Cale, John, 273 “California Dreamin’“ song (Mamas and Papas), 271 Calle 13 (13th Street) reggaetón duo (Puerto Rico), 492, 503 – 9 Call for Solidarity in Defense of the Language, the Culture and the Nation of Catalonia, 440 “Caminhando” song (Vandré), 459 – 60 Canada: Constitution Act (1982), 38; counterpart law, for protecting Native children, 37 – 38; growth of AIM, 36; separation of Native children from families, 25 Canção engajada (Brazilian protest song), 450, 459 – 61 “Canción a Pedro” (Song for Pedro) (Roy Brown), 496 – 97 Canción de alerta (Song of Warning) (Cultura Profética), 501 Canción del Pueblo (Songs of the People) movement (Madrid), 432 “Canción para Vieques” (Song for Vieques), 499 – 500, 502

Capoeira rhythm and instrumentation, 451 – 52, 461 Carawan, Guy, 124, 132 Caribbean: “racial self ” contributions of, 1 Carmichael, Stokely, 337 Carson, Rachel, 166, 178 Carter, Maybelle, 204 Carter Family, 203 Casa de las Américas publicly sponsored movement, 402 Castro, César, 481 – 86. See also Grupo Mono Blanco jaranero ensemble Castro, Fidel, 398; assault on the Moncada Barracks, 402; guidelines for protest music by, 401; invitation to Llach, 429 Catalonia (Spain): Els setze jutges singer-songwriters group, 425 – 26, 428 – 29; freedom of expression restrictions in, 435; Llach’s sporadic ability to perform in, 430 – 31, 430 – 32; Manifiesto de los 2.300, 440; nationalism from dictatorship to democracy, 423 – 43; Nova cançó (New Song) movement, 425 – 26, 427, 432; restricted use of Catalan language, 424; Statute of Autonomy passage, 437 – 38. See also Llach, Lluís Caymmi, Don, 450 Center for Protest Song (Centro de la Canción Protesta) (Cuba), 402 Centro Popular de Cultura (CPC), student movement, 459 “Chacahua (El grito de luz)” song (La Maldita), 366 – 67 Chaka, Yvonne Chaka, 261 “Changes” rap song, 194 Chanting aspects of slave songs, 4 Chaplin, Ralph, 47 – 48, 54, 58 Charles, Ray, 13

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

Charter 77 human rights movement, 292 – 93 Chavez, Cesar, 70 Cherokee Village, Cherokee people’s picketing of, 33 Chestnut, Mary Boykin, 4 China, democracy movement of, 311 – 28; Anti-Piracy concert, 320 – 21; Baranovitch study of popular music, 319; Deng Xiaoping’s Reform, 314; Jones’ contemporary music scene study, 315; OpeningUp Campaign, 314; Tiananmen Square protests, 311 – 13, 315 – 17; Workers’ Stadium concert, 323. See also Cui Jian Cholewa, 301, 300 – 301 Christianity: Contemporary Christian Music, 16 – 17; functions of black churches, 17; and hip-hop music, 96 – 98; introduction in African American communities, 5; in Poland’s history, 295 The Chronic (gangsta rap), 190 – 91 “El Chuchumbé” sone, banning of, 474 – 78 Chuck D (rapper), 190 Churches: as centers of performativity and praxis, 122; contributions to meaningful ideas, 122 – 23; Hymn, Protest, and Prayer images, 123; “Testimony Meetings,” 126 – 28 Cinema novo (films) of Brazil, 452 – 53 Circular 1665 federal dance ban (on Indians), 28 Circular colectivo album (Maldita Vecindad), 357, 358, 363, 366, 369 – 70 “The Citizenship of Dance” essay (Troutman), 26 – 27 “A City Called Heaven” spiritual, 10 Civil Rights Act (1964), 3

519

Civil rights movement, 3 – 4; black identity and, 13; and folk traditions, 123 – 25; Freedom Rides, 10 – 11; King’s influences on, 9, 115 – 16; Mahalia Jackson’s influences on, 9 – 10, 12 – 13; NAACP’s influence on, 115; prayer and song contributions, 122 – 24; SCLC’s influence on, 13, 114, 116; traditional spiritual black music contributions, 12 – 13; white recording artist contributions, 12; Wright’s influences on, 115 Clash (punk group), 272; contributions to political unrest, Northern Ireland, 283; costs of success for, 282 – 83; discovery, refashioning of, 281 – 82; introduction of reggae music to punk audiences, 286; London Calling album, 282; name derivation, 282; Rhodes’ management of, 277; “Rock Against Racism” concert participation, 58; role in British punk movement, 275; Strummer’s front man role in, 272, 274 – 75, 281 – 83. See also Strummer, Joe The Clash (music group), 58 Clean Air Act (U.S.), 173 Clearwater sloop, anti-water pollution project, 80 Cleaver, Eldridge, 146 Clegg, Johnny, 262 Clinton, Bill, 230 Clinton, George, 232 Clinton, Hillary, 230 A Clockwork Orange movie, 275 Cobel vs. Salazar legal decision, 93 Cognitive praxis, culture and music, 122 – 24 Collier, Jimmy, 125 Coltrane, John, 188, 330 Columbia River Dam project, 78

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

520

Index

Com defeito de fabricação album (Tom Zé), 448, 464 Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), 70 Comparsas (street bands), 479, 481 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), 170 Cone, James, 163 Conga: defined, 475; “La conga del viejo”(The Old Man’s Conga), 475; legacy of struggle and protest in Veracruz, 479 – 81; transfer from Cuba to Veracruz, 475 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 48 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 10 – 11, 129 El Conjunto Medellín de Lino Chávez son jarocho ensemble, 474 Connolly, James, 52 Connywerdy, Kevin, 39 The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness Repressive Desublimation (Marcuse), 146 “Conscious” rappers, 89 Constitution Act (Canada, 1982), 38 Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), 16 – 17 Corrido musical genre, 358 – 62 “Corrido para Digna Ochoa” song (La Maldita), 360 – 61 Costello, Kathleen, 390 – 91 Country Gentlemen periodical, 74 Country Joe and the Fish (music group), 154 – 55, 157 Cray, Ed, 68, 71 Creedence Clearwater Revival (music group), 158 Cree folk music, 31 Cronin, Jeremy, 254 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, 155, 157, 158

Cuba: Afro-Cuban dance music, 334 – 35; Asociación Hermanos Saíz, 410 – 11; boleros musical genre, 374 – 75, 459; Cabildos de nación in, 479; Casa de las Américas publicly sponsored movement, 402; Castro’s ouster of Batista, 398; comparsas (street bands) in, 479, 481; Encuentro de la Canción Protesta (Gathering of the Protest Song), 398; establishment of Center for Protest Song, 402 – 3; First Gathering of Young Troubadours (1972), 399; independence gained by, 491; Llach’s performances in, 429; National Cultural Advisory, 403; plight of Afro-Cubans, 406 – 7; Second National Gathering of Young Troubadours, 404. See also Castro, Fidel; Cuban hip-hop and rap music; Cuban protest songs The Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars, Vol. 1 album, 411 Cuban hip-hop and rap music: American influences, 408 – 10; characteristics of, 406; commercial rap, 408 – 9; Festival de Rap Cubano, 408; Grupo Uno hip-hop collective, 408; instruction for rappers, 403; limited artistic commercial successes, 412; nueva trova parallels with, 411; origins/development of, 407 – 8; Papá Humbertico’s home studio gatherings, 412 – 13; popularity of Los Aldeanos, 397, 406, 409, 413 – 16; pros and cons of state support for, 410 – 11; rap cubano music, 397 – 98, 408, 410; “underground” rap, 409 Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), 403, 404 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 149

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

Cuban protest songs, 397 – 416; artists associated with, 405 – 6; Castro’s ideological, cultural guidelines for, 401; establishment of Center for Protest Song, 402 – 3; Fairley’s comments, 399; First Gathering of Young Troubadours, 399; ideologies represented in, 401; indictment of U.S. as topic of, 401; influences, 400, 407; Moore’s comments, 399 – 400, 403, 405 – 6; nueva trova (new ballad) movement, 397 – 406, 410 – 12; role of Milanés, 397 – 416; role of Silvio Rodríguez, 398 – 400, 402 – 6, 413; role of Sound Experimentation Group, 403; Second National Gathering of Young Troubadours, 404 Cuban Rap Agency (ACR), 410 Cui Jian (godfather of Chinese rock), 311 – 28; Balls under the Red Flag album, 320 – 21; biographical background, 311; “Flying” song, 320 – 23; “It’s Not That I Don’t Understand” song, 314; musical background, 314; “Nothing to My Name” song, 311 – 17, 326 – 27; “Opportunists” song, 316; “A Piece of Red Cloth” song, 317 – 20, 323; Power to the Powerless album, 320; Qihe ban (band) membership, 314; “Return of the Vagabond” song, 323 – 25; Rock and Roll and the New Long March album, 312, 317, 320; The Solution album, 320 Cultural Program at Resurrection City image (Houston), 138 Cultural Studies Program en the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 357 Cultura Profética Puerto Rican reggae group, 500 – 501 Culture, music, and cognitive praxis, 122 – 24

521

Culture and Politics (Mills), 146 Culture and Resistance conference (South Africa), 260 Culture Shock Camp, 93 Culture Shock hip-hop showcase, 92 – 93 Curtis, Natalie, 26 Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Deloria, Jr.), 36 Czechoslovakia: persecution of The Plastic People of the Universe, 292 – 93 Daily Worker, 147 Dance in America (PBS special), 38 A Dance of the Forests play (Soyinka), 332 A Dancing People (Ellis), 28 Davis, Angela, 337 Davis, Miles, 188, 337 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 120 Deacons of Defense, 129 Dead Kennedys, 285 Dead Prez (rapper), 197 “Dear Mr. President” rap (Master P), 233 Deceit and Denial (Markowitz and Rosner), 171 Defiance Campaign (South Africa), 252, 253 – 54 deKlerk, F. W., 264 Deloria, Philip, 108 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 36 DeNora, Tia, 187, 188 Densmore, Frances, 25 Denver, John, 314 Denzin, Norm, 203 Depression era (Great Depression): aid to Natives during, 30; writings of Woody Guthrie, 53 Dewey, John, 166 Días, Luís, 375 Díaz-Sánchez, Micaela, 476 – 77

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

522

Index

Diddy, P., 103 Diebel, Linda, 359 – 60 Dixon, Willie, 137 Dizzy Gillespie Performing at Resurrection City image (Houston), 140 DJ Kool Herc, 104 Doggystyle (Dr. Dre and Snoop), 190 – 91 Dole, Bob, 230 Dominican Republic: assassination of Trujillo, 374; content of protest songs in, 378; Hard Rock Cafe bachata concerts, 389 – 90; merengue genre, 374 – 75; role of Radio Guarachita radio station, 377; rule of Balaguer, 378; rule of Fernández, 390; Trujillo’s love for merengue, 377. See also Bachata musical genre “Dope boys,” 191 “Dopeman” song, 190 “Dope” music. See Hip-hop music “Do Re Mi” song (Guthrie), 69, 70 Double meanings, in African American spirituals, 8 Douglass, Frederick: on inherent power in slave songs, 4; traveling slaves of, 12; viewpoint of slave songs, 1 – 3 Dowgiallo, Krzysztof, 300 “Do You Want To Know a Secret” song (Beatles), 153 Dr. Dre, 190 – 92 “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” song (Robinson), 52 Drugs: alcohol use, by artists, 192; as components of musical experience, 188 – 89; Dre’s marijuana use, 192; drug dealing past of Jay-Z, 191 – 92; drug trade, poverty, unjust authority, 193 – 95; East Coast communities studies, 185; Eminem’s use of, recovery from, 183, 189, 195, 198; Hollander’s and Einwohner’s

resistance studies, 184 – 85; and rap/hip-hop music, 183 – 99; as rebellious status symbols, 191 – 93; suffering, remorse in hip-hop drug discourse, 195 – 97; West communities studies, 185; Winehouse’s death from, 193; Wiz Khalifa’s marijuana use, 192 – 93 Drum group music (Native Americans), 22 Dube, Lucky, 261 Du Bois, W.E.B.: on double consciousness of “black folks,” 131; Harlem Renaissance involvement, 12; on inherent power in slave songs, 4; on message in spirituals, 8; naming of “sorrow songs,” 5; on slave spirituals, 187 “Dumpster Diving Forever” song, 175 Dunlap, Thomas, 164 Duo the Sik Prophet hip-hop artist, 93 Duran, Blas, 380 Dust Bowl Ballads (Guthrie), 70 Dust Bowl Era (U.S.), 30, 65, 67 – 70, 72 – 74, 76 – 79, 81 “Dusty Old Dust” song (Guthrie), 68 Dylan, Bob, 12, 55, 81, 148, 297, 330, 459; anti-Vietnam War protest music, 151 – 56; evolving music style of, 154; founding of folk-rock idiom, 152 – 53 Dylan, Jess, 163 The Eagles, 158 Earle, Steve, 81 Earth Day celebration, 173 – 74 Eastern Europe protest songs, 292 – 93 Eco-citizenship and Woody Guthrie. See Guthrie, Woody Eco-protest music, 163 – 78; “Dumpster Diving Forever” song, 175; “H2O Gate Blues” song, 168; Hair

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

Broadway musical, 173; “I Need to Wake Up” song, 178; as a means of education, 166 – 69; “Mercy Mercy Me” song, 166; as a mode of empathy, 169 – 72; as motive for engagement, 172 – 77; of Native Americans, 173; “Only So Much Oil in the Ground” song, 168; “Pollution” song, 166. See also Environmental movement Egan, Timothy, 67 Ehrlich, Paul, 168 Einwohner, Rachel, 184 – 85 Ejército Popular Boricua (Boricua Popular Army), 503. See also Los Macheteros Puerto Rican revolutionary group Ellington, Duke, 106, 140 Ellis, Clyde, 28 Ellison, Ralph, 102 – 3, 107 – 8 Els éxits de Lluís Llach (self-titled) album (Llach), 428 Els setze jutges (Sixteen Judges) Catalonia singer-songwriters group, 425 – 26, 428 – 29 Emcee One (hip-hop MC): biographical background, 91; creation of Culture Shock showcase, 92; definition of “activism,” 90; domestic violence addressed by, 99 – 100; hiphop empowerment efforts of, 87; Hundredfold/One Innertainment production company, 92; Introducing Again for the First Time: Emcee One, A.K.A. Marcus Anthony album, 100; music choices of, 96; nondemoninational religious background, 91 – 92; oppositional subversion style of, 101; religious influences, 97; shared characteristics, 89 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148 Eminem (Marshall Mathers): Recovery album, 163; Relapse album, 163; use

523

of, recovery from drugs, 183, 189, 195, 198 Employment, Manpower, and Poverty Subcommittee (U.S. Senate), 115, 116 Encuentro de la Canción Protesta (Gathering of the Protest Song) (Cuba, 1967), 398 Endangered Species Act, 172 Ensaio sobre a música brasileira (Essay on Brazilian music) (Andrade), 453 Environmentalism and Environmental Justice (Pezzullo), 164 Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism (Schlosberg), 177 Environmental movement (U.S.), 163 – 78; accusations of racist practices in, 163 – 64; animal rights, 172; Earth Day celebration, 173 – 74; Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, 167; Hawaiian Renaissance movement, 176 – 77; “The History Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” article, 171; An Inconvenient Truth movie, 178; legislation, 170, 172, 173; Love Canal community toxic chemical tragedy, 169 – 70; “Mercy Mercy Me” song, 166; 1970s environmental initiatives, 167 – 68; “People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It” campaign, 166, 170; “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” article, 167 – 68; “The Williamstown Study of Critical Environmental Problems,” 167; writers and literature about, 164 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 167 Eschief, Tom, 32 Estudando o pagode (Studying the Pagode) album, 447 – 48

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

524

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Estudando o samba (Studying the Samba) (Tom Zé’), 448 Etheridge, Melissa, 178 “Eve of Destruction” song (MacGuire), 155, 156 “Eyes on the Prize” folk song, 11 Factories in the Fields (McWilliams), 73 Fadiman, Clifton, 65 Fairley, Jan, 399 Faith and Nature (Dunlap), 164 Fandango (in son jarocha musical genre): description, 473; “El churchumbé” in repertoire of, 478; Grupo Mono Blanco’s promotion of, 483; son jarocho’s presence at, 475 Fandanguito (mini-fandango), 485 Farm Aid benefit concerts, 80 – 81 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 75, 135 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation): killing of Ríos in Puerto Rico, 503 – 4; “Querido F.B.I.” (Dear F.B.I.) rap, 504; as topic of a Nas rap, 233 Fear, 285 Federation of South African Women (FSAW), 253 – 54 Feeney, Anne, 58 Female rappers, 211 – 14 Feminist punk movement, 203, 205, 214 – 17 Fernández, DIoni, 378 Fernández, Leonel, 390 “Ferry ‘Cross The Mersy” song (Gerry and the Pacemakers), 153 Festival de Rap Cubano (Cuba), 408 Fiel a la Vega (Puerto Rican rock group), 499 – 501, 508 – 9 Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5), in Brazil, 449 – 50

Fine, Gary, 122 “The Fire Next Time” (Baldwin), 146 – 47 First Along the River (Kline), 163 First Congress of Solidarity, 301 – 2 First Gathering of Young Troubadours (Primer Encuentro de Jóvenes Trovadores) (Cuba, 1972), 399 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 8 Fixico, Donald, 36 “Flash mob” activism, 60 – 61 Flipper (punk rock group), 169 Florida Seminoles, 103 “Flying” song (Cui Jian), 320 – 23 Fogaraté bachata album (Guerre), 382 Folk music: 1940s and 1950s, 50; U.S. revival, 1960s, 80 Folk rock, 153 – 54; British groups, 153; drug influences, 188; role of Dylan in founding, 152 – 53 Folk Songs of North America (Lomax), 51 Folk traditions: civil rights and, 123 – 25; Lomax’s interests in, 148 Food stamp program, 116 Ford, Gerald, 150 Forman, Murray, 186 Fornet, Ambrosio, 401 “For What It’s Worth” song (Stills), 157 Foucault, Michel, 294 “Four Freedoms” speech (Franklin Roosevelt), 79 1491 Nation Presents: MC RedCloud, 98, 101 Franco, Francisco, 423; death of, 435; dictatorship in Spain, 423 – 24; Llach’s “L’Estaca” anti-Franco song, 297, 426 – 29, 431, 433, 440, 442 – 43; Nova cançó anti-Franco musical movement, 425 – 26, 427, 432; student anti-Franco movement, 425 Franklin, Arethra: influence of, 13

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Franklin, Clarence LaVaughn, 127, 128 “Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom!” refrain (in “Think”), 13 Freedom Charter (South Africa), 253 Freedom marches, 9 Freedom Now Suite musical narrative (Roach and Brown, Jr.), 140 Freedom Riders (1960s), 10 – 12 The Freewheeling Bob Dylan album (Dylan), 151 – 52 Friends of the Earth, 167 Friese, Marcus. See Quese, Imc From Santo Domingo to the World: Merengue and Bachata (Velázquez and Ureña), 379 “Fuck tha Police” (rap song), 16 “Fut callejero” song (La Maldita), 362 – 65 Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial Committee (NM), 33 Gangster (gangsta) rap, 15, 94, 185, 190, 212, 230 Garbage Land (Royle), 170 Garcia Canclini, Néstor, 357 – 58, 361 – 62, 364 – 65 Gaye, Marvin, 148, 155, 158 – 59; “Mercy Mercy Me” song, 166; “Save the Children” song, 170; “What’s Goin’ On” song, 148, 155, 158 – 59 Geer, Will, 72, 74 Geiogamah, Hanay, 38 General Citizenship Act (1924), 28 The Genuines, 262 Georgia Sea Island Singers, 139 Gerry and the Pacemakers, 153 Gerstle, Gary, 14 Geto Boys, 196 Gibbs, Alvin, 273 Gil, Gilberto (Bahian songwriter), 450 – 52, 455 – 56, 460, 462, 464 Gillespie, Dizzy, 117, 120 – 21, 140 Giovanni, Nikki, 337

525

“Give Peace a Chance” (Lennon), 157 – 58 Glave, Dianne D., 164, 177 “Glee Club” style songs, 8 Gliroy, Paul, 1 Global Noise, 87 Global real politik (20th century), 145 Godlewski, Zbigniew, 300 “Go Down Moses,” 6 Gospel and freedom songs, 8 – 14; freedom marches, 9; influence of Mahalia Jackson, 9 – 10, 12 – 13; King’s influences on, 9; white recording artist contributions, 12. See also Rap music Gospel rap, 14 – 18; descriptions of Martinez, 15; evangelical message of, 17; evolution of, 16 – 17; Jamaican rapping tradition, 15; potential role of, 17 – 18. See also Gangster (gangsta) rap; Political rap Graceland album (Paul Simon), 263 Grand Coulee Dam, 76, 78, 79 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 74 Grassroots activism, in the U.S., 60 – 61 Great Britain: class struggles in, 59z; food deliveries, during World War II, to, 72; punk music in postindustrial Britain, 271 – 78 Great Depression (1930s, U.S.). See Depression era Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA), 167 Great Society (of Lyndon Johnson), 115 Greencorn Stomp Dances, 104 The Green Revolution (Sale), 163, 166 Greenwich Village (NYC), folksingers and writers, 148, 151 – 53 The Group Areas Act (South Africa), 253 Grupo Mono Blanco jaranero ensemble, 474, 477 – 78, 481, 483, 485

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

526

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Guerra, Juan Luís, 381 – 82 Guinn, Marcus Anthony. See Emcee One (hip-hop MC) Guitar-merengue-bachata mixes, 380 Guthrie, Arlo, 81, 155 Guthrie, Nora, 66 Guthrie, Woody (Woodrow Wilson): attention giving to men employed in public-service projects, 71 – 72; biographical background, 65 – 67; “Boomtown Bill,” 71; Columbia River song cycle, 80; creation of rallying cry music, 147 – 48; “Do Re Mi” song, 69, 70; “Dusty Old Dust” song, 68; and eco-citizenship, 65 – 81; labor, radical songs of, 58; “Oklahoma Hills” song, 67 – 68; “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” 68; songwriting inspiration of, 53; “Talking Dust Bowl” radio show, 69; “This Land Is Your Land” song, 58, 81, 148, 154; “Union Maid” song, 58. See also Bound for Glory Gwangwa, Jonas, 260 – 61 “H2O Gate Blues” song (Heron), 168 Haciendo Punto en otro Son folk group (Puerto Rico), 498 “Hail to the Chief ” song, 292 Hair (Broadway show), 173 Hammond, John, 148, 152 Hani, Chris, 264 “Harlem of South Africa.” See Sophiatown, South Africa Harlem Renaissance: cultural assertions of, 12; Johnson’s activism in, 6 Harper, Charlie, 305 Haskell Indian School (Kansas), Homecoming Weekend, 28 – 29, 42 Hausa ethnic group (West Africa), 331, 336 Havel, Vaclav, 304 Havens, Ritchie, 459

Hawaiian Renaissance environmental movement, 176 – 77 Haycraft, J. Edward, 128 Hayes, Alfred, 52 Hays, Lee, 71 Heavens to Betsy, 205, 217, 221 Hebidge, Dick, 272 Hell, Richard, 275 Hendrix, Jimi, 56, 155 Herman, Ian, 262 Hernandez, Deborah Pacini, 374 Heroin, 188 Heron, Gil Scott, 168 Herzog, George, 105 – 6 Hidalgo, Patricio, 473, 476, 481, 485 – 86 Highlander Folk School, 124 – 25, 132 Highlander Research and Education Center, 141 Hill, Joe, 51 – 52 Hip-hop ghetto gangsta performances, 195 Hip-hop music: African American, 86 – 87, 96, 102, 104, 107; Afrika Bambaataa’s founding of, 88, 238; Afro-Indian intersections, 102 – 9; alcohol/drug use by artists, 184; birth of hip-hop’s voice, 237 – 39; criticism of American politics by, 231; in Cuba, 408 – 10; discourse with politicians, 235 – 37; as “dope” music, 189 – 91; drug use and, 183 – 99; emergence of, 3 – 4, 18, 85; extent of social rejection by, 59; as a form of generational resistance, 186; Grupo Uno Cuban hip-hop collective, 408; indigenous hiphop, 103 – 9; International Hip Hop Exchange, 411; MCs of, 88 – 90; Mitchell on non-African American performances of, 87; Native Americans, 88 – 102, 104; North American, 85; Obama era political rhetoric

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

of, 229 – 46; Obama’s rapport with, 239 – 42; and political rhetoric in the Obama era, 229 – 46; Public Enemy band, 16, 58; religion and, 96 – 98; Rhyme and Reason documentary, 233; social consciousness and, 98 – 100; “underground,” 89; unexpectedness of, 85 – 86; vernacular of antilanguage in, 186 – 87; youth empowerment/self-responsibility and, 100 – 102. See also Emcee One; Eminem; Hip-hop music, MCs of; Quese, Imc; RedCloud Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, 194 The Hips of Tradition (Tom Zé), 464 – 65 Historical memory, 107, 294 – 95 “The History Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” article (White), 171 Hoffman, Elliot, 139 Holiday, Billie, 188, 203 Hollander, Jocelyn, 184 – 85 Holmstrom, John, 272 Holy Inquisition (New Spain), 475, 476, 478 “Honky-Tonk Women” song (Rolling Stones), 153 Hopi nation, 33 – 34 Horne, Lena, 106 Horton, Zilphia, 124 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 52 – 53 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 36 Houston, Robert (photographer): Belafonte at Boston Garden image, 121; Blues and Guitar images, 134 – 36, 137; At Boston Garden image series, 117 – 18; Cultural Program at Resurrection City image, 138; Dizzy Gillespie Performing at Resurrection City image, 140; honoring of King’s vision, 116 – 17;

527

Hymn, Protest, and Prayer book, 123; photography techniques used by, 135; Poitier and Belafonte at Boston Garden image, 120; Preach and Protest photo, 114; Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin Exercising His Vocal Cords at Resurrection City image, 127; Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Resurrection City image, 130; Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick Leading a Workshop in Resurrection City image, 126; use of photography as social commentary, 113, 116 – 17 Howard, Gerald, 145 “How Do U Want It” rap (Tupac), 232 “How I Got Over” (Ward), 10 Huang Xiaomao, 323 – 25 Hubber, Patrick, 147 Huggy Bear, 205 Human rights advocacy: by Ochoa y Plácido, 359 Hundredfold/One Innertainment production company (of Emcee One), 92 Hurricane Katrina, 233 – 34 Hurston, Zora Neale, 8 “Hustlin” (hip-hop song), 195 Hu Yaobang, 311 Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Exiting Modernity (Garcia Canclini), 357 Hymn, Protest, and Prayer (Houston), 123 “I Am My Ancestors” song, 96 Ibrahim, Abdullah, 256 Ice Cube (rap artist), 16, 190, 212, 231 “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die” rag (MacDonald), 154 – 55, 157 Igbo ethnic group (West Africa), 331, 336, 345

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

528

Index

“I Have a Dream” speech (King), 10, 117 “I Hear America Singing” poem (Whitman), 75 “I’ll Be All Right” song, 124 “I’ll Overcome Some Day” song, 124 “I’ll Overcome” song, 124 I Love Bachata film, 391 “I’m Troubled in Mind,” 7 An Inconvenient Truth movie, 178 Incredible Bongo Band, 103 Indian Adoption Project (1958), 30 Indian Affairs Commission (U.S.), 26 Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), 37 Indian Claims Commission Act (1946), 30 Indian Health Board of Minneapolis, 36 Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 29 – 30 Indians. See American Indian Movement; Native Americans The Indians’ Book (Curtis), 26 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), 37 Indian Tribal Justice Act (1933), 38 Indigenous hip-hop, 103 – 9 Indigent Act (California, 1933), 72 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): as emblematic of American labor songs, 49; limited influences of, 48; Little Red Songbook, 47 “I Need to Wake Up” song (Etheridge), 178 Inkhata Freedom Party, 264 The Ink Spots, 255 “In Resurrection City” song (Haycraft), 128 The Internationale (international proletarian anthem, Poland), 58, 299 – 300 International Festival of Song (Spain), 430

International Hip Hop Exchange, 411 International Indian Treaty Council, 37 International Pop Underground, 217 Intertribal Friendship House (California), 32 Introducing Again for the First Time: Emcee One, A.K.A. Marcus Anthony album, 100 Islam: and hip-hop music, 96 “It’s Not That I Don’t Understand” song (Cui Jian), 314 “I Wanna Talk to You” (rap), 232, 234 “I Want to be Sedated” song (Ramones), 284 “I Would Like to be Myself ” song (Poland), 305 Jackson, Jesse, 230 Jackson, Mahalia, 9 – 10; civil rights movement influence of, 9 – 10, 12 – 13; Testimony Meetings participation, 128 Jackson, Mark Allan, 68 Jackson, Wanda, 204 Jagger, Mick, 330 Jaguares (Mexican rock band), 369 Jara, Víctor, 398 Jarocin Rock Festival (Poland), 304 – 5, 306 Jasper, James M., 169 Javabu, D. D., 252 Jay-Z, 1, 191 – 92, 196, 231, 234 Jazz music: challenges to apartheid, in South Africa, 259; instrumental forms, 9; 20th century popularity of, 8 – 9 J.B., hip-hop artist, 93 Jim Crow era, 4, 9 Jiménez,, Ramón Emilio, 375 Jobs creation programs, 116 Johansson, Scarlett, 163 Johnson, C. J., 128, 217

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Johnson, James Weldon, 5 – 6; African American spirituals anthology, 6 – 7; “Lift Every Voice and Sing” composed by, 5 Johnson, Lyndon: King’s denouncing of, 114; role in Vietnam War, 149; War on Poverty, Great Society of, 115 Jones, Andrew, 315, 316, 319 Jones, Bessie, 139 Joplin, Janis, 204 Kaczmarski, Jacek, 297 – 98, 302, 307 Kalakuta Massacre (Nigeria), 331, 344 – 45, 349 Keep American Beautiful organization, 166 “Keep it real” message, of rap music, 89 “Keep on Flowing Dreamy River” song (Haycraft), 128 “Keep Ya Head Up” song (Tupac), 197 “Keep Your Eye on the Prize” song, 12 Kennedy, John F., 145, 149 Kennedy, Kerry, 360 Kennedy, Robert, 80, 150, 115115 Kerry, John, 230 Keti, Zé, 449 – 50, 460 Keyes, Cheryl, 88 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Williams), 42 Kike y su Aché (Latin American rock band), 369 Kill Rock Stars label, 217 “Kill the Indian and Save the Man” mandate, 25 King, Carol, 152 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: assassination of, 3, 113, 150; Belafonte’s remembrance of, 120; “blues transformation” of, 136 – 39; criticism of, 114; criticism of U.S. federal government, 114 – 15; denouncing

529

of President Johnson, 114; Houston’s images of, 117 – 18; “I Have a Dream” speech, 10, 117; influences on civil rights movement, 9; letter to Harry Belafonte, 119 – 20; Nation Institute address, 115; “people-topeople” tour of the U.S., 116, 117; Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 13, 114 King at Boston Garden 1 image (Houston), 118 Kiowa Black Leggings Society, 39 Kiowa Gourd Clan, 39 Kirkpatrick, Frederick Douglass, 125, 126, 128, 130 – 32 Kissinger, Henry, 150 Kitt, Eartha, 140 Kitwana, Bakari, 186 Kline, Benjamin, 163 Korean War, 145 KRS-One (“conscious” rapper), 89, 104 Kuti, Fela (and Afrobeat music), 329 – 52; Afrobeat development by, 335 – 36; Amnesty International benefit appearance, 347; arrests of, 342, 346 – 47; biographical information, 330, 333 – 36; The Black President autobiographical film, 330; ceremonial beginning to performances, 340; challenges to oppression, inequality, 341 – 42, 346 – 47, 349; controversial life experiences of, 330 – 31; cultural and family influences on, 332 – 33; death of, 350 – 51; educational background, 335; group marriage of, 345; Highlife Rakers band membership, 335; influences on, 335, 337 – 38, 348; international successes, 346; Kalakuta Massacre incident, 331, 344 – 45, 349; Koola Lobitos band membership, 335 – 37; Masekela’s

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

530

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

visits with, 340; move to Shrine location, 340 – 41; Original Sufferhead album, 346; police brutality against, 329 – 30; political, musical awakening in London, 335; qualities of music of, 331; recordings of, 342 – 47, 349 – 50; travels to the U.S., 337 – 38, 347; visit by McCartney, 340 Labor Movement (U.S.), 47 – 61; American Federation of Labor, 49; “business unionism” model, 48 – 49; Congress of Industrial Organizations, 48; description, 50; distinctiveness of labor songs, 51; “flash mob” activism, 60 – 61; Hill’s activities, 51 – 52; limbo of working-class consciousness, 56 – 57; music of Phil Ochs, 56; protest movement’s loss of roots in, 55; pro-war sectors of, 56; radical artistic expressions, 58 – 61; rage against strikebreakers, 48; repressive years, 53 – 55; solidarity in, 47 – 48, 52, 60 – 61; song types and genres, 49, 50. See also Solidarity “La conga del viejo”(The Old Man’s Conga), 475 Lafayette, Bernard, Jr., 12 “Laptop composers,” 205 The Last Poets, 337 The Last Poets (radical black writers), 147 Latin America: nueva canción (New Song) movement, 373, 378, 380, 398 – 99; “racial self ” contributions of, 1; well-known rock bands, 369 Leão, Nara, 449 Lee, Murphy, 103 Lees, Gene, 106 Lennon, John, 157 – 58, 347 Lennon, Sean Ono, 347

“L’Estaca” (The Stake) song (Llach), 297, 426 – 28, 426 – 29, 431, 433, 440, 442 – 43 “Let Me Ride” rap song, 190 Let’s Get Free LP (Dead Prez), 197 “Letter to the President” (Tupac), 233 “Let Us Break Chains Together with Our Guns” song (South Africa), 260 Leupp, Francis, 26 Levine, Lawrence, 5 Lewinski, Monica, 232 Lewis, John, 12 Lewis, Rich, 164 Lieber, Jerry, 152 Life magazine, 117 “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” 5 Like a Hurricane (Smith), 34 Lil’ Wayne (hip-hop artist), 193 Linthead Stomp (Hubber), 147 Lippman, Dave, 61 “Liquor Slave” song (Dube), 261 Little, Malcolm. See Malcolm X Little Red Songbook (IWW), 47 Llach, Lluís, 297, 398, 423 – 43; audition for Els setze jutges, 426; concerts in Catalonia and abroad, 428 – 30, 433; contact with Nova cançó musical movement, 425 – 26; Els éxits de Lluís Llach (self-titled) album, 428; emergence on the musical scene, 424 – 25; “L’Estaca” anti-Franco song, 297, 426 – 29, 431, 433, 440, 442 – 43; musical exile of, 430 – 35; sporadic ability to perform in Catalonia, 430 – 32 Lomax, Alan, 51, 125, 137 – 39 London Calling album (Clash), 282 “A Lonely Man” song (Haycraft), 128 “Longile Tabalaza” song (Lucey and Mbuli), 261 – 62 Los Bunkers (Latin American rock band), 369

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Love Canal community (NY state) toxic chemical tragedy, 169 – 70 “Love Canal” song (Flipper), 169 Lucey, Roger, 261 – 62 Lugo-Lugo, Carmen, 502 “Lukewarm II Hot” song (Emcee One), 89 Lumumba, Patrice, 256, 340 Lusane, Clarence, 15 – 16 Lynn, Loretta, 209 – 10 Lynskey, Dorian, 57 MacDonald, Country Joe, 155 MacGuire, Barry, 156 Los Macheteros Puerto Rican revolutionary group, 492, 503 – 4 Macunaíma novel ( Andrade), 453 Mahlasela, Vusi, 257 Makeba, Miriam, 256 – 57, 263, 337 Malcolm X, 3, 14, 330, 337 – 38, 340 La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio (rock fusion group), 355 – 69; “Chacahua” song, 366 – 67; Circular colectivo album, 357, 358, 363, 366, 369 – 70; current events, social justice goals of, 365 – 69; formation of, 356; “Fut callejero” song about soccer, 362 – 65; La Maldita’s song about, 360 – 61; motivation of, 358; “Solín” song, 358; song tribute to African presence, 366 – 68; type of music produced by, 356 – 57 “Mama Africa” musicians, 255 “The Man and the Woman” song (Haycraft), 128 Mandela, Nelson: actions undermining success of, 350; apartheid opposed by, 256 – 57; on the beauty of African music, 251; “Bring Back Nelson Mandela” song, 264; formation of Mkhonto We Sizwe, 256; imprisonment of, 252 – 53, 254; launch of “Program of Action,” 253;

531

Mkhonto We Sizwe formed by, 256; release from prison, 264; Rivonia trial and sentencing, 256; songs about, 261; Treason Trial of, 254; Youth League of the ANC leadership, 253 Mandela, Winnie (wife of Nelson), 261 Mandiga ethnic group (Veracruz), 478 The Manhattan Brothers, 255 Manifesto antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto) (Andrade), 454 Manifiesto de los 2.300 ( Catalonia), 440 Maponya, Maishe, 258 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 9 – 10 Marcuse, Herbert, 146, 156, 159 Marijuana, 188, 191 Marine Mammal Protection Act, 172 Markowitz, Gerald, 171 Marley, Bob, 102 “La Marseillaise” song, 292 Martí, José, 407 Martin, Liko, 176 Martin, Remy, 190 Martínez, Antonia: Cabán Vale’s “Antonio” song about, 495 – 96; police (in Puerto Rico) murder of, 493, 495 Martinez, Theresa A., 15 Masekela, Hugh, 256, 257, 262, 264, 337, 340 Master P (rapper), 233 “Masters of War” song (Dylan), 152, 154 Masuka, Dorothy, 255 Mathers, Marshall. See Eminem Maultsby, Portia K., 8 – 9 Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble, 260 Mbuli, Mzwakhe, 261 – 62 Mbulu, Letta, 265 MC5 (punk band), 273 – 74

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

532

Index

McCartney, Paul, 340 McLaren, Malcolm, 274, 276 – 77, 279 – 83, 287 McNeil, Legs, 271, 272 – 73 MCs (emcees) of hip-hop music. See Hip-hop music, MCs of McWilliams, Carey, 73, 81 “Meadowlands” song (South Africa), 255 – 56 “Mele O Kaho’olawe” song (Mitchell), 176 – 77 Mellencamp, John, 80 – 81 “Memory Lane” rap song, 194 Menominee Restoration Act (1973), 37 “Mercy Mercy Me” song (Gaye), 166 Meredith, James, 136 “Meredith March Against Fear” (University of Mississippi), 136 Merengue genre (Dominican Republic), 374 – 75 Method Man (rapper), 233 Mexico: conga’s legacy of struggle, protest in Veracruz, 479 – 81; corrido musical genre, 358 – 62; farm workers, 69; fútbol (soccer) popularity in, 362 – 65; Indigenous peoples of, 91 – 92, 94, 106; Michoacán earthquake, 356; mixed indigenousEuropean celebrations in, 365 – 66; Ochoa y Plácido’s human rights advocacy, 359; scholarly examination of events in, 355 – 56; son jarocho musical genre, 473 – 87; types/ styles of music in, 356; Veracruzano cultural practices, 475; well-known rock bands, 369; Zapatista Army for National Liberation uprising, 482 – 86. See also La Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio; Veracruz, Mexico Mezzrow, Mezz, 188 Michaels, Elizabeth, 137 – 38

“The Microphone Fiend.” See Rakim Milanés, Pablo, 397 – 416, 499; arrest of, 401 – 2; growing popularity of songs of, 402. See also Cuban protest songs Mills, C. Wright, 146, 156, 204 “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” rap, 196 Mindpower (jazz fusion group), 286 Mini, Vuyisile, 254 – 55 Mini-fandango (fandanguito), 485 Minneapolis AIM Patrol, 36 “Minority Report” song (Jay-Z), 234 Mississippi demonstrations, 114 Missy Elliot, 104 Mitchell, Harry Kunihi, 176 Mitchell, Joni, 171 Mitchell, Tony, 87 Mkhonto We Sizwe (MK), anti-apartheid organization, 256 Mngcina, Sophie, 259 Moby, 104 Moeketsie, Kippie, 255, 256 Mofsie, Louis, 37 Molotov (Mexican rock band), 369 Momaday, N. Scott, 36 “Mom’s Song (Keep on Flyin’)” song, 99 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 9 – 10, 120 Montgomery bus boycott, 9 – 10 Montgomery Improvement Association, 120 Moore, Carlos, 333 Moore, Charles, 117 Moore, Robin, 399 – 400, 403, 405 – 6 Morello, Tom, 58, 59 “Mother Take Me Back” (Haycraft), 128 Motown music, 158 Movement of the Nueva Trova (MNT), 404 Movement of the People (MOP) opposition party, 344 Moyer, Bill, 194

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Mpale, Dennis, 265 Mqhayi, S.E.K., 252 “Mr. Tambourine Man” song (Dylan), 152 – 53, 154, 156 Muhammad, Elijah, 14 Mulholland, Joan, 12 “Mury” (Walls) song (Kaczmarski), 297 Música cachivache (junk music), 375 Música de amargue (music of bitterness), 375 Música de guardia (music of the guards), 375 Music and Conflict (O’Connell), 42 Música para emborracharse (music to get drunk to), 375 Música popular (popular music), 375 “My Girl” song, 148 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 115, 140 “Nanakuli Blues” song (Martin and Wold), 176 Narcotics, 188 Nas (rapper), 194, 232 – 33, 234 Natal Indian Congress, 253 National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), 30 National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), 32 – 33, 35, 36 Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, 496 National Maritime Union, 59 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), 23, 39 National Party (South Africa), 251, 253, 264 National Party of Nigeria (NPN), 345 National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), 168 Nation Institute (Los Angeles), address of MLK, Jr., 115 Nation of Islam, 14, 147, 409

533

Native American Rights Fund (legal defense), 93 Native Americans: assimilation and allotment era, 24 – 29; dedication of “Mele O Kaho’olawe” song to, 176 – 77; environmental protest music, 173; founding of intertribal organizations (1960s), 32; and hip-hop, 88 – 102, 104; NVision nonprofit, 93; reorganization era, 29 – 30; self-determination era I, 31 – 37; self-determination era II, 37 – 38; self-determination era III, 38; self-determination era IV, 38 – 39; termination and relocation era, 30 – 31; termination policy rescinded by Nixon, 36 – 37; Warrior Leadership Summit, 100. See also American Indian Movement Native Americans and the Environment (Lewis), 164 Native Americans Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), 38 Native American Studies program, 34 Natural Protests (Washington), 175 – 76 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), 167 Navaho nation, 33 – 34 Negro National Anthem. See “Lift Every Voice and Sing” “The Negro South” song, 51 Nelson, Willie, 80 – 81 Nemesis hip-hop artist, 93 Neville Brothers, 347 New Deal social programs (U.S.), 53, 59, 69 – 70, 135 New Left politics, 145 – 47, 152, 157 Newport Folk Festival, 139 The New York Dolls (punk band), 273 – 74, 276 – 77, 283, 287 Nico, 273. See also The Velvet Underground

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

534

Index

Ni es lo mismo ni es igual bachata album (Guerre), 382 Nigeria: Campaign for Democracy in, 350; Federal Electoral Commission, 345; identity, culture-building in, 332; Lagos (city) drug problems, 348 – 49; Movement of the People opposition party, 344; 1950s election battles, 345 – 46; 1986 military coup, 347; police beating of Fela Kuti, 329 – 30; power struggles in, 331 – 32, 336; rise of new music in, 338 – 39; Structural Adjustment Plan, 349 – 50; warming to Afrobeat by citizens, 339. See also Afrobeat music; Kuti, Fela Nigerian People’s Party (NPP), 345, 349 Nigerian Women’s Union, 333 Niggas With Attitude (N.W.A.), 190 – 91, 212 “Night of the Living Bassheads” (rap song), 189 – 90 Nighttime Carol musical (Communist Poland), 303 – 4 1960s antiwar music: roots of, 147 – 48 1963-1971 anti-war protest music, 155 – 59 Nixon, Richard, 36, 150, 167 “N’kosi Sikeleli Afrika” (African National Anthem) (Sotonga), 252 – 53, 254 Nkrumah, Kwame, 340 “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” 7 Nordwall, Adam, 32 North American hip-hop music, 85 “Nothing to My Name” song (Cui Jian), 311 – 17, 326 – 27 Notorious B.I.G. (hip-hop artist), 195 Not Yet Uhuru album (Mbulu), 265 Nova cançó (New Song) musical movement (Catalonia), 425 – 26, 427, 432

“Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue” song (Ramones), 284 Ntombela, Man Santana, 261 Ntuli, Sifiso, 252 Nueva canción (New Song) movement (Latin America), 373, 378, 380, 398 – 99 Nueva trova (new ballad) movement (Cuba), 397 – 406, 410 – 12 Nuevo catauro de cubanismos (New Load of Cubans) (Ortiz), 374 NVision (Native American nonprofit), 93 N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitudes) (group), 16 Oakes, Richard, 34 Obama, Barack, 59, 163; hip-hop music, political rhetoric, and, 229 – 46; opening of rhetorical space for younger generation, 234 – 35; pro-Obama hip-hop rhetoric, 230; rapport with hip-hop music, 239 – 42 Oberschall, Anthony, 119 Occupy Wall Street movement, 61 Ochoa, Amparo, 398 Ochoa y Plácido, Digna, 358 – 61; Diebel’s book about, 359 – 60; Kennedy’s book chapter about, 360; kidnap and rape of, 359 Ochs, Phil, 56, 58, 148 O’Connell, John Morgan, 42 O’Connor, Alan, 358 Office of Indian Affairs (U.S.), 25 “Ohio” song (Young), 158 Oil Workers International Union, 71 “Oklahoma Hills” song (Guthrie), 67 – 68 Okosuns, Sonny, 338 Okudzhava, Bulat, 297 “Ol’ Man River” song, 52 One (hip-hop artist), 99

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

“100 Cholos” song, 99 “Only So Much Oil in the Ground” song, 168 Ono, Yoko, 347 “Onward Christian Soldiers” song, 292 “Opinião” samba de morro, 450 “Opportunists” song (Cui Jian), 316 Oppositional identity, 187 Original Sufferhead album (Kuti), 346 Orishas (Cuban rap/hip-hop artist), 411 Ortiz, Fernando, 374 Osbourne, Ozzy, 102 Os Mutantes (psychedelic rock trio), 451, 455 – 56 Osterberg, James. See Pop, Iggy Pagode samba, 447 Paint the Whitehouse Black (George Clinton), 232 Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), 252, 260 Paniagua, Leonardo, 380, 382 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 502 Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 106, 188 Parks, Gordon, 117 Parra, Violeta, 398 La pasión danzaria (Tejeda), 374 – 75 Patton, Ernest “Rip,” Jr., 10 – 12 Paxton, Tom, 148, 151 – 52, 155, 157 Payne, Freda, 159 “Peace on Earth” song (Haycraft), 128 People’s Liberation Army, 312 “People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It” campaign, 166, 170 People-to-people tour (by King) of the U.S., 116, 117 Perry, Imani, 88 – 89, 96, 186 Perry, Mark, 282 – 83, 285 Peter, Paul and Mary, 155 Pezzullo, Phaedra, 164 Phiri musical satire, 258 – 59

535

“A Piece of Red Cloth” song (Cui Jian), 317 – 20, 323 Pietrzak, Jan, 302 – 3 Pimp C (rapper), 193 Plains Indians music, 21 – 22, 21 – 23 Plantations: slave songs on, 1 – 2 The Plastic People of the Universe (Czech rock group), 292 – 93 Playing for Thrills novel (Wang Shuo), 311, 312 – 13 Poitier, Sidney, 117, 120 – 21 Poitier and Belafonte at Boston Garden image, 120 Poland (Communist Poland), songs and resistance, 291 – 307; First Congress of Solidarity, 301 – 2; The Internationale (international proletarian anthem), 58, 299 – 300; International Labor Day celebrations, 294; May Day parades, 294; 1970s, 1980s, antigovernment resistance, 292; religious songs, 295 – 96; Review of Truthful Songs—The Forbidden Songs concert, 301; songs of Kaczmarski, 297 – 98, 302, 307; songs of Vysotsky, 297 – 98; student protest songs, 296 – 99; use of music by the regime, 293 – 95; worker’s songs, 299 – 306 Polish United Workers’ Party, 299 Political cabaret, in Communist Poland, 302 – 3 Political rap, 15 “Pollution” song (Bo Diddley), 166 Poor People’s Action Theater, 127 Poor People’s Campaign (PPC): background, 113 – 16; evolution of, 119; Rinzler’s organization of programs, 125 Poor People’s March, 114, 137 Poor Righteous Teachers hip-hop group, 409 Pop, Iggy (James Osterberg), 273

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

536

Index

Popular Front, 70 – 73 Popular memory (Foucault), 294 The Population Bomb (Ehrlich), 168 Population Registration Act (South Africa), 253 Potter, Russell, 186 Pough, Gwendolyn, 186 Powell, Baden, 450 Power to the Powerless album (Cui Jian), 320 Powwows (Native Americans): categories of, 23; events at, 23, 35; Homecoming Powwow (1926), 28 – 29; Native pride expressed at, 34; role/purposes of, 21 – 22; of SAI, 27; stages of, 23 Prague Spring, 293 Pratt, Richard Henry, 25 The Preludes (Wordsworth), 145 “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” essay (Sachs), 264 – 65 Presley, Elvis, 102, 174 Prima, Louis, 335 “Program of Action” (South Africa), 253 Pryor, Richard, 330 “P.S.A. Native American Suicide” song, 99 Psychedlic music, 273 Public Enemy (hip-hop band), 16, 58, 89, 189 – 90, 231, 409 Puerto Rican anticolonial protest music, 491 – 509; Calle 13 (13th Street) reggaetón duo, 492, 503 – 9; FBI killing of Ojeda Ríos, 492; fight for Vieques island, 497 – 503; Haciendo Punto en otro Son folk group, 498; Los Macheteros revolutionary group, 492, 503 – 4; 1960s and ‘70s antimilitary university campus riots, 491 – 92; police murder of Antonia Martínez, 493, 495 – 96; reggaetón genre for political protest, 504 – 6; Roy Brown and University

of Puerto Rico riots, 492 – 97; “Un pueblo durmiendo” (The sleeping people), 500. See also Vieques island (Puerto Rico) Punk magazine, 271, 272 Punk music: do it yourself attitude of, 286; female bands, 203, 205, 214 – 17; legacy of, 287 – 88; MC5, 273 – 74; McLaren’s involvement with, 274, 276 – 77, 279 – 83, 287; The New York Dolls, 273 – 74, 276 – 77, 283, 287; origins, 273 – 75; in postindustrial Great Britain, 271 – 83; Ramones, 220, 278, 283 – 85; rock music influenced by, 272; Sex Pistols, 271, 274, 275 – 87; and social activism, 285 – 87; The Stooges, 273, 275, 284, 287; in the U.S., 283 – 85; Warhol’s involvement, 273 Qihe ban (Chinese band), 314 Quayle, Dan, 230 Queely, Andrea, 194 – 95 Queen Latifah, 212 – 13, 409 Queen of the Rockabilly. See Jackson, Wanda “Querido F.B.I.” (Dear F.B.I.) rap, 504 Quese, Imc (hip-hop MC): activism of, 90; biographical background, 92 – 93; domestic violence addressed by, 99 – 100; hip-hop empowerment efforts of, 87; music choices of, 96; oppositional subversion style of, 101; rap music performed by, 93; religious influences, 97; scholarlyteacher personality of, 94; shared characteristics, 89; Vans Warped Tour, 100 Quine, Bob, 283 Radio Freedom (South Africa), 259 Radio Guarachita radio station (Dominican Republic), 377, 381 – 82

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

Radio stations: gospel music played on, 9 Rage Against the Machine (music group), 58, 59 The Raincoats, 205 Rakim (rapper), 189 Ramet, Pedro, 304 Ramones (American punk band), 220, 278, 283 – 85; self-portrayal as “antiBeatles,” 284; songs of, 284 – 85; tour of Britain, 283 – 84 Rap cubano music, 397 – 98, 408, 410 Rap music: black activist rap, 4; commercial Cuban rap, 408 – 9; “conscious” rappers, 89; description, 14 – 15; female rappers, 211 – 14; gangsta rap, 15, 94, 185, 190, 212, 230; “keep it real” message of, 89; origins, 3; political rap, 15; politics of drug discourse in, 183 – 99; “Querido F.B.I.” (Dear F.B.I.) rap, 504; of Quese, Imc, 93; reality rap, 212; role in African American culture, 18; sexual aspect of, 89; “underground” Cuban rap, 409. See also Gospel rap; individual rappers and rap songs Rastafarianism, 286 Rathbee, Dolly, 255 Razom Nas Bahato (Together We Are Many) (Ukraine anthem), 293 R&B music: church setting origins, 13; rapping music combined with, 15 Reagan, Nancy, 230 Reagan, Ronald, 16, 57, 230 – 31 Reagon, Bernice Johnson, 124, 139 Reality rap, 212 Recovery album (Eminem), 163 “Red and Blue” song (Redbone), 173 Redbone (Native American band), 173 RedCloud (hip-hop MC), 87; activism by, 90 – 91; biographical background, 94; domestic violence

537

addressed by, 99 – 100; hip-hop empowerment efforts of, 87; Mexican heritage of, 91, 94; music choices of, 95 – 96; oppositional subversion style of, 101; release of 1491 Nation Presents: MC RedCloud, 98, 101; religious influences, 97; shared characteristics, 89; taken name derivation, 94 – 95; trickster-like nature of, 95 Redding, Otis, 13 Red Earth Festival (Oklahoma City, 2011), 39 Red Lake Chippewa, 32 Reed, Lou, 273 Reggae music: Cultura Profética Puerto Rican group, 500 – 501; introduction to punk audience by Clash, 286 Reggaetón genre for political protest, 409 – 10, 412, 504 – 6 Relapse album (Eminem), 163 Religion: and hip-hop music, 96 – 98; introduction of Christianity in African American communities, 5; religious songs of Poland, 295 – 96 Reorganization era (1934-1946) (Native Americans), 29 – 30 Residente o Visitante album (Calle 13), 507 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), 170 “Respect” song, 13 Rethinking ‘Revival’ of American Ethnic Music (Slobin), 26 “Return of the Vagabond” song (Cui Jian, Huang Xiaomao), 323 – 25 Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin Exercising His Vocal Cords at Resurrection City image (Houston), 127 Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Resurrection City image (Houston), 130

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

538

Index

Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick Leading a Workshop in Resurrection City image (Houston), 126 Review of Truthful Songs—The Forbidden Songs concert (Poland), 301 Reyes, Frank, 390 Reyes, Teodoro, 375, 377 – 78 Rhianna, 205 Rhodes, Bernie, 277 Rhyme and Reason hip-hop documentary, 233 Rice, Condoleezza, 230 Rinzler, Ralph, 125, 137 Ríos, Filberto Ojeda, 492, 503 – 5, 507 Riot grrrls (feminist punk movement), 203, 205, 214 – 25; backlash and the legacy of, 222 – 24; Beat Happening, 217; Bikini Kill, 205, 217 – 21; Bratmobile, 205, 220 – 21; daytime TV talk shows courting of, 222 – 23; evolution of, 214 – 16; gender hegemony challenged by, 219 – 20; Heavens to Betsy, 205, 217, 221; International Pop Underground Conference, 217; Kill Rock Stars label, 217; locations of development, 216 – 17; The Raincoats, 205, 215; self-reflection inspired by, 222; The Slits, 205, 215 Roach, Max, 140 Robeson, Paul, 52 – 53, 59, 140 Robles-Cahero, Antonio, 475, 480 Roc-a-fella Records, 191 “Roc Boys,” 191 “Rock Against Racism” concert, 58, 283 Rock and Roll and the New Long March album (Cui Jian), 312, 317, 320 Rock and roll music: in Communist Poland, 304 – 6; English rock style, 153; punk music influences on, 272 Rock’n’Roll High School movie, 284 Rockwell, George, 147

Rodgers, Jimmie, 71 Rodríguez, Mélida, 379 Rodríguez, Silvio, 398 – 400, 402 – 6, 413, 429, 499 Rogers, Will, 71 Rolling Stones, 153, 314 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 69, 71; “Arsenal of Democracy” slogan, 72; “Four Freedoms” speech, 79 Roosevelt, Theodore: endorsement of The Indians’ Book, 26 Rooted in the Earth (Glave), 164, 177 Rose, Tricia, 185, 186, 191 Rosner, David, 171 Ross, Rick, 195 Rosselson, Leon, 58 ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), 491, 493, 495, 498. See also University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations Rotten, Johnny, 271, 277 – 81. See also Sex Pistols Rovics, David, 61 Roxy Music, 287 Roy Brown III album (Roy Brown), 496 Royle, Elizabeth, 170 Ruether, Rosemary, 164, 177 Ruffin, Kimberly N., 164 Run DMC, 104 Sachs, Albie, 264 – 65 SAI. See Society of American Indians Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 31, 154 – 55, 156 Sale, Kirkpatrick, 163, 166 Sandler, Ronald, 164 Santa Domingo Blues film, 375, 377, 379, 382 – 83 Santamaría, Haydée, 402 – 3 Santos, Eladio Romero, 375 – 76 “Satisfaction” song (Rolling Stones), 153 Save the Bay, 167

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

“Save the Children” song (Gaye), 170 “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” song, 13 – 14 Schlesinger, Arthur, 146, 151 Schlosberg, David, 177 Schrade, Paul, 139 Scott, James, 185, 191 The Secret Life of Plants (Bird and Tompkins), 172 Seeger, Pete, 12, 31, 54; Clearwater sloop, anti-water pollution project, 80; labor, radical songs of, 58; morale/unity-building workshops of, 139; social movement activism by, 55; “Turn! Turn! Turn!” song, 156; on “We Shall Overcome,” 124 Segura, Luís, 377, 380 Selepe, Sydney, 258 Self-determination eras for Native Americans: era I (1961-1973), 31 – 37; era II (1974-1982), 37 – 38; era III (1983-1993), 38; era IV (1993-2012), 38 – 39 Seminole-African musical interactions, 104 Seminole Indians, 92 – 93, 96 “Senzeni na?” South African liberation song, 265 Separate Amenities Act (South Africa), 253 Sexism and God Talk (Ruether), 164, 177 Sex Pistols (punk band), 271, 274, 275 – 87; British media review of, 276; Johnny Rotten’s front man role, 271, 277 – 81; McLaren’s role in, 276 – 77, 279 – 81; menacing personal of, 285; Today talk show appearance, 275; U.S. tour, 284. See also Rotten, Johnny Sharpeville Massacre (South Africa), 252, 256 – 57 Sharpton, Al, 230

539

Shock-B (Brian Frejo) hip-hop artist, 93 “Shona Molonga” freedom song (South Africa), 260 “Shot Down” song (Mbuli), 262 “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” article (Stone), 167 – 68 Show Opinião theatrical production (Brazil), 449 Silent Spring (Carson), 166, 178 Simmons, Lucille, 124 Simmons, Russell, 194 Simon, David, 194 Simon, Paul, 263 Simon and Garfunkel, 314 Simone, Nina, 337 Sinatra, Frank, 120 Sinclair, John, 274 Singer, Pete, 172 “Singing revolution.” See Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004 “Single Girl, Married Girl” song (Carter Family), 203, 204 Sisulu, Albertina, 254 Sisulu, Walter, 254 Situationist musical experiment (McLaren), 279 The Sixties (Howard), 145 Slave songs, 4 – 8; chanting aspects of, 4; of the Civil War era, 8; elusive resistance in, 4 – 5; influences on American culture, 8; nationalism/ black identity and interpretations of, 7; rap music relation to, 16; types of resistance in, 16; viewpoint of Douglass on, 1 – 2 Sleepy Eye hip-hop MC collaborator, 93 The Slits, 205, 215 Slobin, Mark, 26 Small, Mark, 382 Smith, Kimberly K., 164

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

540

Index

Smith, Patti, 204 – 5 Smith, Paul Chaat, 34, 39 Smithsonian Institution, 125 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Sniffin Glue (Ramones fanzine), 285 Snoop Dogg, 190 – 91, 232 Social Security Amendments (1967), 116 Society of American Indians (SAI), 27 The Sociological Imagination (Wright), 204 Solidarity: in the African American community, 9, 12; described, 47 – 48; emotions associated with, 52; in the U.S. Labor Movement, 47 – 48, 52, 60 – 61 “Solidarity Forever” song (Chaplin), 47 – 48, 54, 58 “Solín” song (La Maldita), 358 “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” song (Guthrie), 68 The Solution album (Cui Jian), 320 Song forms, 154 – 55, 159 Son jarocho musical genre (Mexico), 473 – 87; African influences on, 473; Andrés Huesca y los Costeños son ensemble, 474; banning of “El Chuchumbé” sone, 474 – 78; banning of specific sones, 475 – 78; El Conjunto Medellín de Lino Chávez ensemble, 474; fandango component, 473, 475, 478, 483, 485; Grupo Mono Blanco jaranero ensemble, 474, 477 – 78, 481, 483, 485; hidden histories of resistance in, 475; historical background, 473; instrumentation, 474 – 75; zapateado (percussive dance), 473, 476, 485 Sophiatown, South Africa (“Harlem of South Africa”), 255 – 56, 261 Sorrow songs, 5

Sosa, Mercedes, 398, 499 “So that Poland be Poland” song (Pietrzak), 302 – 3, 307 Sotonga, Enoch Mankai, 252 Soul Force journal (SLCC), 128 Soul on Ice (Baldwin), 147 Sound Experimentation Group (Cuba), 403 South Africa: BC movement, student uprisings, 257; Culture and Resistance conference, 260; exile of musicians from, 256 – 57; music of antiapartheid, 255 – 57, 259 – 66; National Party, 251, 253, 264; 1980s internal disruption period, 261; opposition to British colonial authority, 238; Oscar Brown’s musical narrative on racial inequalities in, 140; police brutality in, 261 – 62; Radio Freedom, 259; role of music in anti-apartheid movement, 251 – 67; Sharpeville Massacre, 252, 256 – 57; Sophiatown and musical culture of, 255 – 56, 261; Soweto uprising, 257 – 58; “toyi-toyi” jogging dance, 262; Treason Trial of Mandela and Mini, 254; UN cultural boycott of, 263. See also Apartheid in South Africa South African Communist Party (SACP), 252, 253 South African Congress of Trades Unions (SACTU), 252, 254 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 13, 114, 138; fundraising for, 119; “people-topeople” tour of the U.S., 116; Soul Force journal, 128 Soyinka, Wole, 332 Spain: Canción del Pueblo (Songs of the People) movement, 432; defeat in Spanish American War, 491; Franco’s military dictatorship

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Index

in, 423 – 24; International Festival of Song, 430; loosening cultural restrictions in, 424; post-Franco transition to democracy, 435 – 43. See also Catalonia; Llach, Lluís Spann, Otis, 137 Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World (Kennedy), 360 Spears, Britney, 205 Spice Girls, 223 Spirituals (religious songs), 4 – 8; in Anglican Christian slave society, 2 – 3; authenticity issue in contemporary spirituals, 8; hope and despair generated by, 5; “I’ll Overcome,” 124; Johnson’s African American spirituals anthology, 6 – 7; rap music relation to, 16; themes in, 7 – 8; types of resistance in, 16. See also Gospel and freedom songs; Slave songs Springsteen, Bruce, 57 Stalinism, 292 Starr, Edwin, 158 “The Star Spangled Banner,” 292 Steinbeck, John, 74, 81 Stevens, Cat (folk rock singer), 170 Stills, Stephen, 157 Stock Market Crach (1929, U.S.), 30 Stoll, Mark, 164 Stoller, Mike, 152 Stone, Christopher D., 167 – 68 The Stooges (punk band), 273, 275, 284, 287 Straight Outta Compton (Niggas With Attitude), 190 “Strange Fruit” song (Holiday), 203 Structural Adjustment Plan (SAP) (Nigeria), 349 – 50 Strummer, Joe, 272, 274 – 75, 281 – 83. See also Clash Stuckey, Sterling, 187

541

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 124 Student protest songs, in Communist Poland, 296 – 99 Sugar Hill Gang, 103 Sun Ra, 330 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” song, 148 Szwed, John F., 14 – 15 Taft-Hartley Act (1947), 54 “Talking Dust Bowl” radio show (Guthrie), 69 Talking Heads, 283 “Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues” song (Paxton), 151 Tea for the Tillerman album (Stevens), 170 Teatro Campesino, 127, 139 Tejeda, Darío, 374 – 75 Temperance movement (U.S.), 292 Terkel, Studs, 10, 70 Termination and relocation era (1946-1961) (Native Americans), 30 – 31 “Testimony Meetings,” 126 – 27 Things Fall Apart novel (Achebe), 332 “Think” song, 13 33 Revolutions per Minute (Lynskey), 57 “This Land Is Your Land” song (Guthrie), 58, 81, 148, 154 Thom, Mel, 33 Thomas, Hank, 11 Thunderbird American Indian Dancers (NYC), 37 Tiananmen Square democracy protests (1989), 311 – 13, 315 – 17 The Times They Are a-Changin’ album (Dylan), 152 “The Times They Are a-Changing” song (Dylan), 152, 154 Tindley, Charles, 124 T. Love (Polish rock band), 306

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

542

Index

To Love the Wind and Rain (Glave and Stoll), 164 “Tomahawk Chop” (Florida Seminoles), 103 Tompkins, Peter, 172 Too Short (rapper), 212, 230 Topete y su Trova (Latin American rock band), 369 “To the Last Whale . . . Critical Mass/ Wind on the Water” song (Crosty and Nash), 172 Tower of Power (music group), 168 Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), 170 “Toyi-toyi” jogging dance (South Africa), 262 Treason Trial (South Africa), 254 A Tribe Called Quest, 409 Tribe Called Quest (“conscious” rapper), 89 Tropicália music movement (Brazil), 452 – 56, 464 – 65 Tropicália: Ou panis et circensis (Bread and circuses) album, 456 – 58 Tropicalists (Brazil), 451 – 59, 461 – 62, 464 – 66 Troutman, John, 26 – 27 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas, 374 Truman Doctrine (1947), 53 Tú no eres varón (You’re Not a Man) bachata song, 379 – 80 Tupac Shakur (rapper), 194, 196, 197, 233 Turner, Nat, 5 “Turn! Turn! Turn!” song (Seeger), 156 Turok, Ben, 254 – 55 TV Record Festival (Brazil), 450, 458 2 Live Crew, 212 2Pacalypse Now hip-hop rap album (Tupac), 196 – 97, 231 Udall, Stewart, 80 Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004, 293

“Umshini Wami (My Machine Gun)” song, 265 “Underground” of hip-hop music, 89 UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 38, 39 UN Human Rights Commission, 39 “Union Maid” song (Guthrie), 58 “Union Town” song (Morello), 59 United Auto Workers, 139 United Bay Area Council of American Indian Affairs, Inc. (United Council), 32 United Democratic Front (UDF), 252 United States (U.S.): Bilingual Education Act, 35; Civil Rights Act, 3; cultural influences of slave songs, 8; Dust Bowl Era, 30, 65, 67 – 70, 72 – 74, 76 – 79, 81; General Citizenship Act, 28; grassroots activism in, 60 – 61; growth of AIM, 36; hip-hop music origins, 59; Indian Child Welfare Act, 37; Indian Claims Commission Act, 30; Indian Reorganization Act, 29 – 30; Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, 37; Indian Tribal Justice Act, 38; Menominee Restoration Act, 37; Native Americans Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, 38; Native termination rescinded by Nixon, 36 – 37; New Deal social programs, 53, 59, 69 – 70, 135; New Left politics, 145 – 47, 152, 157; 1960s folk music revival, 80; punk music in, 283 – 85; Reagan era, 16; separation of Native children from families, 25; Taft-Hartley Act, 54; Temperance movement, 292; Truman Doctrine, 53; Voting Rights Act, 56. See also Bureau of Indian Affairs; Civil rights movement “The Universal Soldier” song (SaintMarie), 31, 154 – 55, 156

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Index

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 22 University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, 492 – 97 “Un pueblo durmiendo” (The sleeping people) song (Fiel a la Vega), 500 Ureña, Alejandro, 379 U.S. Department of Interior, 80 Valdez, Pedro Antonio, 390 Vale, João do, 449 Vandré, Geraldo, 450, 458 – 60 Velázquez, Carlos, 379 Veloso, Caetano (Bahian songwriter), 450 – 51, 453 – 60, 464 – 65 The Velvet Underground (punk band), 273 Vena, VIncent, 262 Ventura, Aridia, 379 Veracruz, Mexico: arpa (harp) use in, 474; “El Chuchumbé” sone in, 477; conga’s legacy of struggle and protest in, 479 – 81; conga’s transfer from Cuba to, 475; cultural practices, 475; Holy Inquisition in, 478; immigrant transfer from Cuba to, 476; Mandiga ethnic group, 478; Ochoa y Plácido’s human rights advocacy in, 359; son jarocho’s history in, 473, 475 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 254 Vicious, Sid, 274, 279 – 80 Vieques island (Puerto Rico): Canción de alerta (Song of Warning) song, 501; “Canción para Vieques” protest song, 499 – 500, 502; Governor Marín’s protests to Kennedy, 497 – 98; Haciendo Punto en otro Son folk group, 498; protests by fisherman vs. fishing ban, 498; protests by musicians on, 498 – 99; U.S. Navy bombing practice on, 491 – 92, 498; U.S. Navy withdrawal from, 503

543

“Vietnam” song (Ochs), 151 Vietnam War: anti-war demonstrations, 50 – 51, 56, 492 – 95, 498; escalation of, 3; King’s opposition, 114; overview of, 148 – 50; post-war ebbing of U.S. activism, 58; protest music against, 145 – 60; working class opposition to, 56. See also Anti-Vietnam War protest music Virgin Records, 279 Voluntary Relocation Program (for Native Americans), 30 Voting Rights Act (1965), 56 Vysotsky, Vladimir, 297 – 98 “The Wabash Cannonball” folk melody, 71 “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” song, 55 Walker, T. Bone, 153 Walker, Theodore, Jr., 163 Walter, Little, 137 Wang Shuo, 311, 312 – 13 Ward, Clara, 10 Warhol, Andy, 273 War on Poverty, 115 Warren, Louis, 163 Warrior, Clyde, 32 – 33 Warrior, Robert Allen, 34 Warrior Leadership Summit, 100 “War” song, 158 Washington, Sylvia, 175 – 76 Washington demonstrations, 114 Waters, Muddy, 137 – 38, 153 Watkins, Craig, 186 “We are the World” collaborative anthem (USA for Africa), 502 Weavers, 68, 71 “We Don’t Want Commies” song (Poland), 302 “We Got it For Cheap” rap, 196 Werner, Craig, 8, 9, 10 “We Shall Overcome” song, 12, 55, 58, 124

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

544

Index

Westmoreland, William, 149 – 50 “We Want to be Ourselves” song (Poland), 305 “What’s Goin’ On” song (Gaye), 148, 155, 158 – 59 “Which Side Are You On?”, 58 White, John, 5 White, Lynn, 171 White Panther Party, 274 Whitman, Walt, 148 Williams, Raymond, 42 “The Williamstown Study of Critical Environmental Problems,” 167 Winehouse, Amy, 193 “Winning My Dear Love” song (Chaka), 261 The Wire tv show, 194 Wiz Khalifa (rapper), 192 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World Wold, Thor, 176 Women, and the music of cultural resistance: backlash and the legacy of riot grrrl, 222 – 24; Bikini Kill, 205, 217 – 21; Billie Holiday, 188, 203, 208 – 9; Bratmobile, 205, 220 – 21; Carter Family, 204, 206 – 7; female punk bands, 205; female rappers, 211 – 14; Heavens to Betsy, 205, 217, 221; Loretta Lynn, 209 – 10; Marian Anderson, 207 – 8; Maybelle Carter’s feminism, 204; Patti Smith, 204 – 5, 210 – 11; riot grrrl feminist punk movement, 203, 205, 214 – 25 Women and the music of cultural resistance, 203 – 25 Woodstock Festival (1969), 51, 56, 271 “Words of Wisdom” rap (Tupac), 231 Worker’s songs, in Communist Poland, 299 – 306; Nighttime Carol

musical, 303 – 4; political cabaret, 302 – 3; rock music, 304 – 6 Workers’ Stadium concert (China), 323 Working-class solidarity, 47 World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC), 261, 343 Wounded Knee Hamlet standoff (by AIM), 36 Wright, Marian: NAACP address before Congress, 115 X-Clan (“conscious” rapper), 89 “Yankee Doodle,” 292 Yeshitela, Omali, 197 “Yes We Can” video (Black Eye Peas), 163 Yoruba ethnic group (West Africa), 329 – 34, 336, 341, 345 Young, Neil, 80 – 81, 158 Youth League of the African National Congress, 253 Zapateado (percussive dance), 473, 476, 485 Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), 482 – 86 Zé, Tom, 447 – 48, 450, 456 – 57, 464, 465; The Best of Tom Zé: Massive Hits, 465; Com defeito de fabricação album, 448, 464; Estudando o pagode album, 447 – 48; Estudando o samba album, 448; The Hips of Tradition, 464 – 65; manipulation, deconstruction, repurposing of found musical objects by, 448 Zotigh, Dennis, 23 Zulu, Lindiwe, 257 Zulu Nation, 88 – 89, 239 Zwerg, Jim, 11

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

About the Editors EUNICE ROJAS, PhD, is assistant professor of Spanish at Lynchburg College. Her publications include contributions to ABC-CLIO’s Encyclopedia of Latin Music; “Ricardo Piglia’s Schizophrenic Machine: The Madness of Resistance in La ciudad ausente; ” and “Madness as Redemption in ‘Circe.’” Rojas holds a doctorate in Spanish with an emphasis on cultural studies from the University of Virginia.

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

LINDSAY MICHIE, PhD, is assistant professor of history at Lynchburg College and the author of The End of Apartheid in South Africa and Portrait of an Appeaser: Robert Hadow, First Secretary in the British Foreign Office, 1931–1939. Michie holds a doctorate in modern history from St. Andrew’s University, Scotland. Her current focus is contemporary African and South African history.

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,

Copyright © 2013. ABC-CLIO, LLC. All rights reserved.

Contributors T. Christopher Aplin, Independent Scholar Aaron Bryant, University of Maryland Neill Clegg, Greensboro College Paula Conlon, University of Oklahoma Brian E. Crim, Lynchburg College Vangeli Gamede, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Tyson-Lord J. Gray, Vanderbilt University Alexandro D. Hernández, Smithsonian Institute Michael P. Jeffries, Wellesley College Paul McKenzie-Jones, University of Oklahoma Craig A. Meyer, Ohio University Ian Michie, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Ayoyinka Oriola, Folk Musician and Independent Scholar Lori Oxford, Western Carolina University Marek Payerhin, Lynchburg College Patricia Reagan, Randolph-Macon College Carlos Rojas, Duke University Stephen Silverstein, Baylor University Todd D. Snyder, Siena College Chris Stover, New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music Matthew D. Sutton, College of William and Mary Victor Wallis, Berklee College of Music Charles Walton, Lynchburg College

Sounds of Resistance : The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism, edited by Eunice Rojas, and Lindsay Michie,