There’s no better time than the present for a book about race and rock’n’roll. Log on and look around: social justice warriors jam the net with op-eds on everything from Beyoncé’s Super Bowl set to Kanye West’s naked bedfellows to David Bowie’s soul-boy phase. Elsewhere, cultural appropriation critics seem to advocate separatist states where only black people sing the blues or hip hop. (And, presumably, only rednecks play classic rock.)
This seething cauldron of online discourse manages to be both right-on and right-wing, sanctimonious and censorious. It’s also anti-art. If you berate a non-Rastafarian college kid for his dreadlocks, you must also prohibit Afrika Bambaataa from sampling Kraftwerk, Charley Pride from singing country, or Bad Brains from playing hardcore. Minstrelsy arguments are always messy. The real issue is power. Who steals it? Who wields it? Who’s making money and who’s getting paid?
Slate contributor Jack Hamilton's Just Around Midnight takes its title from The Rolling Stones' 1970 hit Brown Sugar, a song campus clicktivists would surely decry as "hugely problematic". Consider it anew: a gang of young white Londoners eroticising the image of a white slaver whipping black women, set to music that owes a substantial debt to Chicago bluesmasters and rock'n'roll pioneers such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
White male fantasy
As Hamilton writes, Brown Sugar "traffics in repugnant stereotypes of black female sexuality, and mines the historical atrocity of slavery for white male fantasy, while its rocking and ebullient backing track implies galling flippancy toward its own subject matter".
The author’s central thesis goes something like this: not only did white rock artists appropriate black roots music, they also recast the very idea of rock as a white man’s domain, consigning black artists to, if not exactly a ghetto, then a separate state where gospel, soul, funk and blues – but not classic or hard rock – were the national language.
It’s a complex subject, and Hamilton has chosen to stack his deck by focusing exclusively on 1960s acts (Hendrix, Dylan, The Beatles, Motown), conveniently overlooking anyone doesn’t fit with his angle. Consequently, there’s little or nothing on funkadelic (“Who says a funk band can’t play rock/ Who says a rock band can’t play funk?”), Sly and the Family Stone, Bob Marley, Rage Against the Machine, Prince, Phil Lynott, Don Letts, 2-Tone, Slash, Cypress Hill, Ice T’s Body Count, Living Colour or the Black Rock Coalition.
As well, any book that purports to explore the antagonisms between black and white music but doesn't at least anticipate Public Enemy (who lambasted Elvis in Fight the Power while collaborating with Anthrax in the studio and on stage), is incomplete.
Just Around Midnight is mostly about a perception of rock music promoted by white critics and corporate radio and MTV programmers. Musicians obey no such formatting restrictions. Hamilton, who teaches American studies and media studies at the University of Virginia, does a decent job of rehashing received 1960s history, and he quotes reams of previously published research, but he seems to have conducted no new interviews for this book. As a result, his theories are never challenged or expanded.
In fact, the book seems more interested in faculty jargon, back-and-forth rhetoric and three-syllable words than actual musicians (the blurbs come not from writers or artists, but fellow academics). Example: Bob Dylan's version of No More Auction Block is framed as "the intercultural repurposing of this song for a progressive political project" – as opposed to, y'know, a Jewish kid from Minnesota trying to imagine life as a black slave in order to do justice to an old protest song.
Cultural waffle
Hamilton is capable of the occasional brilliant insight – he perfectly nails the Stones' Gimme Shelter as a cross between Charlie Patton's High Water Everywhere and Yeats's The Second Coming. However, these are mostly swamped in cultural theories waffle. Consider the following gobstopper of a paragraph:
“The ‘whitening’ of rock and roll music is a subject that has generally been approached in one of three ways. The first is by casting the music’s re-racialization as just one more iteration of a broadly transhistorical phenomenon of white-on-black cultural theft. In this telling, the appropriation of back musical styles by performers ranging from Elvis Presley to John Lennon to Janis Joplin is held as conceptually and ethically contiguous with a singular tradition of plunder most fundamentally exemplified in the practice of blackface minstrelsy. In its most reductive instances, this formulation rests on ideas of cultural ownership, essentialist originalism, and racial hermiticism . . . ”
I'm not stupid. I think I know roughly what this is supposed to mean. But, boy, is it dull. Just Around Midnight is a congested and long-winded study of what really should be an explosive subject.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River, published by Faber.
