Weird American Music: Case Studies of Underground Resistance, Barlowgirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music [Hardcover ed.] 3825369560, 9783825369569

The author takes Greil Marcus's capacious category of "weirdness" in new directions to examine a tension

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Weird American Music: Case Studies of Underground Resistance, Barlowgirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music [Hardcover ed.]
 3825369560, 9783825369569

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dorothea gail

Weird American Music

gail Weird American Music

T

gail

Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music

American Studies ★ A Monograph Series Weird American Music

he author takes Greil Marcus’s capacious category of “weirdness” in new directions to examine a tension in certain expressions of American music and music communities since the 1980s. It locates this tension in the space between the artists’ striving for authenticity in the values they want to communicate on the one hand, and the demands of the marketplace on the other. The results are “weird” in both the economic and artistic sense. The book follows five different case studies: Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, the latter-day reception of Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music. All have struggled against co-optation, and arguably faced defeat in their efforts to stay authentic during an era in which lifestyle and ethnicity have become commodified, and both religious and humanistic values have become products.

Volume 299

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-6956-9

win t e r

Heidelberg

american studies – a monograph series Volume 299 Edited on behalf of the German Association for American Studies by

alfred h ornung anke ortlepp heike pau l

dorothea gail

Weird American Music Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music

Universitätsverlag

winter

Heidelberg

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft

umschlagbild © Dorothea Gail

isbn 978-3-8253-6956-9 Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2018 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Druck: Memminger MedienCentrum, 87700 Memmingen Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de

For Ray with Love

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

1 Introduction

1

2 Underground Resistance “They Keep Calling Me”: Ghosts, Post-Collapse Resistance, and the African American Imaginary in Detroit Techno

33

3 BarlowGirl Warrior Virgins and the Therapeutic Family in Chicago Christian Rock

103

4 Jackalope R. Carlos Nakai, Larry Yáñez, and the Ironies of Southwestern Hybridity

171

5 Charles Ives The Reception of a New England Hero and the Classical Music Cult

227

6 Waffle House Music Advertising as Southern Folk Art

287

7 Conclusion: Fade Out

347

Appendix I Appendix II

377 385

Index

387

Acknowledgments It was a snowy April day when I stumbled into Prof. Dr. Alfred Hornung’s office at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, in 2013. This was the day that made this book happen, because Alfred put trust into my post-doctoral book proposal for the German Research Foundation (DFG) and told me to go forward with my grant application. Thanks to historian John Carter Wood, who shared his own DFG proposal with me, and to Dagmar Stockfisch at Uni Mainz for giving me advise. Nine months later, I got a three-year grant to research my project and I became employed at what later became the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz. Thanks a million, to the DFG for the grant and the support for printing this book. On the long way, during the lonely hours hunched over my laptop and over my books, I got support from many sides, without which I would not have been able to finish my project. First, there are the people who already believed in me while I was still at the University of Oklahoma, U.S., teaching music and not yet teaching American Studies: Sanna Pederson, who opened her house for me, Sarah Ellis, who lent me her car so many times, Michael Lee, who advised me on getting a summer teaching position to avoid visa issues, Paula Conlon, who introduced me to Native American music, and the entire German Stammtisch at OU! At the University of Michigan in my position as the Executive Editor of Music of the United States of America (MUSA), I found support from my colleagues Meilu Ho, Mark Clague, Richard Crawford, and Charles Garrett, and all the authors of MUSA who entrusted their work into my editing hands; also, thanks to Aloma Bardi from the International Center for American Music (ICAMUS). I am deeply grateful to historians Howard Brick and MacDonald Moore for listening to me and advising me while the project was gestating in my mind. Thanks to Trevor and Jenny and to everybody attending the German Stammtisch at UofM! At the Obama Institute in Mainz, my colleagues Christoph, Sabine, Xiuming, Melanie, Bärbel, Pia, and Joy kept me sane and grounded in reality. Thanks to Manfred Siebald, who read and criticized parts of my

work, and thanks to Mita Banerjee for her moral support. I would like to thank Wilfried Raussert and the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Bielefeld for keeping me alert to any hemispheric entanglements. I am grateful to the referees of my written thesis: Charles Garrett, George Lipsitz, and Alfred Hornung, and the entire habilitation committee at the University of Mainz. This book would not have been possible were it not for the willingness of my interviewees to sit down with me or answer my questions on the phone. I am indebted and grateful to Underground Resistance, Canyon Records with Jackalope, Willow Creek church, and Waffle House Music. My friends at home in Germany and abroad lifted me up when I was doubting myself. Hugs to Ralph, Barbara, and Tom! Last but not least, my husband Ray was not only the one who put the idea of pursuing a research project of my own into my head, he also challenged me during kitchen table discussions to sharpen my arguments. He helped iron out as best as possible all my Denglish, the Deutsch-(German)-English of a nonnative English speaker. What shortcomings remain are all of my own doing. I would like to thank him for his endurance with me and hereby dedicate this book to him in love. In Postcards from the End of America, author Linh Dinh expresses his frustration with what American life has become. Perhaps we can find some consolation, as Scott Erickson puts it in The History of the Decline and Fall of America, in looking at the way we have travelled to come to this point. May we never forget the charm of the “old, weird America.” Brittas, Glantane, Ireland, the 2nd of September 2018 Dorothea Gail

1 Introduction Enlightened people didn’t really care anymore about the minimum wage or workers’ rights. But the stuff about authenticity and personal fulfillment – the stuff that appealed to “the young existentialists” – that stuff would win elections. (Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal 50)

The course of pop music history changed when in July 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival. Dylan had not only defined the sound of the folk music revival as it encountered the age of rock and roll, the persona he constructed had been the face of folk for a new generation of postwar fans. But when he strummed his first chords on an electric guitar at the performance in Newport, he encountered loud booing. Backstage, the apocryphal image of a furious Pete Seeger eager to chop off the cables of Dylan’s guitar or mike from the sound system with an axe has entered the realm of pop mythology. There are many theories about the cause of the booing that day. Some conclude that it had no relation to the transition to electric instruments or even to Dylan himself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Dylan’s move to an electric sound was subsequently seen as a betrayal by the folk community. His black leather motorcycle jacket was negatively dubbed a “sell out” jacket by critics. Greil Marcus writes in Invisible Republic that with Dylan’s turn away from his early persona of earnest acoustic folkie to folk-rock star the “sound of his hammered acoustic guitar and pealing harmonica [...] a kind of free-floating trademark, like the peace symbol, signifying determination and honesty in a world of corruption and lies” was now neutralized, “suspended in the air” (x). The first album after Newport, Highway 61 Revisited was clean and fully orchestrated in the slickest and most accessible rock ’n’ roll style. A tour followed, during which Dylan had to repeatedly face crowds of fans angry at the amplified rock portions of his shows. In 1966 Dylan suffered a motorcycle accident. Recovering from it, he joined his recent tour band in recording some informal sessions in a basement. What came out of these sessions – first leaked to the public in bootlegged versions and then

partly released officially in 1975 – was a music which stood between the traditional folk style and the newly established sound of rock. However, the 1960s new folk revival had not been just a stylistic phase in the story of pop. The entire folk music community young and old lived with one musical bible, the Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of folk music recordings from the 1920s and 1930s released and made accessible to a broader public in anthology form in 1952. The songs and ballads from this anthology had been taken up by the folk music revival, which began in New York City’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 1960s. For the musicians of the folk revival, the anthology was a window into the American past, but not the past recognized by the consensus narrative of conservative postwar mainstream society. The Anthology did for America what later world music would do in a broader context; it made forgotten regional cultures accessible and opened the possibility for its modern-day practitioners to imagine themselves as part of deeply felt “authentic” cultures. In the case of the Anthology however, the rediscovered musical elements of the culture in question largely sidestepped issues of ethnic difference and therefore cultural accessibility. This music was presented by its champions as the pre-modern heritage of mainstream white Americans themselves, in an even more “authentic” sense than the recognizably “invented” cowboy or country mythologies that underlay some regional radio traditions in the South and the West. The field collection and recording expeditions to the Appalachians of Cecil Sharp in 1916 had laid the groundwork for better understanding – and exploitation-cumacknowledgement – of this material by a broader mainstream community of fans. Starting in the 1950s however folk music did not just stay inside the fan community or on printed paper in some library. It was revived and adopted by the mainstream media as a sign of a real past for white America that reeked of authenticity, ever more appealing to the city dwelling youth as the times they lived in seemed ever more inauthentic. Greil Marcus dubbed it the music of “old, weird America,” an invisible American republic of the heart populated by the ghosts of the past. 1 Jefferson Cowie and Lauren Boehm write about Marcus’s dream of this past in connection with Bruce Springsteen:

1

2

The title of the revised edition of Invisible Republic is The Old, Weird America.

Just as the last vestiges of hope for a republic of wage earners were collapsing, so was what Greil Marcus celebrated as the wild and eccentric “invisible republic” of people’s music. Marcus invokes the idea of a strange, vibrant, interracial republican world of vinyl, where all of the wild and eccentric energy of America came together in popular music: “Here is a mystical body of the republic, a kind of public secret: a declaration of a weird but clearly recognizable America within the America of the exercise of institutional majoritarian power.” In “Born in the U.S.A.,” however, the “old weird America” seems to be coming to a close as the official trumps the mystical, the national smothers the local, and the majority drowns out the individual. The “ruling question of public life” is no longer what Marcus describes as “how people plumb their souls and then present their discoveries, their true selves to others” [1997, 125] but, as Springsteen proclaims, how “you spend half your life just covering up.” (371-72)

I would like to look at the grey area between the two poles of Marcus’s “old weird” authenticity, and Springsteen’s new world of “lifestyles” in which the self is engaged in a constant cover up. The “weirdness” of Bob Dylan’s basement tapes is not just an effect of the weirdness of old folky styles filtered through his own personal weirdness; rather it comes through the combination in these basement tapes of the old with the new, of dreams of revived authenticity combined with the forward driving force of the market. This contradiction expressed something about the times after the peaking of the civil rights and peace movements; a time in which co-optation was rapidly uncovering yet also taking away the glimpses of authenticity from the past, a time in which the folk music community was “as conflicted as all America,” as Mark Sinker observed in The Wire (76). My investigations deal with such conflicted and “weird” musics.2 The weirdness arrives among us through the category of “in-betweenness,” a tense, unstable field lying between the concept of authenticity and the concept of the market, between inherent if subjective experiences of identity and the conscious commodification of identity. The tension derives from trying to hold on to something which gives meaning, while managing the subordination of meaning to the market’s endless need for new musical product.

2

My category overlaps but not fully encompasses what has been labeled “outsider music” (Chusid).

3

If we look at individual American artists and the ways they have negotiated between these two poles since about 1980, we get a picture of a society and its subcultures filled with people trying to make a living while expressing something honest about themselves. These individuals must however play according to the rules for distributing political, economic, and symbolic power in a neoliberal market economy that more and more permeates all parts of our lives. This economy insists we are consumers first and foremost, and only secondarily workers, artists, thinkers, and citizens. In my research I have tried to find out if neoliberalism has already fully swallowed up the artistic identity of the musicians I examine, or if they have found a way to at least partly escape co-optation. Is authenticity still possible, or – as Thomas Frank has suggested in his path-breaking book The Conquest of Cool, and the more recent Listen, Liberal – has it become just another word for self-fulfillment, a performance, a lifestyle choice itself, rather than an issue of finding ultimate meaning in a core identity free of market or other outside considerations? How did patterns of artistic value definition, and the forms in which these values were expressed, change over the course of the more than three decades from 1980 to the 2010s? What do these changes tell us about the current passage through which American culture is making its way? The ideological field in which this passage is taking place is neoliberalism, introduced into public policy in its current form under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In its basic economic sense, neoliberalism was a turn away from Keynesian economics and the legacy of the New Deal interventionist and redistributionist state, which had sought to regulate capitalism after its near-collapse during the Great Depression. In its place, Chicago School economists like Milton Friedman advocated countering high inflation with a tight monetary policy, tax cuts for big businesses to cause investments and a “trickle down” effect, and deregulation of the financial sector. The same policies were mirrored by Britain’s then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. For our purposes however, neoliberalism cannot be understood in the merely economic sense, as an updated anti-statist version of laissez-faire capitalism (a doctrine of classic liberalism). Neoliberal ideas about the market as the ultimate arena for the enactment of politics, personhood, and human value now permeate American culture. The long-term results are a rising gap between the rich and the poor, the decimation of organized labor, the rise of the “consumer” as the replacement for the old identity of 4

“citizen,” and the deterioration or outright disappearance of any ideas about the commons or public good that cannot be monetized and commodified for personal gain (cf. Hickel; W. Brown; Chomsky). In this ideological regime, products (and in this study I am focusing on musical products) have to succeed in the neoliberal market in order for their intrinsic (in this case aesthetic) value to become real. This does not mean however, that such values (moral, religious, ideological, political) embedded in the products are necessarily superfluous or even damaging to their marketability. In this study I track the options artists have to express their beliefs and values (their “authenticity”), while at the same time they negotiate the market’s different set of options. I use the word “in-between” rather than the already well theorized term “hybridity” to express the idea that the tension between competing world views and competing ways of life remains unresolved and therefore more conceptually and heuristically dynamic. 3 I retain the term hybridity however, to describe the inner aesthetics of musical works, as a marker of a successful melting of different cultural musical traits. When I then deploy the actual term “in-between(ness)” in musical aesthetics, I seek to mark an actual point when successful hybridity becomes unstable, thereby exposing an external, market-driven “in-betweenness,” which only pretends that cultures join together in a mutual agreement. Hybridity is often hailed as an achievable solution for problems of assimilation or a welcome outcome of successful integration in advanced late capitalist consumer societies. Many times, however, such hybridity is 3

In this I follow Homi Bhabha, who pointed out the liminality of hybridity and its threat towards centers of power. The category of “in-betweenness” can be applied to describe both the identity of individual artists (located between two or more identities) and the cultural location of the music (between authenticity and the market). The Call for Papers for the 2013 “Liminality & Borderlands” conference of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music stated: “[P]opular music and culture are full of performers and characters who move through and effectively occupy zones of ‘in-betweenness,’ carrying signifiers of more than one identity at a time while fully embodying none.” For the usage of the term “in-betweenness” in pop music and art see Basu and Crowdy et al., for identity see Walter. The separate discourse around musical hybridity (especially in the UK) emphasizes the creative potential in fusing cultures, and is less focused on investigating the power relationships and the appropriation of cultures of “Otherness” unavoidably connected with it (cf. Haynes).

5

very fragile, depending on an equilibrium of economic or physical power between incompatible groups of roughly the same status, or the random good will of a hegemonic establishment, usually ethnically or religiously based, that gains political and moral legitimacy from temporarily allowing such diversity. What happens however, when the correlations of power shift, and hegemonic orders become unstable? I want to investigate the ruptured, incomplete and compromised in the entanglements of authenticity with the market in a late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century America which has progressed way beyond the sweet spot and panacea of achievable equal opportunity into unknown cultural and political territory, a country showing more signs of domestic instability by the day.

American Culture between Authenticity and the Market In the five different musical case studies that comprise this book, I examine the place of identity and of values in cultural practice and discourse in the United States since the 1980s. After the first emergence of identity politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then a return to a social ethos of conspicuous consumption under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, new and old subgroups defined by shared values proliferated or redefined themselves by the end of the century. These diverse values found expression in religious belief, ethnic, regional, or gender identity, socially stratified aesthetic taste, and political ideology. The subcultures attracted support and propagated their beliefs by defining their values as lifestyle choices, available in a society defined no longer by the role of citizen but of consumer. Unlike earlier campaigns to spread universal or consensus values such as equality and civil rights, defined as important for the society as a whole, the newer waves of value propagation became linked to parochial projects of subcultural identity-making. The language of identity thereby took over the cultural and political role of critiquing limitations that still stood in the way for non-white people and economically precarious members of the white lower and middle classes in both their struggle for self-realization and in their chances in the marketplace. The overarching system of enactment of identity politics and ethnic essentialism at the end of the 20th century even allowed groups within the ethnic and cultural main6

stream such as conservative evangelical Christians to partake in a discourse demanding their recognition as valuable identity groups. Stephen Greenblatt therefore believes that “there is an urgent need to […] understand the vitally important dialectic of cultural persistence and change” (1-2) as neither the newer concepts of “hybridity” nor the older of “rootedness and autochthony” seem to fit with the contemporary reality in which cosmopolitanism, hegemonic nationalism, and rejectionist identity politics all exist at the same time in the same social formation. The mainstream culture of the United States for most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first is the classic example of a consumer society. Fox and Lears note that when this “new” societal form – in which consumption of commodities is the driver of a capitalistic economic system – emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, voices of contestation could already be heard. Subjected to critical analysis by Marxist-influenced scholars (Benjamin, Adorno, Attali) or other figures such as Max Weber, this system (and its attendant culture industry and mass market) has established itself as the dominant “American way of life” or the “American Dream.” Many studies have described the history and values underlying this consumer culture (cf. Goodwin et al.; Cross; McGovern; Cohen; Appleby). In such a socioeconomic formation, even the smallest and most wellhidden subcultures cannot maintain a position of dialectical opposition outside of the system but become part of the system’s claim to diversity, innovation, and the creation of new types of market demand. Acknowledging the ubiquity of the market and the fragmented criteria for describing an elective affinity (ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion, age, region, etc.) scholars have introduced new terminologies for describing a subculture; as “urban tribe,” “new tribe,” “co-culture,” “partial culture,” or “fragmented culture” (cf. Muggleton and Weinzierl; Bennett and KahnHarris; Samovar et al.; in the particular case of music and subculture, also Hebdige 1987 and 1993). Due to the market’s co-optation and commercialization of the category of “identity” (usually interpreted as a commodified lifestyle choice), the ideas of a counterculture or a culture of resistance collapse into the superficial category of “subculture.” Today, even formerly hegemonic, pre-market identities like “Christian,” gladly identify as belonging to a commodified “Christian” subculture. Meanwhile the fragmentation of such markets makes it ever more difficult to define a clearly dominant mass culture. 7

In one of the first widespread reactions to the initial establishment of this commercialization/co-optation consensus, the hippies and the rest of the 1960s counterculture played a decisive role in at least reintroducing (if not coherently advocating or defining) the ideal of a fulfilled and meaningful life into mainstream discussion, following in the less visible footsteps of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg a decade or two earlier. They connected the idea to an emphasis on individualism and with a rejection of middle-class culture. To counter the alienating extremes that individualism risked, they mythologized a community-oriented spirit, even if the community in mind was their own subgroup (Rorabaugh 11). In this hippie understanding of authenticity, there was always the risk that the will to self-fulfillment would easily get corrupted back into selfishness and lose the communal spirit through a concentration on individualism. Authenticity as self-realization also proved easy for the market to co-opt – one only has to think about the continuation of “spiritual” commodification into the twenty-first century, as presented in the book and film Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert). Authenticity can also confuse the spirit of longing for a simpler past with the desire for a völkisch authoritarianism that supposedly existed before modernity supposedly broke all the bonds of traditional communitarianism. Charles Taylor takes us through these dilemmas in The Ethics of Authenticity, investigating the tension between the will to individualism and a longing for a lost order of meaning. Marshall Berman follows the intellectual history of authenticity from the post-renaissance “emergence of modern society” and also understands it in terms of the claim of the individual to happiness. This idea easily moves via romanticism into the world of subjective feelings and emotion. By the second half of the twentieth century, it had moved even further towards a therapeutic culture, in which the quest for happiness is so individualized that it can be easily co-opted by the market through the idea that the fulfillment of happiness (and also the risk of realizing one’s own misery) is no longer connected with societal circumstances or responsibilities (Imber). Authenticity, understood as an expression of reality, was also thought to have disappeared in postmodernism. Hanneke Stolk writes in connection with postmodernism’s critique of capitalism: Baudrillard discussed “bubbles of simulation” like Disneyland as places constructed according to a scenario of potent signs and images. His work

8

offers an interesting perspective on questions of reality and authenticity and reveals the very important social and cultural role that such “meaningless” locations play in the way we construct these concepts in our contemporary societies. (230)

Music between Authenticity and the Market Perhaps more than other art forms, music has been instrumental in symbolizing lifestyle choices, in disseminating messages about subcultural beliefs and affiliations, and in defining the individual’s relationship to the consumer society. However, and despite a seemingly vibrant mass popular publishing industry devoted to this topic, music has been somewhat underutilized as a means to investigate the cultural changes in recent American society, while art and literature feature prominently in this discourse. I therefore want to stress that this study does not take music as its main subject, in the sense of tracking a series of genres unfolding in the art form’s history. Rather I use the category music as a tool to investigate those cultural changes. Music both reflects and influences the broader production of culture while remaining an important cultural practice in itself, an important repository and stage for the enactment of the key individualist myth of artistic freedom. Music has played a prime role in the establishment of the consumer culture, through its deployment in advertising and in the various emergent genres of popular music itself, starting with sheet music production in Tin Pan Alley and furthered by the invention of the gramophone record (Suisman; T. Taylor 2012). In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank has pointed out how a long series of countercultural phenomena, including music, which might have started out as protest against mainstream society became appropriated by the same society and made to serve the dominant values of consumption and conformity. David Hesmondhalgh (1995) indicates that the authenticity of “independent” labels (which are supposedly independent from the major labels and not just fronts for the bigger ones) has to be questioned, when they collaborate with bigger labels in the distribution of their underground records. The broader market actually tolerates the smaller labels as a way to have them figure out the market; once a new style establishes they move in with force to exploit exactly this style (cf. also Hesmondhalgh 2002; Garofalo 1987; Kotarba and Vannini 78-81; Fenster; King). 9

Musical discussions about authenticity have often revolved around the seriousness of the musical expression in contrast to a supposedly superficial “fun” or “make-believe” function of ludic play. 4 In the course of this discussion, rock music became a genre connected with the idea of authenticity, while disco music – in which flamboyant gay behavior, the concept of “camp,” and dance were supposed to dominate – became understood as inauthentic by much of the mainstream audience and critical community of popular music (to the question of rock’s co-optation see Grossberg 338; Chapple and Garofalo). The problem involved in these dialectical definitions was that rock music was perceived as predominantly white and straight, while disco was configured as black and gay. When a deliberate campaign against the inauthenticity of disco got included as a promotional gimmick during a 1979 baseball match in Chicago – resulting in the destruction of disco records in the half-time break – the supposed authenticity of rock outed itself as essentialist discrimination on this Disco Demolition Night. Modern popular music arguably first got connected with a rhetoric of authenticity in the course of the modern folk revival of the 1960s. Later on, it became associated with the music produced by non-white cultures, which were still believed to be intact and practicing their own lifeways and value systems outside the commercial nexus – or at least they were so understood by the New Age and world music movements that sought to exploit them. Regina Bendix, writing about the search for authenticity in the folklore movement, points toward the mingling of authenticity and the market when Zulu singers back up Paul Simon or when “indigenous” people lobby for copyrighted protection of their arts and crafts. She refers to the impossibility of distinguishing between “fakelore” and folklore (101). Timothy Taylor writes in Global Pop about the persistent and selfserving idea that musical authenticity is located outside the white market: Western culture is neither pure nor impure because it is owned. It is constructed as outside the purview of such ideas as authenticity. But other cultures’ forms are available to be constructed as pure or impure when they are not owned, and even, sometimes, when they are. I would like to make it clear that the “authenticity” I am attempting to describe here is a 4

Cf. Barker and Taylor. I would like to highly recommend Richard Elliott’s detailed course syllabus “Popular Music & the Politics of Authenticity” for an approach towards authenticity in popular music.

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real thing, not just a marketing tool, or as Martin Stokes has written, “a discursive trope of great persuasive power,” or, as Iain Chambers has argued, on the wane. But “authenticity” is something that many musicians and listeners believe in and use as a discursive trope. (22)

In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz ponders the culture of prefabrication that is rife in the pop music industry, where boy band identities are “scripted and carefully coordinated on the basis of market research,” never being “original, innovative, or unpredictable” (4). He thereby establishes a lower limit by which to evaluate commercial authenticity, a standard which is not reliant on historical exactness and ethnic essentialism. In Dangerous Crossroads he shows us that questions of authenticity can become especially burdensome to musicians from formerly colonized countries, as the reality that such musicians grew up in was always a reality of many cosmopolitan influences. Allen Moore likewise lobbies for replacing the static word “authenticity” with the more dynamic “authentication” – the process of investigating if a musical expression is sincere (cf. Trilling, who presents sincerity as a moral category).

Case Studies In this book, I investigate what kind of authenticity is at play in a selection of artistic case studies, and how this authenticity is altered, overdetermined, or defined by aspects of market logic. I argue for the possibility of a measurable authenticity, which, like an ingredient in a recipe, is always mixed with the other ingredient of marketability to produce the final internal-aesthetic as well as external-cultural meaning of the art in question. My study examines the intersection of aesthetic, subcultural, and consumerist values in the post-Fordist society of consumption operating in the United States since the 1980s. I take five eclectically selected case studies of musical activity from different U.S. subcultures and examine them, using approaches from the fields of critical/cultural studies as well as musicology. I locate each of these musical activities between the conceptual poles of authenticity (as measured by the aesthetic and political/moral values of the interpretive communities that produced them) and the market imperatives of the wider consumer society. I examine these subcultures’ efforts to position their respective musics at a particular cultural location in-between these two poles. I believe these efforts can tell us much about 11

the interaction of music, identity, and consumption in the transition from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption” that the historian Charles Maier has identified as a salient aspect of late modern society in the United States. This under-researched field addresses important emerging topics such as the study of whiteness and political conservatism in U.S. culture studies (cf. the anthology White Privilege by Rothenberg). My study is of sociopolitical importance in showing how the tensions between consumer society and subcultural values are interwoven strands in the emergence of a particular kind of post-consensus but nevertheless mainstream culture. In the historical period we have entered of American political and cultural hegemony in decline, this study will help us to understand how power has recently been negotiated and understood in domestic American cultural debates. It will help us better understand and cope with various tendencies in a declining model of American multiculturalism, as power struggles become more intense due to global economic and political instability. My choice of these five case studies aims to cover a sufficient range of subcultures and musical styles representative of the late twentieth-century United States. The case studies deal with milieus and musics in which the tensions between artistic authenticity, the market imperative, and values within and outside the subculture are overtly articulated and highly visible. All of the studies cover cases in which musical production is not integrated into the mainstream big business of the entertainment industry. In this book I do not focus on the production of mass-market culture, but on subcultural musical phenomena that have emerged in this consumer society without fully participating in its values. In contrast to studies that investigate musical subcultures in the strictest sense of the term, my effort will focus on music in a broader range of subcultures or partial cultures (subgroups) which are not necessarily constituted or defined by the music itself. The case studies include 1) anti-consumerist tendencies in the second wave of Detroit techno electronic dance music (Underground Resistance); 2) the commercialization of conservative Christian values in Contemporary Christian Music (BarlowGirl); 3) the redefinition of ethnicity and world-views in Native American/Chicano cross-over music (R. Carlos Nakai and Larry Yáñez); 4) the question of elitism and outsider status in the classical music scene (Charles Ives) and 5) the fusion of consumer values, branding, and community identity in advertising via of the self12

produced jukebox music of the regional roadside restaurant chain Waffle House. In the chapter on the early twentieth-century classical composer Charles Ives, I mostly investigate the reception of his music from the 1980s to today, rather than focusing on the artist himself. The questions I pose to this material about authenticity and the market therefore concern the recent reception, and not the composer himself. In that way, this chapter differs from the others in which the musicians themselves are the main protagonists. Detroit techno’s in-betweenness is unexpected. Middle-class African Americans built a new form of electronic music called techno out of elements from earlier dance music forms, Italo pop, and the sound of the German band Kraftwerk. This appropriation of European genres got reappropriated in turn when techno music conquered the UK and Europe, making its black roots a forgotten footnote in the mainstream history of techno music. But it is not just the weirdness of standing between black and white – hiding their faces behind gasmasks or bandanas to be “visibly invisible” as blacks – that makes Detroit techno compelling, it is also the weirdness of standing between life and death. Detroit has become a haunted city, a city of living ghosts and of dead ghosts, the past ghosts of the slave trade and the present ghosts of the drug trade, ghosts in the form of robots in outer space or in the absence of the composer through his substitution with the DJ. Imagining space and equality in a musical dream sphere in the so-called musical underground has become the way of resisting further exploitation (e.g., through the music industry). Detroit copes with the harsh reality on the ground of a black, Southern-derived population that came to the industrial North to nurture hopes of freedom and prosperity just in time to see these hopes crushed when industry moved to the non-unionized South and white flight left the city center desolate. The discrepancy between the broadening horizons of the African American middle-class mind and the late twentieth-century dystopia it witnessed on the ground in this city created the matrix for the creativity of techno’s beginnings. I follow the label Underground Resistance in the second wave of Detroit techno since the 1990s in their efforts to stay independent and nevertheless be able to make a living through music. The weirdness and the feeling of sitting between two non-compatible chairs in the case study of the Christian rock group BarlowGirl from 13

Chicago’s suburbs comes less from the music itself, which sounds like a slightly hysterical form of standard stadium rock music. The impression of weirdness comes rather from the combination of rock music – in itself rebellious and aiming to express protest – and the extremely conservative Christian lyrics, yelling out a defense of sexual purity, the overwhelming threat of worldly temptation, and self-crushing confessions of faith failing and “falling.” The weirdness is also located in the specific late twentiethcentury Christian fundamentalist subculture’s expressivity and affect, which combines extreme ideological positions with soft-sell consumer and popular culture form; trying, for example, to make chastity hip through the “virgin chic” (Deerman) of “True Love Waits” rings and father-daughter chastity balls. In the case of the Barlow family, whose three daughters have toured as BarlowGirl, we deal with a fourth and fifth generation Catholic Irish immigrant family background, now turned Protestant non-denominational charismatic with a vengeance. In the third generation, the girl’s paternal grandparents in the 1950s had been upwardly mobile. The girl’s parents and aunts and uncles however, came of age in the 1960s and 1970. Classic products of the Reagan years in the ’80s, they embraced the cults of entrepreneurialism and business consultancy as well as therapeutic approaches to consumerism, finally jumping onto the bandwagon of consumer Christianization in the early ’90s with its emerging megachurches. Remaining upwardly mobile in a time of growing inequality however, gradually became an unattainable goal which could only be achieved through magical thinking and the embrace of the prosperity gospel: believe in God and you shall be given what you want. The downside of a magical world view, however, were the extreme fears projected onto the Barlow children, sheltered from the outside by something like a family-based cult: home birth, homeschooling, Christian college, family economic project via an all-female Christian band composed of the three daughters, with the father as band manager. Regardless of this non-mainstream worldview and the all-pervasive family cult, the outward appearance was in the consumerist idiom: multiple outfits for the band on stage and their publicity, the embrace of the Disney princess image, consistently narcissistic self-centeredness, and superficiality in interviews. The next case study seeks out the in-betweenness linking the poles of a Native American and a Chicano identity and the intellectual sphere of 14

experimental art and pop music, channeled through a New Age market. R. Carlos Nakai, a versatile Native flute player, and Larry Yáñez, a Chicano artist with inclinations towards rock and avant-garde music, formed the ensemble Jackalope at the beginning of the 1980s. An image that captures this weirdness would be a Navajo with a U.S. military veteran’s cap eating Mexican food in a restaurant in Tucson, Arizona with me, a German researcher, talking about the shared experience of an exhibition of stuffed chimeras (composite animals or Wolpertinger) in a museum in Munich. Or a Chicano in his Arizona home town of Yuma (rhymes with “humor”) eating potato tacos with the same researcher after the discovery that both love the cacophonic music of Charles Ives. For the player of the Native flute, R. Carlos Nakai, it had been an inspiring example to see that R. C. Gorman, a Navajo, had made it out of the relatively narrow tribal world onto the bigger cosmopolitan stage as an artist. Having seen the outlines of a wider intellectual and artistic horizon than what was available on the reservation while growing up near Flagstaff, Nakai tried to expand beyond his birth identity by becoming a classical trumpeter, only to get his dreams crushed, together with his wind-instrument player’s teeth, by a car accident. He then took up the Native flute, selling his own music mostly in New Age markets. Enter a Chicano artist, Larry Yáñez; together they start mocking ethnic conquest and exploitation, developing an in-between project called Jackalope – after a mythical animal half jackrabbit and antelope. Here, they mixed pop music, experimental noise, and a haunting flute sound. The context out of which this music grows is a complex one – the experience of being born in a land repeatedly conquered by others, mixing Natives, Hispanics, Anglos, and later hippies and the conservative right. The unstable mixture represented by the Jackalope is more a dream of a possible multiculturalism than a reality. The weirdness in the reception of the early-twentieth-century classical music of the New Englander Charles Ives comes from the clash of elitism and eccentricity in the urban and small-town worlds of the progressiveera East Coast. The region’s academic and cultural life was cut off from Europe but nevertheless extremely Eurocentric, steeped in the ideas of free thought, transcendentalism, individualism, and a certain kind of postProtestant moralism. The social and cultural history of his reception reflects the quality of in-betweenness already inherent in Charles Ives’s own life and work. Ives had seemed destined to become a banker or business15

man, but he also wanted to be an artist and finally managed to live both lives in parallel. This left him as an outsider in the professional musical world despite his sound musical education and a mentor who had studied in Munich. Ives developed a style best described as polymorphously hybrid, while more or less maintaining the framework of classical form. The psychological tensions between family expectations of a successful business career, the identity conflicts around possible closeted homosexuality sublimated into homophobia, and the guilt generated by leaving his art as an avocation seems to have contributed to a music full of breaks, collapses, and loops, one that mixed pop and classical idioms and used literary forms as a means for building new musical structures. His music spoke to people who felt similarly torn between conflicting identities and duties. In the belated scholarly reception of this music however – the subject on which I focus in my chapter – it was not the label of eccentricity, but the category of eliteness that prevailed as a way of permanently defining Ives. Newer generations of musicologists succeeded in establishing a view of Ives as a “normal” romantic composer – in the course of a heated discussion in regards to Ives’s normativity or deviance – and thereby made it possible to elevate Ives into the established pantheon of the Eurocentric classical music cult. The Waffle House fast-food chain has an in-house jukebox, on which part of the selection consists of promotional music composed for the Waffle House company itself by professional jingle composers. However, the resulting material takes the form of extremely cleverly composed and well produced, complete pop songs extolling the actual food item one is already eating at the Waffle House as the song is playing. Not only are these songs too long to be usable radio broadcast ads, they are only available on these jukeboxes in the Waffle House once one has already made the decision to sit down and order food. The songs stand weirdly in-between – not being real songs in themselves, nor being superficial advertisement clips. The failure to fit in preconceived categories of what songs are for, so to say, at the same time makes them artistically very interesting. Through them an older Southern folk tradition of musical parody can play itself out in a novel and commercial setting. The South itself serves here as a staging ground of an in-betweenness with a rich historical perspective. Adding to and making such an in-between form of music, is possible there where local white identity had remained something apart from the sensibilities of a globalizing world deep into the twentieth century, while 16

stuck in an endless loop of the 1950s to the 1980s when the region rejoined the national economy. I had to leave out many other possible case studies. For example, I did not write about Asian Americans and the American Idol contestant William Hung, a Hong Kong-born American on the West Coast, who made a career out of getting humiliated by the show’s jury for his awful performances. In the end, he wound up becoming loved precisely for his awfulness by a huge audience who saw in him an exemplification of the American Dream: you gamble, try to reach as high as you can, and if you fail, that’s part of the dream. William Hung did not fail financially. He founded a music label and marketed his “awful” image so well that he actually ended up being hired as one of the Super Bowl half-time musicians. I also did not write about Latino music and the tragic life of Selena QuintanillaPérez, an incredibly popular tejano singer, who got murdered by the female founder of her fan club. I had to leave out the story of the Chicano Elvis impersonator El Vez, whose weirdness would have fitted perfectly. 5 Another singer I left out with regret – because I chose R. Carlos Nakai for investigating Native cross-over – is Radmilla Cody born to an African American father and a Navajo mother. Her soul filled voice singing the National Anthem in Navajo language is such a beautiful part of this country that I hope that somebody else will fill this and all the other gaps I have left, in the future. *** I embarked on field studies for this book in March of 2015, spending a week each in Detroit (techno music), Phoenix (Native/Chicano cross-over music), Atlanta (Waffle House music) and Chicago (BarlowGirl). As part of the subculture of musicologists in the U.S., and involved in Ives research during earlier phases of my scholarly career, I decided to work insights into this topic from my personal experience of this scene. It was sometimes not that easy to get access and interview time, as the different subcultures were aware that I would write about them from a possibly critical perspective. I did not want to hide the fact that I was coming with something of an anthropological approach, with all the classic epis-

5

Cf. Mita Banerjees investigation into El Vez’s performance of an ethnic Elvis.

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temological power of a white scholarly investigator already pre-entangled in an unequal power relationship. When we look at the relation of power to whiteness several things came up in my field studies that might tell us about how the players/musicians locate themselves in a larger cultural system. It might seem a coincidence that most of the white subjects – the Waffle House musicians, the Waffle House executives and the BarlowGirls – chose to remain nearly invisible for me. In the case of BarlowGirl, a band which had disbanded at the end of 2012, I could not find any email or phone information for the three sisters. Several emails to their father Vince Barlow, who had been their manager, remained unanswered. The only contact I got was an email exchange with the African American minister of the church they had gone to in Elgin, but he could do nothing else than suggest to me to try emailing Vince Barlow. I respect this decision to retain privacy, but it also hewed closely to the general tenor of their relations with the complicated outside world of other cultures in the multicultural USA. At the end, I had a pleasant interview with the (white) musician Matt Lundgren at Willow Creek megachurch in Chicago’s North-West. Despite the stress of pre-Easter preparations, he took 30 minutes to sit with me face to face in the church’s cafe to answer my questions regarding Willow Creek and its music. In the case of Waffle House in Atlanta I had two phone conversations with musicians and one with representatives of the company, however I was not able to meet any of them in person, something I had offered to do. Waffle House first stonewalled me and I had to call and email a couple of times before they agreed to a phone interview, asking me to submit my questions beforehand. I wondered about that, because I clearly identified myself as a “fan” of their music and food. When I finally talked to them they refused to take the interview beyond the repetition of company promotional objectives onto a more “personal” level of a behind the scenes encounter. The press agent was very careful not to reveal any real insights into the system, sometimes even seeming to know less than myself (for example that all and not just a selection of the tunes had been transferred to the new digital jukebox). Even the musicians I talked to seemed to be extra careful in choosing their words. It seemed that business practice in Atlanta – as in many other cities – hewed to the convention that you only meet with insiders on a personal level. Everything seemed very corporate. Waffle House were the most suspicious of all the subcultures, having a 18

second spokesperson listening into the phone conversation I had with the executive. In the case of the techno outfit Underground Resistance, I had no problem getting an appointment with John Collins, manager of UR/Submerge in Detroit, who gave me a tour through the in-house techno museum. Only after the three-hour long tour was over did I ask him for a recorded interview, because I did not expect to immediately be trusted as a white researcher from outside the community. When Collins was nice enough to set another appointment for that interview, he nevertheless checked my questions in advance to screen out any possible “trick” questions. The experience of white exploitation is a staple in the culture of African American Detroit and I can understand this caution. This pattern of being accessible to fans but not to the general public is also apparent in the door policy of techno clubs. I spent two nights dancing to the music of Robert Hood and John Collins in Berlin’s Tresor club and one-night dancing to Underground Resistance’s Buzz Goree at the Berlin Berghain club. Tresor has a very capricious and sometimes hostile door culture. The club has no particular soft spot for journalists or researchers; as they never tire of pointing out, they don’t need publicity. I guess that the Detroit techno T-shirt I wore that night identified me as an insider. The doors of Berghain were friendlier; however even here I got patted down for drinks and my cell phone was checked because they don’t allow photos. The ready access and the warm welcome in Phoenix from Robert Doyle, CEO of Canyon Records which distributes Jackalope and R. Carlos Nakai, was pleasantly surprising. I interviewed Nakai in Tucson and Larry Yáñez in Yuma, a four hour drive away, both face-to-face, in their family homes. Here however I was dealing with musicians plugged into the academic scene, all college graduates. They knew what I planned to do and were already aware of their rights and their positions in a knowledge and culture economy that put a premium on creativity, exoticism, and individuality. They opened their world, their corporate offices, and their private spheres sufficiently so I could let the impressions of the environment in.

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Research Methods There is a large body of scholarship looking at the relationship between music in the United States and the social groups that consume or practice it (for an introduction to these diverse musical cultures see Koskoff 2005). This kind of scholarship from an interdisciplinary cultural studies perspective draws from fields as varied as American studies, history, anthropology, sociology, and of course, from musicology and ethnomusicology (for the latter see Koskoff 2001). There is however, still not much scholarship that successfully combines an examination of the motivating factors from the production and compositional side of the music together with analysis of the cultural implications at play in the production. To investigate this relationship, one needs to combine technical methods from musicology with the more interdisciplinary approaches of cultural studies. This combination is necessary because music is a site where cultural values are crystallized in aesthetic form and expression, but not necessarily with linear argument. In his 2007 monograph on Woody Guthrie for example, Martin Butler tries explicitly to engage the music itself in a broader cultural discussion, but he ends up only utilizing the lyrics of the songs in his analysis and does not take Guthrie’s life or the sound of the music into consideration at all. Among scholars based in the United States itself, music as a topic has played an increasingly prominent role in most of the social sciences and American Studies (Kotarba and Vannini; Keeling and Kun), leading to the founding of a “sound caucus” at the American Studies Association yearly conference in 2011. “Sound studies” currently seems to be taking a different route of investigation, but the fields are overlapping (Pinch and Bijsterveld). Meanwhile, research on music produced by scholars of American Studies or Popular Music Studies based in Germany tried to reconcile the strictly musicological German reception of this music (which mostly understands it as a means of transcending the traditional highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy) with a more informed understanding of the cultural meaning and resonance of this music in the U.S. itself. This has often led to a focus on depicting this music as somehow inherently “liberating” in a political-ideological sense, thus portraying globalization as a consistently positive force in identity politics (Raussert and Miller Jones; Raussert and Habell-Pallán). By contrast, works on music produced by American Studies scholars based in the U.S. focus more on the 20

subjective empowerment of a subcultural community or the unjustified appropriation of this music by the broader culture. As my project stands between musicology, popular music studies, anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies and cultural studies, I will use methods derived from these disciplines (critical theory, Gramscian hegemonic theory, the Frankfurt School, as subsumed into the field of Transnational American Studies). As a prime example of how musicological and cultural studies methods can be combined I would like to refer to Charles Hiroshi Garrett’s book Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century. This book of essays about a wide range of styles from jazz to Hawai’ian music focuses on the problems of race and identity formation, and provides a useful inspiration. Dick Hebdige’s various works on subcultures and music also effectively combine a cultural studies approach with a focus on aesthetics (1978, 1993). In her thoughtful work on the role of selling as a trope in the culture and content of country music, Diane Pecknold examined how the demands of the consumer society become integrated into acts of creative authenticity and became part of the values of a subculture. I will not neglect issues of race and gender, but I will mainly focus on these issues as they connect with a broader concern about class, power and the hegemonic cultural function of consumer society, an approach that has demonstrated its usefulness in the emergent field of whiteness studies (Lipsitz 1998). As Susan Hekman noted, we are not fully free in performing the actions that constitute our identity nor are we wholly formed by the hegemonic discourse that constitutes our society (5). Amy Kaplan has built on this to show the usefulness of a perspective of reversed power in negotiating relationships between subculture and hegemony. My project will explore the usefulness of these approaches in relation to music and consumption. The varying characteristics of the different case studies in this book demand varying approaches and levels of intensity in the application of the available analytical methods I describe above. The musicological analysis is strongest in the chapter on Charles Ives, and it can also clearly be seen at work in the Jackalope and Waffle House chapters. A focus on issues of marketability comes out most clearly in the chapters on Detroit techno and Jackalope, while questions of identity – interestingly enough, considering the demographic groups that first thematized identity politics – emerge perhaps most tellingly in the chapters on BarlowGirl and Ives. 21

The Barlow chapter in particular pays more attention to socio-political issues such as gender anxiety, generational tensions, and economic mobility than to the internal characteristics of rock music itself, linking a sense of loss of white privilege to the atomizing pressures of hyper-individualism in the neoliberal era, and the corresponding need to define new boundaries with doctrines of “inside” versus “outside.” Relying more on partly subjective measures of appropriateness than consistency, I have adjusted my approaches to the changing nature of each of the subjects at hand, and I have followed the roads of inquiry which seemed most promising for the individual case studies. I hope that at the end I can show that there is a very wide range of possible cultural expressions by musicians (and scholars) of the tensions between authenticity and the market. Following in a long and honorable tradition of anthropological writing, I have also included some of my ethnographic field study notes, impressions and personal experiences as Preludes or Interludes in the chapters themselves. Running the risk of privileging the anecdotal, I nevertheless see them as an effective means of including what Clifford Geertz called “thick description” in his ethnographic research. Through them I want to express the conviction that as a researcher I am always entangled in the topics I am researching and I need to acknowledge that entanglement of my own presence, and my relative position of power vis-a-vis that of my subjects.6

Taking the Pulse of Late Capitalist America My survey of the artists presented in the case studies was, personally for me, like taking the pulse of America at a certain moment in time. Both my research and my personal experience have afforded me a close look at the South and the middle of the country, the so-called fly-over states, encompassing parts of the Sunbelt, the Midwest, Great Plains and finally the mountain West and Southwest. These areas are often ignored by elites on 6

Cf. in this regard the preface and introduction of a book about Indonesia by Margaret J. Wiener, who openly reflects about her position as a Western scholar entangled in relations of power and who lays open the scope and limits of her scholarly and personal interaction with local collaborators. In the usage of field descriptions, I also follow other ethnomusicological scholars like Jonathan Pieslak.

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both sides of the coast, but they have arguably become more important for the long term social and cultural development of the country since the middle of the twentieth century than the coasts. My first chance to experience the rhythms and textures of everyday life in the U.S. came when I lived in Norman, Oklahoma. On extended trips to other parts of the country from that base and a later relocation to Michigan, I realized that an entire human lifetime could only show a fragment of what it means to live in such a country. I had gotten so used to seeing miles and miles of strip malls near the highways of the spread-out cities in the middle of vast empty plains that such a landscape did not strike me as strange any more until I reread Robert D. Kaplan’s An Empire Wilderness. In 1999 Kaplan could still express shock at the commercialization of the middle of America, with the endless repetitions of the same chain store businesses along the vast stretches of suburbia outside the cities. In such towns as Phoenix, Tucson, Oklahoma City, or Kansas City the downtown is not really the center any more. Such cities do not have or depend on a center, they are pure suburbs or exurbs. Kaplan wrote: America’s geographical advantage – the vast empty tracts beyond the older suburbs with their low real estate values, especially compared to those of Europe and East Asia – allows the middle class to move further and further away from the disruptive poor and thus avoid, among other things, local taxes for social programs that may – or may not – work. For the citizens of the new Kansas City region, the traditional social contract that binds all citizens to the common good is gradually becoming an impediment to participation in the emerging global economy. (17)

Kaplan traced the fragmentation of the culture into subgroups “with their own journals, social networks, and obsessions,” who from time to time “bump into other travelers – other subgroups – in superficial encounters” (11). Amidst the fears that were common before 9/11 that a globalizing America would lose its identity in a world itself more and more networked and Americanized, Kaplan retraced how corporations and consumerism have changed the U.S. The countervailing side, the anti-market and antiglobal aspects and forces within the culture, have however not lost their meaning, especially in the middle of America. This side I have labeled “authenticity,” even if this label does not accurately reflect how much this sensibility has fused with conservative political ideology. It sometimes astonishes me in the face of such relentless commodification, how many 23

aspects of local history and the hidden histories of the cultures that have lived or moved across the different parts of the U.S. still influence the attitude and the thinking of people in everyday life. In The Nine Nations of North America (1981), Joel Garreau distinguished the economic and cultural landscapes I had researched as “Mexamerica” in Arizona, the “Foundry” with Chicago and Detroit as the declining centers of the industrial era, “Dixie” in Atlanta, and “New England” for the area of the same name. According to his categories I had just barely missed the Midwestern “Breadbasket.” Garreau’s cultural fault lines were strongly rooted in history, but they did not account for the ascendancy of the Sun- and Bible-belt culture in many other states, a development which is slowly erasing the differences among regional cultures in the middle of America. The latter was explicitly made visible in a depiction of the division of the U.S. after the 2004 election: The middle was covered in red, while the West Coast, the coast of the North East and the Great Lakes states showed blue. Because of the strong connection of the Republican vote with Christian values the red map also got labeled “The Jesusland Map,” with blue “Realitania” building a union with the rest of Canada. In Albion’s Seed (1989) David Hackett Fischer tried to explain the American cultural landscape through the different folkways of the British people settling there. In regards to people on the Blue Ridge Mountain range he wrote: Early in the twentieth century the English folklorist Cecil Sharp left his home in Stratford-on-Avon and spent many months in America’s Appalachian highlands, collecting the songs and dances of the back settlers. After careful comparison with British materials, he wrote of these people: “From an analysis of their traditional songs, ballads, dances, singinggames, etc. […] they came from a part of England where the civilization was least developed – probably the North of England, or the Border country between Scotland and England.” (621)

Colin Woodard stayed in American Nations (2011) with the idea of distinguishing different cultures of the U.S. mainly through the settlement pattern, including, e.g., the Scots-Irish settlement of Oklahoma into “Greater Appalachia.” In total contrast to Kaplan’s “market” view of the U.S. stands Paul Theroux’s Deep South (2015), in which local “authenticity” is reduced to the clichés of a Northerner imagining a pre-industrial 24

South. Theroux deliberately avoided any big city, staying solidly on the lesser, “blue” roads: The poor, having little else, keep their culture intact as part of their vitality, long after the well-off have dumped it. This was one of the many encounters that showed me how a traveler may arrive and slip into the rhythm of life in the South, the immersive power of its simple welcome amounting to a spell. (8-9)

My own road trip through America in the course of my case studies tried to find a middle ground between the anonymity of economic globalism and the patches of “authenticity” left over from a time when being human was not a market decision. If I succeed or if my biases have clouded the analysis too much is for the reader to judge.

Change or Decline? All of my examples show moments in the unraveling of a great postwar consensus. If they do not yet document a true cultural collapse, they certainly showcase a lot of unfulfilled expectations, and the human responses towards this outcome. We see the hopes of multiculturalism and a real confrontation with colonialism in Nakai’s and Yáñez’s music in the ’80s, and we see the naïveness of Southern musical culture and the belief in a retro “American Dream” of the mid-century in the Waffle House songs. In the ’90s the collapse of Detroit bears strange fruit with techno music, a way of keeping up the un-exploited reaches of the internal mind as something which the latest crop of African American musical talent could still call their own. Acceptance as an insider and the price to be paid is evident in contrast in the case of Charles Ives, who got included in the pantheon of elite (European-like) composers. In the 2000s, the Christian subculture provides a dreamland shelter of magical beliefs that prosperity will come by divine blessing, with the option of blaming the outside, evil world if that is not the case. Looking at the subcultures, none of them provides a real safety net against hardship in a neoliberal world of individualism. But all of them provide means of articulating hope, even if only in the pictures and sounds of unrealistic dream worlds. America’s strength has always been a strong belief in optimism and hope. However, when the power shift towards a 25

chaotic and polycentric world will have run its course, such faith might become a problem in itself, because it helps people ignore reality and prevents the deployment of other strategies to cope with frustration and powerlessness. Music will help us to cope – but will also show us the signs and fault lines of future conflict.

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Works Cited (Music see separate list below, websites accessed Oct. 2018) Appleby, Joyce. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. New York: Norton, 2010. Banerjee, Mita. Race-ing the Century. Heidelberg: Winter 2005. Basu, Paul, ed. The Inbetweenness of Things: Materializing Mediation and Movement between Worlds. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Barker, Hugh, and Yuval Taylor. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. New York: Norton, 2007. Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Bennett, Andy, and Keith Kahn-Harris, eds. After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Berman, Marshall. The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society. London: Allen & Unwin, 1970. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Butler, Martin. Voices of the Down and Out: The Dust Bowl Migration and the Great Depression in the Songs of Woody Guthrie. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Chapple, Steve, and Reebee Garofalo. Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977. Chomsky, Noam. Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Chusid, Irwin. Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. Chicago: A Cappella, 2000. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003. Cowie, Jefferson, and Lauren Boehm. “Dead Man’s Town: ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ Social History, and Working-Class Identity.” American Quarterly 58.2 (2006): 353-78. Cross, Gary. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. Crowdy, Denis, Shane Holman, and Tony Mitchell, eds. Musical In-Betweenness: The Proceedings of the 8th IASPM Australian-New Zealand Conference. Sydney: UTS Publications, 2001. Deerman, M. Eugenia. “Transporting Movement Ideology into Popular Culture: Right-Wing Think Tanks and the Case of ‘Virgin Chic.’” Sociological Spectrum: Mid-South Sociological Association 32.2 (2012): 95-113.

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Eat, Pray, Love. Ryan Murphy (dir.). Columbia Pictures, 2010. DVD. Elliott, Richard. “Popular Music & the Politics of Authenticity.” Syllabus 201112. Academia website. . Fenster, Mark Andrew. “The Articulation of Difference and Identity in Alternative Popular Music Practice.” Diss. U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1992. Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Fox, Richard Wightman, and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. New York/Toronto: Random House, 1983. Frank, Thomas. Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016. ———. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Garofalo, Reebee. “How Autonomous is Relative: Popular Music, the Social Formation and Cultural Struggle.” Popular Music 6.1 (Jan. 1987): 77–92. Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Garrett, Charles Hiroshi. Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Viking, 2006. Goodwin, Neva R., Frank Ackerman, and David Kiron. The Consumer Society. Washington DC: Island P, 1997. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Ed. Greenblatt et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 2-13. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life.” Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. II. The Rock Era. Ed. Simon Frith. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 311-42. Haynes, Jo. Music, Difference, and the Residue of Race. New York, London: Routledge, 2013 Hebdige, Dick. Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London, New York: Methuen, 1987. ———. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1993. Hekman, Susan J. Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics. University Park: Pennsylvania State U, 2004. Hesmondhalgh, David. The Culture Industries. Los Angeles: Sage, 2002.

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———. “Is This What You Call Change? Post-Fordism, Flexibility and the Cultural Industries.” Popular Music: Style and Identity. Ed. Will Straw, Stacey Johnson, Rebecca Sullivan, and Paul Friedlander. Montreal: Centre for Research into Canadian Cultural Industries, 1995. 141-47. Hickel, Jason. “A Short History of Neoliberalism (and How We Can Fix It).” New Left Project. . Imber, Jonathan B, ed. Therapeutic Culture: Triumph and Defeat. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Kaplan, Robert D. An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future. New York: Random House, 1998. Keeling, Kara, and Josh Kun, ed. Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Spec. issue of American Quarterly. 63.3 (Sept. 2011). King, Richard. How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks Who Made Independent Music (1975–2005). London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Koskoff, Ellen, ed. Music Cultures in the United States: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. ———. The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 3. The United States and Canada. New York: Garland Publishing, 2001. Kotarba, Joseph A., and Phillip Vannini. Understanding Society through Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2009. “Liminality & Borderlands.” Call for Papers for the Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch 2013, Austin. . Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London, New York: Verso, 1994. ———. Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. ———. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1998. Maier, Charles S. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Updated ed. from Invisible Republic. New York: Picador, 2001. ———. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: H. Holt & Co, 1997. McGovern, Charles F. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006.

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Moore, Allan. “Authenticity as Authentication.” Popular Music 21.2 (2002): 20923. Muggleton, David, and Rupert Weinzierl, eds. The Post-Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Pecknold, Diane. The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Pieslak, Jonathan. Radicalism & Music: An Introduction to the Music Culture of al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-animal Rights Militants. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2015. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Raussert, Wilfried, and John Miller Jones. Traveling Sounds: Music, Migration, and Identity in the U.S. and Beyond. Berlin: LIT, 2008. Raussert, Wilfried, and Michelle Habell-Pallán, eds. Cornbread and Cuchifritos: Ethnic Identity Politics, Transnationalization, and Transculturation in American Urban Popular Music. Trier/Tempe, AZ: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier/Bilingual P, 2011. Rorabaugh, W. J. American Hippies. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. Samovar, Larry A., Richard E. Porter, and Edwin R. McDaniel. Intercultural Communication: A Reader. 12th ed. South Melbourne: Thomson/ Wadsworth, 2009. Sinker, Mark. Rev. of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, by Greil Markus. The Wire 160 (1997): 76. Stolk, Hanneke. “This is Not Mexico, This is the Border: Discourses on Authentic Mexican Culture in Tijuana.” Etnofoor 17.1-2 (2004): 227-47. Also published as Authenticity: Beyond Essentialism and Deconstruction. Ed. Yolanda van Ede. Münster: LIT, 2005. Suisman, David. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2009. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1991. Taylor, Timothy D. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Theroux, Paul. Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972. Walter, Roland. Narrative Identities: (Inter)Cultural In-Betweenness in the Americas. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003.

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Wiener, Margaret J. Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Woodard, Colin. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York: Viking, 2011.

Music Cited Anthology of American Folk Music. Compiled by Harry Smith. Folkways Records, 1952. Vinyl. Dylan, Bob. At Newport Folk Festival. 25 July 1965. ———. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia CL 2389, released 30 Aug 1965. Vinyl. ———, & The Band. The Basement Tapes. Columbia C2 33682, 1975. 2 x Vinyl. Springsteen, Bruce. Born in the U.S.A. Columbia QC 38653, 1984. Vinyl.

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2 Underground Resistance “They Keep Calling Me”: Ghosts, Post-Collapse Resistance, and the African American Imaginary in Detroit Techno

Where figures from the past stand tall, And mocking voices ring the halls Imperialistic house of prayer, Conquistadors who took their share. They keep calling me Joy (Joy Division, “Dead Souls”) [Mike Banks] speaks of developing protective clothing to withstand the pressure of [police] chokeholds, but then muses that such advanced garment-technology would immediately be made illegal. Banks considers the mostly instrumental nature of techno as a way of side-stepping censorship. He says Detroit is way ahead, having heralded the failure of capitalism. (Martin Longley in The Guardian, writing about Underground Resistance at MoMa, New York, 2014)

The hope that people can change the world and transcend poverty, oppression, and misery through engagement in politics, individual consciousness-raising, protest, and even violent revolution is the hope that dies last. It is the core renewal myth of any liberal society. We are uncomfortable with the opposing notion – that for many individuals and communities, things will not change for the better, or will not change fast enough to really matter for the damaged and the prematurely dead from a long and growing line of lost generations. Often enough, when change does come, it comes for the worse. The human capacity to sublimate adversity into endurance, engagement, or destructive confrontation is not infinite. After a certain point, to preserve sanity and self-respect, people facing the fact of inescapable societal failure must give up hope for a

secure place in some elusive larger commonwealth that they cannot fully join, cannot leave, cannot change, and cannot destroy. 1 The culture that emerges under such conditions is often overdetermined by the imperative of bearing witness to the realities of victimization or marginalization. Such culture often defines as its only conceivable subject the representation of essentialized, assertive resistance identities, complete with compensatory cults of self-esteem. The African American experience amply illustrates how vulnerable these strategies have become to both external appropriation and intramural self-commodification. But what other options are there? Can meaningful cultural production be about anything else, when the negative implications of group belonging seem so overwhelming and inescapable? The musicians and producers responsible for the musical genre known as Detroit techno recognize the high stakes lying behind these questions. More than many other artists, they have built their answers into both the content and the presentation of their work. In this chapter, I examine the career of one group working in this genre who are particularly noteworthy in this regard; the music label and production/performance collective known as Underground Resistance, or UR, founded by Mike Banks and Jeff Mills, quickly joined by Robert Hood in 1990. Throughout its existence, UR has problematized the artist’s ethnic identifiability as a factor in the reception of the artwork. I argue that this conscious awareness of the shifting valuation of creativity based on the public representation of the creator’s identity has shaped UR’s actual artistic results in an unusually explicit way. These results allow us to understand more closely the complicated choices about identity and authenticity that confront all artists, and certainly African American ones. A type of largely instrumental electronic dance music originally invented in Detroit during the first half of the 1980s, techno is now a staple of international dance scenes around the world. The style had originally emerged in the early 1980s from the efforts of an earlier cohort of African American musicians from the city’s suburbs that included Juan Atkins, 1

Partha Chatterjee’s critique of an ultimate belief in civil society comes to mind here, and also the nihilistic (Afro-pessimistic) positions of Frank B. Wilderson. I would like to thank Christian Ravela and Curtis Hisayasu for organizing and including me in the panel “Representing Misery without Civil Society” at the ASA conference in Toronto, 2015, and John David Marquez for his insightful comments.

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Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, otherwise known as the Belleville Three because they attended high school together in Belleville, and Eddie “Flashin” Fowlkes from downtown Detroit. As all four are credited with having been the fathers of techno in the following I will refer to them as the Detroit Four.2 UR, the subject of this chapter, thus belongs to the second generation of Detroit techno. Although Mills and Hood left UR in 1992, Banks still keeps the label running as of the time of writing, working with a changing selection of producers and DJs. Banks also founded Submerge, a distribution company that manages UR and other labels (Vecchiola 2011). A shift in the public reception of this second generation compared to that of the first is central to the development of my analysis here. The challenge of defining techno’s relationship to (or distance from) earlier traditions of modern African American popular dance music and local sociability in Detroit was the context in which the original Detroit Four had performed their pioneering work. In contrast, the career of Underground Resistance has played out during a subsequent period when techno in general has lost any specific ethnic associations as part of its rise to global acceptance. Understanding this process of “de-ethnization” is crucial to understanding the UR’s emergence in the 1990s, but first requires a closer look back at techno’s original foundation story. *** A decade or so before UR, the Detroit Four had been interested in exploring new ways to create dance music beyond the formal strictures inherited from earlier pop forms, the heritage of R&B as transmitted by the local Motown sound, and the related traditions of funk and disco. Like other African American musicians out of Chicago who at roughly the same time were responsible for the emergence of house music, Atkins, May, Saun2

Because Fowlkes did not open his own label his contribution for the foundation of techno got forgotten and the term Belleville Three was coined for the three pioneers who had their own labels. At least since the Detroit Historical Museum’s exhibit “Techno: Detroit’s Gift to the World” in 2003, Fowlkes is given credit as the fourth originator of techno. I therefore want to encourage to give history credit in addressing the pioneers as the Detroit Four and not the Belleville Three taking into account that the techno scene in which these artists were/are active is located in downtown Detroit and not in the predominantly white suburbs.

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derson, Fowlkes and their early collaborators in Detroit seized the possibilities offered by newly affordable and powerful electronic instruments such as synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines. After serving as one of the influences for early techno (and vice versa) however, early house music soon embarked on a separate line of development, with a characteristic emphasis on stylized, often female or female-type vocals, a rock-solid 4/4 beat, melodic basslines reminiscent of disco but more synthesized, stripped down and minimalistic, and a very accessible, demotic, and danceable overall party aesthetic. In contrast, the early techno artists instead maintained the deliberately mechanical style of electro, a somewhat earlier African American dance music style, and shared its interest in learning from European electronic pioneers such as Kraftwerk and early Eurodisco. The techno pioneers then expanded all these predecessors’ focus on texture and atmosphere to develop an ever more abstract, largely instrumental-driven and atmospherically “colder” compositional and production approach. Early techno did not develop as quickly as house into a worldwide mass dancefloor sound in the early 1990s. Instead, it gradually acquired a more committed but narrower fan base that appreciated an aesthetic based on technical engagement with electronic instrument programming and production. To this, techno further added programmatic references to the work of futurists like Alvin Toffler, allusions to science fiction, and themes of escape into the technological sublime derived from Afrofuturism. Although techno eventually also did take off to massive global success right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall – for reasons directly related to this political development and the subsequent reunification of Germany and its capital city – it only achieved this success after first becoming widely understood in most of the world (including most of the United States) as a primarily European dance music form. This “Europeanization” of techno occurred regardless of the fact that most of its early cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic knew full well that the style had first emerged in the early 1980s in Detroit. From the start, Detroit artists of both the pioneer and UR generations have therefore fought an uphill battle for the recognition of their city as the birthplace of techno. But even after they achieved recognition for Detroit’s seminal role, global mainstream popular and journalistic understanding mostly still relegates them

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to footnotes in the much-better-known stories of more influential and commercial European artists. Even moving from popular perception to the more specialized scholarship on techno, our understanding of how the Detroit artists’ cultural background influenced their work also remains poorly developed. This is largely because most research on techno seeks to understand it as a musical art form to be evaluated aesthetically and formally, and not as an entry point for engagement in identity formation or social critique. Scholars have also focused much more on the culture of techno’s audience – the club, rave, and festival scenes as instances of sociability – and on the culture of critical reception in music journalism. Far less attention is given to techno’s creation, production and marketing as distinct cultural practices of an artistic community. In contrast, my particular focus on the interplay between authenticity and the market drives me to examine how the conscious shaping of their creative output and its representation by the artists of second-generation Detroit techno can illuminate the tensions and complications around the negotiation of group identities.3 Such negotiations have great significance

3

Scholars of music and music critics choose several criteria for differentiating: between the older (more “authentic”) techno and the newer EDM culture, between underground techno and mainstream techno, or between Detroit techno and techno from Europe. In all these binaries color does not seem to play a role and appropriation is taken as a given. A general history of electronic music which includes the first wave of Detroit techno, i.e., the pioneers, is, e.g., Kirn. Other historical approaches focus rather on the development of the scene and only mention the originators in a side note (Matos; Brewster and Broughton). Works dealing with the sociology of the dance culture itself are, among others, St. John, Technomad; Thornton, Club Cultures; Farrugia, Beyond the Dance Floor (about female DJs); or the dissertation by Gholz, who focuses on the gay roots of the Detroit club culture. For ethnomusicological description of the Detroit scene cf. Vecchiola and Dalphond in their respective Ph.D. theses. For an overview of music scenes in general compare Bennett and Peterson, Music Scenes. Sicko, who has written the first comprehensive history of Detroit techno, focuses indiscriminately on black and white Detroit techno artists. Reynolds (1999) includes the Detroit producers into a history of the underground and non-conformist rave scene, but stays in the context of a UK centered perception. Works explicitly investigating the meaning of the origins of techno in an African American context are the explorations by Walters (U.S.), Albiez (UK), Eshun (UK), Schaub (Germany), and Schneider

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for the future of a wider culture fragmenting into media-driven echo chambers and market segments, where self-involved interest groups of all kinds, all defined by essentialist ideologies, aggressively compete for the valuable status of socially acknowledged victim. One aspect of the complicated situation is described by the French DJ Laurent Garnier (105-06). In a personal story he reflects on how black techno musicians ran up against racism in Detroit. He visited the city and was invited to DJ in an illegal African American rave in a primary school classroom. The dancers left the building after someone announced that the police had arrived, while a white Detroit DJ across the hall, Richie Hawtin, continued playing music for his white crowd. The discussion ongoing in this second decade of the twenty-first century about the “Culture of Victimhood” (Campbell and Manning) on college campuses, the necessity of trigger warnings and “safe rooms” might call forth a justified critique about the downsides of an excessively narrow focus on identity politics, affirmative action, a therapeutic culture, helicopter parents and the “no child left behind” policy. Any critique of victimization and self-identification as victim is unfortunately quickly taken up by the political Right as a useful means to undercut the self-representation of African Americans, gays, and other groups. From the 1990s onward, in various different forms, artists and intellectuals understood the need to elaborate a usable idea of non-essentialized blackness. However, the discussion did not move away from race, but rather focused on a contrast between black middle-class achievements and continuing racism in regards to both lower and middle-class blacks, well-exemplified in Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class (1993). In a conservative detournement, this morphed into a description of an “angry” black middle class (Dinesh D’Souza 491). In the 2010s, this approach gave way to one represented again by Cose in his The End of Anger, which describes a new generation of African American middle-class students (Case calls them “the Believers”), who did not report the subjective experience of undue limitations. However, as well as generational markers like the 1990s riots, the new generation of relatively privileged African Americans – the children of the affirmative action generation – also had to deal with racialized police killings of African Americans and the rise of the Black Lives (Germany). In regards to first person accounts of how African American Detroit DJs had to fight against racism in their own city cf. the article by Cosgrove.

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Matter movement. Henry Louis Gates describes the crystallization of minority middle class anger on college campuses and the tactic of “call-outs” in an article in the New York Times in February 2016: The class divide is, in my opinion, one of the most important and overlooked factors in the rise of Black Lives Matter, led by a new generation of college graduates and students. […] I asked Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, a senior, what was behind the racial unrest on campus. […] She described the motivation as “our sense of responsibility to the black communities who do not have access to the universities we attend.” The goal: “to call out the ways our own institutions participate in and perpetuate structures of racism that affect the black communities we represent through our presence at places like Harvard.

A resort to usable victimhood also surfaces in white, non-minority discourses, as in the supposed “attack on Christmas” through Starbuck’s use of non-Christmassy cup decorations (supposedly deliberately avoiding any reference to the “Christian” nature of the holiday), called out by the Religious Right (cf. Arthur Brooks). In addition, the New York Times called 2015 “The Year We Obsessed over Identity” (Morris), when popular culture engaged with the topic of transwomen (Caitlyn Jenner), the blackening of the Founding Fathers in the musical Hamilton and the clone-self in the series Orphan Black. It remains for future research to establish the extent to which the perception of an unstable white identity through the reality of American whites becoming a numerical and proportional minority in the future (cf. Porter), and a resurgence of violent racism against black males in police shootings (and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement) might be connected. *** Whatever its creators’ intentions, other recent forms of successful African American popular music such as rap and hip hop had made the cultural signifiers of the “’hood” in general (and the explicit responses of urban and poor African American males to their circumstances in particular) visible to a larger audience. The global mainstream success of these genres suggests the power of these local parochial signifiers to take on cultural meanings and functions far beyond their original contexts and ethnic or gender publics. In contrast, what do the distanced, futurist, impersonal, 39

almost mathematical abstractions of techno, when taken alongside the relative ignorance of its worldwide audience about its urban African American origins, signify in this regard? If hip hop seems to be about reified images of African American urban life, however glamorously stylized and taken out of context, the material I investigate in this chapter seems to suggest that techno’s imperative is rather to remain depersonalized, utopian, unmoored from specific time and place – in short, to be fluid. Judging from the way in which Underground Resistance in particular pursues this goal of fluidity, I would argue that this kind of distancing is not the flight from ethnically grounded personal identity or community responsibility that it first appears to be. Rather, it is a response to the problem of African American self-representation – and the reception of this self-representation – that rejects the narrow binary that hip hop, disco, and other forms of modern African American popular music have accepted as their standard frames – the choice between an often parodistic depiction of hedonistic escape/smooth assimilation into materialist consumerism on the one hand, and the essentialist assertion of overt, defiant resistance against co-optation or oppression on the other. To find out what techno’s stance against personal or community specificity instead might be concealing, I’d like to examine more closely the ways in which UR has developed a dialogue about fluidity across boundaries with both the African American community and with the wider national and global audience for techno. The emergence of this dialogue as UR’s output has accumulated over the years does not take the form of a deliberate articulation of conscious manifestoes, but rather the unplanned, unsystematic accretion of a position that only becomes apparent over time. Three examples of pictures from UR’s promotional material at different, non-consecutive points in their career might illustrate the intuitive, cumulative nature of this process, and some of the themes involved. This includes a) a photo of UR in Japan, b) the back cover of Revolution for Change, and c) a picture of Geronimo on LBH – 6251876.

A) A Photo of UR in Japan The first image is a photo I saw on the Underground Resistance Facebook page. It features about five African American musicians standing in front of a green hillside in Japan. Below them, the waters of the Pacific are 40

visible. Each musician is holding a long-stemmed wine glass filled with red wine. They are celebrating a tour of the label’s Timeline/Galaxy 2 Galaxy live band in Japan in 2003 (or 2005). Instead of presenting African American males as stereotypical poor inner-city criminals, ethnically representative figures, or vulgarly ostentatious drug dealers, the photo stands in for a counter-narrative claim: these are cosmopolitan members of an undifferentiated American middle class. I don’t want to claim that this is their only identity or that such a photo reflects the “authentic” aspirations of the subjects; nevertheless, it presents an image reflecting the opposition of many Detroiters to the overwhelming outsider perception of Detroit as “murder capital” and “ruin city.”

B) The Back Cover of Revolution for Change The second image comes from the back cover of the compilation Revolution for Change from 1992 and features an artistically reworked, partly colorized black and white photo of the burning Motor City during the 1967 riot. The photo evokes the long and painful decline of Detroit and the destruction of its neighborhoods in the twentieth century. The evocation of this violence on an album cover released on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the riots asserts the persistence of black suffering and African American disenfranchisement, implying that the civil rights era had not produced any meaningful improvement. Taken on the face of it, the cover design is not a particularly original juxtaposition of African American identity with signifiers of misery. What is instead noteworthy is the wider marketing context; the image was specifically chosen not for the U.S. market but to promote UR’s music in Britain, a market for which a clear indication of the ethnic background and urban local provenance of the group’s members was helpful. The historically informed community of Northern soul music fans in the UK prided itself on its command of the most obscure nuances of black and other minority culture in both the U.S. and the UK, and eagerly looked out for such markers of “authenticity” as part of their exploration and consumption of signifiers of obscure Americana.

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C) A Picture of Geronimo on LBH – 6251876 The third image does not dwell on the aspirational or the clichés of historical tribulation, but rather on the fantastical; what Greil Marcus might have called the “weirdness” of UR: The booklet of the record LBH – 6251876 (A Red Planet Compilation) (1999) features the face of the Native American resistant fighter Geronimo superimposed on the surface of the planet Mars. In other images of the booklet a green, human-like Martian resembling the Native American Kokopelli figure is giving landing instructions for an approaching spaceship. The playfulness of the record’s producer, who hides his identity behind the alias The Martian clearly marks the booklet’s content as fictional play rather than as a realistic societal critique. It tells a story of a mythical Martian population cohabiting with humans; the Martians vanished from earth when humans started destroying the planet, and they “phase shifted” to life on Mars. With “vibrational attunement” however, selected humans can “attune themselves to the different wavelength of Martian reality. However, a human can only witness this alternate reality for a short period of time because of the toll it takes on human physiology.”4 What humans witness over there is a happy pre-industrial society. In the face of the post-apocalyptic results of neoliberalism in Detroit, this alternative vision aligns with or appropriates (depending on your ideology) the struggles of Native Americans, and seems to me to be the kind of ghostly in-between world in which we can locate the authentic center of expression of UR and the second wave of Detroit techno. *** UR understands the promotional and distribution policies of the bigger music labels as damaging to the interests of African Americans, exploiting musicians and dumbing the community down by not producing and promoting challenging music. It is not enough to try and escape this exploitation; the UR artists also had to be clever in appealing to different non-mainstream markets in order to be able to survive financially. To do 4

For my research I am indebted to the many fans who have contributed to the content of the discogs.com website which features all of UR’s records with full descriptions and album covers.

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this, they needed to make strategic decisions about what part of their identity and self-stylization to emphasize to achieve the optimum impact on different niche audiences. As the above samples illustrate, throughout all these negotiations UR have consistently understood themselves as aspirationally middle-class African Americans ground in the daily life of a city defined by black misery. While resisting the temptations of unethical wealth through drug pushing or playing music designed to sell out to a mass audience, all the while they struggle to remain open to the wonder of the fantastical. This grounding in a real-world understanding of their circumstances is the foundation on which they pursue the dialogue about fluidity that informs UR’s handling of many themes in its work and its self-presentation: physical space and the permeability of its boundaries; the fluidity of class lines, the place of Detroit in the global imagination, the role of the fantastic, and perhaps most fundamentally, the relationship of visibility or invisibility to blackness. Let us begin here.

Post-Blackness The invisibility of blackness in techno music has been lauded by some scholars and criticized by others. Both sides are influenced by certain discourses in which they are themselves invested. Kodwo Eshun, a British music journalist with roots in Ghana, applauds Detroit techno for its rejection of an ethnic designation: Techno secedes from the logic of empowerment which underpins the entire American mediascape: from all those directives to become visible, to assume your voice, to tell your story. […] Simultaneously, Techno secedes from the street which is widely assumed to be the engine of black pop culture, to be its foundation and its apotheosis, its origin and its limit. Techno emigrates from America, into what former UR producer Robert Hood terms the Internal Empire. In vanishing from the street, and from Trad HipHop’s compulsory logic of representation and will to realness. (116-17)

Eshun understands techno first and foremost in the context of science fiction and Afrofuturist art, as a way of playing with signifiers detached from any specific historical U.S. experience, and detached from discussions about class and gender. For him, Detroit techno expresses a particular 43

response to the issue of black identity; the option of becoming invisible – not for the sake of integration or submission, but rather as a way to escape victim status, and a defense of the idea that a socio-politically decontextualized “art for art’s sake” is a real option for all people, including the oppressed. But before Detroit techno could be appreciated as a non-ethnic type of dance music in Europe, it had to go through a hall of mirrors. It is ironic in our present context that Neil Rushton “discovered” techno in Detroit in 1988 for a British music label – as part of a long, almost crypto-imperial British obsession with championing underappreciated forms of music from blacks in the United States.5 British scholar and electronic musician Sean Albiez points out that Stuart Cosgrove’s feature article “Seventh City Techno” and his sleeve notes to Rushton’s compilation record Techno! The Dance Sound of Detroit both emphasized the “post-soul, post-Motown,” – i.e. the post-African American – quality of techno. Albiez speculates that Cosgrove’s presentation “resulted in a perhaps too simplistic view of Techno’s perceived desire to break with the (African American) past, and a misinterpretation of the ethnic dynamics at the heart of Techno’s U.S. origins” (7). Although Cosgrove’s article and the liner notes might have emphasized the “whiteness” of Detroit techno, he also stresses that it was the old British Northern soul community that first embraced Detroit techno. For Northern soul fans, it was important that there were “ethnic dynamics” involved. For them, the style’s provenance (Detroit, the city of soul) and the ethnicity of the musicians (African American) as well as the rarity of such material in Britain (the tracks had not been released anywhere outside Detroit) were all very important. 6 Less important was the “colorless” quality of the music or the sound per se. 5

Timothy Taylor states in an article about musical appropriation: “Stuart Hall writes that ‘[t]he English are racist not because they hate the Blacks but because they don’t know who they are without the Blacks. They have to know who they are not in order to know who they are’” (1997, 83). 6 DJs like Mike Pickering in Manchester’s club Haçienda introduced techno (and house) to the Northern soul community. It also seems no surprise that records which had more of a soul-sound, like “Big Fun” from Kevin Saunderson, were more popular in Britain than such with no black signifiers. For a description of the introduction of house and techno to the Haçienda see Garnier. The delayed translation of Garnier’s book in different languages shows the interest in techno and techno history in the respective countries. Published in 2003 in French language,

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In his article, Cosgrove consciously chose to emphasize suitably apocalyptic descriptions of the city of Detroit, enhanced with stories of how the music industry in the city had neglected the techno pioneers. This would appeal to Northern soul fans who had been mostly interested in records which had not been produced by Motown but rather by some obscure small Detroit producer. A story about obscure techno labels would fit their interpretive scheme. Some of Cosgrove’s choices of how to present Detroit remind this writer of the tradition of ethnic slumming that has always been a steady undercurrent in U.S. journalism. Cosgrove quotes Derrick May in the sleeve notes to the record compilation: Factories are closing and people are drifting away […] the old industrial Detroit is falling apart, the structures have collapsed. It’s the murder capital of America, six year olds carry guns and thousands of black people have stopped caring if they ever work again.

Cosgrove closes his article with a clear interpretation of techno as indeed music of the black community, “as one of the most experimental forms of music black America has produced” (89). By casting techno in terms of racial identity, Rushton and Cosgrove made it possible for the style to be appropriated by European whites primed to take up material labeled as such.7 But as the sound itself left no easily recognizable traces of its African American origin, it was a British music scene containing audiences and artists informed by an appreciation for hybridity and having no fear of appropriation that fulfilled the Detroit techno-pioneers’ original agenda of detaching the performance, perception, and consumption of the genre from its original, racially imbricated context. From a certain kind of U.S. perspective that is fully invested in the relevance, primacy, inescapability, and utility of identity politics, the invisibility of the artist’s African American-ness in techno seems problematic. I would argue that scholars based in African American Studies and it got translated into Japanese and Spanish in 2006 (Spain has the biggest openair raves in Europe). The German version came out in 2008, while the British publishers took until 2015 for an English language edition. 7 May later might have understood how he had been played and retaliated in his own way when he published without permission the track, “Der Klang der Familie” by some white (Berlin) DJs on his own label Transmat (see Denk and von Thülen 202-03).

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similar programs perhaps don’t write about techno because they believe that the music is not really black, but a form of middle class mainstream popular music. From their perspective, techno therefore does not reflect the struggle for equal access to opportunity and protection from unofficial discrimination and racially motivated violence reflected in the programmatic content of other forms of African American popular music such as rap, hip hop, or even the blues. From such a perspective, techno thematizes neither victimization nor empowerment and therefore does not contribute to the forming of a usable black identity. 8 Wendy S. Walters is – as far as I am aware – the only African American scholar who has tried to assess the role of techno in terms of identity.9 She refers to the expatriate Detroiter and music critic Mike Rubin, when she mentions the “disassociation of Detroit Techno from black audiences” (130). Techno artists’ lack of success inside their local community in Detroit seems to pose a problem in interpretation for scholars. Walters speculates that because Detroit had become predominantly black, the need to “emphasize black identity politics as part of the music” (ibid.) fell by the wayside. Walters’s readiness to grapple with the problems posed by a serious study of techno’s role in black culture represents the beginning of a turn in the current discourse about techno that brings the African American middle class into the picture. It seems timely; artists and journalists have started to describe something they have labeled the “new blackness,” the term was coined by Mark Anthony Neal in connection with Masani Alexis De Veaux (Neal 2003, 13), or “post-blackness,” a term coined by Thelma 8

The fault lines between black lower and middle/upper class has always been strained and the different fractions lobbying for an integration or segregation. Amiri Baraka writes in an essay called “Class Struggle in Music”: “So too the ‘Tail Europeans’ reflect a sector of the black middle class (a white sector too) that needs Europe as their ultimate legitimizer and judge of their creative efforts” (319). Kevin Gaines states in “Racial Uplift”: “By affirming their respectability through the moralistic rhetoric of ‘uplifting the race,’ and advocating the moral guidance of the black masses, African American middle-class leaders and spokespersons were marginalizing the idea of uplift in its more democratic and inclusive sense of collective social advancement and demands for equal rights.” Cf. also Gaines (1996). 9 Non-scholarly approaches to Underground Resistance include, e.g., the brilliant interview of Mike Banks by Liz Copeland on NPR.

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Golden and Glen Ligon (as described by Golden, 14), in an effort to express a post-civil rights black identity that is diverse, fluid and polyvalent.10 It seems to me however, that the Detroit techno artists from the first and the second wave cannot really be counted together with artists who celebrate a post-black and post-soul “anti-essentialist essentialism” (Neal 2003, 13 in reference to Greg Tate). I would argue rather, that the techno artists’ expressions of alienation and the studied invisibility of their bodies ought to be understood as attempts, conscious or otherwise to replicate earlier understandings of the radical fungibility of the (enslaved) black body (cf. Patterson 1982). Only this time, the fungibility and the invisibility are not externally imposed, but are deliberately initiated by the black music producer himself (and it is mostly a he). 11 The techno musicians challenge the roles that most ethnically-specific musicians have been assigned in the consumer cultures spawned by Western modernity; what Richard Iton has called the “basis on which blacks have been excommunicated by the reification and deification of the 10

Touré writes in 2011: “It does not mean we are leaving Blackness behind, it means we’re leaving behind the vision of Blackness as something narrowly definable and we’re embracing every conception of Blackness as legitimate. Let me be clear: Post-Black does not mean ‘post-racial.’ Post-racial posits that race does not exist or that we’re somehow beyond race and suggests colorblindness: It’s a bankrupt concept that reflects a naïve understanding of race in America. Post-Black means we are like Obama: rooted in but not restricted by Blackness” (12). Orlando Patterson states in a review of this book in the New York Times: “Post-blackness entails a different perspective from earlier generations’, one that takes for granted what they fought for: equal rights, integration, middle-class status, affirmative action and political power.” He mentions the singers Janelle Monáe and Santigold as representing a post-black condition, the former playing on an image of an android, the latter influenced by punk-rock. The post-black self-definition has to put up against a definition of what blackness means from the outside: from the killing of Treyvon Martin in 2012 to the media attention of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 protesting the police related deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. 11 In defining the meaning of Afrofuturism we would therefore need to differentiate between artists and art which expresses the invisibility (neutrality, equality) of the black body in regards to race, and such celebrating blackness in the alienated situation (cf. Rollefson; Dery). To futurism and Afrofuturism in music cf. McLeod.

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modern” and the musicians’ capacity to “displace modernity as a master signifier within black and global discourse, along with its norms and modal infrastructures” (28).

Visible Invisibility Detroit techno, and UR in particular, decided fundamentally against black visibility. Mike Banks says in 2007: We’d both [Jeff Mills and Mike Banks] grown tired of seeing the ’80s era commercial media portraying African Americans once again as they were in the ’70s Black Exploitation movies – happy clowns who wanted nothing more than a big fat ass, diamonds, furs and gold, a ridiculously flashy car and a pocket full of cash earned from “hustlin.” […] We wanted a label and a sound that depicted brothers in a different darkness and a different light. (Denk and von Thülen, 141-42)12

To defy the black stereotype while endeavouring to avoid the trap of trying too hard to transcend specific ethnicity (an option that historically has been open only to white artists), Banks and Mills decided to hide their faces: And the facelessness was based on hopin’ that people would listen more to the music coming out of the speakers and weren’t worrien’ [sic] about what we looked like, because in the era that we will create music a lot of African American singers and musicians and shit was getting it made, their nose pointed and skin lightening and all types of crazy shit. So we weren’t with that shit. So we just said: “Fucker we gonna do our thing faceless for as long as we possibly could.” (Banks, interview by Slices)

Jeff Mills in his solo project later went back to this idea of a colorless music: “The music that I make now has absolutely nothing to do with color. It has nothing to do with man/woman, East/West, up/down, but more [to do with] ‘the mind.’ The mind has no color” (Reynolds 1999, 233).

12

Cf. the full interview by von Thülen in 2007 for De:Bug magazine.

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Underground Resistance’s understanding of the performance of invisibility differs somewhat from what Juan Atkins, part of the first techno generation, had previously done. Atkins had wanted to “repudiat[e] ethnic designations” (Rubin 116) by establishing a difference between himself as a person and his invented artist persona – in his case, appearing to be a robotic non-human onstage performer under the alias of Model 500.13 Yet it was clear that Atkins’s music did not represent an unfiltered real world objective, invoking as he did Afrofuturist concepts in compositions such as “Cosmic Cars” or “No UFO’s,” and limning his imagined worlds with abstract techno soundscapes evoking the soundtracks of science fiction films. Atkins’s inspirations were the stage personae of members of the German electronic band Kraftwerk. These artists from the industrial city of Düsseldorf had styled themselves in the 1970s as robots with whitepainted faces.14 They had defined as their ultimate goal the harnessing of German industrial know-how to create such perfect robotic stand-ins for themselves that they could leave these “Man-Machines” on stage and view their own concerts themselves, as members of the audience. Excavating the local sources of this impulse to escape specificity in self-representation requires us to revisit the social settings from which techno originally emerged. Proto-techno had its beginnings in the club scenes of the upper-middle-class high schools of Detroit’s North-West, and not in the poorer parts of the city in the east. Just like their counterparts in thousands of white mainstream suburbs across the country during this decade, African American kids in this relatively well-off and secure milieu styled themselves with designer clothing and developed eclectic record buying patterns ranging from New Wave bands such as the B52s to Italo-Disco. This openness allowed them to make space on their playlists and mix tapes for the first proto-techno tracks, bearing somewhat pretentious, disco-like titles such as “Sharevari.” As their careers 13

Only in the 2000s Atkins started to reference his blackness. In 2010 he performed in a Geordi La Forge suit during a live show of his Model 500 band at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. La Forge played by “LeVar” Burton Jr. was the only black character in the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. 14 Banks says in regards to Kraftwerk: “I’ve seen them play live many times but I’ve never heard anyone talk about their age, and in the early days I never heard anybody say anything about their race. They weren’t Germans. They weren’t white. In fact, we thought they were robots. We had no idea that they were human beings till we saw their show” (Banks, interview by Fisher 2007, 46).

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developed, Detroit Four musicians such as Atkins styled themselves like classical music composers, with black turtle neck pullover and similar characteristically cosmopolitan clothing. Underground Resistance, coming from the second generation of Detroit techno artists, had a chance to evaluate the effectiveness of these earlier personae before coming up with their own emerging style. They eventually developed a different solution to the challenge of defining a rhetorical space between the artist and his visible public presence, one keyed to their more expressly political and confrontational stance against appropriation by the wider music industry and mainstream white culture. In contrast to the personae of smoothly cosmopolitan producers and composers – models that the Detroit Four could derive from earlier images of African American music-making in Detroit such as Motown’s Berry Gordy – Underground Resistance promoted their music with images and publicity material that presented themselves as if they were a politically conscious live band. For their stage personae they laid claim to the authenticity of angry paramilitary street fighters – their faces hidden behind bandanas, gas masks or football helmets. They thereby invoked indirect associations with preexisting instances of black militant style from the 1960s and 1970s, such as the armed fighters of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.15 Photographs from their early years show them backlighted, their faces invisible and sometimes pixilated so they cannot be identified. Yet these images are not seriously credible as those of committed political activists. They are constructed in a way that makes the musicians’ invisibility explicitly visible, suggesting that behind the images were “real” people who wanted to stay hidden. Mike Banks also shied away from giving interviews, thereby increasing the atmosphere of mystery and giving optical reinforcement to the quasi-political claim of being “underground.”

15

This idea of facelessness is on the opposite spectrum of the reasons why other artists wear masks. In the case of the EDM superstar Deadmou5 the comic-like mouse mask definitely is there to enhance visibility. In a metaphorical sense does Franz Fanon critically address the question of the “white mask.” The Detroit artists would however reject the idea that they are hiding behind such a white mask or that their music would be a culturally white assimilation. For them the concept of “colorlessness” takes that place.

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Integrated Radio Apart from issues of style and visual presentation, techno musicians did not invent the color-blind approach towards the music itself. They had been challenged by presenters from some radio stations that played an important role in the African American communities of the period. The Detroit radio show host Charles Johnson, aka The Electrifying Mojo, exerted a particular inspiration on the techno pioneers. Mojo had produced the “Midnight Funk Association,” a radio show in which he played black and white records alike. Bill Brown quotes Mojo in the Michigan Voice in October 1983: In the 10 years since the arrival of “album oriented” FM radio, the notions that white people don’t want to hear music by black people and that black people don’t want to hear music by white people have unfortunately achieved a very wide currency among the hundreds of thousands of American kids who are too young to remember the color-blind formats of many of the early, pioneering rock stations. It’s clear that these racially segregated conditions work to the major record companies’ and AOR networks’ advantage. They are, after all, in the business of fragmenting and specializing. (268)16

The proto-techno of Cybotron (Richard Davis and Juan Atkins) and the techno of the Detroit Four fused black and white influences from a wide variety of existing popular music forms that were played by such stations – progressive rock influences from the Italian group Goblin, electronic approaches from the Germans Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and the Briton Gary Numan, the experimental New Wave of Devo from Cleveland in the U.S. Rust Belt, and the funk tradition of George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic. We have already seen how the birth of techno was closely associated with the emergence of Chicago house. Techno

16

Brown comments: “It is for these reasons that we should value the Electrifying Mojo, the disk jockey who commands the 10 pm to 2 am slot on WJLB-FM, an ‘urban contemporary’ station in Detroit. Not only does he pick his own music, but he plays J. Geils and the Rolling Stones right alongside Prince and the Whispers. He demonstrates, by example, that the authors of the separate-but-equal AOR mentality are liars” (267). To the change in radio format cf. Blanchard, 564-5 (entry by Ronald Garay).

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musicians at the same time were also quite aware of the hip hop phenomenon in New York, and of the sound of electro pioneered by the likes of Afrika Baambaata and Kraftwerk, although techno rejected hip hop’s explicit enactment of urban African American realities. Though the techno pioneers quickly began to get airplay on Mojo’s show, this initial success in their own community came to an early halt at the very end of the 1980s, with the consolidation of urban radio stations by larger corporations eager for growth in market share in the regional and national radio markets of the United States. Programmers started looking out for music which would appeal to a broad audience while maintaining an identity in a specific niche market. The experimental and insufficiently “black” sound of techno did not fit the requirements of “urban” radio programming driven by the runaway popularity of hip hop. Richie Hawtin, a white Detroit techno producer, says in an interview in 2013: There was a change in American radio policy, I think in the very early ’90s. Where the programming was very decentralized, so that in Detroit and Chicago and New York they had really cool radio stations but suddenly they were being bought up by multi-conglomerates and then programming was done nationally. As that happened hip hop came in and kind of suddenly took over the airwaves. That destroyed part of the momentum of the scene in Detroit at that point. (Red Bull Music Academy at 37:20)

It is important to note that it was not original hip hop per se that took over and crowded techno out of the U.S. radio landscape, but a variant of mainstream “urban” music that derived much of its character from the encounter between market research, slick big budget production, and hip hop style.17 D. Davey writes in an online response to the death of the black station WAMO in Pittsburgh: “Sadly, this station went the way of so many other Black formatted radio stations by dumbing down the audience and playing it super safe.” 17

Detroit techno was never opposed to hip hop in general. Hawtin’s critique was only directed toward the radio stations which pushed hip hop to dominate the air waves and drove techno into the underground. I want to stress here that hip hop has been crucial for a contemporary African American identity. To the significance of hip hop cf. Tricia Rose’s books; Katz; Kajikawa.

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This process of “dumbing down,” which cultural observers were noting in many areas of American society (white and non-white) at the end of the twentieth century, hit Detroit hard. Mike Banks however sees two reasons for black techno’s lack of success in the U.S.: one is the streamlining of the black radio audience towards less challenging music in the early 1990s, the other, however, is a consequence of the relatively quicker success of techno and house in Europe: […] I would be faced with a common European question: “Those people don’t listen to Techno Music they only listen to Rap don’t they?” It was and is still one of the most difficult aspects of making this music. It’s as if we are smart enough to make this music but too fucking dumb to listen to it. Hip Hop never abandoned its original audience. It spoke to the hood first and it stays in the hood and expanded outward later which is beautiful! Detroit Techno and Chicago House never had time to root themselves as deeply into all the U.S. cities. They were diverted to Europe at the height of their inner city influence. I can distinctly remember on Jeff Mills “WJLB Wizard Show” all three of those musics existed side by side. (Interview by von Thülen)

These developments drove UR to make the fight against the mainstream radio stations and major labels in the music industry into a permanent part of their operating philosophy. UR’s manifesto from 1992, published on their European-release CD Revolution for Change reads: Underground Resistance is a label for a movement. A movement that wants change by Sonic Revolution. We urge you to join the Resistance and help us to combat the mediocre audio and visual programming that is being fed to the inhabitants of earth, this programming is stagnating the minds of the people: building a wall between races and preventing world peace. […] Techno is a music based in experimentation: it is sacred to no one race; it has no definitive sound. […] We urge all brothers and sisters of the underground to create and transmit their tones and frequencies no matter how so called primitive their equipment may be[.]

What sounds like a call for everybody to go and start DIY music is a reflection, of UR’s growing dissatisfaction and even anger at their own situation. Success at home had been made impossible through radio’s preference for hip hop. What was once considered an uplifting new idea for black popular music and culture – to create and listen to music which 53

sounded color-neutral – would now become a kind of music mostly consumed by European whites.

Against Black Stereotyping In most of the modern history of Detroit, the lines of social and community allegiance had not been defined by race and ethnicity alone, but also by lines of class – cutting both within and across the color line. There have always been observers and critics concerned about the possible limitations and dangers of ethnic essentialism. Robin Kelley ponders this problem: The pioneering black scholars practically had no choice but to devote their work to uplifting the race. But is that always the best place for them to be? Aren’t there some negative consequences to allowing skin color and ethnic allegiances to drive one’s scholarship? (163-64)

Kelley is very critical of the manner in which sociologists and other observers have constructed the idea of a black “underclass,” thus contributing to an enduring image already ubiquitous in popular culture that portrays predominantly black neighborhoods as defined by young unemployed males dealing drugs. He protests that the majority of people living in these neighborhoods have always belonged to hard-working, aspirational families with high moral values. Yet these families do not feature prominently in such ethnological conventional wisdom: [I]n retrospect at least, the explosion of interest in the inner city cannot be easily divorced from the marketplace. Although these social scientists came to mine what they believed was the ‘authentic Negro culture,’ there was real gold in them thar ghettos since white America’s fascination with the pathological urban poor translated into massive book sales. (20)

UR’s Mike Banks echoes this sentiment in an interview by Liz Copeland on NPR: We did a series of records – we kind of seen the stereotype what’s going down in the European media how they kind of get you into these degrading questions of Detroit, “Isn’t it screwed up, isn’t it dark and damp and

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you know.” And I’m like “it’s just like any other big city, it’s got the good the bad and the ugly in it,” and if you gonna be an effective journalist man, you need to quit painting these African Safari pictures, and shit, Commander McBragg, come with the real, man, if you going to film a bad neighborhood then go and film a good neighborhood. (at 2:14:32)

Banks and Kelley actually have the same position on hip hop’s complicated relationship to this stereotype of the black “underclass.” Both understand that first and foremost hip hop is art, feeding on the concept of cool (37).18 Banks comments: Contrary to popular opinion most people in our neighborhoods associate that lifestyle [hip hop’s Bling] not with success but just what it is: “entertainment.” Nothing more. Crazy kids just having fun. And believe it or not many of these kids don’t take it serious […] because they know what lurks on “The other side of Bling.” (Interview by von Thülen)

I took with me this understanding of the performativity of a given musical style – and the dangers of taking its outer signifiers too seriously – when I visited Detroit in 2015 to examine the UR phenomenon in its home setting.

Interlude: Detroit’s Antagonism When I land at Detroit airport in early March 2015, the clouds are hanging low over the flat icy Michigan landscape, the wind freezing cold. A light 18

Simon Reynolds in his assessment of hip hop is much more critical, as the play and the phantasies of the consumers of hip hop (of becoming rich) are actually played out in reality through the producers. While materialism seems to be the force on both sides of the production/consumption continuum, Reynolds criticizes the scholarly understanding of hip hop as a resistance art: “Whenever Left-Inclined subcultural theorists encounter a black pop culture, they always follow the same syllogistic reasoning. Black people are oppressed […] Therefore, such-andsuch a music must be animated, at however sublimated and submerged a level, by currents of resistance to the way-things-are […] So Paul Gilroy can argue that Eric B and Rakim’s Paid in Full is a ‘demystification of their means of production.’ Demystification, eh? The guys are on the make, they want in, they’re counting their money” (1990, 155).

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rain makes me wonder if my rental car has enough wiper fluid to keep my windshield clear until I can make it in the next ten minutes to my Super 8 motel in Belleville. On the plane I have struck up a nice conversation with a Pakistani-Canadian who works for the Bosch corporation in the car industry in the suburb of Farmington Hills. He is flying back from the head office in Germany. As my sister and brother-in-law also work for Bosch back in Stuttgart, I could find enough common ground for an in-flight conversation. The Detroit landscape is very prominent in the German imagination due to the transnational employment connections in the car industry. I chose Belleville as my destination, because the Belleville Three went to high school here. And Detroit welcomes me musically by confounding the stereotyped prejudices of class and race: the African American airport shuttle bus driver has his radio tuned to a classic music station, the sounds of opera reaching my ear. When I pull into the motel parking lot with my rented car, I see a young white guy head to his car parked in the adjacent space to the left of my spot, only to pause and not open his driver’s-side door. Only after I leave my car does he approach his – on the passenger side. He excuses himself, telling me that the driver door did not work anymore, requiring him to climb into the car from the opposite side. During my first morning at the Motel while making waffles, I realize that the self-service breakfast area functions as an encounter zone with very uncertain social boundaries. A young white couple comes down from their room with bare feet, no socks. A single black young mother, apparently a longer-term motel guest, urges her three kids to stay quiet as she gets them ready for school and head out. I take my breakfast back to my room, trying to avoid as much contact with all the people here, feeling that some of them who are visibly trying to keep their desperation suppressed could explode at any moment. I switch on my TV and zap through the channels and their advertising, learning about an exclusive pillow certified by the National Sleep Association, and that “not all carbs are created equal.” Advertising blends seamlessly with infotainment on the television, telling me that Aretha Franklin would be at an American Idol casting call in downtown Detroit today. I am struck by the apparent lack of a dedicated black channel as is common in other large U.S. cities. There is no sign of a consciously black presence or voice in the infotainment. I hear nothing, for example, about current concerns of the black community or the 56

political situation of Detroit, while from German and other international news I have seen before my arrival I know that the city has stopped water service to a couple of thousand people who have not been able to pay their bills. The next day the sky is so blue and reflects so beautifully on the snow that it makes the landscape seem to have been iced like a cake. For me it feels like a homecoming, because I have previously lived for two years in the neighboring, sheltered college town of Ann Arbor, forty-five minutes west of Detroit, and some twenty minutes away from Belleville. When I lived in Ann Arbor, I had been fascinated by the aesthetics of the decaying metropolis of Detroit, a city which has lost about 500,000 inhabitants in the last few decades. Detroit has a lot of vacant buildings crumbling down, derelict future archeological ruins such the art-deco Grand Central rail station, miles of grass-filled urban prairie between the urban corporate core and the outer suburbs, thousands of empty lots through which people have made short cuts in diagonal paths seeking the quickest line to their destination; the so-called desire lines. In Ann Arbor I learned to take in stride the warnings from white colleagues at the University of Michigan that it was not safe in Detroit: don’t stop with your car anywhere, don’t go there alone – “they” will either kill you, or steal your car, or steal the tires of your car. Regardless of the warnings I visited the famous Detroit Institute of Art with its Diego Rivera murals, seen the Motown museum, and ate a sixpiece box of fried chicken with biscuits and gravy in a downtown Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet where bulletproof glass shielded the counter staff from the customers. Like any self-respecting white middle-class “slummer” consuming the experience of Detroit’s urban “authenticity,” in my time in Ann Arbor I danced in sunny daylight during the Detroit Electronic Music Festival downtown at Hart Plaza. For an Easter dinner I once visited a colleague who lived at Gross Pointe, perhaps Detroit’s richest suburb. An integrated party of blacks, whites, gays, professional women and men, we enjoyed appetizers as we talked about choral singing competitions, the perennially dire school situation, and the morgue – one of the guests worked there as a medical examiner and he wondered if the city would be able to continue paying his salary. A totally normal evening in the arms of Detroit’s suburban middle class.

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Although it had once been truly urban, by the time I encountered Detroit it was a city which was nearly no city at all. The landscape is so flat that the sprawl rushed quickly outward onto the prairie, everybody living in his own one- or two-story house with a yard around it. Large tracts of these houses lie abandoned today. When you drive northwest in the summer out of the city center, suddenly you will see that the grass on the side of the road is tended to. Then you can be sure that you have hit “white” suburbia, complete with its over-the-top malls and gated communities. But when I drive to my appointment at Submerge at the outskirts of downtown Detroit, I realize that the exit I want to take is closed due to construction work. Not having a good map, I take a chance and get off at the next exit, trying to go under the highway and circle my way back. Only a couple of hundred meters off the road everything looks like an abandoned industrial district. I throw a switch to lock the car. I am trying to parallel-track the I-75 highway northbound before crossing over and going down to Grand Boulevard. Cars held together by duct tape are parked at the side of the street in front of one-story houses which are falling apart. The snow makes everything look dirty. On Grand, I feel like I am in a city again and I stop in front of the three story Submerge building – in time to glimpse a police car with flashing lights in a side street. A white man is shuffling snow in front of a Christian Music ministry. I ring the bell at Submerge while reading a sign: “No entry without appointment.” A guy with a hoodie and baggy pants opens the door. I say that I have an appointment. He amiably guides me into a hall where I find the “Techno Museum” – a handful of glass boxes with pictures, books, records and newspaper clippings. Through a glass door I see a white dog – probably not a classic pit bull, but impressive enough. I thought I would find myself in a middle-class business office environment, but it feels more like a private space with a 1960s hippie vibe, blended with the typical ’hood markers of baggy clothes and dangerous dog. I soon realize however that nothing really is as intimidating as it seemed to me at the start. The hooded guy, Raphael Merriweathers, Jr., has barely struck up a conversation with me when Mike Banks strolls in and starts giving me a tour of what he holds to be the most important features of the place. He points out a back cover of a book by a DJ, The Electrifying Mojo, on the subject of black genocide. Then he rushes to show me a print-out of some hip hop lyrics which talk about cocaine as if 58

it were sugar, telling me that he wants radio stations to boycott this song. UR’s John Collins – with whom I have the actual appointment – then calls me on my cell phone to tell me that he is running five minutes late. He literally is only five minutes late as he enters, dressed in a fancy corduroy jacket, telling me that he cut off his dreadlocks after he got a kidney transplant. Kidney failure due to untreated hypertension is a number one danger for African American males. Collins gives me the full tour, explaining all the while that UR is fighting against stereotyping and disregard. He points out that calling the founders of techno the Belleville Three leaves out the seminal contributions of Eddie Fowlkes, while the word Belleville suggests white suburbia, although the actual cradle (and the performance venues) for techno has always been the city of Detroit. Collins becomes emotional when I raise doubts that Detroit is safe today, and he tells me he hates the current international cultural fascination with “ruin porn” – the proliferating photographic portfolios and clever artistic projects feeding off of images of the city’s ruined infrastructure. Such coverage reduces Detroit to a zoo, all the while barely acknowledging the city’s great history, a story of African American achievement and pride from Motown, to the GM workers, to black bankers, encompassing entire generations that has lifted themselves up from poverty. Collins has recently begun to invest his hopes in a Detroit-Berlin connection; Dimitri Hegemann, the owner of the famous Berlin Tresor dance club, wants to open a techno club in Detroit in the future (if he can arrange for the lifting of the curfew and get a liquor license). In a second meeting – after a three hours tour in the techno museum there has been no time any more for the interview – I ask Collins (who is openly gay) if he feels like an outsider, he wants to know what I mean. I realize that asking about blackness or gayness is not welcome, because it is clear that most of the staff of UR and Submerge present that day want to be recognized via the music only – and not via identity politics. Yet it seems that the Detroit techno guys I meet really feel at home in a city which is more than eighty percent black. Banks and Collins are invested in Detroit and are solidly rooted in social structures centered on their families. Banks still works as a handyman on the side while Collins works for Submerge while also gigging as a DJ. The talk turns personal when Collins begins telling me about how the music industry tried to rip off one of his brothers. After being gently guided to the basement and buying a couple of vinyl records there in UR’s private store/gift shop, I put my autograph on 59

the wall next to the names of many other fans who have come for visits. Driving back, I land in a traffic jam, switch on my car radio, and begin listening to a report on National Public Radio about the importance (and exploitation) of the African American woman Henrietta Lacks, obscure in life but better known after death through the cell line derived from her cancer cells. The line named HeLa is the most commonly used human cell line in medical research. The time is 3:13 pm. 19

Morality and Resistance: Against Mental Dystopia The back cover of The Electrifying Mojo’s book The Mental Machine reads: Warning! To all record companies who continue to manufacture the insidious soundtrack to genocide. Deeper still, to those brothers and sisters who produce, perform, promote, sell, and give radio and video airplay to songs whose lyrics exacerbate the extermination of the African American male – history will hold each of you in utter contempt! We live in an era where there are more African American males in the dark dungeons of our prisons than in the hallowed halls of our most prestigious universities.

It is difficult now to imagine a time when both programmers and the audience believed that music played on radio stations had such power to influence the moral choices of young listeners for good or ill. But before about 1990, community radio had a role in the transmission of vicarious emotional experience, sensibility, and yes, moral education to impoverished and disadvantaged black inner-city youth. The mind-opening, challenging programming that Mojo presented in the 1970s was consciously intended as a counter measure against mental dystopia. It is only when looking in from the outside that the roots of inner-city violence and degradation and urban decay seem explainable through dispassionate sociological analyses. In contrast, for people actually living out the daily reality of urban decay and community collapse, the only way to understand and grapple with this structural and personal violence is to invoke a moral lens and to use emotion to spur personal engagement. This 19

313 is the local phone area code of Detroit and was used for the informal techno mailing list in the past.

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involves activist education, and edifying measures to widen horizons and demonstrate that creativity enables an escape from mental exploitation. The political valence of such an appeal to morality is however doublesided. While socially conscious, it also subtly reifies an ideology of individual responsibility, blaming poverty on wrong personal choices in each person’s life. Such attitudes are common among law-abiding people who still retain hope for a better future while living in blighted and neglected neighborhoods. Such people fear for their own children who are swayed by the “easy” money apparently available through drug dealing and easy relief through alcohol or drug consumption, while in constant danger of becoming victims of violence. In the face of these challenges some groups in the black community promote and welcome the fierce persecution of crime through a punitive justice system enforced by militarized police. 20 A class divide implicit in this attitude also comes to the forefront in an encounter Luke Bergmann describes occurring in Detroit: middle-class people from different parts of the city taking part in a demonstration in front of a new store opening in a poor neighborhood, protesting that the store will be selling alcohol. The actual community of underprivileged people that make up the neighborhood itself is however in favor of this store; it will be the only one in walking distance. Bergmann describes the suspicions among the poor local population that outside business lobbies fronted by black city officials wanted to destroy the neighborhood by eliminating infrastructure such as food stores, so that the area could be used for building higher-priced real estate (61-75). On the opposite side of the spectrum from a position emphasizing individual responsibility, we find positions blaming the crack crisis and the “war on drugs” in the 1980s directly on actors from outside the black community. 21 20

Michael Javen Fortner writes about the involvement of black middle-class ministers in implementing stricter laws against drugs in New York. His book is a welcome contribution to a more differentiated look at the African American community and its author lays the paradoxes of decisions between protection of people and empathy for the poor and desperate open. Written mostly in terms of law history, however, it only paints the picture from the side of the middle-class community, leaving the reasons for the inner-city violence on the sidelines. The danger of such an approach is the lack of such commentary which could prevent the misuse of the data for ideological reasons. 21 Craig Delaval, production assistant in a PBS, Frontline produced four-hour documentary “Drug Wars” (aired 2000 by Marcela Gaviria) writes: “African Amer-

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Though crack proved attractive for small African American dealers as a means to becoming upwardly mobile, Bergmann believes that drug addiction is not the most pressing issue. In the documentary film Rollin’ about the drug economy in Detroit, director Al Profit interviews him in his capacity as the director of the city’s health department. Bergmann explains: “[V]ery few young black folks in Detroit do hard drugs. The hardest of the hard living that they’re doing I think is because they are drinking at insane levels […] motivated by the fact that they are profoundly depressed. They sort of lose any sense of focus or purpose.” UR’s founders grew up in this polarized environment and were familiar with these different attempts at interpretation and contextualization. Mike Banks was taught by his father to experience the environment outside their front door as a war zone in which moral and physical booby traps and landmines abounded. In an interview by Deborah Che in 2008 Banks remarked ironically: I admire that you use some of the most beautiful women in our culture to advertise some cheap ass wine like MD 20/20. […] These are simple tools of colonization that have worked for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to keep mother fuckers blind. […] OK, I was fortunate. I had a father, he pointed them out, he said look, these are all land mines […] to catch your ass so you don’t succeed and you end up in prison or dead. Either you see them or don’t. But the one I didn’t get was the one coming through my ears. And when they started shutting down PE (Public Enemy) and stuff that I thought that I needed to hear, I was mad, I was real mad. Because I understood then that the radio was just another enemy. In fact one of the big, programmers, they was programming us for failure, no kind of success. (Che 2012, 131)22

In the interview by Copeland in 2004 Banks talked about the emotional associations he inherited from moments in his own Detroit upbringing, or that he absorbed from the experiences of people around him: the sound of ican leaders like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, […] pointed to Webb’s articles [Gary Webb, articles in the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996] as proof of a mastermind plot to destroy inner-city black America.” 22 Banks speaks here about the fact that radio stations even took the hip hop of Public Enemy from the airwaves as being too controversial and not mainstream enough. Jeff Mills actually got fired by a station because he refused to take PE from his repertoire (Che 2012, 131).

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“Precious Lord” when a casket is closed, the tension people feel just before doing a drive-by shooting, the feeling drug users get when the heroin rushes into their blood. Copeland asked him about the contrasts of UR’s militant approach to protecting identity or protesting exploitation and the gospel music of his childhood that Banks himself brings to the table. Banks answered: UR means Underground Resistance, and it’s resistance what me and Jeff would be seeing in our neighborhood: smoke cool cigarettes, drink Wild Irish Rose [a cheap, fortified wine with 13-20% alcohol] different mines just set in place for you to fail, all different kind of booby trap [?] music that’s programmed at you, all set up for you to fail, so that was resistant, but it also stood for urban reality, which was like the duality of man, you know, Full Metal Jacket, you know. I’m trained to kill but then I have a peace sign on my helmet and that’s all we are, that’s all what we humans is to me. (at 54:45)

One reaction to the experience of exploitation was for UR to decide to stay fully independent, and not to participate in the process of engagement with outside publicity, sponsorship, distribution, and marketing, as the rap group Public Enemy for example eventually decided to do. While Public Enemy’s Chuck D had famously stated: “We’re in a capitalist society, we can’t overthrow this government, so we must learn to use the system” (Reynolds 1990, 155), UR’s strategy was to become fully independent, not sharing any part of the collective’s workflow and income with the bigger players in the industry. As Detroit techno artists of the second generation, UR thematized their liminal status as consciously “good” citizens living in the amoral ’hood. In interviews and other publicity, they stressed their modest backgrounds and the reality that they had been not totally law-abiding in their lives – but then testifying to the power of techno music to change their lives, offering a path to alternative, positive development. Apart from the emphasis on issues of morality, this stance also meant the successful instrumentalization of authenticity, or “street cred.” Banks admitted that he had spent short spells in prison for theft and illegal car racing (Interview by Fisher). Robert Hood grew up under extremely poor conditions on the infamous 7 Mile Road and was actually grazed by a stray shot fired in a street altercation during the time he was with UR (Interview, Red Bull Music Academy at 23:00). 63

Detroit and Ruin Porn Detroit’s poverty rate in the annual American Community Survey for 2014 was 39.8 percent; that of Chicago in the same report was 22.7 percent. With a population according to that survey of 695,437 (80.9 percent African American), that makes around 276,783 people who live in poverty in Detroit. Earlier, the automobile industry and its subcontractors had helped the city grow from a population of 500,000 in 1910 to around 2,000,000 by 1950. Since then however, it lost 150,000 people with each passing decade, until it shrank to its current size, while still encompassing an area equal to the square mileage of Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston combined – cities which host a total of three million people (Staes). With the Second World War coming after the Depression of the 1930s, the boom in the defense industry attracted many more blacks than whites. In 1950 the city was already sixteen percent black. From here on until the 1990s, a process of what has been labelled “white flight” took place, mostly motivated by the fear of black people moving into white neighborhoods, and causing “block busting”; a drop in house prices. 23 Each decade of this period saw 300,000 whites leaving the city for the mostly selfgoverning, self-funded, and self-contained outer suburbs.24 Regardless of the loss of white people, Detroit still experienced a net influx of around 150,000 African Americans in each of these decades. By the later 1980s, the city was no longer able to attract African Americans, because even low paying, non-unionized jobs were disappearing. From the period of their peak population until the time of writing, some 200,000 African Americans have left the city. Detroit is an exemplary case for the boom-and-bust dynamic intrinsic to both the industrial economy in the so-called Rust Belt in its heyday, and the subsequent shift in this and similar regions around the Western 23

George Lipsitz, in his landmark book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness points out the real estate practices of redlining, steering, and block busting (27). Thomas J. Sugrue has written the most intense description of how real estate featured in creating racial divisions in Detroit. 24 In Milliken vs. Bradley (1974) the Supreme Court decision was, that Detroit schools only needed to desegregate if it could be proven that district lines had been drawn according to racist intentions, meaning a de facto acceptance of the segregation in Detroit. The segregation of housing, which was a reason for the segregation of schools, was turned to the state’s responsibility.

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world to a post-Fordist service economy. By the time techno emerged in the 1980s, the public transport system based around a streetcar network had long since been dismantled by well-funded lobbying for a car friendly infrastructure policy and the hostile takeover of public transit corporations, in what has sometimes been called the “General Motors streetcar conspiracy.” One result was the destruction of vibrant black neighborhoods and communities, now dissected and isolated by the building of the limited-access highway system running through the city. The 1967 riots hit hardest in black neighborhoods assaulted by looting and burning, as black kids robbed and trashed black-owned neighborhood businesses in an outbreak of anomie and rage during a time of suspended law.25 The death of community solidarity in Detroit is ever-present in the consciousness of many techno artists, as is a sense of a widespread struggle of all against all. This atomized and antisocial attitude stems from extreme poverty and a fight for very scarce resources, a lack of close-knit communities (destroyed both because of the aforementioned building of the highways and dysfunctional resettlement housing when older residential quarters such as the Paradise Ghetto got torn down), and the failure to reproduce or replace the extended family support structures left down South, casualties of the Great Migration. If the first part of the 1990s were still dominated by media images of the long tradition of riots, the latter part of this decade saw the first emergence of what is dubbed “ruin porn.” The photographer Camilo José Vergara published two coffee table books; The New American Ghetto and 25

Bergmann points out that “historians and social scientists have disputed the extent to which race played a role in the Detroit riots of 1967” (53). He goes on stating that in later years, like in the 1992 twenty-five-year commemoration the riots were framed or remembered “as a rebellion or an ‘uprising’” (54) and a young adult stated: “The same conditions that existed then exist now […] Economic deprivation, lack of jobs, lack of political empowerment, lack of viable options. There’s still rioting going on.” (55). Sidney Fine even goes so far in pointing out that riots are still a sign of hope, of people getting angry while non-rioting means having given up: “The differences in the historical context of the two times are also relevant to an understanding of why there was a riot in 1967 but not in 1987. […] They did not, however, think that there was anything inevitable about this state of affairs. […] In this sense, the rioting of 1967 was born out of hope, not of despair, the hope that improvement would follow the disorder in the streets” (462).

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American Ruins, highlights of a career built on the collection, loving curation, and aggressive marketing of images of urban decay to well-off suburbanites, part of a shift in global consumer aesthetics at the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, an attempt at “alternative” consumerand lifestyle-driven revitalization of the city also began, with an influx of opportunistic white artists, hangers-on, and young “creatives” attracted by unbelievably low house prices. Vergara would eventually be among the first to suggest to such people the idea that part of Detroit be turned into a ruin park. Although this art project was never realized, many long-term traditional inhabitants of Detroit perceived the idea itself – and its endless reiterations as an early-twenty-first-century hipster trope – as an insult. One can only hope that a peak in white hipster interest in Detroit’s famous ruins has been reached with the publication of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit in 2010. In AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History Jerry Herron points out that Detroit has been appropriated by the global media culture as a stand-in for the economic hopes and despairs of the entire country, a screen for increasingly pessimistic projections about the future of the United States. That black people are shown to be the permanent losers of the shift towards a post-industrial economy, with even the images of their ruined communities still open to exploitation, glamorization, and commodification by voyeuristic white “creative” people, makes such a projection even more problematical. It would be too simplistic however, to conclude that it is only outsiders who make money off the propagation of images of urban ruin images and black suffering. Detroit techno artists of the first Detroit Four generation had conceived their music as a futuristic escape from the misery of the city, but the picture is complicated by the fact that even that early we already find that these very same artists took the opportunity to capitalize on images of misery: Derrick May did not shy away from posing for publicity photos in front of ruined buildings. In an interview with Juan Atkins conducted by Billie Ray Martin in 2013, two different ideas of what Detroit represents are in conflict: Martin: Are you out there looking around, getting inspired and then writing all those tunes that are influenced by Detroit as it is now? Atkins: Not really. It’s funny; I don’t pay too much attention of what’s happening in Detroit. […]

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Martin: I bought a lot of books about Detroit, with all the famous concert halls, cinemas, opera houses, etc in ruins and poor people taking the iron structures out of them to sell the iron for money […] Atkins: Actually those are the kinds of things that you kind of want to escape from. […] I’m sure that subconsciously it affects what I do, but somehow I am more into creating an alternative to the reality, as opposed to perpetuating.

Nevertheless, Atkins had been photographed not only with hand raised in a Star Trek greeting with only the blue sky and a plane in the background, he has also made himself available for advertising in the ruins, filmed for Mercedes Benz (“Juan Atkins – The Beauty of Decay”).26 However, images of the “real” Detroit were much more present in the UR catalogue than they were in the work of the first wave of Detroit techno. Instances of UR album art with urban decay themes include a wall with graffiti and a neighborhood watch sign on City of Fear by Andre Holland (1995), a Detroit street on Hardlife by Gerald Mitchell (2001), an image of Grand Central Station on Abandoned Building in Mono by Chuck Gibson (2004), the General Motors building flip-sided by a burned house on Hi-Tech Dreams/ Lo-Tech Reality by Mike Banks (2007), and a real estate sign advertising the availability of a former church building on Has God Left This City? by Alone (2013). UR also didn’t shy away from explicitly political messages. An inscription on the cover of Message to the Majors (meaning the major music labels): “Message to all murderers on the Detroit Police Force – We’ll see you in hell! Dedicated to Malice Green.” Green had died after a police assault in 1992 in Detroit. But perhaps the most elaborate representation of an explicit yet heavily manipulated black identity appears in the output of Drexciya, a duo who were produced by Submerge. They created a mythical story to go with their music, which depicts the history of a black underwater settlement. The story acts as a kind of counter-fable to a routine nightmare reality of the transatlantic slave trade: pregnant women thrown overboard during the middle passage. In Drexciya’s fabulation, 26

The video was published September 16, 2013. The text to the video reads: “The godfather of techno takes us on a tour through his Detroit hometown explaining how the crumbling city stimulates art and creativity.” Mercedes started an art related project in 2011, the Avant/Garde Diaries, connecting with art to enhance their brand.

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these women supposedly gave birth to babies who had the ability to breathe under water. After centuries of patient preparation, their descendants have now gathered an under-water army ready for an invasion of the slavemasters’ continent of North America (liner notes, album The Quest). Another UR record by James Pennington was called Dark Energy and featured the outlines of the African continent in the center of the disc with the motto “Escape the chains of your music.” With these records, UR has perhaps most explicitly referenced their blackness, African provenance and slavery. Beyond this mythopoesis of African American experience, also worth mentioning here are UR tracks that make reference to Star Trek and its multicultural crew (especially to the Star Trek franchise Deep Space Nine, where the series got its first African American captain). UR also dropped the habit of using a white label – a disc with a white, unprinted label produced before a record’s official release, used as a promotional preview item by selected high-profile DJs. Instead UR decided to use a black label with white letters. Similarly, they changed their logo: From the black letters on a white background they switched to white letters on a black background. During my visit at Submerge John Collins showed and sold me a special UR T-shirt, the logical next stage of this development: The black letters UR are printed on a black colored T-shirt.

No Exploitation (by Others) Although the elements of an ideological stance did gradually emerge in the course of the collective’s history, the original motivation for the founders of UR had not been to spread a message, but to succeed financially and artistically as an independent label, and thereby to leave a trace in cultural history as people standing upright. Therefore, exactly what kind of music they would present was negotiable. Mike Banks even first tried to succeed with house music, promoting a group known as Members of the House (he himself didn’t sing with them). They had a successful international tour in 1991, but then got forgotten. The styles of music Banks subsequently produced with UR varied enormously, ranging from hardcore and acid techno to high-tech jazz and even Cajun-influenced techno. Most Detroiters of his generation had grown up in close proximity to gospel, soul, funk and Motown. The latter had such a huge impact in 68

the music market, and had set such a high bar for measuring success, that failing as blacks in the music industry after Motown would most likely have felt like a big step back into an earlier period of artistic frustration. Although Mike Banks and Jeff Mills are at heart musicians and artists, not entrepreneurs, they nevertheless were not comfortable just making music on the side as an avocation. They already had previous experience as professionals in the market – Banks as the bassist in a side project of the Funkadelics, and Mills as a radio DJ, and as a member of a band known as The Final Cut with which he had toured Germany at the invitation of dance music entrepreneur Dimitri Hegemann (Dincsoy). Both had the opportunity to learn the hard way about the ethical choices demanded by the market and the attendant risks to artistic integrity. Mills had once been ripped off as a band member by a white producer, and his persistence in playing Public Enemy tracks as a DJ had gotten him fired by bosses unwilling to allow PE’s overtly political material onto otherwise uncontroversial hip hop set playlists (Sicko 98). Banks recalls: [Jeff] was frustrated because he was a black guy doing industrial and the world wasn’t ready for him and I was frustrated because – I was a studio rat – and I guess we weren’t pretty enough or we wouldn’t wear out funny clothes you needed to wear to be in R&B, so we were both screwed up in the here from the major record company business. (Interview by Copeland at 17:18)

To “make it,” the Detroit techno community ironically realized that they couldn’t stay in a mainstream market geared to “white” and cross-over expectations. Because the techno labels owned by the Belleville Three – Transmat (May), Metroplex (Atkins), and KSM (Saunderson) – were too busy DJing and could not spare the time to really develop and promote younger artists, UR founded their own label, literally going “underground.” Soon after disconnecting from mainstream music distribution and promotion networks however, it became clear that record sales alone were not enough to keep UR going. An alternative source for the supplementary income necessary to stay afloat – and one synergistically linked to the growth in global recognition of the UR “brand” – eventually emerged in the form of fees and contractual retainers from individual appearances and longer-term residencies as DJs at dance clubs and festivals around the world. However even this income source did not allow UR’s members to devote themselves full time 69

to their music. We have already seen that until today Mike Banks – who as a keyboardist himself never really learned professional DJ skills – still works on the side as a home repair handyman. He used the money generated by the label to buy up a vacant building and there establish Submerge as a distribution company for UR and newer generations of artists. Banks has a ready response for kids “who want to ‘make it big’ fast”: [W]e can offer a spiritual situation in which you can find exactly who UR [is] thru the music if your shit is good enough in a global market. Anything more than that is a blessing. For most small independent labels that’s all we can offer[:] HOPE. Many artists come to us initially humble and with only the desire to make a record, hear a DJ play it, see people dance to it. But often especially with UR you may get a chance to travel. The kid may see the world, see the money, see the lifestyle and see the women. At that point often the desire changes and the innocence lost. The music loses its original impetus and its edge and consequently your shit doesn’t come out on UR and it[’]s time [to move on]. We lose artists to this phenomena [sic!] constantly. And what’s sad sometimes you can’t blame the guy. It’s truly their only possibility at a better life. (Interview by von Thülen)

It remains an inescapable fact that escaping exploitation by the music industry has meant financial instability for UR. However, the collective’s self-stylization as an “underground” movement militantly resisting exploitation can also be understood as their biggest marketing asset. The collective thought long and hard about the way the wanted to stylize themselves, and the consequences of such choices for their business strategy and brand. UR had not been cemented into a hardcore techno sound from the beginning. Their first record actually featured a houseoriented sound with a female voice. The commitment to a more hardcore approach came after 1991, with the increasingly clear indications that this was what the European market of that period wanted. It took UR time to build their reputation with this new audience and develop strategies to appeal to European fans’ emphasis on insider knowledge and expertise about all forms of Americana. The latter are typical European cultural strategies for snobbishly screening out the uninitiated and always “knowing better” than the next expert when engaging among themselves in clique-ish games of one-upmanship using imported American cultural material. UR earned a corresponding reputation for authenticity in these communities via Banks’s reluctance to giving inter70

views, his seemingly total commitment to artistic and business independence, and word of his grassroots mentoring work in Detroit itself with the founding of Submerge. 27

Germany In Germany and Belgium in the early 1990s, the hardcore techno style was very much en vogue. UR’s position resonated with the connection already established in these audiences between the hardcore style and the repudiation of the mainstream music business. Yet this success was itself a reflection of UR’s readiness to give these markets what they wanted. When I asked John Collins of Submerge about the issue of selling out, he responded that it was sometimes necessary to respond to people where they were, and then take them to where you’d like to have them. DJ Buzz Goree, with whom I spoke in Berlin on April 7, 2015 during a gig by John Collins at Tresor, acknowledged that the temptation of adjusting too much to what the Berlin audience expected UR to be had been a real issue.

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Artists not so invested in independence – such who cannot capitalize on independence – make compromises. The Red Bull energy drink company has for example instigated a Red Bull Music Academy in which young musicians meet experienced artists who also give interviews. These interviews are recorded and available online. The quality of the interviews is very high and I assume that artists sign a deal with Red Bull to get advertisement money. These artists, like Robert Hood, then also often have a Red Bull drink standing next to them while they are DJing. That Robert Hood went down that road to make money can be understood in relation to his complaints of having been cut out of the German market when he switched to a U.S. based booking agent instead of using a Europe based one. I personally saw the energy drink positioned at his DJ desk at Tresor, Berlin, January 31, 2015. Hood complains in an interview in 2001: “Racism, that’s the problem. My wife does all my bookings, all my management. When I had European bookers I had no problem getting bookings. […] I heard Sven Väth say ‘Robert’s wife won’t return phone calls.’ That’s bullshit, we don’t do that […] We like to make money like anybody else” (Interview by Osselaer). Jeff Mills on the other side tries to generate money in reaching out for a higher priced segment, selling a box of CDs called Emerging Crystal Universe with a real diamond in the casing (Limited “Emerging Crystal Universe” Object of Art, USB key inside a plexiglass object with a Swarovski crystal for $85.00) (Mills, website).

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The collective’s visual aesthetic – from the paramilitary appearance to the name of the group – also raised the profile of UR among German audiences. DJ Jonzon (aka Jürgen Stöckemann) actually thinks that UR’s being African American was a significant factor in the reception of their show as convincing and authentic: To me, the Underground Resistance aesthetic was always above all good marketing. Of course you also bought it coming from them. The concept was coherent. This militancy in their performances, this disguise, had a different legitimacy for them as African Americans. If a white DJ had done that, it would have been strange, carnivalesque. (Denk and von Thülen, 150-51)

Yet the gap between intention and reception allowed for considerable ambiguity. Jeff Mills states: Let me be very very clear […] Underground Resistance wasn’t militant, nor was it angry” (Reynolds 1999, 233). Dan Sicko sees behind the aggressive sound an “attitude [that] was marked more by caution and protection of its own turf and the Detroit techno sound in general. (101).

UR, according to Sicko, “beat the opposition at its own game. The result was a brand of increasingly over-the-top, experimental and anthem-like techno. Ironically, the European crowds reveled in it; whatever havoc UR wreaked on their synapses, they kept wanting more” (ibid.). Holding the styling of UR to be a clever form of the marketing of an authentic underground, Sicko sees in Submerge the logical step to make the underground an organized viable market in itself. Stylization as countercultural and militaristic figures actually was a strategy derived from two other genres: industrial and hip hop, especially Public Enemy. UR however never abandoned the model of an actual music only incidentally supported by ancillary aesthetics and never achieved a shift to the competing model of a mutually reinforcing multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk. The latter approach is exemplified in the ideologically thorough and deeply historically informed militaristic “over-identification” of the Slovenian band Laibach, which has enlisted the stylistic

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elements of 1930s and 1940s European extremist political movements in both the form and the content of its art. 28 The breakthrough to a solid German-Berlin connection for techno began in the early hours after the fall of the Berlin wall, when the style became an in-group marker for supporters of the many spontaneous dance parties and raves that began taking place in unused and abandoned spaces in the former capital of the just-defunct German Democratic Republic. The enthusiastic, celebratory mood in Berlin fostered newly opened techno clubs like Tresor in 1991, basically a formalization of informal evenings that had begun in the treasury vault of a former bank. UR were among the first DJs to perform there, and also spearheaded the Tresor record label with the album Sonic Destroyer in the summer of ’91. The record cover showed a big X--101 on a blurry ultrasound or x-ray background. In the lower left the logo of UR was featured combined with an ultrasound picture of an embryo. The embryo images also feature on the back-cover. The tracks allude to a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the “Rave New World” (track title) is emerging. The embryos on the cover simultaneously suggest hope and alienation, the blurry little bodies incongruous in the avant-garde setting. Will the babies be the new techno generation, will they rather become UR’s mythic new underground army? No references to the African American or Detroit experiences can be found. This post-collapse sensibility juxtaposed with a hope of a new dawn sat well with a Berlin audience conscious of the apocalyptic bombing of German cities into ruins in WWII. Not all of the ruined buildings had been cleared away in the aftermath. The fall of the wall opened up a situation of free-floating lawless zones in lost spaces in the communist eastern half of the city, where deserted, Detroit-like post-industrial landscapes were suddenly open to explore.29 Tracks like “The Final Hour” evoked a sound28

Slavoj Žižek writes: “In this sense, the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it ‘frustrates’ the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but represents an over-identification with it” (2006, 63-66). Cf. the elaborations on Laibach and “overidentification” in Shukaitis; Monroe; Hanley, Žižek 1997. 29 See the documentary film B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin 1979-1989 which follows the story and filmic material of Mark Reeder, a musician who came to Berlin as the representative of Manchester’s Factory Records. Reader later founded his own techno music label MFS, which produced world famous DJ Paul von Dyk, who was born as Matthias Paul in Eisenhüttenstadt, East Germany.

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world to accompany the life of a doomsday survivor, equipped with a gasmask, and phone lines going dead with the incipient end of all things. On the track “Whatever Happened to Peace” we find a vocal sample from the anti-nuclear-war film The Day After (1984) in which the president of the U.S. addresses the nation after several atomic bombs have hit the country: “During this hour of sorrow, I wish to assure you that America has survived this terrible tribulation. There has been no surrender, no retreat[.]” The film had actually started its fictional Cold War confrontation in East Germany, and showed how both sides had escalated the conflict until the bombs finally were released.30 Atlantis, the next record UR released with Tresor, also evoked a doomsday scenario – this time the explosion of the Santorini volcano in the Mediterranean in antiquity. The style here is no longer hardcore, but minimal techno. In The Rings of Saturn we enter an even more inhospitable landscape in outer space.31 The presentation of a more abstract, but nevertheless hardcore sound to a German audience was a deliberate decision by UR to position themselves to advantage in the underground dance market of Germany and mainland Europe.32 As the Detroit guys were Europeanizing their music, they were almost completely dependent on Dimitri Hegemann of Tresor for bookings. This connection had already started as an unequal 30

Even if one takes the choices of UR’s references with as pop-cultural lightness, one can detect a clear difference between the political implications of UR’s material and the fully playful selection of fellow white Detroit artist Richie Hawtin, who sampled the beginning of the movie Invaders from Mars (1953) in 1993 on the record Cybersonik (track “Revelation 928”). The introductory remarks in the movie read: “The heavens, once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region of growing knowledge.” The film later on confronts us with an alien invasion. 31 With this record cutter Ron Murphy realized an experimental idea: He cut the different tracks in endless loops on the vinyl, mimicking the rings of Saturn. 32 The word “underground” describes here more a musical direction (independent, alternative) than that it should be understood as meaning literally hidden from sight. UR and Submerge certainly don’t advertise their headquarters widely, nor is their website very refined (while their Facebook account is meticulously kept). The club scene exercises control through strict door policies, so that on online platforms fans discuss the ways of getting in (what clothes to wear, to come with a girl, etc.). Sometimes fans get informed through an email list where a certain concert will take place only hours before it takes place. To the question if the underground still is worth its name, see Keenan.

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relationship between a German club owner controlling the potential for future success via the centrality of the techno scene in Berlin, and African American DJs who had to seek recognition abroad because they could not generate enough money to support full-time careers back home. The relationship became even more unequal in the course of time as Hegemann began to make a lot of money with his club. Hegemann eventually expressed an interest in giving something back to Detroit, floating the idea of revitalizing the old Packard factory building as a techno club (Zlatopolsky). But the notion of revitalizing the center of Detroit through outside money and white investment is inescapably bound up with controversy. John Collins, who declared himself in favor of Hegemann’s club idea, is fully aware of the possible downside. He told me of a project Mike Banks undertook with students where they built a scale model of a future Detroit: the city center nice and shining but fenced off from poor people surrounding it. Even considering how UR had offered up cultural capital from their own city to the international market to survive in the face of local neglect, a revitalization of the city with a white European club owner (and prospectively a majority white global audience consuming this particular techno club experience enhanced by the voyeuristic global interest in Detroit ruin porn) still does not have a completely healthy ring.

Britain At about the same time as the post-Wall arrival of techno in Berlin, UR also began to make an impression in the British music scene. As opposed to the German reception however, the British one was more overtly politicized, with the appearance of the record album Revolution for Change which prominently featured a picture of the burning Motor City on the back cover. As mentioned earlier, 1992 saw the twenty-five-year commemoration of massive waves of late-1960s unrest in the city that have become interpreted as race riots, symbols of everything that had gone wrong for the city’s black community. In terms of UR’s manifesto, also part of the CD package, the “Riot” track could be interpreted as the anger about exploitation through the majors, but also through “the system.” A sampled fragment of Martin Luther King intoning the words “Now is the time” makes the blackness of the track audible to a British audience who 75

shared the same language and retained a historical memory of the American civil rights movement. Internal evidence suggests that this track is similar in political stance to the first ever song that seems to have been composed by an African American about the Detroit riots, John Lee Hooker’s “The Motor City Is Burning,” which both showed a critical stance towards the event. The female voice on the UR track saying “What’s the matter with you” could be put into the mouth of a woman caught on a Youtube clip scolding her rioting son in Baltimore in 2015 (Ohlheiser). The British market was interested in signifiers of African American culture and another track on the UR album, “Sometimes I Feel Like,” exemplified that, referring to the spiritual of the same name. The promo text for the British version of the release reads: Revolution for Change. The Public Enemy of Techno? The Black Poets fused with an 808? War on Bullshit – or just another set of designer dance slogans? UR likely to have the wrong perceptions unless you tune into the true tones. It’s time to wake up […]. (Underground Resistance, Network release promo)

From the late 1950s onwards, folk groups and rock bands had already spoken out for social causes in their songs, resuming a tradition of protest music from the 1930s. By the 1960s, such music had been understood as countercultural, although it appealed to an increasingly wider market. By the 1980s, British popular music in a wide variety of genres had taken up this function of political and social critique, ranging from the electro-andvocal-sample-driven “19” by Paul Hardcastle decrying the loss of life in the Vietnam War on its tenth anniversary, to protests against the inhuman and classist educational system like Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (Part II), which featured the lyrics “We don’t need no thought control.” However, Thomas Frank has pointed out how political messages have since the 1960s increasingly become style markers to be consumed, carry their own selling factor for a specific audience interested in the commodification of virtue and social consciousness. The publicity materials for UR’s first British release play with the knowledge that not everything which is advertised as political is really meant as such. Nevertheless, they encourage an understanding of UR’s output as “authentic.” A further twist on this PR campaign is that Mike Banks insisted in his 1992 deal with the 76

British label Networks on the right to use these materials for UR’s own promotion at home – something he described as counter-exploitation: We didn’t have any promotion money or that. We also used techniques like we did with Revolution for Change. We was kind of scandalous in our technique, man, we would license stuff to guys, and they was like, “Ah, man, you know, we really like you guys’ stuff and if you get down, we make an album for you, if you get down with us and sign a long term contract,” and we would be, “Let’s see what you could do.” And they’d do all the promotion for us and we’d come out with a whole bunch of 12inces, spinning off the album, you know, riding the promotion. It was kind of ghetto style. Ah, that’s how it was. They know how to pimp you, so we kind of reversed it, and pimped them. (Interview by Copeland at 34:00)

Japan with Latino Accents UR entered the Japanese market in the early 2000s, a step coinciding with a move toward a live band and the inclusion of Latino elements in the collective’s sound. Several unrelated situations came together to spur these changes, which comprised a successful new chapter in UR’s history. Since 1996 UR had included a Latino DJ, Rolando Rocha (aka The Aztec Mystic) from Detroit’s Mexicantown. Rocha produced the trance track “Jaguar” in 1999, which became very popular in Europe. Because UR has a history of not licensing tracks to major record companies, a hostile and vindictive Sony Germany team produced a note-by-note cover of this track for the European market using its own in-house session musicians, producers, and programmers. They called the track “Jaguar” too, yet they gave the group behind it the invented name Type. This procedure was legal according to German law as long the original producers were given credit somewhere on the label and would get a percentage of the profit. Shocked, UR mobilized its fans and launched an internet campaign to shame the global Sony for its German affiliate’s move. Sony got cold feet and sold the recording to the German media conglomerate BMG, which brought the track on the market and then later changed its mind and pulled the imitation from the shelves in Europe (while still promoting it in South America). UR retaliated by releasing several remixes of “Jaguar” into the market and teaming up with a UK label for distribution, because

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their own distribution system with mail order only functioned effectively in the U.S.33 With Rocha now enjoying more popularity, UR supported his new sub-label (developed together with Gerald Mitchell) called Los Hermanos, which would showcase the Latino side of techno. With Rocha busy DJing around the world, UR hired three other Latino musicians (Santiago Salazar, Dan Caballero aka DJ Dex aka Nomadico, and Esteban Adame) to man what had now evolved into an UR live band. In 2003, on the initiative of Jeff Mills, UR toured Japan for the first time with some members from this band. The lineup for the Japanese tour was called Timeline, as the festival at which they were playing had chosen the concept of time as a motto. The repertoire consisted mostly of material which Mike Banks has labelled “hi-tech jazz,” tracks which could be found on albums with titles like Nation 2 Nation, World 2 World, or Galaxy 2 Galaxy. In 2005, a follow-up tour of Japan also included material from Los Hermanos, like the famous track “Jaguar,” now performed live (DVD Submerge Live in Japan). Rocha would eventually separate in 2005 from UR and Los Hermanos. He had not been artistically convinced by such a major enlistment of Latino flavor in the music which Los Hermanos had embraced in the meantime. But the real reason might have been a different understanding of what nested exploitation entails. In 2011 Rocha finally spoke his mind in regards to “Jaguar” in an interview by Ray Philip for The Skinny: I wanted to be more open and willing to collaborate with people, especially after Jaguar. So many doors had opened [that I couldn’t take], or people didn’t even bother approaching me because they’d done it in the past and because of the history [of UR], they were like “I’m not even gonna bother my arse because I know the answer already.”

Rolando spoke further here about the possibility of licensing his tracks to major labels. He had profited from the connection with UR, but had not been ready to subscribe to its underlying agenda of independence and unexploitability. In an interview from 2003 with Ramon Crespo, he dodged the question of what UR stands for: “You’ll probably hate me for this but the best answer for what is UR […] would be on the UR website.” Even 33

For a more detailed account of the “Jaguar” incident and the impact of Los Hermanos cf. Gail 2017.

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with one of UR’s tracks bearing the title “Fuck the Majors” (1992), it evidently still came as a surprise to Rocha that this rejection was meant literally. The encounter of UR with the Japanese independent music market happened some 20 years after UR had introduced itself to the UK and Germany. Electronic music had deep roots in Japan going back at least to the likes of the famous Yellow Magic Orchestra, who had become world famous by 1978. Jeff Mills, who had separated from UR in 1992 after a three-year stint, had recorded in Tokyo as early as 1996 with Takkyo Ishino at the Liquid Room. Mills, who now runs his own label, did not object to having his music distributed by a major, Sony Japan (the parent company of the worldwide conglomerate that had tried to exploit the success of “Jaguar” in Europe), and through them licensed his independent solo releases to the UK. When Mills asked Mike Banks to contribute to a festival in Japan in 2003, Banks got the idea to appear as a live band. This move to playing live with instruments and the concomitant switch to a lighter jazz hi-tech style also made it possible for UR to play live concerts in the open air – something Banks had been reluctant to do till then with the hardcore UR style.34 With this shift in format also came a change of image. The UR live band shifts freely between the names Timeline, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, while the band name Los Hermanos remains restricted to Gerald Mitchell’s project. The band members have stopped concealing their faces or appear in paramilitary attire. Instead, they now wear UR merchandise: T-shirts with the white UR logo printed on the front, or – as was the case at Los Hermanos’ performance in 2009 in Japan – they wear blue Jeans, red T-shirts and red baseball caps. At Timeline’s performance in June 2015 in Edinburgh, one of the group members even wore a long-sleeved grey buttondown shirt reminiscent of a member of an avant-garde jazz ensemble. Their recent musical style has even been compared to that of the jazz group Weather Report (Timeline at Boiler Room). This shift to a more refined appearance had already started with their first tour of Japan in 2003. They have deliberately tried to appeal to a young Japanese middle34

This shift also made it possible and acceptable for Banks to perform for the first time in 2014 at Movement, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, which had been started in 2000.

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class audience by styling themselves as jazz musicians. Emphasizing the aspects of UR’s catalogue in which techno and jazz overlap was another conscious strategy for increasing acceptance of UR in the Japanese audience, another market obsessed with deploying insider specialist knowledge of all sorts of Americana. The photo of the group holding longstemmed wine glasses cited early in this chapter reflects that shift in image. E. Taylor Atkins writes: Most Japanese fans, by some estimates the largest per capita jazz audience in the world, concur that jazz by black Americans is the “real thing”; at the very least many share a compulsion to categorize the music (an activity of which Japanese fans seldom weary) as “black jazz” or “white jazz.” (35)

Interestingly, UR does not tour with its live band and the attached “ethnic” sound of jazz and Latin beats in Germany. However, the approach pioneered in Japan has also proved viable in the UK, Italy and France, where such ethno-techno seems to appeal to fans not limited – as those in Central Europe seem to be – by excessively doctrinaire preconceptions of what Detroit techno and UR in particular MUST sound like.

Afro-Hauntology In his landmark study of the electronic dance culture, Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds writes: Underground Resistance’s musical evolution chimes in with a dialectic that runs through most “serious” black pop: a tension between militancy and mysticism […] With its outer-spatial imagery, most Detroit techno falls into the second Afro-futurist camp, transcending terrestrial oppression by traveling “strange celestial roads” of the imagination. Of course, some artists shift back and forth across the militant/mystic divide; Underground Resistance is a prime example. (1999, 224)

After spending six pages expanding on UR’s militant side, Reynolds dedicates only half a page to address what he understands as their mystic/fabulist aspect, thereby making it clear what his main focal point and preferences are: “Although both Rings of Saturn and Atlantis are brilliant al80

bums, the conceptual overkill, with its odd echo of mid-seventies progrock, was a worrying sign” (225). Similarly, Dan Sicko also spends only one paragraph on UR’s mystic/fabulist aspects, although he does acknowledge that the album Galaxy 2 Galaxy and in particular the track “Astral Apache” constitute “the most spiritual sounds ever committed to vinyl in Detroit” (104). This fantastical side of the UR catalogue has mostly been neglected by techno scholars, perhaps because it seems to them too mystical, too redolent of a certain kind of low-brow sci-fi, or too eclectic to be coherent. Figures such as The Martian on the Red Planet playing Kokopelli-style Native American flute do not seem to have much to do with any coherent point about black identity or experience. Likewise, the backstories that the Aztec Mystic (aka Rolando Rocha) attached to the tracks, sound more like a New Age hippie pastiche of cobbled-together pop-cultural tropes than any kind of real cultural mediation. But what these records have in common that is of interest to us is a total turn away from the themes that previously crystallized in the work of techno artists around the idea of Detroit as ground zero. Neither can they be completely understood as further developments of the separate complex of ideas derived from Afrofuturism. Most of the original Detroit techno compositions had been a far cry from what Eshun has described as sonic futurism’s “cruel, despotic, amoral attitude towards the human species” (-5 [sic, Eshun uses negative page numbers]). When Juan Atkins escaped from the harsh reality of Detroit into the world of outer space, he still stayed attached to the here and now through the concrete symbol of the car – transmogrified in his music into “Cosmic Cars.” The “Flying African” had not just been an invention of Afrofuturism’s science fiction phantasmagoria; it had been connected earlier with even older African American fantasies from slave times of raising the unconquerable soul from the stricken body and flying it back to the homeland (cf. McDaniel; Wilentz). The low swinging chariot would carry Elijah to heaven, comin’ from the sky to pick you up and carry you away. While in the 1970s Sun Ra or P-Funk with their Mothership had been the funky aliens of a preapocalyptic stage of popular culture, settling on another planet or rescuing the black race through the figure of the Star Child, the later space imagery of techno is post-apocalyptic, reminiscent of the themes of television series like Battlestar Galactica (1978), where earth is irretrievably lost.

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Death is evoked everywhere in UR’s output. Even the track “Theory,” celebrating the Star Trek mythology as a site of cultural dreaming about an integrated, better future, refers to a threatening scenario from one of the episodes of the original television series, involving a choice between personal sacrifice or mass destruction: The Genesis Device, once constructed to generate life on uninhabitable planets, is activated by an enemy to destroy the Enterprise. Spock, a non-white crew member, sacrifices himself at the end to save the spaceship. UR sampled his last line before his apparent death: “The lives of the many outweigh the lives of the few.”35 UR’s fantasy worlds are not cold worlds of dehumanized technology, as the critic Eshun wants us to believe, nor, as Sicko points out, are they the “techno rebels” of Alvin Toffler, taking a critical stance against the machine (12 and 42). Eshun thinks of the imaginative spaces of UR’s music and imagery as unpopulated – but they are populated by ghosts. Since doomsday has already happened, the only hope for transcendence is to accept that you are already dead, that you have nothing to lose; that you are a ghost. Mike Bank’s album Galaxy 2 Galaxy (1993) consists of four sections: “The Dream,” “The Journey,” “The Search,” and “The Last Transmission.” The black-and-white sleeve art shows two figures who glance into the stars at night on the front side, while the two middle sides feature images of Bruce Lee and Geronimo. The last side presents us with a view of the Milky Way. In “The Journey” Banks tries to describe a way into the “other world,” taken by the ghosts of non-white people who fought for equality and had to live through racism. Banks depicts the journey as a trip through space towards a new home somewhere deeper in the center of the galaxy. In the sleeve notes, he refers to the martial arts action star Bruce Lee and his son Brandon, to the South African anti-apartheid fighter Chris Hani, and to Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student who was shot in Louisiana by a white homeowner who accused him of trespassing. All of these people died in 1992 or 1993, or their deaths were commemorated in these years. For the track “Journey of the Dragons” (a reference to Lee films such as Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon), Banks sampled “Computer 35

To the problem of early science-fiction films on the one side including African American actors, but on the other making them sacrifice themselves during the show, see Nama.

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Incantations for World Peace” from the fusion jazz musician Jean-Luc Ponty.36 In the liner notes Banks adds: “May your journey through the stars be peaceful.” The face of the Native American resistance fighter Geronimo appears on the next record (“The Search”), which bears the caption “Geronimo – The Resistance.” On the first track, titled “Astral Apache” with the subtitle “Star Stories,” the music fuses an Indian sitar sound with Native American shouts/song phrases of “heya ho,” and runs them through a processed flanger sound reminiscent of a helicopter rotor going up and down in pitch with distance. The second track “Deep Space 9” refers to the Star Trek series in which African American commander Benjamin Sisko features prominently (addressed again in the comment “A Brother Runs This Ship” on the record). The track’s beginning chords are reminiscent of samples of old film music. Both characters featured on this record, Geronimo and Benjamin Sisko, fought to resist colonization or protect a formerly oppressed, now liberated planet. In the context of African American popicons like Bruce Lee or Avery Brooks, the actor who played Commander Sisko, the depiction of Geronimo requires further clarification. Mike Banks is partially of Blackfoot Native American descent on his mother’s side (Reynolds 1999, 232; Banks, interview by Benney). Reynolds has already noted that Banks stands behind the pseudonym The Martian, the Native American Kokopelli figure on the Red Planet label and connects tracks like “Ghostdancer” with the historic Native American fantasy of preventing colonization through ritual dancing. We can detect in such juxtapositions a readiness to move spontaneously between the symbolic worlds of popular culture and everyday reality. I believe that the idea of being – or already having become – a ghost, and of communicating with such ghosts, has become crucial to the selfunderstanding and the survival of many black people in the United States. 36

The Last Glow (pseudonym) writes: “The cult like popularity of the 1985 motown meets kung fu classic The Last Dragon attests to the influence Bruce Lee had on Black culture. He was Leroy Green’s hero, my hero and probably yours too. In a time where very few minorities where cast in leading roles Bruce Lee exploded on the scene and wasn’t going to be pushed around by anybody. […] This message resonates with the revolutionary voice inside many of us but it especially spoke to minorities in the 70’s who were hungry for a role model that spoke to their struggle. Many rappers like the LL Cool J and Wu-Tang’s RZA name Bruce Lee as a major influence on their careers.”

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What for many of them has surely been a post-apocalyptic situation over the last few centuries, has called for an interpretive framework. Self-identification as a ghost makes a community possible with the many who have passed away, and it also has the power to scare the powerful by showing them that what they thought they had killed and left behind did not really die. In the last track on Galaxy 2 Galaxy, acoustical revenants of UR – sampled snippets of former tracks – glide into a sonic vortex, evoking for this listener the infinitely sad image of a disabled spaceship with this music on board making its way slowly, out of reach of everything else, drifting into endless space.37 In the last episode of the British science fiction TV series Sapphire and Steel, the protagonists have become trapped in a similar situation, the humble earthly place that they had been in – a roadway service station – suddenly detached from reality and drifting in outer space. The return home is impossible and death will come for sure. Sapphire and Steel’s mission had been to prevent “Lovecraftian horrors from slipping through weak spots in time and snatching things” (“Series / Sapphire and Steel”). Such horrors had been the topic of Cybotron’s proto-techno from the Detroit Four period onward. As their track “Clear” proclaimed, the “barren land” had already been “cleared,” evoking associations with “Lovecraft’s Old Ones depopulating Earth, if the Rapture didn’t beat them to it” (Tompkins). Space and nirvana are no sudden shock for UR, as they were for the characters in Sapphire and Steel. UR’s world had already been destroyed long ago, with the slavery and the massacres of Native Americans. An album by UR’s Unknown Soldier (aka Ray Merriweathers, Jr., aka M.I.A) contains other ghosts. The liner notes for the track “Mississippi Mutants” proclaim: “They killed me in Vietnam and I didn’t even know.” The mutant cited on this track is not one of Drexciya’s underwater-baby army who infiltrate the Mississippi delta, but rather a black POW left behind in Vietnam. In the track we hear a voice through the spectral ether of studio production: “Get – me – out – of – here.” This is an American expression of an aesthetic and mood that has emerged in British popular culture and popular music over the last fifteen 37

Fan commentary identifies the samples as all coming from older UR recordings, like “Living for the Night,” “Sometimes I Feel Like,” “Riot,” “Sonic Destroyer,” “Punisher” (from a gig in Utrecht) – see royal618 (pseudonym).

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years or so dubbed hauntology. Artists such as the electronic musicians Burial, The Caretaker (aka James Leyland Kirby), and those gathered around the label Ghost Box are prominent representatives. Originally a concept coined by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993) to express the mourning for the great universalist emancipatory discourses of modernity that never prevailed, hauntology has found resonance as an aesthetic approach in electronic music. The critic Mark Fisher has located in hauntological music an interest in the exploration of disjunctures of time and experience, as a way of reflecting on the failures of modernism. He points out that this kind of disjuncture has always been part of the African American experience, and efforts to express its psychic effects can also be found in Afrofuturism (2013, 47). Fisher says that “[t]exture is central to both Afrofuturism and what I and others have been calling ‘sonic hauntology’” (44). The feeling of time being out of joint is produced through electronic means, through dub, a crackling microphone, reverb – all to create an associative texture or spectrality for sound that evokes past time, childhood trauma, lost historical opportunities, etc. There are significant differences between UR’s approach to evoking past and lost time and that of British hauntology. Ghost Box pursues an elusive past by making use of evocative radio announcements, sound effects albums from school education programs, and television public service spots from the British 1970s before the political turn to neoliberal Thatcherism, creating a feeling of faux-nostalgia for a technocratic, social-democratic future that never arrived. In contrast, although the Detroit techno sound relies on DIY studio aesthetics and deliberately includes samples and some rough edges in the sound, it does not present such a thick texture of memory, nor does it fall back in a nostalgic way on music from the past. It is nevertheless equally self-reflective, as on the previously cited last track on Galaxy 2 Galaxy where the snippets of older songs pass by the present. But the stakes around memory are far higher in Detroit than even in Britain, perhaps the most nostalgic country in the Western World. I believe for the Detroit producers, attitudes that correspond to what the British and French termed hauntology refer not so much a particular musical style or production technique, but rather methods of literally preparing oneself to learn to become a ghost, to take all the ghosts of the world seriously. When the POW from “Mississippi Mutants” utters the line “Get – me – out – of – here” we know that this is not possible, that it never will 85

be possible. But the opposite is certainly possible: to become a ghost, to suffer with the ones who are stuck, waiting – with no trace of hope on the horizon – and to acknowledge their pain and their loss. Empathy is not a word or category of experience evoked by the British practitioners of sonic hauntology, because their engagement with slavery was never on the receiving side and ended almost two centuries ago without a final reckoning with how the financial profits from it underwrote their subsequent hope of a better world. But it is exactly empathy, and not salvation, redemption or recovery that M.I.A. wants to evoke with his track. With it, one can dance with all the ghosts who are still waiting for that indefinable set of circumstances when they finally get released. Techno itself becomes funeral music, a kind of African American ghost dance with which to resist the bullets flying around in a drive-by shooting. When Robert Hood (aka Floorplan) samples Aretha Franklin’s voice on “We Never Grow Old,” he evokes the ever-present possibility of African Americans leaving this world too early. But I wish to end this part of the story not with a whimper, but with a bang. There are striking similarities between the identities of the Detroit techno artists and the living situations of young Detroit drug dealers. This comparison at first seems weird and inappropriate, because techno artists are totally against drug use, violence, and drug dealing. Yet it is not the content of their respective products or the morality of the production/distribution process which makes the comparison possible, but rather the same lived experience on the same ground. In both cases, black males seek to position psychically themselves in a place which is both hostile to them and at the same time home, and in which they try to earn a living. In his sociological study/embedded experience narrative Getting Ghost Luke Bergmann describes fine grained details of the lives of two Detroit teenagers dealing drugs. Like techno artists, drug dealers don’t respect the strict borders between the predominantly black inner city and the largely white suburbs. They both blur the line between public space and private space, as they use their private houses for drug dealing, sometimes under the noses of their mothers and siblings, or for housing the production facilities and distribution operations for their music labels. Both groups are masters in being visible for their customers, but invisible for the police, constantly moving but at the same time standing still. Being independent owners of their own fluidity makes gang members proud, something

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which is also true for the Detroit techno producers of UR. Both groups will remain proud until death claims them.

Conclusion: Entrepreneurial Resistance and Authenticity Underground Resistance did not originally start its own small business primarily to make a political point of opting out of capitalism per se, or to found some kind of commune which would share a common income. They opted out of getting a regular income from the mainstream music industry, but also opted out of being exploited and having their creativity stultified by the major music labels. An amorphous big system (the programmers, according to Mike Banks) is out there to make you fail, to make you into a mindless consumer (of music or alcohol) without caring if that ruins your life. Deborah Che has praised UR’s business as a model of what she and Detroit activists Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs describe as “Building the Beloved Community.” An idea first expressed in these words by Martin Luther King, “The Beloved Community concept […] would go beyond capitalism’s emphasis on the market, individualistic competition and profit maximization. It would incorporate social and economic justice principles” (2012, 126). In a different context these words could be understood simply as a reformulated call for an explicitly political, already very familiar program of social democracy and welfarist control of capitalism. With such a concept proven unable to compete with the neoliberal hegemony of the early twenty-first century, the idea has instead cross-mutated with the anarchist and intentional community movements to become a prescription for a certain kind of small-scale and community-based alternative capitalism. The goal, according to ex-radical socialists such as the Boggses, is no longer to overthrow the government, but to create “self-reliant, sustainable multicultural communities” through “developing our own small enterprises growing our own food, creating our own businesses, developing a community and making that rather than economic growth the purpose of the society” (126). However, Che does not devote enough attention to obvious problems with this characterization of UR. To escape corporate America is only possible by finding a market currently (and for the conceivable future) not served by the big players. Small Chinese eateries or (subcontinental) 87

Indian-owned low-budget motels are examples in the U.S. However, they function only because their independent market is organized by wellstructured intra-community delivery and support systems that span the continent. Such markets also depend on close-knit family ties, ethnic solidarity, and at the end white mainstream patronage. For African Americans in Detroit, ensuring the presence of all three of these last-mentioned factors already poses a problem. Due to the Great Migration and the economic and social developments of the subsequent decades, urban African American family structures had been disrupted. Ethnic solidarity is not easy when crime and poverty make class differences more acute, and when racism from outsiders and an authoritarian police and welfare state still prevails. Bergmann tells us that it remains very difficult for African Americans to open and keep a small business running in Detroit because of the insoluble problem of finding credit with affordable interest rates. He points in comparison to big and robust family networks of mutual support to explaining the relative success of newer immigrant groups engaged in small business entrepreneurialism (56-57 and especially footnotes 32 and 33). In contrast, UR has found far less congenial circumstances right at home in Detroit, where local audiences do not buy their products; it has been overseas where they found audiences for their music. To take economic considerations totally out of the practice of music-making while trying to earn money with unrelated activities is not a viable solution for an African American population traditionally dependent on the so-called “culture economy.” George Lipsitz actually sees in the commercialized inauthenticity of Detroit techno a new way of exposing resistance to a “culture of containerization”: Detroit techno music, as a consequence, builds recreational and commercial experiences from the material and social practices of society, from synthesized sequences, cybernetic simulations, song fragments, and invocations of new forms of embodiment and disembodiment. Detroit techno music emerges out of the particular history of the industrial and postindustrial eras but invests itself in the possibilities of the future. (2007, 252-53)

Using electronic means of reproduction, blurring the line between consumer and producer, Detroit techno nevertheless centers the dancing human body as a resisting force to the marginalization of an entire culture. 88

Mike Banks has never acquired the skill level and connections to be a professional DJ. He therefore tries to function within the model of music as avocation, but more out of necessity than choice, working on the side as a home handyman to earn money. The other UR members who are working DJs need to travel abroad to stay afloat, because the record sales mostly only cover the production costs. Yet it is also important to note that Banks has had offers to leave Detroit but deliberately chose a modest life there instead of potentially living better somewhere else. UR has also tried to give back to the community, by participating in fundraisers and supporting other small homegrown enterprises and setting a positive example. Banks says: I always challenge some of my friends that sell drugs. They’re all like “man, I’m making money, I’m doing this, I’m doing that,” I just hold up my passport, and I tell em “yeah, you’re doing this, and you’re doing that, but motherfucker when they come after your ass, you can’t even get out of the country, shut the fuck up.” And they see the stamps, and they be like “damn,” it shuts em down. So to the kids, I’m much more powerful than some drug dealer, and to the kids these guys talk to, yeah, they might know the local drug dealer but my man right there he just back from Norway, you ain’t even been to Colombia where they make the cocaine. (Interview by Fisher)

To achieve this modest, sustainable and long-term success with UR, the Detroit producers had to sell their ethnicity and alternativeness abroad, strategies that have their own unavoidable impact on their authenticity. However, apart from selling their musical product and their live performances to mid-level entrepreneurs like Dimitri Hegemann, UR have never had an exclusive contract with any major player in the music industry but have stayed independent. Che (2009) describes UR’s creative strategy as a form of post-Fordism, contrasting their flexibility in a niche market with the interchangeable in-house stable of artists maintained by the Fordist mass-production approach of formerly big Detroit labels like Motown. There is furthermore a huge difference between UR’s independence – backed up by its reluctance to license material – and the “independence” of small labels which depend on a strategy of secondary licensing of their artists to the majors. In many cases, if a small company wishes to fully exploit the potential of a hit, they need the majors to manage the 89

worldwide distribution through licensing. Tim Wall concurs with the findings of David Hesmondhalgh and Stephen Lee, who in different studies have pointed out that in such cases, post-Fordism does not always mean more flexibility and democracy for the minor labels. In many cases, it is the major players who actually profit from the credibility of their associated minors as “underground” labels (141-43). That UR’s position of real independence is very important for the fans of the underground can be followed in a rare response Mike Banks gave to a critic/fan on the 313 e-mailing list in 1995. It is as good a way to close this analysis as any. The fan pointed out that Drexciya, who had once been in UR’s stable, had licensed their tracks to major record companies like Warp and Rephlex: “I don’t think WARP, Mute Records, and New Electronica are any better than R&S. They pimp just like Renaat [owner of the major label R&S]!” Therefore, he concluded, I take the UR, Mad Mike, and Drexciya public statements as part of their “act.” Much like the façade of some Metal bands who act like devil worshippers. It’s all entertainment and good at that. I just happen to think the whole “at war with the commercial forces” theme a pretty cool one. (“Mad Mike Speaks,” blog)

Mike Banks responded by pointing out that Drexciya only licensed music which had never been on the UR label and therefore had never been under Banks’s control. However, he did not stop there. Showing a remarkable lack of bitterness and generosity of spirit, Banks went on to note the completely honorable reasons for why Detroit artists left the city, licensed their music to bigger labels, or quit the real underground altogether. He pointed to racial problems, lack of opportunity, and the sheer physical dangers facing African Americans living in the city: It is very, very difficult to describe what it feels like to lose talented people the caliber of Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, or Drexciya, not to lose them to arguments or disagreements, but to lose them due to the environment here in Detroit […] Jeff Mills was a world class DJ a talent the world now enjoys. He had nowhere to play here in Detroit […] Rob Noise went with Jeff due to a life threat[en]ing incident he had on 7 mile and we all agreed that Rob had to get away […] I cannot tell you how many times me and my crew were denied entrance to a [techno] party because there were to[o] many Black and Mexican scary guys or gang members at the door!! And

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these kidz were supposed to be progressive! Unfortunately 1 OF the guys from Drexciya was with us that nite and it was a nite he never forgot. (Ibid., see full presentation of Mike Bank’s statement in appendix I)

For his own part however, Banks claimed never to have lost faith with the underground. He deserves the last word: I have never been pimped and neither has my company, the moves and strategies that I use are for one thing and one thing only – and that is to guar[an]tee that the programmers agendas and stereotypes do not proceed into the next century!! Because it is these same agendas and prejudices that nearly extreminated [sic] my mother[’]s peoples (blackfoot indians) and forcibly inslaved [sic] my father[’]s Peoples for 400 years – so believe me when I tell you UR [is] some DEADLY serious shit!!!! (Ibid.)

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Music Cited 044 (Hardlife). Hardlife. Gerald Mitchell. Underground Resistance UR-044, 2001. Vinyl. 3 Phase Featuring Dr. Motte – Der Klang der Familie. A “Der Klang Der Familie”/ B “Spacegenerator”). Transmat (label of Derrick May). MS 17. 1992. Vinyl. A Number of Names. “Sharevari.” Cappricio Records. 1981. Vinyl.

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Alone. Has God Left This City? Underground Resistance UR-085, 2013. Vinyl. Aztec Mystic, The. “Jaguar.” Knights of the Jaguar. DJ Rolando (Rolando Rocha). Underground Resistance UR-049, 1999. Vinyl. ———. Jaguar. DJ Rolando. Radio cut by Robert Burton, mix by Jeff Mills, original mix. Pub. in UK by 430 West 430WUKTCD2, 2000. CD. ———. Jaguar. DJ Rolando. Mixes by Mayday (Derrick May). Pub. in US by 430 West. 2000. Vinyl. ———. Revenge of the Jaguar – The Mixes. DJ Rolando. Mixes by Jeff Mills, Octave One, Mad Mike. Pub. in U.S. by Underground Resistance UR2000, 2000. Vinyl. Banks, Mike. Hi-Tech Dreams / Lo-Tech Reality. Underground Resistance UR071, 2007. Vinyl. Cybersonic. Backlash. “Revelation 928.” Richie Hawtin, Daniel Bell, John Acquaviva. Plus 8 Records PLUS8007, 1991. Cybotron. A “Cosmic Cars”/ B “The Line”. 3070 (Richard Davis), Juan Atkins. Deep Space Records (label of Davis and Atkins). 1982. Vinyl. Cybotron. Clear. Fantasy D-216, 1983. Vinyl. Drexciya. The Quest. Gerald Donald, James Stinson. Submerge SVE-7, 1997. Vinyl. Floorplan. Paradise. “Never Grow Old.” Robert Hood. M-Plant Music, 2013. CD. Hardcastle, Paul. 19. Chrysalis CHS 22 2860, 1985. Vinyl. Holland, Andre. City of Fear. Underground Resistance UR-032, 1995. Vinyl. Hooker, John Lee. “The Motor City Is Burning.” Bluesway, 1967. 7’’ Vinyl. M.I.A. Mississippi Mutants / Schoolcraft Bump. Ray Merriweathers, Jr., Underground Resistance UR-018, 1999. Vinyl. Martian, The. LBH – 6251876 (A Red Planet Compilation). (Likely Mike Banks). Red Planet RP 10, 1999. CD. ———. Ghostdancer. Red Planet RP 6, 1995. 2 x Vinyl. Model 500. “No UFO’s.” Metroplex (label of Juan Atkins). Juan Atkins. M-001. 1985. Vinyl. Pennington, James “Suburban Night”. Dark Energy. With Mike Banks. Underground Resistance UR-029, 1994. 2 x Vinyl. Perception and Mad Mike. Windchimes. Chuck Gibson, Mike Banks. B Perception “Abandoned Building in Mono.” Underground Resistance UR 0-54, 2004. Vinyl. Pink Floyd. Another Brick in the Wall (Part II). Harvest HAR 5194, 1979. Vinyl. Ponty, Jean-Luc. Individual Choice. “Computer Incantations for World Peace.” Atlantic, 1983. Vinyl. Submerge Live in Japan. Los Hermanos, Mr. De’, Galaxy 2 Galaxy. “Metamorphose Presents Submerge Tour 2005.02.13 at Liquidroom.” “Live At Metamorphose 1005.08.27 at Izu Cycle Sports Center (Bonus Materials).” Soundscape (Japan), 2006. DVD.

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Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit. 10 Records DIXCD 75 (UK), 1988. CD. Timeline. Live appearance at Ballantine’s Stay True Scotland concert 4 June 2015. Edinburgh. Underground Resistance. Video broadcast by Boiler Room. Boiler Room website. “Underground Resistance presents Timeline.” . Video. Type. Jaguar. BMG, Ariola 74321 73920 2 (Germany), 2000. CD. [Video of the cover version accessed via Youtube. .] Underground Resistance. Equinox Chapter One. “The Theory.” Retroactive CAD 004.1, 1990. Vinyl. ———. Galaxy 2 Galaxy. UR-025, 1993. 2 x Vinyl. ———. Living for the Night. UR-016, 1991. Vinyl. ———. Message to the Majors. UR-023, 1992. Vinyl. ———. Nation 2 Nation. UR-005, 1991. Vinyl. ———. Revolution for Change. Network Records URLP1 (UK), 1992. 2 x Vinyl. ———. World 2 World. UR-020, 1992. Vinyl. X-101. X-101. “Sonic Destroyer.” Underground Resistance. Tresor 1 (Germany), 1991. Vinyl. X-102. Discovers the Rings of Saturn. Underground Resistance. Tresor 4 (Germany), 1992. CD. X-103. Atlantis. Underground Resistance. Tresor 12 (Germany), 1993. CD.

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3 BarlowGirl Warrior Virgins and the Therapeutic Family in Chicago Christian Rock

I feel like the fact that cookies don’t help you lose weight is just total proof that Satan exists. (Lauren Barlow, Twitter 2015)

At the end of 2012, Alyssa, Lauren, and Rebecca Barlow, three women who comprised the Christian rock group BarlowGirl 1, abruptly retired from their musical careers. Coming after several years of an active online, media, and live stage presence through which the young(-ish) sisters had eagerly shared many aspects of their lives and spiritual journeys with fans of music produced under the banner of Christian authenticity, BarlowGirl’s sudden announcement included no mention of any coherent plan for their future lives. After a wave of online affirmations that God would take care of their future, they simply vanished from the public stage. By far the most prominent theme in both the content of their music and the self-representation of BarlowGirl had been the chastity and antidating ideology widespread in the conservative Christian subculture of the United States. Ironically, it was this leitmotif itself that had created the circumstances under which they could no longer continue. The spirit of the no-boyfriend/girlfriend/virginity-until-marriage doctrine expressed in their lyric “My prince will come for me” (from “Average Girl” on album BarlowGirl) had come up against the realities of adult human biology and life cycles, and the social-familial environment that is their setting. At the time of the band’s retirement, Alyssa had turned thirty and Lauren was twenty-seven years old. Their older sister Rebecca thirty-three. These fully adult women had spent the last decade being managed by their own father while touring as working musicians, all the while living at home with their parents, having never set up their own individual 1

I have used the band’s preferred orthography, which is typical of a certain kind of middlebrow, suburban American brand-name nomenclature – a stylization of the two words “Barlow Girl” into the single word “BarlowGirl.”

households. To the best of this researcher’s knowledge, at the time of this writing none of the members of BarlowGirl has ever had a boyfriend or fiancé, or been married. And now they had moved far beyond the age demographic of their intended target teen/young adult audiences. In the meantime, the majority of their original fans had presumably moved on to the state of morally pure married bliss that had ironically bypassed the Barlows themselves – perhaps the most high-profile proponents of the chastity-till-inevitable-marriage ideology in recent American popular culture. Despite appearances to the contrary, to be Christian, adult, and single in America is not a simple identity. Only a radical revamping of the band’s concept, and a complete image-change away from the teen/young adult segment towards a representation of independent, grown up Christian single women could have saved BarlowGirl.2 Such an shift was however difficult to achieve; behind the wall of privacy within which the Barlow women’s internal deliberations as well as those of the whole family/band support organization took place, we can only speculate as to what extent the traditional (and not necessary Christian) idea had prevailed that daughters could only leave the sphere of the father’s authority when they married into the protection of another male. (The Barlow sisters’ older brother had already been married when the band was formed in 2000, and has never featured in any of the family pictures the band put out). In the following chapter I will examine the career of BarlowGirl and place it in the context of how the “family values,” popularly associated 2

Christian fundamentalists understand Christian single women very often as having not yet reached their final identity, which they think only is fulfilled when they are married. From inside the subculture Christian single women are accused of being too picky, looking for a “perfect” husband. The accusations include the insinuation that they “want to be treated like a princess” but do not want to “share any power or give up any control” (SuperChampInc, blog). The blog entry points toward the “princess” culture which connects with the so-called Generation-Me, the Millennials. What is not addressed is the pressure fundamentalist single Christian women feel to quickly find the right partner. The blame for being single is directed only to the individual, not to the culture at large, i.e., modern fundamentalist communities do not organize mingling opportunity for their teenagers for the purpose of finding a partner out of their community. Christian singles lobby towards an acceptance of their status (cf. the book by Colón and Field written from inside the subculture).

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with authoritarian, patriarchal stereotypes of traditional morality have come to be so strongly associated with conservative forms of Christianity in today’s America, and how this association has affected popular culture. How has the modern idea of the helicopter parents – who want to protect their kid from any harm – fused with the ideology of Christian fundamentalism?3 BarlowGirl has never self-identified as belonging to any particular denomination. My findings about them on this matter are derived from hints they leave in their statements and the online documentation of their lives. They seem to be involved in a non-denominational Pentecostal movement which grew out of the Assemblies of God labeled the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), or the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. As it is not a formal organization with fixed membership but a diffuse theological movement, it groups non-denominational and independent churches in a loose network. C. Peter Wagner, a key figure in this movement, was professor of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Missions, and president of Global Harvest Ministries until 2011. Apart from healing and prophecy, he specializes in teaching ideas about spiritual warfare. The NAR/Third Wave is also loosely connected with movements such as the Latter Rain, the Toronto Blessing (connected with the Vineyard Movement), and the Lakeland Revival of Todd Bentley. Other central figures in the NAR movement are Rick Joyner (MorningStar Ministries), Mike Bickle (IHOPKC), and Bill Johnson (head pastor of Bethel Church, Redding, California). These groups advocate a doctrine of Christian control of American political structures characteristic of Dominionism, and also emphasize healing and reform of the profane world through the casting out of demons.4 Wagner writes in Spiritual Warfare Strategy: 3

I want to follow here a distinction between “Fundamentalist Christianity,” a historical movement rooted in the 1910s, and “Christian fundamentalism,” as a term “encompassing a variety of Christian denominations” as laid out by Pieslak (12728). See below the definition of some of the key terms. As much as is possible I will specify the individual denominations I address in this chapter. 4 Cf. primary literature by Wagner; Joyner (2002 and website entry 2015), and scholarly secondary literature by Sean McCloud; Holvast; Weaver (2016). Weaver mentions that 8-10 million Americans follow the New Apostolic Reformation, while the Third Wave Pentecostal movement includes “over 295 million people worldwide as of 2000” (2). Another book about the movement comes from

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Strategic-level spiritual warfare describes confrontation with high-ranking principalities and powers such as Paul writes about in Ephesians 6:12. These enemy forces are frequently called “territorial spirits” because they attempt to keep large numbers of humans networked through cities, nations, neighborhoods, people groups, religious allegiance, industries, or any other form of human society in spiritual captivity. This level of warfare, also called “cosmic-level spiritual warfare,” has precipitated most of the current controversy. Some believe that we overstep our divinely appointed boundaries if we engage the enemy on this level, and this book addresses such objections. (21)

Such ideas have gotten expression, for example, when Rick Joyner openly prayed for a military coup to bring down President Obama (Edwards). What motivates my closer look at how BarlowGirl is entangled in the NAR movement and its teachings is my wish to understand how and why a Christian girl band would engage in such a set of politically and ideologically unsettling beliefs. The first amendment and the free exercise of religion clause guarantee that everybody in the U.S. can choose whatever belief he or she sees fit. When such ideas motivate discrimination against others, undermine democracy and civil society, encourage neocolonial or imperialist attitudes, and possibly also harm the holders of such beliefs themselves, they deserve further scrutiny. When I was on a road-trip through the Midwest in 2010, my attention was drawn to a book on a rack at a gas station checkout counter with the title Wake Up and Smell the Culture: A Guide to Protecting Your Family against the Spirit of the World by Debra Capperrune. Capperrune had been a Catholic and is now a born-again Christian in the non-denominational Set Free Christian Fellowship Church in Washington, Illinois. 5 The book reflects a strange combination of the need for existential security, a magical belief in Satan and Satanic forces, and therapeutic approaches to religion and behavior. On the first pages it explains: “This book is for two authors of the evangelical Biola University, Geivett and Pivec. Tabachnick (Political Research Associates) is a critique of the NAR (in NARwatch and Talk to Action) and has been interviewed by NPR (“Evangelicals Engaged in Spiritual Warfare”). 5 It is not clear if this church is independent, or connected with other Set Free Fellowship Churches. Phil Aguilar, the pastor of the Anaheim Set Free church which is a biker church, has been credited with founding Set Free Churches worldwide, running also Christian rehabilitation centers (Barboza and Reza).

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individuals who: suffer from: depression, eating disorders […] low selfesteem / have addiction to: drugs & alcohol […] shopping, food / are manipulated by: TV, Hollywood, Media, Idolatries” (vi). I could not find anything explicitly about families in the book, but it stated: “[T]his book’s mission is a ‘call to action’ for parents and youth workers. It is a witness tool to bring salvation and deliverance to our youth who have been ensnared by our culture” (vi). This book, with its defensive, rejectionist tone, is part of the same broad cultural moment as the one that produced BarlowGirl. Yet popular culture and some elements of the 1960s ethos of individual fulfillment and empowerment have also become conduits through which this ideology is not only made attractive – from “virgin chic” to “prayer warriors” – but also has had an impact on wide areas of the secular culture. I would like to understand the location where the Barlow family and its music project stands, in this nexus between broader U.S. culture and the Christian fundamentalist milieu. The trope of parents managing their children’s show-business careers is a well-known, usually tragic morality tale in American popular culture, in both its secular and Christian-subcultural variants. Established clichés usually limit the trope to a narrow set of themes; the hijacking of children’s autonomy and independent development to serve the vicarious need for ego-extension by insecure and damaged parents, and the concomitant creation of another generation of stunted or damaged adults, primed for later self-destruction, out of former child performers. Yet the Barlow story suggests how much more this theme can reveal to the careful scholar about the interaction between Christian entrepreneurship, artistic creativity, and sexual politics. It can tell us about how difficult it is to disentangle the agency of the parents from those of their three daughters; the intentions of the three girls are very difficult to identify. I can never be sure if they are performing their own identity or if they are following the interest and intentions of their parents; they seem to be inseparable. The Barlow sisters joined in on a trend in the 2000s of younger female (pop) rock music singers trying to appeal to a teenage/early adult audience, like the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne or the American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson. Especially in their musical performance style, BarlowGirl comes close to rock numbers from Clarkson, for example the latter’s song “Since U Been Gone” (2004). Other Christian female rock groups 107

with similar messages to BarlowGirl are Superchic[k] and their front women Tricia Baumhardt (active 1999-2013), Krystal Meyers (active 2005-9, mostly in Japan), and the Australian Rebecca St. James, who came to fame in the U.S. in the late 1990s. All three artists/bands addressed outspokenly the issue of sexual abstinence. Contemporary Christian Music owes its visibility to the ascendancy of rock music in American culture. It was the controversy over the question “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music” (a song by Larry Norman) which triggered the emergence of the specific genre of Christian rock in the late 1960s (cf. Howard and Streck; Thompson; Luhr). BarlowGirl’s original decision to go in this stylistic direction might have been driven not only by the desire to participate in the then-burgeoning Christian rock music outdoor festival scene (which shrank significantly in the late 2000s), but also because the technical dynamics and aesthetics of this kind of music could express a Christian form of female “toughness” (not to say feminism). In this chapter, I do not focus on the musical style of BarlowGirl, but rather investigate the religious and social environment out of which the sisters come. This investigation reveals BarlowGirl to be a specific example and product of Christian fundamentalism. The musical expression of their ideology was therefore not toned down for a more mainstream Christian market. In a typical neoliberal conflation of the market with the rest of human experience however, the possibility of expressing Christian fundamentalist ideas through music seems to be an expression of the same Zeitgeist (and therefore the same market opportunity) as the cultural moment of Christian fundamentalist frenzy during the early George W. Bush era, around the time of the Iraq war.

The Emergence of BarlowGirl It is not clear how the Barlow family ended up living in a brick building in the small city of Elgin, some thirty miles west of Chicago. Most likely it was the father’s search for a stable job in the Christian music industry that brought them there. Vincent Barlow worked from 1991 to 1998 in the musical children’s ministry for Willow Creek, a very popular evangelical and non-denominational megachurch in the North-West Chicago suburb

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of South Barrington (founded by Pastor Bill Hybels 6), less than half an hour drive east from Elgin, a cheaper place to live than in the upper-middle class suburban neighborhoods around the Willow Creek church itself. As children, the Barlow girls had already gotten their early performance experiences singing background vocals in their father’s musical performances at Willow Creek services, and touring the country with their father’s children’s ministry program. They eventually got the opportunity to include some original compositions they themselves composed in the sets they played, and moved from simply providing backup vocals to playing band instruments. In 1998, Vince Barlow quit his job at Willow Creek to found his own family ministry, planning to create a place where families could retreat and learn positive ways of interacting with each other. The concept was similar to that of a therapeutic ministry. He began to canvass for followers with a couple of hundred addresses of Christians which he had collected over the course of his entire life and career. There are not many available sources for a detailed picture of how this ministry got off the ground. But with the fees and expenses for their son, Rebecca, and Alyssa, who were all attending a Christian college in Elgin (Lauren had not yet reached college age), the evidence suggests that this period must have been financially trying for the family. In August 2002 the three sisters went off to a Christian band training camp located on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains near Estes Park, north of Boulder, Colorado. Their official publicity material does not disclose who paid for this; considering the presence at the camp of A&R talent scouts from the Christian music divisions of major record companies, the most likely sources of funding were the parents themselves, wishing to prepare the girls for careers in the Christian music industry. While still claiming until today that they were unaware that the seminar had a casting function, the Barlow sisters suddenly found themselves the object of attention by A&R talent scouts willing to discuss recording contracts. With their father as manager and a contract signing pending, the three girls now began preparing for a performance career; Rebecca and Alyssa dropped out of college. Then the news came that the recording contract 6

Hybels resigned 10 April 2018 because of allegations of sexual misconduct. This caused a ripple effect in several pastors stepping down from their posts (Goodstein).

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had been held up indefinitely. The family retreated from the normal routines of daily life into a marathon, cult-like regime of intense, fervent prayer sessions (six to eight hours a day, over six months) imploring God to give them the desired break into show business. Finally, they got a contract with the label Fervent in November 2003.7 Fervent later got taken over by Word Records, itself a Christian music sub-label of Warner Brothers. Otto Price, an African American bass player from the group DC Talk who had been their A&R scout in Colorado, now became their producer when the girls arrived for recording sessions in Nashville. It is interesting to note that on the first recorded album released in 2004, the girls do not seem to have played their instruments on all the recordings, although their performances as instrumentalists eventually became a central part of the band’s image. Instead the first album’s credits for a majority of songs list Otto Price on bass, Barry Graul from the band MercyMe on guitar, and Mike Radcliffe on drums. That the recording was a broad communal effort can be seen on numbers for which background vocals were provided by Vince and his wife MaryAnn Barlow, Otto and his wife Trish Price, and Janelle Evrist, the daughter of Dale Evrist, pastor of New Song Christian Fellowship in Nashville to which the Prices belonged.8 Despite the team effort required to put the music out and despite the pronounced collective family focus of the production and promotion effort, the girls are presented professionally as the faces and center of the band. The parents disappear into the background. Nevertheless, the entries for the songs in the official credits’ listings filed with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Artists, and Performers) list not just the three girls but also both parents as “composers.” The involvement of many people in a successful recording is common in the music industry, and not unique to Christian music or to BarlowGirl. In the overlapping contexts of both mainline popular music singer-songwriter culture and in Christian evangelical culture however – both claiming authenticity as a key component of cultural capital – the image of the Barlow girls as authentically autonomous agents and the main driving forces of their own careers becomes problematic. This image is projected

7

See the video clip by Vince Barlow, “Empty Your Cup Daily.” Dale Evrist states in an online video message that when the church reaches out, “that third place is the Market Place. And that’s where we are reaching out to the world” (Evrist). See also the “Who We Are” link on the website of New Song. 8

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over a reality in which the girls do not show much evidence of having really acted independently throughout the entire life of the band. Regardless of the content of the girls’ own personal convictions, obscuring the extent to which they channel their parents’ belief system – and remaining silent over the parent’s role as major collaborators in the composition and recording of the music – seems to militate against minimal standards of artistic integrity. In their live tours through much of the Christian music and secularcommercial performance circuit in the stadium arenas and stages of towns and cities in the American cultural heartland (often referred to by outside observers as the Red States or “flyover country”) and certain other Western countries during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the girls eventually demonstrated that they were capable of performing without outside support: singing, playing guitar, bass, keyboard and drums all by themselves.9 BarlowGirl and the team behind it produced a total of five albums during the period, reaching a career high point during the George W. Bush and Iraq war years. Although other Christian musicians such as Rebecca St. James were also active proponents of chastity till marriage, BarlowGirl made this element of traditional Christian “family values” rhetoric and sexual and family politics a central component of their “brand,” by adding a signature anti-dating emphasis to appeal to teenagers below the legally acceptable marriage age. Their success in identifying themselves with these particular themes was affirmed by the homage paid to them upon their entry into the market by Superchic[k], a predecessor Christian band who wrote a song called “Barlow Girls,” prominently featuring our heroines’ commitment to their chastity pledge. The Barlows stand at a particular nexus of suburban life, shaken middle-class aspiration, media-driven consumerism, and racially tinged Christian sexual politics. Their music brings together culturally pessimistic strains of fundamentalist belief with the commitment to cultural outreach of non-denominational evangelicalism. In their experience, the emotionalism of Charismatic/Pentecostal traditions of healing and direct experience of the Holy Spirit connects via the myth of suburbia-as-frontier with the separate Frontier/survivalist traditions of homeschooling and male authority. 9

A list of BarlowGirl’s live performances can be found at the Songkick website.

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To understand how the Barlows arrived at this synthesis, and why their enactment of it on stage and in recorded song had such resonance in the early twenty-first century Christian music market, we need to take a closer look at the history of their connections with outside institutions, regional and national conservative Christian infrastructures, doctrinal teachings, and map this encounter onto more of their own family narrative. In gathering the materials to do this, I had no direct contact with the three singers or their direct family, and the information I have found so far is not complete. However, I think what I have already found is compelling enough to draw a vivid picture.10

American Christian Protestant Terminology In talking about varieties of conservative Christianity and their membership and forms of expression, and trying to make sense of the Barlows in these contexts, it is important to take some time and space to establish the precise meaning of certain forms of historically controversial terminology, in order to avoid misunderstandings. “Evangelicals” Jacques Berlinerblau writes: Evangelicalism is not a religion per se but a mode of being religious. It unites born-again, bibliocentric Protestants from across sundry denominations. This is why a Methodist can be an evangelical, as can a Southern Baptist. There are also self-professed Catholic evangelicals. (146, fn51)

Within the U.S. context, “evangelical” is an overarching term for a certain mode of engagement with a tendency toward aggressive proselytization 10

The primary source material I acquired consists of all of their published music albums, a book called BarlowGirl: More Than Music ghostwritten by their uncle Andrew Barlow (who also has been the speechwriter for governor Rick Perry in Texas in the 2007-11), a book Inspired by Tozer, edited by Lauren Barlow and a Christian teaching DVD by Nashville Pentecostal pastor David Spring titled [UP] which features BarlowGirl as one of other Christian bands which serve here as a contemporary approach of teaching Christian lessons to youth groups. I extensively used the internet to find out more about the Barlow’s roots.

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of outsiders that runs across several different denominations in American Protestantism (and to a lesser degree, American Catholicism). 11 In the U.S., the term does not describe any formal organization, in the way that its German counterpart, “evangelisch,” broadly refers to the entire official Protestant family of organized churches in Germany (where only some members inside this group, such who follow evangelical ideas, are called “Evangelikale”). The difference in usage reflects the divergent historical experiences of two different countries, out of which different revival and renewal movements emerged in the nineteenth century, which in their turn underwent different paths of further evolution in the twentieth. I want to use the term “evangelical” not in the way it is often used in the U.S. media, referring in an undifferentiated way to the sometimes extreme tenets, belonging to the category of “fundamentalism,” a separate strain including doctrinal and political conservatism that I examine in the next section of the chapter. This latter meaning has become the default U.S. usage of the term “evangelical” because Christian fundamentalists prefer to self-identify as “evangelical” and not as “fundamentalist.” 12 I define the term “evangelical” here in the broadest sense possible as described by Bebbington, to mean a group embracing four core tenets: biblical authority (not necessary inerrancy or literalism), becoming “born again” and accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior, believing in the atonement through Jesus’s crucifixion, and following the call to proselytize.

11

Cf. Kyle. On the back-cover Bruce L. Shelley comments: “Evangelicals have gained their positions of cultural influence, Kyle argues, by ‘baptizing’ America’s political and economic systems. Kyle considers this maneuver an extremely risky move, for in the process, he says, evangelicals have surrendered almost totally to American pop culture.” The description of the book on the publisher’s website reads: “Many Evangelicals view America as God’s chosen nation, thus sanctifying American culture, consumerism, and middle-class values” (Transaction Publishers). 12 Sutton writes: “By the 1940s, many of the men and women who had built the fundamentalist movement determined that the label ‘fundamentalist’ was doing more harm than good, so they dropped it. They replaced ‘fundamentalist’ with the older, more historic term ‘evangelical.’ […] While I do not ignore the many differences that separated Pentecostals from other fundamentalists, by the early 1940s they had joined together to craft the modern evangelical movement” (x).

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Many people in the U.S. for whom this term “evangelical” is used today come from a wave of conversions in the 1970s. A generation of young people from Catholic and mainstream Protestant backgrounds embraced a more spiritual form of Christianity during that decade, as a modern expression of what it meant to be “authentically Christian.” These movements emphasized a specific kind of rhetoric centered on the spirituality of being “born again in Jesus Christ,” but most resisted a direct affiliation with existing church organizations. The earliest forms of Christian rock music, as well as the Jesus People movement colored this turn with a popcultural tinge. Music figured prominently within this turn towards a popular, youthful appeal (Young). Existing denominations that previously had already developed their own parochial “born-again” traditions and rhetoric, like those in the Southern Baptist Convention, slowly joined the trend toward including these “modern” forms of worship. In a separate development, many non-denominational churches sprung up in the U.S. in the 1980s with an emphasis on a modern worship style. It is important to remember however, that U.S.-style evangelicals can be progressive or conservative, although the proportions are not symmetrical. On the one hand this means formal political affiliation with either the Democratic or the Republican Party. Pew research data from 2007 shows that African American evangelicals (six percent of all evangelicals, who in turn make up twenty-five percent of all Americans), identify with or lean predominantly towards the Democratic Party (with seventy-six percent) (Sahgal). While in 2007 fifty-eight percent of white evangelicals identified or leaned towards the Republican Party the latter affiliation has reached sixty-eight percent in a Pew research from 2014 (“A Deep Dive,” Pew).13 If we take into account that the figures for party affiliation among white evangelicals were thirty-four percent Republican versus twentynine percent Democratic as late as 1988, a nearly equal split, we can trace a very clear shift of evangelicals towards the Republican party in the last two or three decades (Keeter). However, some thirty-two percent still

13

It might be important to remark that members of traditionally Black churches were not counted as “evangelical” and black members of the Southern Baptists were counted as “evangelical” by Pew (Sahgal).

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leaned towards the Democrats or were independent in 2014. This group has been labeled “freestyle evangelicals.” 14 The difference between progressive and conservative evangelicals (and their differentiation from the more uncompromisingly right-wing fundamentalists) is reflected in the different ways they understand and emphasize certain shared key doctrines.15 Progressive evangelicals might have no problem with homosexuality and/or abortion, and they might not aggressively proselytize, while still believing that their belief in salvation only through Christ is universally valid and that people should hear this “good news.” In contrast, conservative evangelicals might emphasize strict moral approaches towards homosexuality and abortion, however they still might not support the doctrine of Dominionism, i.e., the idea that the U.S. should be politically governed by a Christian theocracy. Instead of a specific political/ideological orientation however, perhaps the most characteristic features of modern U.S.-style evangelicalism are its presentation and dissemination through contemporary popular music and popular culture, its therapeutic approach towards establishing good relationships and well-being in families and communities, its requirement of regular attendance and material contribution to a church group, the immanence of spirituality and religiosity in all aspects of everyday life, and its commitment to outreach and growth (the latter in terms of both missionary conversion and also economic prosperity for the church and the individual). The Willow Creek church in Chicago which had employed Vince Barlow, and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California are prominent examples of the many hundreds (if not thousands) of evangelical (nonPentecostal) megachurches which try to be as inclusive as possible to

14

The term “freestyle evangelicals” for liberal evangelicals was coined by Waldman and Green. Cf. also Berlinerblau, chapter 2 “The Bible and the Environment.” For evaluations of the survey data see also Brint and Schroedel (especially chapter 2, “Interests, Values, and Party Identification between 1972 and 2006,” by Hout and Greeley). Amy Sullivan, a liberal Democrat and evangelical Christian, describes this combination in The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap. 15 Stephen R. Rock writes: “According to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, over 40 percent of Evangelical Protestants do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible” (14).

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attract a large number of people.16 Institutionally, evangelicals are represented in the U.S. by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which globally is a member of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA). Both fellowships have a faith statement which includes the infallibility of the Bible; however, I associate this with commitment to fundamentalist belief and therefore do not list it as a core essential for being an evangelical (“Statement of Faith,” NAE website and “Who We Are,” WEA website). The assemblies of the WEA are not the same as the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, which is a proselytizing movement initiated by Billy Graham in 1974, in which members of the WEA were/are involved. “Fundamentalist Christianity” – “Christian Fundamentalism” Fundamentalist Christianity was originally a counter-movement against modernism in the main-line American Protestant churches of the late 19th and early 20th century, and has maintained a focus on a closely literalist interpretation of the Bible.17 Later departing from the strict terms of its institutional establishment, the term “Christian fundamentalism” has come to be used for churches which add to the evangelical values of salvation only through Christ and a missionary calling, a further commitment to the above-mentioned literal interpretation of the Bible and to a form of Dominionism (the overcoming of the legal separation of church and state). In practice, most Christian fundamentalists have strongly conservative opinions about morality, are in favor of absolute chastity before marriage and abstinence-only sex education in schools, and condemn homosexuality and abortion as sinful. Such people have a very strong, sometimes paranoid investment in the ultimately Calvinist idea that “the world,” meaning the non-“Christian” society outside their own specific (if occasionally elastic) belief community, is irredeemably evil, a place where freely moving Satanic forces are a reality. Some fundamentalists regard evangelicals (and even fundamentalist evangelicals) who embrace modernist means

16

The inclusiveness is part of a soft-sell approach, which condemns the “sin” but not the “sinner.” 17 Cf. the series of publications titled “The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth” by Dixon and Torrey. George M. Marsden (1980 and 1991) describes the roots of this movement.

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such as pop-culture to spread the word of salvation very skeptically, deeming the latter to be complacent about the power of the evil “world.” “Pentecostalism” Apart from the characteristic preoccupations of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, there is a separate emphasis in certain denominational and non-denominational churches such as the Assemblies of God and related Pentecostal groups (and even some Catholics) on bodily healing, speaking in tongues, and the emotional apprehension of God or the Holy Spirit. These “charismatic” practices are some of the oldest traditions of Christianity (A.H. Anderson). A key idea in this belief system is that everybody who believes in God will be made “holy” in body and soul and will not experience negative things anymore. From the belief that a holy body can’t get sick (otherwise it is still filled with Satan), charismatic conviction extrapolates the prosperity gospel, the idea that God will bless his believers with worldly goods and punish nonbelievers and enemies with material failure. The idea of Satan as an active force in the world is very strongly present in Pentecostalism, and many Pentecostal churches also agree with the tenets of fundamentalist doctrines and have also adopted modern-style evangelicalism. Hillsong United, the Australian megachurch, and Bethel Church in California are examples of non-denominational churches which broke away from Assemblies of God. Both churches have strong music ministries (Bethel Music and Hillsong Music). “Dominionism” Dominionism in the U.S. context means the advocacy of an American theocracy, i.e., the take-over of the government through fundamentalist Christian leaders, ushering in God’s promised “dominion” of his faithful over everyone else. This would result in the formalization of Christian moral standards as universally applicable law (making abortion and homosexual relationships illegal), and the installation of Christian practices as official practices in secular institutions (universal school prayer, a religious pledge of allegiance). However, people propagating this ideology reject the label “Dominionist,” perhaps because of the negative associations of conspiracy inherent in the word. Nevertheless, it is useful as a descriptive term to analyze the ideological positions and actual influence of certain Christian networks in the arena of political action. The ascent 117

of the “New Right” since the 1960s and the emergence of a “Christian Right” around the time of the Reagan administration in the 1980s are linked phenomena, but of course not identical developments in U.S. political history, nor can all the groups and constituencies involved in this development automatically be classified as propagating Dominionism. 18 Dominionists believe that the U.S. constitution is a Christian document proving that the country had been founded upon Christian belief and values that need to be re-elevated to their proper, dominant place in public life. The belief system is fundamentally jingoistic-nationalistic and has totalitarian or even proto-fascist features in the way it collapses Christian and “American” values into one (Hedges 2007). Dominionism has forms of expression in many different areas of activity. It is closely related to the Calvinist-derived movement called Reconstructionism founded by Rousas John Rushdoony, who also favored economic doctrines that we now understand as neoliberalism (Ingersoll 2015). Much of the Christian Homeschooling movement also has very close ties in terms of ideology, inspiration, personnel, and foundational texts with the Dominionist milieu. At the centers of national political power in Washington D.C. and many state capitals, Dominionist ideas are propagated by the collection of fellowships, associations, and communal living arrangements for political operatives called “The Family.” This is part of a Christian movement (International Foundation, The Fellowship) in the political Right which has started the National Prayer Breakfasts and sought to exercise a direct influence on the courts, legislatures, and executive offices of government (Sharlet).

18

The term “Christian Right” is already an amalgam of the positions of the political right-wing and Christian believes. Cf. Diamond; Schäfer; Lindsay; Kintz and Lesage. A German study from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development (Berlin Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung) from 2004 by Kröger, von Olst and Klingholz dedicates some space to describing the ascent of the Christian Right in the U.S. (47ff) and provides list of Christian organizations against birth control like Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, True Love Waits, and the Silver Ring Thing (66).

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The Barlow Family Belief System The Barlow family has never used any consistent terminology or self-description for their particular version of a Christian belief system. We have seen how Vince Barlow, the father of the three Barlow girls, had worked as a musician for the evangelical Willow Creek megachurch in Chicago, where the girls got their initial socialization outside the family. Avoiding the competing social models and affiliations of the local public elementary and high schools, they had been home-schooled and then had gone directly to a local Christian college in Elgin. At some point, it appears that the family turned clearly in the direction of Pentecostalism, embracing a particularly charismatic and emotionalist expression of it in the form of the New Apostolic Reformation through their involvement in their home congregation, the Family Life Church (Eagle’s Nest) in Elgin. Family Life Church, of which they were members between 2000 and 2012, was affiliated with MorningStar Ministries which has its headquarters in Moravian Falls, NC (see MorningStar website). MorningStar’s lead pastor is Rick Joyner, who – as has already been pointed out – practices the teachings of the NAR and exposes Dominionist ideas.19 What comes as something of a surprise here is that both parents of the Barlow girls, Vince and MaryAnn, came from a Catholic background. Previous generations of both sides of the family were actively engaged in the Catholic Church and its lay organizations. However, a conservative defense of family values had already stood high in the agenda of both sets of grandparents, a predisposition that would ease the transition to conservative (Protestant) Christian ideas in the following generations. The mother’s side of the Barlow family was of mixed Eastern and Western European heritage. The Barlow girls’ maternal grandfather had worked in the steel industry and was a member of a Catholic lay order, the Society of the Holy Name (“Obituaries,” 2002). This group had strict rules against blasphemy, perjury and immorality.20 His wife was a 19

Rick Joyner writes in 2015: “In the core foundations a society is built on, America is in a decline. This includes government, business, education, and security (crime and national defense). […] [T]he slide began over fifty years ago. It has gradually but relentlessly picked up speed, mirrored by a continual spiritual and moral deterioration and a steady decoupling from our Constitution.” 20 The St. Titus Holy Name Society newsletter in Aliquippa, the organization to which he belonged, emphasizes in its Feb. 2014 newsletter the holiness and

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member of the Confraternity of Christian Mothers (CCM), a lay movement against secularization. (“Aliquippa, CCM News.”).21 On the father’s side, the family was Irish. Vince Barlow’s parents had met in South Bend were both had been attending college. After college the girls’ paternal grandfather first worked for General Electric (“Barlow, Dan”/ Alumni Class 1950). His wife also had at least partly Irish roots and had been active in the Catholic Christian Family Movement (CFM) (“Obituaries,” 2015). This was a lay organization in which the family was understood as a “‘domestic church’ in which members live their faith actively” (Christian Family Movement, website).22 Together the Barlow girls’ paternal grandparents had fourteen children in total, suggesting that regardless of their college educations and suburban lifestyle in the 1950s, key family values – the rejection of all birth control, and apparently even of abstinence – were still very much determined by their Catholic Irish roots. One could go so far as to seeing the large number of children raised by the Barlow girls’ paternal grandparents as a deliberate affirmation of the most conservative version of their Catholic faith against the changing times. Nevertheless, the grandparents’ generation participated fully in postwar American life. Perhaps inspired by the 1950 movie Cheaper by the Dozen, the Barlow grandparents had embraced the intertwined postwar American ideals of consumer prosperity and natalist baby boom wholeheartedly. It seems particularly ironic that in the abovementioned film, the

importance of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. It lobbies for observing National Marriage Week and other marriage enforcing action. 21 To the history of the CCM a website of the Diocese of Pittsburgh reads: “The Archconfraternity of Christian Mothers sprang up from the heartfelt needs of a group of mothers in France. It was a time about the middle of the 19th century, when the secular forces undermining family life first began to seriously challenge Catholic Christian values” (Archconfraternity of Christian Mothers). 22 Burns writes about the meetings of the movements, similar to the cell structure of the later megachurches: “The heart of the meeting remained the Social Inquiry. […] The first four inquiries were devoted to the neighborhood – getting to know one’s neighbors and the problems of the neighborhood. Pioneer CFMer George St. Peter remarked that the primary duty of the first meetings was ‘your duty to know your neighbor.’ The next four meetings focused explicitly on family problems – children within the home, children outside the home, the parent-child relationship, and the family obligations of the father” (34).

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child-rich couple were efficiency engineers by profession, not so different in social status from the paternal Barlow grandparents who ventured into the fields of propaganda, lobbying, public relations, or “value engineering,” a field closely connected with the military. The obituary of the Barlow sisters’ paternal grandmother reads: “During the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, she and her husband helped carve more than a billion dollars out of government projects including the ballistic missile submarine base at Kings Bay, Georgia” (“Obituaries,” 2015). A very different approach to expressing generally conservative Christian attitudes to sexual behavior emerged in the next two generations, culminating in the commitment to chastity of the Barlow sisters themselves. Because the dramatic reduction in sibling size that occurred across three Barlow generations straddled the introduction of the pill as a widely available means of birth control for the non-Catholic population, it is difficult to evaluate how much the shift from Catholicism to Protestantism was a pragmatic decision of Vince and MaryAnn Barlow to avoid the large families of the past, and how much their embrace of Protestantism and the attached ideologies of absolute chastity and no-dating till marriage was an expression of an ideological attraction to fundamentalism for its own sake. What is clear is that the means might have changed, but the commitment to expressing conservative Christianity through attitudes to the female body, or more specifically, through the female reproductive system – remained. Kristin Luker writes: New technologies and the changing nature of work have opened up possibilities for women outside of the home undreamed of in the nineteenth century; together, these changes give women – for the first time in history – the option of deciding exactly how and when their family roles will fit into the larger context of their lives. In essence, therefore, this round of the abortion debate is so passionate and hard-fought because it is a referendum on the place and meaning of motherhood. (193; cf. also Balmer)

Yet there is a broader significance to the shift in religious affiliation. The paternal grandparents’ characteristic Catholic emphasis on actions and results – the presence or absence of children (with little or no clear discussion of controlling other aspects of relations between the sexes) – contrasts significantly with the typically Protestant fundamentalist preoccupation with regulation of morality and intention (the rejection of social arrangements like dating), culminating in the radical enshrinement of 121

chastity that becomes evident first with Vince Barlow’s generation. The difference between the two emphases is, pardon the expression, a fundamental one. The subsequent history of the Barlow family from Vince and MaryAnn’s marriage onward makes clear that their story of how a family moved from a Catholic background to a new paradigm of non-denominational Protestantism was not only about finding new ways to express a traditional belief in “family values.” It also signified a much more radical turn away from engagement with secular institutions and society and a retreat into an increasingly beleaguered, subcultural Weltanschauung: MaryAnn Barlow had all her children through home births and she homeschooled them before she and her husband sent them to a Christian college and introduced the no-dating policy to the girls when they turned 16, making this regime attractive to the girls via parents gifts of chastity rings with real diamonds (Barlow, Vince and MaryAnn 131 and BarlowGirl, More than Music 69-70). Taking a closer look below at the careers of some of the fourteen Barlow aunts and uncles suggests that their retreats into a particularly idiosyncratic embrace of free market capitalism, family authoritarianism, and ideological links to military or public service were part of the search for a secure future they also pursued via some of the economic and career models espoused by the non-denominational Protestant megachurches. Coinciding with the job market shifting towards a service economy and the onset of decades of uncertain economic conditions, it is also understandable that a flight into a religious belief with even stricter moral codes seemed to give security. The entanglement of Christianity and capitalist ideas in the U.S. is a topic which would be too broad to fully elaborate here (cf. Connolly; Fones-Wolf; Kruse, Weber). For my purposes it suffices to point out that the ideological development toward anti-state laissez-faire capitalism and individualism was sold to Christians and non-Christians alike as a solution to the crisis of the 1970s by connecting it with the defense of “American” values. Axel R. Schäfer refers to a paradox in the way evangelical Christians embraced laissez-faire capitalism but stayed true to their preor anti-capitalist moral ideology: As [George M.] Marsden has aptly commented, the fundamentalist vindication of free market economics, while attacking the immorality of what

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this free market produces, reveals how difficult it is to sustain the concept of the evangelical challenge to secular culture. (128)

With an economy moving from production to consumption, and with it a shift from life-time job security to short-term work contracts and consultancies, religion’s understandings of prosperity as “grace” began to normalize the idea that one could make money out of nothing. 23 These shifts echoed traditional Calvinist ideas that God would reward his chosen with prosperity, while he would punish the morally decadent with poverty. The sprouting megachurches took over the idea of endless growth from America’s business culture, and restructured the institution of the church as a marketplace for pleasing consumers, with a professionally defined standard for fundraising (which then can help the pastor to live a very lavish lifestyle, go into generating even more disciples and with them more money, or both). The problem of course is, that there is no safety net for Christian business failure outside the church congregation itself, isolated in a radically free market that brought constant job insecurity. Looking at the response of Vince Barlow’s siblings to this situation, an interesting trend seems to be visible. Although Vince’s father could still make a career in engineering, this field was no longer attractive for his children, because the job market had significantly shrunk in the intervening decades of globalization. Most of Vince’s siblings move into freelance consulting, using their communication skills and contacts in the Christian business world. The Christian megachurch movement itself proved to be a welcoming employer. After working for Christian hedge fund manager Ed Owens in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Barrington, one brother, Joseph (Joe) Barlow, secured a job with the Living Word Christian Center, an African American megachurch (J. Barlow, LinkedIn).24 He eventually founded his own 23

To the issue of job insecurity in the free market see the euphemistic book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson and the response by Barbara Ehrenreich. 24 In the late 1980s Owens lived a luxurious lifestyle, before he became a bornagain Christian in 1991 (after he had gotten bankrupt). He got back on his feet again, founded his own company in 1996 and made about $10 Mio in the late 90s. In 2003 he announced that he made the decision to cap his income at $500,000 and his net worth at 8 Mio and give the rest away, especially through his own Samaritan Foundation (Owens).

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church and other subsidiary ministries and went on missionary tours, teaching the prosperity gospel in the Global South. 25 The prosperity gospel is a characteristic phenomenon of turn-of-the-millennium American Protestant Christianity, emerging out of the charismatic Pentecostal tradition.26 Its message is: believe in Christ and you will get rich, as God will bless his faithful disciples. It is understandable that poor people who no longer believe that there are other ways out of poverty through structural change take prosperity gospel as a sign of hope. Another brother, Andrew Barlow, worked in public relations as a media manager at Lake Hills Church, a megachurch in Austin, Texas, before becoming a ghostwriter for the conservative Texas governor Rick Perry (Andrew Barlow, LinkedIn). Perry’s prayer rally in 2011, “The Response” is connected with the New Apostolic Reformation movement: Two ministries in the movement planned and orchestrated Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s recent prayer rally, where apostles and prophets from around the nation spoke or appeared onstage. The event was patterned after The

25

The website of the Joseph Barlow Ministries features a map of the overseas trips and states in connection with a 2013 trip to Angola: “Pastor Joe taught his Wealth to the Nations Seminar. After that, they went to Uganda with a team of 6. There they taught the Wealth to the Nations seminar, along with a marriage class at Light the World Church.” The same website shows a map, which lists under Liberia: “Joseph Barlow and Eldon Tracy went to Liberia to speak at a prosperity conference.” A trip to the Philippines is commented as follows: “With the help of his financial supporters Pastor Joe was able to help underwrite the cost of the conference as well as supply a new guitar to a ministry in great need. – What fun! You may need to consider joining Pastor Joe on one of these trips!” (J. Barlow, Ministries). 26 Anthropologists Nanda and Warms understand prosperity theology as a cargo cult (275). In the Global South believers in prosperity theology actually get support through Western churches and so the prosperity gospel fulfills itself. Iain Buchanan in The Armies of God, writing about the influences of Christian missionary activity, points out that such Christian connections to the Global South are not just immaterial lines of propagating an ideology (here: prosperity gospel), but that the connections are also used for political and economic purposes. To the various issues connected with prosperity theology see Hefner (esp. Wiegele) about the neglect of addressing needed social change, Barnes about Black Megachurches in the U.S.; C.R. Clarke and likewise Kroesbergen about Pentecostal theology in Africa (written from a Christian Reformed (Calvinist) perspective).

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Call, held at locations around the globe and led by Lou Engle, who has served in the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders of the NAR. Other NAR apostles endorsed Perry’s event, including two who lead a 50-state “prayer warrior” network. Thomas Muthee, the Kenyan pastor who anointed Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God Church in 2005, while praying for Jesus to protect her from the spirit of witchcraft, is also part of this movement. (Tabachnick)

One of Vince Barlow’s sisters, Annie Seabrooke, moved into the even newer market of Christian therapy/re-education, becoming a board member of Escuela Caribe a controversial Christian school in the Dominican Republic, where her husband worked in a leadership position. 27 This particular Barlow sibling’s experience seems particularly instructive, and we will examine it at more length. The school was run by New Horizons Youth Ministry, a residential ministry for at-risk youth which also operated facilities in Marion, Indiana. New Horizons had been founded by the Baptist minister Gordon C. Blossom from Grand Rapids, MI, in 1971, using his developed treatments of “Culture Shock Therapy” and “Christian Milieu Therapy.” 28 Advertisement for the Christian rehabilitation school was placed in the mainstream evangelical magazine Christianity Today (Scheeres 151). Apart from the neocolonial attitude one can infer from the school’s location in a third world country with a history of Protestant American missionizing, it was there also conveniently out of the reach of the U.S. government. In the middle of the 2000s, the entire “troubled-teen rehabilitation industry” became the subject of increased media focus and scrutiny. Maia Szalavitz published Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids in 2006. On 10 October 2007 a federal report of the Government Accountability Office was released, investigating 27

For the involvement of the Barlow’s aunt in the New Horizon Youth Ministry see an entry in a staff list from the Heal network. Heal is a network led by activist Angela Smith from Seattle. The husband of Annie, Jeff Seabrooke, is mentioned in the film Kidnapped for Christ as the director of the program. The Barlow girls’ paternal grandmother’s obituary also includes the line: “Later in life, she spent the better part of five years in the Dominican Republic helping at-risk kids find a new lease on life” (“Obituaries,” 2015). 28 Shirley Jo Petersen, daughter of Blossom, accused him in her publication The Whisper of having sexually abused her as a child (11). Cf. also the first-person account of Rosado.

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the death of ten teenagers at so called “residential treatment programs.” The problem with Christian fundamentalist treatment centers is, that many of them are run by non-professionals, i.e., staff members have never learned psychotherapeutic methods and refer to older ideas of breaking the will of the individual. It is important to state here that not all programs are run under a Christian fundamentalist agenda, and not all fundamentalist treatment programs are abusive. What unites many of these treatment programs however, including Christian fundamentalist therapy institutions, is their method for re-education: military-style drill measures, group confessional strategies from Alcoholics Anonymous, public humiliation, and community work, i.e., the centers employ old school ideas of breaking the will of the individual. Such methods had been used by the Synanon cult in the early 1970s and eventually established themselves as mainstream treatment methods inside the juvenile therapy profession. 29 As David Sheff points out, the treatment measures are not based on psychotherapeutic methods, nor is the staff adequately schooled. While at Alcoholics Anonymous people submit themselves freely to the measures, in the case of reeducation schools the students are often there against their own will. At Escuela Caribe it was impossible for the students to escape; the school was in a third world Hispanophone country, their passports and money had been taken away, and armed guards stood at the gates. As was the case at fundamentalist Christian therapy centers like Mercy Ministries, the Escuela Caribe staff was not trained to do therapy for kids who had been using alcohol or drugs. The methods instead used were constant surveillance, beatings, physical strain and humiliation. In conjunction with these methods, the staff believed that Christian teachings could heal kids by encouraging them to surrender their lives to God. The slogan for the students’ entire experience there was a biblical one: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world.” The same slogan, clearly cited in its original form as a Bible verse, was used by BarlowGirl for their band merchandise and gave the name to their “Do not conform” tour in 2006: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is that

29

For critiques on Christian fundamentalist therapy see Weaver 2015 and Hedges 2013.

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which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2, New American Standard Bible). The school was highly lucrative, because it attracted enough affluent parents able to pay tuition fees higher than Harvard’s. 30 Many Christian parents among Escuela Caribe’s clientele seemed to be overwhelmed when their kids exhibited what the parents defined as amoral behavior; the only way out seemed to be through total authoritarianism and control. Such fundamentalist Christians define deviant behavior as being possessed by Satan. Parents refuse to think that they themselves might have added to the problem. Julia Scheeres published the book Jesus Land in 2005 about her experience at the boarding school. In her case, her father had been violent, breaking her brother’s arm in an outburst of rage, and she had started drinking as a teenager to compensate. In the case of David, featured in the movie Kidnapped for Christ (2014), it was the refusal of his parents to accept that he was gay. The parents clashed with him. As Christian parents they must have felt that they failed their calling, missing the goal of a Christian family: to have a good relationship with your kid and lead it in the faith.31 It seems no coincidence, that they placed him in Escuela Caribe at the age of seventeen, one year before he could have legally resisted. After continued protests from alumni who came forward with stories of physical and emotional abuse, the school shut down in 2011, most likely due to a lack of new enrollment because of bad press. Soon after however, it opened again at the same location under a new name (Caribbean Mountain Academy) and new management (Crossroads Ministry). Crossroads’ mother organization, Lifeline Youth and Family Services, is located in Fort Wayne, IN, only 50 miles north of the headquarters of the former Horizon Ministries. To switch back to Vince Barlow’s own career path, he first worked as his parents in the field of “value engineering,” having a degree in sociology and theology. After some other smaller management jobs, he landed 30

Julia Scheeres states that her parents paid a tuition of $5000 a month (Scheeres, Facebook). Deirdre Sugiuchi, a former student calls this on her blog “fake Christians who made bank by exploiting families and abusing kids.” 31 The film Kidnapped for Christ shows in the “extras” section an interview with a couple who placed their kid in the facility. Asked what they think about the controversies around the school, the husband states that these are messages spread by Satan who wants to make them doubt.

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in the Children’s music ministry at Willow Creek, composing songs and performing from 1991-98 (V. Barlow, LinkedIn). He quit Willow Creek – his wife had told him that God had a different calling – and he and his wife founded their own Jeremiah Restoration Ministry that year, without any financial backing (V. Barlow 2012). Kate Clements writes for the Daily Herald on 19 Sept. 1999: Vince Barlow quit his job as associate pastor at Willow Creek church with no other source of income lined up and a family to support. “Some of our friends thought we were totally nutty,” he said. But Barlow had a powerful faith in God and strong commitment to his family and its vision of a new kind of ministry. “Everything in society, even churches, are pulling families apart,” he said. “There are very few things out there for the whole family to experience together.”

The report goes on: “They offer church services, concerts, projects and retreats aimed at the entire family.” Another article featured in the Daily Herald (“Faith: Barlow Family”) quotes Vince Barlow: “Our dream is to eventually have a farm-based camp, where families can come and spend time together.” With a mailing list which Barlow acquired during his work as a Christian musician they started their work, including travelling and performing concerts and family services. Barlow observed: “The teachings are very applicable to family life. Family members can talk to each other more, spend time together, learn to communicate better, appreciate each other more and have pride in being a family.” The project was abandoned when the three Barlow girls started with the band. With the money made on their tours, the Barlow family most likely was able to buy what they now call their “family farm” on the outskirts of Elgin. Today Vince Barlow coaches Christian business people and does charity public relations for a law firm. These short vignettes from the lives of the Barlow siblings of Vince’s generation reveal individual patterns which reflect a general social trend that started in the mid-70s. All steeped from birth in a very Christian lifestyle with strong emphasis on the family and family values, they enlisted readily in the emerging culture war, the modernization of the Christian evangelical movement with the signifiers of popular culture and business management culture, the turn towards a therapeutic social style, all linked

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to a belief in creating prosperity and growth through cultivation of image, public relations, and the right sales tactics. 32 Nearly all of the siblings have had to deal with uncertain, short term employment and the relentless pressure to re-invent themselves over and over. They did not come from a wealthy family (even if their father had been employed by General Electric); however, they sought out people and social circles who are better off, in a landscape to which they could connect through shared Christian belief.

Interlude 1: The Onion Structure of Chicagoland The Barlow family seems to dream of a frontier life, escaping modernity and the loneliness of the anonymous suburbs. Strangely however, the Barlows have lived in Elgin, Illinois, already since the early 1990s, if not earlier – and are therefore not the incessant wanderers who look for a place to settle, as they depict themselves in the phantasy of the family farm. Elgin looks like a poor place, a dirty place in the winter when the snow gets brown and the city center of Elgin features the typical red brick industrial buildings, African Americans taking over the center while whites following the typical pattern of white flight live further out, in old wooden buildings to which steps lead up from the hilly roads, or further south in a suburbia, which is so far away, that it might orient itself already South, away from the center of Elgin, towards Aurora and the other Christian center in Wheaton College. A big cement factory – or is it just the building of a new road – lines itself on the road between the river, and mushroom McMansions try to make forget that just two miles north is the non-white center of Elgin. There is no way to move from suburbia to suburbia without seeing poverty, when one wants to reach the Christian University in the north of Elgin. And even further East after acres of corn start the affluent Chicago suburbs which include several megachurches, like Willow Creek in South Barrington, close to the Hoffman Estates. Only who lives there can close themselves off from the poorer neighborhoods

32

These sales tactics have their roots already in the 1930s. One may think of the extremely popular book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. His main target audience were business managers, who were on the hunt of making more money through simple techniques like smiling.

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in the West and the actual city of Chicago, which starts east of Willow Creek with stretches of street and storage halls and one or the other mall, before one reaches O’Hare airport. Living in Elgin you cannot dream yourself away so easily – and you never become a city girl. For that I respect the Barlows, who are not as smooth and nice and “out of everything” like the majority of Willow Creek attendance (or what the attendance of Willow Creek wants to belong to – as I could see a lot of lower middle-class people there). In Elgin the Barlows gave up fighting the spiritual war for the city itself. The next best alternative was retreat into their own four walls and constant travelling to meet like-minded people. The Barlow family’s message is not the message of the megachurch, which is: you are all welcome, we don’t care how your moral values are; we just want you to feel well (you can use such a message when your clientele is homogenous enough, not “amoral” folks and mostly white or white-Hispanics). Megachurches in suburbia have already separated themselves from the blacks of the inner cities and the poor of the countryside. But the Barlows were in the middle, and their response to the situation was a fall back onto morality. The typical reaction of an upwardly aspiring family. Jeff Sharlet writes about Colorado Springs: It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream Christian, but in its particulars it is American, populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. (292-93)

For the Barlows their temples are their bodies, as long as they can’t connect themselves with the places of affluence in suburbia.

Christian Geography Connected with the Barlows The specific form of Christianity we have encountered with the Barlow family in suburban Chicagoland is also well represented in the broader area known as the American Midwest and in most suburban areas of the entire country. This kind of religious practice carries an ideological orientation that blends the conservative populist politics of the white South 130

and the rural American “heartland” with the consumerist, pro-private enterprise ethos that characterizes the post-industrial, suburban and exurban Sunbelt. A restorationist discourse around “authentic” or “real” American values and a hostility to cultural diversity seeks to soften the impact of the last two generations of rapid social and demographic change that have left the less prosperous parts of the traditional white majority economically and culturally adrift. One connection leads to Colorado Springs. The town has been coined the “Protestant Vatican” and includes institutions like Ted Haggard’s New Life Church. In the late ’80s Haggard started this church, supported by the city council, which wanted to attract churches to help the community emerge from the crisis of a collapsed high-tech industry (Burlein 17177). Colorado Springs is not only home to the U.S. Air Force’s North American Aerospace Defense Command, we also find among the hundreds of parachurch organizations based there – faith-based organizations which are not churches in themselves. Among these are the headquarters of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose teachings inspired at least one song of BarlowGirl, “One More Round” (“BarlowGirl,” CBN). Dobson’s wife is the chairwoman of the National Day of Prayer for which BarlowGirl had spent a year serving as youth ambassadors. Elsewhere in the heartland, we find the people and communities featured in the shocking documentary movie Jesus Camp (2006). The film featured the charismatic leader Becky Fischer steering Christian kids from families with a right-leaning political bias towards the idea of becoming Christian warriors (cf. a description of Fischer’s practices in Pieslak 12930). Fischer’s summer camp was located in North Dakota, while the children came from Christ Triumphant Church of Kansas City, a church linked with the charismatic network Harvest International Ministries. Becky Fischer also worked in Rick Joyner’s MorningStar Ministries in Wilkesboro, NC, as a children’s pastor. Here we find a link to BarlowGirl. As mentioned before, MorningStar has a Fellowship of affiliated churches (MFC), one of which was Family Life Church, Eagles Nest in Elgin, which the Barlow family attended in the first decade of the 2000s.33

33

BarlowGirl mentions the pastor Robert Whitt from Family Life Church and his wife in the thank you section of their CD booklets. Whitt is listed on the MorningStar website.

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A central part of the evangelical geography, Kansas City is home to IHOPKC (International House of Prayer Kansas City), a charismatic megachurch which once had ties to the neocharismatic Vineyard movement. IHOPKC features in the film God Loves Uganda (2013), which suggests that their religious influence and missionary practices had a decisive impact on the successful passing of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. In a biographical feature Rebecca Barlow lists: “Greatest Influences: (besides mom and dad) Joyce Meyer, Josh Harris, Todd Bentley, Darlene Zschech, Bob Sorge, Mike Bickle, Eric and Leslie Ludy, Delirious” (R. Barlow, Barlowgirl, unofficial website). Micke Bickle is the founder of IHOPKC. Bickle was also involved in organizing Rick Perry’s “Response” rally. The Barlow’s network of heartland connections takes us next to St. Louis where in the suburb of Fenton, Joyce Meyer has her church. BarlowGirl featured in a clip for the ministry, because Rebecca Barlow claims that she found healing from her depression through the books and teachings of Meyer, especially her Battlefield of the Mind in which three therapeutic steps are lined out: “1 We are engaged in a war. 2 Our enemy is Satan. 3 The mind is the battlefield” (14, cf. also R. Barlow, “BarlowGirl’s Becca’s Testimony”). Meyer’s teachings are used in the Christian rehab facility Mercy Ministries, founded by Nancy Alcorn, a ministry embraced by BarlowGirl, who ran a charity rally for Mercy Ministries on their band website. Meyer financially supported the creation of a new Mercy Ministries facility in St. Louis. BarlowGirl was present at the opening of this facility. Alcorn writes: God had put in Dave and Joyce’s heart for Joyce Meyer Ministries to fund a Mercy home in the St. Louis area. […] September 28, 2005, was a very special day as Dave and Joyce Meyer gathered with Nick and Christine Caine from Sydney, Australia, and contemporary Christian artists BarlowGirl, along with mercy friends and supporters from all across the nation, to officially cut the ribbon. (240-41)

From there we also extend the geography to Sydney, Australia, where the Pentecostal megachurch and music ministry Hillsong is located. Hillsong was aligned with a branch of Mercy Ministries, until the latter had to close due to a controversy.34 To my knowledge BarlowGirl never performed in 34

Mercy Ministries in Australia was investigated by a consumer agency about using the benefit money of its members, while nevertheless claiming that their

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the music event called the Hillsong Conference to which many U.S. Christian bands flock; however, they performed once in Sydney. Darlene Zschech, the front-women of the Hillsong music label, is also mentioned in Rebecca Barlow’s list of important persons. What is so specific about the newer form of religiosity represented by BarlowGirl is the entanglement of emotional engagement and financial calculation. I would like to trace back this consumerist attitude to the culture of a region that first emerged in the period after 1945 called the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt, as a fusion of the old South and the recently won Southwest, had been a region crippled by the Great Depression, but rapidly regained economic vitality from the economic programs of the New Deal and the stimulus of war production in the 1940s. After this recovery was immediately followed by the business-friendly development of mass suburbia in the post-war years, jobs flowed there from the unionized North. Darren Dochuk writes about the mood in the 1970s and the linkage of growth and religiosity in the region: In the same way Newsweek attributed America’s “born again” phenomenon of 1976 to new Sunbelt trends, the New York Times and Time connected evangelicalism’s rise to an emerging New South that stretched from Southern California to South Carolina […] Still, as far as Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times saw it, Sunbelt insurgency came courtesy of a business strategy to freeze out unions and undermine principles of industrial unionism – in short, to keep the new America “untarnished” by Rustbelt ways. Evangelicalism, critics pointed out, helped shape this system by sanctifying a gospel of bootstrap entrepreneurialism, anathema to the industrial economy of the North. Indeed, any talk about shifting realities in America’s political economy frequently came paired with commentary on evangelicalism’s reliance on business tycoons, ranging from Dallas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt to Holiday Inn’s founder and “praying millionaire,” Wallace Johnson. (2012, 216-18)

The Sunbelt was the place where strict fundamental Christianity suddenly was confronted with modernity in the ’50s. A paradoxical situation eventreatment was free of charge. Other accusations entailed exorcism and unqualified staff. The Australian facility closed down in 2009 (see Pollard 28 Oct. and 17 Dec.). During the controversy Hillsong distanced itself from Mercy Ministries. Weaver (2015, 86ff) played a role in the outing of Mercy Ministries as an exorcism ministry.

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tually emerged, wherein consumerism was much welcomed by the regions political, religious and business leaders, while at the same time the same elites decried a loss of moral standards. This Sunbelt attitude slowly spread north into the Midwest, where now the aging industrial cities of the Rust Belt needed an antidote against psychological depression. 35

The Princess Ideology Why does adolescent female sexuality feature so importantly in the worldview of Christian fundamentalists? There is no easy answer to this question. The focus on this in fundamentalist ideology seems to extend beyond the basic idea of protecting children from harm and bringing them up in a Christian way, to prevent them from “going to hell.” Female sexual transgression – like male homosexuality – seems to figure as a threat to the whole belief system, as something which could potentially cause it to collapse. Considering the Scots-Irish and rural/small town English cultural and social foundations from which so much of this Calvinist religiosity first emerged, when we put the problem in terms of the continuation of a clan or ethnos, it of course makes sense to control the inclusion of new male members. The husbands of daughters, for example, are potentially powerful competitors for material and ideological authority. One way to avoid this possibility of loss of control as long as possible is to control female sexual activity through chastity until the adult daughters identify (or are indoctrinated) irrevocably with the ideology or mores of the group. The best way then to protect something is to declare it holy. Burlein writes: This ontological chain linking sex, gender, and desire is the Christian right’s version of the genetic code that white supremacists such as [Peter J. “Pete”] Peters imagine to be written in the hearts of the white race. Both Peters and [James] Dobson reinscribe the Law of the Father through 35

To the topic of the Sunbelt and religion see Cunningham, esp. chapter 5 “Mobilizing the Religious Right in the Politicized ‘Bible Belt.’” Cf. also Dochuk’s (2011) history of the rise of evangelical conservatism in southern California, a region to which many pious Okies migrated during the dust bowl. To the mix of suburban development, political right turn and religious “culture war” in the Sunbelt see Lassiter.

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mystical access to a transcendent identity that is rooted in the body. For Peters, the transcendent identity is race; for Dobson, it is gender that is invested with the aura of the sacred. (124-25)36

If the assigned role of the female in the defense of the ethnos is to stay pure, the role of the male is to take on authority and leadership. It seems rather interesting to note that there is a recognizable gap between the message of chastity presented to girls and to boys; as of the time of this writing no tradition of “mother-son-chastity-balls” has emerged in conservative American religious culture as counterparts to established father-daughter events. BarlowGirl’s chastity song for boys seems to come almost as an afterthought to their “no-dating” policy: So many times, people will say to us, “Thank you for speaking to our girls,” and we’ve often thought, “But this message of purity isn’t just for the girls […] it’s just as important for the guys to hear!” The enemy really tries to target guys with media and images these days, and we wanted to specifically write a song for guys that said, “Take a stand and get serious about this issue!” (BarlowGirl, interview by Lauren Summerford)

In such statements, the Barlow girls reveal their affinity to Ron Luce’s Battle Cry Campaign, a conservative culture war movement founded in 2005 which points a particular finger at the perceived corruption of popular culture by a cynical and degenerate national media. Ron Luce, leader of Teen Mania Ministries and Acquire the Fire, describes this position thus, alluding to the same kinds of unspecified perpetrators that have been the stock in trade of culturally pessimistic defenders of traditional populations facing accelerated change: “We’re fighting for those who don’t know they have a voice, that are being manipulated by our pop culture […] They’re raping virgin teenage America on the sidewalk, and every-

36

Peters was a white-supremacist Christian preacher in Laporte, Colorado. Julie Ingersoll (2003) comes to a similar conclusion: “I suggest that one way in which conservative Christians have responded to the loss of a sense of place that has come with modernity is by grounding sacred symbols not only in sacralized geographical spaces but in the human body itself – the gendered human body […] Like sacred space, the gendered body is ritual space, ‘a location for formalized, repeatable symbolic performances’” (124). Cf. also Chidester and Linenthal 9.

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body’s walking by and acting like everything’s Ok. And it’s just not OK” (“Teen Christians Campaign against Pop Culture”). Battle Cry was a morality movement against premarital sex, drugs and drinking. In a surprising (for free-enterprise Christians) turn towards a critique of neoliberal conglomerates and secular corporations, the language used is of protecting girls (here “America” as the helpless female victim) from rape – not to protect boys from rape. Lilli Matson Dagdigian writes in her BA thesis “At the Frontlines of God’s Army” about the Battle Cry movement: While everyone, of course, is to remain chaste until their wedding night, the methods girls and boys are told to use to achieve this goal reveal wildly dissimilar expectations. I argue that women are constructed as the guardians of chastity, responsible for both their own purity and that of their male counterparts. This idea runs throughout evangelical culture, as seen in the purity ball craze sweeping the country – teenage girls’ purity is endlessly discussed in the name of protection and the sanctity of marriage. Furthermore, I contend that expectations for teenage boys are not only less emphasized, but nearly absent. In the songs I examine, boys are figured as at the mercy of their hormones during their teenage years, and cannot be expected to put in their fair share of the work of keeping everyone virginal. (36)

She goes on stating that “female sexual desire is absent from all of these discussions regarding chastity, as all of the challenge in maintaining your virginity comes from convincing boyfriends to wait until marriage” (45). What interests us here is not so much the fact that the female body is used – similar to the child’s body – as a projection surface for the unspecified fears haunting fundamentalists, and as a means of using it as a site of male power and control. Sara Moslener shows us in her book Virgin Nation, that this has happened in repeated waves over the entire history of Christian culture, occasionally, as in the Victorian case, becoming the culture of a given society. What is rather of more interest here is the form this takes in an environment when American Christianity has engaged with the forms of the new consumer and popular cultures that had emerged in the period after the Vietnam War and the 1960s cultural upheavals. When Rebecca Barlow turned sixteen on 24 November 1995, her parents took her out for dinner and presented her with a diamond ring. What sounds like a marriage proposal and engagement dinner gone awry was 136

actually an established fundamentalist Christian consumerist ritual that had become established fairly recently – the bestowal of a chastity ring. The ritual invokes the romantic atmosphere of an adult courtship and pairing ritual, but repurposed and performed with a different intention on a younger girl. From the perspective that conservative Christianity shares with the many other milieu of American middle-class life, which adolescent girl would not want to be treated like an adult held in esteem for her womanhood – here getting a high-priced ring – and which girl would not wish to experience a wedding or engagement ritual at some point early in her life? Packaged in such familiar and culturally respected forms, the radical demand for female chastity is made chic and trendy. Christine J. Gardner writes in her book Making Chastity Sexy: “[T]he abstinence organizations use sex to sell abstinence by presenting their message through sexy (albeit modestly dressed) celebrity spokespersons” (48). The contemporary proliferation of suburban Christian chastity movements or campaigns with names like “True Love Waits,” “The Silver Ring Thing, or “Purity Balls” – in which girls are dressed like princesses or southern belle debutantes and are serenaded or dance with their equally formally dressed fathers who promise to protect their purity – are marked by a strong emphasis on conspicuous consumption, with striking parallels to the commodification and excess of the contemporary wedding industry (you need to get your chastity wristband or purity silver ring from an approved list of suppliers). The association of chastity with the contemporary consumer expression of the princess archetype image has gained further ground through deliberate cross-marketing with the steady succession of movies and merchandise that the culturally soft-conservative Walt Disney organization has produced to accompany every single cohort of postwar American girlhood. The Barlow sisters even imagine themselves as different characters from the Disney series of girl movies: “Becca would be Mulan, Lauren would be Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) and Alyssa would be Belle (from Beauty & The Beast)” (BarlowGirl, interview by Lauren Summerford). In 1998, the first recorded purity ball took place in Colorado Springs, organized by Randy and Lisa Wilson of the New Horizons Foundation. The “inventor” of the purity balls was also engaged in public policymaking and advocacy for Focus on the Family and is now National Field Director for church ministries for the Family Research Council. M. Eugenia 137

Deerman writes about the concept of “virgin chic” that emerged at about this time: “By sponsoring the family values frame and by sponsoring morality legislation the Right contributed to the development and integration of this new narrative […] into popular culture” (110). Part of the attractiveness of the ring also came from a scare: if girls started dating boys who would not become their husbands, this would inevitably produce repeated incidents of great emotional harm in the breakup phase as well as endanger continued possession of the ring. Rebecca Barlow recounts: We each received our purity rings when we were sixteen years old. The coolest part was mom and dad picked out the rings themselves. They each have a diamond on them. One of the reasons why they thought it was important for us to have a diamond is because the most beautiful diamonds are formed under the most extreme pressure. They told us this life of purity is going to be a challenge but it is what God has for us. If we stick to it and go through it we will be beautiful diamonds on the other end. The day we turned sixteen mom and dad took us out to eat and shared with us their story and how they grew up in their high school years and their college years and how they dated. They were both good kids and didn’t mess up or whatever but there was still a lot of brokenness that came into their marriage because of their dating relationships. They shared that with us how their brokenness damaged their marriage and how they could have saved so much heartache if they had waited. (BarlowGirl, interview by Joe Montague)

It seems clear from the start that the Barlow parents’ idea was not just to discourage sexual intercourse, but to also prevent their girls from starting to date in the first place. At the bottom of this idea was the fantasy, derived from a vulgarized understanding of the dynamics of psychotherapy that parents could protect their children from making mistakes, and that emotional learning can take place without going through emotional experiences. It also incorporates the Calvinist idea that the future husband will automatically be predestined to be the “right” guy, with whom the relationship will work without problems – something which supposedly will happen when both partners have lived a life of chastity. Lauren Barlow states: “God doesn’t want our hearts to be broken […] we wear it on our wedding ring finger to symbolize we are already taken” (BarlowGirl, interview by JCTV). 138

The Barlow sisters’ mother MaryAnn found further elaboration of the nodating life and philosophy in a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris (1997). Harris favors courtship instead of dating for Christians, and encourages Christians to go out in gender mixed groups. Rebecca St. James, a famous Christian singer who was nineteen years old at the time the book came out, wrote a foreword. She can be seen as the model the Barlows had for promoting this ideology while being a singer. In a classic example of Christian-style multimedia mutual promotion, she released the song “Wait for Me” to complement Harris’ sequel Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship. In 2002, she published a book herself called Wait for Me: Rediscovering the Joy of Purity in Romance.37 St. James had presented the no-dating policy in a traditionally feminine way. Her music video shows her sitting at the back of a car, dreaming about her future husband and asking him to wait for her. The approach BarlowGirl eventually developed for themselves moved more in the direction of consumerist hard sell, reflective of the tone of heartland suburbia rather than St. James’ understatement. But the Barlows persisted with the no-dating policy more consistently over a longer period and eventually made it into a central component of their brand. This association was so marked that it was acknowledged by other Christian musicians in their own work. The band Superchic[k] came out with a song called “Barlow Girls,” describing the girls’ no-dating policy. On BarlowGirl’s first album the song “Average Girl” enunciates the position directly: “No more dating, I’m just waiting, my prince will come for me.” In a culture in which the marriage age is pushed further and further back in time, purity pledges are often broken or ending in unintended single lives. Girls grow up with very high expectations for the maturity and commitment of a future husband who is supposed to have an equally consistent, if less rigidly policed, commitment to chastity before marriage, and then is the one who is supposed to treat the female like a princess. It is obviously difficult to compare this ideal with the women’s subjective experience of the lived reality of their actual married lives. The corresponding politics of supporting and rationalizing abstinence-only programs instead of a complete curriculum of sex-education in schools and 37

Alyssa Barlow lists I Kissed Dating Goodbye under her favorite books (“Alyssa,” Barlowgirl, unofficial website). Rebecca St. James would marry in 2011, and changing her purity ring with the purity ring her husband was wearing.

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programs is a topic too large to be discussed fully here, but the results are verifiable.38 More and more regions in the United States are beginning to resemble traditional areas of the country like the South, where teenage pregnancy rates, married or not, are the highest in the developed world.39

The Warrior Ideology May 13, 2010 on the premises of Fort Eustin military base, located south of Williamsburg, Virgina. Soldiers are marched to the theater on the premises. This evening, they will have a different kind of fitness training, one labeled by their superiors as “spiritual fitness.” The Christian band BarlowGirl is giving a rock concert for the military. Some cadets who feel uncomfortable participating in an evangelical Christian show – because they are not themselves evangelical Christians – wonder if and when they can back out of attending. Only after they have reached the theatre the option is given to remain outside and instead serve barrack duty. Eighty soldiers back out and eight later file complaints with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, because they feel that there was a high degree of pressure to attend, and that barrack duty instead of a free evening was a punishment. The complaints of the soldiers were the subject three months later of an article by Chris Rodda (2010).40 Rodda stated that concerts featuring Christian main acts cost the military between $30,000 and $100,000, representing a good amount of income for the act itself – in this case, BarlowGirl. Joseph L. Conn from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU) also reported the story, adding a comment by army 38

The state support for abstinence teaching rose under the George W. Bush administration. A report from the BBC listed 125 million $ as the amount of funding in 2003 (Alwyn). Cf. also Moslener 113 about the Adolescent Family Life Act signed into law by President Reagan in 1981. 39 An UN report states: “The United States teenage birth rate of 52.1 is the highest in the developed world – and about four times the European Union average” (“A League Table of Teenage Births”). 40 Rodda is senior research director of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The Barlow-story of the complaining soldiers hit the airwaves on RT America in late 2010 with the title “God, Guns & Rock n’ Roll: Would G.I. Jesus do Spiritual Fitness?” (Moon).

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spokesman Col. Thomas Collins: “If something like that were to have happened, it would be contrary to Army policy.” The base newspaper ran an article after the concert stating: Following the Apostle Paul’s message to the Ephesians in the Bible, Christian rock music’s edgy, all-girl band BarlowGirl brought the armor of God to the warriors and families of Fort Eustis during another installment of the Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert Series May 13 at Jacobs Theater. (Rodda 2010)

It went on to quote Vince Barlow, the father of the sisters: “We really believe that to be a Christian in today’s world, you have to be a warrior, and we feel very blessed and privileged that God has given us the tool to deliver His message and arm His army.” In 2010 BarlowGirl toured with their newest album Love & War and stated on their website: BarlowGirl has always represented an interesting dichotomy; tenderhearted, beautiful young women who aren’t afraid to take an aggressive, almost warrior-like stance when it comes to spreading the gospel and serving God. That fiery obedience reverberates throughout their latest release, Love & War. (BarlowGirl, website)

The “spiritual fitness” concert series had been initiated years earlier and was part of a bigger effort to respond to a spike in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the ensuing suicide crisis among members of the military in the wake of the Iraq war, as the website of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers points out. Many voices in the culture of therapeutic intervention widespread in the early twenty-first century U.S. believed that religious people are more resilient to a crisis of meaning. In addition, it was the heartfelt conviction of Christian fundamentalists that non-believers (in their form of Christian faith) were not morally stable. An article on the homepage of the military website writing about similar concerts in 2008 at Fort Lee quoted Maj. General James E. Chambers: Our Soldiers today come from many different backgrounds. […] Some of those backgrounds did not include any kind of ethical, moral or civicstype training as children. Our intent is to expose that to them while they’re

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here, and if it changes just a few behaviors than we’ve been successful. (Bell)

This is a kind of dog-whistle political language for evangelical proselytizing, expressing the hope that if a soldier converted to Christianity, perhaps due to a BarlowGirl concert, he or she would be “nicer” to the people in his or her surroundings. From this perspective, non-Christian soldiers pose a possible danger to their unit, due to their spiritual un-fitness and their supposed lack of moral and mental strength. Such beliefs appear in a volume by army chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy titled Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel, “asserting that non-religious service members had no defense against sin and could therefore cause the failure of their units,” a book endorsed by Gen. David Petraeus (Rodda 2012). The most prominent case of protest against this kind of proselytizing was a lawsuit by Mikey Weinstein in 2005.41 I am unaware of any other military concert that featured BarlowGirl. The negative reaction to their 2010 concert came at the tail end of a period of “overt” provision of Christian music for formal and secular army programming. However, I am aware of one other event where army personal might have been actively invited to attend a Christian concert in which BarlowGirl performed. BarlowGirl played in 2005 together with the hard rockers Day of Fire at the Christmas Rock Night in Ennepetal, Germany, an event organized yearly by the local YMCA (Christmas Rock Night). 42 The U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes featured the event: Americans in Europe got the rare opportunity to rock with some of Christian music’s hottest artists and most promising newcomers last month. Fans at Christmas Rock Night in Germany and Winter Wonder Rock Festival in the Netherlands were able to catch performances by Pillar, the O.C. Supertones, Project 86, Barlow Girl, Sanctus Real and the hard-rocking new group Day of Fire. […] Among those singing, dancing and

41

The case was dismissed a year later with the argument, “that the plaintiffs had graduated and were thus unable to prove any direct harm” (Grant 40). Mikey Weinstein’s book With God on Our Side (2006) tells the story of his son being religiously harassed at the Colorado Springs Air Force Academy and how the Air Force reacted to the accusations. 42 The YMCA in Germany works purely as an evangelical Christian association and does not run gyms there.

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praising at the Dutch and German festivals were members of the U.S. military community. “They seemed really excited to have American rock music over there,” he [Joshua Brown from Day of Fire] said. Brown said he enjoys reaching out to U.S. troops because his wife grew up in a military family. “I am so thankful for our troops,” he said. (Bowers)

The use of war metaphors to express Christian ideas of being culturally and psychologically persecuted, to express the difficulty of sustaining a morally good life, and to describe the imperative of proselytizing, is as old as Christianity itself (cf. the reference in Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians about the “armor” of God). One prominent example of a Christian group explicitly using an extended war metaphor in the late nineteenth century is the Salvation Army. This is a charitable group dedicated to serving the disadvantaged in society with an emphasis on the social gospel, while at the same time dressed in the uniforms of a typical industrial period military force, complete with elaborate ranks and command ritual. However, of more direct interest here is the specific understanding, usage, and meaning of the war “metaphor” in the hands and minds of Christian fundamentalist Americans of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Here, it seems that we are dealing with a much more literal understanding of an outside “evil” which needs to be repelled by actual military power. The militarization of Christian fundamentalist language in the age of neoliberalism, and the concomitant growth in support for the military in this period among U.S. Christians, can be traced back at least to the sacralization of the 1991 Gulf War and its Victory Parades. Christian extremists interpreted the Gulf conflict as an End Times conflict, as described in the Bible in Daniel 8.43 In mainstream American culture, the victory parade symbolized a renewal of the pride in the military that had been missing in action after the Vietnam disaster. It became acceptable again in broad sections of the U.S. public to use military allusions in popular culture. Tom Engelhardt might have announced The End of Victory Culture prematurely. The spread of war metaphors in popular culture in the 1990s is also evident in Christian children’s music. Carman, a Christian singer who 43

James Albright’s website shows a 1991 gulf war victory parade with a commentary referring to Dan 8:8: “The video below demonstrates that the USA fulfilled the male goat that magnified itself when it reveals that a Persian Gulf War victory parade was held in Washington DC.”

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came to fame in the late 1980s, issued a children’s music album titled Yo Kidz 2: The Armor of God. According to the album, children needed to shield themselves from the temptations of the world through their imagined Christian armor. If Carman’s album suggested that there was a spiritual fight going on – and not real physical fighting involving kids – this position starts to shift in the songs written by Vince Barlow for Willow Creek’s children’s ministry Promiseland. A track on the Armor of God CD is “Sword and Shield” from 1998. It starts with a spoken voice of temptation: “Why don’t you give up, why don’t you break the rules,” a children’s choir answers: “It’s a battle, I’m not gonna fall, thick is my shield, so I can stand tall. It’s a battle that I’m gonna win, God’s word is my sword, so I won’t give in.” At the end tempting voices are murmuring in the back, but the main singer sings “I’m gonna win.” Here the conflict between good and evil plays out directly in the child’s mind and is potentially threatening in the real world. So far however, none of this emotional warfare into which Christian fundamentalists initiate their children is directly connected with real American wars. This next step happens when both sides of the metaphor, the spiritual warfare between the soul and “the world” and the real physical warfare and threat from extremist Muslims are folded together into a single threat. The festering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq collapse into a scenario where Christians see themselves under attack from external forces as well as forces inside the “worldly” U.S. society that want to abolish school prayer and the supposedly Christian aspects of the U.S. constitution. The language of a “holy war,” or a Christian war is projected onto the military endeavors in the Middle East (Aslan). Warlike cultural references and vocabulary are not taboo for Christian women. Rather, they are encouraged to use the ideas of fighting and shielding themselves as a kind of Christian feminine re-empowerment, a soft-sell addendum to the doctrines of Christian fundamentalist feminine submission (cf. Griffith). The fight can be understood as a fight against low female self-esteem, which Christian coach Cindi McMenamin describes as falling “prey to the flaming arrows or ‘fiery darts’ of the enemy because we believe his lies.” In an even more loaded form of vocabulary, this becomes the fight against ubiquitous spiritual threats, as a review of Irene Revels-Hawkins’s book Building Christian Women Warriors and Tacticians states: “[W]omen warriors can finally establish a solid foundation for victorious 144

spiritual warfare in Christ through Biblical principles” (“Building Christian Women Warriors”).44 It can however also be understood as a fight against a threat to a beloved Christian community. In her scholarly book Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America Leslie Dorrough Smith concentrates on how and why rhetoric regarding sex, gender, and reproduction is among the most useful and emotionally charged means through which groups like CWA authorize their attempts to transform American culture and politics […] Chaos rhetoric is a type of declension speech that attempts to persuade an audience by stressing an imminent threat to a beloved entity (which could include everything from children, to liberty, to the nation itself). In claiming the deterioration of this entity, chaos rhetoric portrays a world where threat, disorder, fear, and chaos reign. (5)

BarlowGirl caters to all those aspects – linking itself with the virginity movement and its sexually focused rhetoric, with the idea of endless spiritual warfare and its therapeutic shielding, and finally, with the idea of the Christian nation under threat.

Disciplined and Cherished: Christian Overprotection What happens when the decisions Christian women make about pairing up and reproducing continue to be defined by the commitments they made as children to their parents, long after they have attained the legal agency of adult status as seen by the secular state? What happens when they then are kept in dependent relations originating in childhood, when the musical careers with which they launch themselves into the adult world are subordinated to the initiatives of their father? As is the case with secular child music stars who have always performed not just for an audience but also to please their parents, crucial stages of growing up and realizing personal and artistic autonomy are delayed. The Barlow girls’ situation is only one

44

Cf. also the non-gendered book You the Warrior Leader: Applying Military Strategy for Victorious Spiritual Warfare by Bobby Welch.

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conservative Christian instance of the wider phenomenon of a vastly extended adolescence which has become the norm in the United States.45 For most American cultural milieu, the point in time when young adults step up to take over responsibility and act as free agents has become increasingly postponed in recent decades. The time required for acquiring the education (or rather, the education-derived credentials) considered necessary to rise into middle-class lives has been greatly extended. Job insecurity forces more and more adults to share living quarters with their parents much longer, or even return after unsuccessful first forays into independent living. A general fear of taking responsibility grips younger generations who have grown up in a time of geopolitical instability and conflict dramatized by the media, and massive economic downturns. A trend towards so-called “helicopter” parenting – the overprotection and over-structuring of the lives of children and adolescents, who are thereby robbed of the chance to learn how to fix their own mistakes, is a recent development in U.S. society. The Christian fundamentalist version of this receives additional and idiosyncratic reinforcement from parents desirous not just of protecting their children from making normal human mistakes, but also protecting them from an outside world that has always been defined as “evil,” but now more than ever is showing signs of increasing unpredictability, intrusiveness, and danger.46 45

Cf. Blatterer and the self-help book by Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen. The concepts of delayed adulthood have been complemented by ideas of “emerging adulthood” and boomerang kids. Steinberg writes: “According to a large-scale national study conducted since the late 1970s, it has taken longer for each successive generation to finish school, establish financial independence, marry and have children. Today’s 25-year-olds, compared with their parents’ generation at the same age, are twice as likely to still be students, only half as likely to be married and 50 percent more likely to be receiving financial assistance from their parents.” Another phenomenon is the so called “Peter Pan Syndrome,” which might be caused by overprotective parents. 46 Behind the idea of protecting them from bad experiences stands also the fear of Christian fundamentalist parents, that if their kids experience other ways of living as ok (and not as the scary lifestyles as they were depicted by their parents) they might leave their narrow and restrictive church life. The outside therefore has to be painted in the worst colors. Because of unpreparedness with the outside world and the standards of responsibility and self-reliance, kids who get out of restrictive situations ironically sometimes get into trouble, as can be seen in Tanya Levin’s autobiography of how she left the Australian Hillsong church.

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According to “On My Own,” the very first song on the first album of BarlowGirl, the most important concerns of adolescents are not really the struggles involved in finding their identities, their independence, their talents and future job inclinations or their sexual identity. The lyrics talk instead about “messing up,” “falling,” not being “strong enough” and realizing that they “can’t make it on their own.” The girls don’t refer to “sins” (like stealing or having pre-marital sex) with the word “messing up,” but rather describe that they erred by using their own mind to guide their actions. The goal of their Christian education is to experience the super-ego as God’s voice, and to give this voice the priority in their lives. Perhaps the girls looked at a fan or gossip magazine featuring current teen idols, and then dreamed of themselves becoming famous or going their own way. The way the girls see themselves as “fallen,” as “failures,” who need somebody else (the father, God) to guide them, to submit to, can only be described as authoritarian and yes, even anti-feminist – although authoritarians invariably describe this form of self-definition and self-understanding as liberation. This song suggests how much pressure has built up in the Barlow girls by the time of their adolescence, and how difficult it is for people at this developmental stage to “conform” to the fundamentalist Christian lifestyle. Song lyrics like “Should have learned this lesson by the thousandth time” and “I’m not as strong as I thought” followed by “God You have to save me” still seem to fit into a traditional Christian idea of Jesus dying for the sins of the world and “saving” people from going to hell. However, the emphasis behind these words have shifted in a significant way towards a much more extreme form of salvation doctrine. God is no longer asked to take away sin, but instead will be there to help prevent people from making mistakes in the first place, by helping them resist temptation. In other words, life is depicted as a minefield of evil distractions or seductions, and the only way to live is total disengagement from the evil outside world and total submission to God. The girls therefore are caught up in a vicious circle. By not learning from mistakes, they remain unable to establish an identity sufficiently autonomous from that of their parents. Yet while being kept in the moral status of children without fundamental agency, they nevertheless are developing a sense of their adolescent and then post-adolescent female gender identity, yet cannot compare this sense to other models. The fear-offailure-driven lyrics they then produce for their songs do not just parrot 147

their parent’s position, but rather dramatize their own crisis of discovering and accepting what the parents, and supposedly God, wants from them: being submissive females, following the lead of the male. The question of whether they have a real choice is never directly addressed. In another strange loop, the girls are attracted most by what they officially fear: the chastity ideology is expressed together with the wish to become successful and desirable music superstars, swarmed by fans. They pay incredible attention to the construction of an ambiguously attractive stage aesthetic (styling themselves with makeup, combining “decent” clothes and wearing high heels in publicity pictures) and obsessing about their weight. This subtext of eroticism is never far away from the ostensible piety. A video to their song “Never Alone” shows an attractive male (with bare feet, standing somewhere in a quarry), who is tied by ropes and struggles to get away. Only at the end of the video does he give up his struggle and the ropes fall off. It becomes clear that he made the ropes tight himself because he struggled. This “trust against all odds” attitude was also part of the song “Never Alone,” which Vince Barlow reports had been written by Rebecca while the family had undertaken their marathon all-day prayer sessions after the first potential band contract had vanished into thin air (V. Barlow 2012). At this moment in their history, the family had apparently found it very difficult to keep trust in God – trust defined as believing that becoming a famous band was God’s will. But even smaller issues of day-to-day band life become big emotional dramas for girls who have not learned to cope with technical problems occurring in recording sessions and the pressure to deliver. Alyssa Barlow states: We were going through an interesting season where there was a lot of spiritual warfare. I was just crying all the day and I came to the girls and I literally threw it down in writing, I’m done fighting. I’m done with the passion, I’m done with what comes against us so often […] And we often want to have our lives easy. And God said, Alyssa, I’m not going to take you out of this situation, I’m gonna take you through it. (Alyssa Barlow, “BarlowGirl, ‘This is Not Forever’”)

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Interlude 2: Willow Creek’s Coffeehouse Christianity When I described BarlowGirl’s retirement at the start of this chapter, I described how they literally “vanished” from the public sphere. This was no exaggeration. The sisters had done a seemingly thorough job of taking all band contact information off the internet. Their father Vince Barlow did not answer the emails I sent to try and set up an interview. 47 This clear signal prompted an ethical decision on my part to respect their desire for privacy – and from all indications, showing up to ring their door bell would be a bad idea anyway. I decided instead to get a first-hand impression of the Christian scene in the Chicago suburbs from which they had emerged a decade or so ago. I later spoke with Matt Lundgren, a worship musician at Willow Creek. We met in Dr. B’s, the megachurch’s cafe, conveniently located in the lobby of the main entrance to the building. I love coffee; it might be part of my own Protestant Christian upbringing that I can understand the importance of coffee in that subculture. In contrast to groups like the Mormons that ban it, for conservative Protestants coffee is the only acceptable stimulant, not burdened with moral opprobrium. When I spoke with Lundgren and asked him about the church’s take on moral values he told me: We don’t really go into this with a specific “list” thing: do all of these things and don’t do all of these […] And I think more important than all of the great sins you’ve done and all your deeds is the trajectory your life is going. And so, one of the things I am concerned about for myself: Am I a better person this year than I was last year?

Again, I was astonished, as this sounded more like generic American selfimprovement rhetoric and not Christian fundamentalism. Matt also told me that the rationale behind the music choices they make for the worship in the service is, that the music has to be accessible and inspiring “no 47

Nor could I get other contact information through the church they once went to in Elgin – as the African American minister Robert Whitt told me they would not attend there anymore. I actually only got hold of the minister in emailing his son, DJ Breje Whitt (Diamond Cut Productions), who in one of the BarlowGirl tours stepped in as a drummer and who has since opened his own DJing business with the money he made on that tour (Pohl and Ferrarin).

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matter if they have been a Christian for thirty years or if they walk into church for the very first time.” To reach as broad an audience as possible, music genres that Lundgren called “fringe expressions” were not performed. The music needed to reach as many tastes as possible, and therefore the common denominator was a middle-of-the-road style. When I attended the Saturday service at Willow Creek I was again surprised; nothing I heard would have sounded strange to the ears of any mainline Protestant. In essence the message was: praise God and believe. The only word that stood out which I hadn’t heard before in church was “leadership.” The constantly reiterated calls to be a “leader” seemed to come from a management/business school-style style vocabulary, but applied to private and spiritual life. The lack of any edge, the absence of Christian symbols in the lobby, the polished market language, and the smoothness of it all made me feel uncomfortable. It all reminded me of a really well-run corporation which based all its decisions on feedback from focus groups about the needs and tastes of their customers. The TV screens in the lobby showed the many courses and seminars on offer, many of them variations on the theme of therapy and counseling from saving your marriage to caring for your finances. Willow Creek’s business model actually has been the focus of a study from the Harvard Business School. The author of the study eventually got a job at Willow Creek itself. 48 This soft-sell approach to spreading conservative religion in the twenty-first century might be termed “Coffeehouse Christianity” (cf. Turner). Through it, evangelicals participate in the general trend in the U.S. to proliferate the relatively affordable stylistic markers and accessories of an aspirational simulacrum of a “middleclass” lifestyle to large numbers of socioeconomically precarious people. Decently brewed coffee in a bewildering variety of flavors and optional combinations has become something of a homeopathic mini-luxury among the broad masses of Americans who sincerely believe they are middle class, a claim to (not necessarily achieved) “respectable” status, that also fit the worldwide Protestant preference for non-alcoholic and 48

An article in the Economist (“Jesus, CEO”) talking about the business structure of megachurches mentions the Harvard Business case study by Santiago “Jim” Mellado about Willow Creek. The study showed that megachurches are run like successful businesses. Mellado, who wrote the study, served as president of the Willow Creek Association from 1993-2013 and is CEO of Compassion International.

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non-psychotropic stimulation. My styrofoam cup during the discussion with Lundgren, decorated in shades of tropical yellow, brown and green, had a message written on its side: “Creating Community! Dr. B’s Café / We Use Organic Fair Trade Coffee.” This coffee culture signaled at least the outward signs of a concern for the environment and fair trade that I had not expected from what I thought was the “Christian right.” Drinking coffee in the U.S. – more than drinking caffeinated soft-drinks – has become a marker for this class segment in the same way as other former leftleaning or hipster lifestyles – being vegetarian, undertaking personal discovery through therapy or counseling, and pro-environmentalism, for example – have been embraced by the Christian community.

Moral Restrictions and Soft Sell: Between Satan and the New Christian Coffeehouse Culture Bärbel Harju describes the history of Christian music as a journey away from strict moral values towards a soft-sell in the 1990s: [T]he breakout from the cultural ghetto is successful with new rhetoric – the triumphalist and simplified speech pattern of the 1980s are superseded by messages which follow the new evangelical trends of seeker sensitivity and emergent church. The abstaining of absolute truth in relation to religious belief and the admittance of doubt and failing makes it more attractive for such outside the subculture than self-righteous pious missionary zeal. An alternative value system, that does not only propagate altruism and chastity, but also includes critique of capitalism and social consciousness, causes in the consumers a strong feeling of belonging and group identity. (248, here translated from German)

Harju identifies the soft-sell approach and its associations with fashionable eco-sensitivity and critiques of capitalism as a byproduct of the “new emergent church” movement. This movement, represented for example through Tony Jones, invoked an old apostolic model to organize itself in small home groups, as a trend against the slightly earlier and more impersonal ascent of megachurches. Its rhetoric, however, has partly been taken over by megachurches and likewise the small-group idea. In his book The Family, Jeff Sharlet doubts that the seeming openness of resulting networks of politically conservative Christians in the 151

megachurches to markers of new and progressive lifestyles really represents a change towards a more open political worldview. He points out that the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, for example, influences its members’ politics and spreads ideology not so much in the formal Sunday services, but rather in the home meetings of so called “cells” and in their other group activities. He writes about the post-Fordist fragmenting marketing technique Ted Haggard, the disgraced founder of New Life, applies: His real challenge became one not of policing individual morality but of persuading his working- and middle-class congregation that the deregulated market […] was both biblical and in their interest. […] The cellgroup system, which functions much like consumer capitalism – offering the semblance of “choice” even as it forecloses genuine alternatives – proved the perfect means of persuasion. (306)

Under the surface smoothness and consumer appeal of a feel-good Christianity, beliefs still circulate about the reality of a Satan at constant war with God’s people. Satan’s power, here in Colorado Springs, continues to be understood as expressing itself in the presence of non-believers, homosexuals, prostitutes or secular urbanites in general. It is the alloy of these extreme ideas and the associated rigid moral stands on issues such as chastity and abortion with the economic model of free market capitalism and the idea and necessity of growth which distinguishes the seemingly “harmless” and consumer-oriented “new paradigm megachurches” apart from previous forms of Christian church organization and belief. The pronounced ideological edge of BarlowGirl’s music and the dynamics of the family’s collective effort to promote the band did not seem to have easily aligned itself with the soft-sell approach of the megachurches. When I first asked about their possible connection to the Barlows and my effort to get in touch with the family, Paul Johnson from Willow Creek, replied in an email from 22 February 2015: Thanks for the email and for thinking of us at Willow. I’m happy to connect you with one of our worship leaders during your visit to Chicago. However, you should know that, to the best of my knowledge, Willow had nothing to do with the start of Barlow Girl. I believe some of the band members attended Willow for a time, but we have no way of contacting

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them or know of any direct connection between what we do at the church and what they do with their music.

Such a rapprochement is however possible. The Australian megachurch Hillsong can serve as a prime example of how morally restrictive values and ideas can be transmitted via a soft-sell method. Tanya Levin, a dropout critical of Hillsong, writes of her experience in 1987, when “John O’D,” who also attended Hillsong – not further identified, but most likely a John O’Donnell who works for Christian radio in Australia – told her that “the worst person Satan has anointed is Bruce Springsteen” and that “[r]ock’n’roll is all about fornication, especially ‘Dancing in the Dark’” (50). Levin then went home and destroyed her Springsteen records and took posters of the singer down. She subsequently spoke to Geoff Bullock, who later founded the Hillsong music conferences and kick-started the Hillsong music empire: “I said how I used to love the concerts and he said ‘I used to play in the concerts’ and I said I’d always stayed away from heavy metal because I was afraid. He said, ‘You have more power than the devil’” (53). Subsequently however, Hillsong began to spread its message with the formats of mainstream popular music. Levin comments: “Hillsong has done for Christian music what the Dixie Chicks did for country and western: made it blond, sexy and mainstream” (137). Two songs of BarlowGirl are connected with the ideas and worldview represented by James Dobson and his Focus on the Family. As mentioned before, Dobson’s wife is the chairwoman of the National Day of Prayer (NDP). In 2007 BarlowGirl was the “NDP youth ambassador” and was “reaching out to a generation of young people who are passionate about the things of God, calling them to action and challenging them to make an impact in their communities,” according to Michael Calhoun, the director of marketing for the NDP Task Force (Bryant). Clint Lagerberg and Otto Price, BarlowGirl’s producer, wrote the song “We Pray” which the girls performed together with other prominent singers. At a first glance “We Pray” seems to have an empowering message as it asks for those who are down to be lifted up: For the tired and the weary Lost and confused Hopeless and needy With nothing to lose For those who are falling

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Or have already fallen away […] For a world that is dying To be lifted up. (BarlowGirl, “We Pray”)

But in a second reading it becomes clear that the worldview depicted in the song is rather dark: the world is dying, people are “falling” – meaning “falling” from God. In my understanding it means that out there is the evil ungodly world and prayer is a tool for empowerment to win the spiritual battle (cf. Bornschein, A Prayer Warrior’s Guide to Spiritual Battle: On the Front Line). If we compare the Barlow’s song with further examples of songs from the 1980s in which Christians take on the attributes of warriors and fighters, it becomes clear that a cult of victory in the songs from that decade has been transformed in the course of the 1990s to a more interior struggle marked by a desperate, defensive attitude (M.A. Powell 86-104). The other song inspired by a radio broadcast of Dobson “One More Round” on the album How Can We Be Silent takes the battle metaphor to a more explicit level. If one looks at the words the Barlow sisters use in describing the CD, which features them standing in a boxing ring, the language is soaked with allusions to a fight: “God does have victory,” “we will see Him win the battle,” “We’re very battle-oriented in our family,” or “Be the one at the frontline” (“BarlowGirl,” CBN). Lauren states: We want everybody to be happy, but I think God has shown us in our life that this world is a battle. This life is a battle between good and evil. It’s not just a battle physically; it’s a spiritual battle. We as Christians have to fight. We have to fight against the things of this world that are trying to drive us down. So that is what that boxing ring symbolizes: To fight and to not give up. (Ibid.)49

Ann Burlein writes about how movements like white supremacy and the Christian Right take advantage of the fears of people for the safety of their families. She emphasizes the role images of children play in projecting fear, making them the center of what needs protecting and what is threatened by external and incomprehensible forces. As examples of fears she lists: “black rapists violating little six-year-old white schoolgirls, gay teachers recruiting children in public schools, welfare mothers having babies as a way to scam taxpayers and avoid working.” She goes on stating 49

Cf. also BarlowGirl interview by Mindy Lynn.

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that “[e]ach of these images engenders its popular appeal by addressing, and constituting, its audience as parents” (9). Burlein warns about misunderstandings of Focus on the Family’s message as one empowering women, and being non-partisan. She points out that the soft-sell, pop-cultural, even feminist and therapeutic strategies are just means for covering up the deeper authoritarian message: Dobson rearticulates feminist insights and investments into a conservative sensibility. In the process, he separates women’s personal empowerment from feminist politics. Such a soft-sell style is especially appealing to white middle-class women, for it enables them to secure their own empowerment without confronting larger systems and structures. (125)

Dobson’s famous book on child education however, does not sound therapeutic. It is titled Dare to Discipline. Dobson talks about kids as if they were amoral little monsters needing protection from each other, tight control and firm authority to straighten out. 50 The best way to protect your kid from other kids is, of course, homeschooling. Historically, Christian homeschooling got a major boost in visibility and popularity when it was promoted by Rousas John Rushdoony in the ’60s as a reaction of Christian parents against desegregation of schools and busing, and legal rulings against school prayer. Also, intersection with the antigovernment paranoia of other groups on the right not specifically focused on Christian messages, homeschooling was a tighter way to indoctrinate with the fundamental Christian message (cf. W. Martin, chapter “We – Some of Us – Are Family). The empowerment of women in homeschooling parallels the empowerment of women in the rise of the religious right. Women have to prepare themselves with homeschooling material to become good educators and have power over their kids the entire day. This power however, can easily be interpreted as sacrifice, and fits thereby in the scheme in which the husband remains the head of the household. Vince Barlow writes:

50

Dobson says in a show: “The aspect of homeschooling that means the most to me is the protection of that little spirit that is so fragile and so easily wounded. And you can built a little world that allows that child to grow up in a healthy way and not get bludgeoned. You know, children are brutal to each other” (Dobson 2013).

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My wife would lay down her life and go to the nth degree to love our children, and I would often say, “Why are you doing so much?” She would always reply, “The only way the children will never forget they are loved is if someone is willing to die to his or her own desires to meet their needs.” […] From home birth to home school, to not replacing our TV antenna when it blew off the roof, to no R-rated movies and no teen magazines. […] [I]f we wanted to raise children of His Kingdom – children who would change the world – then they could not look, think or act like the world. (V. and M. Barlow 131)

Conclusion BarlowGirl propagandizes for morally restrictive values in a way that differs somewhat from the soft-sell approach with which the new megachurches package the same message. Rather, they come across as a feminist version of the old tradition of rock music rebels – seemingly championing women’s empowerment through their invocation of a (more or less) aggressive, masculine (even militant) musical style. The rebellious attitude however is in total contradiction to the content of the majority of their songs. The theme of chastity, for example, appears to be something chic and rebellious to fight for. The normal valences of identity politics and feminism are turned upside down: white Christians are depicted as the victims of an amoral society, and women become empowered through rocking about virginity. BarlowGirl filled a niche in the market during the Christian fundamentalist surge after 9/11, a good example of the cultural consequences of George W. Bush’s presidency and the atmosphere of wounded national paranoia between the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This synthesis of militant Christianity and belief in prosperity gospel received a setback via the 2008 economic crisis, the realization of the moral and material extent of the Iraq disaster, and the presidency of Barack Obama. What makes this specific form of Christianity unsettling to look upon from the outside is the way children are exposed to a double bind: they are declared the most precious things in their parents’ lives, while at the same time they are controlled to an extreme, making it difficult for them to grow up and gather the necessary emotional and practical intelligence needed to be autonomous adults. A therapeutic notion of shielding kids from experiencing a hard time generates the opposite effect: it makes it impossible for 156

them to have a good time. The BarlowGirl phenomenon and the warrior Christianity of the first decade of the 21st century however exposes the pathology of soft-sell and Christian fundamentalism openly – even if some of the repressive methods applied, such as in Escuela Caribe or in Mercy Ministries took a long time to be revealed. The free market is not really “free” – it has become a staging ground for battles over government subsidies for Christian crime prevention programs, Christian re-education and rehab programs, Christian coffee chains, Christian business networks and Christian megachurch programs – all based on the idea of growth and money. What seems scary today is that under the soft-sell of groups and multi-million-dollar businesses like Hillsong, Australia – at the same time Pentecostal church and music business – a fundamentally authoritarian ideology is hiding.51 *** In times of perceived crisis, be it personal or cultural, renewed religion is a common popular reaction. The perception of what constitutes a crisis and what constitutes a lesser kind of challenge however, is very subjective. Fundamentalist Christians understand the cultural changes which have taken place in U.S. society from the ’60s to the late ’80s as a major existential crisis (Hunter). It is important to differentiate the verifiable realities of this major cultural change in the country from the subsequent interpretation of these realities which are specific to the conservative subcultures of the U.S. And even the “facts” can be contested and differently interpreted by different groups. When we look at clearly struggling families aspiring to stable middleclass status like the Barlows, we might wish to explain their flight into a very conservative Christian ideological regime of strict value policing primarily as a reaction to the financial strain of Reaganomics and the further neoliberal gains of the Clinton years. We could note that such families, having embraced the ideology of the free market, were unable to blame this ideology for their continuing economic insecurity; therefore, they had

51

See the Hillsong’s history of having been a conservative Christian congregation, their connection with the prosperity gospel and the money-making growth church model imported from the U.S. (Levin).

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to look elsewhere for an explanation for their existentially unsatisfactory situation. However, it would be simplistic and reductionist to explain their fear of a loss of identity only as a byproduct of the failure of neoliberalism to deliver on its promises of progress and betterment. Even if the U.S. economy had indeed developed in a more sustainable way through the end of the century, we would probably have needed to diagnose an emerging crisis of “white” identity anyway. In its American manifestation this identity is connected with the frontier myth of unbounded agency, providing God’s chosen people – white Protestant Anglos – with the seemingly limitless resources and the privileges which came with white rule over a depopulated continent.52 In this regard, the United States by the end of the twentieth century had turned away from this narrative for good. Optically and culturally, there was no further possibility of assimilating newer social and ethnic groups to God’s chosen people anymore, in the way the door to becoming “white,” had been open for the Irish, Jews, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and arguably a few Asians until about 1980 (Ignatiev; Roediger). Now, self-ascribed whites feel that their particularist imagined community (within the larger imagined community of the U.S. itself), replete with an imagined pre-1970s social formation – the lifestyle of job security, single family income and the suburban house 53 – is under mortal threat. The protection of white virgin girls in this scenario reminds eerily of discriminatory practices in the past.

52

This U.S. specific loss of white privilege or the fear of this loss (or the attribution of bad economic circumstances as an effect of the loss of privileges) is part of a bigger trend of the fear of the loss of privileges of the Western World in general. A reaction towards shielding the West like a ghetto, or a gated community, with big fences is one reaction, which is however countered by multiple permeations of this “wall” through immigration (if legal or illegal). 53 Coontz reminds us that the suburban middle-class lifestyle of the 1950s had only been possible through extensive government subvention, a subvention which took money away from supporting the poor (78).

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Griffith, R. Marie. God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Berkeley, London: U of California P, 2000. Harju, Bärbel. Rock & Religion: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Christlichen Popmusik in den USA. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Harris, Joshua. Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship. Sisters: Multnomah Books, 2000. ———. I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Sisters: Multnomah Books, 1997. Heal Network. Feature about New Horizon Youth Ministry (NHYM). . Hedges, Chris. “Mind Rape and the Christian Right.” Truthdig 21 July 2013. . ———. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hefner, Robert W., ed. Global Pentecostalism in the 21st Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2013. Holvast, René. Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina 1989-2005: A Geography of Fear. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2009. Howard, Jay R., and John M. Streck. Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999. Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White, New York: Routledge, 1995. Ingersoll, Julie. Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. ———. Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. New York and London: New York UP, 2003. Jesus Camp. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (dir.). ICA Films, 2006. DVD. “Jesus, CEO.” The Economist 20 Dec. 2005. . Johnson, Paul. Email from Paul Johnson, Willow Creek Church. 22 Feb. 2015. Johnson, Spencer. Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life. New York: Putnam, 1998. Joyner, Rick. “How Far We Have Fallen.” MorningStar Prophetic Bulletin 95. 19 Oct. 2015. . ———. Breaking the Power of Evil: Winning the Battle for the Soul of Man. Shippensburg: Destiny Image Pub., 2002. Keeter, Scott. “Will White Evangelicals Desert the Gop?” Pew Research Center Website. 2 May 2006. .

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Kidnapped for Christ. Kate Logan (dir.). Red Thorn. Kidnapped for Christ LLC, 2014. DVD. Kintz, Linda, and Julia Lesage, eds. Media, Culture, and the Religious Right. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Kroesbergen, Hermen, ed. In Search of Health and Wealth: The Prosperity Gospel in African, Reformed Perspective. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014. Kröger, Inga, Nienke von Olst, and Reiner Klingholz. “Das Ende der Aufklärung: Der internationale Widerstand gegen das Recht auf Familienplanung.” [“The End of Sex Education: The International Resistance against the Right of Family Planning.”] Berlin Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung, 2004. . Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Kyle, Richard. Evangelicalism: An Americanized Christianity. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2006. Lassiter, Matthew D. “Big Government and Family Values: Political Culture in the Metropolitan Sunbelt.” Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region. Ed. Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2011. 82-109. Levin, Tanya. People in Glass Houses: An Insider’s Story of a Life in & out of Hillsong, Collingwood VIC, Australia: Black Inc., 2015 (1st ed. 2007). Lindsay, D. Michael. Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Luhr, Eileen. Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1984. Lundgren, Matt. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 27 Mar. 2015. Audio. Unpublished. Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers (MAAF). Website. “Spirituality and Spiritual Fitness.” . Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870-1925. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. ———. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991. Martin, William. With God on our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1996. McCloud, Sean. American Possessions: Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States. New York: Oxford UP, 2015.

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McCoy, William. Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel. Ozark: ACW Press, 2005. McMenamin, Cindi. “Be a Warrior Woman, Not a Wounded One.” Blog. 21 Jan. 2016. . Meyer, Joyce. Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind. Tulsa: Harrison House, 1982. Hout, Michael, and Andrew Greeley “Interests, Values, and Party Identification between 1972 and 2006.” See Brint and Schroedel 57-82. Moon, Cedric. “God, Guns & Rock n’ Roll: Would G.I. Jesus do Spiritual Fitness?” RT America. TV. Feature about BarlowGirl military concert. Also titled “Thou Shalt Rock-n-Roll.” Uploaded by RT America 2 Jan. 2011. Youtube. . Video. MorningStar. E-Journal vol. 22/3. Entry “Robert Whitt.” Family Life Church Elgin. . Moslener, Sara. Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. Nanda, Serena, and Richard L. Warms. Cultural Anthropology. 11th ed. Belmont: Wadsworth (Cengage), 2013. New Horizons Foundation. Website. . New Song. Church in Nashville. “Who We Are.” . “Obituaries.” Walter “Butsy” Domitrovich. Beaver County Times 13 Nov. 2002: A5. . ———. Teresa Ann Barlow. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 27-28 May 2015. . Owens, Ed. “Following Jesus with Wealth.” Testimony shared at Generous Giving Conference, Pasadena, 28 Feb.-2 Mar. 2003. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available. Petersen, Shirley Jo. The Whisper. Snowflake: Ceder Hill Publishing, 2005. Pieslak, Jonathan. Radicalism & Music: An Introduction to the Music Culture of al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Ecoanimal Rights Militants. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2015.

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Pohl, Kimberly and Elena Ferrarin. “Teen Entrepeneur [sic] from Elgin Takes on Music Industry.” Daily Herald 12 Jan. 2014 (updated). . Pollard, Ruth. “Mercy Ministries Admits Claims Were False.” The Sydney Morning Herald 17 Dec. 2009. . ———. “Mercy Ministries Home to Close.” The Sydney Morning Herald 28 Oct. 2009. . Powell, Mark Allan. “Contemporary Christian Music as a Window on American Piety.” Literature, Music, Popular Art, and Merchandise. Vol. 2 of Evangelical Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospel. Ed. Robert H Woods Jr. 3 vols. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013. 86-104. Revels-Hawkins, Irene. Building Christian Women Warriors and Tacticians. New York: iUniverse, 2009. Rock, Stephen R. Faith and Foreign Policy: The Views and Influence of U.S. Christians and Christian Organizations. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011. Rodda, Chris. “Hey General Petraeus, How’s that ‘Spiritual Fitness’ Stuff Working for You?” Huffington Post 13 Nov. 2012. Updated 13 Jan. 2013. . ———. “U.S. Soldiers Punished for Not Attending Christian Concert.” Huffington Post 19 Aug. 2010. . Roediger, David R. Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Rosado, Theresa. “To Hell and Back: A NUVO Series. The Specific Truths behind the Rise and Fall of New Horizons Youth Ministry.” Nuvo 28 Oct. 2015. . Website accessible only outside of E.U. Schäfer, Axel R. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2011. Sahgal, Neha. “A Religious Portrait of African-Americans.” Pew Research Center Website. 30 Jan. 2009. Data taken from “Pew Forum U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” conducted in 2007, released in 2008. . Scheeres, Julia. Facebook. . ———. Jesus Land: A Memoir. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2005.

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Sharlet, Jeff. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. New York: Harper, 2008. Sheff, David. “Viewpoint: We Need to Rethink Rehab.” Time 3 Apr. 2013. . Smith, Leslie Dorrough. Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Songkick. BarlowGirl Past Concerts. . St. James, Rebecca. Wait for Me: Rediscovering the Joy of Purity in Romance. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2002. St. Titus Holy Name Society newsletter. Feb. 2014. . Accessed Aug. 2016. Newsletter no longer on website of St. Titus Parish, Diocese of Pittsburgh. “Statement of Faith.” NAE (National Association of Evangelicals). . Steinberg, Laurence. “The Case for Delayed Adulthood.” New York Times 19 Sept. 2014. . Sugiuchi, Deirdre. Blog. 2 Dec. 2013. . Sullivan, Amy. The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap. New York: Scribner, A Division of Simon & Schuster, 2008. SuperChampInc. “5 Reasons Why Many Christian Girls Remain Single.” 28 Apr. 2014. . Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2014. Szalavitz, Maia. Help at any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. New York: Riverhead, 2006. Tabachnick, Rachel. Interviewed by NPR, Fresh Air. “The Evangelicals Engaged in Spiritual Warfare.” 19 Aug 2011. . “Teen Christians Campaign against Pop Culture.” CNN 23 Aug. 2007. Part of “God’s Warriors” documentary hosted by Christiane Amanpour. . Thompson, John J. Raised by Wolves: The Story of Christan Rock & Roll. Toronto: ECW Press, 2000. Transaction Publishers. Description of Richard Kyle, Evangelicalism (see above). .

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Music Cited [UP]: Artist-Driven Bible Studies that Connect Music to the Message. Featuring Nashville Pentecostal pastor David Spring and bands BarlowGirl, Stellar Kart and The Turning. Vol. 1: Choices. Big Shiny Planet 2007. DVD.

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4 Jackalope R. Carlos Nakai, Larry Yáñez, and the Ironies of Southwestern Hybridity

The Jackalope (lepus antilocapra erectus) is a fabled creature, part jackrabbit and part antelope, said to inhabit the vast deserts of the American Southwest. (Jackalope, CD Weavings, back cover) I truly live in two worlds. This “two world” concept once posed too much ambiguity for me, as I felt torn as to whom I was. In maturity I have come to find it the source of my power, as I can easily move between these two places and not feel that I have to be one or the other, that I am an Indian in this modern society. (James Luna, performance artist, McFadden/Taubman 12)

In the more than three decades of his career, R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo/Ute Native American musician, has demonstrated an unusually high degree of transcultural mobility, with an accomplished record in Native American flute employed traditionally, in a classical context or in the New Age genre. In addition, Nakai also is a talented costume maker and practices other Native artforms. Likewise, Larry Yáñez, a Chicano with roots in Yuma, Arizona, has prevailed as a multi-media visual and performance artist in Arizona, having worked for the Arizona Commission of the Arts. He also is a trained musician, guitar, percussion and synthesizer player. With their Mexican-Anglo-Native band Jackalope (named for a mythical hybrid animal), Nakai and Yáñez created sites and states of in-betweenness both in their narrations of their lives through this project and in the musical aesthetics they created. They constructed a hybrid, but characteristically American style. Their allusions and influences range from Native American flute melodies and the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” through to the soundtracks of filmic Westerns and New Age meditative composition. For the internal description of musical aesthetics on which I focus in this chapter, I retain use of the term “hybridity,” as the artists work directly in the field of world music (today often labeled “ethnic fusion”) out

of which the term emerged. However, “hybridity” in world music essentially stems from a white hegemonic discourse, and should be used with caution in the current context of Jackalope. In a narrow sense then, musical hybridity means an aesthetically convincing fusion of two musical cultures. From my subjective standpoint, Jackalope has achieved that. However, they go beyond the demands of artistic expressivity as they play with the available cultural ingredients to achieve a hybrid; their work also exposes the asymmetric power relations inherent in an ethnic-white musical mix. I investigate the consequences of this hybridity as it manifests itself in Jackalope, the vehicle through which the band members negotiate their own complex identities via their music.1 The two artists produced four albums as Jackalope together between 1986 and 1993, and Yáñez produced one album as a solo project in 1989 which comes very close to Jackalope’s style. The final two albums released in 1993 reveal that a split in style and approach had set in as the band neared its dissolution; one album used experimental musical elements and was mockingly critical and topical in its examination of the voyages of discovery of Columbus. The other engages with genres of mainstream pop or world music with no obvious political undertones. The Western/Native-Chicano hybridity had dissolved into its constituent parts. By the time Jackalope broke up, its core idea of a transformative multiculturalism had not achieved the hoped-for resonance in the wider mainstream of American society. While multiculturalism was being co-opted by a market-driven culture industry, an exclusivist ethnocentrism was becoming ascendant in subcultures increasingly cut off from the mainstream. As the history of Jackalope reflects this societal shift, the impossibility of escaping pre-existing relations of unequal power informs the content as well as the context of this chapter. As a scholar with a personal background in the dominant Western cultural formation, my analysis needs to proceed from the fact that I am already advantageously invested in these inequalities. The music of Jackalope perplexes with its unexpectedness. 2 This unexpectedness emerges from the particular way that Nakai and Yáñez mix

1

This chapter is an extension of the article Gail 2015 which was published in Key Tropes of Inter-American Studies: Perspectives from the forum for inter-american research (fiar). 2 I am using here the category of “unexpected” in following Philip Deloria (2004).

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Native traditional and Western classical and pop musical elements, and, through the latter, also including appropriations of Asianness. 3 How do musicians in this genre negotiate the tension between form, aesthetic, and their own personal identities? Must they negotiate? Does this negotiation proceed in the same way, or differently than the negotiations of musicians in other genres? And what do they ultimately express through this music? What George Lipsitz has written about African, East-Asian and Caribbean immigrants in Europe and their music, can with slight modifications also be applied to Nakai’s and Yáñez’s situation: Traditional arguments about immigration, assimilation, and acculturation assume that immigrants choose between two equally accessible cultures that are clearly differentiated and distinct from one another. But what if immigrants leave a country that has been shaped by its colonizers and enter one that has been shaped by those it colonized? (1994, 126).

Lipsitz gives the example of an African musician playing jazz in Paris: Jazz saxophone and vibraphone player Manu Dibango emphasizes the conflict of cultures that has characterized his artistic career: “At first people in Africa said that I made Western music, that I was black-white. I carried that around for a long time. In France, people often told me that I made American music. And when I went to the United States, the Americans thought that I made African music. It’s impossible to be more of a traitor than that!” Dibango’s dilemma illustrates the inadequacy of binary models of assimilation. He never had the luxury of being completely inside or completely outside of African, European, or American culture, but instead experienced them together at all times. (Ibid. 123)

In my approach, I follow the trails blazed by the sociological and aesthetical analysis of popular music pioneered by Dick Hebdige, as well as more anthropological approaches like those of Richard Wilk. I also agree with Clifford Geertz’s understanding of culture as semiotics, as something 3

Interestingly, Yáñez does not emphasize his Chicanoness through a deliberate emphasis on mariachi music. He uses chord progressions and elements of musical form from mariachi, but never the sound itself. The reason behind that is, that he himself did not practice mariachi music, but rather comes with a rock and classical music background.

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which reveals its meaning (for the society in which it occurs) through a careful process of interdisciplinary analysis and interpretation. Cultural utterances, reaching from collective rituals to individual artworks, reflect a useful spectrum of societal and personal issues.4 Theodor W. Adorno used this approach, i.e., the understanding of musical form as a kind of “telling” and as a reflection of societal situations, in his interpretations of Mahler and Beethoven and the society and moment in time out of which these artists worked.5 In contrast to Hebdige, however, I am not looking at entire collective styles of music. By using an individual case study, I aim to map the thoughts and musical expression of individual composers onto our understanding of a specific American subculture, of the country’s wider general culture, of the culture’s overall menu of musical genres, of the necessities of the market, by examining these artists’ creative expressions as a space to negotiate their own individual position in that mix. To assess the mix properly, we need to try to differentiate not only the individual contributions of Yáñez and Nakai, but also the connections of the hybridity to the individual histories of Native American music and Chicano art. As Nakai is the more famous of the duo, the music is foremost understood from the perspective of Native American hybrid music. The Chicano side of the equation that Yáñez represents should however not become obscured, as

4

Geertz writes: “The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (5). 5 Max Paddison summarizes Adorno’s approach: “By 1932 Adorno was writing to Krenek […] that the task of sociology ‘is not to ask music how it functions, but rather, how it stands in relation to the fundamental antinomies of society; whether it confronts them, masters them or lets them be, or even conceals them’” (96). To quote Adorno himself: “Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express – in the antinomies of its own formal language – the exigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. It is not for music to stare in helpless horror at society: it fulfills its societal function more precisely when it presents social problems through its own material and according to its own formal laws – problems which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of its technique” (393).

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it brings the vitally important element of the particular Chicano aesthetic of weirdness called “rasquache” into play. *** My interest in Native American-based hybrid music is informed by my experience of teaching classes in music and culture at the University of Michigan. In these classes I talked about the tradition of homegrown classical European-style music in the U.S., about country and rock, and about the origins of jazz and blues in African American communities and their appropriation (and mass dissemination) by white American mainstream culture. Native American music – normally addressed only in ethnomusicology classes – also emerged as a topic in these classes, because we discussed how mainstream white culture has appropriated historically Native melodies and worked them into classical music compositions. While showing my class clips of Native pow-wow music and dancing, I wondered if I could also show them examples of less traditional Native/Western hybrid music, something equivalent to the hybridity manifested in jazz or tejano music. In digging deeper into this material, I also pointed out to my students that present-day pow-wow practices and forms actually represent a relatively modern tradition, one that evolved as an intertribal practice out of fragments of various tribal dancing traditions in the course of the 20th century. It had actually received a big defining push through the efforts of urban Indians, who performed in university environments, in the context of academic research interest in this material (cf. Browner 2004 and 2009 and Ellis). These performances were already fundamentally hybrid in nature, combining old and new, using modern colors and modern dance steps for example in the relatively recent “invented” category of Fancy Dancing. Similarly, “traditional” Native flute music was re-invented or re-vitalized in the 1970s. It will never have the exact form in which flute music might have manifested itself in the 1500s (cf. Conlon 2014).6 R. Carlos Nakai himself played a crucial role in the latter-day re-invention of the Native flute tradition, following in the footsteps of Doc Tate Nevaquaya and 6

I would like to thank Paula Conlon for encouraging me to develop my interest in Native culture.

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others. Nakai developed methods of tuning and playing a Native flute using Western classical music pitches, and also introduced a tablature system to note melodies down (Nakai and DeMars; McAllester; Conlon 2002). During a concert I attended, Nakai stated that the specific duct flute design of many Native flutes actually was derived from wooden pipes for western-style organs, as Natives had been helpers in the construction of such organs for churches in the colonial Americas. He speculated that some smaller pipes may have landed in the hands of tribal members, who then drilled holes in them to make the pipes playable like flutes. It is important to note here how long organs have existed in the New World; as early as 1524, one was built outside Mexico City (Goss). For anyone interested in questions about the meaning or definition of authenticity and the commodification of cultural heritage, it is thus very important to acknowledge that we are dealing with fairly recent traditions. Hybridity and transcultural mobility have already been at play for a very long time in traditional expressions of Native cultures across such a large continent, in the same way as they are present in contemporary expressions of other cultures. However, Native cultures struggle with a double burden; their own long-term patterns of cultural development and cultural interchange were massively interrupted due to the colonization of the Americas and the subsequent decimation of their people.7 In the U.S., state power restricted some Natives to reservations and simultaneously forced an assimilation agenda on the others. In addition, an ethnologically grounded political ideology of “saving” the supposedly dying Native cultures, while simultaneously exploiting and elegiacally cherishing their “authentic” products, made it difficult for Native communities to develop strategies for maintaining their culture autonomously, even after the initial displacements, removals, violence, and disruptions had given way to unquestioned white hegemony over the continent. In response to these overwhelming outside pressures, rejectionist positions among strict Native traditionalists stand alongside a spectrum of positions among Native modernists regarding engagement with non-

7

Paul Gilroy challenges us to not immediately think that being part of a minority culture means being at a disadvantage. This kind of thinking just manifests the power order of strong perpetrator and weak victim (personal conversation, BAAS 2013; cf. also Gilroy).

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Native culture; there are people who now resent everything associated with the dominant mainstream culture, as well as people who want to participate fully in it. Perhaps most interesting and important however, are the many positions in-between. Individuals can also engage in interesting forms of compartmentalization; John-Carlos Perea for example, can be completely “traditional” when performing at a pow-wow, and “modernist” when he teaches modern academic music at San Francisco State University. A parallel with my own personal experience might be useful. As a German female who moved to the U.S. for a while for work, I found myself suddenly “performing” a traditional German beer drinking evening, the so called Stammtisch, – although I had never attended such “old fashioned,” largely male-dominated social practices in Germany myself. I found a kind of emotional logic to justify this. While I would not go so far as to explain this in the classically idealist (and recently extremely dangerous) terms of preserving some essentialist “Germanness,” I found personal value in being together with other Germans, practicing the language, and having a cultural exchange with interested non-Germans.8 A challenge I did not (and do not) face, which however confronted Native Americans seeking to preserve or recreate their culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is of course the problem of intrusive monitoring and interpretation of their culture by privileged ethnologists. A further, related problem was the exploitation with impunity of their cultures by casual lay outsiders. For most of the last three hundred years or so in the Americas, ethnological research has gone hand in hand with an unregulated market for Native cultural artefacts and art. Until fairly recently, most of this native culture was made available or marketed to whites in stereotypical ways. Over time, a white-guided (or even white-fomented) and naïve stylistic aesthetic was established, particularly in visual art, as this kind of art sold better to whites than more sophisticated efforts by Natives to engage with modernist art from the

8

I use the word “performing” here in relation to Erving Goffman’s idea of performing everyday life. I restrain from the word “playing,” especially in connection with Native performances, as this means some kind of intended staging. Indianness was staged for a white audience in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows (at least with bringing some Natives on the pay lists) or with fake Natives at the German Bad Segeberg Karl May performances. Cf. Philip Deloria (1998).

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European tradition (cf. Archuleta).9 When some Natives did engage with modernism, critics from inside and outside Native culture immediately raised the question: what remained of these artists’ own identity as Natives? Later, Native engagements with postmodern art, even if these had Western inspiration, at least left more room for reflecting and expressing Nativeness.10 As Alexandra Harmon points out, Native culture has never been static and has always forcibly or deliberately changed due to changes in the living situation: [H]istory contradicts the still-prevalent notion that culture change destroys Indianness; it shows that Indianness cannot be calibrated to degrees of cultural continuity. Group after group has maintained a strong sense of Indian identity despite wholesale changes in structure, customs, beliefs, and personnel. (260)

In the ’90s, Natives achieved signal successes in the struggle against cultural appropriation. The political and legislative climate encouraged the emergence of a legal regime in which it is predominantly Natives who are allowed to profit from selling Native art (cf. Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990). In the end, however, issues of unregulated money-making and market relationships remain central to understanding the place of Native creativity in Western consumer society. If you are a Native musician who has also broadly trained in many other musical traditions and want to make a living by selling music on the global market, you still have to negotiate the tension between protecting and exploiting your cultural heritage, and that of others. Here we deal with a fundamentally unequal power relationship, because, in contrast to the Native American case, ethnic music derived from Western European cultural traditions will not become the proprietary “object” of somebody else’s commodification or appropriation regime for the foreseeable future. The rules of the game for the marketing of world music have been (and will probably continue to be) set by Western (mostly Anglophone) soft and hard global power.

9

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, one can find a lot of literature about the development of (modern) Native art, but not about the development of (modern) Native music. 10 Cf. here for example the artwork of Marcus Amerman or that of R. C. Gorman, whose success impressed Nakai as a juvenile.

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Native Modern or Hybrid Music Natives participate today in all kinds of traditional and Western musical styles (for an overview cf. Perea). At least theoretically, the Native American Music Awards (NAMA) actually take all music made by Natives into consideration, be it in traditional styles, reggae, hip hop or waila (chicken scratch). Cross-over efforts by Natives well-known to a broader audience include the work of the folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, the rock band XIT, or the blues group Indigenous. In XIT’s concept album Plight of the Redman for example, the rock song “Nothing Could Be Finer than a 49’er” adds pow-wow music to its ending (a 49’er is not just a hot-rodded car or a California Gold Rush miner, but a specific song in the pow-wow cycle) (Gray 119). However, the result here is not exactly fusion music. More recently, rap and reggae have found much popularity on reservations, and Native rappers like Litefoot or the bands WithOut Rezervation or WarParty are popular.11 Interestingly, the rock rappers WithOut Rezervation use the modern style of African American hip hop to sing about keeping up the Native American tradition and not selling out to the “American way.” Their song “To the Sell Outs” states: Proud and true is whatcha gotta get into And not the plan of the other man So check yourself ‘bout time you made a stand And if you don’t and you just wanna sell-out All we’ll say is get the motherfxxxing hell-out. You drink but don’t think and now your breath stink But worst than that you sold your last link And your ties and ways, back to the old days. (Lyrics from the album Are You Ready for W.O.R.?)

The song invokes the “old days” not as a signifier of solidified traditions, but rather as a way to be proud of being a Native American in the abstract. The recording includes the sentence “Only a dead Indian is a good Indian” 11

To Native hip hop also cf. Del Hierro. The “red roots” of many original American musical styles can here only be mentioned as a side note. The rapper Melle Mel, e.g., was one of the hip hop originators in New York. His mother is a Cherokee, his father African American.

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– lines that the performers see come to life through the choices of many Native Americans to drink their low self-esteem away. The group’s counter-narrative reaches back to regain pride in the Native American identity. There is the sound of a pow-wow drum with singers, over which an announcer speaks about racism (being called a “dirty Indian”), poverty (being hungry), and the different standards of education available to whites and natives. The actual rap number is framed in such a way that it is impossible to take the musical number only as music. The song has a separate preface in which a radio reporter states that the normal life expectancy of adult males on the reservation is 45 years “and the leading cause of death is alcohol.” This phrase is used repeatedly. The usage is very similar to the way Paul Hardcastle used a sample of a spoken radio voice clip in the song “19,” flatly stating that in World War II the average age of a soldier was twenty-six. This statement is then followed by the sample-turned-hook which will appear over and over in the rest of the song: “in Vietnam, it was nineteen.” Alan Lechusza Aquallo writes about “representational space” (24-25) in connection with WithOut Rezervation. For him, this “representational space” comprises both the manner and the content of the expression, and alludes to the potential, not always achieved, for cross-cultural fertilization of different musical styles. However, it does not really articulate a theory of how this hybridity happens, nor suggest any means of evaluating the effectiveness of the results. The worlds of traditional Native Music and popular music seem here too far apart to be united. The Navajo postmodern composer Raven Chacon comes closer to a useful analysis of hybridity. A student of James Tenney and Morton Subotnik, he works in the genre of experimental art music, composing for chamber ensembles or performing experimental noise music himself. In an art collective called “Postcommodity” he participates in creating multimedia artwork. Barbara Serena Moroncini observes: “Chacon clearly mixes elements of his Navajo heritage, the historical avant-garde, and the classical tradition of Western music” (98). However, it is clear that the center of his music roots solidly in the Western avant-garde tradition. In an interview, Chacon told Moronchini: When we were kids we had piano lessons from this woman who would come to the reservation, and it turned out that she was friend with John Cage, and she took us to one of his performances when he was really old, in 1988; so when we were 10-years old we saw all this crazy shit, you

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know, put toys in the piano; her name was Dawn Chambers. I was very fortunate that this woman came to donate these lessons in the reservation. (91)

Publicly released recordings of pow-wows have yielded evidence of this “updating,” as can be heard in the song “Sponge Bob,” performed for a kids’ pow-wow CD by the Black Lodge Singers. In their repertoire, they sometimes alter and mix Native melodies with modern ones, including for example the song “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” The black-Native mixed-race singer Radmilla Cody also shows a certain flexibility by mixing blues influences with traditional (or traditional-style) melodies; she crosses over in a different way when she sings the U.S. national anthem in Diné bizaad, the Navajo language. In her persona and through her music, Cody embodies cross-culturalization within the Navajo Nation. She grew up close to the reservation in a rural environment. Her winning of the title Miss Navajo in 1997 initiated a discussion of what Navajo identity would be. The contestants in the Miss Navajo competition had to prove their versatility in Navajo traditions and language, something which posed no problem for Cody, as she had been raised by her Christian Navajo grandmother and spoke the tribal language. In the meantime, Cody has also become an advocate against domestic violence after having been jailed for eighteen months because she had wired one thousand dollars to her abusive boyfriend for use in illegal drug trafficking. According to National Public Radio, “Cody’s voice is bicultural. Her mother was Navajo, her father African-American. Now, she sings folk songs in the language of her Native American ancestors – with a twist. […] Radmilla projects more and uses techniques like bending notes: common among blues, jazz and pop singers” (Contreras). Her style has been labeled Navajo soul. It was a hard choice between Cody and Jackalope as a case study for this volume. However, as much as Cody’s personal life story might showcase the nature of cultural and personal in-betweenness and the process of identity construction in an exemplary way, the higher levels of integration and intellectual energy in Nakai’s and Yáñez’s music recommend Jackalope as a better choice for exposing musical hybridity. Neal Ullestad observes: In the face of marginalization by the mainstream, American Indian musicians experience two distinct poles of artistic expression: traditionalist and commercial/assimilationist. Rejecting the idea of having to choose be-

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tween these two seemingly unbridgeable poles is a broad array of artists who combine the two approaches, those who work within the wide “in between” category, combining elements of traditional and commercial music, as well as traditional and contemporary themes. (64)

I do not agree with Ullestad’s view that a “broad array of artists” in Native community really explore hybridity effectively, whether via the construction of their personal and performing identities or via the nature of the music itself. Many Native artists rather follow the example of singer Joanne Shenandoah, who does not try to hybridize her styles but performs both, traditional Native songs and non-Native folk songs. If one looks to the ethnic fusion styles which try to mix the Native and the Western traditions, the level of successful hybridity actually achieved is (from my subjective point of view) rather limited. It often results in an arbitrary mix of pop music sounds with pow-wow rhythms or fragments of Native vocal lines, but never achieves a convincing transcendence of its influences to attain a true cross-fertilization of the essence of the different styles. The reason for this outcome might be a market-driven assimilation to the aesthetic and the stylistic clichés attendant on the already mentioned commercialization of globalized ethnic music in the ’90s. I hope I can illustrate with the example of the music of Jackalope the richness of the questions raised by the investigation of what I have termed Native hybrid music. It is no coincidence that Nakai and Yáñez abandoned Jackalope at exactly the point in time (in the early 1990s) when the wider mainstream culture was undergoing a shift from being potentially open to unmediated, unregulated multiculturalism to a stance of co-opting it as a consumer “lifestyle” choice, creating in the process various flavors of “ethnic”-sounding music as commodified aspirational mass product. We need to look more closely at this window of time between roughly 1986 and 1993, as well as at the specifics of Jackalope’s style, to understand what was at stake in this changing attitude in consumer culture to Native material.

Musical and Ethnic Cross-over in the 1980s After the convulsions of identity politics in the previous two decades, the 1980s in the United States were a time when the phenomenon of crossover between a normative whiteness and an otherness often defined as 182

ethnic seemed to have become increasingly routinized. Even if this increased interest in ethnic music did give non-white performers more chances to make a living, the decisive actors enabling in and profiting from this cross-over were mostly white. In the 1990s, however, a split in the perception of what the term “ethnic” signified took place: one approach led back to an ethnocentric retreat into authenticity, the other to a more thoroughly commodified version of ethnic fusion. The years 1986 and 1992 are good bookends to frame this transitional period of multi-/cross-culturalism. To take only one prominent example from the popular music of the period, Paul Simon recorded the best-selling Graceland album with South African musicians in 1986, marking the moment when world music (as fusion) undeniably went mainstream. Culturally white popular musicians could still conceive of a cross-over which did not immediately smell like commodification of traditional cultures, but appeared as sincere dialogue or frank and honest white-majority-culture interest in different cultural traditions. That the dialogue was nevertheless color-dependent and asymmetric is pointed out by Timothy Taylor in Global Pop: Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and other western musicians who collaborate with musicians from other parts of the world are never described as makers of hybrids, and demands of authenticity are not made of them and their music. […] Musicians from the margins of the global economy, however, have demands of authenticity made of them by western listeners, even if these third world musicians grew up listening to the same popular musicians as any western kid. (201) In 1987 the Grammy Awards included world music for the first time in the category of “traditional folk” (which was split that year from “contemporary folk”). The South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo, featured on Simon’s recording, won in 1988. In 1992 “world music” itself was established as an individual Grammy category. Tellingly however, the first winner in that category was Mickey Hart, the white ex-drummer of the Grateful Dead, who had studied African drumming. 12 12

One could argue that it was necessary to have a white front-man to bring the style to a bigger white audience, but it has the same feeling like the argument, that Paul Whiteman was important to bring jazz to a white audience. The moves undeniably also helped to foster the sales of non-whites, but whites got the biggest stacks in the market sales.

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In addition to world music, we find in the 1980s a growing New Age music scene that was to exert an influence on both the content and the reception of Jackalope; a Grammy category for “New Age” was established in 1987. New Age music drew elements from the ambient, classical, and traditional music scenes. It then melded these together to create a kind of background soundtrack to which a good-sized market of somewhat selfinvolved, generally middle- or upper-middle-class consumers could proceed to experience various forms of meditation and, hopefully, a closer connection to reality. The inventors of this music were (at least culturally) middle-class whites who also used (or appropriated) traditional nonWestern musics and spiritual approaches to create a mix that had not previously existed. A third development which also influenced Jackalope was an art music scene, which crossed over in this period from experimental avantgarde approaches to appropriate the aesthetic of more commercially accessible pop/synthesizer/electronic music. Laurie Anderson became famous with her hit “O Superman” in 1981. Of course, there had been crossovers between art music/avant-garde and pop/rock music before; already in the 1960s and 1970s, bands like The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Captain Beefheart, or Yellow Magic Orchestra were blending minimal music with progressive and experimental rock, psychedelia, avant-garde, or electronic approaches. Indeed, Captain Beefheart’s guitarist Ry Cooder was to later reach out into the field of world music himself. The 1980s, however, brought the specifically ethnic qualities of this emerging mix to the forefront. To better grasp what the 1980s meant for multiculturalism on the level of personal identity choices, we could take a prominent example from public political life. 1986 was the year in which the phenotypically lightskinned, blond-haired Elizabeth Warren, who later (2013) became a U.S. senator representing Massachusetts, began to describe herself as “Native American.” Warren’s move was a response to a call for listings in a minority section of the Directory of the American Association of Law Schools Faculty. She claimed this category because according to family lore she was one-sixty-fourth Native from her mother’s side (Cherokee and Delaware). Responding to shifting cultural trends, 1992 was the last year in which she used that ethnic category in this directory (Hicks). This self-description eventually became an issue in the 2012 senatorial election, with her opponent claiming that she had used this category to land a 184

job at Harvard mainly due to her claimed minority status (Harvard had actually used her ethnic self-identification in its minority reports) without actually having been an enlisted member of a tribe. Warren’s motivations for declaring herself Native American are no longer easily understandable from an early twenty-first-century perspective, looking back on the intervening two decades or so of identity politics and culture wars. 13 From a contemporary white mindset of the 1980s, however, such a personal self-identification was not necessarily a problem. Back then, the perception of the borders between Native and non-Native identities in the public discussion was much more blurred. Since the early 1970s appropriation of the identity by elements of the white counterculture, it had been fashionable to claim to be Native even without close ties to a Native community.

R. Carlos Nakai and His Music Born in 1946, R. Carlos Nakai grew up as an urban Native American in Flagstaff, Arizona, in a predominantly white cultural environment. He played trumpet in the high school brass band. His consciousness of Native heritage drew sustenance from his continued links to his family roots in the Navajo and Ute peoples (as well as in Spanish and Irish settlers and some other Native tribes). Nakai self-identifies as multicultural or “hybrid” with this long list of heritages (Nakai, Lecture Performance). He often spent time on the nearby Navajo reservation. His father had already been a “modern” Indian, working first as an announcer for a public radio station in Flagstaff preferred by Natives, and later ascending to the office now called President of the Navajo Nation from 1963-70, the highest electoral position in Navajo politics. His father had made a name by trying to modernize the Navajo Nation (even if at the cost of significant damage to

13

Some tribes recognize the proof of 1/32 Native as enough to become an enlisted member of this tribe and the tribe gets money from the government for enlisted members. Elvis Presley for example was 1/32 Cherokee – however not registered, as at that time the ethnic category “Native” only brought disadvantages. That Warren looks white is another issue which complicates the circumstance in the discussion, as the assumption that Natives need to look differently is of course racially stereotyping.

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the local environment, as with the Black Mesa coal mining affair) (Iverson 27-45, esp. 42-44). After returning from military service in Vietnam and an unsuccessful attempt to get into the U.S. Army Brass Band, R. Carlos Nakai studied classical and jazz trumpet in Flagstaff and at Phoenix College and completed an M.A. in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona in Phoenix. If he had not ruined his embrouchure in a car accident, we might know him today as a classical musician in a major orchestra. Forced to look for a new career path, he turned to the Native flute. During his studies Nakai had discovered the Native American flute and had started researching its inter-tribal history. The Diné (i.e., the Navajo) had lost their original flute tradition during their Southwards migration from Canada to the American Southwest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nakai started to reconstruct and reinvent the Native flute tradition with the help of song melodies and surviving flute traditions from other tribes. He is today well-known as one of the pioneers in reviving or reinventing this flute tradition and in creating a musical notation for it. He released his first traditional Native American flute recording in 1983 with Canyon Records, a non-Native-owned independent label that specializes in Native music, and went on to release an average of one record a year for several years. Already in these albums he used non-traditional electro-acoustic effects, like reverb. Sometime in the early ’80s, after Nakai’s first recording for Canyon Records, he and Yáñez started exploring the potential of cross-over music and cross-cultural potential in general more fully, with Jackalope. The duo would play live at coffee houses and receptions and recorded their first album in 1986. Regardless of the fact that financially, the Jackalope recordings were not as successful as Nakai’s solo albums (Jackalope, Weavings, and Dances with Rabbits sold over 45,000 in total, while Boat People underperformed in selling “only” 5,000 copies), the freedom expressed on them seems to have been an important step for Nakai. He realized that he was not limited to a received image of the traditional Native; he could counteract external expectations of what a Native musician was supposed to be. His record label had his back and was supporting him even, with productions which were way outside of mainstream market expectations. After the solo recordings Changes (1981), Cycles (1983) and Journey (1985), Nakai came out with an album called Earth Spirit (1986). The 186

album cover shows a photo of Nakai in Native regalia with headdress, styled in a yellowed, monochromal black and white. Highlighting Nakai’s cheekbones and long hair, the photo looks like it could be an old one from the early twentieth century made by the famous photographer of Native Americans, Edward S. Curtis. The record itself featured unaccompanied and non-modernized Native flute music with melodies from the Athabascan and Omaha traditions. It was clearly a Native American music album, but it started selling really well in the New Age bracket. Two years later in 1989, Nakai came out with a record called Canyon Trilogy, still fully in the Native American tradition. However, the tracks now use electronic studio production techniques to enhance the acoustic effect and are composed by Nakai himself, in the style of older tunes. The title cover style has changed to appeal more to a New Age audience, featuring full-body shots of Nakai wearing Western clothes and standing in the midst of nature, the rising sun behind him making him appear like a black shadow carrying a flute. The titles of the song numbers on the record, grouped in three sections, are also in line with contemporary ideas of New Age meditation and spirituality; “Dawn’s Mirage,” “Dreamscapes,” “Resonance.” This record sold so well that in 1998 it reached Gold status (500,000 copies sold) and later reached Platinum (one million copies sold). In 1988 Nakai started actively developing his New Age market, collaborating on projects with New Age musicians like William Eaton (starting in 1988), Peter Karter (on Silver Waves Records starting in 1990), Will Clipman (from 1993 on Jackalope’s Dances with Rabbits, since 1995 together with Eaton), and Paul Horn (1997, 1999). These efforts garnered Grammy nominations. When I asked Robert Doyle, the CEO of Canyon Records, if Nakai had felt comfortable with the New Age designation, Doyle’s answer is worth quoting at length: A genre of music labeled “New Age” came into musical consciousness around the same time as the release of Nakai’s first solo Native American flute albums. We quickly found a new audience, retailers, and distributors for Nakai’s music because the soothing, transporting, meditative qualities of his solo albums fit into that genre, which soon had its own section in record stores. Though “New Age” proved to be a viable commercial channel for RC’s projects, whether solo or collaborations with artists like William Eaton and even stretched to include Jackalope, our artists did not like the designation.

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“New Age” became a catch-all term for a diverse range of beliefs from standard meditation practices to believers in UFOs and the healing power of crystals. The most troubling to Native American artists were the socalled “shamans,” non-Native Americans using their distortions of Native American culture to present an allegedly “authentic” experience of traditional practices such as sweat lodges or vision quests. While most practitioners of the diverse categories of New Age philosophy and techniques were genuine, far too many appropriated Native American cultural and religious ways. Nonetheless, the “New Age” designation for Native American music did help us find a place in the larger record chains. Clerks were faced with having to sort thousands of titles into different sections in the large stores of the time. Even if we didn’t like the name, New Age, which was diverse and eclectic in musical styles, gave us a section (all our albums, no matter the style – flute, traditional, guitar, or even classical – were automatically binned under New Age) that attracted more attention than “Misc.” As Native American music expanded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some chains added a “Native American” section, but Nakai’s music was always binned with the New Age artists. Jackalope was also binned under New Age, but the eclecticism of its music made it impossible to be placed in other sections in stores.

In 1991, Nakai recorded the first of his albums where the flute sound was embedded in a classical music context. James DeMars, the composer, mixed a neoclassical sound with the Native flute and African percussion. Nakai continued to pursue this classical line in subsequent projects with DeMars. By 1996, Nakai had founded an ethnic jazz band, the R. Carlos Nakai Quartet, with which he continues exploring the pop-hybrid form up to the time of writing. The Quartet’s first album, Kokopelli’s Café, also made clear in the title Nakai’s continuing interest in exploring a NativeWestern mix. As if all these different approaches were not enough, Nakai started collaborating with other “ethnic” musicians - working since 2001 with African American jazz saxophonist AmoChip Dabney, with Hawai’ian Keola Beamer, or with the Japanese Wind Travelin’ Band, where he pairs the Native flute with the Japanese shakuhachi.

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Chicano Art as Exemplified through Yáñez Larry M. Yáñez is a Chicano, born and resident in Yuma, Arizona. He is a versatile performer who plays guitar, percussion, and synthesizer with Jackalope. Yáñez served in the military, was stationed for a while in Germany. He afterwards became a visual artist, with a paying job working for the Arizona Commission on the Arts in the “Arts in Education Program” and the “Traveling Exhibition Program.” He was a member of MARS (Movimiento Artístico de Río Salado), a Phoenix-based art collective, and is currently part of the North End Artists Co-op in and around Yuma. Yáñez studied at Arizona State University in Tempe/Mesa and received a B.A. in sculpture in 1977. He reflects on his art: One of the goals I try to achieve with my artwork is to use my story of telling capabilities in written, visual and musical composition. I use serious humor to share images of my culture, whether it be Mexican-American or Southwestern-American (Arizona) heritage. I use whatever art media is available at the time of inspiration, much of my material is based on family stories or suburban myths of Arizona. The culture of the Southwest is so different from the rest of the United States. All of us here in Yuma share a culture mixed with multi-cultural elements that help inspire my art work. (Northendartists)

Yáñez’s works often bear titles in Spanglish or use other kinds of wordplay. His 2014 exhibition in Yuma was titled “Bean There Done That” and the invitation stated: “A future retrospective of the artists’ casually self-exploitive journey” (“Exhibition – Bean There, Done That”). He works primarily with Chicana/o symbols, but also includes tri-cultural approaches from the White and Native traditions in his art. This catholicity (small c) suffuses a description of five seri-/lithographs he exhibited under the topic “Mi casa es su casa” at “Chicano Art for Our Millennium,” a 2004 exhibition at the Mesa Southwest Museum (Arizona Museum of Natural History) in Mesa: It [Yáñez’s contribution] is also a good introduction to the traditional icons of Chicano art: the Virgin of Guadalupe, calendars featuring Aztec lovers turned into volcanoes, tacos and salsa, crucifixes, chiles, cacti and other flora of the Southwest, and family altars. However, sometimes these icons are transmuted comically or by artistic sleight of hand. Our casa

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features taco shell shower curtains, calavera magnets, a crucifix with Jesus suspended ethereally from the mirror above the bathroom sink, and desert landscapes that spring from ambiguous interior/exterior origins. Finally, the Yáñez works also make strategic use of Amerindian iconography as it is often found in traditional and current architecture (frequently with the designation of territorial design) and Navajo textiles. (Keller 13)

The titles of the prints and their iconography show Yáñez’s fondness for playing with culture through words: Cocina Jaiteca shows us what could presumably count as a hi-tech kitchen from the perspective of a poor household in a developing country. It includes an electric fridge and a gas stove; a taco shell is filled and ready to eat on the kitchen table. Signifiers of traditional Mexican culture take the form of a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a crucifix and an irrationally big rose-flower ornament, problematizing the reality of the scene and reminiscent of the work of both Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe. Sofa so Good shows a sofa decorated with a comical chili pattern in front of a wall decorated with a tapestry showing different cacti and an outdoor scene, breaking the clear division between inside and outside. A pair of sneakers and a TV antenna remind us that we are still in the modern world. Once Juan Won One uses in its title four very similar sounding words. They have no obvious connection with the bathroom scene depicted in the print, which shows a shower curtain with a taco-shell pattern. Over the banal toilet seat, we find a window with a curtain covered with calaveras, the skull pattern which is so important in Mexican culture in the commemoration of the dead. In combination with symbols of modern Western and Chicano culture, the generous helpings of Mexican symbols create a sense of self-irony which overcomes and questions the act of stereotyping. Another art-work in which Yáñez also mixes everyday life and consumer culture with an image of cultural importance is his collage Adelita. In it, he combines Agustín Casasola’s iconic photograph of female Mexican resistance fighters (soldaderas) with cut-out pictures of a tostada and other signifiers of Mexicanness. Guisela Latorre writes: Rather than engaging in a nationalist interpretation of this photograph by Casasola, Chicano artist Larry Yáñez opted to comment on the image’s treatment as a commodity. In his photocopy composition entitled Adelita (1981) […] he put together mass produced objects such as a post-card image of the Virgin Mary, a Mexican flag and a large tostada, all elements

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commonly associated with “Mexicanness” by commercial media. His use of photocopies as an artistic medium further emphasized the irreverent tone of the work while also reiterating society’s continuous craving for reproduced material. […] Yáñez and many other Chicana/o artists have employed these mass produced objects in their work as a way to denounce their inherent absurdity. […] While Yáñez in his Adelita was ridiculing these objects that have come to symbolize Mexican identity in our market economy, the central placing and larger scale of the soldadera in the composition reveals a more ambiguous attitude toward this icon on the part of the artist. Rather than mocking this one figure as he did with the elements surrounding her, he appeared to be underscoring her displacement and dislocation amidst these vestiges of consumer culture. (102-04)

As the overall Chicano social movement in the U.S. slowly shed the activist “movimiento” ideology of the 1960s, an oulet for the political energy of protest persisted in the Chicano art movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Yáñez was not as radically engaged as the L.A. collective Asco, early users of spray paint who bypassed galleries altogether. Using irony rather than anger to register protest in his art, Yáñez retains a playfulness in his work. By the early ’80s, when Yáñez had started working for the Arizona Commission of the Arts, the classic genres of Chicano visual art – murals, posters, and screenprints – were gradually becoming accepted by non-Chicano culture. This resulted in many artists starting to produce for commercial galleries, even as the non-for profit, community-oriented outlets for such work like MARS continued their operations (Goldman 111).

The Music of Jackalope The Jackalope catalogue consists of concept albums that address the dualisms of modern/traditional and white/Native in both their musical form and their conceptual content. This approach informs not only the songs themselves but also the ideas behind the album concept and storyline, the titles, and the liner notes inside the CD booklet (and in the last recording, also the booklet art). The band name itself denotes a mythical hybrid animal, the jackalope, a cross between antelope and jackrabbit. This chimera – like some forms of the German Wolpertinger – was probably derived from sightings of 191

diseased rabbits which had grown horn-like protuberances due to their illness. The jackalope does not seem to symbolize smooth or successful hybridity, but rather a grotesque, tragic, but also funny mix. These characteristics are also central to the music and the concept of the band Jackalope. It is interesting to note that the rabbit also plays the role of the trickster in the folklore of the Southeast of the U.S., particularly in African American and Cherokee lore. Sandra K. Baringer, writing about “Brer Rabbit and his Cherokee Cousin” quotes Gayle Ross (6-7), who tells Cherokee trickster stories: Each animal had its place. […] Rabbit’s job was to be the messenger. He was to spread important news. He was also a good singer and often led in the dance. But Rabbit was the leader of them all in mischief, and his bold ways were always getting him into trouble. (Baringer 131)

Baringer goes on stating: “Just as Raven is the primary trickster in the Pacific Northwest and Coyote in the Southwest, these roles seem fairly stable among eastern tribes” (Ibid.). The rabbit had also been a day sign in the calendar of the Mesoamerican Aztecs, situated next to the deer as its twin. However, the two were not combined in a hybrid. The Aztecs also believed that a rabbit lived on the moon, interpreting some markings on its surface as outlining the shape of the animal. Stories of a horned rabbit can also be found in the traditions of the Huichol Indians living in Western Mexico (see Furst). Jackalope’s concept albums tell a story without lyrics through the sound, but also tell the story through the song titles, the descriptions of the individual songs in the booklet and sometimes even the artwork included in those booklets, made by Yáñez. With the band’s hybrid sound mixing Native flute with pop or world music while the underlying concept enlists predominantly Chicano symbols, it is reasonable to assume that the two artists divided their responsibilities. In terms of pop music style, the four Jackalope albums can be described as examples of a certain approach to a low-intensity, chilled-out form of the world music sound. The evidence of hybridity manifests itself most clearly in the combination of the sound of the Native flute with pop, world, and electronic music patterns and motifs that today mark the genre of New Age music. However, the experimental aspects in the music and successive and simultaneous use of multiple hybridized styles – one number pop, one jazz, one experimental – do not make it possible to situate the albums in 192

the commercial music realm, but rather on the edge of independent postmodern art music. The sound can be located between art and pop music, pitched to an educated and culturally informed audience. The somewhat self-mocking portmanteau description of the style as “SynthacoustipunkarachiNavajazz” – a play on synthesizer and acoustic music, punk, mariachi, Navajo, and jazz – in the album booklets and on the Canyon Records website is an amusing parody of a marketing move, but it (perhaps deliberately) misleadingly suggests we are dealing here with an real existing popular music hybrid genre. First Album The cover of the first album (simply titled Jackalope) from 1986 features a black and white drawing of the jackrabbit with horns in front of a black background with white crosses. This imagery might be an allusion to the mass deaths and other undesirable results of colonization in the Americas. We are left with uneasy thoughts about hybrid people (here still symbolized as animals) and a heritage of massacres on the indigenous population. The music is supposed to depict a world of imaginary people and animals reminiscent of, for example, the cartoon cosmos created for the Beatles album Yellow Submarine or the stylized world of Southern California late hippiedom created for the Cheech and Chong movies. Among the denizens of this world are the mysterious hybrid Jackalope itself (who later becomes roadkill), the Chicano Samurai Lord Fumamota – Yáñez’s alter ego and a play on the Spanish phrase “fuma mota” (meaning pot smoking) and the Japanese sound of the words themselves –, and a plant called Coyote Mint, standing in for the Dog Soldier (the alter ego of Nakai).14 The conceptual arc of the record is similar to an avant-garde song cycle. We start with the “Jackalope” theme song, which is followed by a “G-Minor Improvisation.” The numbers “Roadkill” and the final “Dog Leather” frame the “Festival of the Cows,” “Macho Picho” [sic] and the three figures “Lord Fumamota,” “Lady Toda Awada” and “Coyote Mint.” The titles “Roadkill” and “Dog Leather” show that hybrids often go to the dogs, or – to use a German phrase – “come under the wheels.” Yáñez employs a strategy of associational meaning-fusion in the CD booklet to emphasize an interrelation between tradition, modernity, fan14

Yáñez told me that during this time Nakai was into Japanese shakuhachi music and they tried to go in that direction with the sound.

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tasy, and humor. I want to focus on the number entitled “Macho Picho” – the “fabled home of Lord Fumamota.” Labeling the number “Macho Picho” implies irony – the old Inca city is correctly called Machu (with a “u”) Picchu (with double “c” and “u”). Yáñez explained the title to me: “[Nakai was] the one that came up with the title for it and we misspelled it deliberately. We were making fun of, because we are both minorities and we both are pro-feminists, so that’s what ‘Macho Picho’ is about, because Picho in a dialect from South America means penis.” In bringing a sense of whimsical irony to his treatment of the Latin American cultural heritage, Yáñez makes a statement against taking the anthropological, historical heritage of Amerindian-Latino culture too seriously, pointing rather toward the modern, living Chicano. Musically, “Macho Picho” starts with a choir humming chords in which a bass voice singing in a Gregorian chant style intones the indistinct but profound-seeming wisdom of a shaman. Then a guitar chord progression resembling that of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” starts a loop and is joined by a flute with a melody which could be Native or blues. In the music we do not find the same kind of irony which was implied in the booklet, which refers to the act of ethnic border crossing. The music evokes the culturally white, slightly New Age-y mainstream act of ethnic identity shopping and re-mixing, along with the attitude of self-important faux-seriousness that goes with this activity. The possibility that the entire thing is a parody of the clichés the sounds evoke – the clichés of the lonely and sad Native, the cliché of the Native flute sound from the Andes, the cliché of Gregorian chant – is hard to pin down. Sometimes the sound, approaching but not reaching cliché itself, seems to be engaging positively with these evoked images – as if these sounds were neutral and did not involve white exploitation of the ethnic other. The techniques employed by Nakai and Yáñez include loops of early electronic music patterns, simple synthesizer chords and melodies, chord progressions and tonal moods from California rock, Ennio Morricone filmic western soundtracks, New Age motifs of nature and animals, east Asian sounds, African drumming, Gregorian/shaman chant, and blues and jazz progressions. The sound approximates a summation of the house sound of the contemporary Putumayo world music label, back then on heavy rotation on millions of middle-class CD players. However, Jackalope’s sound has a consistently higher level of musicianship, and thematically, addresses abstract and uncomfortable concepts more enthusias194

tically than the sound of the Putumayo label. More than perhaps commercially advisable, death, irony, and self-referentiality mark Jackalope’s iteration of hybridity. We should, however, not underestimate the musicians’ ability at the same time to have fun while making this music. They both seem to take on the classic cultural personae of Coyotes, the Native American tricksters of the Southwest, who know that the very act of consuming any kind of ethnic music (and not only by whites) inevitably means some form of exploitation.15 They accept this consciously and present themselves as cultural brokers, trying to mediate between the different worlds (cf. Hinderaker, “Translation and Cultural Brokerage”). They know that they actually are not producing authentic ethnic music. The awareness of the power imbalance, and of the reality of a cash-mediated value exchange shelters them from being culturally exploited. The Coyote or a Coyote aesthetic sensibility is the Native equivalent to the Chicano concept of “rasquache” playfulness that I will address later in the chapter. The Coyote disobeys conventional rules and exhibits deviant behavior, is sometimes foolish, sometimes wise. The clown in Native traditions is an essential element in ceremonies accessing the sacred, like the Mudhead Kachina in Hopi seasonal dances. In The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Native Art Allan J. Ryan writes: Having the power to manipulate stereotypes and to create images more real than stereotypes, as Farmer suggests in the previous chapter, is of little consequence to Native artists if the power to exhibit such images remains with White administrators of cultural institutions that still value and even promote stereotypes. How then, does an artist contend with or expose a “system of power which legitimates certain cultural representations while prohibiting and disavowing others” (Galbo 1987-8, 40)? “Very carefully,” one might answer, “very cunningly.” In the same way that Native authors use ironic strategies to contest oppressive hegemonic ideologies (Fischer 1986, 224ff), visual artists employ trickster tactics to undermine institutional practice and expectation, breaking from formula and breaking out of program in ways both familiar and radically unknown (Bruchac 1987, 290). (92) 15

Another trickster figure needs to be mentioned here: the hunchbacked flute playing Kokopelli from the Pueblo Indians. The role of Kokopelli seemed to consist of fertilizing the earth with his semen while his flute playing makes the earth willing to accept such fertilization.

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The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum website describes the Coyote as such: He is prominently figured as the Trickster as well as the Wise One in Native American myths and legends. The coyote fascinates us with its intelligence and adaptability. It can survive eating anything from saguaro fruit to roadkills, and is able to live in any habitat from cactus forest to the city.

This seems to be the meaning which Jackalope takes on, when they describe Nakai’s alter ego as Coyote, somebody who is able to adapt to different circumstances and can live “in any habitat,” from the reservation to the urban city. Alexandra Harmon writes: Thus, in hundreds of times and places, people with various ancestries and experiences have weighed the benefits and penalties of being Indian, have considered the choices and constraints that their physiognomy and history and immediate circumstances present, and have decided how to present themselves in a racialized world. Some have insisted on their Indian identity; some have renounced or downplayed their claim to an Indian identity; and some have done one and then the other, according to their situations (Merrell, 1997). (258)

The music of the first album already situates the Jackalope project on a certain track: specific ethnicity is no longer essential for the identity of the jackalope (for example Anglo, Native, Chicano), but rather the animal denotes that the constant flux of different ethnic features (including musical figures from Asia and the Arab world) is welcome. The booklet writes: “The jackalope’s song is improvisatory and ever changing. Jackalope’s music follows that of its namesake and this is a typical sample based on ethnic themes.” The creators of this music and record concept welcome all kinds of ethnic fusion, as they themselves are fused in their identities. To celebrate ethnic fusion or multiculturalism allows Nakai and Yáñez to imagine a world in which they are the insiders, not the outsiders. There is, however, a contradiction or unavoidable paradox attached to this agenda. When understood as a relatively massified and no longer elite phenomenon, the compulsion to engage in ethnic lifestyle shopping, the mixing and combining of ethnic signifiers for fun, had started as a white postwar consumerist attitude among ex-suburban members of the 1950s and 1960s counterculture (cf. S. Smith). Nakai’s ethnic in-betweenness 196

was forced upon him by growing up in a white mainstream society as a Native with a limited range of life chances and highly structured life options. For the more fortunate members of mainstream postwar American society this interest in hybridity was a deliberate lifestyle choice, as it also turned out to be for the musicians from the mainstream culture engaging with New Age or world music in the coming decades. Unequal power relationships are (still) very much in play when Nakai engages in making and participating in such music. In the Western world view, a white body is easily and whimsically transformed at will through lighthearted and largely unconsidered appropriation of “otherness” signifiers. This can happen in fashion (Hippies with Native buckskin pants or Indian saris), in religion (Buddhism, Zen), or with the consumption of music, with participation in the “ethnic.” But when hybridity is enacted by non-whites for mainstream audiences, it forces these non-whites to start the operation at their core, with a mandatory reception of Western identity, which they then garnish with some of their birth “ethnic” styles (meaning, in this case, with Nakai’s Native flute playing). Starting with a core of a Native identity and adding other ethnic melodies does not work in the same way – to make sense in the wider culture market, it all must be channeled through the assumptions and rhythms of white-mediated central cultural exchange. Nakai and Yáñez do not exploit authentic ethnic melodies of other traditions. They play rather with Western stereotypes of Asian and Arab figures, perhaps even reflecting with this Brechtian distancing the earlier, Saidian phase of exploitation of other cultures by whites. In the wake of world music’s success, culturally white audiences have become increasingly reluctant to consume these cultures only through outdated and mediated Orientalizing stereotypes, but rather feel entitled to demand unfiltered access and authenticity, and the freedom to consume these things in their original, unmediated forms (even if still channeled through a white musician’s more polished and accessible performance). Second Album The second album, Weavings, from 1988 has a stronger and even wittier storyline: the two protagonists embark on an imaginary journey from the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan (Snake Island) to the outer, white world. As Dog Soldier, aka Nakai, changes to non-traditional clothes, the music now uses classical trumpet instead of Native flute. They meet up with 197

friends; a Chicano referred to as Haiteca-Manteca (a “hightec” guitar player – on the recording represented through Richard Carbajal, a musician in a Caribbean music ensemble playing calypso and reggae),16 and a Waspteca (from WASP, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant – the Canadian indie-rock player Darrell Flint). They travel to the modern tribe of the Naugahyde. “Naugahyde” is of course not a name for a real tribe, but was a kind of artificial leather popular in stereotypically white mainstream suburban home furnishings and gas-guzzlig, big-finned Detroit automobiles between around 1950 and 1970. The Naugahyde company developed an advertising campaign around the invented Nauga – an imaginary animal from which supposedly this leather-like material came. As tourists at the Bering Strait, the alter egos of Nakai and company glimpse woolly mammoths. In the album’s culturally cross-coded-narrative, one way to understand these allusions, I believe, is to visualize white people in thick outdoor gear skiing. This time however, it is the whites, not the Natives, who are the objects of anthropological curiosity. The album ends with a composition alluding to the title of the Agatha Christie mystery Then There Was None (itself derived from the now-unsingable children’s song “Ten Little Indians”), here modified to read “… And Then There Was Wood” – thereby rejecting the idea that the Indians can vanish completely. The CD booklet reads: “Returning home, the group hears of tourists visiting the land of the Maya bringing horses, disease and bingo. They eventually take over the neighborhood. The travelers are stranded. There is no home to return to. They must learn to function and survive in the outer culture.” In a clever double play on the colonization by the Spaniards and on today’s neocolonialism or exploitation through tourism, the lyrics assert that there is no way of returning to old ways of being (incidentally noting that the concept of Natives on horseback as an “old” way of being is of course a misconception). We can find an example of Nakai’s and Yáñez’s openness to a friendly musical multiculturalism in the number “God Save the Queen.” Instead of mocking the topic with blasts of fuzzed-out electric guitar barre chords as the Sex Pistols did with their version, the evocative melody here is 16

None of Carbajal’s band members seem to have family ties to the Caribbean. They are just playing this music for the fun of it – and they have teamed up with a Swedish band of that style.

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caressed by different instruments and blended into the world music sound. It is actually meant to evoke Canada, the Athabascan homeland and exBritish dominion from which the Navajos migrated southwards. The booklet text reads: “Dog Soldier’s story is of his people’s traditional homeland, Canada.” For Americans this melody is also familiar as “My Country ‘tis of Thee.” The U.S. version goes on to celebrate a “Land where my fathers died! Land of the Pilgrims’ pride!” The Native activist Vine Deloria refers to this melody in his book Custer Died for Your Sins, where he remembers Natives singing these lines during a convention and then bursting into laughter – because North America was really the land where their fathers had died, but at the hand of the pilgrims (3). As Nakai refers to Deloria’s book as a source of inspiration, he might have had this double take on the song in mind (cf. Nakai, interview by Voyager). Yáñez’s Solo Album Yáñez released a solo album called Sueños (Dreams) with Canyon Records in 1989, in which he “creates a strange and surreal world of carnivallike sounds, ominous synth drones, chugging sequencers” (Backroads Music). The style of the music comes close to that of Jackalope, with however Nakai’s signature Native flute sound conspicuously missing. In assessing this music without that sound, it becomes clear that the flute had been an essential part of Jackalope, lifting it into the realm of purely musical merit, i.e., music which can be enjoyed even without the extra-musical meaning of lyrics, manifestos, concepts or other programmatic elements. The actual sound of Sueños on the other hand, does not stand effectively by itself. It needs the armature of a concept and extra-musical stories to gain meaning as a work of performance art. Nakai’s flute sound had given Jackalope a transcendent aspect, which is not there in Yáñez’s hands-on concept of presenting the multiculturalism of the everyday. Sueños takes us into a purely Chicano world, while Jackalope had drawn a bigger picture of what all Native cultures in the Americas had to go through: colonialization either through the Spanish or U.S.-Americans (– and in the cases of the Native population in Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico, both), stereotyping and discrimination in modern times as the traditional Native or Chicano, and the effects of colonization and modernization on nature and everyday life.

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Sueños presents us with musical numbers which are successive evocations of Chicano heritage and life, told in the form of dreams. The Chicano protagonist falls asleep in the evening at the kitchen table after having eaten Nopalitos, a dish made of catus pads. As the story starts in the kitchen the cassette cover presents Yáñez’s print Cocina Jaiteca. The dreamer then evokes “El Tejano,” the ghost of a Texan bandit who once hid his treasure in the Tucson area, and in doing so becoming the focus of an important local folk tale (Roach). The next number memorializes “Adelita,” the archetype women warrior of the Mexican revolution, as an update of an older folk song called “El Adelita.” Yáñez’s musical number evokes that folk tune and transports us back into a time of train travel. This is followed by “Coatlicupi,” the Aztec earth goddess, (whose real name, Coatlicue, might have been deliberately modified by Yáñez for reasons that remain obscure). In the protagonist’s dream she comes seductively down from a pyramid, before the dream switches to Yaqui dancers in his backyard. Coronado appears and the protagonist points him to a direction where he might find the “Seven Cities of Gold.” History and mythology suddenly mix, when Chicano film stars and then Christopher Columbus and the Spanish settlers are told that it’s over. A dog barks outside and leaves his traces in a dream of hundreds of Chihuahua puppies – once a food source for the Aztecs. Yáñez ends on a funny note. To “Dogs in Your Dreams” the booklet text says: “The rock group, El Cucui, have a new hit. They’re live on stage and the drummer won’t slow down. I wake in a cold sweat and yell out the window for the neighbor’s dogs to shut up.” The deeper meaning of the surreal fun comes out when one understands that “El Cucui” is Spanish for the bogeyman. When we compare the two Jackalope albums to Sueños, we see clearly that in them Yáñez downplayed, but did not fully eliminate, the specifically Hispanic symbols in order to focus on the Native Aztec heritage, while still alluding to himself as a Latino. The first album (Jackalope) had included purely Native American experiences only in the two numbers “Roadkill” and “Coyote Mint.” Roadkill had been inspired by Nakai’s observation that on the reservation, dead animals on the street are often not removed, and just get flatter and flatter. This reflected the modern experience of Natives, as also does the other number, “Coyote Mint,” alluding to Coyote, the trickster, an alias for Nakai. The coyote here signifies a wise animal, suggesting that it is wise of Nakai to refrain from presenting himself as a Navajo in an urban environment, in order to avoid 200

stereotyping. That this is the interpretation Nakai intends becomes clear when looking at “Dog Soldier” a song on the second album which employs a modern trumpet sound. The booklet reads: “Dog Soldier journeys attired in his best traditional dress. However, this persona creates antagonistic defense responses and he adopts the persona of the Wise One (Coyote) in order to move safely within the outer world.” Yáñez presents the Latino (not just the Chicano) side of himself in a much more general, even clichéd way. He employs the Inca city of Machu Picchu as the staging ground for his clearly invented alter ego Fumamota. That Peru, where the Inca city is located, has an elite political dynasty with Japanese heritage (the Fujimoris) might just be a useful sidenote here. Yáñez presents his alter ego already as an ironic misconception of a bi-cultural Latino, as if everything in the Latin world would apply to him. Third Album The third album, Dances with Rabbits from 1993, showcases the most pop-ified side of Jackalope. J. David Muñiz (bass) and Will Clipman (percussion) participate. Overt critique is almost totally absent. The sense of an ethnic in-betweenness as imagined by Nakai and Yáñez in the first albums has disappeared here, possibly due to changing circumstances in the music business and changing cultural perceptions of the utility of ethnicity as a marketing tool by the time of the album’s release. Ethnic music had gone mainstream; far clearer genre separations now existed between pop with an ethnic tinge, world music, and the New Age market. Dances with Rabbits alludes in its title to the contemporary film Dances with Wolves, a somewhat self-indulgent vehicle for the actor/ Kevin Costner to portray himself as a white person on the 19th-century frontier able to integrate himself into Native life so effectively that he winds up saving them. For Nakai and Yáñez, however, Natives and Chicanos are not wolves, but comically distorted rabbits, hybrid jackalopes. The album’s cover art, drawn by Yáñez, makes that clear. It does not feature the Native predictably dressed in beadwork and buckskin, but a comical drawing of four horned rabbits wearing buckskin pants and colorful skirts. Jackalope examines here the idea that Natives can do the same as Costner but in reverse; successfully integrate themselves into white culture. This album has a looser story line, emphasizing aspects of modern urban life in the song titles, and engaging in self-reflection about 201

musicianship as a lifestyle: the title “Sausage Fingers” describes how hands feel after playing a lot of guitar numbers. The title “Noh Tango Nada” again includes a musically knowing play on the phrase “No Tengo Nada” – “I have nothing.” This statement is reinforced by the booklet text, which asks: “Hey, you gotta a job? Support me!” In “Fry Bread,” the last number, the musicians pretend that they and the listeners are in a live performance situation in a tent during a Native art show, where grease from fried bread fills the air and creeps into the singer’s voice. Doyle explained that in this last number, Nakai was also challenging his own people: “Fried Bread Grease Blue” is a comment on perceptions of Native identity, both externally and internally. At any pow-wow or indoor art show with food vendors, you won’t get away from the smell of grease cooking and sometimes burning into dense clouds. Like all satirists, Nakai points his commentary both ways. Much of what Nakai does with Jackalope satirizes external thinking about Natives and how excessively respectful stereotypes can be just as corrosive as the non-respectful, but this song has a double audience. For non-Natives, it announces, “Our lives have the same daily issues as yours including the challenge of frying food.” To Natives, “If you’re offended by this, you’re thinking too small.” Nakai also knows humor is an important group process in the many Native American communities and cultures; Native Americans will get the joke. (Interview)

Fourth Album The last Jackalope album, Boat People (subtitled “A Musical Codex”), features the harshest critique of all four. The duo recorded this album alone. It performs a cross-coding and revaluation of ethnic relations, in which now whites are the ones to pity. They are now understood as the “boat people” landing for the first time on American soil centuries ago, showing their dumbness in dealing with Natives. The booklet is designed in the form of a Mesoamerican codex, alternating painted vignettes with cryptic descriptions. The title of the album takes the word for Vietnamese refugees, the boat people, and applies it as a counter-narrative to the Spanish conquerors. In a comment on the back cover the reality of “peoples colliding” is not ignored: “five centuries later, we are all native and all Boat People.” This mix of Hispanic and Native heritage can be claimed by both musicians. The amusing storyline of disoriented Spaniards running around the new world bringing Bingo with them and having a succession of embar202

rassing troubles in a new country turns serious in the last three numbers. Here Nakai and Yáñez question the American Dream of a decent life of material security that seems open only for whites of skin or affiliation, criticize the relentless suburbanization “asphalting and paving the country” and point to the irrationality of the U.S.-Mexican border. The music, which so far has remained in the stylistic confines of world music, becomes experimental again. Whistles and electric screwdrivers take center stage. In “Penny Tanto” the title already plays upon having only pennies and not participating in the dream of prosperity for all. The booklet text asks: “[E]ven as the ‘Merkin dream we are allowed to observe success but not indulge ourselves. Isn’t that good business? Isn’t that the ‘Merkin way?” In “Street Chiefs” Jackalope points towards the many Native Americans who have fallen for alcohol and are populating the cityscapes. Richard Ray Whitman, a Native American from Oklahoma made a photo series titled Street Chiefs (1970-80), depicting homeless Natives in Oklahoma City. The number was inspired by those famous pictures. The last musical number, “On the Border,” addresses the U.S.-Mexican border and the celebration of Columbus Day by Anglos. The booklet reads: These “Mapamekas” (mapmakers) put a line, right there, on the paper and said, “There it is!” “Oh, geez, look what time it is!” “We’d better hurry we’ll miss Christoph Hitler’s birthday.” “Remember? In fourteen something, Christoph Hitler sailed all over the blue ocean in the Heehaw, a Pueta and a Sangre Maria.”

Its musical form mocks history with a grotesque soundscape of a carnival gone wrong. A music style stemming from a 19th-century western popular tradition speaks to the absurdity of conquering other ethnicities. The recording was one of the many reactions from the Native side to the Columbus quincentennial celebrations of 1992, which triggered a wave of protest by Native communities who didn’t find it appropriate for the country to celebrate their conquest (cf. Kubal).17

17

I would like to thank Michelle Habell-Pallán for guiding my attention to this issue.

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The Chicano Concept of “Rasquachismo” and Jackalope Larry Yáñez has mostly expressed himself as a non-musical artist. Therefore, I will discuss his aesthetic position here in connection with his art, before I transfer the analysis onto his contribution to Jackalope. Yáñez brings into his own art a specifically Chicano form of weirdness; “rasquachismo.” “Rasquache” in common usage can mean poor, ridiculous or even vulgar. “Rasquachismo” is a uniquely Chicano aesthetic and strategy of using whatever is at hand to create art, to effect change in society, and to transform one’s environment. The term was first explored by art critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in the essay “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility,” appearing in 1989 in the magazine Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo published by MARS, the Phoenix collective to which Yáñez belonged. The cover showed a drawing by Yáñez, and his art also illustrates Ybarra-Frausto’s essay. The essay also appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition “Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation” (CARA) which toured the U.S. from 1990-93. It was the first Chicano art exhibition to achieve widespread attention. Larry Yáñez was one of the artists who got exhibited; he is also mentioned in a footnote in the updated version of Ybarra-Frausto’s article as exemplifying a “rasquache” aesthetic (Ybarra-Frausto 1991). Kobena Mercer writes: “The work of Larry Yáñez, Diane Gamboa and Luis Jimenez is among the kinds of practice that led Ybarra-Frausto to his essay” (82). Mercer notes that the critical weirdness of rasquachismo entails a finely honed political and class sensibility: For art historian and critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, its foremost proponent, rasquachismo is first and foremost a working-class sensibility. YbarraFrausto believes that “rasquachismo draws its essence within the world of the tattered, shattered, and broken: lo remendado [stiched together].” Rasquachismo is an aesthetic choice used by those who are forced to make do without proper toos, without materials, without supplies, etc. That is to say that rasquachismo is an underdog sensibility that allows workingclass peoples the ability to counter the hegemonic forms of popular culture by creating lo rasquache. (Miner 65)

From the perspective of modern Chicano art, an aesthetics which had been a necessity for the poor, becomes a style element to express resistance: “To ‘be rasquache,’ or to practice rasquachismo, is to be unpretentious 204

and resourceful, to use what is accessible for artistic creation” (Jackson 62). According to Amalia Mesa-Bains the “[a]esthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials” (12). Ybarra-Frausto states himself in an interview with Latinopia: When I was young – and we were driving around and there was an all falling down house, unpainted and untaken care of, but had a certain character, “es una casa rasquache,” that’s a rasquache house, or a person would dress with a very weird combinations of colors, they would say, “ah, es una persona rasquache.” It wasn’t a putdown to be una persona rasquache, it was a particular taste, a sensibility. Now I called it “Rasquachismo – A Chicano Sensibility,” because it isn’t a style, it isn’t a form, it’s a sensibility. Now what is a sensibility? A sensibility is an understanding of a particular aesthetic code in any particular community and it comes out of the experience of living in that community. […] You make do with what you have. (Ybarra-Frausto 2011)

The Jackalope project betrayed the influence of rasquachismo in various ways. From an aesthetic point of view, the music does sound at many points like world or New Age music. However, there are several moments when this mode is broken; here the music starts to include a comedic note, a bearer of irony. What Yáñez and Nakai are doing at such points is not strictly “rasquachismo” in the narrower sense of folk art which without much reflection arranges bits and pieces together into a collage. Instead, the duo carefully reflects on the phenomenon of folk art itself and then uses rasquachismo to deliberately break expectations and undermine stereotyping. On one level, when we look for the meaning of the project we can see a concrete political agenda of protest against the pigeonholing of minority ethnic identities and individuals. Jackalope employ a reverse or counter-narrative when they make the Spaniards and Columbus the boat people, while the Natives take over modern preoccupations like Bingo for example. The musical instruments are scrambled together in a manner reminiscent of the juxtaposed items in a multi-media collage; songs sometimes employing found sounds, like that of an electric screwdriver. However, this tradition had already emerged separately as part of (experimental) academic music, as can be heard in the compositions of Cage or Stockhausen. The trend crossed over into popular music sometime in the 1970s, with pioneering figures such as Brian Eno first using found objects in his recordings. 205

What differentiates Jackalope from these musical approaches is that Nakai and Yáñez never take the idea of using such everyday items completely seriously. Similarly, the overarching storyline underlying the album concepts on the individual Jackalope releases is never carefully stitched together into a comprehensive narrative; a playful sense of accidental discovery is never far away. Sometimes we can indeed detect a more disciplined and overriding concept in individual albums like Boat People; at other times the story line is more associative than logical. The weirdness of Jackalope’s live performances came closest to what one could understand as “rasquachismo.” This included the disorientation created through playing with the expectations of the audience, with two visibly “ethnic” musicians engaging not with their expected ethnic stereotypes, but rather breaking such expectations. However, at no point are Yáñez and Nakai able to escape their non-whiteness; thus, they stay dialectically involved with the stereotypes. The line between exploring hybridity and becoming the “performing ethnic entertainer” is very thin. In contrast to performance artists such as El Vez and Guillermo Gómez-Peña however, Jackalope avoided strategies of over-identification that required deployment of their own personas and bodies. El Vez, for example, depicts himself as a cartoon Mexican bandido, while GómezPeña in Border Brujo surrounds himself with as many Mexican stereotypes as possible, wearing a sombrero and positioning himself in a context of a postmodern Mexican altar (cf. Priewe, 189 and 209 resp.). 18 Nevertheless, these performance artists share with Jackalope the aesthetics of rasquachismo. In his examination of national imaginaries in Chicana/o narratives, Marc Priewe writes: “Gómez-Peña’s works employ a rasquache aesthetic to imagine and perform cultural transgressions of nation-state borders, of boundaries between literature and performance art and of dividing lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures” (206). On the Jackalope albums, absent the fact of a live performance, the amount of “rasquachismo” that can be transmitted solely through the music is limited. Even when Yáñez and Nakai want to pull an overt sonic stunt, like the humming, pseudo-monastic sound at the beginning of “Macho Picho” 18 El Vez is a performance artist, singer-songwriter and musician who styles himself as an ironic Chicano Elvis impersonator. Gómez-Peña is a performance artists, writer and activist who exhibited himself and fellow artist Coco Fusco in a cage in museums during the time of the Columbus quincentennial celebrations (1992-94) under the title Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West.

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on the first Jackalope album, the effect easily aligns itself with the most non-ironic elements of New Age music – itself trafficking in ethnic Bulgarian essentialism, i.e., a perspective of intra-white power dynamics. The irony, which is included in the misspelling of “Macho Picho” cannot be felt in the music itself. It seems that the subtlety of the approach and the irony in the surrounding programmatic material are not transferred to the musical material. There is nothing particularly ironic in a Native American humming a monastic melody on a record. Instead, the music appropriates in reverse the act of ethnic border crossing, portraying the white West European obsession with the consumption and mixing of “ethnic” experiences as a positive and serious pursuit, renouncing the possibility of poking fun at the cliché the sounds create.

Interlude: Mole Sauce and Potato Tacos I land at Phoenix’s “Sky Harbor” airport in the early morning and make my way with the rental car to the Heard Museum, which is hosting its annual Indian Fair and Market. There I encounter a young, educated audience with impeccably curated multicultural credentials – just the right blend of African Americans, Asians, Natives, Latinos, and Anglos for that smooth, clean aftertaste. Before I stroll around the stalls looking for Native beadwork, I stop at the music tent organized by Canyon Records. A Hopi singer recounts that he first hesitated before signing up with Canyon, but that he became convinced that he should record there primarily in the interests of his own community, because he is the only one now who could still sing these songs. The Hopi singer talks about kinship and his aunt, who is in the audience asking for a song. A Navajo flute player speaks a greeting in Navajo, acknowledging his clan and other clans. I get in my car again to drive up to Paradise, a satellite community northeast of Phoenix, where R. Carlos Nakai will participate in a classical music concert. The audience is ninety-nine percent white, wears pearl jewelry, is largely over sixty-five, and people seem to have just come back from their morning outing on the golf course. Nakai is announced like a superstar. He hits the stage, telling the story of his people as a counternarrative to the traditional Native image in white consciousness. He depicts his ancestors as having been avid tourists and grocery shoppers. When the sound of his flute begins to fill the church in which the concert 207

is held, I get goosebumps. The sound immediately creates a particular virtual space, distant and close at the same time. When I’m finally settled in a Super 8 Motel next to Interstate 17, I grab a dinner at a nearby Iraqi shisha bar, getting a baklava for free. On Monday morning I head a couple of miles south to interview Robert Doyle, owner of Canyon records. Of partly Filipino ancestry, Doyle took over Canyon records in 1992 from the white founders Ray and Mary Boley, who had created it in 1951. The Boleys had a recording studio where they made spots for election campaigns and radio commercials as well as private recordings of bar mitzvahs or festivities of their own, Catholic community. When Ray Boley was asked to record the Navajo singer Ed Lee Natay for a theatre production he was so impressed by the aesthetics and quality of Natay’s voice, singing in a Western art-music style, that he recorded an entire album and began selling copies at the yearly Arizona State Fair. The album did not take off as a tourist item, but the Native communities picked it up and encouraged the Boleys to go on recording Native music. Canyon was thus from the start a label which catered mostly to Native communities themselves. The recordings were not anthropological field recordings, but from the beginning were intended for commercial purposes and therefore committed to commercial production values. This is important to mention, because paradoxically the commercial relationship between the Boleys and the Native performers prevented or limited the kind of drift to cultural exploitation and white cultural patronizing, instead setting and keeping both parties on an equal (and modern) footing. Doyle himself has been involved in the production of Jackalope, and he talks about the importance of this project for Nakai: RC needed the freedom of Jackalope: not worrying about the aesthetic outcome, improvising, experimenting, exploring pure sound, and occasionally the expressiveness of noise. He enjoys the opportunity to tell jokes and deploy satire. But everything he does makes sense in the context of an essentially iconoclastic approach to his art, his teaching, his life. He revels in tweaking expectations, tossing a mental hand grenade toward his audience as if to say, “You seem to see in one, fixed way, but let’s look from way over there.” He uses humor and the unexpected when talking about “ethnic identity” and undermining new, but still distorting preconceptions assigned to “ethnics” in an attempt to balance the racism of the past. He chafes at “identity politics” because of the over simplification

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and constraints. Jackalope provided RC a richness of expression beyond shaping notes into songs; it gave him freedom, including the freedom from taking oneself too seriously.

Doyle points out to me that publishing Jackalope was not without risk: While I understood what RC and Larry were trying to express and personally enjoyed the subversiveness of Jackalope, Canyon was (and is) a commercial operation, a small one with limited resources. Taking on Jackalope was a financial risk; the music didn’t fit our other product lines, which connected mainly to Native American cultural or social expressions. The owner, Ray Boley, didn’t want it because it sounded too raw, too jumbled, too strange. Still, I had a sense that Nakai had an appeal beyond his solo albums and argued that Canyon should “follow along where this guy’s going; he’s something special.” The first album sold the best of the four Jackalope albums and, while it didn’t sell as well as RC’s solo productions, it outsold all our other releases. Jackalope quickly exceeded expectations and I would have given it more credit for being a hit if it hadn’t so overshadowed by the sales from RC’s other projects. In any case, Jackalope found a home at Canyon that lasted almost ten years and resulted in three more albums.

After some days in Phoenix, where I have been unable to resist buying a Navajo rug with Yei figures, I take a road trip to Yuma at the MexicanAmerican border to meet up with Larry Yáñez at his home. It is fancifully filled with art-work and not so different from prints he makes about the interiors of Chicano houses. I immediately get attracted to three little 3x4 inch pottery army tanks glazed in shiny earth colors. The inspiration to make military vehicles out of clay, as miniature art, fascinates me. Yáñez tells me that he and Nakai met when Yáñez was working for the Arizona Commission of the Arts. They hit it off as musicians and started working on a first project. Yáñez recalls that Nakai had been the first “ethnic” person in his life to hand him a sheet of music with a notated melody, totally against the expectations of “uneducated” non-whites: I had been a music major and I changed my major when I got out of the military to visual art. It was the first time that a Native American person, another ethnic person, hands me sheet music and says, “Can you read this?” “Yes,” I was a music major. And it was a melody and I looked at it and I put it on the piano and of course I was able to analyze it, because

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[…] I did it. And that’s what Jackalope came from. He had the melody and I was, “Look at these chords, and these chords correspond to these notes,” and that’s where the chord progression came from.

At that time, Nakai had not yet become famous, having just recorded his first cassette. Yáñez himself came from a rock music background and had been trained classically at music school. Yáñez remembers that it was not the money which drove the project: Eventually I built up a backing of synthesizers because we started here and there. He would say, “Let’s go play.” You know, and I didn’t care if we would get paid or not. Sometimes it was like, “We are just getting dinner tonight” – “Oh, cool,” or, “Hey, we got paid, wonderful.” It just kind of worked out that whenever he said, “Let’s do this,” I said, “Yes, let’s do it.”

With regards to the style of Jackalope’s music, Yáñez does not use the word “rasquache” but describes the aesthetic in terms of modern music’s category of “cacophony.” What thrills me especially is that he drops the name of Charles Ives, one of the other artists I deal with in my case studies: And I used some of these formulas, but because of my classical training I also involved us into – being from the ’60s, rock ’n’ roll, blues – that also. But I was always trying to get to the Charles Ives things, the total dissonance. And there is some of it in the things we did. That’s why I would sometimes throw in some recognizable melodies from someplace else and then we would do dissonant things. At the time also, I was a performance artist. So. a lot of the stuff that we did were things I was thinking about as performance art on stage; a lot of it was visual. Like “Meet Me at the Bering Strait” there is a break in that I would call “Charles Ives” – because all this cacophony. But in that [number] I had a spear with a rubber head on it, I had toy dinosaurs and stuff and we would throw them in the air and all this kind of stuff. It was hilarious.

He goes on to recount that Jackalope had decided to present themselves as “cosmopolitan” artists, wearing black tuxedoes for their live shows. Some people in the audience were not comfortable with the fact that Nakai was not wearing the expected Native attire. The effort toward modernization or cosmopolitanization of Jackalope’s image consequently did not 210

work. It was impossible to escape the wider society’s compulsive ethnic stereotyping. At a banquet, for example, people mistook them for waiters – “Well, if you have an ethnic person in a tuxedo, obviously that’s the waiter, in all these fancy restaurants” (Yáñez). After that experience they started to combine elements of ethnic/Native attire with the tuxedos, to avoid further confusion. After the interview Yáñez takes me to Lutes’ Casino, now a restaurant, and I have the first potato tacos in my life. Potato tacos are corn tacos filled with mashed potatoes which are then deep fried – delicious. Driving back to Phoenix I get to see two U.S. Border Patrol drones flying over the highway, checking on illegal immigration and the drug trade. The next day, my itinerary takes me to Tucson, to finally meet up with R. Carlos Nakai – also at home. I am amazed at the friendliness of the artists I encounter in Arizona, while at the same time I am disturbed by the bumper stickers proclaiming in bold letters “I don’t believe” – with a closer look revealing another line below in smaller type – “in liberal media.” Nakai greets me with a cup of coffee and immediately wants to know and discuss more of my own background. He tells me about the history of Prussia and the crisis of German identity after the Second World War. We hit it off when I learn that Nakai has seen the same exhibition of Wolpertinger chimeric composite stuffed animals in Munich as I had just a year ago. We discuss how the mythic animals Jackalope and the Wolpertinger might be related.19 Nakai tells his side of the story of the founding of Jackalope, when he was still working for the Heard Museum as an art instructor: And before that time we [Yáñez and Nakai] were doing primarily art. Viual art and found art that kind of represented where we are today as indigenous people. But he is also Spanish, real Spanish. So he said, “I have this Mexican Spanish thing.” And I said, “Oh, well I have that too, but if you are Moorish, then I am Celtic, from northern Spain. So, we should be enemies, but we should have confronted discussions about what we are. Because there is a difference between those two communities.” “Yeah, but we live today, we do these art projects and I never thought of doing these. Well, you know, I think about it a lot.” And so […] that frustration showed up in us and we said, “We really need to talk about the impact of 19

In 1988 Nakai was on Europe tour with Bavarian sculptor and sound installation artist Paul Fuchs.

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colonialism on us.” And I said, “How do we do that?” And he said, “Well, we can do some music and do music as an art project, so it’s not really music, it’s an art project. And we’ll make up stories to fit the music.” And so, the stories are actually […] about an art project which is in sound rather than in visual arts.

For Nakai, the connection with his own Hispanic heritage and the history of colonization was very important. On the related topic of identity politics in the 1980s, he recounts what Doyle has already told me: Yeah, there was some mix and mingle, but at that time there was much of what they call racism too, of self-containment of communities. There were the Chinese, the Japanese, there were the so called Irish and then there were the so called this and that, and it went on. And so everyone was in their own little box. What we were doing was making holes in the box. And looking into the other community and saying, “Hm, interesting. That’s what they’re doing, let’s do it too.” So, we started tearing the box down and then we added our own perspective of what that perspective was like and how it influenced us.

After the interview, he and his wife take me to a Mexican restaurant. In a repeat of the potato taco experience with Yáñez in Yuma, I get to eat my first dish with mole, meat in a brown spicy sauce made from chocolate and chilies. I really like it. I take a short hike in the afternoon into a wilderness of cacti and rattlesnakes, after which I head down to Sahuarita, to catch a last concert with Nakai. This time the audience can be clearly categorized as hippie. The concert takes place in a church which is also the meeting point for a group of people who position water in the Sonora desert so that illegal immigrants don’t die from heat exhaustion during their long trip from Mexico. Nakai turns the concert into a mix of storytelling and flute demonstration, moving from Chief Black & Decker, who bored the holes into his flute, to talking in Catalan to counter expectations that he would talk in Navajo. When I drive back to Phoenix I enjoy the colder night temperatures after a hot spring day and I wonder about the flexibility that Nakai must have, to deal with all the three different types of live audiences I encountered – the young educated multi-ethnics, the pearl-necklaced retirees, and the flock of hippie snowbirds.

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1990s: Co-optation of Ethnicity through the Market It is interesting to note that Jackalope ended its run in 1993 with the release of not one but two albums, portraying opposite ways of dealing with white society. One approach supporting full integration, the other vehement protest. What had changed in Jackalope’s perception of the cultural field, and why did the band end its catalogue in this way? Priewe writes that “The so-called backlash of the 1990s – e.g., the reversal of affirmative action in some parts of the U.S. […] was accompanied by a Latino boom as part of the commercial craze for anything that appeared ‘multicultural’” (222). In looking at the audience responses to Gómez-Peña’s performance art Temple of Confessions, Priewe detects a “paradoxical coexistence of the marketability of Otherness and the sociopolitical reprisals against minority groups, the decline of the transformative and the rise of corporate multiculturalism” (222). Here Priewe expands on Bill Martin’s previous analyses of multiculturalism. It sounds like a paradox then; the culturally open-minded Clinton years, with their general societal push to foster meaningful trans-cultural exchange at even stronger and broader levels than the 1960s counterculture, actually brought the final co-optation of what can be labeled “ethnic” music through mass consumption. By the 1990s, the consumers of such music were no longer just countercultural members or specialist gatekeepers based at academic institutions. They now also included a much larger group of people seeking to add moral virtue and cultural tone to their relentless consumerism, a group that the conservative cultural commentator David Brooks has labeled “bourgeois bohemians.” Acknowledging this shift of multiculturalism from transformative critique to corporate marketing tool might help us understand why Nakai and Yáñez abandoned their project of imagining an ethnic hybrid music. Ethnicity could no longer serve as a playground for trying to define an inbetween space, for developing the latest American in-between identity. In the last two Jackalope recordings the hybrid has once again separated back into its constituent parts – jackrabbit and antelope, Anglo and Native. While both can now more or less amicably coexist at the same cultural time-space coordinates, they can no longer be mixed. The Native performance artist James Luna describes this identity split as such:

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I truly live in two worlds. This “two world” concept once posed too much ambiguity for me, as I felt torn as to whom I was. In maturity I have come to find it the source of my power, as I can easily move between these two places and not feel that I have to be one or the other, that I am an Indian in this modern society. (McFadden/Taubman 12)

Luna, who is both Native American and Mexican American, exhibited himself in 1987 in a glass display cabinet with sand and objects around him, even legal papers and explanations about his several scars. The dictionary Native American Today comments: Confronted with an occasional critic who accuses Luna of exploiting his own cultural background, he replies that all artists draw from their own experiences. […] Some of Luna’s work is autobiographical, as when he illustrates his own battle with alcoholism as part of a culture wide problem. (Johansen 161)

Luna exposes stereotyping in his artwork, which very often includes his own body. Even if Nakai and Yáñez failed to permanently hold the jackalope together, they succeeded in another task: That of making a modern Native identity as visible as a traditional Native identity. Nakai and other modern Native spokesmen such as Philip and Vine Deloria resist a default anthropological attitude to creativity inside and outside the Native community, which restricts them and their culture to the status of reified cultural artifact or object of study (as I am treating them here, for example). Vine Deloria writes: The more we try to be ourselves, the more we are forced to defend what we have never been. The American public feels most comfortable with the mythical Indians of stereotype-land who were always THERE. These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us don’t fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating, which is seldom. To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical. (2)

Nakai seeks to make palpable through his art the experience of the “real” Native, of whom the large majority live in cities and engage with white mainstream culture on a daily basis, in addition to whatever form of their own Native culture remains accessible to them. He is an outspoken 214

supporter of the Nammy, the Native American Music Award, exactly because there all styles, traditional or modern, are welcome. He was critical of the introduction of the category “Native Traditional Music” into the Grammys in 2001 (abolished in 2012), as he felt this perpetuated the stereotype of the “traditional” Native (cf. Brockman). Nakai performed at the inaugural gala of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., a museum which, on the one hand, has been criticized for its seeming hodgepodge of decontextualized, diachronic exhibitions and its alleged lack of interest in explaining Native history. The museum has on the other hand been lauded for its focus on the “living” Native, and its refusal to endlessly reflect on the Indian’s experience as victim – an approach which is very much in line with Nakai’s intentions. When we want to position Jackalope and its two protagonists between authenticity and the market we can look backward from the aesthetic and philosophical stand to which they have arrived – or to which the market has pushed them over the course of time. Both artists/musicians have opted for a clear splitting of their identities as Native/Chicano and Westerner. Nakai now works clearly on both sides. On the Native side he is continuing to create a repertoire for the Native flute and to keep reviving this tradition, passing it on to the younger generation. In addition, his Native arts and crafts talent drives him to offer courses in build Native rattles out of dried fruit shells, beads, and yarn. On the other hand, he participates fully in the world of Western classical music, playing in classical music settings, participating in the recording of the oratorio “Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Roses” or the Two Worlds Concerto, composed by James DeMars with Nakai as a soloist expressly in mind. Nakai also performed the Native flute part in Philip Glass’s piano concerto no. 2 “After Lewis and Clarke” in 2005. The pop or experimental art genre in which Jackalope had deployed the Native flute has faded away, replaced by the new/old poles: “real” authenticity when used in a Native art context or being employed as the exotic Native sound in a classical environment. On both sides of the equation a commitment to “authenticity” – or at least to what is believed to be tradition, is now enforced. Not even the New Age genre has been able to keep something of that in-between feeling or successfully deploy “nonauthenticity” and “ethnic sound exploitation,” as the sound employed there has already become too well known to Westerners to still be experienced as strange, or as a means of investigating the spaces between 215

different cultures. These days, we immediately know – or think we know – if a piece of music is white, Native or Chicano – no mixes seem to be possible anymore. The market defines the target audiences and also what they demand; in fragmenting the market the culture loses the option of throwing these three groups together. In Nakai’s current output we can still barely detect an overlapping of the Chicano and white market in the production of “Catholic” (Mexican) themed classical music, as is the case with “Guadalupe.” In Yáñez’s case he had already to reckon with a period of foundational hybridization in the emergence of modern Chicano culture itself. This hybridization became even more highlighted in his artwork, playing on a clichéd understanding of Mexican culture in the U.S. But this pervasive irony in his work from the 1980s is no longer there in his work from the 2010s. Yáñez seems to have moved towards a more isolationist, even rejectionist position, not engaging any more or commenting on the perception of Chicanos among Anglos. His work now seems to stand solidly in a Chicano/Mexican symbolic field, when he produces nicely decorated clay calaveras, something which might even sell in tourist markets interested in Mexican (and not specifically Chicano) art. The market seems to have pushed both artists/musicians toward a clear definition of their ethnic boundaries and forced them to stay in the realm of the authentic, rather than the invented but productive inauthentic.

Conclusion Nakai’s and Yáñez’s main goal with the Jackalope project was to show Natives as complicated, modern people. In their efforts to criticize the exploitation and stereotyping of Native people, the musicians of Jackalope did not play the card of over-identification, as did for example the Slovenian art and music collective Laibach/Neue Slovenische Kunst and its sublime parodies of the fascist aesthetic. Rather, Jackalope presented themselves as having the same right to use, abuse, and manipulate all kinds of ethnicity to create art as mainstream middle-class white consumers. This attitude, the belief in borderless and level-playing-field multiculturalism, the assumption that it is possible for non-whites to do the same kind of cultural cut-and-paste consumption in this regard as what whites do, seems slightly naïve from today’s point of view. The examples 216

of classic white enablers such as Paul Simon and Elizabeth Warren suggest that the 1980s might have offered to everyone more choices for deliberately creating an identity than today – but also more chances to participate in forms of mainstream exploitation, pretending that they were not exploitation. To achieve a fuller understanding of the significance of these developments, we need to relate the individual positions of artists about this matter to larger trends in the various interpretive communities active in late modern U.S. culture. In a consumer age in which music is produced for selling, it seems a needless restriction to understand the music of the community as only the music played in community situations themselves. Benedict Anderson’s description of a musical situation as “an experience of simultaneity,” or an “echoed physical realization of the imagined community” (145) assumes a unified society and a music detached from market value. However, even music produced on commercial records creates an imagined community, and in Jackalope’s case it is an imagined multicultural society, including Native, Chicanos, and Anglos. Since the 1990s this multicultural, cosmopolitan (and sometimes neo-Marxist) worldview has lost its universal power. Once-radical countercultural ideas are now routinely co-opted into system-supportive lifestyle choices, as Thomas Frank has ably demonstrated. After the high tide of identity politics, a certain ethnic particularism, even ethnocentrism or ethnic nationalism has once again arisen. Stephen Greenblatt therefore believes that “there is an urgent need to […] understand the vitally important dialectic of cultural persistence and change” (1-2) as neither the newer concept of “hybridity” nor the older of “rootedness and autochthony” seem to fit with the contemporary reality in which cosmopolitanism, hegemonic nationalism, and rejectionist identity politics all exist at the same time in the same social formation. However, as Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen point out, a re-emergence of the idea of cosmopolitanism is also being fueled by the experience that neither “ethnocentric nationalism” nor “particularistic multiculturalism” is a solution for creating a world democracy. Cosmopolitanism can be invoked “to advocate a non-communitarian, post-identity politics of overlapping interests and heterogenous or hybrid publics in order to challenge conventional notions of belonging, identity and citizenship” (1). The expectations generated by the cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s about a positive, open, and tolerant multiculturalism of the future, 217

creating something of a general global culture, has not been fulfilled. Stuart Hall, in a chapter section titled “The Global, the Local and the Return of Ethnicity,” points out: It has consequently become apparent that globalization is not necessarily coterminous with a uniform world culture, but also causes the assertion and reproduction of difference as well as the re-drawing and policing of certain cultural boundaries, often to the point of a (violent) “return of ethnicity.” (623-24).

The dream of an open and accessible world culture didn’t take into account that the access to this global-lifestyle shopping mall was only open mainly for a certain kind of “enlightened,” at least culturally white, consuming person. As long as the physical flow of people from the Global South to the West is restricted, there will only be a limited, asymmetrical exchange of cultural ideas, an exchange mediated and dictated on largely Western terms. As standards of living continue to decay in the industrial world, multiculturalism in the West – the EU as well as the U.S. – will be sorely tested, and racialized thinking inside the nation states and towards the outside will rise. Walter Mignolo suggests that we are studying a wasting process when we investigate the conditions for cultural production in the Western Hemisphere: What do we need and want to know about ourselves and about the tsunami world order that will alter the long lasting formation, rise, and consolidation of Western Civilization, the U.S. of North America and Canada, and the continuing struggle of South America and Caribbean-America? The cycle that started with the invention of America and later on the Western Hemisphere is closing. Theorizing Hemispheric Studies of the Americas means to start from this closing while, at the same time, knowing well the conditions under which America and the Western Hemisphere were created and under which the illusion is maintained. (356)

Solidarity inside the nation-state will once again only be made accessible to those belonging to the “folk” or the organic community, however defined. It will be interesting to see what cultural role, influence, and form cosmopolitan cultural consumerism (and its associated ideas of hybridity and exchange) will take in this scenario.

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The music of Jackalope reminds us of a specific point in the recent past of U.S. culture, a time in which it had seemed that there was discernible a path to a future of playful, irreverent multiculturalism. However, Jackalope’s actual trajectory as a project – and its eventual demise – has also made perfectly clear the decisive, inescapable consequences of the fact that the cultures involved – white, Chicano, and Native – had never been negotiating on the same level of power.

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Works Cited (Music see separate list below, websites accessed Oct. 2018) Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2002. Amerman, Marcus. . Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Aquallo, Alan Lechusza. “Without Reservations: Native Hip Hop and Identity in the Music of W.O.R.” Diss. U of California, San Diego, 2009. Archuleta, Margaret et al., eds. The Native American Fine Art Movement: A Resource Guide. Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 1994. . Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Website. “Coyote & Fox.” . Backroads Music/Heartbeats, Rovi. Jackalope Albums. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available. Baringer, Sandra K. “Brer Rabbit and His Cherokee Cousin: Moving Beyond the Appropriation Paradigm.” When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature. Ed. Jonathan Brennan. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003. 114-40. Brockman, Joshua. “Arts in America; Beyond Drumbeats: New Sounds from Indian Country.” New York Times 16 Jan. 2002. . Brooks, David. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Browner, Tara. “The Role of Musical Transcription in the Work of Ethnography.” Songs from “A New Circle of Voices”: The Sixteenth Annual Pow-wow at UCLA. Ed. Tara Browner. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2009. xii-xxvii. Music of the United States of America 20. ———. Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-wow. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004 Conlon, Paula. “Bending or Breaking the Native American Flute Tradition?” Oxford Handbook of Music Revival. Ed. Caroline Bithell and Juniper Hill. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. 442-65. ———. “The Native American Flute: Convergence and Collaboration as Exemplified by R. Carlos Nakai,” Indigenous Popular Music in North America: Continuations and Innovations. Ed. Max Peter Bauman et al. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2002. 61-74.

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Contreras, Felix. “Radmilla Cody: Two Cultures, One Voice.” NPR 10 May 2010. . Christie, Agatha. And then there Were None. London: Collins Crime Club, 1939. Dances with Wolves. Kevin Costner (dir.). Tig Productions, Majestic Films International, 1990. Movie. Del Hierro, Marcos. “‘By the Time I Get to Arizona’: Hip Hop Responses to Arizona SB 1070.” Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop. Ed. Jeff Berglund, Jan Johnson, and Kimberli Lee. Tucson: The U of Arizona P, 2016. 224-36. Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2004. ———. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Deloria, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. 1969. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988. Doyle, Robert. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 9 Mar. 2015. Audio. Unpublished. Ellis, Clyde. A Dancing People: Powwow Culture on the Southern Plains. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2003. “Exhibition – Bean There, Done That.” Americantowns website. Yuma arts and entertainment events. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available. Goss, Clint. “Organ Pipes and the Native American Flute.” 2016. Flutopedia website. . Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Fuchs, Paul. Website. . Furst, Jill L. “Horned Rabbit: Natural History and Myth in West Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Lore 15.1 (1989): 137-49. Gail, Dorothea. “Identity and In-Betweenness: Hybridity as Transcultural Mobility in the Music of Native American R. Carlos Nakai and His Band Jackalope.” Forum for Interamerican Research 8.1 (June 2015): 40-62. Reprinted in: See Raussert et al. 213-30. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959. Goldman, Shifra M. “Chicano Artists.” The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. Vol 1. Ed. Joan M. Marter. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 110-12. Gray, Judith A. “New Musics.” Music Cultures in the United States: An Introduction. Ed. Ellen Koskoff. New York: Routledge, 2005. 117-19. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Ed. Greenblatt et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 2-13.

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Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Ed. Stuart Hall et al. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996. 596632. Harmon, Alexandra. “Wanted: More Histories of Indian Identity.” A Companion to American Indian History. Ed. Philip Deloria and Neal Salisbury. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 248-65. Hebdige, Dick. Cut ‘n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London, New York: Methuen, 1987. ———. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1993. Hicks, Josh. “Did Elizabeth Warren check the Native American box when she ‘applied’ to Harvard and Penn?” Washington Post, 28 Sep 2012. . Hinderaker, Eric. “Translation and Cultural Brokerage.” A Companion to American Indian History. Ed. Philip Deloria and Neal Salisbury. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 357-76. Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990. Indian Arts and Crafts Board. U.S. Department of the Interior. N.d. . Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2002. Jackson, Carlos Francisco. Chicana and Chicano Art: ProtestArte. Tuscon: University of Arizona P, 2009. Johansen, Bruce Elliott, ed. “Luna, James.” Native Americans Today: A Biographical Dictionary. Santa Barbara, Denver and Oxford: Greenwood, 2010. 160-64. Keller, Gary D. et al., eds. Chicano Art for Our Millennium: Collected Works from the Arizona State University Community. Tempe: Bilingual P, 2004. Kubal, Timothy. Cultural Movements and Collective Memory: Christopher Columbus and the Rewriting of the National Origin Myth. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008 Latorre, Guisela. “Agustín Víctor Casasola’s Soldaderas: Malinchismo and the Chicana/o Artist.” Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche. Ed. Rolando Romero and Amanda Nolacea Harris. Houston: Arte Público P, 2005. 98-111. Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place. London, New York: Verso, 1994. Martin, Bill. “Multiculturalism: Consumerist or Transformational?” Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate. Ed. Cynthia Willet. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 121-50.

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McAllester, David P. “The Music of R. Carlos Nakai.” To the Four Corners: A Festschrift in Honor of Rose Brandel. Ed. Ellen C. Leichtman. Warren: Harmony Park P, 1994. 189–210. McFadden, David Revere, and Ellen Napiura Taubman. Changing Hands: Art without Reservation: Contemporary Native North American Art from the West, Northwest, and Pacific. New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2005. Mercer, Kobena. Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. Cambridge: MIT P, 2007 Mesa-Bains, Amalia. Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art. San Francisco: Mexican Museum, 1993. Mignolo, Walter. “Decolonial Reflections on Hemispheric Partitions: The ‘Western Hemisphere’ in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity and the Irreversible Historical Shift to the ‘Eastern Hemisphere.’” See Raussert et al. 34357. Miner, Dylan. “El Grito del Diseño: Diseño Mestizo and the Radical Visual Language in Chicana/o Newspapers.” Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority. Ed. Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland. Oakland: AK Press, 2007. 54-67 Moroncini, Barbara Serena. “Experimental Music after Los Angeles: Site, Power, Self, Sound.” Diss. U of California, Los Angeles, 2008. Nakai, R. Carlos. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 13 Mar. 2015. Audio. Unpublished. ———. Interview by Raven Voyager. “Exclusive Interview: R. Carlos Nakai.” Native Digest. N.d. Expired website. Accessible with Wayback Machine 21 Feb. 2015. . Written. ———. Lecture Performance at the Library of Congress “Homegrown” Series. 17 Nov. 2010. . Video. Nakai, R. Carlos, and James DeMars. The Art of the Native American Flute. With additional material by David P. McAllester and Ken Light. Phoenix: Canyon Records, 1996. Northendartists. Yuma art co-op. . Paddison, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. Perea, John-Carlos. Intertribal Native American Music in the United States. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Priewe, Marc. Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/o Narratives. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Raussert, Wilfried et al. Key Tropes in Inter-American Studies: Perspectives from the forum for inter-american research (fiar). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015.

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Roach, Joyce Gibson. “The Legends of El Tejano, the Texan Who Never Was.” Western Folklore 27.1 (Jan. 1968): 33-42. Ross, Gayle. How Rabbit Tricked Otter: And Other Cherokee Trickster Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Ryan, Allan J. The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Native Art. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1999. Smith, Sherry L. Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Taylor, Timothy D. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Ullestad, Neal. “American Indian Rap and Reggae: Dancing ‘to the Beat of a Different Drummer.’” Popular Music and Society 3.2 (1999): 63-90. Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen. “Introduction: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism.” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 1-24. Wilk, Richard. “Consuming America.” Reflecting on America: Anthropological Views of U.S. Culture. Ed. Clare L. Boulanger. Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon, 2007. 79-83. Yáñez, Larry. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 12 Mar. 2015. Audio. Unpublished. Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. Interview. Latinopia Art. “Latinopia Art Thomás YbarraFrausto ‘Rasquachismo.’” 2011. . Video. ———. “Rasquache: A Chicano Sensibility.” Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo. Phoenix: MARS, Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado, 1989. 58. ———. “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” CARA: Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985. Ed. Richard Griswold Del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. Los Angeles: Wright Art Gallery, UCLA, 1991. 155-62.

Music Cited Anderson, Laurie. O Superman. Warner Bros. Records, 1981. Vinyl. Beatles, The. Yellow Submarine. Apple Records, 1969. Vinyl. Black Lodge Singers. Kids’ Pow-wow Songs. “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Canyon Records, 1996. CD. ———. More Kids’ Pow-wow Songs. “Sponge Bob Square Pants.” Canyon Records, 2010. CD. Cody, Radmilla. Within the Four Directions. “The Navajo National Anthem.” Cool Runnings, 2000. CD.

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DeMars, James. Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Roses. Canyon Records, 2008. CD. ———. Two World Concerto. Canyon Records, 1997. CD. Eagles. Hotel California. Asylum Records, 1976. Vinyl. Glass, Philip. Piano Concerto No. 2 “After Lewis and Clarke.” New York: Dunvagen Music Publishers, 2004. Score. Hardcastle, Paul. 19. Chrysalis CHS 22 2860, 1985. Vinyl. Jackalope. Boat People: A Musical Codex. R. Carlos Nakai and Larry M. Yáñez. Canyon Records CR-7003, 1993. CD. ———. Dances with Rabbits. R. Carlos Nakai, Larry M. Yáñez, J. David Muñiz, Will Clipman. Canyon Records CR-7005, 1993. CD. ———. Jackalope. R. Carlos Nakai and Larry M. Yáñez. Canyon Records CR7001, 1986. CD. ———. Weavings. R. Carlos Nakai, Larry M. Yáñez, Darrell Flint, Richard Carbajal. Canyon Record CR-7002, 1988. CD. Nakai, R. Carlos. Canyon Triology. Canyon Records, 1989. Vinyl. ———. Changes. Canyon Records, 1981. Vinyl. ———. Carlos. Cycles. Canyon Records, 1983. Vinyl. ———. Earth Spirit. Canyon Records, 1986. Vinyl. ———. Journey. Canyon Records, 1985. Vinyl. R. Carlos Nakai Quartet. Kokopelli’s Café. Canyon Records, 1996. CD. Natay, Ed Lee. Natay Navajo Singer. Canyon Records Vintage Collection Vol. 1. CR-6160. CD. Simon, Paul. Graceland. Warner Bros. Records, 1986. Vinyl. WithOut Rezervation. Are You Ready for W.O.R.? “To the Sell Outs.” Canyon Records, 1994. CD. XIT. Plight of the Redman. “Nothing Could Be Finer than a 49’er.” Rare Earth, 1972. Vinyl. Yáñez, Larry. Sueños. Canyon Records, 1989. Cassette.

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5 Charles Ives The Reception of a New England Hero and the Classical Music Cult

The great trouble is that the commercialists are always (most always) on the side of the conventional and so sellable. (Charles Ives, Memos 94) [D]oes love have a gender, asks Dave quietly? Tell me, Charles, you should know. I hug him, briefly, intensely […]. (Ralph Roger Glöckler, Mr. Ives 177)1

Prelude: Nonconformity I grew up in 1970s West Germany with the children’s TV show Sesame Street. It was a morning ritual to get up, have my mom prepare sandwiches with cheddar cheese, slice them into little squares, and then put cups of warm hot chocolate next to me and my older brother. We would sit at our living room coffee table on little folding chairs, eating breakfast and watching Sesame Street translated into German. With its multiracial cast, its creative use of words, images, and music to introduce children to the world of knowledge and nature, and its irresistible city street set of red brick houses, I loved the show and, of course, was fascinated by the very different environment it showed to me: a little small-town girl who had never seen red brick houses or a big city. It formed an idea of the U.S. as a very child-friendly place, consisting of loving communities in which everybody – regardless of how quirky – was welcome. Whether intentionally or not, with Sesame Street the United States did a great job of promoting a positive image of itself abroad to the most perceptive of all hearts and minds: the children. In 1999, I sang in the choir during a performance in Frankfurt of the Fourth Symphony by the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), with John Adams conducting the Ensemble Modern Orchestra. The strangeness of this music, but also its freedom from norms and its 1

Here translated from German by D. Gail.

openness to musical form, reminded me of my childhood experience of Sesame Street. Both conjured up a United States where people could live out their differences, enjoy following their own paths, and let their creativity flow. I remember sitting in the sun outside my student dorm and wondering if there were any limits to music: after hearing Ives I could imagine composing a piece that might take any form – like the form of the bush growing next to me. The encounter with Ives made me rethink my conservative upbringing in a small town and my struggle to gain acceptance as an artist and intellectual in the music conservatory where I studied. I was unaware that, especially since the 1970s, the promotion of Ives’s music and the image of “freedom” attached to it had been deliberately undertaken as cultural propaganda by the U.S. State Department; Ivesscores had accordingly made their way into many United States Information Service libraries abroad.2 In the years since then, I learned the hard way – almost a century after Ives’s Fourth –that the real existing United States of the early twenty-first century did not necessarily adhere to this older propaganda image of letting people follow their own individual paths. Three years after the attacks of September 11, I was conducting research for my doctoral thesis on the Ives manuscripts held at the Yale library in New Haven. One night, close to midnight, I was sitting inside a warm train station. I had chosen a place 2

To the use of Ives’s music in promoting American values by the U.S. government, see Dayton, “Charles Ives.” I also found a concert program of Dayton in his role as cultural attaché playing the piano at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece. Sandwiched between Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven were the works of four American composers: the 16th-century composer of the Federal Period, Alexander Reinagle, and the three 20th century composers Halsey Stevens, Charles Ives, and Roger Sessions. The Ives movement chosen was the very tame “Alcotts” movement from the Concord Sonata, while Sessions’s Second Sonata from 1946 was a really modern presentation. I could not find a date on the concert program (Dayton, Concert), but it is referred to by composer Yannis Ioannidis in his comments during the Ives Festival in 1974 (see Hitchcock and Perlis, 49). As David C. Paul points out the records of the USIA are available for research and might reveal more about the role of Ives’s music as a propaganda tool for the U.S. abroad during the Cold War (239, fn 34). Dayton also delivered talks about American music abroad, among them “Charles Ives: American Musical Pioneer” (1972). To the role of American experimental music in the rebuilding of musical culture in Germany after WWII, cf. Beal 2006.

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away from the rest of the waiting train passengers, close to where I could look out to see if my bus was coming, when a policeman told me to move. When I asked him why, he got harsh and, with an angry voice, told me to sit with the other people on the other side of the train station. On another occasion, I walked to a supermarket one mile up from downtown, passing through the African American ring surrounding the center of New Haven. An older black man addressed me, “What are you doing here?” In both cases, I think, the policeman and the older black man were concerned for my safety. But this safety came with a high price: the rejection of nonconformity. Little everyday incidents like these can be instructive in ways unlike those of scholarly analysis. Apart from the disillusionment about freedom’s daily meaning in the U.S. of the 2000s, I also had to learn that the professional field of musicology in the U.S. did not embrace the idea I had cherished of Ives as a liberator from musical conservatism. Instead, Ives had been canonized into a fine but tamed composer of classical music. How that happened I will explore in this chapter. We will investigate three sides of Ives as he appears to the musicological community or subculture: the weird maverick, the radical modernist, and the conformist romantic. Because of the nature of Ives’s music, the “conformist romantic” image does not sell. For classical music audiences who love Beethoven and Mozart, Ives already sounds far too modern. However, it is exactly this third image – of the conformist – that the dominant line in Ives scholarship has embraced; this is because the core constituency of the discipline of musicology in the U.S. (before the arrival in the 1990s of the “new musicology”) has historically focused on the study of “masterworks.” But before I investigate in detail the cultural consequences of this institutional investment in a non-marketable image, and the reasons for this overinvestment by the subculture of scholarly musicology, I will briefly lay out the two other images – those of Ives as the maverick and Ives as the modernist.

The Sellable Maverick If the reader thinks it weird to find a chapter about classical music in a book that is otherwise concerned with popular music, I hasten to reassure 229

him or her that it will get even weirder, because we are dealing with Charles Ives and his reception in the subculture of U.S. musicology. The category “weird” I gratefully take (along with many other grateful adapters) from the title of Greil Marcus’s The Old, Weird America, in which he writes about the unsettling but seminal basement tapes of Bob Dylan. In the preface, Marcus quotes Malcolm Jones, a critic who considers the appropriateness of the term “weirdness” as it has been retrospectively applied to a lot of U.S. art since Marcus had first coined the usage in 1997: But except for maybe circus freaks and those African-Americans who wore blackface in minstrel shows – now that was strange – there’s nothing particularly weird about the cultural stuff that got ignored until the last half of the 20th century, unless you want to make the argument that Blind Blake is weirder than Charles Ives or that Howard Finster is stranger than Robert Rauschenberg. (xvi)

Ives is mentioned here in the august company of a blind black blues guitarist, an outsider religious folk artist, and a neo-Dadaist. Popular music scholarship has had fewer problems with the category “weird” than the classical music establishment. Alongside Marcus, popular music and popular music studies have embraced the idea of weirdness in other manifestations. These include a certain British repurposing of Derrida as “hauntology” (Fisher), but also a blanket term for experimentalism, a series of invented alternative histories of imaginary overlooked music of the past, or the digging up and subsequent necrophiliac celebration of obscure, forgotten labels, full of haphazardly produced and accidentally recorded or preserved outsider art (Petridis 19). The British journal Wire has specialized in the celebration of popular avant-garde music crossing the pop-classical divide. Ives’s Fourth Symphony occupies a slot in the journal’s list of the “100 Records that Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening).” Chris Blackford writes: Charles Ives (1874-1954) is now regarded as the father of American music, though during his lifetime his work was rarely played and usually misunderstood. His magnificent Fourth Symphony (1910-16) involves polytonality, polyrhythms, quarter-tones, aleatoric music, and the simultaneous playing of different idioms, achieving a stunning complexity in a work that is by turns nightmarish, phantasmagoric, nostalgic and triumphant. Popular tunes, hymns, ragtime rhythms, marching band themes,

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atonality and skewed romanticism jostle and collide or are delicately superimposed. And Ives hadn’t even heard any Stravinsky or Schoenberg. His principal influences were an imaginative and eccentric father, and the sights and sounds of his New England childhood. Seiji Ozawa’s DG recording with The Boston Symphony Orchestra effectively handles the myriad changes. Berio and The Beatles, Zappa and Zorn, plus countless tape collagists and samplists, have all followed in the pioneering footsteps of this great composer. CBl. (33-34)

A small group did, however, listen to the music and to the sound of money that can flow by using the term “weird,” or in Ives’s case, the term “maverick.” One can sell outsiders in classical music in the same way Wire sells and promotes popular music artists. A discrepancy between real weirdness and the commodification of a market category called “weirdness” is unavoidable in the process. It seems to be no coincidence that the “maverick” label was applied in the year 2000 to twenty-two American composers as a selling point for the “American Maverick” festival of the San Francisco Symphony under conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. As David C. Paul has pointed out, the category does not really mean that all of these composers wrote “weird” music, but rather includes individuals like modern music composers who did not have a faculty position in academe: It is a narrative that bifurcates the history of American classical music, valorizing those composers who have foregone the patronage of the university (particularly in the form of tenure appointments) and the styles of modernism that have flourished there. It is, in short, an antiestablishment narrative, though as the San Francisco Symphony’s “Maverick Festival” demonstrates, it has, ironically, found support from some of the most established musical institutions in the classical-music world. (208)

The lack of support and performance opportunity through academic sponsorship forced composers outside of the system to look for other ways to promote their music. A composer like John Cage, for example, found a huge following because he plugged himself as an exotic American into the German scene at the Darmstädter Musiktage, successfully getting published by a German imprint (Edition Peters). A divide between the “academic” composers and the “experimental” composers had already been spelled out via John Edmunds with the support of the West Coast 231

critic Peter Yates in 1959. Edmunds published two volumes about American composers and proposed a new classification system for composers: “We’ll avoid the invidious distinction between Independent-or-Experimental and Academic-or-Traditional simply by calling the two [bibliographies] Vol. I and Vol. II. It took me a month to think of this ruse” (Beal 2008, 665, fn. 28). Both volumes, Some Twentieth-Century Composers vol. 1 and 2, were later also distributed by the State Department to USIA libraries abroad. The divide between the two groups already manifested in the 1920s, when two different composers’ lobbies competed for legitimacy: on the one side we can find organizations like the nationally oriented Pro-Musica Society, the International Composers’ Guild and later the Pan American Association. On the other side we have the Euro-centric League of Composers, which featured works by Schoenberg and Stravinsky. American composers who started their studies in the 1920s and 1930s could distinguish themselves with a European pedigree after having studied abroad in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, helping them later become academic – not experimental – composers. Another split took place in New York between the “uptown” and “downtown” scenes: The uptowners enjoyed the benefits of mainstream credibility and institutional support, while the downtowners were forced back on their own resources, making a go of it by themselves or forging local alliances. (Paul 208)

The category of “experimentalists” gained new importance in the 1960s with what could be called the beginnings of a “radical” tradition in music. Edmunds even had the idea of initiating a Henry Cowell Award or an Ives Award for the “most controversial composer of the year” (Beal 2008, 661). Even though the concept of “experimental” had been around since the 1930s, had been renewed by Gilbert Chase in 1955, and was also used by Yates and Edwards, musical performances built around this “topic” remained exceptions. The group Tone Roads had a concert in 1965 that included music by Ives. Writing for the Wall Street Journal in 2004, Barbara Jepson refers to the reception of Ives during the hippie era thusly: “During the 1970s, Ives’s maverick status turned this wealthy New England Puritan into a countercultural icon.” The proponents of post-Cage music in the downtown scene started a festival in 1979 for avant-garde music that was 232

described by the composer Tom Johnson as a “coming-out celebration for music that had existed ‘on the fringes of official culture’” (Paul 213). In the 1980s, this yearly event started touring the country and, in the 1990s, the effects of this promotion could be seen in scholarship: David Nicholls published American Experimental Music in 1990 and, as David C. Paul points out, “Robert Morgan declared that Ives had the ‘voice of an authentic American maverick’” (215). When conductor Michael Tilson Thomas took over the San Francisco Symphony in the 1990s, he started to schedule so-called “maverick” concerts, culminating with the aforementioned “Maverick Festival” in 2000 and another tour in 2012. These proponents understood Ives as a modern “experimentalist” who belonged together in a row with Lou Harrison and John Cage, not as a composer caught between romanticism and modernism. However, as Ives’s sound retains traces of romanticism, especially in his first and second symphonies, the “maverick equals experimentalist” equation does not really add up. Paul, who does not hide his conviction that Ives was a solidly romantic composer, writes: “From a cynical standpoint, this eager readiness to confer the maverick mantle smacks of commercial opportunism” (218).

The Sellable Modernist Charles Ives worked his entire life as an insurance manager. As such, he is most famous for making a fortune out of buying up policies from small competitors who could not carry the risks. A procedure that later on was made illegal, this strategy made Ives rich. Ives revolutionized the insurance profession through such methods and through the introduction of clever advertising. In one ad, he appealed to the moral obligation of a family father to protect loved ones while invoking images of popular culture such as the game scores of football matches. Ives knew a lot about selling and promoting a product or service and was not naïve when it came to carefully gauging the possibilities of success and failure as a composer. In 1902, he had first tried to break through with his romantic composition, the cantata The Celestial Country. The hope of success with such a piece must have been inspired by the success of his Yale teacher, Horatio Parker, who had gotten his reputation with his oratorio Hora Novissima (1893). But Ives’s composition was denied any success. From that moment on, Ives “gave up music,” i.e., gave up 233

trying to have a successful professional career with mainstream compositions in the mainstream classical music scene. He committed himself to the business world, and composed freely as an avocation, without any monetary pressure attached to conform in order to be able to sell. However, when the opportunity came in the 1920s, Ives actively started to promote his own music in a new and very specific music market: musical modernism, or what was called at the time ultramodernism. In analogy to the contemporary wave of inventions in other fields like aviation in the early twentieth century, he promoted himself in this field as a “pioneer” and as having “invented” modern music techniques before the European composers Schoenberg and Stravinsky had even dreamed of them. Both the “pioneer” claim and the claim of being an ultramodernist had some core of truth, but at the same time, they were not as clear-cut as Ives depicted them. He did not belong to the new ultramodernist generation of Henry Cowell or Ruth Crawford Seeger, who composed in a fully atonal style. Ives had composed a more transitional kind of music – one with a romantic spirit and program but with a good amount of dissonances and formal ruptures. Apart from this “in-between” music, Ives had also composed more or less fully romantic pieces, as well as, later on, fully modernist ones. To take advantage of the widespread fascination with modernism in the 1920s, however, Ives depicted himself as a full-blown modernist. He didn’t rely on older-style compositions to compete in the market, regardless of the fact that he had composed many of them. From about 1905 to 1920, almost none of his compositions was performed in public. Of the pieces that did get performed, he only chose the most modern, like his second piano sonata, Concord, with which to address the public. In the Concord Sonata, Ives honored the transcendentalist tradition and its literary output. He dedicated each movement to one important person or family who had lived in Concord, Massachusetts, between 1840 and 1860. The movements are titled “Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” and “Thoreau.” He also wrote the Essays before a Sonata, which he published simultaneously at his own expense at Knickerbocker Press. He then sent hundreds of copies of both the music and the volume of essays to selected denizens of the American musical world as a free gift. Unfortunately, the Concord Sonata, published in 1920 (actually delivered in January of 1921, Sinclair, Catalogue, 194), did not see performance in the 1920s because it was considered too difficult. So, Ives started to compose 234

other new piano works such as the Quarter-Tone Pieces, which were premiered in 1925. In 1927, however, an older work of Ives received its premiere. This was the Fourth Symphony – or, more exactly, the first and second movement of this symphony. The symphony had a program: the first movement inquired about the meaning of life, and the three following movements gave different possible answers. The first movement used the hymn “Watchman, tell us of the night, what the signs of promise are.” The second movement followed the Hawthorne story “The Celestial Rail-road,” itself a parody of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The second movement actually used all the material related to the story of “The Celestial Railroad” which Ives had already put into the piano movement “Hawthorne.” For the symphony movement, Ives reassembled this material, added new material to it, and orchestrated it in such a way that the instruments did not just play the piano lines. Rather, he kept the piano score intact and layered more and more instrumental melodic lines over it. The third movement is a very conventional romantic fugue, and, according to the program notes, expresses ritualism. The fourth movement is the definitive answer to the questions of life, as it follows the melody of “Nearer, my God to Thee” and promises heavenly redemption at the end. The Fourth Symphony was a piece with which Ives could establish his “pioneer” status. From the evidence of the program notes, he had started to compose it in 1910. What the audience got to hear sounded highly modern – in accordance with the ultramodernist style. Ives claimed that he had not heard any note of Stravinsky before 1919 and none from Schoenberg before 1932 (Ives, Memos 138 and 27). With the Fourth Symphony, Ives could therefore claim to have predated Schoenberg and Stravinsky in the invention of modern music. But in this exposition, Ives did not fully stick to the truth. He had manipulated the actual facts involved in the history of the creation of this symphony. The Fourth had been one of his first works to have drawn some notice from an audience in the 1920s. It had been a crucial moment in Ives’s self-promotion as a modernist when the New York Philharmonic under conductor Eugene Goosens had performed it. The program notes for this performance praised Ives as a New England composer and indi-

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cated that he had finished the symphony around 1917. 3 In 1928, a piano version of the second movement of the symphony entitled The Celestial Railroad was premiered, and Ives stated that he had derived this version from the orchestrated movement. 4 It was only in 1994 that the musicologist Thomas M. Brodhead discovered that the piano manuscript for The Celestial Railroad was by no means a derivation from the symphony movement. It had instead been the starting point for composing and then orchestrating the later symphony movement. A look at the piano manuscript indicates that it was clearly annotated heavily with several instrumental lines – the lines that later became melodies of the orchestral instruments. It was also clear that Ives had composed this “version” of the “Hawthorne” material after 1921, because it included passages literally cut and pasted from the printed piano score of the Concord Sonata. Even long after his death, Ives had convinced the public (between 1927 and 1994) that the very modern second movement of his Fourth Symphony had been composed before 1917, while in truth it first found its fully modern form only after 1920. We can only speculate as to Ives’s reasons for this deception. He knew that Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had been performed in the U.S. for the first time in 1922, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in 1923. The Pierrot had had its premiere in Berlin in 1912 and the Rite in Paris in 1913. It seems clear that Ives did not want the audience of the Fourth Symphony to see him as just a follower of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. It is important 3

The program notes read: “This symphony, the fourth, was written for the most part in 1910 and completed about ten years ago” (Bellamann xxvi). Ives wrote in his Memos: “The fugue was written just before the entire thing was finished in 1916, but the last movement covers a good many years” (66). In a worklist Ives notes: “Fourth Symphony for large orchestra, 4 movements 1910-16” (164). 4 “The piano piece, Celestial Railroad, that Rovinsky played at concerts a few years ago, is an arrangement (and not any too good a one at that) for piano from parts of the “Hawthorne” movement of the Second Sonata, but mostly from the second movement of the Fourth Symphony (which was worked at about the same time and finished later when the last movement was made, winter 1913-14)” (Ives, Memos 82). With good will one could interpret this statement as a generalization of the composition process which was Second Sonata – Celestial Railroad (score sketch) – Fourth Symphony – Celestial Railroad (clear copy for piano). However, the way he tells the story it suggests that the second movement of the Fourth Symphony was finished around 1914.

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to reiterate here that he clearly was not, as he had already developed some of his techniques in the first decade of the twentieth century. However, the perception that he was derivative would have been the default if he had not predated the completion date of the score to 1916. Actually, such an insinuation – that Ives was not a composer of his own merit but rather was mimicking the European modernists – was made in 1931, when the Three Places in New England were performed in Europe. Ives commented wryly on the bad review he got from Henri Prunière: “He says that I know my Schoenberg – interesting information to me, as I have never heard nor seen a note of Schoenberg’s music. Then he says that I haven’t ‘applied the lessons as well as I might’” (Ives, Memos 27). Ives’s motivation for predating the score of the Fourth Symphony (and thereby risking a different sort of opprobrium) may well be found in the incredible arrogance of the European music scene and their prejudiced belief that no good music could come from the U.S., although the countermeasures he used are difficult to defend ethically. He needed to insist on his pioneer status in order not to be dismissed as merely inspired by or even derivative of European modernism.5 This move did not sit well with the musicologists, who later saw in Ives their hero or even their idol, a representative symbol of America’s equal validity alongside the European music scene. As I will point out later, it was actually not Brodhead’s article that stirred the original uproar about manipulation of the dating but an article by Maynard Solomon, an author of psychobiographies of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert (and cofounder of Vanguard Records, which signed The Weavers), published in 1987. It was not the loss of the pioneer status itself which bothered the Ives scholars but the possibility that Ives could have deliberately lied to posterity. To avoid the conclusion of a deliberate lie, Brodhead advanced an alternative hypothesis: until 1916, according to this interpretation, Ives used another orchestral movement, the lost Hawthorne Concerto, as the second movement of the symphony. He could therefore claim that he “finished” the symphony in 1916.6 5

Stravinsky actually had no problem in acknowledging that Ives had been the first to invent certain compositional techniques. For Stravinsky, it was, however, important what was done with these techniques, and in this regard, he considered Ives to be his inferior (Buchman 147). 6 Brodhead writes: “Ives does place the composition of the entire Fourth Symphony between 1910 and 1916, which contradicts our present findings. What then

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In 2008, the scholar Gayle Sherwood Magee summed up her conclusions regarding Ives’s revisions of his musical works: “If we accept this more fluid understanding of his [Ives’s] work and output, and that many of Ives’s works legitimately date from a span of several decades, then his later compositional activities can be seen as genuinely creative, rather than intentionally deceptive (Sherwood Magee 2008, 5). Sherwood Magee views the emergence of Ives’s Fourth Symphony as a story without any fundamental problems. She fully credits Brodhead’s view that the symphony had been finished (with the Hawthorne Concerto as the second movement) in 1916, and she fully subscribes to the idea that Ives changed or exchanged this movement with another “version” of the “Hawthorne” material (footnote 43 and 44, 210-11).7 However, these explanations do not eliminate the fact that Ives presented a different movement than the Hawthorne Concerto in the 1927 concert (scholars agree with Brodhead’s finding that Ives orchestrated the current second movement from a manuscript he assembled after 1920). Sherwood Magee’s explanation also does not take into consideration that the modernity of the second movement of Ives’s Fourth Symphony stems from its orchestration. Here, the truth of the claim that he composed this specific modern movement before 1917 is at stake. Furthermore, the existence of a Hawthorne Concerto is total speculation, an assumption that bases itself on only a few annotations on manuscripts. This possibility was actually denied by Ives himself. To the question raised by John Kirkpatrick about the existence of such an orchestrated “Hawthorne” movement as a predecessor to the piano sonata movement, Ives answered:

did Ives mean by this dating?” (410) and goes on “The Celestial Railroad seems to originate from another work in Ives’s ‘Men of Literature’ series, his ‘Hawthorne Piano Concerto’” (414). He concludes that Ives, “adopted the ‘Hawthorne Piano Concerto’ as the scherzo (second movement) of the symphony” (418). 7 Sherwood Magee additionally believes that in his Ives biography, Jan Swafford “strenuously defends Ives’s misdating of his work on the Fourth Symphony (from its actual date in the 1920s to the 1916 completion date) as an intentional lie” (Sherwood Magee 2008, footnote 43, 210). Swafford tried to explain Ives’s wrong dating not through a claim of pioneer status but rather as an office-related “lie”: Ives left the office in the early 1920s much earlier than his responsibility would have demanded to compose on the second movement of the Fourth Symphony (Swafford 342-45).

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You ask if Hawthorne is an arrangement from a score – No. […] But I was working on a Symphony about this time, and in the scherzo I put some of the Hawthorne movement in, mostly the parts having to do with The Celestial Railraod. Later on I made a short fantasy for piano from the symphony score, which had some of the Hawthorne. This piece, as I remember, didn’t seem quite satisfactory, and I have no copy. (Ives, Memos 204)

My own separate research has revealed that Ives “finished” his symphony as a three-movement piece in 1916. Each of the three movements was based on a hymn tune and also retained some of the more romantic sound and structure of hymn compositions. Only after 1920 did Ives add the highly modern second movement, at the same time changing the numbering of the old second and third movement to “III” and “IV.” 8 In my previous book on this subject, I wrote that from the numbering of the symphony movements, “one can deduct, that Ives first designed the symphony in three movements and inserted the ‘Hawthorne’-movement only at the beginning of the 1920s as a new second movement” (Gail 2009, vol. 1, 218, here transl. from German, cf. also 228, 230, 248). Other support for the three-movement theory can be found in an annotation Ives put on one of the title pages to the first movement. William Brooks describes the annotation as such: “Greinert copied 1st II / who gave it to Price / & 4th (partly[)] / just before the War 1917” (Ives, Symphony No. 4, Critical Edition, 159). Ives mentions only three, not four, movements which were copied before the U.S. joined into WWI. Indirect support for the threemovement idea can be found in Ives’s work list. Maynard Solomon writes:

8

James B. Sinclair, executive editor since 1985 of the complete edition of Charles Ives’s work, could still write in the critical edition of the symphony published in 2011: “By 1916 Ives felt that he had a four-movement symphony fully realized” (ix). He bases this speculation on the idea that there must have been another second movement before the orchestrated “Celestial Railroad” movement (here called “Comedy”) came in as the second movement. Sinclair’s position contradicts that of Wayne Shirley, who wrote in the same edition with regards to the source description to the fourth movement that an early score-sketch is “headed ‘III’ (i.e. last mvt. of an original 3-mvt. plan).” He dates this sketch, and with it the three-movement form, to “ca. 1915-16.”

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I believe that we now must seriously entertain the possibility that some of Ives’s major works were mainly, or even wholly, composed after 1920. In a letter of 4 July 1921 to Henry Bellamann, Ives listed his works as: two piano sonatas, “some early organ fugues, cantatas, etc; 4 violin sonatas; 3 symphonies; 2 suites for orchestra; 1 string quartet; and about 240 songs” (Charles Ives Papers, Music Library of Yale University, MSS 14/Box 27/1). […] [T]he most striking omissions, of course are of the fourth symphony, the second string quartet, […] including most of the ultramodern works on which Ives’s reputation was largely founded. (1989, 216)

Ives clearly hoped that Bellamann could arrange for performances of his works. The Fourth Symphony was not in a shape to be performed, because even for the three-movement form, Ives did not have usable ink copies. The first copyist was a German named Greinert who had been so disturbed by the news of the U.S. joining the war against Germany that he mislaid pages of Ives’s score and send the rest back wrongly. Ives then switched to the copyist Price, with whom he also was not happy, as Price silently “corrected” pitches he thought Ives had put down wrongly in the manuscript (cf. Ives, Memos 65). All these details matter here because most Ives scholars still do not want to believe that Ives deliberately deceived the public. They still hold to the idea that there are logical ways to establish that Ives “composed” the second movement before 1917. My own findings were published in a German language dissertation in 2009. However, when I tried to publish them in the U.S. in article form, the anonymous reviewers commented that my findings came close to being a “conspiracy theory.”9 It is not for me here to debate this, only to note that my own scholarship and its reception are now part of the story I tell. 9

The unknown referee wrote: “The author wants to persuade readers that we should interpret Ives’s remarks about his work on the Fourth Symphony as part of an elaborate lie, the equivalent of a musicological Ponzi scheme. While this is theoretically possible, readers of JAMS deserve reliable evidence to document conspiracy theories. […] The only way I can think of to adopt the view of the thesis presented in the abstract and throughout the essay that ‘there was no scherzo movement at all in this symphony before the 1920s,’ would be to fail to recognize the extensive overlapping content between the so-called ‘new movement’ and its predecessor, the ‘Hawthorne’ movement from ‘Concord’ (connections clearly shown by Brodhead and others). […] Of course, I would never accuse the author of a ‘systematic pattern of falsification’ (the accusation voiced by Maynard

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Later in this chapter, I will examine more closely some possible reasons why the community of Ives scholars is so reluctant to accept such new findings. For now, it suffices to say that Ives knew what promotion entailed in the American cultural context of his time. He also knew what he needed to do to appear as a pioneer in the ultramodernist scene of the 1920s. A key factor here was the relative unimportance of money or remuneration in Ives’s calculations. It was reputation that he was after, and he was not averse to using his own money to fund the publication of his music and even pay for the orchestras required to perform it. He had become a member of the Pro-Musica Society, which organized the premiere of the two movements of the Fourth Symphony while Ives had functioned as a patron of the association (cf. Sherwood Magee 2008, 153). In a similar way, Ives funded Henry Cowell’s publication, the New Music Quarterly. It is no surprise that Cowell published several of Ives’s compositions in this series. Apart from his music and his insurance career, Ives’s biggest achievement was his role as a patron of modern music in the U.S., donating and distributing a lot of his own money for this cause. The results, however, were not encouraging. The fashion for ultramodernism had gradually died away in the early 1930s. Suddenly, Ives’s compositions were being judged according to new, less congenial standards that the next generation of American composers had learned under the guidance of Nadia Boulanger in Paris: originality certainly, but also inner material logic firmly linked to neoclassical style.

The Classical Music Cult I would like to take a closer look at the uncommercial side of Ives’s reception. I am particularly interested in the cult-like feeling that surrounds the classical music scene in general, and Ives’s audience in particular. What effect does this cult-like interpretive community have on the reception of Ives among professional musicologists? Solomon in his controversial 1987 JAMS essay towards Ives’s published statements and repeated in the present essay), but I do think he or she fails to present persuasive evidence or arguments pertaining to Ives sources, compositional process, chronology, or reception.” To a critique of peer reviews through gatekeepers cf. Shatz.

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We are used to the notion that pop-music fans are members of cults; many such people see their own subcultural values represented in their preferred rock band or rap crew, and use pop music for building their own identity at various stages of their life cycles. We do not normally think about classical music that way; however, the same behavior patterns found in pop fandom also exist in classical music, and fans of the latter can (often) actually be more extreme in their fan culture than those of the former. I found a discussion in a wiki forum about the question of whether something like a classical music subculture exists. One contributor responded: “You don’t recognize CM [classical music] fans as a subculture, just because they [do] not wear t-shirts with Mozart, Monteverdi, Vivaldi faces on them or don’t make, say, Beethoven-like-hairstyle?” (Wiki Talk: List of Subcultures). In Who Needs Classical Music? Julian Johnson writes: We use music as a medium for self-articulation, as a way of defining ourselves, and we invest in it in profoundly personal ways. The music we identify with often becomes inseparable from ourselves. For this reason, we often identify in an intensely personal manner with certain performers or composers. […] Above all, we invest it with a quality of “truth” or “authenticity” that hinges on that of the composer or performer who delivers it: they speak truthfully for us, we believe, because they speak truthfully from themselves. (41) Johnson points out that cultural analysis often focuses on the class and power relations at play in classical music, but this analysis overlooks the subjective effect of the experience of hearing the music itself. Such analysis often does not acknowledge that most musicologists are also music lovers and have chosen their topics according to their own musical preferences. Perhaps more so than in many other fields of scholarship, many musicologists are also heavily emotionally invested in their own personal feelings about the outcome and reception of their research. Musicology as a scholarly field emerged out of music journalism about the great “masterworks,” spearheaded by the bourgeois interpretive community that developed around the rituals of Beethoven admiration and the scholarly editing of J.S. Bach’s work. In biographies written by such people, homage was paid by painstakingly tracking every moment of a composer’s life. There was not much room for critical reflection about the artist – or about his admirers themselves – in this kind of cult. This tradition of passionately adoring composers as geniuses emerged out of the life of the music world itself in historical time, and was not just a 242

retrospective invention of scholars. At the beginning of the discipline, the production of musicological knowledge was in sync with the sentiment and affect of the broad middle sections of the wider society. The quasireligious nature of this music cult rested on the solid foundations of early 19th century German Romanticism. Peter van der Merwe writes: [W]e see how all-important the German contribution was, not merely to Romanticism, but to “classical music” in general. […] Throughout that century and a half, the German-speaking world was haunted by the ideal of the Kunstreligion in which art, and especially music, attained a religious value. Exported with enormous success, this art-religion has swollen to absurd proportions. All over the Western world, it has acquired its own temples, seminaries, synods, sects, tithes, sacred texts, priests, saints, martyrs, theologians, and heretics, becoming, in the process, more and more a substitute for actual religion. (342)

Van der Merwe sees this cult extending into today’s classical music community: [E]ven today musicology retains a devotional aura. Criticism and analysis are forms of homage; the works of the great masters are sacred texts, approached in a spirit of exegetical piety; the masters themselves transcend the merely human. At the very least, musicologists see themselves as concerned with only the best music. As one of them [Kenneth J. Levy] has put it: “there are, at bottom, just two tests for the worthiness of a musicological undertaking: (1) that it be concerned with first-class music; and (2) that it be concerned with a first-class problem.” (2)

This specific form of musicology, which is concerned with musical style and form, only deals with canonical works, “first-class music,” and very much influenced the discourse of the Ives reception and the reactions towards it by musicologists. (The limits of the canon, of course, were never completely stable.) The classical music cult influenced how the emerging discipline of musicology has articulated its norms and approaches. Until today, the cult of art-as-religion has retained a set of defining features from the cultural environment of the period in which it was born, the early 19th century. Then, it had been a way for the emerging bourgeoisie to establish themselves as a cultural force against the aristocrats and their tradition of courtly patronage of music. As a member of the bourgeoisie, one was a 243

solid member of a rising urban community establishment that underwrote and then elevated artists to godlike figures, untainted by moral or material failures, as part of an effort to restrict access to this middle class on grounds of taste and culture. 10 If we were to speak of only one classical music cult hero figure, it would be Beethoven. Through his work in particular, or rather, through cultist interpretations of his art, the idea of the sublime was fused with the experience of music: Music is being accorded powers at once transcendent and transformative: it hovers far above the ordinary world, yet it also reaches down and alters the course of human events […]. “We ourselves appear to become mythologized in the process of identifying with this music,” the scholar Scott Burnham has written. (A. Ross)11

In this subculture’s particular kind of logic, admirers participate in the ability of the worshipped musical genius to become immortal. Maynard Solomon, in an article about Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, points out that the investment in immortality is a big part of why biographies of famous composers frequently leave out some very “human” aspects of the heroes: Potentially, taboo attaches to almost any object that partakes of the mysterious or the holy, but in biographical studies it gravitates always to the dominant issues of personal knowledge: birth, parentage, illegitimacy, love, sexuality, and death. And beyond these, to questions of morality and innocence: taboo surrounds every effort to demonstrate that human beings are destructive and deeply sexual creatures. (2007, 14)

The taboo “sets the boundaries that separate the sacred from the profane” (ibid. 13). Two taboos that Solomon mentions also will concern us with Ives. The “sexual” taboo encompasses the mechanisms in which scholars 10

This, being stuck in the moment the aesthetic movement was created, can also be seen in other music genres: Jazz, for example, seems in its image to be stuck in an infinite 1930s and rock with its rebel aesthetics is stuck in a 1950’s world. They all are reflecting the emotional state of the time in which they were created. 11 In his article in the New Yorker from 2014 Alex Ross points out that the new Beethoven biography from 2014 by Jan Swafford – an author and composer who had written a biography about Ives – stays with an admiring approach, already obvious in the title chosen: Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph.

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justify overlooking or classifying as “irrelevant” any evidence that points towards a non-normative sexuality in the hero figure (as defined by the prevailing civic ideology). Solomon was the first to look carefully at documents in relation to Schubert, finding several indications that point towards the high probability that Schubert was bi- or homosexual. He states: All in all, the evidence pointed to the strong likelihood, bordering on certainty, that Schubert’s sexual orientation was an unconventional one and suggested that he was a central figure in a Viennese circle of creative artists and nonconformists who were open to participation in the full range of sexual expression, including homosexuality. (11-12)

The other taboo centers on issues of honesty or personal and professional integrity. Scholars are reluctant to face that a hero figure had lied. To take one example, Solomon focuses on one of Mozart’s trips to Berlin, where Mozart claimed he had been invited by the King of Prussia. As it turns out, Mozart went there but did not get an audience. Solomon states that Mozart “most certainly invented the story” (8) of the invitation to Potsdam and instead went there on his own “on spec,” as a later artist might have termed it, to see what opportunities he himself could turn up. Solomon uses the examples of Mozart and Schubert to explain scholarly evasions in biographical writing to an audience of psychologists (he published the article in American Imago). What he does not mention in this context is that we are dealing here not with biographies of common people. When we deal with “gods” or “demi-gods,” i.e., people whose public biographies have taken on something of an independent life of their own as subjects on which others have invested the building of their own careers, the issue of the taboo becomes even more crucial. In such cases, the cult figure needs to be protected, for the future of the classical music cult as a whole is at stake.12 12

It is interesting that Solomon does not reflect about the classical music cult per se. Perhaps he himself was – regardless of his deconstruction of hero-figures – nevertheless invested in perceiving classical music (if not the composer) as “sacred.” In a similar way, it is noticeable that the book The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking by Alessandra Comini is making myth itself by including the early reception history without critical assessment. Just by repeating stories of how people adored Beethoven, like Gustav Mahler for example, she makes this book also popular within the “cult” community.

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German musicology since the late 19th century found ways to separate the perceived transcendence of the music and its religious status from the person of the composer. Discussion of the personal circumstances of the composer and his life became off limits for the profession. The idea behind that turn was that music was “absolute music,” that it did not reflect any personal trait of the composer himself, who was essentially only a conduit of phenomena that were not part of his personhood. Music had to stand alone, without any programmatic, i.e., thematic or narrative content. Even if the music tended on occasion to revert to the programmatic, like Beethoven’s Eroica or Pastorale, the work was judged not according to its program, but according to its purely musical inner structure. The music was judged “good” only if it built its formal development on a logical extension of the musical material. In contrast to the situation in Europe, musicology in the U.S. was much more willing to see a connection between the composer and his music – as long as the image of the hero was not tainted by any connection to possible negative elements of his own biography. Solomon’s findings regarding Beethoven – that Beethoven deliberately gave us a wrong birthdate, that he falsely claimed to have been an illegitimate child of nobility, the equally spurious claim to be in love with a married woman (the famous “immortal beloved”) – did not cause a big stir in the scholarly community, because Beethoven’s music was securely placed in the pantheon. In any case, the German-dominated scholarship on him did not place importance on biographical information not related to the music. The case of Schubert to give a contrasting example, was slightly different, because his position in the bourgeois pantheon was not that secure; next to Beethoven, he was a lesser demi-god.13 With regards to Ives, Solomon pointed out in the article Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity (1987) that Ives deliberately predated some of his works and gave wrong statements in his autobiography. This finding caused problems for the scholars who had barely managed to make 13

Solomon’s revelation that Schubert had most likely been gay had not only caused headlines in leading newspapers, it had also stirred up the defenders of Schubert’s “honor.” Philip Brett writes in an encyclopedia about Gay Histories and Cultures in the entry to Schubert: “Gay scholars held their peace, realizing how great were the stakes of the ‘classical music’ canon in transcendence, autonomy, and (therefore) compulsory heterosexuality. Middlebrow culture, however, has begun to accept the queer Schubert” (1200-01).

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Ives canonical in the years before.14 For them, the possibility that Ives, the putative victim who had been ignored by history in the years before his elevation into the pantheon, would suddenly turn out to have deceived us was very problematic. Many scholars were not interested in the “real” persona of Ives but rather in a reified, authentic victim-hero figure. Solomon’s (and later Stuart Feder’s) presentations of Ives as a struggling and imperfect human being actually make the composer, in my considered opinion, actually more sympathetic. They sought psychological explanations for Ives’s “flaws,” seeing in the early death of his father a major factor in the development of his character and identity.

Ives: A Musical Walt Whitman? Charles Ives composed four symphonies. All are full of melodic lines from a couple of hundred songs. The majority of these songs and melodies comes from various strands of the Protestant tradition; a smaller number comes from the various traditions of American popular song of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They range from “Down in the Cornfield” to “Nearer, my God to Thee,” from “The Camptown Races” to “Ye Christian Heroes go Proclaim.” His orchestral sets dealt with programmatic ideas. The Holiday Symphony presents in four movements four American holidays from the four seasons (Washington’s Birthday, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving).15 Three Places in New England features: the monument by Augustus St. Gauden in Boston commemorating a fighting African American regiment in the Civil War; Putnam’s Camp,

14

Anne C. Shreffler writes: “[T]he repertory has been extended at both ends: wide swaths of eighteen-century music (Handel operas are the most notable example) and twentieth-century music (by composers including Shostakovich, Ives, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Britten, and Bartok) have entered the standard repertory, while the music of Dukas, Massenet, Borodin, Delius, and Delibes does not enjoy the respect it used to” (612 in German language, here English version taken from unpublished Web version, 7). 15 The Holiday Symphony is really a national symbol, because only after the Civil War the two Holidays Decoration Day (today known as Memorial Day) and Thanksgiving became “national” holidays, next to Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday (today known as President’s Day).

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a memorial to the Revolutionary War leader Israel Putnam; and the Housatonic River at Stockbridge, a picturesque Berkshire town. Ives also quoted previous classical music; the three-note motif from Beethoven’s fifth symphony is a leading motive in the Concord Sonata. With a modernist approach to coloring that was nevertheless also evocative of the trompe l’œil technique in painting, and with the structure of his pieces drawing from literary ways of organizing material (Emerson’s associative free speech, Hawthorne’s little helter-skelter stories) Ives defined a place in music for a new, uniquely American expressivity. Deeply rooted in New England traditions of transcendental spiritualism and the social gospel, it was a mode of conveying the emotions and narrating the woe of the traumatic Civil War, and linking this to a future story leading up to world salvation and peace through Christianity. The First World War must have shaken this belief in progress fundamentally. Considering their different generational positions, it is possible to accord Ives a similar position in music history as that occupied by Walt Whitman in literature if we take into account a certain “delay,” often observable in the reaction of the world of music to wider cultural trends. Ives and Whitman can both be understood as reflecting the desire to create an American art rooted in the transcendentalist tradition. There are other grounds for seeing such an affinity. The nineteenth century saw Europeanstyle romantic music compositions achieve great popularity in the U.S. Most of it was non-programmatic music that dispensed with a musical storyline. At first inspection, it is therefore very difficult to see anything unmistakably “American” in such compositions themselves. However, even when the sound was internally indistinguishable from European pieces, there was always the possibility for a composer to make his work “American” through the explicit message of the external program structure. The composer William Henry Fry tried this in his Victory Symphony, dedicated to the end of the Civil War. The movements resembled peace, struggle, and triumph (A. Block 114). But even then, the program was vague and the means to reaching it was a palette of romantic sound textures that could not be easily interpreted as “typically” American. The composers of the decades immediately before Ives had conducted a debate about how to create an “American” identity in music, either through the personal background of the composer himself or through a new, American sound. Finally, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák received a commission to go over to New 248

York to help Americans create their own national identity in music. Coming from a context of efforts by various nationalities of Austria-Hungary to assert their identities against that empire’s German and Magyar elite, Dvořák suggested doing for American music what he and Bědrich Smetana had done in asserting a “Bohemian” (meaning Slavic/Czech, not German) identity through music. Jean Sibelius had done this for Finland, Edvard Grieg for Norway, Carl Nielsen for Denmark, and Kurt Attaberg, Wilhelm Stenhammer, Hugo Alfvén and Wilhelm Peterson-Berger for Sweden. During his stint in New York as director of the National Conservatory of Music, from 1891 to 1895, Dvořák urged the Americans to build their national music on the foundation of the country’s “folk songs.” As the “songcatcher” movement would only discover the white Appalachian “folk song” tradition in the 1920s, Dvořák still thought that the coming tradition of representative U.S. national art music should be built on either African American songs or songs of the Native Americans. Harry T. Burleigh, an African American singer, sang spirituals for Dvořák on which the latter built his New World Symphony in 1893. Dvořák only used the melodic patterns of the spirituals; the result did not sound particularly evocative of a specifically African American experience anymore. Given the racial attitudes of the white mainstream, the idea of taking motifs or melodies of “Negro” songs to represent the nation did not gain much support, and most composers interested in this issue tried working with Native American melodies. These composers who tried to create music expressing an American national identity via Native songs are today called the Indianists. They even founded their own publishing outlet, the WaWan Press. Their style of composing however, remained essentially European-Romantic. The composer Dudley Buck thus stands alone among Ives’s predecessors in his use of white “popular” music (instead of the then still-inaccessible white “folk” music). Even as early as the 1860s, Buck had composed organ pieces with quotations of Civil War songs. As organs were installed in concert halls, such concerts could attract a huge number of people, becoming essentially propaganda events. Organists in churches were used to creating improvised music based on melodies from Protestant hymn tunes; it required just one step out of the church or the barracks to mobilize these traditions as a means to create an American national music.

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Ives tried to create American music with all the means he had at hand. He did not only use tunes from Protestant hymns, he also changed the musical style from romantic to modern. He used American topics to shape the programmatic element of his music’s conception, and looked to literature to create new and very unique compositional forms. Ives, however, never explicitly said that he had set out to create an American identity through music. Music history has obligingly not ranked Ives among the composers who have tried to do so. So, all we have is indirect proof. 16 Ives claimed that the embrace of the local would lead to the national, which would then lead to the universal: Some say “Why choose local authors for a reason for music? – people will say you are provincial. Why the local (which is national, and not universal and cosmic)?” I say “O Hell!” to this label monger! If a man is born in a sewer, he smells it and of it – (but he may be nearer a spiritual fragrance than the mayor). God lives somewhere in the Heavens – but ain’t he universal? – Emerson lives in Massachusetts – and he’s as universal as any writer, probably more so. (Memos 77)17

However, he also stated in the Essays Before a Sonata that it was more important to convey a more abstract sense of the American spirit, than to stick by a commitment to any particular choice of form, like the African American or Native melodies: If local color is a natural part (that is, a part of substance), the art-effort cannot help but show its color – and it will be a true color, no matter how colored. […] A true love of country is likely to be so big that it will embrace the virtue one sees in other countries, and in the same breath, so to speak. A composer born in America, but who has not been interested in the “cause of the Freedmen,” may be so interested in “negro melodies” that he writes a symphony over them. He is conscious (perhaps only 16

Ives, of course, knew about Dvořák’s attempt to create that national music, and it seems interesting that Ives used the same song title for one of his own songs as Dvořák had used in 1880: “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Ives, however, also adds to his collection of 114 Songs, published in 1922, “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” 17 In the Essays, Ives writes that the “Hawthorne” movement depicts “something personal, which tries to be ‘national’ suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at midnight” (42).

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subconscious) that he wishes it to be “American music.” […] In other words, if this composer isn’t as deeply interested in the ‘cause’ as Wendell Phillips was, when he fought his way through that anti-abolitionist crowd at Faneuil Hall, his music is liable to be less American than he wishes. […] Again, if a man finds that the cadences of an Apache war-dance come nearest to his soul – provided he has taken pains to know enough other cadences, for eclecticism is part of his duty; […] let him assimilate whatever he finds highest of the Indian ideal […] if he is confident that they have a part in his spiritual consciousness. (78-80)

He then goes on to describe himself: The man “born down to Babbitt’s Corner’s” may find a deep appeal in the simple but acute Gospel hymns of the New England “camp meetin’” of a generation or so ago. He finds in them – some of them – a vigor, a depth of feeling, a natural-soil rhythm, a sincerity – emphatic but inartistic – which, in spite of a vociferous sentimentality, carries him nearer the ‘Christ of the people’ than does the Te Deum of the greatest cathedral. … If his music can but catch that spirit by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near his ideal – and it will be American, too – perhaps nearer so than that of the devotee of Indian or negro melody. In other words, if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the universal color, it is a divine quality. (80-81)

Ives’s interest in spirituality spurred his effort to create an American identity (and not just an American music) out of transcendentalism; his was an America based on moral values and tradition. For Ives, transcendentalism was both a path to the national and to the universal. The symbols of Christianity, the Western expression of an urge to transcendence, would help to achieve world peace in a Western-dominated era. It would seem to be no coincidence that in 1911, the year the first World Missionary Congress took place, Ives used the following lines in his Fourth Symphony: From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand; Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand: From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain, They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

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This goes on further: “Salvation! O Salvation! The joyful sound proclaim, ’Till earth’s remotest nation has learned Messiah’s Name.” The world’s fulfillment was still dependent on the success of the imperialist attitudes inherent in these thoughts and songs, although on the surface they were ostensibly more about a mix of desire for world peace and American pride in the country’s own freedom struggle.18 To further clarify the different ways in which Ives tried to make his music “American,” I will examine closer two related works, the Fourth Symphony and the Concord Sonata. Ives composed his signature piece, the Concord Sonata, sometime in the 1910s and finished it shortly before publication in 1920.19 But it is not only the sonata that Ives published, he simultaneously published the Essays. In these essays, Ives explains not only his aesthetics, but also describes the aspects of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau that he found most inspiring and put into sound. In the writings, as in the music itself, Ives was already trying to mimic or

18

Ives writes: “There are communities – now partly vanished, but cherished and sacred – scattered throughout this world of ours, in which freedom of thought and soul, and even of body, have been fought for. And we believe that there ever lives in that part of the over-soul native to them the thoughts which these freedomstruggles have inspired. America is not too young to have its divinities, and its place-legends. Many of those ‘Transcendent Thoughts’ and ‘Visions’ which had their birth beneath our Concord elms – messages that have brought salvation to many listening souls throughout the world – are still growing day by day to greater and greater beauty – are still showing clearer and clearer man’s way to God!’” (Essays 101). Ives refers here to the American Revolution, which started in Concord with its Minute Men, as much as he refers to the transcendentalists and a general idea of freedom and democracy for the entire world, following the American example. 19 When J. Peter Burkholder in Charles Ives: The Ideas behind the Music tries to prove that Ives was not influenced by transcendentalism and was steeped in late Victorian thought (according to the readings of books in the evenings together with his wife Harmony), one has to however concede that sometime in the 1910s Ives turned deliberately towards transcendentalism – otherwise he would have not composed the Concord Sonata and would not have rushed to publish it by himself with his own money after a heart attack in 1918 if that piece would not have been important for him. Burkholder has a certain motivation to declare Ives detached from transcendentalism as he wants to prove that the music has merit in itself, and is not just interesting because of an extra-musical transcendentalist program.

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express the style or the personality of the inspirational individuals in question.20 In neither the Emerson or Thoreau movements are there any quotations or attempts to picture any particular essay or saying or philosophic part. They try rather to reflect the underlying definite and indefinite things in the authors’ characters and works – or, as suggested in the preface, but composite pictures, or an impression. But the Hawthorne and Alcott movements try to suggest something in the tales, incidents, or more definite characteristics of the authors. For instance, the Alcott piece tries to catch something of old man Alcott’s – the great talker’s – sonorous thought. (Memos 199)

However, the deployment and later publication of a program introduced a certain problem. Listeners could take the program so literally that they would not focus on the music any more as music, but only try to find the meaning of the program. Ives therefore toned down the descriptiveness of the Concord Sonata’s program in his later writings (cf. G. Block 66). Already in the choice of topic, Ives had made his program explicitly American. Aaron Copland would try to do the same thing by choosing a statesman in his Lincoln Portrait. Ives however chose not a specific person but a particular New England intellectual and literary tradition as the bearer of an American identity. What also made Ives’s realization of the program different from romantic composers was his use of literature as a model of how to create a new composing style and form. He would reproduce literary effects with musical means. In the Essays, Ives describes the content and style (Ives uses the words “substance” and “manner”) of the writers. He describes Emerson, for example, as a deep and spiritual thinker. Ives tries to depict this quality of spiritual depth in his composition by using dissonant chords and employing the Beethoven-Fate-motif, 20

Ives writes: “And as I tried to infer in the book, in various places, that Emerson, Thoreau especially, and the others perhaps less so, weren’t static, rule-making, do-as I’m-told professors, – to me their thoughts, substance, and inspiration change and grow, rise to this mountain, then to that, as the years go on through time to the Eternities. It was the attempt to catch this, to give one man’s impression, reflected as it might be through sounds – inadequate enough probably to others – but not to let the music get the best of it, of them or the ideals. If the music is just taken as such, and by itself, it shouldn’t mean the right something, or anything much” (Memos 191-92).

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reinterpreting it in his writings as the motif that will open the door to spiritual secrets. He interprets Emerson’s “manner” – the way the author wrote or the rhetoric manner in which he gave talks – as a very free-form mode of expression. Ives writes in the Essays about Emerson: “Read where you will, each sentence seems not to point to the next but to the undercurrent of all” (15). Ives observed that when Emerson gave a talk to a congregation, he would improvise the elements of his speech – not caring if he expressed one or the other idea first, and never exactly the same from lecture to lecture. Ives writes about the Emerson movement: The music, in its playing as well as in its substance, should have some of Emerson’s freedom in action and thought – of the explorer “taking the ultimate of today as the first of tomorrow’s new series.” It is said that Emerson seldom gave any of his lectures in exactly the same way, and that the published essays were not kept too literally. Sometime in the 1850s my grandmother heard Emerson lecture on the New England Reformers. I remember her saying that she was startled (perhaps somewhat put out) to find that the printed text, which she knew almost by heart, was hardly more than an outline in his lecture. (Memos 201)

One can already anticipate what this would mean for the music if a composer allowed ideas to switch their places freely in a piece. This goes fully against an “ideal” of logical development of musical-thematic pieces toward a resolution. Ives took Emerson as a fellow outsider: “If Emerson’s manner is not always beautiful in accordance with accepted standards, why not accept a few other standards?” (Essays 24). Ives took Emerson’s commitment to stylistic and thematic freedom seriously, as can be seen in the many different possible versions he put out for the Emerson-based musical material from the initial Concord Sonata movement onward, and in the so-called Four Transcriptions from Emerson and his own recordings of it.21 In doing so, Ives invented a new musical form, one that did not follow the logic of the formal compositional elements, but rather the logic of different rhetorical styles.

21

Ives writes: “It’s a peculiar experience and, I must admit, a stimulating and agreeable one that I’ve had with this Emerson music. It may have something to do with the feeling I have about Emerson, for every time I read him I seem to get a new angle of thought and feeling and experience from him” (Memos 79).

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Ives might have thought that this shift was necessary to create a “new” American style of composing – but it would not set a new norm. Instead, it meant that every piece of music would have to create its own appropriate musical form, according to the content it wanted to express. 22 In using an individual form for a piece to convey a vital part of its meaning, Ives enhanced the ability of music to represent “content” – something that is very difficult to do with something that does not use words. For the “Hawthorne” movement, Ives decided to depict the “manner” rather than the “substance” of Hawthorne. He decided to invoke many of Hawthorne’s moral stories and iconic imagery in these stories: kids sliding in the snow, the devil riding the Celestial Railroad, the scarecrow that comes to life and realizes that it has a pumpkin for a head, etc. (program written 1913, Ives, Memos 186-88 and in the Essays 42). He connects the little episodic segments with a ragtime-like musical figure, symbolizing the train from the Celestial Railroad.23 It is not just the stories that Ives is depicting here, but also the literary style: many shorter ideas, wildly 22

For many other pieces Ives still kept ideas of classical form (of the idea of progressive form of romanticism and the idea of architectonic form from neoclassicism) and manipulated them only slightly. As Burkholder has pointed out in All Made of Tunes, Ives, for example, did not start with the presentation of two opposite themes that would become ameliorated to each other in a development and at the end get presented in a resolved way – as in a sonata form of a classical symphony. Ives would start directly with the development, bringing the clean statement of the form actually at the ending. Burkholder calls another Ivesian form a “cumulative” form, one in which more and more things come together at the end (138). Burkholder points out these new forms and argues that these work in a purely musical way, without needing an extra-musical “program” to explain them. He declares these procedures as fully coherent with the romantic tradition in art music. However, “breaking the form” is considered a no-go in the teachings of musicology for the “quality” of an artwork in romanticism and modernism. 23 In Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Rail-road,” the sinners don’t walk any more with their burden through life – like the figure of Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – but they ride with the much more comfortable train to the heavenly Jerusalem. They get their pay-back when they board the ferry over the river Jordan. They realize that the devil had been running the train and the ferry sinks – and Hawthorne has the protagonist waking up from a dream. Ives writes in the Essays: “Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne, either in words or music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do with the influence of sin upon the conscience” (41).

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thrown together, expressing fantastic realms. Ives never directly stated that his music followed the structure of Hawthorne’s writing, but evidence can show this to be the case. At the beginning of the Essays one sentence follows the other, connected through similar words and questions marks, which make the reader expect an endless row of sentences: How far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms of music (in sound, if you like) the value of anything, material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, which is usually expressed in terms other than music? How far afield can music go and keep honest as well as reasonable or artistic? Is it a matter limited only by the composer’s power of expressing what lies in his subjective or objective consciousness? Or is it limited by any limitations of the composer? Can a tune literally represent a stone wall […]? Can it be done by anything sort of an act of mesmerism […]? Does the extreme materializing of music appeal strongly to anyone except to those without a sense of humor or, rather, with a sense of humor? […] Does the success of program music depend more upon the program than upon the music? If it does, what is the use of the music? If it does not, what is the use of the program? (3) 24

In the “Hawthorne” movement of the Fourth Symphony, Ives refines this additive approach further. In the movement, he lines up fifty little passages – each from two to eight measures in length – one after the other, like pearls on a necklace. Each passage contains a hymn or song line from a selection of over thirty songs. The song fragments are tonal melodies, which Ives interrupts in the middle of the melody to switch to a new melody. The collision points are resolved in the following way: if the first melody ends on a certain pitch, the next melody will start a half-step higher or lower. With that technique Ives can add endless passages, one following the other not because of material logic, but because of the expectation of the listener, who expects the ending of the first phrase, which 24

Cf. Mehring’s findings in regards to Ives’s literary writing style and the style of the transcendentalists (esp. 286 and 290-92).

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is then substituted with the beginning of a new phrase, and so on (cf. Gail 2009, 373-74). These examples might suffice to show that Ives worked to define an “American” identity in music, parallel to Walt Whitman’s efforts in literature. Both men came from a cultural tradition that emphasized spirituality and not materialism and both used transcendentalism to create a “new” style in their respective fields, a style positioned between transcendentalism and realism. Whitman had stayed with a romantic poetry form but used the content for expressing a new American identity. Ives, coming later, also used the newer language of dissonance and transgressed against the traditional way musical form was understood in order to achieve his aesthetic and programmatic goals. Why then did Ives never inhabit the revered position Whitman came to occupy in American culture? The answer is complicated, because for some constituencies, Ives indeed became the “Father of American Music.” Official American propaganda, in particular, made a tactical decision to instrumentalize Ives as a means for promoting Americanism abroad during the Cold War. However, the discipline of musicology itself remained highly critical and extremely reluctant to declare Ives canonical.

The Ives Cult Charles Ives and his music seem to be particularly prone to serve as catalysts for attracting cult-like phenomena, for the simple reason that he has always been considered an outsider in the world of music. 25 Regardless of the promotion of Ives as a national hero during the Cold War, in the worlds of music criticism, performance, audience culture, and especially academic musicology, Ives was not taken as a serious composer. This rejection stemmed from a strain of reception started by the composer Elliott Carter, who believed that Ives had written “bad” music.

25

To the concept of outsider or naïve music see Chusid. Leonard Bernstein called Ives an “authentic primitive” (liner notes Charles Ives, Symphony No. 2, CD) and likened him to the folk artist Anna Marie Robertson Moses, aka “Grandma Moses” in the program notes to the premiere of the Second Symphony in 1951. For Ives devotees who don’t want to see Ives in the maverick category this comparison sounds like an insult (cf. Joe Horowitz).

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Any evaluation of Carter’s position needs to set him alongside the views of four other prominent figures in the world of Ives reception who became Ives-“promoters” – the pianist John Kirkpatrick, and three successive presidents of the Ives Society; H. Wiley Hitchcock, J. Peter Burkholder and Gayle Sherwood Magee. Burkholder’s dissertation was perhaps the one single intervention most responsible for making Ives part of the modern canon in the 1980s. Once Ives had achieved this insider role, the position needed to be protected. It was mainly Sherwood Magee who stood up for such a defense. The particular strain of Ives reception that I here label the Ives cult has tried to defend Ives from many of the negative implications of the “outsider” label that has gotten attached to him: that Ives had not been a trained academic composer, that he lacked the proper skills for standard European music, that he was psychologically unstable and had some moral flaws. By the conventions of traditional musicology, scholars of American music are by themselves understood as outsiders, working outside the mainstream of European classical music. However, such scholars tried hard to get accepted by such mainstream. At the risk of overly broad generalization, it is interesting to note that many of them come from, or work in, the Midwest and other interior regions of the country, and not from areas of the U.S. historically most associated with European influence such as the East Coast. They have fought hard to make their voices heard in the East Coast-dominated establishment of musicology. Again, risking accusations of overgeneralization, scholars from or based on the West Coast seem to have had no problem in defining Ives as the outsider, fitting in with a very liberal West Coast spirit. The history of classical music has largely been the history of masterworks and their reception. To most of the musicological community, the criteria of what was considered a masterwork were clear: the inner logic of the piece, the pure musical logic, needed to be based upon the consistent development and treatment of the musical material. Extra-musical program content was conceivable, but was not considered constitutive element of the music itself. A composer who did not follow the logical development of musical material and its originality was considered a dilettante. For the ears of composer and critic Elliott Carter for example, even the more modern of Ives’s works, like the Concord Sonata, sounded 258

highly romantic; Carter despised this. Because of the many quotations and the lack of “invented” new musical material, Carter doubted that Ives was sufficiently “original”; for him, the Concord Sonata lacked the requisite inner musical logic. Carter was spot on in noting that the inner logic of Ives’s Concord Sonata did not follow compositional norms.26 To judge that as being the sign of a dilletante composer is however connected with a view which regards norms as binding, not conceptualizing that norms can be broken by purpose and not due to a lack of skills. Carter went so far as to question Ives’s pioneer status, suggesting that he added dissonances to originally romantic pieces much later to make them appear modern. As Carter belonged to the new generation of upcoming composers who had also attached themselves to academe in increasing numbers, his word was taken as gospel for a long time. Ives therefore suffered a severe hit to his reputation in scholarly circles. Carter published his critique of the Concord Sonata under the title “The Case of Mr. Ives” in 1939. This critique was personally very hurtful for Ives because he had introduced Carter as a young composer into the world of modern music, and had even written a recommendation letter for Carter to get into Harvard. Several fellow composers such as Virgil Thomson followed Carter with their own statements declaring Ives a dilettante. Because of the influence of Carter’s opinion, the Ives reception regrouped around the idea that only the program and the quotations held Ives’s music together, i.e., that his work itself was deficient on the level of pure music, the litmus test for all “good” music. The first performer of the Concord Sonata was the pianist John Kirkpatrick, like Carter, a student of Nadia Boulanger. Like Ives, he came from New England’s old WASP establishment. Kirkpatrick had turned towards Theosophy and had seen Ives’s score on a piano of another Theosophist in Paris, Katherine Heyman. She had gotten to know Ives and his 26

German musicologist Giselher Schubert presents a careful analysis of this nonnormative aspect of the Concord Sonata. I agree with his finding that Ives’s music is not following the normative compositional logic, however, I don’t agree with judging that a deficiency. Peter Burkholder (1995), on the other hand, states that Ives still is in the realm of the normative, even when he changes a sonata form by starting with the development and then coming to the exposition of the themes. This is contested by scholars like Schubert. I agree with a critique of Burkholder by German studies scholar Larson Powell, while at the same time I reject the conclusion of Powell to declare Ives an incapable composer.

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music in New York in the early 1920s after a member of her salon, the student Clifton Furness, had played a movement from Concord at a University lecture recital. Furness had subsequently made Ives’s acquaintance and eventually introduced him to Heyman’s circle. The Theosophists were attracted to any music that had spiritual or transcendental aspects, like the work of Alexander Scriabin. Ives, not a Theosophist himself, must nevertheless have been glad to find at least one “fan club.” Kirkpatrick premiered Concord in 1939, and it is fair to say became obsessed with the piece. He tried to find the “right” solution for it; he had learned from Boulanger the imperative of simplicity and accountability in a piece of music. In other words, Kirkpatrick thought that the piece was not quite “good” enough and tried to improve it, writing out several versions during his lifetime. As Kirkpatrick had been in touch with Ives’s wife after Ives’s death in 1954, he convinced Harmony (a nice name for the spouse of a composer steeped in dissonances!) to give all the manuscripts to the Yale library. Once they arrived, Kirkpatrick started to sort the manuscripts and describe them in a very detailed catalogue. After the Ives Society was founded, Kirkpatrick became their choice for executive editor of Ives’s collected works. Kirkpatrick, however, persisted in the conviction that Ives needed to be saved from Ives himself. He believed that Ives’s earliest sketches for many compositions had been logical and clear; it was only later, he believed, that Ives began messing the music up by adding unnecessary material. If he could only find the earliest versions and assemble a full piece out of them, Kirkpatrick believed, a work would emerge that would meet the prevailing standards of what musical logic demanded from a good composer. Ives’s actual compositional methods during the 1910s involved going back to old organ pieces he had written or memorized during or before the 1900s. These were mostly church preludes and postludes, all based on hymn tunes. He would then enlarge their form bit by bit, filling in new passages, adding more melodic lines, cutting the piece again and filling in the cuts with new ideas and material. This manner of composing had never been straightforward invention of the form, but the use of old material, and the adding of new material to it. The result was that a nice contrast of his various compositional styles, sometimes twenty years apart, would emerge.

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Ives, in short, loved to change and add and cut and paste (less so to delete), i.e., to edit. Kirkpatrick became so caught up in trying to find out what Ives had intended at each of these stages that he started to believe that he was channeling Ives himself. He even grew a beard like Ives and tried to look like the composer.27 Drew Massey writes at length about Kirkpatrick’s obsession with channeling Ives, giving us a statement by Kirkpatrick written to Carl and Charlotte Ruggles after Ives’s funeral: George [Tyler, Ives’s son-in-law] mentioned (very flatteringly) how he thought some of Charlie’s genius had descended on me, – but I tried to explain to him that I play Concord very differently from the way Charlie would have – that I’ve always wondered if I regularized it too much. But I’ve tried to do it (as far as I could imagine) more from the point of view of eternity (or perhaps the eternal qualities of his soul), and minimizing the accident of the rebellious character of his personality. I don’t think he would have been content with that. (2013, 121)

Kirkpatrick was aware that his editorial work on the early Ives might endanger the composer’s status as a modern pioneer, a status Ives had claimed for himself in the 1920s. It is interesting to note that in search of validation for his work, Kirkpatrick exchanged letters with Elliott Carter, exactly the man who had first doubted Ives’s pioneer status. Here, Kirkpatrick cited two examples that he strongly believed could be dated clearly before 1907. In his response, Carter downplayed his doubts about Ives as an “originator” while continuing to leave open Kirkpatrick’s question; “Ives – How Modern How Soon?” (Massey 2007, 606-10). H. Wiley Hitchcock, the first president of the Ives Society (effective 1973), understood Ives as a dilettante composer in the same way as Kirkpatrick had. Before becoming a musicologist, Hitchcock had also studied with Nadia Boulanger. Hitchcock also loved the “early,” cleaner Ives, especially the romantic songs. In contrast to Kirkpatrick’s understanding of Ives as a transcendental composer however, it was important for Hitch27

“In 1970 he told Vivian Perlis he was ‘certain’ he had known Ives in a previous life, and later he began hinting he was actually Ives’s reincarnation: he grew an unkempt beard uncannily like Ives’s in his old age and began dressing in rough clothes and living an ascetic life that was a startling reversal from a lifetime of loving fast cars and other luxuries” (Budiansky 250). Cf. also Massey 2007, 608fn39.

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cock to position Ives in the history of American music. Ives, according to him, combined the two strands of American music, popular and art, or as Hitchcock would say, the vernacular and the cultivated traditions. For an academically trained musicologist, Hitchcock was ahead of his time in this regard, becoming the president of the Institute of American Music in 1970, five years before the founding of the Society for American Music. The Charles Ives Society got its start with the Ives centennial commemoration conference in 1974, organized by Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis. Perlis had compiled an oral history of Ives, interviewing all his remaining relatives and friends as well as many of his acquaintances. The Ives Society had as its goal a scholarly edition (Gesamtausgabe) of all of Ives’s works. Hitchcock had no problem with Kirkpatrick’s “early preference” emphasis, which underlay editorial guidelines enjoining editors not to automatically trust Ives’s later revisions. Massey presents us with the wording of these early guidelines from the 70s: The editor’s primary duty is to the composer that Ives was at the time of the composition in question, and to those musical factors that make the piece cohere most strongly and fulfill its expressive purpose most eloquently and naturally. One should hold a skeptical but open view of his later revisions, which were often touches of genius illuminating the original concept, but too frequently were unnecessary added dissonances or elaborated details sidetracking the original directness. (2007, 614)

Only when Kirkpatrick, in 1980, went so far as to suggest editing an imagined Fifth Violin Sonata (which, he claimed, Ives might have intended as a transcription of selected orchestral movements for violin and piano, of which only one movement – Decoration Day – had been finished), did Hitchcock become uncomfortable enough to pull Kirkpatrick back: Now John, don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t agree more heartily with you when you say that “these three movements make a shapely and substantial unity […]” But I honestly do not think they should be presented as Ives’s Fifth Sonata [which could call] into question the scholarly integrity of the de facto editor-in-chief of the Charles Ives Society. (Massey 2007, 61718, fn 67)

The big shift in Ives’s reception happened when J. Peter Burkholder managed to make Ives canonical. He finished his dissertation examining the 262

compositional structure of Ives’s works and Ives’s aesthetic in 1983. Although it took some time for the findings to be published, the scholarly world quickly took notice of Burkholder’s arguments: that Ives had composed within the “norms,” that he had a proper teacher in Horatio Parker and had not been a self-taught composer, and that Ives’s works can be seen in continuity with those of the European romantic composers. Burkholder further argued that the programmatic aspects of the music can be safely disregarded, especially explanations of the value of the pieces through ideas of transcendentalism, allowing the purely musical significance of Ives’s work to emerge. Upon publication in 1985 of his monograph Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, Burkholder introduced expanded findings about Ives and transcendentalism, arguing that it was a secondary theme in Ives’s ideological system. Burkholder’s analysis showed that the quotations of hymn tunes were not just programmatical but also had a structural basis; it was published in 1996 as All Made of Tunes. I would agree with all of Burkholder’s findings, apart from the statement that Ives composed within the “norm.” Also, I would not so quickly dismiss all the programmatic and ideological aspects. They might not be directly relevant for the musicological judgement, but they are nevertheless very important for the message this music entails. They are part of the meaning of Ives’s work beyond just being interesting or nice music. In 1993, Burkholder took over the presidency of the Ives Society. In the same year, Hitchcock formed a committee to revise the editorial guidelines, but refrained from installing a “latest hand” policy guideline for the editing work. James B. Sinclair, the executive editor of the Ives edition since 1985, remained largely committed to an “early choice” approach to editing policy and to the reconstruction of older versions. The Ives Society therefore mostly kept the existing focus on the early pieces and early versions, even after Burkholder took over the presidency. However, he was no longer a strict Boulangerist and was able to understand Ives as a full-fledged art music composer. Although his positions may have been contrary to those of Hitchcock, who had not thought of Ives as a composer of “masterworks,” both had in common a personal preference for the “early” Ives. Their focus was not on the modern Ives, but rather the time immediately before, which comprised the later phases of his romantic period.

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Hitchcock’s and Burkholder’s engagements with Ives had been important for their careers. Hitchcock’s accession to the directorship of the first ever Institute for American Music in 1970 enabled him to enlist Ives for a promotion of the “new” discipline of American music (at that point still called American Studies in musicology). Burkholder’s achievement of securing a place for Ives in the canon helped to establish himself in the American Musicological Society (a group concerned with music especially from Europe). He became its President from 2003-4 and its honorary member in 2010. It seems strange that Burkholder would need to undertake a 180-degree reinterpretation of Ives to make him a conservative, traditional, romantic, “normal,” composer. David C. Paul called this canonization a “trauma” for the older Ives fans (who had built their Ives image from the 1950s to the ’70s), because it took away the figure of the independent tinkerer and substituted for it a professionally-educated person well-situated in the European art music tradition (171).28 As far as I can tell, however, Burkholder’s reevaluation of Ives did not really disturb the fans (and the scholars who thought of themselves as belonging to the “independent tinkerer” or “modernist fan” groups); Ives had now been canonized into the mainstream of the discipline, and this popularity helped the performing community, which till then still had to rely on the “maverick” image to sell Ives to an audience. Burkholder had rather enabled yet another kind of Ives cult to emerge, this time along the lines of the usual classical music cult. He had made Ives fully an insider. We will come closer to the question of his possible motivations for doing so when we investigate the record of how and why scholars have defended Ives against insinuations of having been a) a psychological case, b) a homosexual, and c) a bender of truth. What caused the musicological “establishment” to work so hard to maintain the image of Ives as a “normal” composer?

28

It seems to be no coincidence that in the hippie years Ives was happily embraced as an outsider, while in the conservative Reagan decade Ives became “normed” and streamlined as a “proper” composer.

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A) Ives – a Psychological Case? As I have previously mentioned, Solomon’s article, “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity” (1987), caused an uproar in the Ives community. Solomon speculated that Ives had deliberately predated his works because of a burdensome psychological bond he felt with his deceased father. According to Solomon, Charles had gotten disturbed because his father had gone back to working as an underling in a local bank to earn the money necessary to get Charles into Yale to study law, but Charles instead had been taking intensive courses in music composition while not taking other studies seriously. When his father then died, Charles felt that the father had sacrificed his life for his undeserving son. Solomon states: There is no independent confirmation that his father intended Ives for a composer’s career and there are (admittedly ambiguous) signs that he may have discouraged the young boy’s compositional experiments […] His father’s death at the very moment of Ives’s entrance into Yale was perhaps a devastating confirmation that unacknowledged wishes to go beyond his father had had their effect. (445-46)

So, Charles eventually made it a priority to get a “real “job (one unrelated to music). When he talked about his new compositional techniques, he always credited his father as having actually invented them, e.g., quarter tones. This imaginary collaboration with his dead father was also the reason, according to Solomon, why Ives wanted the compositions to enjoy public success. He wanted to be a pioneer for his father’s sake, and so he lied to us about the creation dates. In fact, Solomon continues, Ives did not owe that much to his father, but much more to his composition teacher Horatio Parker at Yale, of whom Ives says very little. Solomon writes: To buttress his idealized portrait of his father, Ives had credited him with his own musical paternity, invoked him as his posthumous collaborator. But these fantasies and exaggerations had an unexpected consequence: to maintain them, Ives had now to embroider the historical record. (450)

Solomon did not see the deceptive dating as a marketing move to appear more modern and less influenced by tradition, but rather as an effect of Ives’s imagined “collaboration” with his dead father in the course of a 265

never-finished mourning process. As one artist among the many who derive their energy from a lovingly nurtured neurosis, Solomon believed, Ives needed to imagine his father alive and as an active co-composer in order to be able to complete his works. For what Solomon left only as a supposition I found possible evidence in my own analysis of the Fourth Symphony. Ives often composed two lines of tunes, one in the key of C and one in the key of G, with variations of these. C could conceivably stand for Charles and G for George, the first name of his father. But this is not decisive. In addition, the Fourth Symphony contains an extra violin, a ghost-violin, which starts directly in the middle of the second (modern) movement. George’s main instruments had been the violin and the flute; Ives recalls that George played railroad music for Charles and his brother on a violin. The ghost-violin in this movement plays a line mimicking railroad sounds, or cars running over the tracks; the story is that of the “Celestial Railroad.” Next to these evocations of a transcendent or ghost world, we hear voices from the dead in the song-phrases that Ives quotes: “I hear those gentle voices calling ‘old black Joe’” (from the song “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” by Stephen Foster), for example. This line is played by the flute. In this popular song, the voices from the afterlife call the old Joe to come and join them. The last movement in the symphony depicts music for a funeral. Ives had started the composition on the death of President William McKinley, felled by an assassin’s bullet. It represents the path of a sinful soul out of the grave and its transformation into one of the heavenly people. That theme Ives had already addressed in “General Booth Enters into Heaven,” written in honor of the Salvation Army leader who would lift up a lot of sinners with him (cf. Gail 2009, 507-19). The early supporters of Ives had already acknowledged this creepy image of Ives composing together with his deceased father. Cowell called it “the son has written his father’s music for him” and John Kirkpatrick comparing Ives’s devotion to his father to “Chinese ancestor worship” (Solomon 1987, 443 and 444). The publications of Stuart Feder also drew hostile reactions from the Ives supporters or “defenders.” Feder, a psychoanalyst himself, wrote two psychobiographies and several articles about Ives. Gayle Sherwood Magee, who was to become the president of the Ives Society, wrote a response to Feder’s book Charles Ives: My Father’s Song titled “Charles Ives and our ‘National Malady.’” Feder had argued that, according to his research in Ives’s medical records, there was no evidence of a biological 266

reason for Ives’s supposed heart attack in 1918. Sherwood Magee comments in her article on Feder’s deduction: Based on this surprising evidence, and using a psychoanalytic interpretation of Ives’s biography, Feder suggests an alternate explanation – that Ives “was suffering from a combination of anxiety and continuing depression,” and that the heart palpitations of 1906 were “vague psychosomatic problems” resulting more from “anxiety and continuing depression” than from any “organic cardiac damage.” The massive breakdown in 1918, he asserts, was similarly emotional and psychological rather than strictly physical, and was related to Ives’s unresolved psychological issues stemming from his father’s sudden death over twenty years earlier. (556)

Sherwood Magee claims that such a psychological diagnosis is “anachronistic” (556) and suggests instead using the relevant diagnostic categories current during that time, in this case neurasthenia. Feder responds: “In the case of Charles Ives, Sherwood’s polarization of the diagnosis of neurasthenia in opposition to ‘psychoanalysis’ in general (or the ‘Freudian’), both of which seem to imply the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, is gratuitous and unfortunate” (2001, 631). I myself would like to understand Sherwood Magee’s article as a defense of Ives’s honor. It is much easier to retain the divinity in the pantheon if the god had “neurasthenia” than that he suffered from depression. But there is actually a bigger, ethical issue at stake here again: lying, or at least intellectual dishonesty. Sherwood Magee raises the question: Perhaps most importantly, Feder’s conclusion that in 1918-19 Ives was “struggling against madness” raises the question of why Ives and his circle disseminated the “heart attack” explanation. What was the family’s role in describing Ives’s health breakdowns? His cousin Amelia Van Wyck refers repeatedly to his “heart attack” of 1918. If Feder’s hypothesis is correct, her description must be viewed as either unintentionally inaccurate or a deliberate deception aimed at protecting the family’s privacy. (557)

What is at stake is clear when Sherwood Magee writes: Harmony and Ives’s aunt, Amelia Ives Brewster, provide the most substantial clues about Ives’s ongoing condition. A letter of 1907 expressed Amelia’s concern about Ives’s health problems as follows: “It is not

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strange that men in business circles break down – for many of them are working to the very limit – in ordinary times and then when additional strain comes […] there is no reserve strength to meet the emergency. (557)

According to Sherwood Magee, Ives did not suffer from depression or other psychological issues, but rather from overwork. This fits a hero’s narrative much more effectively than the idea of a depressed demigod up in the pantheon.

Interlude: Queering the Pitch It was 2008 at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, shortly before the Christmas break when I encountered a particular kind of nexus between gay issues, classical music, and definitions of the normal and the allowable in education. I was teaching the Baroque survey course at the School of Music to a class of advanced students on their way to a doctorate in their individual instruments. It was the time of year when Handel’s Messiah would be played in concert halls as part of getting into a Christmas mood; the first part of that oratorio describes the birth of Jesus. 29 For this day in class I had the students read a text by Gary C. Thomas from the book Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology that raised the question: “Was George Frederic Handel Gay?” The article doesn’t answer this question definitively, because categories of sexuality are notoriously time and context specific, because gayness in the past was often concealed from public view, and because not all evidence has survived to come down to us. The article, however, points out the social practices and meeting locations for gays in London during Handel’s time, and draws some speculative connections between Handel and the gay scene. The article also points out the conceptual/ideological difficulties and cultural politics that explain why gayness has often been understood as a threat.

29

The importance of Handel for a U.S. and Canadian audience was exemplified in 2010, when the famous “Alleluja” chorus of the oratorio made youtube history. The video of a flash mob in a food court in Welland, Ontario singing that choir – an idea by a photography company realized with the help of more than 80 members of Chorus Niagara – got clicked over 25 Million times (“Flash Mob”).

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Knowing that a majority of my students were rooted in the values of the American Bible Belt, I nevertheless thought that a discussion about the arguments of the text and its utility as a means of understanding the social and moral context out of which creativity emerges would be possible. It turned out, however, that many of the students were highly offended just by the suggestion of the possibility of Handel’s gayness. It quickly became apparent that they either never had the chance or had consciously refused earlier opportunities to acquire the intellectual tools to differentiate between their own deeply held beliefs and the arguments in an analytical text. After our break in the middle of the class period, I came back into the classroom to find it half empty. Many students had decided to walk out. Yet some honorable, self-identified Christian fundamentalist students had stayed and continued to try and wrap their heads around an interesting topic that they had to distance from their personal circumstances and views. Interestingly, in the end, it became clear to me as well as the students who chose to remain that this classroom incident over a text speculating about Handel’s gayness achieved what it set out to do: that the open and outspoken affirmation of a “gay” identity for a prominent composer still threatens his status as a “master” or a genius – at least for a group of music lovers who still perceive music from a canonical, masterworks perspective. I use the phrase “open and outspoken affirmation” because the subculture of classical music lovers in general is actually fine with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Nevertheless, the public profile of a classical music hero was for a long time defined as European, white, male, and straight. When we investigate the implication of an outsider-insider dynamic in the history of the reception of Charles Ives’s music, the question of gayness can be used to open up interesting analytical avenues not directly or inevitably centered on sexual politics per se. Such an approach will sharpen the focus of the overall chapter with its varied concerns.

B) Ives – a Homosexual? The question we investigate here is NOT the relevance of Ives’s sexual orientation to a full understanding of his significance as an artist. Such a question would unfairly single out sexual orientation from among all the 269

many other attributes of a human being that have an impact on creativity, for extra scrutiny. The more interesting and relevant question is whether there is any significance to the fact that many of the scholars who worked to normalize Ives themselves had experience of life as outsiders, i.e., as gay men, in a twentieth-century American culture where such a gay identity was not automatically acceptable. The successful normalization of Ives involved a widening of the category of what “normal” meant. It is on the basis of recognizing the extent of this achievement that analysis of gay identity and analysis of musical outsider status (on the part of Ives as well as his various champions) can profitably be integrated. The particular case we consider here is typical of discussions within minority groups concerning the choice between integration and segregation. The gay rights movement in the United States, for example, can be broadly divided into the more assimilationist tendency represented by groups like Human Rights Campaign (which already in its name seeks to subsume lobbying for gay and other non-traditional sexual orientations under the most maximally universalist image possible) on the one hand, and on the other, the militant protest and proudly parochial anti-assimilation positions of Queer Nation. Todd J. Ormsbee writes: “By the 1970s, the primary conflict lay between the perceived divide between liberal reformers (what the gay libbers called the ‘Gay Establishment’ or assimilationists) and the radicals (or the ‘radical element’ or ‘militants’ as SIR [Society for Individual Rights] members called them)” (143-44). He goes on to state that, “In terms of community building, as we have seen, many of the ‘assimilationist’ actions were quite progressive, and many of the radical gay liberation actions were regressive” (143). Angel Daniel Matos describes the two positions in a blog entry titled “Gay Assimilationists versus Radical Queers: The Death of Queerness?” He quotes Jonathan Kemp: In America since the mid-90s a fierce debate has raged between assimilationist lesbians and gay men and radical queers. The assimilationists want gay marriage, inclusion in the military, the right to adopt children – i.e., equal status within the status quo. Queers, on the other hand, want nothing to do with the status quo, instead regarding the most vibrant and radical aspect of homosexuality as being precisely its opposition to normative sexuality and society.

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Let us establish from the beginning: we don’t know if Ives was gay or not. His music and utterances, however, are loaded with gendered connotations. He surrounded himself with a highly homophobic atmosphere. Of course, such an aggressive stance could be interpreted as a strategy, conscious or not, to hide possible homosexual tendencies, in the same way many gay men were eager to enter into a marriage with women to prove their respectability. But this would be nothing but speculation. The truly relevant observation here is that even without any evidence of being gay, Ives already enters the musical stage as an outsider. As is true of the other case studies in this book, we have to differentiate between several subcultural segments and consider how these statuses interact. Being an outsider in one group can mean being an insider in another group. To achieve insider status in a given group means to cast away parts of one’s multifaceted reality that do not fit with that specific subculture. Not only did scholars in the course of the twentieth century push and pull Ives in contradictory directions, but Ives himself did his share to position himself squarely inside one bracket, while deliberately and arbitrarily downplaying other parts of his musical identity. For later scholars, it was not Ives’s efforts at effectively “positioning” himself that mattered, but rather how Ives could be made useful for their own identities and careers in the subculture that they chose. As a group, Ives scholars are no more and no less pragmatic about their own interests than scholars in any other field when it comes to the link between research priorities and career planning. For these Ives scholars, there is a particular piquancy attached to that pragmatism: Choosing the study of Ives, understood as a controversial outsider, does not have the same effect on the structuring of a career as choosing, for example, the study of Beethoven. There are three options available to a scholar interested in bringing the study of Ives into the academic mainstream: one can a) celebrate an outsider as an outsider, b) contest his outsider status and make him an insider, or c) despise Ives as an outsider and try to keep him out. There is copious evidence of this last option as practiced by competing composers and their respective supporting scholars, who understand themselves as part of the “old” center of the discipline of musicology in the U.S. As the overall subculture of musicology is not homogenous, however, I will point out different positions from within. My main focus in what follows will be on the scholars who bring some sympathy for Ives as an outcast in the first place. 271

The ranks of Ives scholars and enthusiasts of all opinions in the U.S. contain a significant number of gay men. Most of them had had to hide their homosexuality due to the conservative climate in the U.S. and especially in academia concerning this issue for much of the twentieth century. We can start with the earliest Ives supporters, some of whom also enjoyed the benefit of Ives’s financial support from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, like the composers and conductors Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. Cowell was imprisoned in the early 1940s for having had sexual relations with other men. Upon release, he immediately got married to a woman to restore a modicum of respectability. Lou Harrison, on the other hand, openly identified as gay. Aaron Copland, who never came out but was secure in his gay identity, championed Ives’s songs in a concert in the early 1930s. Leonard Bernstein, who was gay but married, premiered Ives’s Second Symphony in 1951. Bernstein may have married to acquire the outward signs of straightness, in order to secure conducting positions in a very conservative musical scene (Burton 49). He never openly identified as gay, but it is known that he had several extramarital affairs with men. The pianist John Kirkpatrick, who premiered the Concord Sonata in 1939 and became the first leading editor of a whole edition of Ives’s music, was married and identified as heterosexual. Nevertheless, as the openly gay scholar Drew Massey points out, Kirkpatrick “privately acknowledged his own attraction to men,” which he considered a “temptation” (Massey 2013, 15) against which he needed to fight. Frank Rossiter, a scholar of American Studies, is one of the first academic observers to try to explain Ives’s homophobia as a product of the cultural climate in conservative American communities of the period, in which musicians were by default accused of being “sissies” (1975, also 1977). Ives himself had been subject (and victim) of such accusations in his small town of origin; subsequently, he deliberately styled himself as a “tough” guy to avoid similar denunciations. Such harassment was not always meant literally, but it had an effect. Perhaps the period’s most recognizable exponent of a certain kind of confrontational masculinity, Theodore Roosevelt was similarly accused of being a sissy, because he dressed as a gentleman. He quickly changed his image, also to that of tough guy, switching from a persona and identity rooted in New England gentility to one of the rugged West, identifying himself with the aggressive militarist ethos of the Rough Riders (Bederman 170-215).

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Although the truth of the matter will probably never be established, Frank Rossiter himself believed that the denial of his tenure application occurred because the faculty of his department might have suspected that he was gay, regardless of the fact that he tried to hide it (cf. Rossiter 1975, 1977 and Paul 126-35). Tragically, shortly after Rossiter came out as gay, he committed suicide because he learned that he had contracted HIV. The social and cultural context had become more tolerant and open by the start of the adult career of the second president of the Charles Ives Society, musicology scholar J. Peter Burkholder. He is an openly gay professor at Indiana University with a male husband. Thomas M. Brodhead, a musicologist who practices outside academe as a computer programmer, engraver, and editor of Ives’s music, also openly identifies as gay. There are, of course, also many non-homosexual Ives scholars. What we can be certain of when we focus on the gay scholars is the fact that they all have lived through the experience of being outsiders. Female Ives scholars in this regard can also be understood as coming from a personal experience of inequality and exclusion and therefore in particular might be open to a personal understanding of a musical figure who can also be regarded as an outsider. Ives’s music expresses how two forces – often in separate orchestral groups – contend with each other: a soft theme starts, which suddenly gets overwhelmed by a loud group, which in its turn collapses at a certain moment, revealing again the soft theme; at other times, an atonal passage loudly marches along and is suddenly cut off and followed by a sweet sentimental line. If we look for admittedly subjective (and scientifically unprovable) analogies for such expressions, one of the possible interpretations or connections that can easily be made involves the experience of repressing a feeling for the sake of a demand for an outside conformity. Whether we interpret such passages in Ives’s music as representing the world against heaven, or city against country side, evil against good, the principle of a dichotomy of competing and suppressing forces remains the same. What further distinguishes Ives as a modern composer from other modernists is the fact that he never stopped using tonal passages. Ives combined tonal and atonal forces in his compositions to varying degrees, but he never succumbed totally to one or the other side of romanticism versus modernism. This is insofar remarkable as Ives always tried to express his manliness through dissonances, and he was very skeptical of tonal passages that sounded too nice that had the potential of making him 273

(in cultural ascription) effeminate. Composing in a mode that was too tonal made Ives feel uncomfortable, as if he was not allowed to be soft, tonal, and nice. The analogy with the sexual orientation seems obvious if persistently speculative.30 The composer David Del Tredici expressed how hard it was to be a gay composer. He observes about Aaron Copland: It is true, he never publicly came out and that was a loss. He would have been a terrific gay advocate. Even though the most powerful people in music were gay, not one of them came out. They say that gay composers tend to be more tonal, and straight composers more atonal. This is not true, but certainly in Menotti, Barber, Copland and Bernstein, there is something very touching, in tune with feelings, and certainly in dramatic distinction to the more atonal music of Babbitt, Carter, and Sessions [the latter were straight]. This is perhaps too easy an analogy, but it’s provocative. Maybe the sense of alienation, which every gay man of every generation has felt, does yield another kind of music. I like the image of the grain of sand in the oyster: the irritant that somehow turns into a treasured asset – a pearl. You are definitely never part of any system when you’re gay. You never feel that the world was designed to support your emotional needs. You are alone. That’s partly why, early on, I learned to isolate at the piano. (Hind)

It is interesting to take a closer look at the history of the phase in Ives reception that David C. Paul has called the “turn.” It is the moment when U.S. musicological scholarship relieves Ives of his outsider status. If the scholarly perception of Ives had been that he was too “queer” for acceptance – the self-made, self-taught man who lets two bands march against each other and writes that down as music – Burkholder’s reassessment is more than just a correction of that image in the direction of a normative greatness. The very definition of “normal” had shifted. The issue of gayness goes however further and becomes problematical, if we deal with the personal attitudes to homosexuality held by the 30

Nadine Hubbs writes: “Atonal and dissonant music was perceived as bold and forward-looking, hence masculine, hence straight; tonal and consonant music as gentle and backward-looking, hence feminine, hence gay. […] The associated character profiles vary – from straight serialists to gay tonalists and others – but all share a common significance: They comprise some of the shapes and styles of subjectivity belonging to a particular cultural moment” (176).

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“hero” himself, Ives. It had long been obvious that Ives questioned the masculinity of composers he didn’t like. Some of the most notorious examples of this are his mockery of “Rach-not-man-enough” (for Rachmaninoff) and his description of Chopin as being dressed in a skirt. The musicologist Judith Tick gives us more information about the cultural background of these insults. To prove that he was not a “sissy,” Ives had to mock others with exactly this accusation (cf. also Gail 2005). Scholars of the “new musicology” like Lawrence Kramer condemned Ives for the usage of such despicable vocabulary, making the point that one can criticize a composer’s private moral behavior but nevertheless enjoy the music (1995, 174-200 and 2008). Ives’s behavior was not only a symptom of a general cultural crisis of masculinity at the turn of the nineteenth century. It could also be understood as a way to deal with his own insecurity with his sexual identity. Leta Miller and Rob Collins pointed out that Ives did not make such a complete break with the accused homosexual Henry Cowell as Ives had tried to make us (and his wife) believe. On several occasions, Ives transmitted a message to Cowell not through the hands of his wife, but rather through Clifton Furness, a young Ives admirer, who himself most likely was gay. Miller and Collins quote Harrison, who reports about one luncheon with Ives and his wife, during which Ives expressed to Harrison that at that time (in the ’40s) it was ok for a composer to admit being gay. Lou Harrison said: He [Ives] was repressed but nonetheless he was a married man. [Yet] there was no problem. In fact that was the point I think that Ives made at the one luncheon I attended. Harmony was there and he, sitting off from the table, told me that when he was growing up, if you had anything to do with musicians it meant you were a sissy. Then he looked thoughtful and a little worried and said, “But all that seems to have changed now.” (485)

Harrison states clearly that he thought Ives was “repressed,” meaning a homosexual in the closet, and that, for Ives, the issue had been solved through marriage. What is important here is that up to the 1930s, the category identity of “homosexual” did not yet exist in exactly the form we understand it today. Sex was conceived of in terms of gender performance, and males who had sex with other males dressed as women (“fairies”) were still considered male and manly (Chauncey). 275

Ives did not have biological children. He and his wife adopted a girl in the late 1910s. It is assumed that his wife had a hysterectomy after a miscarriage, as we know that she had some kind of procedure in hospital (Sherwood Magee 2008, 94). But we know nothing else about Ives’s private life apart from the issue that his wife lived in West Redding, close to Ives’s hometown of Danbury, while Ives for the most part of the year stayed during the week in New York, alone. The German author Ralph Roger Glöckler has imagined in a fictional novel how Ives might have had homoerotic inclinations. Glöckler, in a personal conversation, told me that he was disappointed that the Ives enthusiasts and scholars either did not react at all to a translated chapter of his book, or that they, like Vivian Perlis, distanced themselves from the issue in a particular manner characteristic of polite society in New England. It is exactly the in-between position that Ives chose, privately and in his life as a composer that makes it so difficult to deal with the man and his music.

C) Ives – a Bender of Truth? After Solomon had argued that Ives had deceived us with the creation dates of his manuscripts, the New York Times brought the debate to the attention of a broader audience. One reader, John Hoffmeister wrote in a letter to the editor on March, 6, 1988: Your article on Charles Ives [“Did Ives Fiddle with the Truth?” Feb. 21] has knocked one of my favorite heroes off his pedestal. That’s not an easy thing to adjust to, but I’m beginning to come to terms with it. After all, his music was authentic even if he wasn’t entirely authentic himself. […] We just have to get used to the idea that he was less of a hero and more of a human being.

The reaction of Ives scholars was mixed. At a meeting of an AMS chapter, a panel brought Solomon and several Ives scholars together. Burkholder’s paper from this session later got published. He seemed to have had no problem accepting that Ives had been heavily influenced by his Yale composition teacher Horatio Parker and other European composers, and had no problem in throwing overboard the claims of Ives as a pioneer. However, he qualifies this: 276

I do not think that the essential chronology of Ives’s life and works is going to change a great deal. Many pieces and manuscripts can be dated fairly accurately without reference to Ives’s own annotations. Certainly many pieces went through a long process of revising and reworking. Yet as both Wayne Shirley and James Sinclair have pointed out, based on their research as editors of some of Ives’s major orchestral works, the essential conception of a piece is usually its most radical aspect and is almost always present from the first sketch. (1988, 11)

Burkholder, relying on the findings of other scholars whom he trusts, downplays the importance of revision for Ives. The revisions, according to Burkholder, do not alter pieces dramatically and therefore – and he only refers to this indirectly – Ives’s pioneer status as the “inventor of dissonance” could stay intact. For Burkholder, the first draft of a piece mattered more in the dating scheme; he was not so much interested in the finishing date of a composition. In his response, Solomon countered that Burkholder was “unwilling to conclude that the Ives chronology required drastic revision” (1989, 216). Philip Lambert, a music theorist, responded in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, in which Solomon’s article had first come out. He demanded the presumption of innocence: “We cannot, for example, deny the accuracy of Ives’s memories, as stated in the Memos and elsewhere, solely based on Solomon’s theories about the composer’s idealization of his father or motivations for distorting the chronological record.” (1989, 208). He also tried to show that Ives was already “modern” in his first drafts, using the example of the piece Washington’s Birthday. But that Ives had been “modern” early was just one part of the pioneer-myth. The other part was that he revised even already “modern” small pieces (pieces that would, for example, contain polytonality) and cut them, filled them with other material, added extra melodic lines etc. and then still claimed this piece had been written, for example, in 1916, while the last form actually stemmed from 1923. The problem was that Solomon’s doubts about Ives’s pioneer-status as a maker of musical modernity just drove scholars to look again at Ives’s early output and to define this as already “modern” enough to claim him as a pioneer. None of the scholars revisited the later works, except for Thomas Brodhead. Another response came from music theorist Carol Baron, who was not able to suppress her anger: “Recent scholarship has aggressively questioned the image of Charles Ives as a remarkably original musical thinker 277

and one of the great innovators of the early twentieth century” (20). Actually, Baron seemed to have been the only one who favored the late, the modern Ives. She positioned herself against Hitchcock, who in an article from 1988 had shown that Ives did indeed make pieces more modern in later years, turning an octave in a ninth, i.e., a consonance into a dissonance, in the melody of the Unanswered Question. (Hitchcock and Zahler). Baron’s conclusion, however, is that in the context of the piece, the ninth actually results in less dissonance than the octave. Finally, in the row of people defending Ives stood Gayle Sherwood Magee, who was president of the Ives Society from 2010 to 2017. She dedicated her dissertation to establishing a way of dating Ives’s works through paper-type analysis. The problem here was that many companies do not have a specific first issue date for paper. To establish a relative date, she compared similar paper from other composers whom we can trust with their dating. This way of dating only gives us a very approximate date – because Ives could have had new paper lying around for some time before he used it.31 The result of her dating was exactly what Burkholder had predicted: yes, there had to be some adjustments in the dating, but these adjustments were not massive (cf. Sherwood Magee 1994, 1995, 1997, 2008). For the Grove Music Online worklist for the entry on Charles Ives, Burkholder, Sherwood Magee, and Sinclair established a new dating list of the manuscripts by combining Sherwood Magee’s dating with other documentation (Sherwood Magee 2008, 4). However, a problem persists unaddressed: because of Ives’s extensive revisions, the “normal” procedure of giving a composition one single date (without specifying if it is the earliest hand or the latest) does not work for Charles Ives’s works. His unorthodox approach to composing – to draft a piece, let it sit for a decade, meanwhile revising it, including parts of other compositions in it, revising it again etc. – makes it impossible to assess a composition without understanding in detail the process of its emergence. If one acknowledges this situation, it is irresponsible to give

31

The date of first performances or of print publications of Ives’s works during his lifetime present us with dates for the latest hand. But the scholars referred to here are not interested in the latest hand, but rather the earliest, as they still want to establish Ives’s pioneer status. In addition, a lot of Ives’s compositions were never performed or published during his lifetime.

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only one composition date in the Grove without describing or at least acknowledging the problems with that approach. 32

Conclusion The voices in the Ives interpretive community in favor of a “normalizing” reception removed Ives from his outsider status of being merely “American” and made him safely “European”; they removed his pioneer status, but afterward there was no further interest in delegitimizing him as a liar or a psychologically disturbed person. Moral acceptability seems to be the highest value in this view, reflecting the overarching value system of the prevailing classical music cult. Making Ives “normal” in the way he composed and subsequently avoiding any discussion of possible personal nonconformity reflects how insecure Ives’s position in the pantheon still remains. We can take the example of Stravinsky as a counterpoint. Brooke Bennet wrote in 1994 in the Dartmouth college newspaper: Stravinsky had long denied that he employed actual Russian folk songs in “Les Noces.” In his autobiography, Stravinsky wrote: “I borrow[ed] nothing from folk pieces […] The recreation of a country wedding […] which I never had the chance either to see or listen to […] absolutely didn’t enter my mind.” But Pokrovsky has provided evidence to the contrary: Traveling to remote villages in the south and west of Russia, he and members of his ensemble, […] tracked down some of the very same folk weddings songs that Stravinsky denied having heard.

Richard Taruskin tracked Stravinsky’s Russian past in detail in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, published in 1996. In the case of Stravinsky, 32

In literature, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Virginia Wolf are some of the famous revisers of drafts of their work. James Joyce is known to have added and added material to his novel Ulysses. Cf. Fehrman’s review of The Work of Revision by Hannah Sullivan. Drew Massey stated that with the change in the editing policy of the Ives Society came an awareness of Ives as a reviser. He therefore called his article “The Problem of Ives’s Revisions.” Massey also pointed out that a differentiated approach for other composers who edited their works extensively has been suggested by Leta Miller in her article “Lou Harrison” (Massey 2007, 613).

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the revision and reevaluation of his work was done by a major figure in the subculture of musicology, from an openly declared starting point that Stravinsky had not told the truth. In contrast to the case of Charles Ives, however, Stravinsky had never been accused of composing as a dilettante. In Ives’s case, therefore any threat against his authenticity always threatens the entire current position of Ives in the canon of the art world. Only when the normalization will have sunk in enough to be uncontestable will it become possible to address any “failures” in personal “authenticity.” The time for that has not yet come.

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———. “Charles Ives and His Fathers: A Response to Maynard Solomon.” Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter 18.1 (Nov. 1988): 8-11. ———. Charles Ives: The Ideas behind the Music. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. Burton, Humphrey. Leonard Bernstein. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Carter, Elliott. “The Case of Mr. Ives.” Modern Music 16 (1939): 172–76. Repr. in Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995. Ed. Jonathan W. Bernard. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 1998. 87–90. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Chusid, Irwin. Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. Chicago: A Cappella, 2000. Comini, Alessandra. The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking. New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Dayton, Daryl D. “Charles Ives: American Musical Pioneer.” 1972. Typescript, 12 leaves. The Chinese U of Hong Kong. ———. “Charles Ives in the USIA.” Student Musicologists at Minnesota 6 (1975): 87-94. ———. Concert Program. Piano Recital by Daryl D. Dayton. N.d. Archived by Aristotle U of Thessaloniki. . Feder, Stuart. Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song.” A Psychoanalytic Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. ———. “Heard Maladies Are Sweet (‘But Those Unheard Are Sweeter’): A Response to Gayle Sherwood.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54/3 (Fall 2001): 627-41. Fehrman, Craig. “Revising Your Writing Again? Blame the Modernists.” The Boston Globe 30 June 2013. . Fisher, Mark. “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5.2 (2013): 42-55. . “Flash Mob Hallelujah Chorus a YouTube Sensation.” CBN News (Christian Broadcasting Network). 23 Dec. 2010. . Gail, Dorothea. Charles E. Ives’ Fourth Symphony: Quellen – Analyse – Deutung. 3 vol. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2009. ———. “Gegen eine ‘entmännlichte’ Musik: Genderkonnotationen in Musik und Texten von Charles Ives.” (“Against an ‘Emasculated’ Music: Gender Connotations in Music and Texts by Charles Ives.”) Frankfurter Online Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 8 (2005): 18-41. .

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Glöckler, Ralph Roger. Mr. Ives und die Vettern vierten Grades. Berlin: Elfenbein Verlag, 2012. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tales and Sketches. [“The Celestial Rail-road.”] The Library of America 2. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, distributed by Viking Press, 1982. Hind, Rolf. “Queer Pitch: Is There Such a Thing?” The Guardian 12 Sept. 2015. . Hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Noel Zahler. “Just What Is Ives’s Unanswered Question?” Notes 2nd ser. 44.3 (Mar. 1988): 437–43. Hitchcock, H. Wiley, and Vivian Perlis, eds. An Ives Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference. Urbana, Chicago, London: U of Illinois P, 1977. Hoffmeister, John. Letter. “Ives’s Lives.” New York Times 6 Mar. 1988. . Horowitz, Joe. “Unanswered Question” Blog. “Ives the Sophisticate.” 12 May 2013. . Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Berkely: U of California P, 2004. Ives, Charles. Essays before a Sonata, the Majority, and other Writings by Charles Ives. Ed. by Howard Boatwright. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. ———. Memos. Arranged and ed. John Kirkpatrick. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972. Jepson, Barbara. “Charles Ives: Once Neglected, Now Overrated.” Wall Street Journal 20 Jan. 2004. . Johnson, Julian. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. New York: Oxford U, 2002. Kramer, Lawrence. Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. ———. “Music and the Politics of Memory: Charles Ives’s A Symphony: New England Holidays.” Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (2008): 459-75. Lambert. Philip. “Letter to the Editor.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 42/1 (Spring 1989): 204-09. Magee, Gayle Sherwood. See Sherwood Magee. Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Updated ed. from Invisible Republic. New York: Picador, 2001. Massey, Drew. John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page. Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2013.

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———. “The Problem of Ives’s Revisions, 1973–1987.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 60.3 (Fall 2007): 599-645. Matos, Angel Daniel. “Gay Assimilationists versus Radical Queers: The Death of Queerness?” 6 Apr. 2013. Blog by the author. . Mehring, Frank. Sphere Melodies: Die Manifestation transzendentalistischen Gedankenguts in der Musik der Avantgardisten Charles Ives und John Cage. Stuttgart und Weimar: Metzler, 2003. Miller, Leta. “Lou Harrison and the Aesthetics of Revision, Alteration, and SelfBorrowing.” Twentieth-Century Music 2 (2005): 79–107. ———, and Rob Collins. “The Cowell-Ives Relationship: A New Look at Cowell’s Prison Years.” American Music 23.4 (Winter 2005): 473-92. Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890-1940. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. Ormsbee, Todd J. The Meaning of Gay: Interaction, Publicity, and Community among Homosexual Men in 1960s San Francisco. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. Paul, David C. Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: U of Illinois P, 2013. Petridis, Alexis. “Cheap Thrills: The Vaults of New York’s P&P Records are a Goldmine of Weird, Low-Budget Disco and Funk, as this Lovingly Crafted Compilation Proves.” The Guardian 14 Aug. 2015. Pop Reviews. Powell, Larson. “Die Zukunft in Ruinen: Versuch über Charles Ives I–III.” Musik & Ästhetik 11.41 (2007): 5-26. Ross, Alex. “Deus ex Musica.” New Yorker 20 Oct. 2014. . Rossiter, Frank. Charles Ives and His America. New York: Liveright, 1975. ———. “Charles Ives: Good American and Isolated Artist.” 1977. See Hitchcock and Perlis 16-28. Schubert, Giselher. “Die Concord-Sonata von Charles Ives: Anmerkungen zur Werkstruktur und Interpretation.” Aspekte der Musikalischen Interpretation: Sava Savoff zum 70. Geburtstag. Ed. Hermann Danuser and Christoph Keller. Hamburg: Verlag der Musikalienhandlung Karl Dieter Wagner, 1980. 121-38. Shatz, David. Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Sherwood Magee, Gayle. “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady.’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54.3 (Fall 2001): 555-84. ———. Charles Ives Reconsidered. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2008. ———. “Questions and Veracities: Reassessing the Chronology of Ives’s Choral Works.” Musical Quarterly 78.3 (Autumn 1994): 429-47.

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———. “Redating Ives’s Choral Sources.” Ives Studies. Ed. Philip Lambert, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 77-104. ———. “The Choral Works of Charles Ives: Chronology, Style, Reception.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1995. Shreffler, Anne C. “Musikalische Kanonisierung und Dekanonisierung im 20. Jahrhundert.” Der Kanon der Musik: Theorie und Geschichte. Ein Handbuch. Ed. Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald. Munich: Edition Text & Kritik, 2011. 606-25. English original under title “Musical Canonization and Decanonization in the Twentieth Century) accessible at Academia Website. . Sinclair, James B. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Solomon, Maynard. “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40.3 (Autumn 1987): 443-70. ———. Letter. Journal of the American Musicological Society 42.1 (Spring 1989): 209-18. ———. “Taboo and Biographical Information: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,” American Imago 64.1 (Spring 2007): 7-21. Sullivan, Hannah. The Work of Revision. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2013. Swafford, Jan. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. ———. Charles Ives: A Life with Music. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Taruskin, Richard. Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. 2 vol. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Thomas, Gary C. “‘Was George Frideric Handel Gay?’ On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics.” Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. 155-204. Tick, Judith. “Charles Ives and Gender Ideology.” Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Ed. Ruth A. Solie. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993. 83-106. Van der Merwe, Peter. Roots of the Classical: The Popular Origins of Western Music. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Wiki Talk: List of Subcultures. “Classical Music.” Wikipedia. Commentator Abdullais4u. 9 Feb 2008, .

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Music Cited Beethoven, Ludwig van. Symphony No. 3: Eroica. Gesamtausgabe, 1862-65. ———. Symphony No. 5. Gesamtausgabe, 1862-65. ———. Symphony No. 6: Pastoral Symphony. [Pastorale]. Gesamtausgabe, 186265. Copland, Aaron. Lincoln Portait. New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1942. Dvořák, Antonín. Symphony No. 9: From the New World. [New World Symphony]. Berlin: N. Simrock, 1894. Fry, William Henry. Victory Symphony. Unpublished. Handel, George Frideric. Messiah. London: Preston, n.d. Score. Ives, Charles. 114 Songs. Redding, CT: C. E. Ives, 1922. [Self-published]. ———. A Symphony: New England Holidays. [Holiday Symphony]. New York: Peer International, 1971. ———. Fourth Symphony. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1965. Score. ———. Ives Plays Ives. [Incl. segments of Four Transcriptions from Emerson]. New York: Sony, 1999. CD. ———. Orchestral Set No. 1: Three Places in New England. Bryan Mawr, PA: Mercury Music, 1976. ———. Piano Sonata no. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-1860. [Concord Sonata.]1st ed. Redding, CT: C. E. Ives, 1920. [Self-published]. 2nd ed. New York: Arrow Music Press, 1947. Score. ———. Quarter-Tone Pieces. New York: C. F. Peters, 1968. Score. ———. Symphony No. 2. Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 1990. CD. ———. Symphony No. 4. Charles Ives Society Critical Edition. New York: Associated Music Publishers, 2011. ———. Symphony No. 4. [Fourth Symphony]. John Adams (conductor). Ensemble Modern Orchestra. EM Medien EMCD-001, 1999. CD. ———. The Celestial Country. New York: Peer International, 1973. Score. ———. The Celestial Railroad. Ed. By Thomas M. Brodhead. New York: Associate Music Publishers, 2001. Parker, Horatio. Hora Novissima, Op. 30. London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1893. Score. Schoenberg, Arnold. Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1914. Stravinsky, Igor. Rite of Spring. [Le sacre du printemps]. Edition Russe de Musique, RV 197/197b, 1921.

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6 Waffle House Music Advertising as Folk Art

“Well, there’s 844,739 ways to make a hamburger at Waffle House. You heard that right.” (“844,739 Ways to Eat a Hamburger,” Waffle House Jukebox Favorites Vol. 1)

American life narratives are only later written on paper; they are first enacted by bodies performing the act of living everyday life. 1 As Erving Goffman expressed it in 1959 in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the daily routine is a performance. The performance is however not a fully free artistic choice of self-presentation, but is connected with pre-existing patterns of cultural behavior – what Judith Butler has labeled “ritual[s] reiterated under and through constraint” (95). This performance of everyday life, which in itself can be understood as an art form, is in turn also reflected in other popular art forms, which themselves have become part of daily life. I want to focus here especially on the central art form of popular music, the song. Here is a site where everyday life has traditionally had a strong presence. I want to deepen our understanding of the performance of the quotidian, the non-lyrical – other topics apart from “love” and “death” which are staples of this genre. To note just one prominent example, commercialized Tin Pan Alley music – an important component of the emerging culture industry of the late nineteenth-century United States – wound up not only becoming ubiquitous in everyday life, but also choosing everyday life as a frequent topic. We can find songs about the Ferris wheel, shopping in a department store, murder headlines, or the latest children’s book character (Levy). 1

I would like to thank Pia Wiegmink and Andrea Zittlau for including me as a panelist in their workshop “Exhibiting American Lives: The Poetics and Politics of (Re-)Presentation” at the 59th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies in Mainz in 2012. This gave me the opportunity to present an earlier form of this chapter and to receive feedback.

A very specific and well-known everyday performance in the U.S. is the eating of short-order or fast food. I will explore a particular representation in popular music song form of this common activity and investigate how the authenticity of the quotidian has mixed with commercialism. The diner chain Waffle House, originating and still concentrated in the Southern United States, does not only serve short-order or fast food, but also features (up to the time of this writing) a varying selection of around thirty promotional songs about its own food, on its own in-house jukeboxes.2 These songs deliberately draw attention to the idea that while customers are eating at Waffle House, they are participating in a particularly selfreferential version of one of the central rituals of mainstream American mass consumption. The subset of these songs on the jukebox that feature the sound narratives of the customers and employees eating or preparing this food are themselves a soundtrack to the actual everyday of eating or working at Waffle House itself. The quality and care put into the production of these songs is impressive. This suggests that condemning the culture industry or consumer capitalism for a particularly cynical instance of appropriating the act of eating at a restaurant, and aestheticizing it to create yet more promotion, might not be a productive approach to understanding this phenomenon. Furthermore, although this chapter’s topic touches on many contentious issues of power explored by the study of concepts such as whiteness, Southern culture, suburbanization, and consumption-as-consolation, I do not wish to present a one-sided focus on power relationships. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the links between culture and consumerism, between entertainment and exploitation, and between real-life hardship and the imagined American Dream. In a 2010 Waffle House video clip on Youtube called “Southern Classic Cookin’” a then-fashionable flashmob-type scene emerges as customers suddenly get up and dance to the tune playing on the jukebox.3 It seems to be no coincidence that flashmobs connected with music often take place in food courts, as these public spaces can still sometimes provide a feeling of community not really present any more in most other anon2

See appendix II for a full list of Waffle House songs. The tune actually is not on their jukebox list. Tim Horrigan, whose cousin stars in the video, writes 3 Aug. 2010 on his blog: “The other ladies in the joint get up and dance to the song, which has the same melody and chord structure as ZZ Top’s ‘Sharp Dressed Man.’” 3

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ymous mass gathering places of our consumer society. The format – a scenic presentation of singing and dancing in stylized representations of real-life scenes – is already well-known to most audiences through the visual grammar of stage or film musicals. Playing Waffle House songs on a jukebox in a Waffle house while eating Waffle House food is a subtler way of enacting this smooth blend of reality and imagination, seducing the listener to dive inside the song-as-narrative. Once inside the songs, the customers who put money into the jukeboxes and the workers who must listen to whatever the customers are playing suddenly find that they themselves have been recruited as the stars of an implied musical, taking center stage in a bigger, imagined Waffle House musical community. If we accept Nelson Goodman’s main argument in Ways of Worldmaking, human culture and science create the subjective world we perceive around us. Cultural production does not only participate in pre-existing conventions about how we organize our world, it also deploys a medium (art) to support one way of understanding the world, i.e., “make” reality (102). The interaction of binary opposites produces phenomena whose defining characteristic is an epistemological in-betweenness. At the moment, the world is undergoing a comprehensive power shift. Works of scholarly and popular analysis about the decline of the United States are being released at accelerating rates. In such a time it is interesting to focus on understanding American culture in ways that go beyond both the simplistically positive terms of success stories – the elusive concept of an American Dream – and the simplistically negative terms of a bitter-end military defense of hegemony abroad and a nihilist consumer culture at home. Instead of such reductionism, I seek a focus on the interaction of both poles, similar to what Amy Kaplan has deployed to look into the “contradictions, ambiguities and frayed edges that unravel at imperial borders” (14). In this chapter, I will undertake a discussion of real-life representations in these Waffle House songs and the context in which they are played. I would like to examine the ambiguities and contradictions of consumer culture by understanding the extremely self-referential nature of Waffle House songs as a peculiar art form. Suspended between genres, this form survives between the advertisement jingle on the one hand and folk art/music traditions on the other. Yet somehow these peculiar songs remain true to the essence of consumer culture, while maintaining a constant negotiation between market value and the human factor. 289

Waffle House, Southern Identity, and the Rise of the Sunbelt The Southern fast food and short order chain Waffle House was founded in 1955 in Atlanta by two businessmen, Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner. The chain has about 1,600 outlets in around twenty-five states, the majority of them centrally owned, the rest independent franchises. However, they all present the image of being a single, family owned diner. At first glance, the chain itself often seems a backward-looking artifact from an earlier time in American culture, apparently only maintaining its market position because of comparatively low prices and equally low expectations, achieving a kind of déclassé-cult status similar to another, more regionally limited bottom-end chain, White Castle. Waffle House is freely patronized (in both senses of the word) by all demographic types who find themselves on American highways. Nevertheless, it is sometimes hard to avoid the conclusion that the chain provides a space for the enactment of a specific, lower class, mostly white expression of community, often disparagingly referred to by urbanites or non-Southerners as “redneck” culture, isolated from or willfully rejecting any encounter with cultural and political otherness (cf. Goad). Food has always been a crucial defining factor in people’s identities. Bruce Pietrykowski writes: Contrary to neoclassical theory (Stigler and Becker 1977), much information is lost when consumption is portrayed merely as a function of income and relative prices. Our consumption choices send messages to others (Douglas and Isherwood 1979) and we, in turn, adapt our consumption choices in light of others’ perception of us (Cosgel 1994). […] In countries in which living standards are high, the objectives of consumption switch from material subsistence to social signaling through material abundance. (34)

For two or three generations now in the industrialized West, the consumption, marketing, and expansion of fast food has been regarded by most critical commentators as a neoliberal destroyer of small businesses and communities, and as a marker of class, ethnic, and other social divides. I would take elements from Pietrykowski’s argument and myself argue however, that fast food’s identity-creating power has been underestimated. Contrary to their often negative or utilitarian image, fast food restaurants, which first emerged as a market segment and as a mainstay of 290

daily life in the U.S. after 1945 and spread along with the interstate highway system and mass automobile culture, were sites of Pietrykowski’s “social signaling.” Their presence in the South announced that affluence had come to the once marginalized and impoverished, who drew some pride out of the chain restaurants emerging in many small postwar communities. It was the very fact that these restaurants were not local momand-pop diners but commercialized mass-market businesses that boosted the sense of local pride. With them, industrially backward but recovering regions like the South had a handy shorthand sign attesting they were now full and equal participants in the postwar American political economy. This paradoxical power of fast food corporations to define community identity only functions if a chain retains some connection in popular perception to its original regional identity – in this case, the Southern identity. In contrast, I would argue for example that McDonald’s long ago lost its original footing in the regional identity of the American West Coast as the chain became nationalized, and then globalized. Waffle House, together with the Arkansas-based big-box mega retailer Walmart, are examples of major businesses that have clearly retained enough cultural associations with the heartland and/or the South to appeal to the customers from former industrially backward regions, no matter where in the country they may find themselves. Their presence fills such customers with pride that a business from their own kind of people can make it in a global mass market that has undergone repeated waves of standardized McDonaldization (cf. Ritzer; Schlosser). Waffle House curates its Southern image for customers in the know. They celebrate their regional Southern image through this insider-outsider dog-whistle, the “No shoes, no shirt, no service” sign, or the explicit house rules against obscenity. Several factors combined to keep Waffle House a regional chain extending only from the old South into the Sunbelt, and with the exception of southern Ohio and some cities on the eastern seaboard, not far into the North across the Mason-Dixon Line. This situation is different from that of Northern local chain stores like White Castle which clearly have a place in local identities in many Northern locations, but never became a marker for an overall regional identity. 4 The reasons for this difference, I speculate, can be found in the fact that publicly accessible food did not function 4

David G. Hogan writes: “White Castle customers revel in the fact that they are participating in something that they deem historical” (173).

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to fill a void in usable identity in the early twentieth century North as much as it did in the South. In the latter region, people not only had to give up an agricultural-feudal form of economics (the slave, sharecropper, and subsistence economies), but also suffered military defeat in the Civil War (cf. Morris Berman 2012, chapter 4). Reconstruction after 1865 had not really reintegrated the South back into the Northern-dominated national society, although it had reinstalled key elements of the older regime of white privilege. It was when the nation’s elite needed the country united for the Spanish-American War and the rise to great power status between 1917 and 1945 that a process of reconciliation began, continuing through the New Deal and Civil Rights decades to culminate in the return of a “New South” to the national political economy, part of the booming postwar Sunbelt. Throughout this century of slow change after Appomattox, food was a politically acceptable symbol for pride in a specifically Southern identity. The waffles and other generic diner items served in Waffle House might not be a clear marker of authentic Southern foodways, but every Waffle House serves the ur-Southern breakfast of grits (Latshaw). It seems that the chain deliberately retained grits on their menu, not because it would sell, but to keep it as a marker of Southernness.5 Pietrykowski writes: “The practice of buying, cooking, and eating food is a feature of everyday life that reproduces bodies and identities. […] Food nourishes but it also signifies” (36, cf. also Douglas; Mintz and Du Bois). As Waffle House still tries to appear local and non-commercial, Pietrykowki’s statement also applies: “Slow Food [or in our case Waffle House] seeks to position food as a key constituent in the development and maintenance of community. It seeks to de-center the identification of food with its status as a commodity” (37). This function also features in the ethnological observations of food studies scholar Brian Moe. 6 He writes: Gutman and Kaufman (1979) describe the diner: “To any person who has been raised in our culture, the diner is something totally familiar, as 5

Southern foodways and their specifics have recently become the focus of several publications (Williams-Forson; Edge (contains an entry to Waffle House by Auchmutey); Opie; Warnes; E. Engelhardt). 6 I would like to warmly thank Brian for sharing his unpublished paper with me. We met while listening to a food studies panel at the ASA conference in 2011 in Baltimore.

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comfortable as the language we speak or the everyday food we eat. Anyone who shares American values and American ways of doing things, anyone who can cope with a gas station or operate a gumball machine, can function here. The assumptions, the atmosphere, the protocols, even the words that are said, are all known (p. 1).” Try as I might, I cannot place the Waffle House within this framework. But, from the massive praise from informants, friends, and colleagues I know the Waffle House is important to the community of Baton Rouge as a diner. (5)

Again, what Pietrykowski writes about Bourdieu’s (1984) idea of habitus in relation to food applies to the image with which Waffle House surrounds itself – the non-fast food alternative: Food consumption patterns and cuisines are a signal of class and group identification. The desire to resist the dominant culture of fast food, the quest for obscure local and regional foods and cuisines that evoke a cultural heritage are part of the constitution of habitus. (40)

In contrast to White Castle or Bob’s Big Boy, chains which ultimately did not proliferate across the North as much as Waffle House did in the South, Waffle House caught the wave of growth that produced the Sunbelt, with a huge postwar expansion of the regional economy. The chain found a corresponding niche as a diner open round the clock serving people such as workers on late or early shifts, long-haul truckers and other long-distance travelers on the highways, bored adolescents, and eventually, musicians and their fans coming home from concerts or late-night sessions. As Waffle House outlets spread out of the South, they eventually got overtaken in the last two of the above segments by Denny’s, a rival diner chain which started around the same time, but styled itself as suburban and not Southern or small-town. Another reason why Waffle House never really broke through to nationwide success was that, in comparison to the true mass-market fast food giants such as McDonald’s, its prices for comparable menu items were never fully competitive, remaining always a bit on the expensive side of fast food price levels. In many towns in the South and the wider Sunbelt, the image of the local Waffle House as linked to local traditions of unassuming self-help was enhanced by their ability to function in crisis, with the region often exposed to extreme weather emergencies such as tornados and hurricanes. In 2011, after a devastating tornado destroyed much of the town of Joplin, 293

Missouri, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) developed the color-coded “Waffle House Index” as a useful shorthand concept in assessing the severity of a local emergency situation. The color green indicated the survival of enough infrastructure and logistical connection to guarantee full service as usual at a local Waffle House, i.e., electric power up and deliveries continuing. Yellow meant a limited menu was available at Waffle House outlets in the area due to limited supply lines and intermittent or unreliable power, water, and other service connections. Red indicated catastrophic conditions under which the local Waffle House was closed. Apart from its starring role in the FEMA scheme, Waffle House has its own emergency system in place to reach extra staff in a crisis situation, and maintains temporary warehouses in many locations to cover the possibility of an interrupted supply line (“What the Waffle House”). In The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, expatriate travel writer Bill Bryson decries the sea of identical chain stores and diners along the outskirts of every city in the U.S.: It used to be that when you came to the outskirts of a town you would find a gas station and a Dairy Queen, maybe a motel or two if it was a busy road or the town had a college. Now every town, even a quite modest one, has a mile or more of fast-food places, motor inns, discount cities, shopping malls – all with thirty-foot-high revolving signs and parking lots the size of Shropshire. Carbondale appeared to have nothing else. I drove in on a road that became a two-mile strip of shopping centers and gas stations, K Marts, J. C. Penneys, Hardees and McDonald’s. (46) Such sameness however, can become a comfort for the traveler, an illusion of home, of the well-known and unchallenging. In the case of the Waffle House outlets, which are mostly located in the South and the Sunbelt, the feeling of comfort and familiarity manifest most to customers living or returning to the region who have learned to identify the chain as “home.” But even people from more Northern locations have fond memories of family and community in connection with Waffle House. A colleague in Michigan told me that the Waffle House reminds him of family vacations in the 1970s, when they would drive south and stop at a Waffle House for a lunch or dinner break. Although most of the generic diner menu items offered by Waffle House are not particularly Southern in nature, we have already seen how grits serve to reinforce a Southern identity. However, chicken wings, fried 294

chicken, okra, collard greens, and other staples of Southern African American foodways are not on the menu, as they would be in a soul food restaurant. Absent also are more specific sub-regional items from cuisines such as Cajun and Tex-Mex. Along with other regionally Southern restaurant chains such as the full-service Cracker Barrel, Waffle House in the past has had to deal with lawsuits involving discrimination against African Americans. The Atlanta Business Chronicle reported 18 Jan. 2005 about Waffle House: At a press conference this morning in Atlanta, lawyers from several firms discussed the new suits against the Norcross-based restaurant chain and its franchisees, claiming an alleged pattern and practice of discrimination and violations of federal civil rights laws. […] The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has joined two of the lawsuits as a plaintiff and has endorsed the other suits. (“Waffle House Hit”)7

Katie Rawson examines the early history of Waffle House’s contribution to a culture of inclusion, as well as incidents of the infringement of equality. Reflecting on a statement by singer John Mayer, she writes: “Pop star John Mayer’s statement that ‘Martin Luther King had a dream, and I think Waffle House was in it’ seems to be a shortcut to say that Waffle House is racially diverse” (228). Commenting on a statement in 2004 by Rogers, Sr., that he, as the CEO, invited African Americans into the restaurant in 1961 during the height of the sit-in protests, she sets this against another story reported in the Atlanta Daily World in 1964, that African Americans sat in a Waffle House for over an hour and were not served until management stepped in (228-29). Although it would go too far to suggest that the Southern identity Waffle House represents is a specifically white one, the chain’s record when it comes to race relations seems mixed, and in that way, representative for the region as a whole. In its physical architecture, internal store layout, and in most of its material aspects, a typical Waffle House restaurant retains the atmosphere of the particular moment of now-outdated postwar modernity that atten-

7

In 2003 and 2009 other lawsuits in relation to race were brought in (“Blacks Sue Waffle House”; Greber).

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ded the chain’s founding in 1955.8 They never jumped on the bandwagon of fake authenticity that includes other Southern chains like Cracker Barrel. This other chain tries to appeal to the customer with invocations of a deeper regional past via wood paneling, rocking chairs in front of their old-style veranda and a selection of synthetic Americana, like reproductions of old signage (made in China) installed on the walls to create a retro appeal or the selling of supposedly homemade marmalade in their restaurant shop. Some Waffle Houses feature a sign saying “No shirt, no shoes, no service” (BDay’s Bubble).9 The chain’s rules in regard to seating, service and proper behavior are spelled out in the official House Rules. This prescriptive, even earnest, certainly old-fashioned approach has attracted amused attention from observers who feel themselves to be outside Waffle House’s target audience, and feel entitled to comment in a semi-anthropological way. In one of his routines on his late-night talk show, the commentator and comedian Stephen Colbert examined this approach to customer education and behavior management. Colbert sang a parody song together with the country singer Sturgill Simpson on the show on April 18, 2016, entitled “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Knuckleheads” (Late Show). As Waffle House in the past has taken on its jukebox songs from song contests, Colbert offered it as a suggestion to be taken up on the

8

To the question of technology and mass-food production and Southern identity in relation to the North Carolinian doughnut chain Krispy Kreme Carolyn de la Peña writes: “For southerners confronting a cultural modernity that arrived distinctly later than that of the North, Krispy Kreme’s visible assembly line offered patrons an opportunity to partake in a practice that both signified progress and connected them intimately to the rhythms of machines” (244). My German colleague Joy Katzmarzik in Mainz told me about her initiation into Southern culture in Atlanta with a local friend through a visit at Krispy Kreme with its open assembly line attached to the customer seating. 9 The blog BDay’s Bubble states: “At a Waffle House in an upscale Peachtree City strip center Saturday, I spied a sign on the wall that said: Shirt and Shoes Must Be worn To Be Served. […] Because we’re used to seeing, here in the South, “NoShoesNoShirtNoService” [sic] signs, we understand it by context. But imagine Star Man or someone from another country trying to parse this out. It could mean a host of things, not one of them what its author intended.” The official House Rules actually only state that one should not wear obscene clothing.

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jukebox.10 The lyrics to the song however, in the end subtly validate Waffle House’s insistence on proper behavior, but question whether this is practical given the real-world nature of the chain’s customers: When you’re killing your hangover, but you’re killing my mood. All these nice, upstanding families just came for some food. If you’re gonna cause a ruckus then I must object, These are world famous waffles son, show some respect […] Cuz this house has rules, and there’s a bunch.

Anthony Bourdain, a celebrity chef who specialized in Cajun cuisine from Louisiana, was interviewed on Colbert’s show in 2015. He recalled that he had first discovered Waffle House in Charlotte, NC; his unfamiliarity with it as a Louisiana native suggests how specific Waffle House’s regional appeal was to a certain white, Protestant sub-section of the Southern population: “This is a – talk about exotica – I had never been. It’s apparently a place you can go no matter how wrecked or obnoxious you are, or how late at night, they are nice to you. […] I had the best time there.” Another comedian, Jeff Gaffigan, takes issue with the cleanliness of Waffle House, and reinforces the perception of the chain as demographically tied to a specific white lower class Southern regional cliché: “If you have never been to a Waffle House, just imagine a gas station bathroom that sells waffles. […] It’s the people in there, it’s like a white trash convention, or for me a family reunion.”

Modernity, Self-Referentiality, and Southernness in Waffle House Songs Waffle House does not indulge in a nostalgia for an imagined nineteenth or early twentieth century in the South that never actually happened. Instead, the chain froze into eternity the real 1950s style with which it commenced operations. When the Waffle House promotional jukebox music project started in the 1980s along the then-fashionable lines of 1950s and 10

In an ironic turn Waffle House actually included Simpson’s tune on their inhouse jukebox. This fact was featured again on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert (30 June 2016). I would love to thank my student Vasco Ochoa from my American Studies seminar 2015/16 in Mainz for alerting me to both of Colbert’s Waffle House parodies.

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1960s retro revival, it was simply returning to a style of music that the chain had featured on its jukeboxes at the start. The in-house music created for those jukeboxes in the 1980s however, shows much more racial flexibility than a comparable soundtrack from the 1950s and the early 1960s, featuring not just influences from white country music, but also R&B and Motown. This Waffle House jukebox is nowadays an odd artifact. Anecdotal evidence suggests that almost nobody activates it in a typical Waffle House any more. Waffle House features a jukebox in all of its diners. Beside a changing selection of around a hundred well-known popular songs from various genres, since about 1984 the average Waffle House jukebox has featured a changing selection of about thirty songs about Waffle House itself, and its food. If one chooses to accept the odd idea of paying a quarter to listen to an advertisement about the restaurant in which one is currently eating, one gets rewarded with a witty/weird combination of deliberately or unconsciously naïve lyrics praising one product of the Waffle House from the perspective of a customer or worker. 11 These lyrics are set to various forms of popular music, utilizing a broad but also carefully limited variety of typical styles: from rock and country to disco, gospel and Motown inspired. Some songs are real musical parodies in which older songs are given new Waffle House lyrics. Some of these lyrics are truly hilarious, like “Waffle House Hash Browns I love you, I love you so much”; others celebrate the overweight “Meat Lover” who has to be carried out to his truck after eating the actual Waffle House special-order meal called a Meat Lover. Others depict the hard life of truck drivers and the basic creature comforts they find when stopping at one of the hundreds of Waffle House restaurants on the American interstate highway system, or the hard work of a short-order line cook or cashier in the Waffle House itself. Some songs are elegiac, inspired, extremely well-composed and performed, such as the bittersweet country ballad “Life is Like a Cup of Coffee” (sometimes hot, sometimes cold). Others are valedictory “Waffle House Thank You” songs to the customers for patronizing the restaurant. In all these songs, a particular region- and class-marked vision of daily

11

I would like to thank Brian Chance, University of Oklahoma, for encouraging me to engage with the Waffle House jukebox.

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American consumer life is performed – a reflection of the real life which takes place in the fast food restaurant itself. When we look at the entire spectrum of dedicated Waffle House songs more closely, we can group them in songs about the staff (cook, grill operator, waitress), songs featuring good service and a homey feeling (dedication, family, down-home comfort food, the staff trying to outdo each other in making customers feel cared for) and songs about the products (grits, coffee, coke, hash browns, toast, meat, burger, eggs, steaks, chili). We can also divide them according to style: There are gospel songs (“They’re Cooking up My Order”), bluegrass renditions (“Waffle House Steaks”), R&B (“Waffle House for You and Me”), or rock ’n’ roll (“Saturday Night at My Place”), among other genres (cf. Whitehead).12 Waffle House has so far released three CDs of these songs – in 1999 (Waffle House Favorites Vol. 1), in 2011 (Waffle House Favorites Vol. 2), and a Christmas Special in 2001. Only the most recent CD was sold exclusively on their website, something they stopped doing in 2013.13 “Raisins in My Toast,” a Waffle House song from 1996, is a send-up of the well-known hit doo-wop hit “Sherry,” by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. Composed by Bob Gaudio, “Sherry” reached Number Five on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962. “Sherry” was last quoted in popular culture in the film The Help in 2011. “Raisins in My Toast,” a kind of implied “musical stage show,” – as I would like to interpret the scene – is narrated by the singer and concurrent Waffle House customer, describing what happened to him when he entered a Waffle House that morning. We are encouraged to see the scene literally playing out as an animated Disney-style musical film in our minds, while the narrator tells us: he enters the Waffle House, sits down in a booth, looks at the menu and wonders what he might order. At that moment, some living, talking raisins come 12

Sam Whitehead reports that the newest song with video as of 2015 is “Color Me Gone,” performed by Kaitlyn Bergeron (née Rogers) and written by Scotty Sullivan. 13 My research is informed by listening to the two jukebox favorites CDs, listening to the jukebox in an actual Waffle House, and one rendition of a song from their Christmas CD on Youtube of which I couldn’t get a copy (an original can be found in the library of Waco, TX). I also accessed song videos on their Vimeo channel. In addition, I had phone interviews with the Waffle House song producer/composer Jerry Buckner on 10 Jan. 2012, with producer Danny Jones on 18 March 2015, and with the Waffle House representative Shelby White on 19 March 2015.

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to his table, dance in front of him, and tell him, that he should order raisin toast. Then they pop back into the toast and the toast itself jumps into the toaster. The resemblance to “Sherry” from the Four Seasons is not restricted to chord progressions. The Waffle House parody also has similar melody lines. Furthermore, the entire song structure is taken from “Sherry” (with the exception of some verses). In addition, the vocal style on “Raisins” mimics the falsetto voice of Frankie Valli in “Sherry.” Already in the original, the falsetto was a signifier more of a stunt or a novelty song, injecting some self-deprecating fun (but not irony) into the song. We also find a call-and-response figure in “Sherry,” when the melody switches from the falsetto voice (in the table below in italics) to the normal male voice/ voices (normal font in the table). In the Waffle House send-up, the high-pitched voice can be connected with the imaginary living little raisins, who sing with a comical voice to mark their essential associations with characters in animated cartoons. However, the song does not clearly switch between a “raisin voice” and a “normal voice” to definitively mark the raisins. In this, “Raisins” also follows “Sherry” in the latter, the falsetto voice is not exclusively Valli’s, with the male choir also joining in from time to time. As the Waffle House song does not provide a high-pitched beginning, the echo voice (here in parentheses) overlapping the main line is put on a lower pitch to provide the necessary contrast. “Raisins” also derives much of its charm from the closeness with which it also hews to the original in its lyrical intonations and syllabic patterns, achieving in this way the desired parodistic, intertextual effect: “Sherry, Sherry baby” in the original becomes in the sendup “Raisin, raisin toast,” sung in the same rhythm. 14 Here are two excerpts of the lyrics of both songs which show the similarities: 14

Jerry Buckner, the composer/producer of most of the Waffle House songs together with Gary Garcia, pointed out to me in a telephone interview in 2012 that the Waffle House songs are not covers, but rather tributes to different styles, sounding “like” somebody. The question if a rendition breaks copyright law has been delegated to the courts since hip hop started sampling. However, parodies are to a certain extend included in what is called a fair use. The Economist writes: “The first [exception from copyright protection] is compulsory licensing, which requires any song released to the public in any medium (from wax cylinders to digital download) to be available for any other party to re-record in a substantively similar form. The cover artist pays a fee to the composer for each copy sold or

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“Sherry”

“There Are Raisins in my Toast”

(Upbeat and intro two measures drum and bass)

(Upbeat and intro as in “Sherry,” same figure but different instruments)

Sherry, Sherry baby Sherry, Sherry baby

Raisin, (raisin toast) raisin toast Raisin, (raisin toast) raisin toast

Sherry (Sherry baby) Ba-a-by (Sherry baby)

There are raisins in my toast (Raisin toast)

Sherry can you come out tonight? (Come, come, come out tonight.)

There are raisins in my toast. (Raisin toast at Waffle House) I walked into the Waffle House and sat down at my seat Looked the menu over while deciding what to eat Out came the little guys and looked at me and said: Make sure to choose the raisin toast and popped into the bread 15

The musicians who wrote this send-up for Waffle House attempt to draw attention from the fundamental promotional purpose of the song through different framing strategies, all inherent in the song’s nature itself:

given away. The second exception is fair use, designed to allow parody, commentary and analysis that advance academic, political or social purposes. A four-part test determines whether a derivative work falls under fair-use protection. But the test is ambiguous and relies on litigation, which is costly. Most artists therefore avoid relying on fair-use provisions, and instead seek permission (as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic does with his parody songs) or avoid using copyrighted material that cannot be licensed” (“Does Parody Trump Copyright?”). 15 If not otherwise noted the song lyrics for Waffle House songs were transcribed by myself.

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1)

2)

3)

4)

As hit song: The tune of the song is well known. It was derived from an actual hit song and fits with the idea that jukeboxes feature old and new hit songs. Surrealism: The song assigns the male falsetto voice to the comical animated raisins, and thereby entertains the listener on more than one level at once. Stage show: The song is made attractive through a narrative alluding to an animated or live musical stage show, one that in the mind’s eye is “actually” happening in the same location in which the listener finds herself at the moment – in a Waffle House. Self-referential pop culture: We are dealing with an advertisement and not a real song. This becomes apparent only when the listener realizes that, apart from “Sherry,” “Raisins in My Toast” belongs to – and quotes – a pre-existing, almost Möbius-strip-like category of advertisement spots enlisting raisins. For the intended listeners who have grown up in American popular culture, it almost subliminally invokes a (recent) previous moment in the collective memory of that culture.

Let us examine point four above in more detail. “Raisins” is not only a rip-off of a well earlier pop song, it also quotes entire semiotic links of association around earlier advertising/pop culture phenomena. The first stop in this chain of references is the late-1980s ad campaign known as the California Raisins. These were Claymation clips seen on U.S. television in the years around 1986, in which the raisins themselves, not shortorder diner restaurants, were the promoted product. One of these commercials shows three workers sitting on a skyscraper, alluding to a wellknown mid-century black-and-white photograph, “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” showing the Rockefeller Center under construction (California Raisins, Workmen). When one of the workers in the California Raisins commercial opens his lunch box, music emerges from the raisins in his raisin toast, which are performing an R&B song titled “I Heard it through the Grapevine.” This is yet another turn down the hall of mirrors with yet another well-known Motown hit by Marvin Gaye from the 1960s. The California Raisins ad campaign became so successful that the animated raisins took on a media life of their own. There were releases of CDs from The California Raisins, TV shows about the band’s career, a mockumentary, and a star turn in the Emmy Award-winning A Claymation Christmas 302

Celebration. They also made a spoof commercial in Claymation in which a raisin “copy” of Michael Jackson performed an R&B version to the lyrics “I Heard It through the Grapevine.” At the end of the commercial we see how a “real” humanoid-claymation Michael Jackson wakes up from a dream and looks towards a bowl of fruit, in which some grapes are placed (California Raisins, Jackson). The singer for this last commercial actually was a Michael Jackson impersonator, Kipp Lennon. 16 Angela McRobbie describes the extreme levels of self-referentiality achieved at the end of the twentieth century as a defining feature of postmodern and popular culture in the United States: It is no longer possible to talk about the image and reality, media and society. Each pair has become so deeply intertwined that it is difficult to draw the line between the two of them. Instead of referring to the real world, much media output devotes itself to referring to other images, other narratives. Self-referentiality is all-embracing, although it is rarely taken account of. (16)

Let us examine more closely this phenomenon of promotion eating its own cultural tail.

Waffle House Songs in the Context of Promotional Music According to Nicolas Cook, “any analysis of musical meaning needs to begin with a clear grasp of the communicative context within which this meaning is realized” (28). It is important to note that Cook looks at the use of incidental music in TV advertisements, and not at instances in which one proper song features prominently. In the case of the former, the sound of the music is mainly deployed to define an emotional context for the advertisement; in the case of the latter, the meaning of the music for the product is mainly embedded in the lyrics. We will see however, that in the Waffle House songs the communicative context itself is deliberately 16

Lennon actually became Michael Jackson’s official impersonator when in an episode of the Simpsons in which Jackson spoke the voice of a Jackson impersonator in the show Jackson wanted to play a trick on his brother and had Lennon sing the song “Happy Birthday Lisa” (J. Brooks). Lennon also sang commercials for Taco Bell, Barbie, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, etc. (Lennon).

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blurry; yes, they are supposed to promote the brand, but in the act of placing them on a jukebox the Waffle House corporation asserts that they are semiotically equal not only to real songs, but to hit songs. 17 The result frankly feels to this observer like a failed advertisement strategy. Specialists in this field such as Jakob Lusensky credit music with the power of creating what he calls an “emotional attachment” to the brand. However, James Kellaris (et al.) have pointed out that “[c]reating positive feelings during ad exposure may be desirable but have little impact unless the brand and message are remembered” (114). These statements define historically different advertisement strategies. Jingles, sung with relatively short lines highlighting a product and featuring a slogan set in an easy musical motif, the hook, became commercialized as early as 1926, when the Wheaties breakfast flake jingle was the first to be broadcasted on radio. In 1936 the radio jingle “PepsiCola Hits the Spot” went viral and was even included in jukeboxes by 1941 (Booth). The famous Chiquita Banana jingle followed in 1944; however, at fifty seconds it did not have the length of a proper song. In the 1960s, TV advertisement music became part of the “lifestyle” ad format, in which a song supported a youth culture life style. Advertisers tried, as Timothy D. Taylor points out in his pathbreaking monograph, “to make commercial music sound less like commercial music […] by eschewing the jingle and attempting to offer a ‘real’ song” (2012, 148). The soft drink “Cola Wars” broke out with “You’ve Got a Lot to Live” (1963) from Pepsi-Cola and “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” (1971) from CocaCola. In the latter case the advertisement was subsequently stripped of its promotional lyrics and was released as a single (The Hillside Singers, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”). In 1983-84 – not coincidentally, at the same time that the first recording of a Waffle House song took place – Michael Jackson hooked up with Pepsi and produced “You’re the Pepsi Generation,” a rip-off of his own song “Billie Jean” with altered lyrics. Somewhat different from advertising on TV and radio is music played on location, i.e., background music which intends to create emotional effects, without the listener really noticing the music or without being tied to a specific product (cf. DeNora 131-50). The MUZAK Corporation pioneered this with instrumental-only renditions of popular hits in an easylistening style that came to be known as “elevator music.” Soon this 17

For a history of the jukebox see Segrave.

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concept found its way into restaurants and cafes (Lanza). This background music does not consist of jingles, but encourages the subjective sense that the real-life settings in which listeners find themselves are taking on the atmosphere of TV ads, with renditions of real-life hit-songs in the background. Café chains such as Starbucks, Panera Bread, and others on the regional level have their own form of gentler background music in accordance with their image of massified “exclusivity,” while mass-market regional grocery chains in many parts of the country go for older hit songs, or occasionally, their own company jingles. McDonald’s has recently started a project to install TVs in every location playing a “McDonald’s Channel” that skips all controversial news, and from time to time plays the McDonald’s jingle of the moment (O’Brian). Waffle House songs have definitely participated in such trends since the 1980s, a decade when a vulgarized form of self-aware mass reflexivity in popular culture about popular culture itself came to the forefront of public consciousness.18 In this period, the aesthetic category of “retro” became standard fashion, and “virtual” songs originally used for short advertising campaign developed interesting afterlives as real classics. A good example is the 1984 clip “Where’s the Beef?” from Wendy’s, a prominent hamburger and fast-food chain. The clip starts with an old lady, played by Clara Peller, looking at huge burger buns, between which a tiny patty of beef can be seen. She then speaks the catchphrase “Where’s the beef?” Nashville songwriter Coyote McCloud then wrote a full song as promotion for the commercial (Batchelor and Stoddart 48). The song, with lyrics by Jim Gossett, is mostly spoken behind a catchy beat. The story describes how a lady enters a burger restaurant and orders a burger. When she opens the buns, the voice of the male narrator recites: She said I’ve had burgers well-done, rare But now I got one that ain’t even there She got no response from ringing the bell And that’s when she started to yell.

Peller shouts the well-known phrase, WHERE’S … THE … BEEF!? Then a female chorus starts singing:

18

Timothy D. Taylor calls it the “nostalgia” of the Baby Boomers (165-77).

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Young man, can’t you hear her call She don’t see no beef at all Call a cop to catch the thief The one who stole this lady’s beef. (Coyote McCloud)

The song was released on vinyl independently of the Wendy’s campaign. The latter ended in 1985 when Peller switched to performing for Prego pasta sauce. For this new client, she began a certain kind of intertextual play with her previous persona for Wendy’s stating in the Prego ad that she had “finally found” the beef for their Bolognese pasta sauce. Another example from recent film culture where this advertisement-meets-popculture-meets-a-“normal”-movie effect can be found in the recent film Zombieland (2009). Here, dessert snack products from the Hostess Corporation, such as Twinkies and Snowballs, were featured, but not just as normal cases of product placement increasingly common in recent Hollywood films. The search for a Twinkie actually became an explicit and central driving element in the storyline. I do not want to overstate the aesthetic quality to be found in these promotional efforts, but I also would like to separate these practices from the phenomenon of “cult followings,” where the artistic product has attracted a fan base because of how spectacularly bad it is. However, as with other records which got produced due to the previous success of a separate TV advertisement, Waffle House songs have managed to produce a fan culture for the advertisement or promotional artifact, but not necessarily for the food they sell. This ironic touch has itself in turn also become part of real TV advertisements. Lars Andersen’s research on Danish advertising trends reveals that ad music over time has become more and more ironic and parodistic, increasingly resorting to vulgarized forms of the postmodern tendency to play with meaning for play’s sake. He identifies this as a new advertisement strategy, which pretends to take the consumer seriously by saying: “we agree with you, and think advertising is a joke, so let’s have some fun with it” (75). In her book about the Selling Sound of country music, Diane Pecknold finds that consumers are aware of the commercial implications inherent in the music, as record companies force the singer to compromise and deviate from a supposedly real authenticity. Interestingly she discovers that, listeners “found themselves caught somewhere between anti-mass media suspicions of the old left and the joyful populist consumer democracy of Richard Nixon” (5). 306

As Nixon did, let us too, begin a “Southern Strategy” to dive deeper into this paradox.

The Musicians behind the Scene of Waffle House In the lyrics of its in-house songs, Waffle House still participated in the older jingle tradition; however, the playing of these songs only on location in the chain’s own restaurants brings it closer to MUZAK then to TV advertisement. It is interesting to note that before the in-house-jukebox campaign, Waffle House had never produced any other form of corporate advertisement. Creating promotional songs for an in-house jukebox was an idea that came directly from the authority of the chain’s owner in the second generation, Joe Rogers Jr. (CEO until 2013), or, more precisely, from Mary Welch Rogers, his then-wife. She hired the professional production and writing team of Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia to actually create the songs. Unlike them however, who seem to have used this opportunity to participate in the “self-reflexive” popular culture trend of the 1980s, Welch Rogers rather seemed to have taken advantage of the already installed jukeboxes to try and keep in touch with some elements of her former life before marrying Rogers, when she was a singer in Las Vegas. She performed the lead vocals on many of the Waffle House songs. As the original idea was motivated more by Welch Rogers’s persistent semiprofessional artistic ambitions (and more than a trace of vanity) rather than a clear advertising strategy, an air of inspired amateurishness persists to this day around the whole promotional effort. It was on the basis of a portfolio that included a 1982 CD project featuring songs about popular arcade video games, including the well-known “Pac-Man Fever,” that Waffle House had hired Buckner and Garcia on a contractual song-to-song basis. Their single, “Pac-Man Fever” had sold over a million copies in 1981 and earned Gold status. 19 The song talks about somebody who throws his quarters into the arcade machine, 19

For a re-recording of the Pac-Man Fever album in 1999 Buckner and Garcia got Danny Jones to join them to play the drums. Columbia (part of Sony) did not want to re-release the old album and due to copyright restrictions Buckner and Garcia had to re-create all the older sounds, actually being forced to make a cover of themselves. Danny Jones also provided the production studio for many of the Waffle House songs.

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because he is addicted to the game – an interesting parallel to the jukebox on which the Waffle House songs later would be played by inserting quarters. The title was a riff on Ted Nugent’s song “Cat Scratch Fever,” but apart from the title, the song has no other relation to Nugent’s number. The arcade game Pac-Man arrived in the US in October of 1980, and soon became widely popular and an icon of popular culture. Buckner and Garcia rode the wave of the craze for Pac-Man merchandise with their original idea of an entire album of novelty songs about the different games. The songs themselves were produced in a stylistic mix of rock ’n’ roll and early electronic sounds, joining up the techno-futuristic appeal of the Japanese game with the sound of Americana. Buckner and Garcia were originally Midwesterners from the Rustbelt town of Akron, Ohio, once the “Rubber Capital of the World.” Buckner’s first local band was called Wild Butter, and produced one psychedelic rock album of the same name in 1970 on the United Artists label. The album cover is an image of a huge piece of butter in the sky at sunrise. After the band disbanded, Buckner (piano, vocals, composing) teamed up with Garcia (guitarist, singer). They first recorded in 1972 as Animal Jack, with a spoken rhythmic song “Gotta Hear the Beat.” Buckner writes in commemoration of Garcia, who died in 2011: We eventually hooked up with a friend who had a recording studio and started recording original songs and jingles for local businesses. We became very good at writing jingles but what we really wanted was to score a hit with our songs. We would take the songs to New York but be promptly sent on our way by every record company. Out of frustration we decided to record a novelty song with nothing but a beat and repetitive lyrics as a joke and see if they would buy that. Surprisingly they did. (BucknerGarcia, website)

In the mid ’70s both moved to Atlanta where they met Buddy Buie, songwriter, manager and producer of The Atlanta Rhythm Section, and Arnie Geller, who together had formed the music production company BGO. Through BGO, Buckner and Garcia released their Pac-Man hit. Buckner and Garcia also had a solid record of successfully producing real songs, like a rendition of the Christian hit “Footprints in the Sand” in 1980, with which singer Edgel Groves landed a Number One hit in the country and Christian charts. Buckner’s and Garcia’s number is credited with making the Christian poem famous. 308

The creative input and experience of Buckner (mostly composition) and Garcia (mostly lyrics and singing) is the reason why the Waffle House output successfully achieved this weird “in-between” feeling. They made the songs overtly witty and slyly self-reflective, while still keeping within well-known commercial formats and avoiding any overly naïve, uni-dimensional advertisement strategy which might have been expected from the echelons of company management itself. In addition, as the promotional aspect of the songs is not hidden but overt, this foregrounding of artifice actually becomes a witty aesthetic element. The fact that the ownership of the Waffle House Company still lies in a single family does not make the stores “authentically” personal. Nevertheless, the image the company and the individual diners try to project is that of being your local Southern neighbor. The servers greet you with the colloquial “hey baby,” “sweetheart,” or “sugar” (Moe 4), even when you are fresh off the interstate with your car and not a local customer whom they know. Mary Welch Rogers’s very first Waffle House song, “Waffle House Family – Part 1” defines this atmosphere as a fixed part of the company policy: Just come on in (come on in), you see (you see) We’re gonna treat you like you’re family. Just come on in (come on in), we’re always home (always home) There’s a waffle in the baker, on the grill we’re making bacon, At the Waffle House you’re always welcome back home.

There is only a hint of irony or self-deprecation at the beginning of the song, where a male voice speaks an echo to the words in a very high pitch. The echo in the refrain shown above is however performed by a gospel choir. The song clearly plays with the idea that once a Southerner who travelled outside the South comes back, Waffle House is a place where he knows he is again on home turf, welcomed back home into the family. The chain gets more concrete about the appropriate customer they have in mind when the lyrics say: “I’m proud to serve good folks like you,” assuming that there might be bad folks out there, or at least people who do not fit the elastic but very specific category of “good folks” who might belong in a small Southern town. The commercial reality of Waffle House recedes from view but never fully vanishes, as when Welch Rogers sings about the founders in the last lines of the song: 309

Long ago Tom and Joe Planted little yellow seeds and watched them grow. Those yellow signs are sprouting up, everywhere ’Cause at Waffle House cash customers they know we care.

The song depicts the business as a seed growing into a big yellow flower, thanks to the customers (all the outlets have a forty-foot tall yellow logo placed next to the one-story diner building itself, so that it can be seen from the interstate). Although the last line actually invokes the issues of mistrust and fraud – Waffle House only accepts cash and not checks or credit cards – this admission of a different policy from other chains functions as a sign that the regionally Southern values of the imagined community that eats at Waffle House is still bound to the earth out of which the seeds of healthy commercialism sprout. Southernness is also expressed through the persistence on the menu of the classic Southern breakfast food of grits. In “Why Would You Eat Your Grits Anyplace Else?” Welch Rogers enlists a modern soul arrangement and belts out the persona of a tough working-class lady: I’ve spent a lot of time driving on the road and not know who. [?] You know you can believe me when I tell you something’s really good. It’s the only place that you’ll ever see me. I’m cooking on the stove down the street at the Waffle House.

Later she asks: “give me a ‘g,’ give me a ‘r’ […] G. R. I. T. S.,” reminiscent of many songs like “Respect” by Aretha Franklin that employ the spelling out of words for rhetorical and dramatic effect, this time for humorous purposes. On “I’m Going Back to the Waffle House” the male voice of Jason Bowen starts Working on a job this day […] I get a good day’s pay […] Hours long keep me on the run […] I’m going back to the Waffle House With people just like me.

Welch Rogers takes over: “Everybody’s moving faster […] strangers in a foreign land” and Waffle House provides the missing sense of a bit of 310

home in this mobile road culture. Both songs establish the dichotomy of the strange and fast-moving modern world outside, and the down-to-earth, homey world of Waffle House, with “people just like me.” 20 “Life is Like a Cup of Coffee” also exemplifies Southernness, this time not in the lyrics, but in the arrangements and also in the sound palette. The song is written in a gospel style, with a fiddle accompaniment. It presents a weird, yet touching sound poem about poor people’s authenticity. The song is from the perspective of a person “never feeling real high,” sitting in a Waffle House frustrated that life had not turned out as she wished. The wisdom of ordinary working folk gives consolation. One needs to accept that “life is like a cup of coffee, some like it hot,” but that sometimes it also turns out cold.

The Parody Style Not all is serious in the Waffle House world invoked by these songs. The really funny ones include “Waffle House Hash Browns (I love you),” “Raisins in my Toast,” “Meat Lover,” “Grill Operator,” “Waffle House March” and “844,739 Ways to Eat a Hamburger,” many of them sung by Billy Dee Cox. Billy Dee with his Southside Allstars Band had been an entertainer, lounge singer and impersonator in the 1970s and won the Atlanta Music Hall of Fame Award in 2002 (Dee Cox, Facebook). He once also attracted the largest crowd ever at Mama Wynette’s Country Music Club (Waffle Records, Facebook). He had an ability to change musical styles in a split second, allowing him to jump from a quick interpretation of Aretha’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” to a humorous rendition of Elvis. Through a rapid-fire medley of songs and song fragments, he would impersonate the singers and their special voices and also introduce them in the classic voice of a master of ceremonies, then shortly after fall into the role of that singer himself. According to Roger Gutierrez, who has produced a video of Billy Dee and his band, he was “Entertainer of the year and voted best impersonator for five years by the entertainment community” (Dee, Billy, Youtube,

20

The songs can be heard on an ebay website which sells this record (Waffle House, “I’m Going Back”).

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music). Billy Dee’s band also recorded novelty songs, like the “Georgia Bulldogs” anthem for the University of Georgia football team. Comparing Billy Dee Cox to Danny Jones, Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, we can detect in common a fondness for a certain kind of oldstyle, parodistic humor in their music, and a connection to a much older American folk tradition of irreverent minstrelsy. To understand the context out of which their music grew, it is necessary to investigate the history of parody songs and comedic performers, especially in the South. B. Lee Cooper counts parody songs as a subset of the larger category of “answer songs”: The answer song, by its nature a counterveiling statement, is often a parody of the recording to which it responds. Yet not all answers are designed to be humorous. Some recording stars have shaped their professional careers by drafting comic responses to hit tunes. Homer and Jethro, Ben Colder, Weird Al Yankovic, Allan Sherman, Stan Freberg and others strategically await opportunities to react to popular songs with their own creative parodies. Generally, parody song titles clearly establish linkage to original hits. […] Some of the most interesting tunes are politically inspired […], while others portray less than heroic antics by such unlikely characters as “Cholley Oop,” the “Uneasy Rider,” and “The Leader Of The Laundromat.” (1991, 137)21

Cooper cites Michael Jackson’s hit “Beat It” (1983) and its Grammy awarded parody by Al Yankovic called “Eat It” (1984) to demonstrate that songs can be parodied by turning the topic to food.22 In this particular case the original song was about a street fight. The music video already draws a connection to food. The opening scene shows a young African American male sitting at a lunch counter in a diner. The image of the lunch counter here evokes memories of the lunch counter sit-in strikes during the civil rights protests. The starting of the narrative in the diner and the connection with sharing food – even in a commercialized context – had activated awareness of highly contested spaces in the racial encounter in the U.S. In his slow and countrified parody, Yankovic diverts the 21

Cooper also edited an answer song discography (1950-1990) together with Haney. See also Cooper 1987. 22 Al Yankovic always gets permission from the original artist to parody their song (Sanders).

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topic of food in another direction: “Well don’t you know that kids are starving in Japan, so eat it.” This in itself is already a twist on a parenting cliché using the line: “There are starving children in Africa. So eat your veggies.” Yankovic cannot resist using a list of food items to ridicule the Jackson song with a terminally banal new topic: “Get yourself an egg and beat it. Have some more chicken, have some more pie, it doesn’t matter if its boiled or fried, just eat it.” The video made for the Yankovic parody retains the two street gangs of Jackson’s video, but this time they are fighting with a spoon and a fork over a rubber chicken. An earlier prominent singing comedy duo in this vein were Homer and Jethro, from Tennessee. Henry D. Haynes (aka Homer) was born near Knoxville and his partner Kenneth C. Burns in the smaller town of Conasauga, both in 1920. They started performing on the radio in 1936 and were known as the Thinking Man’s Hillbillies. They got their fame by performing parodies of well-known hit songs of the time. In 1959 they parodied Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans,” a banjo semi-folk ballad about beating back the British in 1814. They called their rendition “The Battle of Kookamonga.” Already the original song had not been completely serious: Starting with a rendition of the instantly recognizable melody from “Dixie” to establish that the song would evoke issues from Southern history, the parody describes American troops as hillbillies, but very tough ones: We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in a town in New Orleans.

The British defeat appears as a ridiculous rout: Well they ran through the briars, and they ran through the brambles, And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go.

The American side is backward, badly equipped, almost shamanically primitive, but persistent and victorious:

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We fired our cannon ’til the barrel melted down So we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round. (Lyrics from Youtube)

Such stylizations of Southerners into backward but effective hillbillies combining pride in their identity with a huge appetite for self-parody is characteristic of country and folk music performers from the region. “The Battle of Kookamonga” is then a parody of the original’s song’s self-parody; a reflection of old-style fan and comedic intertextuality. Performing on the Ozark Jubilee TV show and the Johnny Cash Show, they switched the scene from a real battlefield to neighboring boys and girls scout campsites. The targets of attack are no longer the British, but the girls. The performance of the song includes deliberate “mistakes” in lyrics, where Homer for example sings “rubbing girls” (to make fire) instead of the original “rubbing sticks.” The fondness for self-deprecation characteristic of much of Southern culture also becomes a theme in shows like Hee Haw, a television variety show with country music launched in 1969. Set in a fictional rural place called Kornfield Kounty, the show’s preference for using the letter “K” instead of “C” has long served as a comedy marker of uneducated rural misspelling. Although not completely a product of Southern creativity, Hee Haw genuinely celebrated country music and rural culture while at the same time making fun of it. In the show white Southerners took charge of their own supposedly backward image.23 This was different from satirical depictions of Southern life completely produced by Northerners such as the Li’l Abner newspaper comics by Al Capp, which ran between 19341977 and greatly influenced how the South was imagined from the outside.24 If we look for sources for Southern humor beyond the British settler and early frontier traditions, we can see another lineage coming from the 23

African Americans had in Soul Train their own music show. The most extreme focal point of Southern backwardness and the hillbilly/redneck/white trash image is projected to Appalachia. At the ASA conference in 2011 I listened to the panel “Appalachian Studies,” including papers by Marjorie Pryse about “Stereotype, Authenticity and the Metaphor of Appalachia as an ‘Internal Colony’” and Susan Sarnoff regarding “Appalachian Identity: An Oxymoron?” Cf. a critical reflection on the Appalachian stereotype in Billings et al. 24

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humor and musical parodies of minstrelsy. Contrary to widespread popular misconception, the Southern tradition of minstrelsy was not only limited to blackface humor. It also employed musical parodies of popular opera numbers and other ephemeral culture of the day (Cockrell; Norris).25 This kind of old-style humor was sometimes called “corn pone” material. Walter Blair writes about this Southern approach to humor: People laugh most heartily when comedians take advantage of an audience’s awareness that certain kinds of characters and actions are ordinarily funny. Judy Canova’s or Dorothy Shay’s hillbilly songs, Jack Benny’s hillbilly sketches, and Al Capp’s Dogpatch comic strips need not be (through they sometimes are) very funny. They will arouse laughter, whether they are very funny or not, because jokes about the naïveté, the illiteracy, and the uncouthness of hillbillies are traditionally mirth-provoking. Antebellum audiences, like modern audiences, knew that Southerners of certain classes and districts have been traditionally laughable. Not only oral lore but also books and articles by British and American travelers, dating back to the time of William Byrd, had established the tradition of comic barbarians on the frontier. (15)

Although Hee Haw had been created by Canadian comedy writers, it was popular not only in the South but also the entire country. It was ultimately cancelled not because Southern people felt insulted, but rather because it was appreciated mostly by an aging demographic which was less affluent and therefore less lucrative in terms of the advertising income which enables TV shows. At approximately the same time, the related figure of the hillbilly from the upland South got its media apotheosis in the iconic show The Beverly Hillbillies. This was a sitcom running from 1962 to 1971 that featured a poor Ozarks family named Clampett that moved to Beverly Hills after they had struck it rich with oil on their farm back home. The show’s humor lies of course in its depiction of the constant clashes between traditional and modern forms of life. Kellogg’s cornflakes became the show’s most faithful sponsor. A big package of the cereal appeared in an ad after the show’s intro, but the corn flakes also become part of the show’s internal plotlines. They are employed as a running gag, showing the Clampetts constantly eating Kellogg’s flakes. Homer and Jethro, who 25

Wade Hall writes: “Throughout the era 1865-1914 the Civil War was second only to the Negro as subject for Southern humor” (87).

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had an appearance in the Beverly Hillbillies, also promoted Kellogg’s products. Tim Hollis writes: The veteran musical satirists participated in a series of commercials in which the tag line was always the same: Homer: Waiter, give me coffee without cream. Jethro: We’re outta cream, sir. Homer: Well, make it without milk, then. Both: Ooooh, that’s corny! […] Had enough of that? The audience couldn’t get its fill, so Kellogg’s even offered Homer and Jethro joke books as Corn Flakes premiums. (213)

Homer and Jethro had also performed on the Cincinnati radio show Midwest Hayride which featured country music and what was called “hayseed” comedy. The show was modeled after Louisiana Hayride (194857), also a country format on which Elvis Presley had gotten his head start.26

Parody Songs about the Automobile and Christmas The comedy arising from the everyday topic of food in the Waffle House songs can also extend to other banal topics. The automobile and Christmas are two such themes B. Lee Cooper lists among others (such as telephones and death) in his topical song discography. A well-known employer of songs about automobiles for comedic effect is the comedy-DIY car repair radio show Car Talk, produced by National Public Radio. Here we do not distinguish between the South and the other regions of the country, but rather enter a general American world of wisecracking, demotic, yet larger-than-life DIY car repair aficionados. The show is hosted by Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, two siblings from Boston whose real names are Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Between the different phone 26

I want to thank my friend Sallie Mock, librarian in Cincinnati, for providing me with a DVD copy of the panel discussion “America’s Song Butchers: The Weird World of Homer and Jethro” on 31 March 2012 at the Main Library in Cincinnati, featuring Karen Raizor (author of the upcoming bio of the duo) and Mike Martini. Not only does the title of the panel refer to food (here meat), the title photo of the DVD shows Jethro wearing a chef’s hat and Homer a colander.

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calls, they take from mostly talkative people with car problems, they feature music with the topic of the automobile. On a CD titled Car Talk Car Tunes: America’s Best Disrespectful Car Songs (Vol. 1) by the Tappet Brothers from 2001 a song by Red Meat called “Under the Wrench” has the lines: Well I talked to my mechanic and he told me not to panic As he pulled my engine out with a winch, He’s got to keep it overnight and I’m just a little frightened Coz my car’s going under the wrench. (Soundclick)

Waffle House’s Buckner and Garcia had grown up in an era of the national culture when the self-deprecating and parodic aesthetic evident in the above examples was joining forces with the logics of commercialism and promotion. In 1980 the duo had already reached billboard #82 with the witty novelty song “Merry Christmas in the NFL.” The song’s lyrics were modelled after the well-known poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“’Twas the Night before Christmas”) and referenced the idiosyncratic vocal delivery of the prominent sports broadcaster Howard Cosell, in the role of Santa Claus. Cosell took offense and radio stations stopped playing the tune. But bad publicity is also publicity. Buckner’s and Garcia’s lyrics and their rendition of the song (under the pseudonym Willis and Vigorish) already foreshadow the later Waffle House songs: Twas the night before Christmas And all through my brain There’s footballs and thoughts Of the upcoming game […] Now Houston, now Dallas Now Pittsburgh, now Green Bay On Denver, on Cleveland On Oakland and L.A. (Lyrics from Youtube)

After a referee’s whistle blows, the composition starts with the melody of “Jingle Bells” played on a xylophone, while military drums, a tambourine, a tuba and a whistle create the comedic background. The first verse (shown above) is an example of Cosell’s football commentary. A light 317

synthesizer tone follows with a pop rhythm, over which the beginning of the parodied Christmas poem is spoken. A female voice then sings the chorus, with spoken responses in a male voice. On the CD It’s a Waffle House Christmas, two renditions of holiday standards keep the release from becoming solely a comedy album. But except for these and a number by Mary Welch Rogers, the CD explodes with parodistic renditions. Lindsay Planer comments in a review of the album that, similarly to the NFL song, in a spoken parody of “’Twas the Night before Christmas,” “Bill ‘The King’ Hoger [is] weaving a tale of Christmas Eve hunger pangs.”27 Other Christmas staples, however, are only slightly altered: “[u]nder the tongue-in-cheek guise of ‘the Four Seasonings,’ the upbeat and handclapping ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Frankie Valli-led Four Seasons” (Planer). The highpoint of comedic (but respectful) treatment can be found in “Waffle House 12 Days of Christmas,” a clip from the album featured on Youtube. In a straight and ethereal voice, a duo of male and female voices sings: At the Waffle House on Christmas my true love gave to me A bowl of delicious hot grits. At the Waffle House on Christmas my true love gave to me, Two waffles baking, and a bowl of delicious hot grits.

The counting story adds more food: Three sausage patties … Four eggs are frying … Five pork chops grilled … Six different omelets … Seven T-bone steaks … Eight chicken sandwiches … Scattered, smothered hash browns … Ten cups of coffee … 27

Bill Hoger and Jerry Buckner teamed as comedians, impersonators, and parody singers on radio shows since 1985, working, for example, on shows by Johnny “Stonewall” Jackson (WYAY Y-106 Atlanta) and Randy Cook & Spiff Carner at Fox97. The characters Hoger invented and impersonated reached from Ed the Mechanic, Mohammed the Convenience Store Clerk, Gramps at the Retirement Home, to Sylvester Sydell of Sydell and Sons Funeral Home (Hoger, website).

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Eleven cups of fizzin’ … Twelve take out boxes … (Lyrics transcribed by the author)

This tradition of lighthearted parody through lyrics is deeply rooted in a community music-making tradition. Although definite proof of the instigation chain (and whether it leads back up to the corporate leadership) is lacking, the evidence for parody as a spontaneous cultural reflex is palpable in a real-life incident from 2011. At a Waffle House outlet on 4301 Sidco Drive in Nashville, Tennessee, the staff sang for their customers carols with food related lyrics they seem to have composed themselves to well-known Christmas tunes, very similar, yet not identical to the Christmas CD Buckner and Garcia had produced. To the melody of “Jingle Bells,” they sang: “Thanks for coming in to a Waffle House today, we’re glad to have you here and share your holiday. […] Waffle House, Waffle House […]” (“Waffle House Christmas Carols”). They also couldn’t resist creating their own version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”: On the twelfth day of Christmas my waitress brought to me, Twelve pork chop dinners, Eleven country hams, Ten Texas cheesecakes, Nine patty melts, Eight biscuits and gravy, Seven BLTs, Five golden waffles!! (Lyrics transcribed by the author)

Perhaps the best-known exponents of the parody Christmas song tradition to which Waffle House aspired with their Christmas CD are Alvin and the Chipmunks, a trio of fictional, anthropomorphic cartoon rodents singing in high pitched squeaky “helium-balloon” voices, whose career is managed by a human foster parent and housemate. Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., created the three Chipmunk voices and their corresponding personae Alvin, Simon, and Theodore in 1958 by speeding up his own recorded voice, which he then layered with himself singing other harmonic parts, also similarly processed. In his natural voice, he also plays the adoptive father of the three characters, David Seville. Christmas with the Chipmunks was the sixth album released by the “group” in 1962. Most of the songs are well known Christmas staples, which get a jolt of humor through the highpitched voices of the chipmunks. Other comedic songs on the album are 319

chipmunk-specific covers of novelty Christmas songs, like “All I Want for Christmas Is my Two Front Teeth,” presented by Spike Jones and His City Slickers and sung by George Rock (originally written in 1948 by Donald Yetter Gardner). The Chipmunks made their name in the increasingly crowded genre of the novelty song. The hippie-stoner comic duo Cheech & Chong, Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong, had a debut single called “Santa Claus and His Old Lady.” In “Christmas Convoy” by Paul Brandt, the genres of road movie and Christmas comedy mesh in a parody of the song by C.W. McCall (an invented performer voiced by Chip Davis and Bill Fries) to the movie Convoy. Old-style musical parodies also found their way into the radio show A Prairie Home Companion (APHC) with Garrison Keillor.28 A Christmas episode parodies the tune “Silent Night” with lyrics appropriate for the agnostic members of the Unitarian Church: “There was a wonderful baby, he was the Messiah, maybe.” As Kathryn Slusher, APHC music librarian, writes in 2003, Keillor also liked creating fake advertisements using well-known classical tunes: Garrison used “Che Gelida Manina” [La Bohème] as the musical setting to his “Jello Aria,” first performed by soprano Maria Jette on our October 13, 2001 broadcast. In the “Jello Aria,” the Soprano sings of her love for not only Christina’s special gelatin, made with fruit and walnuts, but also her love for the simple, lovely things in life, and summer evening memories.

When Waffle House hired a younger cast of musicians in the first decade of the 2000s, their choice was also made in full awareness of the need to produce Christmas novelty songs. They hired Jason Phelps, a rock guitarist and singer from the band Frickin’ A from Ohio, best known for their successful remake of Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” (1981). The band however had also produced a novelty Christmas song, “Merry Frickin’ Christmas”: School[’]s out, Christmas break Home for the holidays[,] meatloaf and fruitcake Off to grandma[’]s, it[’]s so boring 28

In November 2017 Minnesota Public Radio terminated all business relationships with Keillor because of allegations of sexual misconduct.

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Screaming kids and grandpa[’]s snoring […] Shoot me now I’m sick of all my relatives[.] (Lyrics from Youtube)

In a video produced by the new team, “This is the Night,” Waffle House appears as the escape or refuge, a place to go to at Christmas, far removed from holiday stress, open round the clock seven days a week, and also on the holidays. The video features a rap song, many shots of food, the production line and a group of dancing Waffle House customers and employees out in the cold in front of the Waffle House, one costumed as a slice of bacon, another with reindeer antlers, all singing the line: “This is the night before Christmas, it’s our favorite place, this is the night, it doesn’t close and you know why I stuff my face.”

Failure and Absurdity as Articulations of American Culture In a phone interview, Danny Jones was of the opinion that Waffle House could have made much more out of the novelty songs he and the other musicians-for-hire had written for the chain. Instead of restricting them to the in-house jukeboxes only accessible to paying customers who had already sat down and ordered food, the chain could have used the songs themselves as promotional merchandise, easily making them into cult objects in themselves and marketing them. Jones believed that the demand was there, but Waffle House did not jump on this idea. Buckner told me that the owners had always emphasized: “We are in the food business,” and not in the business of promotion or selling other items than food. It is important here to note that Waffle House also never created radio or TV advertisements, relying on word to mouth and visibility on the highway through huge yellow neon signs. The idea was to have the music experienced while eating at the Waffle House, restricting the reality of the experience to the actual place and building, something completely contrary to today’s virtual and mediated realities on the chain’s internet website, and Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo presence. Waffle House senior marketing manager Shelby White stated to me: Here at Waffle House we really talk about the experience that could only take place inside a Waffle House restaurant. There is definitely a different feeling when you walk into a restaurant or a room, anywhere, and there is music in there and there is not music in – music sets a tone. Music at the

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Waffle House is just part of it, it sets a tone and its upbeat and you can sing along. Music is one portion of what makes Waffle House special.

However, the songs did not actually take their place in the culture in the context of being heard inside a real Waffle House, but rather as another pop-cultural expression of the retro trend in the ’80s. The songs fall in the category of cult advertisements, like the Beggin’ Strips commercial for dog treats on TV. Here, a dog, thinking to itself with an anthropomorphized human voice, smells bacon, runs into the kitchen where his owner gives him something which looks like bacon. The dog then looks at the package and thinks: “I can’t read!!!” – to which the female narrator voiceover answers: “Dogs don’t know it’s not bacon!!!” The wordplay around “beggin” and “bacon,” and the speaking dog itself, reminiscent of a mascot, also locate this commercial in the honorable traditions of naïve fun linked to intelligent semiotics and knowing self-deprecation marking the U.S.’s best commercials. Unlike the conservative-Christian-owned fast-food chain Chick-fil-et and its desperate cows pleading with customers to “eat mor chikin [sic]” as a way of avoiding the killing of other meat animals, Waffle House never had a mascot. Their songs instead came closest to being the chain’s expression of the self-referentiality of pop-culture in the ’80s and ’90s. Waffle House management failed to expand their markets across the entire U.S., and also failed to acknowledge the market-transcendent value and the potential for iconic cultural expressivity in the Waffle House song format that could have achieved cult status. Because of this, the resulting song corpus actually remained stuck at a more old-fashioned crossing point where non-commercialized folk parody and jingle-song commercialism come together. Thanks to that holding pattern in the production and presentation of these songs, we have a huge selection of them. Once the Waffle House realized in the later 2000s that the jukebox-only songs had outlived their time and had not achieved any measurable commercial effect, they shifted to different musicians, slowly fading out the team around Buckner of veteran producers and performers. In Phelps’s song “Bert” (produced together with a video in 2007), released on 2011’s Waffle House Jukebox Favorites Vol. 2 the rock song lyrics describe a jealous guy who assumes his girlfriend has another lover until he realizes that she only is in love with “Bert’s Chili” at the local Waffle House. The video ends with the guy following her into the Waffle 322

House and sitting with her in the booth. The real Bert, one of the original co-owners of Waffle House, shows up. The lyrics conclude: “I thought for sure I had lost her, and I found out that she is all mine.” The song’s humor belongs to a different category than the older Waffle House songs. Kaitlyn (Rogers) Bergeron, the daughter of Mary Welch and Joe Rogers, is responsible for this new style. She took over the production of Waffle House’s music around 2010. Like her mother, she also features in some songs, such as the lyrical number “Save Me” (Favorites Vol. 2). This song about love troubles depicts her singing persona sitting drinking coffee in a Waffle House where she and her lover once met. She plays the song on the jukebox they used to play, and she is simply waiting. Some new songs do not necessarily become real pop or country songs, because they retain the convention of mentioning one Waffle House product or feature per song. This Kaitlyn Bergeron number features coffee drinking in a very low-key way, similar to unobtrusive product placement in movies. The other song she sings on the CD, “I” has no mention of any product, or even the Waffle House itself in the lyrics at all. Shelby White said to me: Earlier songs were very, they are almost jingle like. They were almost like a commercial. There was Waffle House in every other sentence. It was very apparent or very clear that it was a Waffle House song. Over time it evolved. The references to Waffle House are more subtle. You may find yourself sing a song and chapter three you might realize that it’s a Waffle House song. May be something you want to play, not necessarily just when you’re at the Waffle House, just when you want to have a song at Waffle House, just a good song overall. Something to entertain you. So the evolution has been from more of a commercial-jingle to what is just a good song with Waffle House theme.

The problem with being “just a good song with a Waffle House theme” is that the knowing deployment of retro associations and the resulting liminality of the song itself between promotion and folk humor are no longer accessible dimensions that enlarge the cultural meaning of the new Waffle House songs. They simultaneously attempt to be real songs and at the same time try to promote the company while hiding the promotional aspect of it. I argue that this current position tries to cover too much cultural ground and in the current cultural context, is not sustainable. The older in-betweenness, rooted in the contemporary fascination of the 1980s with retro effects, was. 323

Interlude: My Waffle House Experience I have to thank a colleague at the University of Oklahoma, originally from Tennessee, for introducing me to Waffle House and its songs. This colleague came from the same town in which Dolly Parton was born. He told me about the weird songs on the chain’s jukebox and I eventually got to eat at one such Waffle House diner in Norman, the town where I worked at the university. Its open grill line was a valuable cultural experience for somebody who had not yet visited the many non-chain diners which still exist in the U.S. However, I was too shy to throw a quarter into the jukebox on that first visit, and nobody else seemed to do it. Only when I drove to other locations outside of Norman in 2009 did I finally collect the courage to activate the jukebox with the selection “Waffle House Family.” I was disappointed that the song sounded so lame. Not long after that, I got to hear many more of the songs, which really made me smile and laugh. I was hooked. Once I even asked the guy who collected the quarters and serviced the jukebox (which contains many more songs than just the Waffle House songs) for whom he was working. I don’t remember the answer any more, but it was clear that the money was going to some music company clearing house who collected the artists’ royalties for playing songs in public. I started my formal case study in the two Waffle Houses in Norman in 2012. In the best intrusive-entitled-anthropological manner, I surreptitiously recorded a couple of songs with a portable recording device for my own research. I noted down all the song titles of Waffle House-specific songs listed in little tabs inside the jukebox, some of them written on paper labels hand-glued over older titles, as the outlet had received a changing selection of these songs over the years. Only a small selection of all the Waffle House songs ever written actually made it on the three CDs released by the chain, so I had to rely on repeat visits to the local diner, each time ordering food and playing and recording the songs, to gather enough material. Once at home the tedious task of transcribing the lyrics had to be done by this non-native English speaker. German speech patterns and a general unfamiliarity with the rhythms of colloquial regional Americanisms sometimes produced results with this material that can be described as meta-comical. On “Grill Operator” for example, lyrics which first sounded like “until the feedies stilla dive” slowly resolved into “until the sleepy town’s alive.” 324

When I learned that Gary Garcia, the singer and guitarist of the team Buckner and Garcia, had died, I decided that I had to move quickly to interview Buckner. I called him in 2012 from my office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a Waffle-House-free zone in the Great Lakes region to where I had moved in the meantime. He told me that he had first asked the company if he was allowed to give me an interview, and they had agreed. I found that opening statement slightly irritating, but I understood it as a particular habit in the culture of corporate media, especially in the advertising music scene, where jingle composers understandably are loyal to their business contacts. I later realized that this obsession with image control and the strict shaping of media statements had escaped its origins in business and government to infect most of American public life. The subsequent interview was also slightly strange, as Buckner insisted that the Waffle House songs they had produced were not rip-offs or parodies of well-known hit songs, but rather were self-composed in the style of a hit song. When I insisted strongly that “Raisins in My Toast” was clearly modelled after “Sherry” the interview dried up. In 2015, I finally got to visit Atlanta, the birthplace of the Waffle House company and the site of the first Waffle House restaurant, now a museum. My hotel was located conveniently south of the airport, near two Waffle Houses at different points just across from the parking lot. Here I encountered for the first time Waffle House outlets where both the staff and the customers were almost exclusively African American (me being the exception). I soon realized that the jukebox didn’t look like I remembered from 2012 but had changed to an electronically operated machine. Nevertheless, I managed to pull up the more than thirty Waffle Housethemed songs and played one or two of them. The staffers started to hum the songs. I quickly got into a conversation and had to explain that I was German. One worker replied: “The two countries I love are Brazil and Germany. I especially like the Odenwald.” The next day I climbed Stone Mountain with its giant carvings of Southern military heroes sponsored by the Daughters of the Confederacy, and encountered the cult around Stonewall Jackson. The Waffle House company seemed to stonewall too. Finally, after several calls to the PR office, I received permission for a telephone interview with the African American Communications Manager, Shelby White. Sitting in was Kelly Thrasher, Vice President/General Manager at Waffle House. I started to wonder why an interview about their music might require the presence of 325

a second person. I told them about my enthusiasm for their music – which is real – and my love for their waffles (also pretty real). What I got back was mostly corporate boilerplate about the Waffle House experience. White told me about their new composer and film team, the presence of videos on their webpage, and that the daughter of the Waffle House owner had now taken over the responsibility for the music selection. Apart from, that I got no new insights or information about the history of the songs, nor did they know that the new jukeboxes still contained all the old songs. I realized that a shift in the corporate culture had taken place over the last couple of years which had sidelined Buckner and Garcia and replaced them with Jason Phelps, a rock singer. The cleverness, self-deprecating irony, humor, and deep awareness and love for American popular culture of the old songwriting team was totally absent in the new songs. What they gained was the additional video attached to them. The next day I took a tour of the Atlanta Coca-Cola museum, an experience which reinforced the vibe of careful image control and corporate “information management” I had already encountered at Waffle House. I got Danny Jones on the phone. Like Buckner, he was very enthusiastic about his Waffle House songs and the good old times in which they produced them. He mentioned that the Christmas CD had never been promoted by Waffle House itself. He stressed that although people really loved it, the company did nothing about this response. He drove around distributing it to some customers himself. In the last couple of years Jones had shifted to different forms of advertising music production, mostly composing standard background music in a variety of styles for customers to download from his website. In addition, he prepared audio guides with tourist information for major attractions, including speech and music. Another musician from the old Waffle House song group, Eddie Middleton, had moved into the field of Christian music. I really felt sad to see that their clever and intelligent tradition of parody promotional songs had died away. In acknowledging the emotional dimension of this loss even if I had not grown up in American culture, my training as a musicologist made me realize how much this music had been part of a genuine folk tradition for a consumer age. Now I also understood why copyright issues did not bother these older guys, because in a standup live music and comedy tradition with parodistic vibes there had never been any concern for copyright restrictions. The entire culture around 326

these projects had been only half-commercial – something the Waffle House songs echoed brilliantly.

The Old Weird South If we think about the nexus of irony, humor, commercialism, and parody in songs about food, we have to remember that the Waffle House song producers did not choose the topics of their songs out of their own free will. In their working lives as composers and producers of advertising music, they were used to writing functional, utilitarian music which would appeal to as many people as possible and make products or services fun. They had enough previous experience with irony and parody, as in the case of the NFL song. There remains one more unexplored element; what is it that seems to connect successful food songs so strongly with a specifically Southern attitude? A chapter could perhaps also have been written about a chain of New-York-style Jewish delis and the humorous music sung about apple strudels during Jewish community summer outings in the Catskills. The difference between this setting and the Waffle House food songs in the South becomes clear: It is the difference between fully non-commercial folk music sung in community gatherings, and commercially produced country or pop music played from jukeboxes in diners which are located in a commercial space. Nevertheless, the half-commercial Waffle House songs remind us of the folk tradition, while at the same time playing and parodying the hit songs from the ’50s to the ’80s. The jingle format and music production for advertising seems to have been heavily influenced by a tradition of comical folk/country music closely associated with the South. Interestingly, people in the South do not seem to consider the gap between noncommercial and commercial music a problem. To the contrary, the history of the country music industry suggests that the region embraces the idea that one can make money off music as an honorable part of authentic creative life in the fold tradition. Diane Pecknold writes about country music and its capital Nashville, only a four-hour drive away from Atlanta: “Unlike the preservationists of the middle class, hillbilly fans did not perceive commercialism and authenticity as mutually exclusive. Indeed, commercialism functioned for some as one way of assigning social and aesthetic 327

value to cultural creations that were often disdained by the urban cultural elite” (44). Commercialization thereby becomes part of authenticity, of the practical life of earning money with music and other related businesses, without fully selling out the way such endeavors construct identity. It is where the two different ways – the community oriented non-commercial and the commercialized – clash, when we see the friction points most clearly. People in the South have learned to embrace commercialization and learned to experience this new way of life as personal and intimate, like the experience of life in the good ol’ days. From unverified anecdotal reports, it creates a world where local outlets of two diner chains, let’s say Denny’s and Waffle House, can help each other out when one unexpectedly runs out of butter or eggs, as reported by a friend. I am very much interested in this intersection between the commercialized and the non-commercialized, in the ways in which commercialized functions try to appear non-commercialized, and in the paradoxical ways in which commercialization fosters true community. As I pointed out in other chapters, artists have to sell to make a living; to carve out space for their real artistic ideas they sometimes have to run this as a vanity project next to the marketing of their more successful, audiencefriendly styles, or they fully commit to the music they like but then differentiate as to which audience receives which of their different kinds of output. In the case of the Waffle House songs, a vanity project started by the very possibly bored owner’s wife and ex-Vegas singer tries to obscure its non-commercial side by actually becoming a commercial. In Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity, Leigh H. Edwards makes a claim that Southern identities in themselves are identities full of contradictions, mixing freedom and conformist patriotism, individualism and nationalism, the sacred and the profane, the hillbilly and the good ol’ boy turned clever business success. These dichotomies are also of interest to Ted Ownby in his examination of the importance of consumption for the South. He identifies four consumer dreams in the region’s culture; dreams respectively of abundance, of access to goods, of choice, and of novelty. Such consumer dreams quickly reached and permeated even the bleakest rural areas of Mississippi and Alabama. Democracy was mostly understood as a democracy of access to goods.

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This combination of old-style humor and eccentricity in music that readily integrates into the new world of commercialism that is so marked in the South also applies to the other arts. Patricia Yaeger writes: Southern women writers pack their fictions with characters whose bodies and minds refuse to be average – characters extraordinary because they are witless or limbless, crippled, deaf, or blind, hermaphroditic or filled with same-sex desire, Lilliputian or gigantic – hybrid characters with bodies and minds that refuse, or fail to comprehend, the norm. These southern freaks and eccentrics – form Carson McCuller’s moony adolescents to Eudora Welty’s gargantuan musicians – reawaken the tipsy magic of carnival […] In the midst of this charade we also find childish characters deformed by the South’s dreamy dreams, kids who are physically traumatized, bent out of shape by racist and sexist southern ideologies: ancient children, old before their time, or their bizarre, grown-up counterparts – adults forever silly and young, grown-ups who can only be described as psychosocial grotesques. (219)

Greil Marcus, who coined the term the “old, weird America,” tried to express this sense of a strangely compelling American grotesquerie that Bob Dylan channeled perfectly into popular music. The association of this term with the South does not sit well with everybody. On a blog post titled “‘Old Weird America’ – An Intellectual Cliché that Should be Stomped Out” the blogger Tom Freeman writes on 8 Oct. 2013: I was reading a local blog I’ve grown to like, Deep Fried Kudzu, and hit a phrase (from a press release) that sets my teeth on edge. Discussing a show of paintings by Memphian Carroll Cloar, the press release states that the Southern states are the “last guards of old, weird America.” The world depicted in Cloar’s work (see above), which I like a lot, is no more “old weird America” than that in Norman Rockwell or Thornton Wilder (who Cloar directly references in a painting; Gibson Bayou Anthology).29

He makes the case that the label “weird” should not be used to distance oneself from a cultural phenomenon, but rather to engage with it, in order to understand the artist: 29

Kudzu, after which the blog is named which he refers to, is an invasive plant, which has been nicknamed “the vine that ate the South,” spreading over the Southern U.S.

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The term “outsider” for these sorts of visionary folk artists is designed to set them apart – present them as weird or not a normal part of their communities. […] For some reason, this all draws me back to Flannery O’Connor’s remark when asked why Southern writers wrote about freaks: “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

Freeman points out the problematic consequences of this stance that Southerners can continue to be looked upon as anthropologically “weird” subjects. A comment on Freeman’s blog by Jon Hogan points towards the Cohen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou, which had also been criticized for having this anthropological perspective. In his response Hogan points out that the term is not “old, weird South” but rather applies to all of the U.S. What he does not consider however, is how the “old” and “weird” elements of Northern popular culture have lost their resonance in popular media over the course of the twentieth century, while the South has managed to retain such elements into an era of mass consumerism and standardization. In the process, the connotations around “weird” have shifted towards that strange in-betweenness of folk and commerce which the film effectively addresses. Karl Hagstrom Miller and Ellen Noonan write: Rife with stereotypes of southern working-class culture, the scene from O Brother nevertheless offers a useful parable of the relationship between the bearers of folk culture and those that collect, study, and sell it. […] Aware of their musical traditions, the characters use them to great advantage, twisting their culture to fit the station manager’s desires, to gain media access, and to put money in their pockets. […] Yet artists’ savvy, uneven deployment of folk culture during encounters with outside authorities (be they corporate, academic, or governmental) has often fallen through the cracks between those studies claiming the privileged place of tradition and those declaring that collectors got it wrong. (1-2)

John Shelton Reed sees a distinctive subculture in the new South which has built itself in the age of industrialization: “If a Southern regional subculture is persisting, it will be at this level, and not at that of wool hats or mint juleps” (4).

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Music and Food in the South Even more than the relationship of literature and food (Davis and Powell), a long history of the relationship between songs about food, comedy, and irony remains to be excavated, especially in the Southern United States. 30 “Goober Peas,” first printed in 1866, celebrates in an ironic way the pleasures of eating peanuts, the only food many Confederate units had to eat in the last days of the war. The cover of the song’s first printing identifies a certain “P. Nutt” as composer. One just needs to think about the names of popular musicians who in one way or another derive inspiration from Southern cultural traditions; this diverse list would include T-Bone Burnett, Ice-T, Jelly Roll Morton, and Fats Waller singing “All That Meat and No Potatoes” in 1941.31 In sending up their supposed Southern heritage for fun, the parodistic Chapel Hill-based hillbilly-punk-rock lineup known as Southern Culture on the Skids uses a caricature of regional-style singing and accents in songs about the pleasures of eating “Banana Puddin’,” “Too Much Pork for Just one Fork,” or an “8 Piece Box” of fried chicken. They also have a song celebrating a Waffle House waitress. Their song “Camel Walk” talks about “Little Debbie” – which is actually a McKee Food brand (based in Tennessee), producing cookies and pies like the oatmeal cream pie. As in many other formerly traditional landscapes first left behind by modernity and then belatedly catching up to consumer society, elegiac singing about the hard realities of plain bygone life has a long history in the American South. After the Civil War defeat, this region retreated into its own insular culture, dominated by a white, religiously conservative mix of landowners, small-town businessmen and poor farmers, the latter crystallizing into social and cultural formations derogatorily called red30

Cf. the blog by Bochan, listing more than 500 songs about food. Another “weird” Southern project is the book/CD The Recipe Project, by the band One Ring Zero (Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp) in which recipes by chefs are published and also set to music. The topic of music and food even updates itself in producing food allergy songs (Dine). 31 Other examples are: Shirley Temple as a child with “Animal Crackers” in the film Curly Top (1935); Louis Jordan & The Tympany Five, “Beans and Cornbread” (1949); Big Bill Lister, “RC Cola and Moon Pie” (1951); Lynn Tait & the Jets, “Soul Food” (1968) or Lonnie Mack, “Oreo Cookie Blues” (1985).

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necks and hillbillies by outsiders. By the later part of the twentieth century, these people had signed on to the Sunbelt iteration of consumer capitalism, promising them access – finally – to the American Dream of material prosperity as they left their old pre-industrial lifestyles behind. Together with many other disadvantaged communities in the U.S., they embraced a chauvinistic form of patriotism as if this patriotism would secure the promise of consumer capitalism. Fast food or short-order outlets such as the Waffle House chain, with its then-modern design, became one of the new signifiers for prosperity for all in this New South, sending the message that hard work would pay off. In his perceptive books about lower class Southern whites, the self-styled redneck social critic Joe Bageant has pointed out that the realization had set in by the end of the twentieth century that the promise of the American Dream would not be fulfilled for many (2007; 2011) Yet developers and banks pressed people down with confiscatory mortgages, as corporations lowered wages and drove unions out of Sunbelt factories or offshored the jobs producing the consumer goods which were then bought on credit by the jobless poor, the faith in the prosperity/patriotism complex somehow remained. No blame was attributed by the lower class to the region’s capitalist middle class “good ol’ boys” – such as the owners of Walmart (Moreton). Waffle House can still capitalize on the hope – or the memory of hope – for a better life by representing a frozen moment in time before the New South went sour. The greasy food represents a corrupted memory trace of the early postwar American dream, as Waffle House deliberately decided not to cater to health-conscious shifts since the 1990s in middle-class eating habits in the manner of McDonald’s. Today the fading dream of the New South has become a rejectionist form of consumerist cultural resistance to change. Diner food has become a consolation; Waffle House songs imagine that life in the New South is still good, hinting at the simple culinary pleasures of a mass consumer democracy – if you just work hard enough.

The American Dream on the Frying Line: Deferred or Gone Sour? I listened for the first time to the song “Grill Operator,” a homage to “Smooth Operator,” a 1985 hit by the British neo-soul singer Sade, as I sat in an average Waffle House in Norman, Oklahoma. 332

In comparison here are two excerpts of the songs: “Smooth Operator”

“Grill Operator”

No need to ask He’s a smooth operator Smooth operator Smooth operator Smooth operator

Can’t let them wait I’m the grill operator Grill operator Grill operator At Waffle House

Coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago Western male Across the North and South, to Key Lago Love for sale

Day to day we work hard to serve you And make it take just right No matter when you stop in to see us Mornin’, noon ’n’ night

The Waffle House song echoes the melody nearly identical, moving around the same chords. However, repeats are installed where the original had its variations. The “Grill Operator” also follows exactly the structural outline of the original, making it easy for a listener to pick up on the puns of intertextuality, when “no need to ask” becomes “can’t let them wait” and the hook of the joke is substituting “smooth operator” with “grill operator.” While the original song deals with a businessman who cuts his deals in questionable night clubs with high end prostitutes, the cover talks about a night shift and an early morning hour in a Waffle House (“It won’t be long until the sleepy town’s alive/ She’ll be here prepared to go”). Instead of city hopping of a businessman the hard work of a blue-collar worker. The song describes someone working on the Waffle House grill, which is visible for all customers since the chain operates with an open kitchen/counter format not separated from the serving area. When I listened to this song for the first time I was astonished, as this sounded like a definite blue collar, almost social-democratic song describing the hard work and pressure of a low-wage earner. I thought this song and its description of an overburdened line cook seemed counterproductive to the goals of the chain and its jukebox promotion strategy, the latter mostly suggesting that everything was fine in a happy world of contented consumers. 333

On closer inspection however, “Grill Operator,” as well a number of other Waffle House songs told from the perspective of truck drivers does not connect hard blue-collar work to possible exploitation through low wages, but sings praises for such work. In an eerie parallel to the worker’s songs of early Stalinist Russia, even a low-paid grill operator is honored with a song. In accepting the song lyrics as a fair representation of reality, he/she frames hard work and low salary as the achievable reality of a more-orless good-enough life – and precisely not as an impulse for starting a union. If a worldview of the Waffle House chain as a clean source of comforting food defines low-paying jobs as a source of pride, and if that worldview comes with (surprisingly good) music to activate emotional response, accepting such a worldview as actual reality and not as fiction is easy. When the message of a resilient American Dream, Southern Style comes with the chaser of music – an affective carrier not so amenable to rationalization as speech – the exploited workers can seem to actually love what they are doing: The work doesn’t seem so hard any more, the food doesn’t taste so greasy, and we have a gender- and race-less society, and I want my burger plain, with mayo on the side.

Conclusion However, the longer I have sat in real-world Waffle House franchises pondering the imaginary world described in the songs on the jukebox, the less it seemed to me that the customers and the workers still believed in this world. Wilbur Joseph Cash’s diagnosis that Southerners are complacent seemed to no longer hold.32 Rather they appeared to me as having resigned. The emotional interaction between customer and company, which was intended to take place on location with the jukebox, has shifted to more virtual, online engagement on the Waffle House Facebook page or in the Waffle House “regular’s” club. The jukeboxes are hardly used by Waffle House customers anymore; younger customers, when they bother to throw in a quarter, perceive the advertisement songs on these machines as a weird relic of a time in which relationships between companies and customers were still driven by a search for symbolic meaning. 32 He wrote: “The result is that the body of the South had inevitably been confirmed in complacency and illusion” (424).

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Today there seems to be no need to forge an attachment of the exploited workers to the brand, to pretend that hard work has some honor. The demands of the laissez-faire neoliberal economy seem uncontested: companies need to exploit their workers; a work relationship is nothing more than money exchange. Symbolic and spiritual meaning has shifted away from the everyday life, to be monopolized by religious beliefs, patriotism, or ephemeral brand symbols without fixed content – as the recent move by Starbucks to a symbol without the brand name suggests. Eating your burger has been stripped of any associations with symbolic pride in the American Dream, and has become a quick and cheap source of instantaneous comfort and consolation, to be repeated and repeated again, forging nothing more than a runaway connection between calories and body size. As Fredric Jameson stated, all of life has become cultural and actual cultural products lose importance (cf. 111). Nevertheless, meaning remains connected with performances of everyday bodies. The latter-day disinterest in Waffle House jukebox music suggests however, that both the everyday as “real” and the everyday as an experience sublimated in culture have lost their functions as conveyers of meaning. The pendulum has shifted the in-between of culture clearly towards the purely commercial. But there is always the hope of future societal failure, which can bring out something of the “weird, new America” that is being born.

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Works Cited (Music see separate list below, websites accessed Oct. 2018) A Claymation Christmas Celebration. 21 Dec. 1987. CBS. TV Show. “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Published anonymously, 1823. A Prairie Home Companion. Radio show with Garrison Keillor. “America’s Song Butchers: The Weird World of Homer and Jethro.” Panel Discussion, Library of Cincinnati. 31 March 2012. DVD. Andersen, Lars Pynt. The Rhetorical Strategies of Danish TV Advertising, - A study of the first fifteen years with special emphasis on genre and irony. Diss. Copenhagen Business School, Doctoral School of Marketing. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur. 2004. Auchmutey, Jim. “Waffle House.” See Edge 178-79. Bageant, Joe. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Three Rivers P, 2007. ———. Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. Melbourne: Scribe, 2011. Batchelor, Bob, and Scott Stoddart. The 1980s: American Popular Culture through History. Westpoint: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. BDay’s Bubble. Website. 24 March 2010. “I’ll Have the Shirt and Shoes. Scattered, Smothered and Covered, Please.” . Berman, Morris. Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Beverly Hillbillies, The. CBS 1962-71. TV Show. Billings, Dwight B., Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds. Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999. “Blacks Sue Waffle House, Alleging Race Discrimination.” Orlando Sentinel 18 Sep. 2003. . Blair, Walter. Essays on American Humor: Blair through the Ages. Ed. Hamlin Hill. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993. Bochan, Peter. “All Mixed Up: 531 Songs about Food.” . Booth, Mark W. “Jingle: Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot.” On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word. Ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 272–76. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Brooks, James L. Commentary for “Stark Raving Dad.” The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season. 20th Century Fox, 2003. DVD.

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Bryson, Bill. The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Buckner, Jerry. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 10 Jan. 2012. Unpublished. BucknerGarcia. Website. . Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge, 1993. Car Talk. NPR radio show. Cash, Wilbur Joseph. The Mind of the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997. Convoy. Sam Peckinpah (dir.). EMI Films. 1978. Movie. Cook, Nicolas. “Music and Meaning in the Commercials,” Popular Music 13.1 (Jan. 1994): 27-40. Cooper, B. Lee. Popular Music Perspectives: Ideas, Themes, and Patterns in Contemporary Lyrics. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1991. ———. “Response Recordings as Creative Repetition: Answer Songs and Pop Parodies in Contemporary American Music.” OneTwoThreeFour: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Quarterly 4 (Winter 1987): 79-87. Cooper, B. Lee, and Wayne S. Haney. Response Recordings: An Answer Song Discography, 1950-1990. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1990. Cosgel, Metin M. “Audience Effects in Consumption.” Economics and Philosophy 10 (1994): 19-30. Curley Top. Irving Cummings (dir.). Fox Film Corporation, 1935. Movie. Davis, David A., and Tara Powell, eds. Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014. Dee Cox, Billy. Facebook. . DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Dine, Kyle. Blog. . “Does Parody Trump Copyright?” The Economist 4 Dec. 2013. . Douglas, Mary. “Deciphering a Meal.” Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 11-19. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Edge, John T. Foodways. Vol. 7 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Edwards, Leigh H. Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009.

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Engelhardt, Elizabeth S. D. A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011. Freeman, Tom. “‘Old Weird America’ – An Intellectual Cliche that Should Be Stomped Out.” Blog Hottytoddy. 8 Oct. 2013. . Gaffigan, Jim. “Waffle House. King Baby. Comedy. Comedy Central Records, 2009. CD. [Here accessed via: “Jim Gaffigan – Waffle House.” Youtube. .] Goad, Jim. The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash became America’s Scapegoats. New York: Touchstone – Simon & Schuster, 1997. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Greber, Dave. “Suit Alleges Racial Bias at Waffle House.” Dayton Daily News 9 June 2009. . Gutman, Richard, and Elliott Kaufman. American Diner. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Hall, Wade H. Reflections of the Civil War in Southern Humor. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2015. Hee Haw. TV variety show. Help, The. Tate Taylor (dir.). Dreamworks Pictures et al., 2011. DVD. Hogan, David Gerard. Selling ‘em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food, New York: New York UP, 1997. Hoger, Bill. Website. . Hollis, Tim. Ain’t That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 2008. Horrigan, Tim. Blog. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 19831998. London, New York: Verso, 1998. Johnny Cash Show, The. TV music variety show. Jones, Danny. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 18 Mar. 2015. Audio. Unpublished. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Kellaris, James J., Anthony D. Cox, and Dena Cox. “The Effect of Background Music on Ad Processing: A Contingency Explanation.” Journal of Marketing 57.4 (Oct. 1993): 114–25. Lanza, Joseph. Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994.

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Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 27 Oct. 2015. TV. [Here accessed via: “Anthony Bourdain Has Discovered the Waffle House. Youtube. Uploaded 28 Oct. 2015. .] ———. 18 Apr. 2016. TV. See Music Cited. ———. 30 June 2016. TV. [Here accessed via: “Sturgill Simpson Returns in ‘Waffle House.’” Youtube. Uploaded 1 July 2016. .] Latshaw, Beth A. “Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South.” Southern Cultures 15.4 (2009): 106-28. Lennon, Kipp. Lunalworld. . Levy, Lester S. Give me Yesterday: American History in Song, 1890-1920. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1975. Louisiana Hayride. Radio and TV country music show. Lusensky, Jakob. Sounds Like Branding: Using the Power of Music to Turn Customers into Fans. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Updated ed. from Invisible Republic. New York: Picador, 2001. McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. Midwest Hayride. Cincinnati radio show. Miller, Karl Hagstrom, and Ellen Noonan. “Editors’ Introduction.” Radical History Review 84 (2002): 1-5. Mintz, Sidney W., and Christine M. Du Bois. “The Anthropology of Food and Eating.” Annual Review Anthropology 31 (2002): 99-119. Moe, Bryan. “Critical Ethnography of a South Iconic Diner: The WAFFLEHOUSE.” Louisiana State U, Baton Rouge. N.d. Unpub. paper. Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Norris, Rene Lapp. “Opera and the Mainstreaming of Blackface Minstrelsy.” Journal of the Society for American Music 1.3 (Aug. 2007): 341-65. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Joel Coen (dir.). Produced by Ethan Coen. Working Title Films, 2000. Movie. O’Brian, Keith. “Supersize: How McDonald’s came back from the brink of a public relations nightmare bigger than ever.” New York Times Magazine 6 May 2012: 46-48, 78, 81. On the front cover titled: “McDonald’s Keeps Eating the World.” One Ring Zero. The Recipe Project: A Delectable Extravaganza of Food and Music. Music by One Ring Zero. Ed. Michael Hearst and Leigh Newman. New York: Black Baloon Publishing, 2011. Book with CD. Opie, Frederick Douglass. Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. New York: Columbia U, 2008.

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Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture 1830-1998. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. Ozark Jubilee. Country music TV show. Pecknold, Diane. The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Peña, Carolyn de la. “Mechanized Southern Comfort: Touring the Technological South at Krispy Kreme.” Dixie Emporium: Tourism, Foodways, and Consumer Culture in the American South. Ed. Anthony J. Stanonis. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 234-63. Pietrykowski, Bruce. “You Are What You Eat: The Social Economy of the Slow Food Movement.” Consuming Symbolic Goods: Identity and Commitment, Values and Economics. Ed. Wilfried Dolfsma. New York: Routledge, 2008. 33-47. Planer, Lindsay. Review of It’s a Waffle House Christmas. 2001. . Rawson, Katie. “‘America’s Place for Inclusion’: Stories of Food, Labor, and Equality at the Waffle House.” The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South. Ed. John T. Edge, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, and Ted Ownby. Athens & London: U of Georgia P, 2013. 216-39. Reed, John Shelton. The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1986. Ritzer, Georg, ed. McDonaldization: The Reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge P, 2002. Sanders, Monica. “2 Live Crew, Weird Al Yankovic, and the Supreme Court on Parody.” Legalzoom. Dec. 2009. . Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the all-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Segrave, Kerry. Jukeboxes: An American Social History. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2002. Simpsons, The. Animated TV Sitcom. Fox Broadcasting Company. Since 1989. Slusher, Kathryn. “Classical Parodies.” A Prairie Home Companion. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available. Soul Train. Music dance TV show. Soundclick. Lyrics to “Under the Wrench.” Written by Scott Young, performed by Red Meat. Song on Album Alameda County Line. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available. Stigler, George, and Gary Becker. “De Gustibus non est Disputandum.” American Economic Review 67/2 (1977): 76-90.

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Taylor, Timothy D. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. “Waffle House Hit with Discrimination Suits.” Atlanta Business Chronicle 18 Jan. 2005. . Waffle Records. Facebook. . Warnes, Andrew. Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. Wendy’s. “Where’s the Beef.” Spoken commercial. See Music list below. Williams-Forson, Psyche. Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. “What the Waffle House Can Teach About Managing Supply Chain Risk.” Insurance Journal 19 July 2011. . White, Shelby. Interview by Dorothea Gail. 19 Mar. 2015. Audio. Unpublished. Whitehead, Sam. “A B-Side with Your Bacon? Waffle House Has its own Music Label.” NPR, 15 Mar. 2016. . Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Zombieland. Ruben Fleischer (dir). Relativity Media Pariah, 2009. Movie.

Music Cited (also see section Musical Field Recordings below) Animal Jack. [Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia.] Gotta Hear the Beat. Prism Records, 1972. Single. Vinyl. Brandt, Paul. A Gift. “Christmas Convoy.” Universal Music Canada, 2006. CD. Buckner & Garcia. [Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia.] Pac-Man Fever. BGO Records, 1981. Single. Vinyl. ———. Also see Wild Butter; Groves, Edgel; Willis “The Guard” & Vigorish. ———. Pac-Man Fever. Columbia, 1982. Album. CD. ———. Pac-Man Fever. Re-release. Buckner Garcia Productions. 1999. Album. CD. California Raisins. “Michael Jackson California Raisins.” Commercial 1989. Uploaded 8 July 2009. Youtube. . Video.

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———. “California Raisins Commercial with Workmen.” California Raisins. Commercial. 1986. Uploaded 22 Aug. 2007. Youtube. . Video. ———. Christmas with the California Raisins. Priority Records, 1988. ———. Meet the Raisins. Atlantic, 1988. ———. The California Raisins Sing the Hit Songs. Priority Records, 1987. Car Talk Car Tunes: America’s Best Disrespectful Car Songs. Vol. 1. The Tappet Brothers. HighBridge Audio, 2002. CD. Cheech & Chong. Santa Claus and His Old Lady. Ode Records, 1971. Single. Vinyl. Chipmunks, The. Christmas with the Chipmunks. Liberty, 1962. Album. Vinyl. Chiquita Banana. Jingle. 1944. . Coca-Cola. Jingle. 1971. “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.” . Dee, Billy. Billy Dee and the Southside Allstars. Georgia Bulldogs. DIG Records, n.d. Single. Vinyl. ———. Live video recording at David’s Lounge, Atlanta, 1970. The Southside Allstars, Billy Dee Cox. “Billy Dee and The Southside Allstars 1970’s.wmv.” Uploaded by Roger Gutierrez 29 Dec. 2012. Youtube. . Video. Franklin, Aretha. Respect. Atlantic, 1967. Single. Vinyl. Frickin’ A. “Merry Frickin’ Christmas.” Here accessed via: “Merry Frickin’ Christmas – Frickin’ A (Lyrics).” Published 26 Dec. 2012 by Heartbrokenlife95. Youtube. . ———. Big Egos … No Ideas. “Jessie’s Girl.” Toucan Cove Entertainment, 2004. CD. Gaye, Marvin. “I Hear it through the Grapevine.” Tamla Motown, 1969. Single. Vinyl. Groves, Edgel. Footprints in the Sand. Written and produced by Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia. Silver Star, 1980. Single. Vinyl. Hillside Singers, The. “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Metromedia, 1971. Single. Vinyl. Homer and Jethro. “The Battle of Kookamonga.” RCA Victor, 1959. Vinyl. ———. Live on Johnny Cash Show. N.d. “Homer & Jethro – San Antonio RoseBattle of Kookamonga.” Youtube. . ———. Live on Ozark Jubilee TV Show. N.d. “Homer & Jethro – The Battle of Kookamonga.” Youtube. .

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Horton, Johnny. “The Battle of New Orleans.” The Battle of New Orleans / All for the Love of a Girl. Columbia, 1959. Vinyl. [Here accessed via: “Johnny Horton – Battle of New Orleans Lyrics.” Published by JosiahRandomness 12 Mar. 2013. Youtube. .] Jackson, Michael. Beat It. Epic, 1983. Single. Vinyl. ———. Billie Jean. Epic, 1982. Single. Vinyl. Jordan, Louis. Louis Jordan & the Tympany Five. Beans and Corn Bread. Decca, 1949. Vinyl. Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 18 Apr. 2016. TV. [Here accessed via: “Stephen Debuts a New Waffle House Song.” Youtube. Uploaded 18 Apr. 2016. .] Lister, “Big Bill.” RC Cola and Moon Pie. Decca, 1951. Vinyl. Louis Jordan & the Tympany Five. See Jordan. Lynn Tait & The Jets. See Tait. Mack, Lonnie. Strike Like Lightning. “Oreo Cookie Blues.” Alligator Records, 1985. CD. McCall, C.W. Convoy. Written by Chip Davis and Bill Fries. MGM Records, 1975. Single. Vinyl. McCloud, Coyote. Where’s the Beef. With Clara Peller. Awesome Records ASM 105, Wendy’s, 1984. Vinyl. [Here accessed via: “Coyote McCloud & Clara Peller – Where’s the Beef? [1984] [With Lyrics!].” Uploaded 20 Feb. 2010 by Green Buddha. Lyrics from the back cover of the vinyl in commentary to upload. Youtube. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available.] Nugent, Ted. Cat Scratch Fever. Epic, 1977. Album. Vinyl. Nutt, P. “Goober Peas.” 1866. Score. One Ring Zero. The Recipe Project: A Delectable Extravaganza of Food and Music. Music by One Ring Zero. Ed. Michael Hearst and Leigh Newman. New York: Black Baloon Publishing, 2011. Book with CD. Pepsi-Cola. Jingle. “Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot.” 1941. Old Time Radio Commercials. . ———. Jingle. “You’re the Pepsi Generation.” Michael Jackson. 1983-84. . ———. Jingle. “You’ve Got a Lot to Live.” 1963. . Red Meat. “Under the Wrench.” Car Talk Car Tunes: America’s Best Disrespectful Car Songs. Vol. 1. NPR, 2001. Originally on: Red Meat. Alameda County Line. Ranchero Records, 2000. CD. Sade. Smooth Operator. Epic, 1984. Vinyl. Southern Culture on the Skids. Dirt Track Date. “Camel Walk,” “8 Piece Box.” DGC, 1995. CD.

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———. Ditch Diggin’. “Too Much Pork for Just One Fork.” Safe House, 1994. CD. ———. Plastic Seat Sweat. “Banana Puddin’.” DGC, 1997. CD. Spike Jones and His City Slickers. “All I Want for Christmas Is my Two Front Teeth.” Sung by George Rock. Composed by Donald Gardner. RCA Victor, 1948. Single. Vinyl. Springfield, Rick. Jessie’s Girl. RCA, 1981. Single. Vinyl. Tait, Lynn. Lynn Tait & The Jets. Soul Food. Pama Records, 1969. Vinyl. Temple, Shirley. Little Miss Shirley Temple. “Animal Crackers in My Soup.” Pickwick, n.d. “Waffle House Christmas Carols.” Uploaded by Npharris14 26 Dec. 2011. Youtube. . Waffle House Music. “Bert.” Official Video. Song by Jason Phelps, 2007. “Bert. wmv.” Youtube. Published by Waffle House 20 Dec. 2012. . Video. ———. “Color Me Gone.” Song with video. Uploaded July 2015 by Waffle House. . ———. “I’m Going Back to the Waffle House.” Mary Welch Rogers, Jason Bowen. Waffle House Music Publishing, 1993. Vinyl. [Here accessed via: Ebay. Updated 12 Nov. 2014. . Accessed Aug. 2016, no longer available.] ———. It’s a Waffle House Christmas. “The Waffle House 12 Days of Christmas.” 2001. CD. [Here accessed via: “The Waffle House 12 Days of Christmas.” Uploaded by Randy Mallory 17 Nov. 2013. Youtube. .] ———. Song with video. “This is the Night.” Uploaded by Waffle House 13 Dec. 2013. Youtube. . ———. “Southern Classic Cookin’.” Song with video. “Waffle House – Southern Classic Cooking’.” Uploaded by Waffle House 3 Aug. 2010. Youtube. . ———. Vimeo Channel. . ———. Waffle House Jukebox Favorites Vol. 1. Recorded at Sound Shop, Atlanta GA. Waffle Records, 1999. CD. ———. Waffle House Jukebox Favorites Vol. 2. WH Capital, 2011. CD. Waller, Fats. “Fats” Waller and His Rhythm. All that Meat and No Potatoes. Bluebird, 1941. Single. Vinyl. Wendy’s. “Where’s the Beef?” Spoken commercial. . For song see McCloud. Wheaties. Breakfast Flake Jingle. 1926. .

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Wild Butter. Wild Butter. With Jerry Buckner. United Artists Records, 1970. Vinyl. Willis “The Guard” & Vigorish. Aka Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia. “Merry Christmas in the NFL.” Handshake Records and Tapes VS85308, 1980. Vinyl. [Here accessed via: “Willis & Vigorish – Merry Christmas in the NFL.” Lyrics and tune. Youtube. .] Yankovic, “Weird Al.” “Eat It.” 1984. Music Video. [Here accessed via Vevo: .] ZZ Top. Sharp Dressed Man. Warner Bros., 1983.

Musical Field Recordings by the Author (I recorded some of the tunes Waffle House did not release on CD, but which are accessible on the in-house jukebox. The chosen location was a Waffle House at 1161 Rambling Oaks Dr, Norman, OK 73072.) “Grill Operator at Waffle House” (28 Feb. 2012) “I Got a Coke for You” (29 Feb. 2012) “Last Night I saw Elvis in the Waffle House” (4 Mar. 2012) “Life is Like a Cup of Coffee” (4 Mar. 2012) “Meat Lover” (29 Feb. 2012) “They’re Cooking up My Order” (4 Mar. 2012) “Waffle House Hashbrowns I Love You” (29 Feb. 2012) “Waffle House March” (4 Mar. 2012) “Why Would You Eat Your Grits Anyplace Else” (4 Mar. 2012)

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7 Conclusion: Fade Out And there’s winners, and there’s losers, But they ain’t no big deal ’Cause the simple man baby pays the thrills, The bills, and the pills that kill. Oh but ain’t that America, for you and me (John Mellencamp, “Pink Houses”)

Seen from a vantage point in the America of the early decades of the twenty-first century, the America of the 1980s seems both a very strange and a very familiar country. If we want to understand the lives, the hopes, the frustration, and the visions for the future expressed in the intervening decades by the musicians and scholars in this book’s case studies, we need to locate them in their contemporary settings. There are the cultural changes, the shifts that have occurred in the way the market and the society interact, the fading of class and the rise of identity politics, the long conversations about individualism versus communitarianism between the generations. The case studies in this book are swan songs of a dying authenticity, slowly fading away in sound. This sound is drowned out more and more by the new sound of the homo oeconomicus, insisting that everything, even our deepest values, are commodities and have always been. The citizen has been transformed into a consumer, turning away from the participation in the precapitalist social contract of the nation-state and adjusting to the necessities and practices of the neoliberal economy. The ubiquity of the marketplace has created a new kind of civic identity – what has been called the citizen-consumer. On the one hand, this points toward the growing necessity to comparison-shop for providers of what used to be public goods; on the other, to the idea that the political function of the citizen is now to control or exert pressure on the behavior of private companies through consumer demand for, to take once example, more ecofriendly and sustainable market solutions, rather than to pursue the same public policy goals through participation in traditional politics (cf. Sandel; Clarke et al.; Wheeler). Non-marketable aspects, problems, or messages of restraint in art and music have no place as the penetration of neoliberal

market thinking into every single corner of our world accelerates (W. Brown 33, Schirrmacher 8). The solution that one of my Michigan students came up with – music taken fully out of the market and practiced for free in community settings – is not one I would recommend. As a musician myself, I insist that making music has a place in the political economy of value exchange beyond both free (possibly state-supported) public good and mere ancillary “content” for free-market messages. Although working a day job to bring in the money to survive while making music only on the side is already the inescapable reality for most musicians in all genres today, music gains something in authenticity when musicians are able to make a living by practicing their art. To a certain extent this problem is related to the larger problem of the “marketability” of the arts and humanities in general; how does a society reward and support the non-marketable qualities in any art?1 With respect to this question, the two or three decades in the United States around the turn of the twenty-first century emerge not as a punctuated period of particular trauma and fear triggered by 9/11, but rather as a more continuous and evolving story of growing insecurity, fear of nonnormative deviancy, poverty and inequality – as the long-term and possibly terminal decline of the American Dream. I hope my analysis of the effects of this decline on the creation of music and the fate of musical communities can be a stone in a larger mosaic that helps to prepare us do a better job of pattern recognition, as the outlines of a post-American world order emerge. 2 1

The easy answer is to leave that again up to the market. Skills of humanities students then quickly become assets in the business world, as Matthew DeShaw puts it in a short essay in the Harvard Gazette, or Paul Jay in his book The Humanities in ‘Crisis’ and the Future of Literary Studies. From a perspective of the university (here in the U.S. and UK) as a market in itself, the humanities actually are increasing, as Peter Mandler tells us: “Professors worry about the ‘crisis in the humanities.’ But more people than ever, especially women, are studying them.” U.S. universities – as Jana Kasperkevic states – are already businesses in themselves, treating the students as their customers. 2 The effects of the decline – resurgent racism, the loss of the idea of a society defined by transformative multiculturalism, the disappearance of local markets, and the dumbing down of the audience, do not necessarily discourage artists’ creativity. As the examples show, flexibility is key to surviving in changing

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A Decision of American Values: Restraint or Consumption At the start of the period I have examined in this book, President Jimmy Carter appeared on nationwide television on 15 July 1979 to deliver what historians have since dubbed the “Crisis of Confidence” or “Malaise” Speech. Coming after the multiple shocks of defeat in Vietnam, loss of political legitimacy in Watergate, and the nation’s first energy crisis, Carter’s speech starkly illuminated the crossroads before which the nation stood: a choice between 1) less consumption, gradual independence from foreign energy sources, and a united civil society which would redistribute wealth more fairly and become less materialistic or 2) more consumption, limitless energy expenditure, dependence on the oil from the Middle East and control of these oil resources even with military might, and a society in which the individual would have to be self-sufficient and in which the government would abandon the redistribution of wealth or the provision of public goods. The American voters’ choice of Ronald Reagan as president in the November elections of 1980 set the country on the second of the two paths outlined above, a turn whose consequences we are all coping with today. This turn certainly affected all the musicians and scholars I mentioned. Reagan apparently got the economy back on track with more consumption, more spending, and less taxes for the rich, but also ensured a recurring series of economic crises and recessions in each succeeding decade, and a steady retreat of the government from all forms of social responsibility, education, and infrastructural investment. Reagan’s politics inspired hope and pride in many Americans, but also played with fire by avoiding the truth: that this kind of America would deliver a shrinking level of security for ordinary working people, that entrepreneurs would not pass on their prosperity in the form of higher wages or fair taxes, and that in the end they would rather outsource production to even cheaper countries abroad instead of ensuring a healthy economy at home. circumstances. It is however perhaps a marker of where we are in the ongoing decline of “whiteness” as the normative category of American life when the three “white” case studies all show a certain inflexibility in dealing with changed circumstances and the encroachment of the market. This latter inflexibility might be interpreted as a mark of integrity – refusing to adjust to the neoliberal market –, however, it also suggests a reluctance to reconcile changing times with familiar privileges and a refusal to ratify white deviance from preexisting norms.

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The turn towards a full-fledged laissez-faire capitalism unleashed a civic religion in which individual entrepreneurship – and individual responsibility for success or failure – drove out the provisions for collective responsibility for everyone’s dignity that had driven the previous era of the long New Deal. This changing climate challenged all the musicians and scholars I have studied to exert as much independent agency as possible in order to make money in the market and thus survive – or in the case of the Ives scholars to locate their art in an ideological segment – while somehow remaining true to their respective original visions for what their art meant for themselves and their communities. All these artists or scholars eventually found their niches in specific subcultures or smaller audience segments during the most productive parts of their careers. Sometimes these affiliations emerged despite conflict with the artists’ or scholars’ own beliefs; sometimes the affiliations helped define and reinforce these beliefs. *** Although Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from the South, was himself an evangelical, he was not really representative of the growing importance of conservative Christians in late twentieth century American politics. These people had somehow managed to combine an embrace of unrestricted capitalism and aggressive consumerism with a culturally pessimistic sense of their values being threatened, cementing this subcultural solidarity via the prosperity gospel. Like them, he ultimately wanted to preserve the American Dream of progress, growth, and material security driven by the capitalist system. To accomplish this however, he wanted to free this system from dependence on Middle East energy, as the first step in a comprehensive redefinition of the ultimate priorities of American life. He asked the American people to start consuming less energy, save, and stop living on credit. He asked his electorate to be patient until the country itself would be able to sustain growth again without further debt. If the country continued on its present course, he foresaw a fragmentation into smaller and smaller subcultures and interest groups, only aiming at their own benefit. He concluded: You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme

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position defended to the last vote […] We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restauration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.

Carter spoke openly and realistically about the lack of unity and solidarity (cf. also Bacevich’s 2009 commentary on Carter’s speech). Even before his defeat by Ronald Reagan in November of 1980 however, driven by political pressure and bureaucratic resistance, Carter had turned his policy a hundred and eighty degrees from his speech in July to announce the socalled “Carter Doctrine” on 23 January 1980. This committed military forces to Saudi Arabia to protect the oil fields as a vital national interest of the U.S. Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2010: To an extent that few have fully appreciated, the Carter Doctrine has had a transformative impact on U.S. national security policy. Both massive and lasting, its impact has also been almost entirely pernicious. Put simply, the sequence of events that has landed the United States in the middle of an open-ended war to determine the fate of the Greater Middle East begins here.

Carter’s volte-face was too little and too late. With Reagan’s election, the country had committed fully to the path Carter had warned about: a path in which the solution to mass unemployment and the energy crisis was solved through a military doctrine abroad (which in the Gulf War would first become a realized military confrontation) and a return of laissez-faire capitalism at home. Reagan began a concerted attack on the functions and reach of the federal government through reduction of taxes, and with it the reduction of the welfare state. This path preached self-reliance to the poor and advocated a state which took the promotion of private businesses whenever possible as the highest priority, believing that “economic growth” would “trickle down” eventually to the poor. In the meantime, a huge expansion in private credit allowed people to compensate for the 351

heightened financial insecurity when their means did not match their consumer expectations. The Warner Brothers cartoon character Wile E. Coyote is a symbol for a failed trickster who is well known from the television programming of the period, and might serve as a diverting analogy for how private overspending and the privatization and cutting of state services (despite a brief return to slightly raised taxes and a balanced budget in the Clinton era) in the last decades of the twentieth century caught up later with the country. Wile E. Coyote runs over a cliff, but before he falls he runs on for a little bit longer, on thin air. Gravity catches up with him only after some time. But then the crash is certain. However, Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” political messages did not signal a crisis or the need to limit consumerism; to the contrary, they pretended that nothing was wrong, that people could start being proud again and just ignore the reality: It’s Morning again in America. […] With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time than in the past four years. (Reagan 1984)

Reagan said in his second inaugural address in 1985: Now, there is a place for the Federal Government in matters of social compassion. But our fundamental goals must be to reduce dependency and upgrade the dignity of those who are infirm […] we look forward to a world rich in possibilities. […] a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That’s our heritage; that is our song. We sing it still […] as we raise our voices to the God who is the Author of this most tender music. And may He continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound.

Almost thirty years later, another president, this time non-white, called this rejection of social responsibility a dangerous mistake, the “same old tune. ‘The market will take care of everything.’” This was Barack Obama in his Economic Speech in Kansas. One can trace a remarkable convergence between a conservative cultural ideology and the economic values of neoliberalism from the 1970s to the 2010s. This convergence also involved the dropping of white mainstream objections to the participation of “ethnic” non-whites in the 352

consumer-driven economy. This new consensus understands ethnicity, along with gender and sexual orientation as markets to serve and customers to please and as a marketable quality in itself, as the fragmentation of the U.S. into individual interest groups and ethnicities proceeds along with the fragmentation of the market. Yet despite Reaganomics, the 1980s were still a decade when the country’s shift towards a neoliberal/marketable way of dealing with all aspects of life remained far from complete. In the marketing and production of popular music, the decade witnessed the emergence of increasingly weird compromises between the market imperative and older traditions. Waffle House and Jackalope mixed sellable musical styles with non-marketable irony/humor. Detroit techno sustained itself in the ’80s through the remnants of the old black middle class, with rich black kids who built their own subculture with designer clothes and listened to Eurodisco. In the ’70s the composer Charles Ives was still considered a “weirdo” who could be made functional in the founding myth of American music. Ironically, the more socially liberal and culturally open Clinton years gave consumer culture and neoliberalism another forward push after the breakthrough of the Reagan era. Thomas Frank argues that a shift in the Democratic Party from support of blue-collar workers towards a recognizably neoliberal agenda was already underway even in the early 1970s. About the Clinton era he writes: Let me suggest a different framework for understanding the Clinton years […] Here is what I propose: How the Market Order Got Cemented into Place. It wasn’t Ronald Reagan alone who did it. What distinguishes the political order we live under now is consensus on certain economic questions, and what made that consensus happen was the capitulation of the Democrats. Republicans could denounce big government all they wanted, but it took a Democrat to declare that “the era of big government is over” and to make it stick. This was Bill Clinton’s historic achievement. Under his direction, as I wrote back then, the opposition “ceased to oppose.” (2016, 106)

At the same time identity politics moved towards essentializing ethnicity, with the society as a whole tending towards self-segregation and not integration. Nakai suddenly was able to sustain himself with his ethnicity. The Detroit techno artists got overrun by commercially pushed black-specific music with hip hop and had to locate new markets in Europe that 353

depended on their ethnicity for acceptance. The Ives scene rallied behind conservatism, defending the inclusion of the composer into the pantheon against a new emphasis on his deviance. Vince Barlow landed a good job at the prospering megachurch Willow Creek, and in 1999 Waffle House started to capitalize on its “Southern” weirdness by releasing the first CD. As the revival of militant nationalism in the wake of the crisis of 9/11 and the wars it triggered pushed the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism a bit to the side, other ideologies returned to the forefront. Conservative Christian fear of change and diversity now found a consumer-friendly format on CD. Mike Banks built his new Submerge headquarters and developed the label as a distribution company for the community of Detroit techno. Nakai started collaborations with other “ethnic” performers, instead of just following the New Age trend. After the economic crisis hit in 2008, the focus changed again in the coming decade. For the conservative Christian community, the push towards winning political power and influence during the George W. Bush administration received a setback with the election of Barack Obama, and the Christian approach to marketing music reverted towards soft-sell. Having lived out the scenario they prescribed for countless other young Christian women, the Barlow girls dropped out of music-making at the end of their twenties. For the Waffle House musicians, the time also came when their non-commercial side was no longer appreciated. Nakai distanced himself from “ethnicity.” Detroit techno tried to revive a scene at home, with the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and with the possible help of Dimitri Hegemann and investment money from Germany.

Between Authenticity and the Market All the case studies in this book had to find their particular places in the field of relationships between market participation and participation in academic, religious, and essentialist interpretive communities that traded not in economic terms but in the discourses of authenticity. However, the market component got to all of them at the end, neutralizing the original values that had driven the artists through the most creative phases of their careers. The neoliberal music market exerted a constant pressure towards normativity, soft-sell, platitudes and superficiality, not even tolerating extreme right-wing political ideas like the ones represented by the Barlows 354

anymore. Therapeutic culture, with its tendency toward positive thinking and euphemism, as well as a kind of unreflective ethnic and sexual tolerance moved into a commanding position in the market and into corporate culture. Liberal issues are now a way to expand market share and brand recognition. In 2016, Walmart lobbied for LGBT rights and Disney threatened to move out of the state of Georgia if its governor signed into law measures against LGBT rights (Surowiecki). Racial or sexual discrimination is considered either overcome or pushed to the side, as it is seen as bad for a mainstream market. Only niche markets can use discrimination against gays as a selling point to Christian fundamentalists. When I started the project, I expected to find that artists who make a living with music always have to negotiate between their own creativity and what the market is looking for, and that such a negotiation always positions itself between the poles of pure authenticity and a full sellout. What surprised me in the end was the shift over time in the conditions under which such negotiations were conducted. The market in the 1980s had left some room for artists and scholars to focus on questions of identity and had allowed them to imagine a whole range of alternative futures for American society – multiple imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson might have put it. The subsequent decades throughout which we followed these artists’ careers constituted a period of time when, as Charles S. Maier put it, an empire of production was succeeded by an empire of consumption. Across the generational cohorts to which the different artists and scholars belong, all these case studies responded to, and in turn influenced, trends like ascendant political conservatism, the economic crashes of 1988 and 2008, the emergence of discourses around the privilege of whiteness, oscillations between individualism and communitarianism. At the end of the period I looked at (2015), what surprised me was a convergence. Across all case studies, I could clearly see a move away from “weird” and problematic aesthetic concerns and values, either because the artist(s) stopped working in that style as in the case of the Waffle House artists and BarlowGirl, or in the move towards “normalization” in the case of the reception of Charles Ives. I could also identify a move towards the common denominator of a soft-sell approach to reaching as many people as possible, and towards a dominant interpretation of ethnicity as a kind of “authenticity-which-can-be-marketed” (UR, Nakai, Yáñez). We can readily use the case studies as a barometer of how the 355

ideological positions of a wide range of different artists and their respective subcultures have changed over the course of almost four decades. Underground Resistance Originally, Detroit techno had been music made by African Americans for an African American local audience; it distinguished itself from earlier such dance musics by its claim to the freedom to develop in a “white” or international style and to appear color-blind to African Americans and other listeners. The idea that the music is first and predominantly produced for African Americans remained a staple of Detroit techno even when the style started to gain recognition outside of the U.S. and the reality of its reception dynamics shifted towards a predominantly white audience. It is important to notice that the Detroit techno artists never moved away; they never left their home subculture regardless of the fact that the subculture wound up not consuming this music. This outcome had interesting effects on the “authenticity” of the music. Producing and distributing recordings of this music did not really generate enough money to support the artistic effort. Sufficient money only came in through live DJing in Europe. Sustained by this income source, Underground Resistance was flexible enough in style to leave room in the label for not-so-marketable productions, like the “funky” part of their œuvre. On the other side UR had to negotiate the European (and Asian) markets carefully, staying true to their original “brand” of hardcore techno in Germany, while experimenting with jazz-techno in Asia. As the market they built for themselves was independent of the big players in the (Detroit) music business, they had to provide their own distribution network for the records. The niche of “underground music” did not provide them with the opportunity (or temptation) of quick or easy money. They rather built a solid fan base gradually, and over a long period of time. Paradoxically, the “non-market” aspect of their music in its North American site of production was rooted in their African American identity, which on the other side of the Atlantic was “the” marketable category, not only explicitly in the British market. Their ethnicity is also a stable core for their success in Germany and Japan, as it is understood as “authenticity.” Interestingly, of the four living artist groups I looked at, only Detroit techno, specifically Mike Banks, had the ability to continue and to change in such a way that there is a consistency between the beginnings of the music in the 1990s and its current forms today. The cultural climate that 356

African Americans experienced in Detroit involved a sense that both forms of cultural expression – cosmopolitan white and parochial black – seemed open to them. Although it was clear that the marketing sweet spot of the 1960s and 1970s via Motown and a stable black middle class was now over for Detroit, techno artists stayed against all odds with the ethnically non-specific music style of techno, and insisted on its artistic validity. Although the Detroit techno producers live in an almost completely black community in Detroit without much interaction with white society or culture, they kept up the dream of ethnic unboundedness. This dream no longer sought integration or acceptance – as it might still have done in the 1980s, but rather now focused on the quest for freedom of expression. Detroit techno artists insisted that they were free to use a style which had not been branded as ethnically “black” to express their own identity. It was no longer a fight about equality of living standards, etc., but rather a fight about the inner freedom of the mind and heart. Mike Banks has paid a high price for hanging on to this conviction. It forced him to go underground, separate himself from the mainstream market, and finally live with the reality that the home community had been captured fully by commercially pushed hip hop from large media conglomerates (while Banks always kept ties to the locally produced, not-socommercial hip hop). If Banks had also started producing ethnocentric black hip hop, he might have made a fortune, or he might have lost his dignity, or both. The members of UR belong to Generation X, a generation which from their youth had to accept that the hopes of the ’60s for a more just, peaceful, and equal society did not come true. They are the first generation which had to realize that they would not be able to make as good a living as their parents; that they were left with insecure job prospects and an uncertain future. Nevertheless, they had not been as fully swallowed up in the consumer mentality as the next generation. However, events would indicate that Banks was not totally opposed to focusing on ethnicity or including “black” music. He eventually got around to selling his “ethnicity” abroad to appeal to audiences. He had resisted appearing at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, but in the 2000s he made the step – not with his basic style, but with ethnically-inflected jazz-techno. A similar episode of playing Latino-techno which mostly took place on tour in Japan gives us a further glimpse of the market-driven pressure to move from

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authenticity to figuring out what a given audience wants and giving it to them. We must remember that UR stayed true to the individualist ethos by remaining their own independent company, not selling out to the big players of the market in terms of ownership and distribution. Ethically however, they had started to sell out, cashing in on the trend that Latino “ethnic” music had become a huge selling category. Although some members of the group that played in Japan actually had Latino roots, they presented the music as pure “fun,” ethnicity as an exotic category of consumption and not a vehicle for exploring more fundamental issues of identity and engagement. Banks personally could distance himself from these developments to some degree – Los Hermanos is an independent sub-label. In other contexts, however, Banks has openly addressed the issue of selling out, of the attraction of the big wide world, of money, and sometimes the necessity of protecting your life from bullets – issues that drove some Detroit artists into the arms of the bigger “market.” Of all the ethnic populations of the U.S., it is African Americans who will most likely never have the option to become recognized as culturally “white,” – they are the Americans who have been left truly alone, to struggle by themselves in a culturally unique way. Ironically, the collapsed city of Detroit provides the foundation for a neoliberal dystopia of everybody fighting for themselves and by themselves alone, to get ahead in the market as independent musicians in the worldwide music scene, or as drug pushers in the global informal drug economy. BarlowGirl Unlike earlier successful examples of white women in Christian pop music, BarlowGirl’s strategy was not to cross over into a mainstream market defined by a certain style, but rather carve out a place for themselves in a very narrowly defined Christian fundamentalist market via the strongest ideological statement possible. BarlowGirl created a strong brand through their emphasis not only on chastity till marriage, but also their “no-dating” philosophy. Once within this framework however, they took on all the features of a standard rock band and the accompanying promotional machine. They made money producing and selling CDs, merchandise, ring tones etc., and toured the country fully supported by a media campaign in Christian publications and interviews. The emphasis on marketability might surprise us, as their inherent message, a form of Christianity under 358

attack, historically had never been “sold” aggressively to the non-converted. In the past this version of the religion had been preached “for free” to possible new disciples. BarlowGirl however catered to the already converted inside the subculture, but in a relatively untraditional manner. The majority of Christian musicians in the past had been employed through a church and did not freelance. Most music used in Christian services in the past had been traditional music, and modern Christian musicians needed to rely on the wider distribution networks of the non-religious free market outside the narrower circles of true believers to get their music heard. There was a sweet spot in the 1990s and early 2000s, where Contemporary Christian Music took off as a commodity and market segment similar to normal pop music (the conditions responsible for Amy Grant’s crossover, for example), and musicians in this period were also able to go on relatively successful Christian festival tours. However, with a counter-trend towards more exclusively “worship”themed music in the 2000s and the loss of audience interest in live Christian music festivals, the employment prospects for modern Christian musicians contracted back into a market represented by audiences in organized churches, with CD and download sales continuing on the side as a secondary income source (e.g., as in Hillsong). BarlowGirl caught the tail end of the Christian festival tour wave and unfortunately had invested everything in the CD marketing and live show aspects of their business, and furthermore had committed to a stylistic genre only appropriate for festivals, but not for a church worship service. They had placed their bets only on the “free” market, and not on a less profitable, but more stable basis of employment with a church congregation. Their particular combination of mainstream stadium-rock music and severe Christian morality only sold well during the very conservative George W. Bush years. As the market demand for this combination subsided in the years afterward, a group like the Hillsong musicians from Australia, belonging to a related Pentecostal tradition as that of the Barlows, responded more flexibly to the changing environment. They toned down the moral message in the music (and perhaps also in the congregation) over the course of time and they switched to worship music, thereby avoiding an abrupt crash in their sales through the restructuring going on in the broader market. The audience for BarlowGirl had never been a locally restricted one. They had to reach as many Christians in the U.S. as possible, touring in 359

the appropriate festivals and making appearances in churches – even those not belonging to their own denomination – and using the Christian press to get exposure. Through their choice of a rock style, the audience they reached was predominantly white, as the African American “free” market in Christian music is more reachable through Christian hip hop or soul. It is also quite ironic that a severe form of Christian fundamentalism remained intact as the one non-marketable aspect of the identity of the Barlow sisters after they abandoned the band project – it was the same aspect that had been the core of their marketability, as long as the market defined this fundamentalism as a valuable commodity. Although, judging from their own pronouncements, spreading the message via the music in whatever way they could would appear to have been of the upmost importance to BarlowGirls’ self-understanding, it is important to note that they immediately stopped making any music at all when the market was not there for them anymore. They seem to have been totally dependent on the market alone, having made no arrangements for continuing the music outside the marketplace. In this they stand out from the other cases I examined, as the others always had side projects. In the case of the Detroit techno musicians, the excursions into weird ghost-music did not sustain them financially, marketability came rather with the more jazz or ethnic inflected techno styles and through DJing. In the case of Jackalope, both artists first had full time jobs in art institutions, and later in Nakai’s case, enough income flowed in from music targeted specifically at New Age audiences. For the Waffle House musicians, neither their full-time project – the jukebox song campaign for Waffle House – nor their side projects (other music for advertisement) really fulfilled them, but they always kept open more than one door. BarlowGirl showed none of this flexibility. They are the youngest artists in my study, belonging to the so-called Millennials or Generation Y. Although the question of their moral ethos and orientation along the individualistic-communitarian spectrum is currently a matter of debate, this generational cohort has been portrayed by social researchers such as Jean Twenge as comparatively more entitled, self-involved, or even narcissistic than the previous one, Gen X. Millennials have resumed trends identified as characteristic of the postwar Baby Boomers, by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1978), written at the same time as President Carter laid out the choice between restraint or consumerism to the 360

American people. In the case of the Barlow girls, their close ties to consumer culture appear to have made them reflect one of the main characteristics of this generation – a disinterest in “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” (Healy). Yes, they were Christians, but they did not develop a philosophy of life for themselves. Being fully centered on one identity as “militant Christian virgin teenagers” they had no way out, when suddenly the market for explicitly Christian music caved in and the realities of their own personal biology and life cycles had advanced sufficiently; when the ideology of militancy waned in the Obama years; when their age just made the “teenager” image impossible to hold up any more. The image BarlowGirl had projected had been that of a reified and levelled “whiteness” – not the culturally specific whiteness of the old WASP elite or the old Southern social formations, but a newer, heartland/Rockies Sunbelt-suburban-whiteness based on affinity-through-consumption. They had no real roots in older ethnic or regional cultural identities like the Waffle House composers. Buckner and Garcia had come from Akron in the North of Ohio and had not been Southerners. They nevertheless could identify with an old-style parodistic music culture, which once had been there all over the U.S. and later on only survived in the South and corners of the heartland. Although BarlowGirl had a family heritage of Irish, German, and Yugoslavian/Ukrainian ancestry and grandparents who had worked in the steel mills on the Ohio River, their parents had become the kind of “rootless” post-Depression and World War II Americans who based their identity and their sense of inclusion on the privileges of middle-class whiteness. These people had no particular ties to place or historical memory, but rather sought to build identities on the symbols of the newer cultures of managerial thinking, magical religiosity, clan-like Christian networking and full embrace of the market as an ideology. BarlowGirl’s in-betweenness had been that of an old-style Christian fundamentalism with very strict moral rules that found expression in the very modern, commercialized medium of rock music. They had promoted this in-betweeness via PR campaigns of constant photo shoots and band interviews, and video documentaries of themselves making the music for a DVD. Although their father had begun a journey down the traditional route of getting a job as a musician in a Christian church to a possible career that would have been less commercialized and more connected with a community, Vince Barlow abandoned this search for a vocation 361

within a community, to begin a different search for a more indefinable “world” audience through the means of a record label. The Barlow sisters had begun their careers at a point in time when the pattern of expanded access to “white” inclusion and privileges for immigrant groups was once again contracting. Since then, the privileges of cultural “whiteness,” on which the hopes of “incoming” new demographic groups for access into the sunlit realms of consumerism and privilege were based, have been waning away. The gap of white people falling through the cracks is widening, and already closing in on the white middle class (Gabler). Parallel to this economic decline in the advantages of whiteness, the absolute and relative numerical strength of the white population in the U.S. is waning. Meanwhile, the numbers of self-defined “white” people who are slowly losing the privileges traditionally associated with this status is steadily growing. The ranks of these people have begun to spread out far beyond groups formerly disparaged as rednecks, white trash, poorer white working-class folks etc. The poor conditions Joe Bageant described among these traditional populations in Deer Hunting with Jesus have now begun to appear among wider and wider groups of social “losers”: So what happens if you are Tom Henderson and you’ve put in more than twenty years at the plant and let every unique aspect of yourself atrophy so you could do the American Dream by the numbers, only to find that cloak of goodness torn? Twenty years at the same job and the same church, thirty years of good credit, and you look up to find that your wife suffers from chronic depression and that terrorists crashed airplanes into New York. And whispered rumor again has it that Rubbermaid is moving your job to Asia, and television pundits loudly proclaim the impending death of the Social Security system you’ve been counting on to be there for you, though you’d never admit it openly because, well, it’s a handout. (72) It is clear that the Barlow sisters loved making music and loved being in the limelight. However, it is very difficult to determine what defined their innermost interest and identity. Lauren, for example, originally wanted to become a Broadway singer. Whether that story was just a child’s dream or seen by the family as a real possibility is difficult to tell. However, as they had grown up and have lived their whole lives in a purely Christian environment – from homebirth, homeschooling and finally Christian college to Christian music band – attempting such a step 362

into “the world” of non-Christians might have not been tolerated by the subculture. The subcultural beliefs of Pentecostal Christian fundamentalism appear to have taken over the person’s entire identity. Remaining in a subcultural community and making music for it on a commercial (and not community volunteer) basis, while defining the outside world as a threatening one which needs to be kept out with police or military force is something I did not encounter in the other cases I examine. The Detroit techno artists no longer made music specifically for their own community, nor did Nakai and Yáñez have their own birth communities as audiences. The Waffle House musicians had an anonymous collection of people on the roads of America – plus a more rooted population of Sunbelt locals as their audience inside the hundreds of Waffle House outlets, and the connection worked as long as the music was understood as parodistic. Jackalope For R. Carlos Nakai and Larry Yáñez, the market ended up not playing a significant role in the development of their Jackalope project at all. What had been much more important for them was to find an idiosyncratic, selfreferential expression for their identity, and an outlet for their feelings of sadness and loss about colonization and stereotyping, in the end resolved by their own belief in an in-between identity for themselves. As far as I understand it, at the end the idea of working at other paying jobs or gigs and doing Jackalope in their spare time did not work out for Yáñez, whose responsibilities with art exhibitions demanded a lot of travel, leaving not enough time to keep Jackalope going. Nakai on the other hand, got overtaken by his own success. If Jackalope had continued, perhaps Nakai would have kept it as a side project along with others he started. With his success in the New Age market however, the original necessity of Jackalope as an outlet to help define an in-between identity gradually gave way to a more accepted “ethnic” identity in a white context. Nakai ended up being a Native musician playing Native melodic lines performing for a predominantly white audience. Market and ethnic identity aligned in a way which Nakai found acceptable, while leaving behind the idea of an in-between identity. Nakai and Yáñez had expressed their dream of a multiethnic and multicultural society in Jackalope, using motifs from their own personal backgrounds to reflect the in-betweenness of being neither fully traditional 363

Native American (in Nakai’s case) nor fully Mexican (in Yáñez’s case). As Baby Boomers growing up in the same cultural framework as “white” hippies, they had firsthand early encounters with non-conformism and widened horizons. However, being required to go to Vietnam (as in Nakai’s case) or at least serve in the army (as in Yáñez’s case), and being defined by the consequences of their Nativeness in a way, others of their age cohort were not, they could not live out all the freedoms the hippies had defined for this generation. Rather, they took up the example of the hippies and they demanded the same rights of ethnic eclecticism and selective playing with signifiers of in-betweenness for themselves. They wanted the same freedom to move between genres and identities, defining themselves as Natives or Anglos according to the needs of the moment, or depending on the mood of the day. However, the future envisioned in Jackalope did not materialize. The market discovered “ethnicity” and “authenticity” as viable selling categories with which to co-opt the ideals of the hippies. Now Nakai and Yáñez could sell themselves as ethnic – in Native attire – and, as Nakai did by making a living with New Age, become integrated into white society as specialist purveyors of a non-specific “Nativeness.” Partly because of this new persona and its acceptance by a new audience, Nakai also now can move to the other extreme, that of being white. Especially since the 2000s, as the interest in New Age began to wane, Naka has successfully extended his market to audiences for classical music. Yáñez also left the mixing and rasquache of Chicano art behind, but he had to re-engage with the “ethnic” identity more decisively than Nakai. Yáñez moved back into his Chicano home community in Yuma, and now produces mostly Mexican art – like the ceramic calavera or skull which he kindly gave me as a present during my visit, an item which sells well to tourists. In the process, Yáñez’s avant-garde side, i.e., the “white” aspect of his performance persona, had to move to the background. In contrast to the situation with the Detroit techno artists, the “ethnic” side of Nakai was not engaged with a community of Natives out of which Nakai could get inspirations and creative oppositions, as is the case with Native hip hop today. Techno sold overseas to whites, while today Nakai and Yáñez sell to whites in the U.S. Authenticity had never been an issue with the musicians of Jackalope, as it had not been demanded by the market. This outcome sets these artists apart from the case of Detroit techno,

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where a connection with the home community is required for the artist’s authenticity. Regardless of the differences between techno and what Nakai and Yáñez have become, both groups have continued to be creative, adjusting to the market, finding ways to stay close to what they actually want to do but also compromising to keep on making music. Both groups engage with their ethnic identity, but do not use this engagement as a means of affirming the market’s premium on ethnicity. Neither advocate the deployment of ethnicity as part of a political challenge to the majority consensus. They don’t have land claims or demand reparations for having been slaughtered, colonized, or turned into slaves, nor do they try to engage in actual political bargaining for rights in regards to affirmative action. Rather, they only demand the right to be taken seriously for what they are and have the same opportunities and possibilities as whites. In that way, both groups, while both very much invested in the multicultural ethos of the 1960s, still believe in the American Dream of freedom and individual opportunity against all odds. In this, they proceed against the current trend of ethnocentrism. Colin Leach et al. write: In this age of political, economic, and moral uncertainty, many view the politics of ethnic identity as an attempt by those with little power to affirm their threatened identities and to assert their claims for material resources and political clout. For most subordinate groups their main bargaining tool is the threat of societal instability. As such, ethnic identity politics constitute a threat to established authorities and centralizing values, such as individual rights, majority rule, and a homogenous national identity, that are the basis of these authorities’ governance. (759)

In the U.S. however, groups like the Natives or African Americans do not really pose a threat to general societal stability. This potential might rather lie in the burgeoning Latino population, if they don’t get integrated into the privileges of cultural whiteness in adequate numbers in the future. Charles Ives When we look at Charles Ives’s reception, we have to immediately connect the music and the market with Europe. This music had been part of the cultural apparatus of the German- and Jewish-dominated East Coast high cultural or music scene, mixed in with the cultural claims of the region’s old-WASP establishment. Ives’s Americanness – and thereby his 365

presumed divergence or possibly deficiency from the perspective of European norms – proved to be a disadvantage. This cargo cult of an imagined European high culture as expressed through music (by European, and later American composers) defined class differences inside the U.S. and connected older immigrant groups with their European roots. One could state that the hyphenated European-American identity survived longest in its approach to musical form. The institutionalization of an appreciation for Americanness into classical music scholarship in the U.S. however was finally achieved in the late 1970s. The Americanness of Ives however had to be made “European” enough as a condition of acceptance into the high-culture of elite circles whose spiritual hearth was the East Coast. J. Peter Burkholder, the product of a different, Midwestern cultural and scholarly tradition, achieved the normalization of Ives into the classical music subculture’s mainstream. The price to pay for that inclusion was the “normalization” of Ives’s deviant musical traits. This could be achieved via an extension of the definition of what Romanticism could encompass, a shifting of focus to only the most romantic sounding pieces in the œuvre, and the downplaying of any irregularities in that corpus. Regardless of the fact that a conservative musical audience would already find the romantic-sounding pieces too modern for their ears, Ives could thereby be pulled from his in-between status towards one stable definition. This induction into the pantheon of musical demi-gods was not a marketable category however. This can be seen in the different approach of the West Coast conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who could only sell Ives to an audience all over the U.S as a typically American “maverick” – i.e., the individualist, and not the solidly romantic conformist. It might come as a surprise that the identification of Americanness as quirky individualism – with an accompanying acceptance of deviance (including the embrace of gay culture) – should hold out longest on the West Coast. However, the conservative construction of Americanness in an equally constructed heartland is a recent phenomenon triggered by the moral backlash to the ’60s counterculture. When Burkholder succeeds in making Ives “normal,” he also puts him back in the closet, hiding his deviancy to make him participate in the musicological discourse. What can be acknowledged as an honorable achievement – giving Ives the recognition he deserves – then quickly becomes a participatory stake in a politics of growing conservatism. What might not have been recognizable in the 1980s became clear in the following 366

decades after Ives’s “canonization.” His latter-day visibility comes with a loss of substance. In the subsequent reception phase, as exemplified by Gayle Sherwood Magee, a decrease of the power of the East Coast elite would happen – through the simple fact of the old immigrant population waning – and a move towards more discussion of the role of Americanness in the entire discipline would take place. This was a move away from elitism and normativity that incidentally also witnessed pop music’s apotheosis as a subject finally worthy of the attention of the discipline. Precluding a successful reception of Ives in these terms, Burkholder’s intervention came too early, already having previously established Ives as a “serious” composer. Sherwood Magee then reinforced the conservative interpretation by extending it from Burkholder’s focus on musical analysis to the person of Ives himself, rejecting any deviant interpretations of the man. Here, I include speculations about the composer’s possible psychological ailments in what was considered deviant and not tolerable in the worldview of the 1990s and 2000s. Something which would normally come as a badge of honor – a romantic composer with a psychological issue – did not mesh well with the traits desired in an American classical music composer. The particular threat of homosexuality to American culture (as the most threatening of the deviant traits) – a parallel to the sexual paranoia over access to white girls in a multicultural society – shows the precarious situation of the established system of normative ethnic and gender privilege. Here, we find the subcultural values of the elite musicological world suddenly indistinguishable from the values of a very conservative heartland culture. In terms of imagined landscapes, if Burkholder had moved Ives from the middle of America (or rather the deviant provinciality of early twentieth century small town American tinkerers) to a place in the Europeanized world of the urban East Coast, Sherwood Magee now moved him back to the recently legitimized heartland. The dynamics of the latter move however, did not have to do with a normalization of the musical style. Rather, it demanded a normalization of Ives’s private life, a “moral” normalization. Burkholder, as an openly gay scholar, achieved the integration of Ives into the European canon with a re-interpretation of his deviant musical traits as largely irrelevant in the face of Ives’s apparent mastery of classical foundations; what was left of “deviancy” was interpreted as nevertheless inside the norm for gifted composers. In parallel, Sherwood Magee achieved the integration of Ives into an acceptable “Ameri367

can” composer through a reinterpretation of his deviant moral traits as being mostly non-existent, and what was left of deviancy was also reinterpreted as being inside the norm, this time of good moral behavior. Ives himself left his music free of any copyright, but the music publishers later on gained money and influence through their publications of the music. For the scholars I talked about in the case study, the sales of Ives’s music do not play a big role at all. They are only interested in the performance of Ives and the spreading of Ives’s music in general (if through markets or just by interest). Waffle House Music The musicians behind the Waffle House jukebox songs were hired talent and were compensated as professionals for their work for company. The producers and musicians Jerry Buckner and Danny Jones never had to “sell” this music on an “open” market, having instead the company as a steady customer. The company then placed the music in the more than one thousand Waffle House outlets, which in this regard constituted a ready-made distribution system with a built-in audience. The artists had created this curious form of advertising music as ordered, and not to express any of their own their creative longing, or something of their own identity. However, their talents and sensibilities introduced a level of quality, witticism and awareness of cultural context that qualifies these “songs” as genuine and unrecognized exemplars of an American folk aesthetic of the late consumer age. As a particularly self-reflective kind of ephemera, they are as much a part of America’s musical heritage as nineteenth century promotional music. This Waffle House music was in-between music, partly commercialized, but nevertheless rooted in folk traditions. But the fun and self-deprecating irony of a Southern identity that the folk tradition had managed to preserve eventually lost any resonance with the changeover of the Waffle House leadership to a new generation. This older Southern identity could obviously be described as “white,” but not in the sense of the newer culture of mainstream consumerism. It was related to other older styles, pre-consumerist and regional forms of “whiteness” rooted in all the interior regions of the U.S., but had survived longest in certain pockets of the South, while constantly under threat from a newer consumer identity that had taken hold in the new Sunbelt.

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In the 2010s, this carefully balanced mix of old-style Southern identity with a new Southern commercialism had ceased to be viable. It had been swallowed by a simplified and much more bland and careful commercialized whiteness which attempts to retain some of the goofiness that marked the old self-deprecating style, but has given up on expressing this sensibility through advertising music. The intelligence and humor which were inherent in the older musical style have given way to a clumsy echoing of what is “fashionable” in the South in any given moment. In the process, the core of the identity has been lost. The original musicians of the Waffle House jukebox songs project had worked smoothly together with the company’s original owners for forty years, sharing the same sensibility and cultural assumptions. They were pushed to the side by the mid-2000s, to be replaced by new talent such as a Christian filmmaking team that made the video to “This is the Night.” Nevertheless, the seeming inauthenticity of advertisement music had proved to be a last pocket in which some cultural authenticity could be preserved for a while longer. Buckner and Jones had both always kept some side projects in the form of other advertisement music going, in order to not be fully dependent on one commercial partner. Jones in particular moved towards supplying commodified library soundscapes as a download, and developing audio-guides for tourism, mixing spoken dialogue and music. Buckner expanded his foot in the ad business from supplying music to offering his voice for voice over, following the old idea of the changeability of a voice – now however not as an impersonator, but as the “pest control guy,” the storyteller, the seller of trucks, etc. Buckner also released two albums by himself after 2000, which are not particularly impressive in an aesthetic sense. In them Buckner becomes “white” in the modern, consumerist, twenty-first-century sense of being emotionally serious and self-determined (i.e., they are not parodies or style copies). One album features instrumental love song melodies played with a synthesizer piano sound (Somewhere in Time), accompanied by synth strings, the other features his storyteller voice, reading love letters of historical figures to a backdrop of soft piano music (Letters of Love). The production quality is not particularly impressive, compared to the old Waffle House output. Even here, Buckner and Jones find that they cannot really let out their frustrations about stifled creativity, as they are highly dependent on the commercialized requirements of the businesses which order advertisement music. They have become insecure in their identity, as they never followed 369

through on the goal of becoming real artists that they espoused early on, but fell for the easy money in advertisement. Now that advertisement drops them too, they have nothing left than the knowledge that they earned good money in the past.

Swan Songs of Authenticity In his book The Man without Qualities (2016) the cultural critic Morris Berman invents a character who is fed up with the emptiness of an American life consisting of hustling and consuming. The main character is a retired professor of German studies, who decides to fill his empty days with a joke: the founding of an Institute of Dullness, advocating a retreat from a fast-moving life, rejecting capitalism and idealist rebellion alike in favor of a commitment to personal authenticity no matter where this may lead. To his huge astonishment, people start flocking to this idea of living an authentic life, throwing away their cell phones, careers, public personas, and following the movement. The sales of antidepressants go down, people start defecting from the military, and at the end a new American Dream has arisen: an authentic life without hustling. The movement ironically triggers a political landslide, caused by one man speaking his mind. The idea of authenticity has never really gone out of fashion – but it often gets presented as an impossible dream. You can’t afford to be authentic, because you still have this mortgage on your house to pay for; you have kids for whom you have to have a stable environment and income to be able to provide them with a good education; you are too poor to afford to go where your heart is; immigrants can’t allow themselves to get carried away by dreams; you don’t know any more what authenticity actually is. The co-optation of authenticity is something that advertisers discovered long ago, as they discovered that we all are hungry for the symbolic value, the “extra” value, which capitalism simultaneously extracts but also promises to provide us (Frank 1997; Dolfsma). Sometimes caring and real community are enacted in advertising, to fill the very same emptiness produced by consumerism. As Timothy D. Taylor has shown in The Sounds of Capitalism, since the co-optation of the counter culture, advertisement – and especially the use of music in advertisement, of full 370

musical songs – has provided us with this “extra” value, as in the famous Coca-Cola hilltop commercial: I’d like to teach the world to sing In perfect harmony I’d like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company That’s the real thing.

When even the idea of authenticity has been co-opted by a soft drink company as “the real thing,” what are we talking about when we pose the question of authenticity in relation to the case studies in this book? Music history has shown that even musics which appeared to be authentic, are often only using such authenticity as a selling hook, using political engagement or the emotionalism of country music as a stylistic feature rather than a statement of personal intent (Barker and Taylor; Pecknold). Are we then rather looking for music which touches our souls, our feelings? If so I could only refer to the music of Ives myself as something which truly spoke to my heart. However, I also appreciate very much all the other musics in the case study, not all on an aesthetical level, but in the understanding that in all of these musics people struggle to come to terms with the negotiation between authenticity and the market. In closing, I find that I would rather define authenticity here as a kind of honest engagement and enjoyment of unconventionality for its own sake, than expect a full expression of the innermost feelings of the artists. In this way, I understand music not as an aesthetic expression, but rather as a social expression. The result of the combination of authenticity with the market creates this in-between space of musical weirdness, which Greil Marcus defined. The music – or rather the entire phenomenon of BarlowGirl, for example, seems to represent a search for the appropriate symbols to express the disappointment and grief that whites have faced in losing privileges they did not even fully realize were theirs. There is some honesty involved in showing the fear they have in regards to others. There is a reality attached to the fact that some people fear that they won’t be as well off in the future as they have been decades ago. There is just nobody around who would deliver the message, that these feelings of fear are real, and that people better come to terms with it. How much have we already learned to think only in preconceived ways, ways paved by both sides, the 371

liberals and the conservatives? Are we not allowed to hear African Americans fight for keeping up a middle-class sense of pride and hope for unlimited cosmopolitan access; can’t we understand angry Christians in their frustration about disappointed hopes; can we adjust to an image of a Native American not suffering, but being well off and thriving? The critic Dmitry Orlov warns us that a collapse of the U.S. could come not as a spectacular catastrophe, but as a slow deterioration, or a “long emergency” as Howard Kunstler calls it (also cf. Morris Berman 2012; Greer). We might not realize it, because – as has already been proven with the experience of the Dust Bowl years – humans have a high potential for denying reality. Politicians tell us that they will make everything fine – either through finding scapegoats or through one more neoliberal reboot to the economy, but never through a message of less consumerism. As Carter said already in 1979, the answers to these questions will alter the future of the American Dream – and I might add, also the future of music in the U.S.

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Works Cited (Music see separate list below, websites accessed Oct. 2018) Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Bacevich, Andrew. “The Carter Doctrine at 30.” World Affairs 1 Apr. 2010. . ———. “The Crisis-of-Confidence Speech.” Comment. 18 June 2009. Blog by John Shaplin. . Bageant, Joe. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Three Rivers P, 2007. Barker, Hugh, and Yuval Taylor. Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. New York: Norton, 2007. Berman, Morris. The Man without Qualities. New York: The Oliver Arts & Open Press, 2016. ———. Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Carter, Jimmy. “Crisis of Confidence Speech.” 15 July 1979. Miller Center. Transcript. . Clarke, John et al. Creating Citizen-Consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services. London: Sage, 2007. DeShaw, Matthew. “Humanities Offer Marketability in a Competitive World.” Harvard Gazette 4 March 2016. . Dolfsma, Wilfred, ed. Consuming Symbolic Goods: Identity and Commitment, Values and Economics. New York: Routledge, 2008. Frank, Thomas. Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016. ———. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Gabler, Neal. “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans.” The Atlantic May 2016. . Greer, John Michael. The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2009.

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Healy, Michelle. “Millennials Might Not Be So Special After All, Study Finds.” USA Today 15 Mar. 2012. . Jay, Paul. The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Kasperkevic, Jana. “The Harsh Truth: US Colleges are Businesses, and Student Loans Pay the Bills.” The Guardian 7 Oct. 2014. . Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Atlantic, 2005. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1978. Leach, Colin Wayne, Lisa M. Brown, Ross E. Worden. “Ethnicity and Identity Politics.” Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict. Ed. Lester Kurtz. Vol. 1 A-F. 2nd ed. Amsterdam, San Diego: Elsevier, 2008. 758-68. Maier, Charles S. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Mandler, Peter. “Rise of the Humanities.” Aeon 17 Dec. 2015. . Marcus, Greil. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. Updated ed. from Invisible Republic. New York: Picador, 2001. Obama, Barack. Kansas Speech. “Remarks by the President on the Economy in Osawatomie, Kansas.” 6 Dec. 2011. Transcript. . Orlov, Dmitry. The Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit. Gabriola, BC: New Society, 2013. Pecknold, Diane. The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Reagan, Ronald. “It’s Morning again in America.” Ad campaign “Prouder, Stronger, Better.” 1984. [Here accessed via: “Ronald Reagan TV Ad: ‘It’s Morning in America Again.” Youtube. .] ———. “Second Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan.” 21 Jan. 1985. Yale Law School Website. Transcript. . Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012.

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Schirrmacher, Frank. Ego: The Game of Life. Transl. Nick Somers. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Orig. pub. as Ego: Das Spiel des Lebens. München: Karl Blessing, 2013. Surowiecki, James. “The Financial Page: Unlikely Alliances.” New Yorker 25 Apr. 2016, 37. Taylor, Timothy D. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. Twenge, Jean M. Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before. New York: Free Press, 2006. Wheeler, Kathryn. Fair Trade and the Citizen-Consumer: Shopping for Justice? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Music Cited Buckner, Jerry. Letters of Love. Soft Wind Records, 2010. CD. ———. Somewhere in Time. CD Baby, 2007. CD. “This is the Night.” Waffle House. Song with video. “This is the Night.” Uploaded by Waffle House 13 Dec. 2013. Youtube. .

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Appendix I 313 Mailing List Entry

Below I reprint three entries from the informal “313” e-mail list which Underground Resistance used to communicate with their fans in the 1990s.1 One entry is by Mike Banks (aka Mad Mike), one of the founders of UR. In this entry he explains what it means for him to maintain the label “authentic,” and that he stands for a “no-selling-out” policy. To provide context for the subjects mentioned in the email entries, I have inserted my own comments. The spelling was retained exactly as it appeared in the emails. Robert Smith, 2 Aug. 1995: From what I know of Mad Mike, they don’t want to be. More friendships are made and more battles are won in the underground rather than on the surface. More substance, less flash.

Smith refers here to an earlier thread on the list discussing the question of why UR decided to be an independent, “underground” group and why they do not publish or license material to major labels. rbcIII the lovebot, 2 Aug. 1995: Well, I take the militant underground stance of the UR crew with a grain of salt. They often dis +8 an[d] others for licensing to big labels but...

Plus 8 was a label by the white Canadian artists Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva based in Windsor, just across the river and international boundary from Detroit. Hawtin learned his craft from within the black 1

“Mad Mike Speaks.” Blog by eluna. Email conversation by Mike Banks et al. 2 and 3 Aug. 1994. .

Detroit scene and then started the label and began DJing himself. He drew big crowds of predominantly white suburban kids and had a huge success with his alias Plastikman. Tension within the community of black techno artists arose when Hawtin issued his third record “Cybersonic,” with the printed words on the label: “The Future Sound of Detroit.” Many critics considered it presumptuous that a white artist would claim to define the future sound of Detroit. 1) Tresor and Tresor II (NovaMute) have UR tracks on them. This is the same label which licenses Probe and Plastikman and FUSE ... 2) Drexciya on WARP 3) Drexciya on Rephlex 4) UR on New Electronica compilations. Many more examples can be found I'm sure. I don't think WARP, Mute records and New Electronica are any better than R&S. They pimp just like Renaat! (rbcIII)

Here the fan wants to show that UR is not staying true to their claim that they are really independent, pointing out instances where UR artists licensed or published on major labels. Tresor, in my opinion, cannot count as a major label, as it is privately owned. However, Tresor might have licensed tracks which UR published with them to the aforementioned New Electronica compilations. As Mike Banks points out in his response below, Drexciya – two artists who published with the label UR – ultimately were their own agents and could freely decide to license their tracks to major labels. Renaat is the owner of the major label R&S. So this “anti white techno” stance is not very solid IMO. I don't mind though. I happen to think the Tresor and Tresor II comps the best NovaMute put out. I think Drexciya deserves the exposure they get on labels like Warp and Rephlex. I love all of the releases that New Electronica has put out (esp. the new Reflections On Reflections) and think UR are a great compliment to the other artists featured. I take the UR, Mad Mike, and Drexciya public statements as part of their “act.” Much like the facade of some Metal bands who act like devil worshippers. It's all entertainment and good at that. I just happen to think the whole “at war with the commercial forces” theme a pretty cool one. (rbcIII)

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The writer of the email connects the “anti-white techno” stance with Drexciya and Mike Banks. As Mike Banks points out in his response below, it was only Drexciya who expressed their anger about racial inequality with regards to techno produced and performed by whites. James Stinson, a member of Drexciya, said in the British magazine Melody Maker (14 Jan. 1995): Why do Richie and his Plus 8 family come down here and throw parties in downtown Detroit? He brings in all these kids from the suburbs and from Canada, and that shows a lack of respect. I’ve been to every one of those parties and I’ve never heard an Underground Resistance record, a Cybotron record, a Model 500 record or an Eddie Fowlkes record. It’s a total lack of respect, and it’s got to stop.2

The writer of the email further suggests that UR are just pretending to be independent and underground, something Mike Banks protests against in his response. Somewhere In Detroit [Mike Banks], 3 Aug. 1995: I dont get out in cyberspace very often so please forgive my net etiquette or any words I may misspell, I do very much appreciate Robert Smith”s passionate defense of UR, but I am a fighter and in this instance I will come out of the shadows in defense of my Label and what it stands for! First regarding Drexciya – It hurts me just as much as anyone else who loves true Underground music from the source to see a group that UR as a Label helped lift from the streets into international underground acclaim. Dont forget these projects on UR were not Drexciyas first outings, their first outings on their own label did not farewell at all. You guys cannot imagine the type of time and energy both financially and studiowise that goes into making 4 trak material good enough to make a record out of. Matter of fact most people cant make 4 trak projects into good sounding records, but at UR thats what we did because I heard something in those traks – I heard some brothers who were using their imaginations to the max, I heard kids who were pure at heart and knew nothing of the

2

Stinson, James (Drexciya). Interview. Melody Maker 14 Jan. 1995. . Written.

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international complexities of this music, I heard dreams. It is very, very difficult to descibe what it feels like to lose talented people the caliber of Jeff Mills, Robert Hood or Drexciya not to lose them due to arguments or disagreements, but to lose them due to the environment here in Detroit.

Mike Banks acknowledges here that he (i.e., UR) “lost” Mills, Hood and Drexciya to the bigger market. He stresses that Drexciya had been their own agents before they came to UR, but that they actually achieved their success with the help of UR. It hurts him that regardless of this help they left UR and sold out to the bigger market. He continues: It is a very difficult place to stay in especially if you have been abroad or know others that have been. After returning some people are never the same! Jeff Mills was a world class DJ a talent the world now enjoys. He had nowhere to play here in Detroit we would watch as DJ after DJ would come play Detroit and for all the hype could not rock the D, basically they could not hold a candle next to Jeff Mills. Jeff is xtremly competetive so he really wanted to get out there and kik ass[.] So when his chance came in 1992 at the Limelite club in N.Y he took it! HE knew and I knew that he would never come back! I never call Jeff a sellout cause he aint, the brother just did what he had to do because that was his chance to share his gift with all of you in peace. Rob Noise went with Jeff due to a life threating incident he had on 7 mile and we all agreed that Rob needed to get away and see the world to see another side of life. You see techno for us is life – these brothers would never have had the chance to see the world and meet people of all different racial groups and idealogies if it wasnt for this music period unless of course they did their 2 year stint in the military!

Banks points out here the reasons for artists leaving UR and Detroit. Jeff Mills did not get the feedback in Detroit which his talent needed and so he left. For Robert Hood, getting out was connected with getting out of the way of street gang fights in Detroit, as Hood lived on the notorious 7 Mile road. Banks refers to the limited opportunities for African Americans to see something of the bigger world; that was a major reason why artists often took the opportunity to get out when the chance presented itself. When Drexciyas James S. made his statements about the caucasion persausion and plus-8 they were made out of frustration, made out of living in a city ringed by 8 mile road a street most minorities dont cross into at

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nite, bordered by Dearborn MI. a suburb that didnt want detroit residents playing basketball in its parks! Please understand there are 4 ways to Escape these boundaries 1.go to prison 2. join the army 3. leave and move somewhere else if you can afford it! 4. substance abuse[.] Thats the fucking way it is partner! So when guys from the city see young affluent white teenagers from the suburbs running around the city and not working particularily hard on inviting brothers to their sets yes it is gonna cause tension! Its called cultural differences. I cannot tell you how many times me and my crew were denied entrance to a party because there where to many Black and mexican scary guys or gang members at the door!! And thes kidz were supposed to be progressive! Unfortunately 1 OF the guys from Drexciya was with us that nite and it was a nite he never forgot. Let me tell you prejudice hurts especially when its associated with the music you love and the city you were raised in. It is for this reason UR is in this war with the programmers – those kidz were by the sight of 20 heavily muscled brothers who yes some were gang members some x-members and now musicians, they were intimidated because the programmers taught them that all brothers that didnt have on silver shoes and didnt smile or laugh at bullshit jokes and small talk were probably criminals ask Mumia, Rodney King or Malice Green who effects programming has on people. (Banks)

Banks here directly refers to Stinson’s interview in Melody Maker in which one section was titled “The Caucasian Persuasion,” where Stinson talked about white musical appropriation and mentioned Richie Hawtin. Banks tries to explain why Stinson was so angry: he refers to different instances of discrimination and the limitations on African Americans. Banks mentions one instance in which he, Drexciya and others wanted to get into a (white) techno club and were denied entry, because of their skin color. Banks points towards the paradox that blacks needed put up a “nice” face to not be perceived as threatening. He mentions the police violence towards black men, who were automatically perceived to be criminals, while they were not. I am a very serious brother nothing that I do or have done with UR is funny or entertaining, I am not a clown and I will never tap dance on cue – I have never been pimped and neither has my company, the moves and strategies that I use are for one thing and one thing only – and that is to guar[an]tee that the programmers agendas and stereotypes do not proceed into the next century!! Because it is these same agendas and prejudices that nearly extreminated my mothers peoples (blackfoot indians) and

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forcibly inslaved my fathers Peoples for 400 years – so believe me when I tell you UR some DEADLY serious shit!!!! there is very little for me to smile and be happy about with the condition my people, my city, my EARTH – MOTHER EARTH is in. All I can hope is that music from our label can without words or explanations knock down all the barriers (racial, economic, religous, etc) that the programmers have cleverly set before us in order to keep us from understanding that catergories and definitions separate and with separation comes exploitation and profit! I hope you can feel what I am saying – as I stated earlier I am not very good on the net and I tried to xplain as efficiently as possible what me and my label stand for so that there would be no misinterpetations or people putting words in my mouth. I am 33 years old and fully capable of speaking for myself but I choose to use music because men have been talking for years but always with FORKTONGUE music is true and ultimately much more efficient than all writtien language to this date – tribal people have known this for thousands of years. WE are all tribal people but some of us have strayed away from the talk of the drum and they talk with words and languages that mean nothing! THE DRUM IS ALWAYS BETTER – (Banks)

Banks states vehemently that neither he himself nor UR has ever sold out and that his anti-exploitation stance is the essence of his label. He fights against stereotyping African Americans and points towards his personal family history of massacres against Native Americans (his mother’s side) and the enslavement of African Americans (his father’s side). He strongly emphasizes that UR is not just presenting their credo as an “act” – as the fan in the email had suggested – but that the message is meant to be taken seriously. Banks finishes please forgive the length of my response and thank you for this very unique forum of communication (consiousness) lets leave the racial issues out of this forum and out of the next century and most of all out of tekno music as it knows no boundaries not even logic – peace MAD MIKE UR Back into the darkness I go do not try to find me ps-lovebot if you ever come to detroit please feel free to look me up and I will show you what I am fighting against maybe then you would understand UR a little better. Its the type of organization that we love you but if you leave – dont come back, its that deep brother[.] Also just to set the

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record straight me, ritchy, john, dan bell and Mike Himes all get along just fine ask em if you need too! IN the future never ever take words or statements that others have said and equate them to me! feel free to fax me and i will get back to you when time allows fax no.313.963.1025 peace and stay low, stay strong – out MAD MIKE

The email ends on a friendly note in which Bank stresses that he himself gets along fine with the musicians from Plus 8 like Richie Hawtin, John Acquaviva, Daniel Bell or Mike Himes.

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Appendix II Waffle House Songs on (and off) the Jukebox

As of 2015, Waffle House has forty-three Waffle House-themed songs on their new electronic jukebox. The jukebox does not feature the song “Appetite for Life” (on CD Favorites vol. 2), which had been written by a customer in a competition in 2010. It also does not feature the two new songs with video, “This is the Night” (ca. 2014), and “Southern Classic Cookin’” (2010). Missing is also the funny number “844,739 Ways to Eat a Hamburger” (on CD Favorites vol. 1), the B side to this record “I Like What I See at the Waffle House” (Jason Bowen, Billy Dee 1994) and the record “Waffle House Christmas / Heading Home for the Holidays” (Mary Welch Rogers 2000). Another record by Trace Adkins, “Songs About Me/ Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” was a promo (2005) (Waffle Records, discogs website). The songs featured are listed here in the order of their appearance on the jukebox and presented with the A and B side of the 7” singles as which they were produced for the analog jukebox.1 Printed in italics are the songs for which I made a field recording: -

1

Waffle House Family (Part 1)/ Waffle House Family (Part 2) – Mary Welch Rogers (1984) Waffle House Home 1/ Waffle House Home 2 – Mary Welch Rogers w/ Tina Britton (1987) I’m Cooking at the Waffle House/ Special Lady at the Waffle House – Billy Dee Cox (1988) Good Food Fast/ Waffle House Doo-Wop – Eddie Middleton (1989) Waffle House Thank You/ We’re Dedicated – Mary Welch Rogers (1990)

I took photos of the song listing in a Waffle House closest to the University of Georgia campus in Atlanta. This list is identical with a list I got from an old jukebox in a Waffle House in Norman, Oklahoma (highway 35, exit Robinson Street West), 28 February 2012, except the new “Rock the House” was not yet on it then.

-

386

We’re Gonna Push/ What Can We Do? – Gary Garcia/ Walter Carter Jr. (1991) Overdoing/ It’s Waffle House Time – Mary Welch Rogers Why Would You Eat Your Grits Anyplace Else?/ I’m Going Back to the Waffle House – Mary Welch Rogers/ Jason Bowen (1993) What Remains/ Life Is Like a Cup of Coffee – Mary Welch Rogers (1994) Saturday Night at My Place/ They’ve Got a Coke for Me – Gary Garcia/ Mary Welch Rogers (1995) Waffle House Hash Browns/ I Feel Good at the Waffle House – Billy Dee Cox/ Alfreda Gerald (1995) There Are Raisins in My Toast/ Happy Birthday (Sing Along) – Gary Garcia/ Jerry Buckner (1996) It’s A Waffle Great Day/ The Meat Lover – B. “The King” Hoger/ Jerry Buckner Make Mine with Cheese/ Sauce Master – W. Mankowski/ Daniel Greaves (2000) Waffle House for You and Me/ Waffle House for You and Me (Instrumental) – G’ane (2001) Grill Operator/ Waffle House March – Bill Kahler/ Billy Dee Cox/ Waffle House Singers Last Night I Saw Elvis at the Waffle House/ Night Shift – Danny Jones/ Jim Chase Waffle House Steaks (A Bluegrass Tribute)/ 50 Years and Counting – Northwest Territory/ Van Temple (2005) They’re Cooking up My Order #1/ They’re Cooking up My Order #2 – Walter Carter/ Alfreda Gerald Bert/ Over Easy – Jason Phelps (2007) Save Me/ I – Kaitlyn Rogers (2007)

Index

313, 60n, 90, 377-83 808, 76 A Prairie Home Companion, 320 abortion. 115-17, 121, 152. See also birth control abstinence, 108, 116, 120, 137, 139, 140. See also chastity, purity, virginity Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 381 academic (classical) composer, 205, 232-32, 258 Acquaviva, John, 377, 383 Acquire the Fire, 135 Adams, John, 227 addiction, 62, 107 Adelita, 190-91, 200 Adkins, Trace, 385 adolescence, extended, 146 Adolescent Family Life Act, 140 Adorno, Theodor W., 7, 174 advertising, 57, 198, 302, 307, 315, 321, 322, 370; Ives and, 233; music in, 9, 12, 16, 289, 298, 302, 303-07, 309, 320, 325-27, 334, 360, 368-70; techno music/musicians and, 67, 71n. See also jingle African: drumming, 183, 188, 194; musicians, 173; Safari, 55; South African, 83, 183 African American. See Black Afrika Baambaata, 52 Afrofuturism, 36, 47n, 48n, 81, 85 Aguilar, Phil, 106n

Air Force, 131, 142n Air Force Academy, 142n Albiez, Sean, 37n, 44 alcohol, 61, 63, 87, 107, 126, 150, 180, 203, 214; drinking of, 62, 127, 136, 177 Alcoholics Anonymous, 126 Alcorn, Nancy, 132 Alcotts, The, 228n, 234, 252 Alfvén, Hugo, 249 Allen, Joseph and Claudia Worrell, 146n Alone (techno producer), 67 Alvin and the Chipmunks, 319 ambient music, 184. See also elevator music, MUZAK ambiguity. See under identity American Dream, 7, 17, 25, 203, 288, 289, 332-35, 348, 350, 362, 365, 370, 372 American Musicological Society, 264, 277 American Way of Life, 7, 179, 293 American values, 131, 228n, 293, 351 Americana, 42, 71, 80, 296, 308 Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU), 140 Amerman, Marcus, 178n Anaheim Set Free Church, 106n Anderson, Benedict, 217, 355 Anderson, Laurie, 184

Anglo, 15, 158, 171, 196, 198, 203, 207, 213, 216, 217, 364 Anthology of American Folk Music, 2 apocalyptic, 45, 74; post-, 42, 73, 82, 84; pre-, 82. See also collapse, decline, dystopia Appalachia, 2, 24, 249, 314n appropriation, 5n, 13, 21, 34, 37n, 44n, 45, 50, 173, 175, 178, 185, 197, 381 army: Christians and, 136, 141; pottery tanks, 209; Salvation, 143, 266; techno ideas and, 68, 73, 84; U.S., 140, 141, 142, 186, 364, 381. See also military Arab, 196, 197 Asco, 191 Asian, 17, 158, 173, 194, 197, 207, 356. See also Orientalizing Assemblies of God, 105, 107 assimilation, 5, 40, 50n, 120, 126, 132, 144, 150, 156, 251, 270 Athabascan, 187, 199 Atkins, E. Taylor, 80 Atkins, Juan, 34, 35, 49, 49n, 50, 51, 66-67, 69, 81 Attaberg, Kurt, 249 Attali, Jacques, 7 authenticity, 4, 8-9; America’s white past and, 2-3, 8, 23-25 as expression of values, 5, 6; as lifestyle, 1, 8; BarlowGirl and, 103, 110; consumerism in country music and, 21, 306, 327-28; ethnic identity and, 34, 41, 54, 176, 183, 197; Ives and, 242, 279-80; Jackalope and, 176, 183, 197, 215, 364, 365; music market and, 3, 5n, 8-12, 22, 215, 354-70; techno and, 34, 37, 41, 50, 57, 63, 70, 87-

388

89, 356, 358; Waffle House Music and, 288, 296, 306, 311, 327-28, 369 authoritarian, 8, 88, 105, 122, 127, 147, 155, 157. See also male authority avant-garde music, 15, 73, 79, 180, 184, 193, 230, 232, 364. See also experimental music Aztec, 189, 192, 197, 200 Aztec Mystic. See Rolando B52s, The, 49 Baby Boomers, 305n, 360, 364 Bacevich, Andrew, 351 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 242 Bagdasarian Sr., Ross. See Alvin and the Chipmunks Bageant, Joe, 332, 362 Banks, Mike (aka Mad Mike), 33102, 354, 356-58, 377-383 Baraka, Amiri, 46n Barber, Samuel, 274 Barbie, 303n Barlow, Alyssa, 103, 109, 137, 139n, 148 Barlow, Andrew, 112n, 124 Barlow, Joseph (Joe), 123, 124n Barlow, Lauren, 103, 109, 112n, 137, 138, 154, 362 Barlow, MaryAnn, 110, 119, 121, 122, 139 Barlow, Rebecca, 103, 109, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 148 Barlow, Vince (Vincent), 18, 10810, 115, 119, 120-23, 125, 12728, 141, 144, 148, 149, 155, 354, 361 BarlowGirl, 12-14, 17, 18, 21, 103170, 355, 358-363 Baron, Carol, 277-78 Bartok, Bela, 247

battle/battlefield. See under Christian militant rhetoric Battle Cry Campaign. See under Christian miliaristic rhetoric Baudrillard, Jean, 8 Baumhardt, Tricia. See Brock, Tricia Beamer, Keola, 188 Beatles, 193, 231 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 174, 228n, 229, 237, 242, 244, 245n, 246, 248, 253, 271 Bell, Daniel, 383 Bellamann, Henry, 236n, 240 Belleville Three, 35, 56, 59, 69. See also Detroit Four Beloved Community, 87 Benjamin, Walter, 7 Benny, Jack, 315 Bentley, Todd, 105, 132 Bergeron, Kaitlyn, 299n, 323, 386 Berghain, 19 Bergmann, Luke,61-62, 65n, 86, 88 Berio, Luciano, 231 Berman, Morris, 292, 370, 372 Bernstein, Leonard, 257n, 272, 274 Bethel Church, Bethel Music, 105, 117 Bhabha, Homi, 5n Bible, 115n, 116, 161; Bible Belt, 24, 134n, 269; Dan 8, 143; Rom 12:2, 126-27. Eph 6:12, see under Christian militant rhetoric: Armor of God Bickle, Mike, 105, 132 Billy Dee and the Southside Allstars. See under Dee Cox, Billy Biola University, 106 birth control, 118n, 120, 121. See also abortion; abstinenc

Black/African American: community, 40, 45, 61, 75, 356, 357, see also Beloved Community; disco as, 10; Flying African, 81; identity, 41, 44, 46, 47, 67, 52n; invisibility, 43-44, 48-50; males, 39, 41, 58-60, 86, 381; middle class, see under class; minority, 41; music (urban)/popular culture, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 45, 53; Post-Blackness, 44, 46-47; radio, 51-54; riots, 38, 41, 65, 75, 76; stereotypes, 41, 48, 54, 55, 62, 154, 381; suffering, 41, 43, 66; techno roots, 13, 38, 45, 53, 378; underclass, 54-55; visibility, 48, 49n. See also non-white and see also under body, homosexuality, pop culture, stereotypes, South Black Exploitation Movies (Blaxploitation), 48 Black Lives Matter, 38-39, 47n Black Lodge Singers, 181 Black Panthers, 50 Blackfoot Indians, 84, 91, 381 Blatterer, Harry, 146 Blind Blake, 230 Blossom, Gordon C., 125 blues, 46, 175, 179, 181, 194, 210, 230, 331n BMG, 78 Bob’s Big Boy, 293 body: black, 47, 48n; dancing, 89; female, 121, 136; gendered, 135; holy, 117, 135; masked, 13, 50; race and, 134-35; used in art, 206n, 214; white, 197 Boggs, Grace Lee and James, 87, 88 Boiler Room, 80

389

born-again Christian, 106, 112, 113, 114, 123n, 133 Borodin, Alexander, 247 Boulanger, Nadia, 232, 241, 259, 260, 261, 263 Bourdain, Anthony, 297 Bourdieu, Pierre, 293 Bowen, Jason, 310, 385, 386 Brecht, Bertold, 197 Brewster, Amelia Ives, 267 British. See under market Britten, Benjamin, 247 Britton, Tina, 385 Brock, Tricia, 108 Brodhead, Thomas M., 236, 23738, 240n, 273, 277 Brooks, Avery, in the role of Benjamin Sisko, 83. Brooks, David, 213 Brooks, William, 239 Brown, Bill, 51 Brown, Joshua, 143 Brown, Michael, 47n Bryson, Bill, 294 Buchanan, Iain, 124n Buck, Dudley, 249 Buckner, Jerry, 299n, 300n, 30709, 312, 317-22, 325, 326, 361, 368, 369 Buffalo Bill, 177n Buie, Buddy, 308 Bullock, Geoff, 153 Bunyan, John, 235, 255n Burial (musician), 85 Burkholder, J. Peter, 252n, 255n, 258, 259n, 262-64, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, 366-67 Burleigh, Harry T., 249 Burnett, T-Bone, 331 Burnham, Scott, 244 Burns, Kenneth C., 313. See also Homer and Jethro

390

Burton, “Le Var,” Jr., in the role of Geordi La Forge 49n. Bush, George W., 108, 111, 140n, 156, 354, 359 Byrd, William, 315 Cage, John, 180, 205, 231, 232, 233 Cajun, 69, 295, 297 calavera, 190, 216 Calhoun, Michael, 153 California Raisins, 302-03 Call, The, 124 Calvinist, 116, 118, 123, 124n, 134, 138 Camp, Joshua, 331n Canova, Judy, 315 Canyon Records, 19, 186, 187, 193, 199, 207, 208-09 capitalism, 7, 63, 87, 88, 332, 350, 370; alternative, 88; Christianity and, 122; consumer, 152, 288, 332, 350; critique of, 8, 151; failure of, 33; free market, 122, 152; laizzer-faire, 4, 122, 350, 351, 354; late, 5, 22-25; pre-, 122, 347; regulation of, 4, 88 Capp, Al, 314-15 Captain Beefheart, 184 Carbajal, Richard, 198 Caretaker, The. See Kirby, James Leyland Caribbean, 173, 198, 218 Caribbean Mountain Academy. See Escuela Caribe Carner, Spiff, 318n Carter Jr., Walter, 386 Carter, Elliott, 257, 258, 261 Carter, Jimmy, 349, 351, 360, 372 Casasola, Augustín, 190 Cash, Johnny, 314, 328

Catalan, 212 Catholic, 14, 106, 112-14, 117, 119, 120-22, 208, 216 Chacon, Raven, 180 Chambers, Dawn, 181 Chambers, Maj. Gen. James E., 141 chaos rhetoric, 145 charismatic, 14, 111, 117, 119, 124, 131, 132. See also Pentecostal Chase, Gilbert, 232 Chase, Jim, 386 chastity, 14, 103-04, 111, 116, 121-22, 134-40, 148, 151, 152, 156, 358. See also abstinence; purity; purity/chastity rings, purity/chastity balls, virginity Chatterjee, Partha, 34n Chauncey, George, 275 Cheech & Chong, 193, 320 Cherokee, 184, 185n, 192, 179n Chicana/o, 12, 14, 15, 17, 171-75, 189-201, 204-09, 215-19, See also Hispanic, Mexican Chicano social movement (movimiento), 191 Chick-fil-et, 322 Chinese, 88, 212, 266. See also Asian Chiquita Banana, 304 Chomsky, Noam, 5 Chong, Tommy. See Cheech & Chong Chopin, Frédéric, 228n, 275 Christ Triumphant Church, Kansas City, 131 Christian Coalition, 118n Christian Family Movement, 120 Christian fundamentalism, 14, 104n, 105-157, 269, 355, 358-

63. See also Fundamentalist Christianity Christian militant rhetoric, 143; Armor of God (Eph 6:12, Bible), 106, 141, 143-44; battle/ battlefield, 132, 144, 154, 157; Battle Cry Campaign, 135-36; fighting, 130, 135, 144-45, 148, 154, 15x6; God’s Army, 136, 141; shield, 144-45, 156; spiritual fitness, 140-42; spiritual warfare, 105-06, 144, 145, 148; support for military, 106, 14043; war, 130, 141, 143, 144, 152; warrior, prayer warrior, 103, 107, 125, 130, 131, 14045, 154, 157 Christian rehabilitation, 106n, 125, 132, 157 Christian Right, 118, 134, 151, 154 Christian rock, 13, 103, 108, 114, 141, 142-43. See also Jesus People movement Christian single women, 104, 139 Christian soft-sell, 14, 116n, 144, 150, 151-57, 354. See also Coffeehouse Christianity Christian subculture. See subculture Christian values. See under values; morality Christianity and capitalism. See capitalism Christiantiy and conservatism. See conservatism Christie, Agatha, 198 Christmas Rock Night, 142-43 Chuck D, 63. See also Public Enemy Civil Rights, 3, 6, 41, 47, 76, 292, 295, 312

391

Civil War, 247, 248, 249, 292, 315n, 331 Clarkson, Kelly, 107 class, 7, 21, 43, 54; black class divide, 54, 61, 88; black middle-class, 13, 33n, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 49, 54, 58, 59, 61n, 353, 357, 372; black lower class, 38, 46, 46n; black upper middle class, 49; classical music and, 33, 242, 244, 366; coffee and, 151; colorless middle class, 41, 43, 46; deregulated market and, 152; divide, 39, 54; fluidity of, 43; food and, 293, 332, 290; identity and, 347; Japanese middle class, 79; middle class and suburbia, 23, 57, 158n, see also white flight; middle class lifestyle and consumerism, 113, 137, 150; middle/upper middle class and new age music, 184, 194; musical taste and, 327, 244; race and, 56; slumming, 57; Southern middle class, 332; upper middle class, 109; white lower class, 6, 290, 297, 332, see also hillbilly, redneck, white trash; white middle class, 6, 130, 216, 361-62; white middle class aspiration, 111, 146, 157; white middle class, rejection of, 8; white middle class women, 155; working class, 152. 204, 310, 311, 330, 349, 362 classical music, 12, 13, 15, 16, 50, 171-76, 180, 184, 186, 188, 197, 207, 210, 215, 216, 229, 231, 234, 248, 255n, 258, 264, 268, 320, 364, 366, 367; cult,

392

241-47, 279. See also under homosexuality Clinton, Bill, 157, 213, 352-53 Clinton, George, 51 Clipman, Will, 187, 201 Cloar, Carroll, 329 Cody, Radmilla, 17, 181 Coen, Ethan and Joel, 339 Coffeehouse Christianity, 149-56. See also Christian soft-sell Cola, 303n, 304, 326, 331n, 371; Cola Wars, 304 Colbert, Stephen, 296-97 Colder, Ben, 312 collapse, 3, 4, 7, 16, 25, 45, 60, 73, 118, 131, 134, 273, 358, 372. See also apocalyptic, decline, dystopia Collins, Col. Thomas, 141 Collins, John, 19, 59, 68, 71, 75 colonization, 11, 25, 62, 83, 173, 176, 193, 198, 199, 212, 363, 365; neo-, 106, 125, 198 Colorado Springs, 130, 131, 137, 152, 142n Columbus, Christopher, 172, 200, 203, 205, 206n Commander McBragg, 55 commodity, 3, 5, 7, 8, 23, 34, 66, 76, 137, 176, 178, 180, 182, 183, 190, 231, 292, 347, 359, 360, 369 communitarianism, 8, 217, 347, 355, 360 Compassion International, 150n Concerned Women for America (CWA), 118n, 145 conformity, 9, 273; non-, 227-29, 279 Confraternity of Christian Mothers, Archconfraternity, 120 Conn, Joseph L., 140

conservatism: American South and, 331; Catholics and, 119, 120; political, 15, 23, 124, 130, 151, 359; construction of Americanness and, 366; consumer culture and, 137; culture war and, 135; homosexuality and, 272; Ives and, 264, 367; music scene and, 264, 272, 366, 367; (Protestant) Christian, 7, 12, 14, 112, 114, 119, 135, 146, 149, 151, 157n, 322, 350, 354; (Prostestant) Christian attitudes to sexuality and, 14, 103, 105, 115, 116, 121, 135, 157; society and, 2, 38, 119, 155, 157, 213, 228, 272, 352, 372 consumerism/consumption: anti-, 12; American South and, 133, 288, 328, 332, 361, 368, 369; as value, 9, 11, 76, 213, 290, 293; BarlowGirl and, 14, 136-37, 139; change of U.S. through, 23; Christians and, 113n, 137, see also Coffeehouse Christianity and under values: soft-sell Christian; conspicous/ hedonistic, 6, 40, 137; emerging as culture, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 123, 131, 134, 349, 355; empire of, 355, 12; emptyness and, 370; music and, 21, 54, 55n, 197, 356; limitations of, 349, 352, 350, 360, 372; loss of values and, 350; mass, 330, 288; media driven, 111; of culture, ethnicity, 41, 45, 75, 195, 196, 207, 213, 218, 288, 358, 365; pre-, 368; therapeutic approaches and, 14; virginity and, see

virgin chic; whiteness and, 54, 57, 75, 218, 362 Contemporary Christian Music, 12, 108, 359 Cooder, Ry, 184 Cook, Randy, 318n co-optation, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 40, 213, 370. See also Frank, Thomas Copeland, Liz, 410, See Warner, Liz Copland, Aaron, 253, 272, 274 copyright, 10, 300n, 301n, 307n, 326, 368, Coronado, Francisco Vázquez de, 200 Cose, Ellis, 38 Cosell, Howard, 317 Cosgrove, Stuart, 44-45, 38n cosmopolitan, 7, 11, 15, 41, 50, 210, 217-18, 357, 372. See also multiculturalism Costner, Kevin, 201 counterculture, 7, 8, 185, 196, 213, 366 counter-narrative, 41, 180, 201, 202, 205, 207 covers (music), 77, 300n, 307n, 320 Cowell, Henry, 232, 234, 241, 266, 272, 275 Coyote, 192, 193, 195-96, 200, 201 Coyote McCloud. See McCloud Coyote, Wile E., 352 Cracker Barrel, 295, 296 Crawford Seeger, Ruth, 234 cross-over (music), 12, 17, 179, 182-85, 186, 359, Crossroads Ministry, 127 cult: ads, 322; cargo, 124n, 366; classical music, 16, 241-47; family, 14; Ives and, 257-64; objects (records), 321; of

393

entrepreneurialism, 14; of Stonewall Jackson, 325; of The Last Dragons, 83n; of victory, 154; Synanon, 126; Waffle House and, 322 culture economy, 19, 88 culture war, 128, 134n, 185; backlash and, 213, 366; Christians against pop culture and, 107, 135, 136 Curtis, Edward S., 187 Cybotron, 51, 84, 379 D’Souza, Dinesh, 38 Dabney, AmoChip, 188 dating, 121, 138; anti-/no-, 103, 111, 121, 122, 135, 139, 158 Davis, Chip, 320 Davis, Richard “3070”, 51, 100 Day of Fire, 142, 143 DC Talk, 110 De Veaux, Masani Alexis, 46 Deadmou5, 50n decline: of America, x, 12, 25-26, 41, 119n, 289, 348, 362; of transformative multiculturalism, 213; of whiteness, 349n. See also collapse, apocalyptic, dystopia Dee Cox, Billy, 311, 312, 385, 386; and the Southside Allstars, 311 Del Tredici, David, 274 Delaval, Craig, 61n Delibes, Léo, 247 Delirious (musicians), 132 Delius, Frederick, 247 Deloria, Philip, 214, 172n, 177n Deloria, Vine, 199, 214 DeMars, James, 176, 188, 215 Democrats, 103n, 114, 115, 353 Demons, 105. See also Satan

394

Denk, Felix, 45n, 48, 72 Denny’s, 293, 328 depression, 62, 107, 132, 134, 267, 268, 362 Derrida, Jacques, 85, 230 Dery, Mark, 47n desegregation, 155; segregation 46n, 64n, 270, 353 Detroit: Institute of Art, 57; Grand Central, 57; Packard Building, 75; riots, 41, 65, 75, 76, 84n; ruin porn, 59, 65, 75; Techno Museum, 19, 58, 59; urban prairie, 57. See also under place Detroit Electronic Music Festival, 49n, 57, 79n, 354, 357 Detroit Four, 35, 50, 51, 66, 84 Detroit techno. See techno devil, 90, 108, 153, 255, 378. See also Satan Devo, 51 Dibango, Manu, 173 Diné bizaad, 181 Dinh, Linh, x disco, 10, 36 Disco Demolition Night, 10 Disney, 137, 299, 355; Disneyland, 8; Disney Princess, 14, 134, 135, 137, 153 Dixie Chicks, 153 Dobson, James, 131, 134, 135, 153, 155 Dominionism, 105, 115, 116, 11718 Downtowners (classical composers), 232. See also Uptowners Doyle, Robert, 19, 187, 202, 208, 209, 212 Dr. Pepper, 303 Drexciya, 67, 84, 90, 91, 378, 379, 380, 381 Dukas, Paul, 247n

Dust Bowl, 134n, 372 Dvořák, Antonín, 248, 249, 250n Dylan, Bob, 1, 3, 29, 230, 329 dystopia, 13, 60-63, 358. See also apocalyptic, collapse, decline Eaton, William, 187 Edmunds, John, 231-32 effeminate, 274 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 123n El Vez, 17, 206 Electrifying Mojo, The (Charles Johnson), 51, 52, 58, 60, 96 Electronic dance music, 12, 34 Electronic music, 13, 44, 79, 85, 184, 192, 354, 37n elevator music, 304. See also ambient music; MUZAK Eliot, T.S., 279n Elvis. See Presley Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 234, 248, 250, 252, 253, 254 End Times, 143 enemy, 106, 132, 135, 144. See also Satan Engle, Lou, 125 Eno, Brian, 205 Ensemble Modern Orchestra, 227 Eric B & Rakim, 55n Erickson, Scott, x Escuela Caribe,127 Eshun, Kodwo, 43, 81, 82, 37n essentialism: ethnic, 6, 10, 11, 34, 38, 40, 54, 177, 353, 354, 207, 217, 218; de-ethnization, 35, 38, 39-40, 43, 357; anti-, 47 ethics, 8; Ives and, 237, 267; market and, 69; military and, 141; unethical, 43; UR and, 358; privacy and, 149; Protestant (Max Weber), 169

ethnic: appropriation/exploitation, 2, 15, 35, 194, 203, 207, 215, 216; as authenticity, 356, 364; consumption of, see consumerism; eclecticism, 364; essentialism, see essentialism; fusion, 171, 182, 183, 196; hybridity/assimilation, 5-6, 213; identity, 6-7, 205, 208n, 363, 364, 365; in-betweenness, 201; lifestyle shopping, 196; multi-, 212, 213, 363; music, 178; jazz, 80, 188; Latino music, 80, 195, 197, 358; self-identification, 184-85; selling and; 89, 357; slumming, 45; solidarity, 88; stereotypes, 205, 209, 211, see also stereotypes; subculture, 7, see also subculture; techno, 44, 80, 358, 360; techno and deethnization, 35, 44, 48, 49, 357 ethnography/ethnology, 22, 54, 177, 292 ethnomusicological, 20, 22n, 37n, 175 evangelical, 112-16 everyday life, 23, 24, 28, 115, 177n, 190, 199, 287, 292, 335 evil, 25, 116, 117, 143, 144, 146, 147, 154, 273. See also Satan Evrist, Dale, 110 Evrist, Janelle,110 experimental music, 15, 45, 51, 52, 72, 172, 180, 184, 192, 203, 205, 215, 228n, 231, 232, 233. See also avant-garde music exploitation, 2, 13, 15, 19, 42, 48, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68-71, 75, 77, 78, 177, 194, 195, 197, 198, 208, 215, 216, 217, 288, 334, 382

395

Factory Records, 73n Family Life Church (Eagle’s Nest), Elgin, 119, 131 family ministry, 109 Family Research Council, 118n, 137 family values. See values Family, The. See International Foundation Fancy Dancing, 175 Fanon, Franz, 50n fascist, 118, 216 Feder, Stuart, 247, 266-67 Fellowship, The. See International Foundation FEMA, 294 Fervent (Christian label), 110 Filipino, 208, 124 Final Cut, The,69 Fine, Sidney, 65n Finster, Howard, 230 Fischer, Becky, 131 Fischer, David Hackett, 24 Fisher, Mark, 49n, 63, 85, 89, 230. See also hauntology Flint, Darrell, 198 fluidity, 40, 43, 86 flute, 266; Native Flute, 15, 81, 171, 175-76, 186, 187-88, 192, 194, 195n, 197, 199, 207, 212, 215; shakuhachi, 188, 193n Flying African. See Black Focus on the Family, 118n, 131, 132, 153, 155 folk art, 205, 257n, 289, 330, 368 folk culture, 330 folk music, 1, 2, 3, 10, 16, 76, 179, 182, 183, 230, 249, 289, 312, 314, 326, 327, 330, 368; Native, 181, 182; Mexican, 200; O Brother, Where Art

396

Thou, 330; parody, 322; Russion, 279; semi-, 313; folklore, 10, 24, 192, 200 folkways, 24 foodways/food: African American, 294-95; art and, 189-90; Cajun, 295; Chihuahua puppies, 200; deserts, 61; fast, 16, 290, 291, 288, see also Bob’s Big Boy, Denny’s, McDonald’s, McDonaldization Taco Bell, Waffle House, Wendy’s, White Castle; growing, 87; identity and, 290, 291, 292, 294; Iraqi, 208; Mexican, 15, 207, 212, 189, 211; music and, 18, 202, 288, 299, 310, 318, 331n, 33132, 385-86; Native, 202; short order, 290; soul, 331n, 295; Southern, 288, 290, 292, 295, 296n, 316, 331-32; (Southern) grits, 292, 294, 299, 310, 318, 386; Southern food chains, see Cracker Barrel, Waffle House, Krispy Kreme; slow, 292; TexMex, 295 Forkner, Tom, 290 Fortner, Michael Javen, 61 Foster, Stephen, 266 Four Seasons, The, 299, 300, 318 Fowlkes, Eddie “Flashin”, 35, 36, 59, 379 Frank, Thomas, 1, 4, 9, 76, 217, 353, 370 Frankfurt School, 21, 227 Franklin, Aretha, 56, 86, 310 Freberg, Stan, 312 Frickin’ A (band), 320 Friedman, Milton, 4 Fries, Bill, 320 frontier, 111, 129, 130, 201, 314; myth, 158

Fry, William Henry, 248 Fuchs, Paul, 211n Fuller Theological Seminary, 105 Fundamentalist Christianity, 166 See also Christian fundamentalism funk, 35, 51, 68, 69, 81 Furness, Clifton, 260, 275 Fusco, Coco, 206 G’ane, 386 Gabriel, Peter, 183 Gaffigan, Jeff, 297 Gaines, Kevin, 46n Galaxy 2 Galaxy, 41, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85 Gamboa, Diane, 204 Garcia, Gary, 300n, 307, 308, 309, 312, 317, 319, 325, 326, 361, 386 Gardner, Donald Yetter, 320 Garner, Eric, 47n Garnier, Laurent, 38, 44n Garreau, Joel, 24 Gates, Henry Louis, 39 Gaudio, Bob, 299 Gaviria, Marcela, 61n Gaye, Marvin, 302 gayness. See homosexuality Geertz, Clifford, 22, 173, 174n Geils, J., 51n Geller, Arnie, 308 gender, 6, 7, 21, 22, 39, 43, 134, 135, 139, 145, 147, 227, 271, 275, 334, 353, 367. See also body, homosexuality, identity, purity General Electric, 120, 129 General Motors streetcar conspiracy, 65 Generation X, 357, 360 Generation Y, 360

Generation-Me, 104n. See also Millennials genocide, 58, 60 geography: Christian 130-34. See also place Geordi la Forge. See La Forge Gerald, Alfreda, 386 German. See under market for techno Geronimo, 40, 42, 82, 83 Ghost Box, 85 ghost dance, 83, 86 ghosts, 2, 13, 42, 80-87, 200, 266, 360. See also hauntology Gibson, Chuck, 67 Gilbert, Elizabeth, 8 Ginsberg, Allen, 8 Global Harvest Ministries, 105 Global South, 124, 218 Golden, Thelma, 47 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 206, 213 Goodman, Nelson, 289 Goosens, Eugene, 235 Gordy, Berry, 50 Goree, Buzz, 19, 71 Gorman, R. C., 15, 178n gospel (music), 63, 68, 251, 298, 299, 309, 311 Gossett, Jim, 305 Graham, Billy, 116 Grammy Awards, 183, 184, 187, 215, 312 Gramsci, Antonio, 21 Grandma Moses, 257n Grant, Amy, 359 Grateful Dead, 183 Graul, Barry, 110 Great Depression, 4, 64, 133, 361 Great Migration, 65, 88 Greaves, Daniel, 386 Green, Leroy, 83n Green, Malice, 67, 385

397

Greenblatt, Stephen, 7, 217 Grieg, Edvard, 249 Gulf War, 143, 351 Guthrie, Woody, 20 Haçienda, 44n Haggard, Ted, 131, 152 Hall, Stuart, 44n, 218 Handel, George Frideric, 268-69 Hani, Chris, 82 Hardcastle, Paul, 76, 180 Harris, Joshua, 132, 139 Harrison, Lou, 233, 272, 275, 279n Hart, Mickey, 183 Harvest International Ministries, 131 Hattori, Yoshihiro, 82 hauntology, 85, 86, 230; Afro-, 8087 Hawthorne, Nathaniel,235, 237, 248, 252, 255, 256; concerto (Ives), 237, 238; movement/ material (Ives), 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240n, 250n, 253, 255, 256 Hawtin, Richie (aka Plastikman), 38, 52, 74n, 377, 378, 381, 383 Haynes, Henry D., 313. See also Homer and Jethro Heal network, 125n healing, 105, 111, 117, 132, 188 Hearst, Michael, 331n heavy metal, 153 Hedges, Chris, 118, 126n Hegemann, Dietmar-Maria “Dimitri”, 59, 69, 74, 75, 89, 354 hegemonic, 6, 7, 12, 21, 87, 172, 176, 195, 204, 217, 289 helicopter parents, 38, 83, 105, 146 Hemingway, Ernest, 279n Hemispheric Studies, 10, 218

398

Herron, Jerry, 66 Heyman, Katherine, 259, 260 hillbilly, 314n, 315, 327, 328, 331. See also redneck, white trash Hillsong Conference, 133, 153 Hillsong United, 117, 132, 133n, 146n, 153, 157, 359 Hillsong Music, 117, 132, 133, 153, 359 Himes, Mike, 383 Hindemith, Paul, 247n hip hop, 39, 40, 46, 52, 53, 55, 58, 62n, 69, 72, 179, 300n, 353, 357, 360, 364. See also rap hippies, 8, 15, 58, 81, 193, 197, 212, 232, 264n, 320, 364 hipster, 66, 151 Hispanic, 15, 130, 200, 202, 212. See also Latina/o, Chicana/o, Mexican Hitchcock, H. Wiley, 228n, 258, 261, 262, 263, 264, 278 Hitler, Adolf, 203 Hoger, Bill, 318 Holland, Andre, 67 holy spirit, 105, 111, 117 Homer and Jethro, 312, 313, 314, 315-16, 336 See also Burns, Kenneth C.; Haynes, Henry D. homeschooling, 14, 111, 118, 155, 362 homo oeconomicus, 347 homosexuality/gayness/queer, 38, 57, 246n, 270, 274, 366; blackness and, 10, 37n, 59; Christians and, 115, 116, 117, 127, 132, 134, 152, 154; classical music and, 245, 246n, 268-76, 367; disco and, 10; Ives and, 16, 269-76; rights and, 270. See also under identity

Hood, Robert, 19, 34, 35, 43, 63, 71n, 86, 90, 380 Hooker, John Lee, 76 Horn, Paul, 187 Horton, Johnny, 313 Hostess Corporation, 306 house (music), 35, 36, 53, 68, 194 Human Rights Campaign, 270 humiliation, 66, 126 Hung, William, 17 Hunt, Nelson Bunker, 133 hustling, 48, 370 Hybels, Bill, 109 hybridity, 5, 7, 171, 176, 217, 218; Chicana/o culture, 216; Ives and, 16; Jackalope and, 171, 172, 174, 181, 191, 192, 193, 195, 197, 201, 206, 213, 216; Nativeness and, 179-82, 195, 188, 175, 174; Southernness and, 329; Underground Resistance and, 45; whiteness and, 172, 183, 197 hypertension, 59 identity, 3, 4, 5n, 6, 12, 21, 23, 39, 217; ambiguity of, 171, 214; American, 248, 250, 251, 253, 257, 272, 328, 365; appropriation and, 184, 185, 217; authenticity and, 34; BarlowGirl and, 21, 147, 360, 361, 362; birth, 15; black, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52n, 67, 81, 356, 357; Chicana/o, 14, 191; choice and, 184; Christian, 7, 104, 151, 363; commodification of, 3, 4, 43, 184, 191, 194, 217; community and, 12, 291, 355; consumer, 4, 184, 185, 194, 347, 368; co-optation of, 7; Detroit techno and, 34, 44, 45,

46, 52, 63, 67, 81; ethnic, 208, 358, 363, 364, 365; food and, 290, 292; formation, 21, 37, 147, 328; gender and, 6, 104, 135, 147, 275; homosexuality and, 16, 269, 270, 275; hyphenated, 366; imagined, 355, 357; Ives and, 21, 16, 247, 271, 275, 366; Jackalope and, 14, 15, 196, 213, 363, 364, 365; male gentile, 272; masculine, 272; Mexican, 191; music and, 242, 249, 250, 366, 368; Native, 14, 178, 180, 181, 196, 197, 202, 214; Northern, 291, 292; performance, 107, 177, 217; race and, 45, 135; regional, 291; Southern, 16, 291, 292, 294, 295, 296n, 314, 328, 368, 369; split, 213; subculture and, 6; Waffle House and, 12, 16, 368, 369; Western, 197, 211; white (aspiring) middle-class, 158, 361. See also class, hybridity, in-betweenness, multiculturalism identity politics, 6, 7, 20, 21, 38, 45, 46, 59, 156, 182, 185, 208, 212, 217, 347, 353, 365 IHOPKC (International House of Prayer Kansas City), 105, 132 in-betweenness, 3, 5, 11, 289, 371; BarlowGirl and, 361; Ives and, 15, 234, 276, 366; Jackalope and, 14, 15, 171, 177, 181, 196, 201, 213, 215, 363; Underground Resistance and, 13, 42. See also hybridity independent labels, 9, 13, 63, 68, 70, 74n, 79, 86, 89, 186, 377, 378, 379; the market and, 79, 88, 356, 358

399

Indian, 83, 88 Indian (Native American). See Native Indian Arts & Crafts Act, 178 Indianists, 149, 251 indigeneity, 10, 193, 211 Indigenous (band), 179 individualism, 8, 9, 15, 22, 25, 27, 87, 122, 328, 347, 355, 358, 360, 366 inner city, 41, 53, 54, 60, 61n, 62n, 86, Institute of American Music, 262 integration, 5, 44, 46n, 47n, 51, 57, 82, 181, 201, 213, 270, 292, 353, 357, 364, 365 International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 5n International Composer’s Guilt, 232 International Foundation, 118, 151-52 invisibility, 1, 2, 3, 13, 18, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 86. See also visibility Ioannidis, Yannis, 228n Iraq war, 108, 111, 141, 144, 156 Irish, 14, 24, 63, 120, 158, 185, 212, 361. See also Scots-Irish Ishino, Takkyo, 79 Ives Society, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 273, 278, 279n Ives, Charles, 13, 15-16, 17, 21, 25, 210, 227-86, 350, 353, 354, 355, 365-68, 371 Ives, Harmony, 252n, 260, 267, 275 Jackalope, 15, 19, 21, 171-226, 353, 360, 363-65 Jackson, Johnny “Stonewall”, 318n

400

Jackson, Michael, 303, 304, 312, 323 Jameson, Fredric, 335 Japanese/Japan, 83; Detroit techno and, 40, 41, 45n, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 356, 357, 358; Jackalope and, 188, 193, 201; Waffle House and, 308, 313. See also under jazz, market jazz, 21, 80, 83, 173, 175, 181, 183n, 186, 188, 192, 193, 194, 221, 244n; hi-tech, 78, 79, 80, 356, 360, see also techno; Japanese and, 80, 356 Jenner, Caitlyn, 39 Jeremiah Restoration Ministry, 128 Jesus People movement, 114 Jimenez, Luis, 204 jingle, 16, 289, 304, 305, 327; Chiquita, 304; Pepsi, 304; Waffle House and, 307, 308, 322, 323, 235, 327; Wheaties, 304 Johnson, Bill, 105 Johnson, Charles. See Electrifying Mojo, The Johnson, Paul, 152 Johnson, Spencer, 122n Johnson, Tom, 233 Johnson, Wallace, 133 Jones, Danny, 299n, 307n, 312, 321, 326, 368 Jones, Malcolm, 230 Jones, Spike. See Spike Jones and His City Slickers Jones, Tony, 151 Jonzon, DJ (aka Jürgen Stöckelmann), 72 Joy Division, 33 Joyce, James, 279n Joyner, Rick, 105, 106, 119, 131

jukebox, 13, 16, 18, 287-89, 29698, 299n, 302, 304, 304n, 30808, 321-27, 333-35, 345, 360, 368-69, 385-86 Kahler, Bill, 386 Kahlo, Frida, 190 Kaplan, Robert D., 23, 24 Karter, Peter, 187 Keillor, Garrison, 320 Kelley, Robin, 54, 55 Kellogg’s, 315, 316 Kemp, Jonathan, 270 Kerouac, Jack, 8 King, Martin Luther, 75, 87, 295 King, Rodney, 381 Kirby, James Leyland (aka The Caretaker), 85 Kirkpatrick, John, 238, 258-62, 266, 272 Kokopelli, 42, 81, 83, 188, 195n Kraftwerk, 13, 36, 49, 51, 52, 184 Krenek, Ernst, 174n Krispy Kreme, 296n Li’l Abner, 314-15 La Forge, Geordi. See Burton, “Le Var” Jr. Lacks, Henrietta, 66 Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 183 Lagerberg, Clint, 153 Laibach, 72, 73n, 216 laizzer-faire. See capitalism Lake Hills Church, Austin, 124 Lakeland Revival, 105 Lambert, Philip, 277 Lasch, Christopher, 360n Latina/o, 207, 358, 365; commercial boom, 213, 358; culture, 194; music, 17, 358; techno, 77-80, 357; Yáñez as,

200, 201. See also Chicana/o, Hispanic, Mexican Latter Rain, 105 Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, 116 Lavigne, Avril, 107 League of Composers, 232 Lee, Brandon, 82 Lee, Bruce, 82, 83 left (political), 55n, 151. See also liberal, progressive Lennon, Kipp, 303 Levin, Tanya, 146n, 153, 157n liberalism, 4. See also neoliberalism liberals, 1, 4, 33, 103n, 115n, 211, 258, 270, 353, 355, 372. See also Democrats licensing, 77, 78, 79, 89, 90, 300n, 301n, 377, 378 Lifeline Youth and Family Services, 127 lifestyle, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 55, 66, 70, 123, 158, 182, 202, 217, 304, 332; Christian, 128, 146n, 147; ethnic shopping, 196, 197, 218; middle-class, 150; progressive, 151, 152; suburban, 120, 158n Ligon, Glen, 47 Lipsitz, George, 11, 21, 64n, 173 Liquid Room, 79 Litefoot, 179 Living Word Christian Center, Chicago, 123 LL Cool J, 83n Los Hermanos,78, 79, 358 Luce, Ron, 135 Ludy, Eric and Leslie, 132 Luna, James, 171, 213, 214 Lundgren, Matt, 18, 149, 150, 151

401

Magee, Gayle Sherwood. See Sherwood Magee, Gayle Magliozzi, Tom and Ray, (aka Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers from Car Talk), 316 Mahler, Gustav, 174, 245n Maier, Charles, 12, 355 mainstream music, 12, 13, 37, 46, 50, 52, 62, 69, 71, 87, 153, 172, 183, 201, 234, 258, 359 male authority, 104, 111, 135 Mankowski, W., 386 manliness, 273. See also effeminate, masculinty Marchand, Yves, 66 Marcus, Greil, 1, 2, 3, 42, 230, 329, 371 mariachi, 173n, 193 Marin, Richard “Cheech.” See Cheech & Chong market: as ideology, 157, 361; authenticity and the, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 22, 23, 25, 37, 213, 289, 350, 354-56, 371; authenticity as selling point, 80, 364; British for techno, 41, 4445, 70, 75-77, 353, 356; Christian, 7, 108, 111, 112, 123, 125, 150, 152, 156, 157, 355, 358, 359, 361, 354; Christian fundamentalism and the, 122, 123, 156, 355, 358; classical music and the, 365; co-optation and the, 7, 8, 9, 172, 213-16; deviance and the, 231-33, 355, 366; ethnicity and the, 54, 66, 191, 213-16, 353-56, 363-65; fragmentation of, 7, 38, 152, 216, 353; free/unregulated, 122, 123, 152, 157, 177, 348n, 352, 359; German for techno, 70, 71-75, 77, 353;

402

global/international, 70, 75, 178; hard-sell and the, 139; indie, 87, 88, 358; Ives and the, 229. 231-33, 234, 265, 266; Japanese for techno, 77-80, 356, 357; liberal market solutions, 348, 355; local, 348n; mainstream, 69, 186, 355, 357, 358; majors/big labels/music industry, 9, 12, 42, 51, 53, 63, 67, 69, 75, 77, 78, 79, 87, 90, 109, 377, 378, 380; mass, 7, 12, 291, 293, 305; Motown and the music, 69; musical modernism and the, 234; neoliberal, 4, 5, 108, 349n, 353, 354; New Age, 15, 184, 187, 201, 363; niche, 52, 89, 90, 157, 293, 355, 356; niche/indie vs. big, 9, 63, 87, 356, 359, 380; non-mainstream, 42; radio and the, 52, 69; research, 11, 52; segment, 38, 71n, 104, 290, 293, 359; selling out to the, 1, 43, 71, 179, 328, 358, 377, 380, 382; soft-sell and the, 14, 116n, 144, 150-57, 354, 355; underground as, 72, 74; values and the, 11, 23, 217, 322, 353; view of U.S., 24; Waffle House and the, 322, 290, 291, 293, 322, 368; whites and the, 10, 69, 177, 183n, 197, 216; weirdness and the, 231, 233; world music and the, 178 marketing, 328, 353; cross-, 137; fragmenting and, 152; of authenticity, 11, 70, 72; of decay, 66; of ethnicity, 201, 213; of fast food, 290; of Public Enemy, 63; of techno, 37, 41, 70, 72, 357; of world music, 178; parody of, 193

marketplace, 6, 54, 123, 347, 360 Martian, The, 42, 81, 83 Martin, Treyvon, 47n Martini, Mike, 316n Marxist, 7, 217 masculinity, 156, 272, 274n, 275. See also effeminate, manliness Mason-Dixon Line, 291 Massenet, Jules, 247n maverick, 229, 231, 233, 157n, 264, 366 May, Derrick, 35, 45, 66, 69 May, Karl, 77n Mayer, John, 295 McCall, C.W., 320. See also Fries, Bill; Davis, Chip McCloud, Coyote, 305-06 McCoy, Lt. Col. William, 142 McCuller, Carson, 329 McDonald’s, 291, 293, 294, 305, 332 McDonaldization, 291 McKinley, William, 266 McMenamin, Cindi, 144 Meffre, Romain, 66 megachurch, 14, 18, 108, 115, 117, 119, 120n, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 132, 149, 150n, 151, 152, 153, 156, 157, 154 Mel, Melle, 179 Mellado, Santiago “Jim”, 150n Mellencamp, John, 347 Members of the House, 68 Menotti, Gian Carlo, 274 Mercedes Benz, 67 Mercy Ministries, 126, 133n, 132, 157 MercyMe, 110 Merriweathers, Raphael, Jr., 58, 84 metal (music), 90, 153, 378 Methodist, 112

Mexican, 15, 77, 90, 171, 176, 189, 190, 191, 192, 200, 203, 206, 209, 211, 212, 214, 216, 364, 381 Meyer, Joyce, 132 Meyers, Krystal, 108 Middleton, Eddie, 326, 385 Mignolo, Walter, 218 military: Christians and, 106, 140, 141, 142-43, 144, 145n, 363; Civil War and, 292, 325; defection, 370; defense, 189; drums, 317; gays and, 270; Jackalope and, 186, 189, 209; oil and, 349, 351; pop culture and, 143; style, 126; techno and, 380; U.S., 15, 106, 121, 122, 149, 141, 143-43, 144, 380. See also Christian militant rhetoric and see Underground Resistance Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, 141 Military Religious Freedom Foundation, 140 Millennials, 104n, 360. See also Generation Me Milliken vs. Bradley (1974), 64n Mills, Jeff, 34, 35, 48, 53, 62n, 69, 71n, 72, 78, 79, 90, 380 minstrel show, 230, 312, 315 Mitchell, Gerald, 67, 78, 79 modernity, 8, 47, 48, 85, 129, 133, 135n, 193, 238, 277, 295, 296n, 297, 331 modernism, 85, 116, 178; classical music and, 229, 231, 233, 234, 235, 237, 241, 248, 255n, 264, 273; Native, 176, 177, 178; pop culture and, 116 Monáe, Janelle, 47n Monteverdi, Claudio, 242

403

moral/morality: amoral, 123, 127, 130, 155, 156; backlash and, 366; Christian rigid, 105, 115, 117, 119, 121-23, 127, 130, 136, 141-42, 149, 151-53, 156, 269, 359, 361; Christian soft, 130, 151, 152, 359; ethos, 360; failure, 244, 258; Ives and, 233, 244, 251, 255, 256, 258, 269, 275, 279, 366-68; legitimacy, 6; microaggression and, 38; loss/ lack of, 119, 134, 141-42, 275; military and, 141-42; political Right and, 138; post-Protestant, 15; sexuality and, 104, 115-17, 119, 121-22, 136, 156, 244, 269; traditional, 105; techno and, 46n, 60, 61, 62, 63, 81, 86; uncertainty, 365; values, 5, 11, 54, 130, 149, 251, 279; virtue and consumerism, 213. Morgan, Robert, 233 Morning Star Ministries, 105, 119, 131 Morricone, Ennio, 194 Morton, Jelly Roll, 331 Moses, Anna Marie Robertson. See Grandma Moses Motown, 35, 44, 45, 50, 57, 68, 69, 83n, 89, 298, 302, 357 Moviemiento Artístico de Río Salado (MARS), 189 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 228n, 229, 237, 242, 244, 245 multiculturalism, 12, 15, 18, 25, 68, 87, 172, 182, 184, 185, 189, 196, 198, 199, 207, 213, 21619, 363, 365, 367; transformative, 172, 213, 348n multiracial, 227 Mumia. See Abu-Jamal Muñiz, J. David, 201

404

Murphy, Ron, 74n Muthee, Thomas, 125 MUZAK, 304, 307. See also ambient music, elevator music NAACP, 295 naïve music/art/lyrics, 25, 177, 257n, 298, 315, 322 Nakai, R. Carlos, 12, 15, 17, 19, 25, 171-226, 353-55, 360, 36365 Nation of Islam, 50 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 116 National Day of Prayer, 131, 153 National Museum of the American Indian, 215 National Prayer Breakfasts, 118 Native American/s: activists, 199; Amerindian, 190, 194, 206; anthropology and, 194, 198; Apache, 81, 83, 251; appropriation and, 177, 178, 184-85, 188, 197, 201; art, 171, 177, 178, 185, 189, 190, 195, 202, 207, 209, 214; Aztec, 81, 189, 192, 197, 200; Blackfoot, 91, 381; Cherokee, 179n, 184, 185n, 192; colonization, 15, 83, 199, 202, 203; cowboy and, 130, 177; culture, 175n, 176, 177, 178, 196, 209, 219; Delaware, 192; drinking and, 179-80, 203; flute, see under flute; hip hop, 179, 364; hippies and, 197; Hopi, 195, 207; Huichol, 192; modern/urban, 171, 175-78, 185, 197, 200, 201, 202, 205, 210-11, 214, 215, 216, 372; music/musicians, 12, 17, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179-82, 186, 188, 208,

209, 215, 216; mythical, 214; Navajo, 15, 17, 171, 180, 181, 185, 186, 190, 193, 199, 200, 207, 208, 209, 212; New Age and, 188; Pueblo, 195n, racism against/death of/massacres of, 84, 176, 179, 198; song/melodies, 83, 179-82, 208, 249, 250, 251, 363; stereotyping, 177n, 179, 180, 198, 199, 214, 216; studies, 186; traditional, 177, 187; traditionalists, 176; tribal enlistment, 185n; Ute, 171; See also counter-narrative, Coyote, ghostdance, identity, Geronimo, hybridity, Kokopelli Native American Fair and Market (Heard Museum), 207 Native American Music Awards (NAMA), 179 Navajo. See Native American Neal, Mark Anthony, 46, 47 “negro,” 54, 249, 250, 251, 315n neocolonial, 106, 125, 198 neoliberalism, 4, 42, 118, 143, 158, 352; Christians and, 118, 136, 143; destruction of small business, 290; dystopia, 358; economy, 335, 347, 352, 372; hegemony and, 88; liberals and, 157, 353; market, see under market; Thatcher/ Reagan/ Clinton, 86, 157, 353 Nevaquaya, Doc Tate, 175 New Age, 10, 15, 81, 171, 184, 187, 188, 192, 194, 197, 201, 205, 207, 215, 354, 360, 363, 364 New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), 105, 119, 124 new blackness. See under Black New Deal, 4, 133, 292, 350

New emergent church, 151 New England, 15, 24, 231, 232, 235, 237, 247, 248, 251, 153, 254, 259, 272, 276 New Horizon Youth Ministry, 125 New Horizons Foundation, 125, 138 New Life Church, 131, 152 new musicology, 229, 275 new paradigm churches, 122, 152 New Right, 118 New Song Christian Fellowship, 110 New South. See South New Wave, 50, 52 Newport Folk Festival, 1 Nielsen, Carl, 249 Nixon, Richard, 306, 307 non-denominational, 14, 105, 106, 108, 111, 114, 117, 122 non-white, 6, 10, 53, 82, 129, 183, 197, 206, 209, 216, 352. See also Black/African American Norman, Larry, 108 Northern soul, 41, 44, 45 Northwest Territory (band), 386 novelty songs, 300, 308, 312, 317, 320, 321 Nugent, Ted, 308 Numan, Gary, 52 O.C. Supertones, 143 O’Connor, Flannery, 230 O’Donnell, John, 153 O’Keefe, Georgia, 190 Obama, Barack, 47n, 106, 156, 352, 354, 361 One Ring Zero, 331n organ (church), 176, 240, 249, 260 Orientalizing, 197 otherness, 182, 197, 213, 290

405

outsider music/art, 3n, 230, 231, 257, 270, 330. See also folk, maverick, naïve, primitive Owens, Ed, 123, 124n Ozawa, Seiji, 23 Palin, Sarah, 125 Pan American Association, 232 Panera Bread, 305 Parker, Horatio, 233, 263, 265, 276 Parliament-Funkadelic, 52, 69, 82 parody (music), 16, 194, 235, 296, 300, 301n, 312n, 318n, 322, 312, 313-14, 316, 318-20, 322, 326-27 Parton, Dolly, 324 Patterson, Orlando, 47 Peller, Clara, 305-06 Pennington, James (aka Suburban Knight), 68, 112n, 113n, 363 Pentecostal, 105, 111, 115, 117, 119, 124, 133, 157, 359. See also charismatic Perea, John Carlos, 177, 179 performativity/performance, 56; art/ist, 17n, 199, 206, 210, 213; of breaking expectations, 206; of ethnicity, 177n, 206, 364; of everyday life, 177n, 287, 288, 335; of gender, 135n, 275; of invisibility, 49; of Indianness, see Philip Deloria; of overidentification, 206 Perlis, Vivian, 228n, 261n, 262, 276 Perry, Rick, 112n, 124, 125, 132 Peters, Peter J. “Pete”, 135 Petersen, Shirley Jo, 125n Peterson-Berger, Wilhelm, 249 Petraeus, Gen. David, 142 Phelps, Jason, 320, 322, 326 Phillips, Wendell, 251

406

Pickering, Mike, 44n Pillar, 143 Pink Floyd, 77 place/space, 252n; abandoned, 73; American South, 24-25, 327, 330, 332; Atlanta, 325-26; celebration of, 237, 247; commercialized middle of America and, 23; consumer society and, 289, 327; contested, 312; detachment from, 40, 42, 84; Detroit, 45, 55-60; different cultural spaces in America, 24; displacement, 176; imagined/ constructed, 8, 13, 43, 82; Elgin, 129-30; Indians in unexpected, see Philip Deloria; legends/ stories and, 192, 197203, 252n; loss of, 34, 135n; outer space and, 13, 42, 68, 74, 81-84; Phoenix, 23, 207-12; rural, 314; safe, 38; symbolic, 135n, 290-93; the “world” as evil, 116; Waffle House as, 309, 310, 321; See also geography, identity (local, regional), in-betweenness, suburbia Pokrovsky, Dmitri, 279 Ponty, Jean-Luc, 83 poor, 4, 23, 25, 39, 41, 54, 61, 67, 75, 124, 129, 130, 190, 204, 311, 315, 331 pop culture: black, 43, 55n; Christians against, 135-36; Christians surrendering to, 113n; self-referentiality of, 302 pop music, 1, 5n, 11, 15, 173, 182, 192, 193, 242, 327, 358, 359, 367 post-American, x, 348 post-Blackness. See under Black

post-Fordist, 11, 65, 152 postmodernism, 8, 178, 180, 193, 206, 303, 306 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 141 Pound, Ezra, 279n pow-wow, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 202 prayer warriors. See Christian militant rhetoric Presley, Elvis, 17, 185, 206n, 311, 316, 386 Price, Otto, 110, 153 Price, Trish, 110 primitive music/art, 257n. See also folk, maverick, naïve Prince (musician), 51n prince, 103, 139 princess, 104n, 134-40. See also Disney Princess Profit, Al (Alan Bradley), 62 progressive, 15, 51, 91, 114, 115, 152, 184, 255n, 270, 381. See also liberal Project 86, 142 Prokofiev, Sergei, 247n Pro-Musica Society, 232, 241 propaganda, 121, 228, 250, 257 prosperity, 13, 120, 129, 203, 332, 348 prosperity gospel, 14, 25, 115, 117, 123, 124, 156, 157n, 350 Protestantism, 14, 15, 112-16, 119, 121-22, 124-25, 131, 149, 150, 158, 198, 247, 250, 297 Prunière, Henri, 237 psychedelia, 184 Public Enemy (PE), 62, 63, 69, 72, 76 Puritan, 232 purity, 14, 135, 139. See also abstinence, chastity, virginity

purity/chastity balls, 14, 135-36 purity/chastity rings, 122, 137, 139n Putnam, Israel, 248 Putumayo, 194, 195 queer. See homosexuality Queer Nation, 270 Quintanilla-Pérez, Selena, 17 R&B, 35, 69, 298, 299, 302, 303 rabbit, 15, 171, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 201, 203, 220, 313 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 275 race, 7, 21, 38, 46n, 47n, 49n, 53, 54, 56, 65n, 75, 81, 134, 135, 295, 334 racism, 38, 39, 44n, 64n, 82, 88, 180, 208, 212, 329, 348n Radcliffe, Mike, 110 radio, 16, 56, 60, 185, 320n; as enemy, 62; boycott by, 59, 62n, 317; Christian, 153, 154; commedy in, 313, 318n, 320; commercials in, 208, 304, 321; DJ, 69; genocide and, 60; in songs, 85, 180; importance of, 60; integrated, 51-54; shows, 316, 318n, 320; South and, 2; urban, 52 rap, 39, 46, 53, 63, 83n, 179, 180, 242, 321. See also hip hop rasquache, 175, 195, 204, 205, 206, 210, 364 See also weirdness Rauschenberg, Robert, 230 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 6, 14, 118, 121, 140n, 157, 264n, 349, 351, 352, 353 Reconstructionism, 118 Red Bull Music Academy, 52, 63, 71n

407

Red Meat, 317 redneck, 290, 314n, 331, 332, 362. See also hillbilly, white trash Reeder, Mark, 73n Reformed (Christian), 124n. See also Calvinism reggae, 179, 198 Reinagle, Alexander, 228n religion, 7, 106, 112, 123, 134n, 150, 157, 197, 243, 350, 359 Renaat. See Vandepapeliere, Renaat Republicans, 24, 114, 353. See also conservative Response, The, 124, 132 retro, 15, 296, 298, 305, 322, 323 Revels-Hawkins, Irene, 144 Reynolds, Simon, 37n, 48, 55n, 63, 72, 80, 83 riots, 38, 65, 76. See also Detroit riots ritual, 174, 227; body as ritual space, 135n; classical music and, 235, 242; consumerist, 137, 288; dancing, 83 Rivera, Diego, 57 Rocha, Rolando (DJ). See Rolando rock (music): authenticity/ rebel aesthetics and, 10, 76, 156, 244n; BarlowGirl and, 13-14, 103, 107, 140, 361; California, 194; co-optation and, 10; crossover, 184; cult and, 242; female, 107, 156; folk-, 1; indie-, 198; Jackalope and, 15, 173n, 200, 210; Native, 179; progressive, 51, 81, 184; pop rock, 107; punk-, 47, 331; radio, 51; rock 'n' roll, 1, 210, 299, 308; stadium, 14, 359; standard band, 358; style, 1-2, 22, 175, 360; Waffle House and, 298,

408

299, 308, 320, 322, 326, 385n; whiteness and, 10, 360 Rock, George, 320, 344 Rockwell, Norman, 329 Rodda, Chris, 140-42 Rogers Sr., Joe, 290, 295 Rogers Jr., Joe, 307, 323 Rogers, Kaitlyn. See Bergeron, Kaitlyn Rogers, Mary Welch, 307, 309, 310, 318, 323, 244, 385, 386 Rolando (Rocha) (aka The Aztec Mystic), 77, 78, 81 Rolling Stones, 51n romanticism, 8, 16, 229, 231, 23335, 239, 243, 248-50, 253, 255n, 257, 259, 262-64, 273, 366-67 Roosevelt, Theodore, 272 Rose, Tricia, 52n Rossiter, Frank, 272, 273 Rovinsky, Anton, 236n Rubin, Mike, 46, 49 Ruggles, Carl and Charlotte, 261 ruin porn. See Detroit Rushdoony, Rousas John, 118, 155 Rushton, Neil, 44, 45 Rust Belt, 51, 64, 134 RZA, 83n Saddleback Church, 115 Sade, 332 Said, Edward, 197 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 179 salvation, 86, 107, 115, 116, 117, 147, 248, 252 Salvation Army, 143, 266 Sanctus Real, 142 Santigold, 47n Sapphire and Steel, 84 Sarnoff, Susan, 314n

Satan, 103, 106, 116, 117, 127, 132, 151, 152, 153. See also Christian militant rhetoric: spiritual warfare; demons, devil, enemy, evil Saunderson, Kevin, 35, 36, 44n, 69 Scheeres, Julia, 125, 127 Schoenberg, Arnold, 231-37 school prayer, 117, 144, 155. See also culture wars Schubert, Franz, 237, 244, 245, 246 Scots-Irish, 24, 134 Scriabin, Alexander, 260 Seabrooke, Annie, 125 Seabrooke, Jeff, 125n Seeger, Pete, 1 segregation. See desegregation Selena. See Quintanilla-Pérez self-referential, 195, 288, 289, 297, 302, 303, 307, 322, 363 selling out. See under market semiotics, 173, 322 Sessions, Roger, 228n, 274 Seville, David. See Alvin and the Chipmuncks Sex Pistols, 198 Sharlet, Jeff, 118, 130, 151 Sharp, Cecil, 2, 24 Shay, Dorothy, 315 Sheff, David, 126 Shelley, Bruce L., 113n Shenandoah, Joanne, 182 Sherman, Allan, 312 Sherwood Magee, Gayle, 238, 241, 258, 266-68, 276, 278, 367 Shirley, Wayne, 239n, 277 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 247n Sibelius, Jean, 249 Sicko, Dan, 37n, 69, 72, 81, 82 Silver Ring Thing, 118n, 137 Simon, Paul, 10, 183, 217

Simpson, Sturgill, 296 Simpsons, The, 303n sin, 116, 142, 147, 255n, 266. See also values, morality Sinclair, James B., 234, 239n, 263, 277 Sisko, Benjamin. See Brooks, Avery sit-in protests, 295, 312 slow food, 292 Smetana, Bědrich, 249 Smith, Angela, 125n social consciousness, 76, 151 Society for American Music, 262 Society of the Holy Name, 119 soft-sell, 355; Christian, 14, 116n, 144, 150-57, 354. See also Coffeehouse Christianity Solomon, Maynard, 237, 239, 241n, 244-47, 265-66, 276-77 Sony Germany, 77 Sony Japan, 79 Sorge, Bob, 132 soul (music), 44, 47, 68, 181, 310, 314n, 332, 360. See also Northern soul sound studies, 20 South, 13; authenticity and the, 24; blackness and, 65; commercialization and the, 327-28, 330, 369; culture, 137, 288, 296n, 309, 311, 323, 324, 331; Deep, 24; freaks/ weirdness, 329, 330, 354; humor and the, 315; music, 25, 312, 33232, 327, see also chapter Waffle House; Old, 16, 25, 133, 291; racism, 196n; New, 133, 291, 292, 332; stereotypes and the, 290, 314, 330; whiteness and, 130, 297, 368. See also foodways, identity, values

409

South America, 77, 194, 218 Southern Baptist, 112, 114 Southern Culture on the Skids, 331 Southwest, 133, 171, 186, 189, 192, 195 space. See place Spanish, 45n, 185, 193, 199, 200, 202, 211 Spanish-American War, 292 Spike Jones and His City Slickers, 320 spiritual fitness. See Christian militant rhetoric spiritual warfare. See Christian militant rhetoric Spring, David, 112n Springfield, Rick, 320 Springsteen, Bruce, 2, 3, 153 St. Gauden, Augustus, 248 St. James, Rebecca, 108, 111, 139 St. Peter, George, 120n Starbucks, 305, 335 Stenhammer, Wilhelm, 249 stereotypes: authoritarian, 105; of Arabs, 197; of Asians, 197; of blacks, 48, 54, 55, 56, 91, 381; of Mexicans, 206; of Natives, 195, 202, 206, 214, 215; of Southerners, 314n, 330 Stevens, Halsey, 228n Stöckelmann, Jürgen. See Jonzon Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 205 Strauss, Richard, 247n Stravinsky, Igor, 231, 232, 234-36, 237n, 247n, 279-80 subcultures, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 17, 21, 25, 174, 350, 356; black, 353, 356; Christian, 7, 14, 25, 103, 104n, 149, 151, 359, 363; conservative, 157; Ives and, 17, 229, 230, 242, 244, 269, 271,

410

366; music and, 7, 12, 21; Waffle House and, 18, 21, 330 Submerge, 19, 35, 58, 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74n, 78, 354 suburbia, 23, 66, 103n, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137, 203, 288, 293; Chicago and, 14, 108, 109, 111, 120, 123, 129, 130, 137, 139, 149, 158; Detroit and, 34, 5659, 64, 86; Phoenix, 23, 189; whiteness and, 35n, 49, 58, 59, 86, 158n, 196, 198, 361, 378, 379, 381 Subotnik, Morton, 180 Sugrue, Thomas J., 64n Sullivan, Hannah, 279n Sullivan, Scotty, 299n Sunbelt, 22, 131, 133, 134, 290-94, 332, 361, 363, 368 Sun Ra, 81, 97 Superchic[k], 108, 111, 139 supremacist, 134, 135n, 154 Swafford, Jan, 238n, 244n taboo, 144, 244, 245 Taco Bell, 303n tacos, 15, 189, 190, 207, 211, 212 Tangerine Dream, 51 Tappet Brothers, Click and Clack, 430. See Magliozzi Taruskin, Richard, 279 Tate, Greg, 47, 94 techno, 13, 19, 34, 35, 36, 40, 44, 46, 53, 73, 75, 379; acid techno, 68; Detroit techno, 12, 13, 19, 21, 33-37, 42-53, 59, 63, 66-69, 72, 80, 81, 85-88, 353-57, 360, 363-64; ethno-techno, 44, 68, 80, 358, 360; hardcore, 68, 70, 71, 74, 79, 356; Latino, 78n, 80, 357; minimal, 74; proto-, 49, 51, 84; techno-jazz/ hi-tech

jazz, 68, 78, 79, 80, 356, 357, 360 Techno Museum. See Detroit Teen Mania Ministries, 135 tejano (music), 17, 175 Tenney, James, 180 Thatcher, Margaret, 4, 85 Theosophy, 260 therapeutic, 7, 8, 14, 38, 103, 106, 109, 115, 126, 128, 132, 141, 145, 155, 156, 355. See also Christian rehabilitation Theroux, Paul, 24, 25 Third Wave of the Holy Spirit, 105 Thomas, Michael Tilson, 231, 233, 366 Thomson, Virgil, 259 Thoreau, Henry David, 234, 252, 253 Timeline, 41, 78, 79 Tin Pan Alley, 9, 287 Toffler, Alvin, 36, 82 Tompkins, Dave, 84 Tone Roads, 232 Toronto Blessing, 105 Touré, 47n transcendentalism, 15, 234, 248, 251, 252n, 256n, 257, 263 transcultural mobility, 171, 176 Transnational American Studies, 21 Tresor, 19, 59, 71, 73, 74, 378 True Love Waits, 14, 137, 250, 318 Twenge, Jean, 360 Tyler, George, 261 ultramodernist, 234, 235, 241 Underground Resistance (UR), 12, 13, 19, 33, 34, 35, 40, 46n, 49, 50, 53, 63, 72, 76, 80, 87, 356,

377, 379; miltant symbols/ rhetoric, 50, 79, 62, 63, 72-73 United States Information Agency/ Service, 228 Uptowner, 232 Valli, Frankie, 299, 300, 318 value engineering, 121, 127 values, 6, 7, 10, 11; American, 118, 131, 222, 228n, 251, 293; as commodities, 4-5, 348; Christian, 12, 24, 116, 118, 120n, 151-56, 157, 269; cultural, 20; family, 104, 111, 119, 120, 122, 128, 138; moral, 54, 130, 149, 151; production/ market, 208, 217, 289, 322; of consumption, 9, 11, 12; religious, 243; Southern, 310; subculture and, 12, 21, 242. See also morals Van Temple, 386 Van Wyck, Amelia, 267 Vandepapeliere, Renaat, 90, 378 Väth, Sven, 71n Velvet Underground, The, 185 Vergara, Camilo José, 65 victimhood, 38, 39 Vietnam, 76, 84, 136, 143, 180, 186, 202, 205, 206, 349, 364 Vineyard Movement, 105, 132 virgin chic, 14, 107, 138, 156 Virgin of Guadalupe, 189, 190, 215, 216 virginity, 135, 136, 145, 156, 158, 361. See also abstinence, chastity, purity visibility, 13, 43, 48, 50, 86, 108, 155, 206, 214, 321 Vivaldi, Antonio, 242 von Dyk, Paul (DJ), 73n

411

Von Thülen, Sven, 45n, 48, 53, 55, 70, 72 Waffle House, 13, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 287-346, 353, 354, 355, 360, 361, 363, 368-70, 385-86 Waffle House Index, 194 Wagner, C. Peter, 106-06 waila (chicken scratch), 179 Waller, Fats, 331 Walmart, 291, 332, 355 Warner Bros., 110, 352 Warner, Liz, 46n, 54, 62, 63, 69, 77 Warp, 90, 378 WarParty, 179 Warren, Elizabeth, 184-85, 217 Warren, Rick, 115 Wasilla Assembly of God Church, 125 WASP, 198, 259, 361, 365 Watergate, 349 Waters, Maxine, 62n Weather Report, 79 Weavers, The, 237 Webb, Gary, 62n Weber, Max, 7, 174n Weinstein, Mikey, 142 weirdness, 2, 3, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 42, 86, 175, 204, 205, 206, 229, 230, 231, 298, 301n, 309, 311, 326n, 312, 331n, 324, 327, 329, 330, 334, 335, 353, 354, 355, 360, 371. See also rasquache Welch, Bobby, 145n Welty, Eudora, 329 Wendy’s, 305-06 Wheaties, 304 Wheaton College, 129 Whispers, The, 51n White Castle, 290, 291, 293 White, Shelby, 299n, 321, 323, 325

412

white flight, 13, 64, 129 white trash, 297, 314n, 362 Whiteman, Paul, 183n whiteness, 12, 18, 21, 64n, 182, 206, 288, 349n, 355, 361, 362, 365, 368, 369; privilege and, 12, 158n, 22, 292. See also Anglo and see also under authenticity, body, class, consumerism, decline, hybridity, identity, market, rock, South, suburbia. Whitman, Richard Ray, 203 Whitman, Walt, 247, 248, 257 Whitt, Breje (DJ), 162 Whitt, Robert, 131n, 162 Wild West Shows, 177n Wilder, Thornton, 329 Wilderson, Frank B., 34n Willow Creek, 18, 108, 109, 115, 119, 128, 129, 130, 144, 149, 150, 152, 354 Wilson, Randy and Lisa, 137 Wind Travelin’ Band 188 Winter Wonder Rock Festival, 142 WithOut Rezervation, 179, 180 Wolf, Virginia, 279n Wolpertinger, 15, 191, 211 Woodard, Colin, 24 World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), 116 World Missionary Congress, 251 world music, 2, 10, 171, 172, 178, 183, 184, 192, 194, 197, 199, 201, 203 Wu-Tang, 83n XIT (rock band), 179 Yáñez, Larry, 12, 15, 19, 25, 171226, 355, 363-65

Yankovic, “Weird” Al, 301n, 312, 313 Yates, Peter, 232 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, 204, 205 Yellow Magic Orchestra, 79, 184

Zappa, Frank, 231 Žižek, Slavoj, 73n Zorn, John, 231 Zschech, Darlene, 132, 133 Zulu, 10 ZZ Top, 288n

413

dorothea gail

Weird American Music

gail Weird American Music

T

gail

Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music

American Studies ★ A Monograph Series Weird American Music

he author takes Greil Marcus’s capacious category of “weirdness” in new directions to examine a tension in certain expressions of American music and music communities since the 1980s. It locates this tension in the space between the artists’ striving for authenticity in the values they want to communicate on the one hand, and the demands of the marketplace on the other. The results are “weird” in both the economic and artistic sense. The book follows five different case studies: Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, the latter-day reception of Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music. All have struggled against co-optation, and arguably faced defeat in their efforts to stay authentic during an era in which lifestyle and ethnicity have become commodified, and both religious and humanistic values have become products.

Volume 299

Universitätsverlag

isbn 978-3-8253-6956-9

win t e r

Heidelberg