A Soundtrack to Revolution
2013; Lawrence and Wishart; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2633-8270
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoA soundtrack to revolution?Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday: A Memoir Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012. ISBN: 978-0802129017.Denise Sullivan, Keep On Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip-hop Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-1556528170.Pat Thomas, Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2012. (Soundtrack album Listen, Whitey! The Sounds of Black Power 1967-1974, Light In The Attic, LITA 081.) ISBN: 978-1606995075.These studies highlight the centrality of music to African-American social memory and struggle. Indeed, from the first blues and jazz through to hip-hop, this most elementary form of collective expression became highly politicised in a context of enduring state repression, social exclusion and political disenfranchisement. In one way or another, these works also reflect the commercialisation, institutionalisation and domestication of street voices by hostile political and corporate forces. A case in hand is Curtis Mayfield's Keep On Pushing, the informal anthem of the Civil Rights Movement that was brashly appropriated by Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.The same song provides Denise Sullivan with the title of her ambitious study of black protest music. Despite the sub-title, by tackling folk, rock and punk, Sullivan bites off more than can be feasibly analysed in under 250 pages; for instance, there is no discussion of the overlap between punk and anarchism, so crucial for a genera- tion of (albeit predominantly white) activists on both sides of the Atlantic. Equally, the treatment of hip-hop is rather thin. Ultimately, the core of this book assesses the 1960s counter-culture and the focus goes beyond African-American music; for instance, there is a fair amount of material on Bob Dylan and Native American Buffy Sainte-Marie, both of whom figure far more prominently than contempo- rary 'raptivists' Public Enemy, who have now notched up over twenty-five years of social criticism. Certainly, in the sense that Dylan was a hero for many of the Black Panthers, his inclusion is not unreasonable; however, this points to another set of problems: the absence of an overarching interpretive framework and, more specifi- cally, the lack of analysis of the relationship between white and black protest music. This is a shame, for Sullivan has conducted some excellent research, including many valuable interviews; but ultimately the devil here is in the excessive detail, as the book stumbles into anecdotes and a disparate narrative: in a desire to be inclusive, a few pages are devoted to political music outside the US. This is vexing when political rappers The Coup, whose albums include 'Kill my Landlord' and New Orleanian Christian Scott, an outspoken critic of policing and post-Katrina policies and whose efforts to drag jazz into the twenty-first century certainly make him a radical, go unmentioned.A further example of Sullivan's problematic approach is when she touches on the institutionalisation of revolutionary voices by the music industry without fully exploring the processes at play. For instance, she correctly notes the 'insurgent' content of early NWA and their intimate ties with the Los Angeles dispossessed; yet the process whereby their initially fierce anti-police message was muted, and the accent placed on their rhetoric of homophobic, sexist and male violence so charac- teristic of 'gangsta rap', goes unmentioned. The end product was the manufacturing of a ghetto version of the American dream, a marketing ploy that conveniently did much to disarm socially contestatory rap, while, curiously, becoming immensely popular with suburban white youth, much to the benefit of record companies.Although also casting his net wide enough to include a range of genres, Pat Thomas's Listen, Whitey! is a far more coherent work. The focus here is African- American protest music from the crest of the wave of protest that saw the radicalisation of a section of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and its rejection of the Civil Rights Movement until its nadir, a decade later, with the switch of the Black Panther Party to electoral politics. …
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