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Listening in an Emergency

2020; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dss.2020.0012

1946-0910

Sara Marcus,

Music History and Culture

Listening in an Emergency Sara Marcus (bio) After the last presidential election, a theory made the rounds that under the new administration, music would get really good again. It's hard to track down this notion's first appearance, but it was already widespread by the time Amanda Palmer voiced it to a journalist in December 2016, comparing the looming Trump regime to Weimar Germany as if she had no clue what had happened next, or perhaps considered it all a fair price to pay for Kurt Weill and fishnets. Plenty of other folks were suggesting similar things to their friends between sets at rock clubs or on Facebook, citing not Berlin but New York, waxing nostalgic for the punk scenes that had emerged in the recession-wracked 1970s and '80s. If the adherents of the Trump Great Rock Theory didn't mean to imply that a certain level of suffering could be compensated for by some righteous anthems, this desperate musical silver-lining-ism did downplay the very real casualties that everybody knew were coming. Those who lionized Reagan-era punk (a genre that of course was mostly white) also ignored, in their implication that Obama-era music had underperformed, all the brilliant music made by black artists during the previous eight years—by D'Angelo, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, to cite just three examples. They similarly discounted the fact that there had been plenty to rage about in recent years, plenty of social tension to process, as songs like Lamar's "Alright" and Bey's "Freedom" attest. Despite all these solid objections to the theory, something different does seem to happen to and in music in moments of social tension and political crisis. Listen back to the revolutionary anticipation in Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready," the simmering laments of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," the slicing anguish of CSNY's "Ohio," the cabaret outrage of Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam." Listen, for that matter, to the ferocious chaos of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," and think about how the whole corpus of recorded African-American blues grew out of 1919's so-called Red Summer of lynchings and race riots, a connection Daphne Brooks and Adam Gussow have both traced. That Red Summer of 1919 marked a resurgence of mob violence that had been gradually diminishing since its peak in the 1890s, when well over 100 African Americans were being lynched every year. Back then, the top-selling recordings by a black musician—the top-selling recordings by anybody, in fact—were George W. Johnson's "The Whistling Coon" and "The Laughing Song." These novelty tracks are important as the first commercial recordings by a black artist, but their shrill whistles and belly laughs are conspicuously different from the sentimental ardor that marked the era's most popular white parlor songs. To become a star, Johnson had to perform a flat, self-mocking selfhood. He repeatedly tried to have other hits, but [End Page 7] these two minstrel songs were the only ones that ever caught on. History suggests, in other words, that even though pop culture can be a platform for challenging an era's injustices, it can mirror and buttress them just as easily. In the bleakest times, many people want songs to tell them what they think they already know. Other people are too busy trying to stay alive to pour their terror and despair and even their relentless hope into works of musical genius. We have no clue whether we're now in a bleakest hour or a moment we'll long for in retrospect. We only know that this feels worse than what came before. And that may or may not have made music better, but it has made it more urgently needed. I can scarcely stomach three minutes of NPR these days before the stress and fury kick in, and then I think of the limited allotment of time I have left in this body, and about the way stress and rage whittle down that time and attenuate the faculties, and off goes the radio. But the silence brings along its own hazards: racing thoughts, seeping dread. One longs...