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Rock ’n’ Roll (Archipelagic American Music Studies)

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.40.4.22

1945-2349

Jessica A. Schwartz,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

This article challenges readers to relisten to rock ’n’ roll, a musical genre that has often been synonymous with postwar American culture and ideology, via the nuclear Pacific; in doing so, it proposes an Archipelagic American music studies that decenters the primacy of “the narrative of continental America (which has been a geographical story central to U.S. historiography and self-conception),” as well as U.S. musical historiography and American music studies.1 Accounts of rock ’n’ roll locate its genealogy, primarily and understandably, in African American music. Similarly, rock ’n’ roll is often considered to be an American export that has become a global phenomenon. By amplifying erasures of Indigenous lives, lands, and listenings that retain spectral presences in the grooves of rock ’n’ roll (and the systems that produce them), this article begins to map a genealogy of rock ’n’ roll that critically engages the term “America” as an imperial power through its neocolonial policies. Tracing rock ’n’ roll's connection to atomic power and nuclear politics, I consider Marshallese rock ’n’ roll amidst more contemporary Indigenous hip-hop in which musicians continue to utilize Black-specific music genres as their contribution to reflections on U.S. imperial violence and their homeland.2According to Bob Dylan in a 2017 interview with Bill Flanagan, “Rock and roll was a sort of anesthetic.” He explained: Rock and roll made you oblivious to [nuclear] fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies put up. We lived under a death cloud; the air was radioactive . . . Doo-wop was the counterpart to rock and roll . . . Rock and roll was atomic powered . . . It didn't seem like an extension of anything but it probably was.3The song, “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream)” (1954) originally by the Bronx, New York-based African American group, the Chords, and covered by the White Canadian group, the Crew Cuts, is a famous pivot between doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll. Coined the first “crossover song,” its genesis story tells an effaced narrative about how rock ’n’ roll, as part of the “atomic powered” pop machine, has helped maintain “barriers” precisely by being an “anesthetic.” According to lead tenor Jimmy Keyes, the song “Sh-Boom” was inspired, in part, by the Chords members watching televised footage of an atomic explosion at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands and wanting to sound the “awesome” power of the bomb. The song was one of the first to employ nonsense syllables (doo-doo-doo-doo, sh-boom) in the now characteristically doo-wop style, and it was the first song by an R&B group in the 1950s to place in the top ten of the Billboard Pop Charts (at number nine), making it a “crossover” song. Just a few months later, the Crew Cuts, a White Canadian band, recorded the song with Mercury Records. In July 1954, their version, which is considered more “traditional,” coded “square” and “White,” entered the Billboard charts, peaking at number one during August and September. By December, the Crew Cuts’ popularity with the song landed them on The Ed Sullivan Show.Rock ’n’ roll emerges from crisscrosses and crossovers that extend the borders and boundaries of any one locale or race, and yet, the story of “Sh-Boom” evinces appropriation as systemic theft. Understanding the whitewashing of rock ’n’ roll is an important component of the work that needs to be done to divest from and repair such problematic legacies. Moreover, the discursive reproduction of rock via rock ’n’ roll as quintessential “American” music through semantic associations with White masculine rebellion and ideological signifiers like “freedom” retains power in global imaginaries. Rock ’n’ roll narratives can limit attention to the global flows that go into one song. Rethinking ‘America’ as empire and rock ’n’ roll as a complexly global production shaped by imperial processes and appropriative institutions helps us understand Dylan's claim that rock ’n’ roll is “atomic power” is real in transnational capacity. The pathway of “Sh-Boom's” crossover that leads to the inception of the song—the atomic vaporization of an islet at Bikini Atoll—leads to the Marshall Islands. It forges a route that points to and amplifies the silence of generational voices, chants, and navigational markers caused by the vaporization of the Bikinian islet, as well as the radiological devastation of neighboring Rongelap Atoll, and the U.S. political power that has maintained such silences. This transpacific pathway resounds three generations of Marshallese music that draw from so-called American music. The silences amplified in these songs participate in constructing the limits to hearing Marshallese voices in ways that uphold the aforementioned mythic bounds of American musical culture.The United States detonated its most powerful thermonuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll, codenamed Castle Bravo, on March 1, 1954. The explosion sent radioactive debris throughout the northern Central Pacific archipelago. Rongelap, which was populated at the time, received high levels of radiation that caused acute and lasting radiogenic illness. The U.S. military evacuated the Rongelapese from their lands more than forty-eight hours after the fallout settled on the atoll and was absorbed by its inhabitants. The Rongelapese were taken to the U.S. military base on Kwajalein Atoll where they would become part of a classified U.S. governmental study on human responses to radiation exposure. Decades later, the Rongelapese and Bikinian communities, as well as other Marshallese populations who were exposed to fallout during the testing period, continue to struggle with displacement, disenfranchisement, sicknesses and deaths, and misinformation from the U.S. government. The broad culture and intimate experiences of silence and secrecy to which they have been subjected are woven into the communities’ songs. The three songs that follow briefly share intergenerational expressions of nuclear catastrophe. These songs are, in part, “atomic powered.” They share the flipside of U.S. nuclear clout in terms of “sonic occupation” of Pacific Indigenous voices, bodies, and generational connection (via the land).4“Kajjitok in aō nan kwe kiiō” (“These are my questions for you now/still”) was composed in 2008 by Rongelapese activist-musician Lijon, who experienced Bravo's fallout. The song formalizes Rongelapese women's questions to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) about their ongoing health issues over fifty years after Bravo.5These are my questions for you nowCan you help meFind a way to untangle myself and my family from these things that hinder us?Can you answer me?Why don't I have a dentist?A doctor for my lungs, my kidney, and my liver?Lijon penned the song when the women's participation was denied at an official event with the DOE and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) government. Lijon told me that, when she lived in the United States, she was part of a rock ’n’ roll band, and she performed “Kajjitok” in a folk, singer-songwriter fashion. By formalizing silence and nuclear injury, this protest song asks questions in subversive ways. It also amplifies the material consequences of “atomic power” in performances where singers’ voices break down due to thyroid issues and removal. The melodic contours and harmonies become disrupted, which give the performers a chance to point to their embodied difficulties and relate them to nuclear trauma.The Rongelapese rock ’n’ roll band, Pej Beto, is comprised of men born to the women of Lijon's generation. The song “I Wanna Go Home” was one of their biggest hits. It was composed around the time of the 1986 Compact of Free Association, which allows the U.S. military to remain on Kwajalein Atoll (the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site) and has absolved the United States of financial liability for nuclear damages in the past, present, and future. It also enables Marshallese to travel between the RMI and United States without a visa and grants limited funding to the RMI government and Marshallese communities disproportionately impacted by nuclear testing and military activities. These communities include the people of Bikini and Rongelap, neither of whom supported the 1986 Compact because it rescinded their relative autonomy in political dealings with the United States by positing the RMI as an intermediary.The song is set to the tune of the Beach Boys’ song “Sloop John B,” a cover of a traditional West Indies tune about a sunken ship; it was popularized as a Calypso song, “The Wreck of John B Sails,” in 1958 by the Kingston Trio, and as a cowboy song. According to the mayor of Rongelap, James Matayoshi, who is a singer, guitarist, and fan of rock ’n’ roll and surf music, the song is a love song that longs for one's atoll homeland to keep its memory alive.Although the distance between us is greatI want to return to youI want to return/ I wanna go homeI'm finding a way/ I wanna go homeThe band's name, Pej Beto, refers to discarded, dried up pandanus keys tossed aside and drifting westward. There is a generational component, as pej also means “placenta,” which is the organ that, during pregnancy, connects the mother to the offspring, providing it life-sustaining oxygen and nutrients and removing waste. The members of Pej Beto are drifting, and as unconnected to their homeland of Rongelap physically, they provide the musical connection. When placing the song in its nuclear context, we can think of the horrific reproductive consequences of the bomb as generational silences. Due to radiation exposure, Marshallese women had stillbirths and miscarriages and birthed severely deformed babies. Thus, this connection can be understood along the lines of discarded placentas—life made fungible by the U.S. military.While the melodic line and inclusion of “yeah, yeahs,” “I Wanna Go Home” echoes the Beach Boys, the musical accompaniment is a departure from the previous iterations. This version offers a musical prism, an uneasy dizzying slide effect that might epitomize the whirlwind of ongoing seasickness, an unmoored drift, and the knowledge of being tossed aside, treated like garbage by a country that, in the wake of World War II, claimed to be like family—to “save” and “liberate” the Marshallese from Japan.The sentiment of dishonest kinship features in the rap song, “Bikini Atoll” by Island Rhythm. The song was written around the time of the second Compact of Free Association in 2004. “Bikini Atoll” by Island Rhythm begins in an extraterrestrial sound world, recalling science fiction film music; a wavering drone is abruptly shattered by the sonic representation of a bomb, subsequently decaying to a transitional silence. This otherworldly feel might represent the bomb, or it might represent Bikini Atoll, a place that is—to younger generations who have never seen their ancestral homelands—otherworldly. Following the transitional silence, sound resumes in the form of the ground bass from Pachelbel's “Canon in D” transposed. The auto-accompaniment of an electronic keyboard includes both the bass and a syncopated, lightly percussive, tapped rhythm. The lead male vocalist first speaks the opening lines in the English language, asserting solidarity between the two atoll communities: Bikini Atoll and Rongelap Atoll.If you're from Rongelap, please stand upIf you're from Bikini, please stand with meYou know me and you, you and me, we're a familyWe're from the Marshall Islands, stand with me!This spoken introduction prefaces the melodic chorus, with the refrain (in English): I stand for the people of Bikini Atoll,for each and every one of them,All for one and one for all (x2).The first two verses are sung in the English language with a hip-hop-style vocal delivery. The first verse opens with questions that connote the repetition of the silence (lack of answers) as traumatic engagement. The lyrics emphasize ownership over their land, a gesture toward indigeneity that separates them from “Uncle Sam,” who “used” Marshallese and “tricked,” “lied to,” and “cheated” them. The singer then asks, in hip-hop vernacular, “what were you thinkin’ cous’?” The move demotes Uncle Sam from an uncle (elder) to cousin. The question, “don't you think we get enough radiation from the sun?” points to the education the Marshallese received concerning radiation as something that was not dangerous because it occurred in nature—such as what comes from the sun. In addition to the “lies” the United States told Marshallese, the lyrics critique written history, which has displaced Marshallese oral culture, experiential knowledge, and contributions. As with many of the younger generation's nuclear songs, “Bikini Atoll” begins in English and ends in the Marshallese language. Employing strategically diplomatic gestures, these songs also follow the structure of older ones that end with the most important part, the part that bridges generations, which is precisely what the Marshallese language does. Moreover, the Marshallese language archives archipelagic rhythms and specific islands even after they have been vaporized and the human communities have been forcibly removed from them. They live in the memory of the language and in other generational modes of communication.Like rock ’n’ roll, “Bikini Atoll” must be read as a transnational cultural production. The song is the resonance of the atomic power that energized rock ’n’ roll, and the atomic power that is affixed to Bikinian identity and pictured on their school uniforms (mushroom cloud) and political productions, such as the Bikinian flag. The atomic bomb has seared itself as silhouette-vaporized negative space in Bikini Atoll's ring of islets. Musically, the atomic bomb is imprinted as sound effect and affective sonic motif. Resounding alternative hip-hop style, the music has a light backbeat and rhythmic accents that counterpoint the bass line, working with vocal delivery. Sonic solidarity with this socially aware Black diasporic music speaks to empowerment of marginalized identities, communal strength, and protest against White American hegemony and greed, and it also traces routes of connection through Caribbean islands’ militarized spaces.Reflecting on (U.S.) rock ’n’ roll as energized by “atomic power,” which is derived in part from Marshallese lands and bodies, U.S. rock ’n’ roll gets amplified at the expense of Marshallese voices. Through these songs we hear Indigenous Marshallese voices erased by the sonic boom of nuclear weapons, an “atomic powered” music, and societal reiterations that claim “American popular music” through such clout-oriented complexes—and yet, when we shift from the “rock ’n’ roll” coded as such by the United States and rethink it in archipelagic American terms, globally interconnected through imperial processes, we are listening to Indigenous Marshallese voices . . . voices that formalize pain, protest, and the promise of their futurities that resound in their mother tongue as the rhythms of their islands, shared between generations.