-
Questions of Genre in Black Popular MusicAuthor(s): David
BrackettReviewed work(s):Source: Black Music Research Journal, Vol.
25, No. 1/2 (Spring - Fall, 2005), pp. 73-92Published by: Center
for Black Music Research - Columbia College Chicago and University
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QUESTIONS OF GENRE IN BLACK POPULAR MUSIC DAVID BRACKETT
In the movie The Jerk (1979), Steve Martin plays Navin Johnson,
a white man raised by an African-American family in rural
Mississippi. The opening credits have barely concluded when it
becomes clear that the development of Navin's personality is
causing some consternation among his adoptive parents and siblings.
He cannot dance, he experi- ences difficulty clapping in time to
the rustic shout-type tune that his family plays on the front
porch, and he prefers tuna fish sandwiches on white bread (with
extra mayonnaise) and shrink-wrapped Twinkies to soul food. Navin
finds his deliverance, however, in a fortuitous exposure to a
broadcast of 1970s-era easy listening music-suddenly, he can clap
on the backbeat to the neo-Herb Alpert strains emanating from the
radio, recognizing through this involuntary response that,
somewhere, others of his own kind must exist.
My summary of the opening of The Jerk may seem remote from the
title of this article. But the movie's first few scenes present
topoi that condense many beliefs and assumptions central to
understanding the links between identity and musical genres. The
film revels in the absurdity of rigid essentialist stereotypes even
as it points to widely shared associa- tions between musical
categories and racial demographics. Nature tri- umphs over culture,
and mimesis (how nature and culture become "sec- ond nature") lurks
outside the frame. Who, after all, associates African Americans
with Herb Alpert?1
1. This is not intended as a condescending swipe at Herb Alpert.
After all, according to Pierre Bourdieu's "heteronomous principle
of hierarchization" (i.e., economic success),
DAVID BRACKETT is Associate Professor of Musicology and Chair of
the Department of Theory (Academic Affairs) at the Schulich School
of Music of McGill University. His previ- ous publications include
Intrepreting Popular Music (University of California Press, 2000;
originally published in 1995) and The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader:
Histories and Debates (Oxford University Press, 2005).
73
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If a generalized connection can be established in The Jerk
between racial identity and musical "kind" writ large, then a
second anecdote illustrates the ambiguity involved with
categorization in practice. On a recent trip to the local HMV
megastore, I attempted to find a recording by the Drifters, a group
that began in the 1950s with Clyde McPhatter's gospel- derived lead
tenor featured against the background of the group's gospel-quartet
influenced "doo-wop" vocals. By the late 1950s, the group (with Ben
E. King now singing lead) had become a star attraction of the new
"uptown," pop-rhythm and blues emerging from the Brill Building in
central Manhattan. After I searched in vain for the "oldies
section," which I assumed would house the Drifters' recordings, a
friendly store clerk directed me to the "R&B" section, and I
left with a copy of the Drifters' Greatest Hits. I felt a bit
perplexed: the Drifters' first recordings certainly were
categorized as "rhythm and blues" in the mid-1950s, and as both
"rhythm and blues" and "popular" (i.e., as "crossover record-
ings") during their Brill Building heyday from 1959 to 1964. But
they have little in common with contemporary R&B, which is what
I expect to find in the R&B section of the contemporary record
store.
Compared with the straightforward, commonsensical relationships
observed in The Jerk, my visit to the HMV megastore presented a
more tangled web of connections. The logic of this particular HMV's
spatial arrangement of categories is not difficult to detect, even
if it is rife with interesting and revealing contradictions. Genres
associated with the African diaspora-rap, reggae, R&B of all
eras, disco-are grouped into one corner of the store along with not
necessarily black but still dance- centered genres such as house,
techno, drum 'n' bass, and other forms of electronic dance music.
Consumers interested in the inconsistencies of this system need
only look under "J" in the R&B section, where they will find
the Jackson 5, the Jacksons, and Jermaine and Janet Jackson, but
not Michael-he's in the Pop/Rock section in the middle of the floor
along with his confreres Prince and Jimi Hendrix. (I might add that
the floor containing the various genres of popular music is in the
basement of the store-Classical and Jazz are "on top.")
Both the opening minutes of The Jerk and my trip to HMV present
notions of genre and identity that result either in laughter or
confusion depending on how well these notions match the generic
codes that we
Alpert's work is unquestionably of great value (Bourdieu 1993,
38). As an illustration of this, Joel Whitbum (2001) ranks Herb
Alpert (with or without the Tijuana Brass) as the twenty- sixth
most popular album artist during the period 1955-2001. For more on
mimesis as "sec- ond nature," see Taussig (1993).
74 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
have internalized. The symbolic function of genre serves us well
until we encounter a situation that reveals the fragile line
between common sense and nonsense.
The Jerk proposes a natural connection between race and taste,
between a preference for pigs' feet and an ease in finding musical
beats. In contrast to the connections proposed by The Jerk, the
organization of HMV high- lights the arbitrary relationship between
recordings and categories, although race once again plays a role in
designating the place of a partic- ular type of music. Both of
these cases exemplify how the notion of genre speaks to transitory
divisions in the musical field that correspond in dis- continuous
and complex ways to a temporally defined social space. The
relationship between divisions in the musical field and social
identities is most obvious in the large categories for popular
music (initially labeled "race," "hillbilly," and "popular") that
have been used by the U.S. music industry since the 1920s. Of these
categories, "race music"-subsequent- ly relabeled "rhythm and
blues," "soul," "black," and most recently, "R&B"-has
persistently been linked with African Americans. It would be a
mistake, however, to assume that this linkage has been straightfor-
ward or consistent: non-African Americans have recorded music that
has been classified in this category; non-African Americans have
certainly purchased, consumed, and listened to music classified in
this category; African Americans have recorded, purchased,
consumed, and listened to music that does not belong in this
category; and, as my Drifters' anecdote suggests, the range of
musical styles included within this category has varied
considerably both synchronically and diachronically.
Yet it would also be a mistake to think of these categories as
solely arbi- trary machinations of the music industry or as mere
"social construc- tions." The large musical categories of the U.S.
popular music industry that have played variations over the basic
terms of popular, race, and hill- billy since the 1920s are part of
a larger field of musical production in which musical genres
participate in the circulation of social connotations that pass
between musicians, fans, critics, music-industry magnates and
employees. That these connotations, these "meanings," are accepted
as "real" speaks to the phantasmatic nature of identity, that
ever-shifting sense of self that finds confirmation and
reinforcement in quotidian social practices and in a range of
discursive formations, both institutional and shadowy.
Even as individuals use genres to articulate the here-and-now of
indi- vidual and collective identities, the variety of genre labels
gestures toward an ephemerality that exceeds the spatial stolidity
indicated when- ever a particular structural arrangement is named.
For example, the music industry categories of "popular," "R&B,"
and "country" each
75
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encompass genre labels that emerge in other media and contexts,
all of which are in a perpetual state of transformation. Thus
R&B, the music- industry category, might consist of R&B,
hip-hop, neo-soul, and quiet storm as propagated in radio formats,
nightclubs, certain record stores, or in the everyday discourse of
fans. By the same token, the larger umbrella category of popular
music functions as part of an even larger field of Western music
containing jazz, classical music, world music, and so on (see
Brackett 2002, 69; 2003).
Because of the fleeting quality of genre arrangements and levels
at any particular point in time, a given musical text may belong to
more than one genre simultaneously, either due to shifting
perceptions of the con- text under consideration or because the
text presents a synthesis that exceeds contemporary comprehension
of generic boundaries. To be sure, close inspection of any text
inevitably raises doubts as to genre identity; but it is also
impossible to imagine a genreless text.2 Similarly, the more
closely one describes a genre in terms of its stylistic components,
the fewer the examples that actually seem to fit (see also Negus
1999, 29; Toynbee 2000, 105). And although the range of sonic
possibilities for any given genre is quite large at a particular
moment, it is not infinite: simply because the boundaries of genre
are permeable and fluctuating does not mean that they are not
patrolled; simply because a musical text may not "belong" to a
genre with any stability does not mean that it does not
"participate" in one. To take a recent example, "Hey Ya" (2003) by
Outkast might be understood as "hip-hop," "rap," maybe even a type
of "alternative rock," or perhaps "alternative" or "progressive
hip-hop," but it could not be considered "country music" by any
stretch of the imagination.3
Whatever sense of boundary exists before slippage ensues relies
on the affinity of musical genres for what Bakhtin (1986, 60-102)
described as "speech genres," verbal "enunciations," and the
resulting quality of "addressivity." As Bakhtin (95) explains, "The
style of the utterance depend[s] on those to whom the utterance is
addressed, [and] how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines
his addressees." Furthermore, "Each speech genre in each area of
speech communication has its own
2. I am here paraphrasing Derrida (1980, 61) when he
hypothesizes that "a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be
without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or sev-
eral genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre
and genres, yet such partici- pation never amounts to belonging."
For studies of specific instances in which the same song was
reclassified due to performance style and context, see Hamm (1995,
370-380). Grenier (1990) discusses how the meaning of a recording
changes when it appears in dif- ferent radio formats.
3. This is not to say that "Hey Ya" could not be performed or
recorded in such a way as to turn it into a country song; again,
see Hamm (1995, 370-380).
76 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music 77
typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a
genre." (95). In addition to marking the intersubjectivity of
speech genres, enuncia- tions refer to particular moments and
specific spaces, emphasize embed- dedness in a discursive web, and
imply a distinct cultural position (see Bhabha 1994, 36; de Certeau
1984, 33).
To continue the parallel, musical utterances form and are
subsequently reformed within (or between or even among) genres,
already anticipating how these utterances will be heard. Successful
interactions with media- tors (e.g., record company employees,
music critics, etc.) situated within institutions that function at
the interstices of power and public culture often depend on generic
intelligibility (at least until a certain level of suc- cess has
been achieved), but these gatekeepers are also not independent from
the social circulation of generic meaning (see Frith 1996,
88-89).
One can anticipate a few common criticisms of genre studies.
Some could easily fault the notion of genre as a static concept
that strips a work of its individuality. The spectral protests of
musicians hover before me, complaining that an emphasis on genre,
and hence (to some extent) on structure, robs them of agency. On
the other hand, when the temporality of genre becomes the focus,
the notion may come to seem meaningless because it then
paradoxically appears to be too unstable: no listing of semantic or
stylistic content can account for all texts that might be brand- ed
by a particular label, and the same labels refer to different
cultural arti- facts at different moments. Moreover, when one
posits a momentary rela- tionship between a musical field of genres
and different positions in social space, one is confronted with the
instability of social identities, which, like genres, are subject
to constant redefinition and which also become meaningful within a
field of relationships at a particular moment.4
A swerve into etymology will show that the term genre, imported
from French into English, refers in French both to categories for
artworks and to what approaches an originary experience of
category: that of gender, the classification of humans into females
and males, a division that, it might be argued, engenders all human
impulses to categorize and classi- fy.5 If the term genre evokes
stasis and spatiality, as do terms such as arrangement and field,
then to describe a text as "participating" in, rather than
"belonging" to, a genre emphasizes temporality. Derrida comments on
the impossibility of defining genre on the basis of traits and on
the
4. For more on the relationship between positions within a
cultural field of production and a social space, see Bourdieu
(1993, 29-73). Bourdieu counterposes the "space of artistic
position-takings" (the cultural field of production) with the
"space of artistic positions" (the position of artists in social
space).
5. For more extensive punning on "genre," see Derrida (1980,
57).
-
simultaneous impossibility of ignoring genre: "[The mark of
belonging] belongs without belonging, and the 'without' (or the
suffix '-less') which relates belonging to nonbelonging appears
only in the timeless time of the blink of an eye" (Derrida 1980,
61). The instability of genre, then, resembles nothing so much as
the situation of meaning in language in general.
If the instability of genre is not particularly remarkable, then
the qual- ity of "addressivity," derived from Bakhtin, claims a bit
more attention. One often reads that genres connect cultural
producers and texts with audiences (for one of the most eloquent
presentations of this argument, see Frith [1996, 75-95]). This
quality provides one way of understanding how people in the United
States (and much of the rest of the world) can speak of "black
popular music" with some sense that they know what they are talking
about despite apparent inconsistencies in terms of musi- cal style,
musicians, and producers and how it is that qualities of race,
place, gender, sexuality, and so on may become associated with an
assem- blage of musical texts.
"Addressivity" notwithstanding, and despite many studies of
produc- tion and consumption, popular-music scholars have rarely
employed genre theory as a way of understanding black music.6 One
of the few essays to address the use of the term black music by
popular-music schol- ars is written by Philip Taggs (1989), "Open
Letter: 'Black Music,'Afro- American Music,' and 'European Music.'"
As indicated by its title, Tagg presents his essay in the form of
an open letter. It is not, in the words of the author, "a
'scholarly' article quoting, misquoting or otherwise attempting to
attack or out-argue anyone else" (Tagg 1989, 285). Rather, "the
letter is intended as a polemical problematisation of terms like
'black music,' 'white music,' 'Afro-American music' or 'European
music'" and "to provide some ideas for a constructive debate on
music, race, and ide- ology" (285). Somewhat surprising, in light
of the importance of the sub- ject, Tagg's essay, while frequently
cited, has not, to my knowledge, in the fifteen-odd years since its
publication received a direct, sustained response nor has there
been a particularly constructive debate within popular music
studies around the issues that Tagg raises.
This lacuna is especially striking given that, since 1989, the
study of particular "scenes" and social groups (i.e., specific
articulations of identi- ty) has become one of the major growth
areas of popular music studies,7
6. For exceptions, see Toynbee (2000, 115-22) and Negus (1999,
83-102); for a systematic theory of genre developed by a popular
music scholar, see Fabbri (1982).
7. Two influential examples of the move toward "scene studies"
are Cohen (1991) and Straw (1991).
78 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
and it may well be that since the publication of Tagg's letter,
broad state- ments about black music of the sort to which he took
exception have tapered off. I would not be surprised if this
tapering off resulted from the force of Tagg's presentation, a
thorough dissection of essentialism in dis- cussions of black music
and in the use of racial terminology itself. Tagg notes the
inconsistency of style traits in the music described as black
music, the heterogeneity of practitioners and audience, and the
presence of black-identified traits in "European" music-in fact,
his critique of the concept of "Afro-American music" might well
resemble a critique of the tendency to classify musical texts into
music genres in general. The relentless rationality of Tagg's
arguments makes them difficult to ignore.
Several possible responses to Tagg suggest themselves, although
none provide the type of empirical data that would refute his
points on their own terms. One could mention a historical discourse
emerging in the United States and emanating to the rest of the
world positing a critical difference between African-American music
and other music produced in the United States. This discourse bears
important similarities to the discourse that insists on the idea of
racial difference itself, an idea emerg- ing in almost-perfect
synchrony in the nineteenth century in a profusion of colonial
texts. While in no sense natural, inevitable, or logical, the
"peculiar institution" of slavery and the equally peculiar
legal/social practice of Jim Crow are but two particularly infamous
and visible instances of routinized racial difference that permeate
U.S. social history and that are performed anew as living traces in
individual memories.8 The centrality of this particular axis of
difference can be difficult to under- stand for people from
elsewhere in the world. African-American legal scholar Patricia
Williams (2004, 10) recounts an exchange that she had with a
Parisian friend who was upset over what seemed to the friend to be
the American obsession with racial categories, an obsession seen
most overtly in personal ads. Williams adds that labels such as
"single black female," "lonely Asian male," and "self-described
hunk or hunkette who is tall, blond and emphatically Caucausian"
characterized "the personals columns of any given newspaper or
magazine," which are "perhaps the most openly and unashamedly
segregated sites in the United States." Yet while the particular
enactment of difference in the United States may not find precise
duplication elsewhere, why should we expect performances of
difference (which may occur along axes of gender, sexuality, class,
reli- gion, language, etc., as well as race) to remain the same
from place to place and time to time?
8. For attempts to theorize this historical discourse, see
Brackett (2000) and Radano (1996). For source readings illustrating
the formation of this discourse, see Southern (1971) and Epstein
(1977).
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Examining the idea of black music as a genre as it occurs in
large pop- ular music categories forms another avenue of response
to Tagg's argu- ment. Especially important are the ideas that
genres are not static assem- blages of empirically verifiable
musical characteristics, that they bring with them social
connotations about race, gender, and so on, and that they are
understandable only in relation to other genres at particular
moments in time. While in some respects less accessible, the same
con- tradictions (some might say shortcomings) of generic
understanding highlighted by Tagg hold true for classical music:
one need only look at Chopin's Nocturne in G minor, op. 15, no. 3,
for an example of a piece with almost no musical characteristics
associated with the genre within which its title places it.9 I am
not suggesting that scholars should avoid analyzing internal
stylistic characteristics that create difference within the musical
field. Rather, the preceding discussion suggests that such inter-
nal differentiations will be most convincing when limited to
particular sociohistorical instances. Of course, one reason the
contradictions of genre are more apparent in black popular music is
precisely because the label highlights its associations with social
identity so much more than the label "Nocturne" does. But then this
is true to some extent of other popular music genres as well. For
example, the assumed audience of country music is clear, especially
in its original guise as "hillbilly" music.
In addition to referring to black popular music as part of a
long-range historical discourse and as part of an ever-changing
genre system in a general sense, we may attain a greater degree of
specificity by looking at the uses of this label in one particular
"frozen" moment. In the following example, the relationship between
recordings that "cross over" genre boundaries articulates those
very same transitory and translucent bound- aries. "Crossover"
recordings illuminate the instability of musical cate- gories even
as they reinforce and rely on them. Comparisons between music
industry genre assignations (keeping in mind that the "music
industry" is not separate from the rest of society) and the sound
of spe- cific recordings often highlight sociocultural factors in
classification pre- cisely because of the lack of an airtight
relationship.10 Examining two dif- ferent recordings of the same
song made around the same time provides an occasion for proceeding
with the assumption that these categorical labels must mean
something if so many people seem to think they do,
9. Jeffrey Kallberg (1996) has done just this in his excellent
analysis. 10. For a more in-depth examination of a different moment
that describes a similar dis-
junction, see Brackett 2002.
80 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
even if the categories appear inconsistent from the standpoint
of empiri- cal, musicological data.11
"By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (hereafter "Phoenix") was written
by Jimmy Webb (1967), part of a new breed of songwriters who
emerged during the 1960s (including, most notably, Burt Bacharach).
Webb retained the basic aesthetic of Tin Pan Alley (especially the
use of sophis- ticated harmonic-melodic relationships and
orchestral backing) while updating this traditional notion of craft
with formal fluctuations, occa- sional modal-tinged harmonies, and
contemporary lyric themes suitable for a new brand of swinging
consumer.12 As such, recordings of Webb's songs by artists such as
Glen Campbell (including "Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman,"
"Galveston"), the 5th Dimension ("Up, Up, and Away"), and Richard
Harris ("MacArthur Park") demonstrated the continued viabili- ty of
the "easy listening" or "middle-of-the-road" (MOR) genre within the
popular mainstream during the late 1960s. Yet, in a manner
recalling Tin Pan Alley songs of the "golden era," Webb's songs
proved adaptable in a variety of genres, as illustrated later in
the discussion of Isaac Hayes' soul version of "Phoenix."
Glen Campbell's recording of "Phoenix," released late in 1967,
poses interesting challenges in terms of genre analysis. As might
be expected, it participates in the pop-MOR genre without belonging
to it. It features orchestral backing and relatively complex
functional harmony, but com- pared with the other songs of Webb's
already mentioned, it is relatively simple in formal terms,
consisting of one sixteen-bar section that goes around three times.
Its sense of late 1960s contemporaneity is provided by a
dotted-quarter-eighth-note bass pattern, an integral part of
produc- ing a "rock ballad" feel, and by lyrics containing a degree
of romantic realism-pessimism-bittersweetness that would have been
distinctly out of place prior to the mid-1960s. A brief two-bar
mixolydian modal vamp appears at the end of the song but fades out
before it sounds three times, as the song clocks in at two minutes,
and forty-three seconds, a conven- tional duration for a pop
recording of the era. Campbell sings the melody very close to how
it appears in the sheet music, adding subtle expressive
ornamentation during verses two and three but largely allowing the
orchestration and the lyrics' narrative to carry the drama of the
recording.
In terms of Billboard chart representation, Campbell's "Phoenix"
was a moderate pop hit, reaching number twenty-six on the "Hot 100"
pop chart, while the album of the same name reached number fifteen
on the
11. A more general study of how cover versions highlight the
connections between genre and identity may be found in Griffiths
(2002).
12. The selection of songs for studies such as this one can be
virtually arbitrary. This song was chosen because I initially
presented this discussion at a conference held in Phoenix.
81
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album chart and won the "Best Album of the Year" Grammy award
for 1968, reflecting the prestige granted MOR-pop by the
music-industry establishment at this time. The broad acceptability
of Campbell's music and persona is also evidenced by his primetime
variety network televi- sion show, which aired from 1968 through
1972.
If the identity of Campbell's "Phoenix" as a MOR ballad is
relatively clear, the same cannot be said of its simultaneous
designation as a coun- try song. On the one hand, the recording
fared much better on Billboard's country chart than on the pop
chart, reaching number two, yet the sonic signifiers of country on
"Phoenix" and Campbell's other hits (which also tended to rank
higher on the country charts) are subtle at best. Line Grenier
(1990) has made a persuasive case for the generic ambiguity of
ballads in the rock era, a property that enables the codes of these
record- ings to be seamlessly rearticulated in varying radio
formats. In other words, Campbell's recording of "Phoenix" created
a "ballad" that could retain the country audience without country
markers strong enough so as to disturb mainstream pop listeners.
Members of the listening audience searching for elements of late
1960s country style would have recognized that Campbell's voice has
a slight southern twang and that the song's persona moves steadily
towards Oklahoma, which comes to represent a southern safe haven,
perhaps even "home." Two other Campbell-Webb collaborations,
"Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman," perform a similar fusion, adding
another countryism in the form of a tremeloed, "Bonanza- esque"
guitar. 13
The almost-tangential relationship of these songs to country
music stereotypes has been typical of country-pop ballads going
back to the late 1950s, most notably in the ballad recordings of
Jim Reeves. In one of the many interesting paradoxes (and
tautologies) of genre, perhaps the clear- est evidence why
Campbell's recording of "Phoenix" would be consid- ered a
country-pop ballad is because it bears some resemblance to previ-
ous country-pop ballads. Another factor in assignations of genre is
the role of the performer's image as understood by the music
industry and consuming public at that time: in other words, if Glen
Campbell is per- ceived as a country musician, then he must make
country recordings.
Released in the summer of 1969, Isaac Hayes' recording of
"Phoenix" crosses over from a completely different direction.
Hayes' recording of
13. Richard Peterson (1997, 137-55) has noted the coexistence of
"hard-core" and "soft- shell" country subgenres since the 1930s, an
internal division that indicates how country's hybridity depends on
the maintenance of opposing forces within itself. While Campbell's
work falls clearly into Peterson's soft-shell category, Peterson's
subgeneric dichotomy demonstrates that one need not necessarily
resort to the intrageneric ballad argument to explain why
Campbell-Webb's "Phoenix" can be understood as country.
82 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
Webb's song (as written) lasts roughly the same duration as
Campbell's (slightly under three minutes) but is framed on the
album version (although not the single) by an
eight-and-a-half-minute introduction and a seven-minute concluding
vamp. The album that includes "Phoenix," Hot Buttered Soul,
presaged a new blend of jazz and soul, in some respects
anticipating the R&B subgenre with "Quiet Storm." On "Phoenix"
and on "Walk on By" (the first song on the album, written in 1964
by Burt Bacharach and Hal David), Hayes approaches these 1960s
updates of Tin Pan Alley song craft as a jazz singer (or some
pre-rock and roll pop singers) would, ornamenting and embellishing
phrases, never singing an entire phrase "straight." The soul-gospel
influence is prominent in the many melismas and interjected moans
and hums. In contrast to Campbell's version, Hayes' vocal
performance infuses the song with a dramatic arc, as his vocal
grows gradually more intense and elaborate over the course of the
song's three verses. This is most dramatically illus- trated by the
different treatment of the third line of each verse, which forms
the melodic climax of the song. Hayes places the beginning of each
of the three lines where this shift occurs progressively higher in
his voice (the recording is in E-flat major):
Verse 1: (eb) "she'll laugh when she reaches the part" Verse 2:
(fi) "she'll hear the phone keep right on ringing" Verse 3: (g)
"then she'll cry just to think I would really leave her"
Whereas Hayes' rendition of these lines features an ascent in
scale degree from one to three during the course of the song,
Campbell's recording hovers around scale degree six in the parallel
passages of all three verses. Thus, even in the first verse, Hayes'
treatment of this phrase represents a significant variation on both
Campbell's recording and the printed sheet music (to which
Campbell's recording adheres more closely than does Hayes').
Examples 1 and 2 add detail to these observations. The third
line, because it forms the climax of the melodic line, provides a
good vehicle for comparing the singers' treatment of the line
during the course of their recordings, as well as for comparing the
recordings to each other. Campbell's recorded performance varies
this line from verse to verse, shifting the phrasing, sometimes by
delaying a phrase for a beat or two (compare Ex. lb with la and Ic)
and, at other times, by micro-rhythmic inflections. The
conversational character of his voice and the limited range of
these lines (restricted to a major third, scale degrees 4-6)
projects well the proselike character of Webb's lyrics. This
perhaps helps explain why certain events that may look remarkable
in notation (e.g., the "reversed" accents on the words "I'm
leavin'" in Ex. la, which also
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84 BMR Journal
Example 1. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." A comparison of the
third phrase (mm. 9-12) in verses 1-3 of Glenn Campbell's recording
(transcription by David Brackett) a.
FMaj7 BlMaj7 C7 Am7
She'll laugh when she reach the part that says I'm leav-in'
b.
FMaj7 BlMaj7 C7 Am7
But she'll just hear that phone 3 keep on ring - in'
c.
FMaj7 BIMaj7 C7 Am7
And she'll cry__ just to think__ I'd real-ly leave her
appear to create an accented nonharmonic tone with the d over an
A minor chord), sound smooth and flowing on the recording. The
tran- scriptions also represent the subtle but increasing intensity
that Campbell injects into his delivery of this line in successive
verses of the song, par- ticularly evident in the melismas present
in the second measure of Examples lb and Ic.
As already suggested by the discussion of the climactic points
in his recording, Hayes varies the line considerably more than
Cambell does, sharing only the emphasis on scale degrees 6 and 5 in
the first two mea- sures of the line (shown in Exx. 2a and 2b;
these pitches are emphasized in the first three measures of Ex.
2c). This variation is evident not only in the high note that
begins these lines in Hayes' recording but in the com- plex
internal subdivisions of the beat, in the immense expansion of the
melodic range of the line (all three versions of the line taken
together span a perfect twelfth), and in the lengthening of the
line to three-and-a- half measures from two-and-a-half. Compared
with Campbell's conver- sational vocal quality, Hayes' voice is
more like an instrument, repeating syllables and words ("Oh" and
"ringin"' in Ex. 2b; "I" and "ea," from
-
Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
Example 2. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." A comparison of the
third phrase (mm. 9-12) in verses 1-3 of Isaac Hayes's recording
(transcription by David Brackett) a.
ElMaj7 AbMaj7 B7
b.
C.
She'll laugh when she reach the part
Gm7 Cm7
that says I'm leav - in' yes she will
EbLMaj7 AlMaj7 B7
Woah_ she'll hear_ Oh_ Oh the phone_ keep
Gm7 Cm7 / I~-----3-- -- :
right on ring-in' and ring-in' and ring-in' and ring-in' woah
and ring-in'
E Maj7 ALMaj7 Bj7
Woah__ then she'll cry (i)
Gm7
just to think
Cm7
I would real-ly lea__ ea-ea ve her
"leave," in Ex. 2c) to enable him to embellish the vocal line.
This instru- mental vocal character reaches an apex in the
almost-vertiginous polyrhythm of "ringin' and ringin' and ringin"'
in Example 2b and the over-the-barline internal triplets of
"le-ea-ea-ve her" in Example 2c.
These features strongly suggest the soul genre circa 1969 (much
more
85
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strongly, I might add, than Campbell's versions suggest country,
even in its "soft-shell" guise, circa 1967), and the long
introduction and conclud- ing vamp that frames Webb's song in
Hayes' version make the connec- tion with soul music even more
explicit. The entirety of the lengthy intro- duction takes place
over a single, jazzy, dominant 11-13 harmony, sustained on a
Hammond organ, with a bass playing the same dotted fig- ure found
on Campbell's recording, and with the drummer steadily play- ing
quarter notes on a ride cymbal. Over this, Hayes "preaches" a
sermon on the "power of love" that outlines a prequel to the
narrative presented in the song. Hayes states that the song is
"written by one of the great young songwriters of today" and that
it is a "deep tune" and has a "deep meaning." This section of the
song reinforces the sense that Hayes is par- ticipating in the soul
genre, as he declares that he is going to do the song "my own way"
and "bring it on down to soulsville." The addition of con-
temporary black slang ("she was bad," "she was outasite")
demonstrates how intersubjective awareness of the
audience-"addressivity"-is in play on both musical and verbal
levels. Hayes refers to a recent soul recording in the introduction
when he compares the narrative of his pre- quel to the story found
in Tyrone Davis's hit from earlier in 1969, "Can I Change My Mind."
This process recalls the sort of "troping" discussed by Henry Louis
Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey (1988), a practice that is
decisive (according to one of Gates's better-known formulations) in
cre- ating a sense of an African-American literary tradition. Hayes
stretches the concluding vamp, heard for a few seconds on
Campbell's recording, to a length almost equal to the introduction,
and provides an opportuni- ty for extensive vocal extemporizing,
another musical practice that evokes gospel and soul music.
As in the classification of Campbell's recording, the importance
of pre- conceptions and social perceptions of identity plays a role
in genre assig- nation in Hayes' version of "Phoenix": Hayes'
personal and vocal identi- ty as an African American cannot be
discounted when one tries to understand the placement of his
recording in the soul music category. Another factor is Hayes'
previous association-as a songwriter, pianist, and producer-with
Stax Records, a recording company specializing in soul music, a
factor that parallels Campbell's previous associations with country
music (as well as with pop music as a studio musician).14 The
representation of the mainstream popularity of these two recordings
was remarkably alike, with neither of them being a big hit using
Billboard's methods of measurement. Campbell, however, had far more
mainstream success in other arenas, as witnessed by his television
show and Grammy
14. Campbell even toured with the Beach Boys during the initial
period when primary songwriter Brian Wilson ceased to perform live
with the band.
86 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
awards. Yet, it was by virtue of similar processes of crossing
over to the mainstream, albeit from different directions, that the
generic identity of the two recordings was confirmed. 15
The way I am establishing the viability of the term black
popular music may well seem absurd to those for whom such elaborate
and circuitous argumentation about black popular music and
African-American identi- ty merely addresses an obvious fact of
life. Many subtle and important statements about black music over
the years have explored conceptual continuities in African-American
music rather than consistency of empir- ically based style
traits.16 These studies reveal how a linkage between social
identity and a practice of music making (as in "black music") need
not depend on the reproduction of negative stereotypes but may
function as a positive marker, a chiastic turn, not unlike the "sly
civility" ("the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative
demand") noted by cer- tain postcolonial critics.17 The centrality
of music in specifically political struggles by African Americans
undermines the idea that black music can only result from naive
beliefs in cultural inferiority and purism.
In two recent scholarly landmarks on African-American music,
Samuel Floyd Jr. (1995) and Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. (2003), use the
concept of "cul- tural memory" as a discursive tactic that forms an
implicit riposte to dis- missals of the idea of black music. One of
the principal ways in which cul- tural memory becomes audible and
visible is through the practice of storytelling, an ineluctably
temporal practice that disturbs the fixity of spatial practices by
blurring the line between scholarly discourse and fic- tion.
Storytelling as a mode of discourse, relying as it invariably does
on memories, forms an opposing pole to scientific discourse. The
truth of storytelling depends on external verifications of truth
that are clearly con- tingent. Scientific discourse, on the other
hand, with its abundant sys- tems of external verification, no
longer has to clarify its relationship to the conditions that
authorize its claims to truth. Michel de Certeau (1984, 87)
describes a powerful property of memory and storytelling in what he
terms the "'art' of memory," an art that "'authorizes' (makes
possible) a
15. Mainstream often remains an unexamined term in discussions
of genre and value in popular music. For a recent attempt to shed
light on this "straw" genre, see Toynbee (2002).
16. A selection (by no means exhaustive) of representative work
includes Baraka (1967), Wilson (1974), Maultsby (1990), Floyd
(1995), Neal (1999), and Ramsey (2003).
17. The term sly civility comes from Homi Bhabha's (1994,
93-101) essay of the same name, a complex meditation on the "the
native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative demand" that
results ultimately in paranoia on the part of the colonizer (99).
For a post- colonial study of the "Black Atlantic" that explores
how a similar dynamic connects African- American tactical responses
to power with that of the black diaspora, see Gilroy (1993).
87
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reversal, a change in order or place, a transition into
something different, a 'metaphor' of practice or of
discourse."18
Floyd (1995, 8) explicitly uses the concept of cultural memory
to con- front objectivist biases that suppress forms of knowledge
that would allow subaltern discourses to surface, acknowledging
what he calls the "nonfactual and nonreferential motivations,
actions and beliefs that members of a culture seem, without direct
knowledge or deliberate train- ing, to 'know.'" Floyd's discussion
of how cultural know-how becomes second nature recalls the work of
other social theorists who have tried to account for the seemingly
objective nature of subjective and intersubjec- tive experience. I
am thinking here primarily of Pierre Bourdieu's (1977, 1990) notion
of the "habitus"-an ensemble of principles that generate and
organize practices and representations-or of Charles Taylor's
(2002) work on "social imaginaries."19
Guthrie Ramsey (2003) elaborates, riffs, and tropes on Floyd's
com- pelling discussion of cultural memory. In this way, he
situates himself in a lineage of African-American writers
discussing African-American music in a manner analogous to the
troping of African-American fiction writers and musicians who
generate an intertextual sense of tradition. Ramsey emphasizes,
even more than Floyd, the concept of cultural mem- ory and the
practice of storytelling, including narratives of the formation of
his own musical identity, as well as a substantial ethnography of
his extended family. With this shift in the grounds of what might
constitute scholarly discourse, Ramsey boldly presents an
enunciating practice that challenges orthodox epistemology in a
fashion that matches the challenge of African-American music as an
object of study within the discipline of musicology. The use of
storytelling and cultural memory emphasizes the time of black music
at the expense of trying to locate it in its proper place; it
scores what de Certeau (1984, 79) calls a coup: "a detour by way of
a past... or by way of a quotation . . . made in order to take
advantage of an occasion and to modify an equilibrium by taking it
by surprise. Its dis- course is characterized more by a way of
exercising itself than by the thing it indicates" (emphasis in the
original). Far from being presented as stat- ic, "pure" form, the
existence of which can only be thrown into doubt by inconsistent
style traits, black music in this context, is revealed as hybrid at
the root, resisting closure as a concept in the vigorous
enunciating practices that perform its identity in ever-new
guises.
Some will undoubtedly raise the question whether this use of
cultural
18. The role of memory in African-American literary practices is
explored in a series of essays collected in Fabre and O'Meally
(1994).
19. For an essay that develops a theoretical framework for
understanding different ways in which music might figure in the
constitution of social imaginaries, see Born (2000).
88 BMR Journal
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Brackett * Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music
memory to write about African-American music excludes scholars
who are not African American and who therefore cannot lay claim to
that par- ticular form of cultural memory. Yet identification in
the intersubjective realm of the social is predicated on
recognizing and identifying with an "other." Thus, my identity as a
white person growing up in the United States during the late 1960s
and 1970s depended (and depends) on my sense of other people being
"nonwhite," and on arguably inhabiting a social imaginary
conterminous or overlapping with others who identi- fied themselves
differently. When cultural memory is invoked as a way of
understanding the enunciating practice of black music, it reminds
us of the contingent nature of identity and how our identity,
whatever we perceive it to be, becomes meaningful in relation to
other identities as they are performed in the same social
space.
To understand how the everyday knowledge embodied in genre
labels can have such communicative power despite their ultimate
irrationality is to begin to understand the sort of almost
subliminal logic performed by the various genres associated with
African-American popular music. Beyond the banal level of keeping
the wheels of music commerce turning, genres function as ephemeral
utterances that provide a clue to the role played by music in the
intersubjective social imagination. As such, gen- res may act as
mediators somewhat in the manner of myth and totemism in the
studies of Levi-Strauss (1966); that is, genres indicate a tacit
and contingent collective agreement about the "proper" place for
different types of music and the social groups most associated with
them.
To insist on the role of popular music in facilitating the
performance of cultural difference may strike some as obeisance to
political and/or the- oretical correctness. Rather than debunk
genre labels for their internal inconsistencies, I have tried to
inquire as to their social functions, as to why these labels seem
so important despite their rather transparent mal- leability. I am
not sure that this quality of genre need be viewed as a defect;
indeed, it would be difficult to find any completely consistent use
of language or of symbolic communication in general. More to the
point, in the specific case of "black popular music," we are not
talking simply about another term or label but about a form of
symbolic communication imbricated in a lengthy history of power
struggles.
It may seem as if I am trying to reconcile two incommensurable
approaches. An emphasis on genre as a way of approaching the
practice of black music stresses institutional structures and
spatial arrangements, whereas an emphasis on cultural memory
foregrounds the deferred tem- porality of enunciation. Yet if we
can accept the idea that cultural memo- ries represent more than
the consciousness of the individual who articu-
89
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lates them, thereby encompassing a cultural group or a
community, then I would argue that genres consist of individual
musical utterances enun- ciating the here-and-now in musical terms.
Embedded as we are in con- stantly reconfigured social imaginaries,
then the point may be that if the personal is political, then the
individual can certainly be institutional.
DISCOGRAPHY
5th Dimension. Up, up, and away. Soul City 756 (1967). Campbell,
Glen. By the time I get to Phoenix. Capitol 2015 (1967). ---.
Galveston. Capitol 2428 (1969). ---. Wichita lineman. Capitol 2302
(1968). Davis, Tyrone. Can I change my mind. Dakar 602 (1968).
Drifters. The very best of the Drifters. Rhino R2 71211 (1993).
Harris, Richard. MacArthur Park. Dunhill 4134 (1968). Hayes, Isaac.
By the time I get to Phoenix. Hot buttered soul. Enterprise 1001
(1969). -. Walk on by. Hot buttered soul. Enterprise 1001 (1969).
Outkast. Hey ya. Speakerboxxx/The love below. Arista 82876-50133-2
(2003).
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Article Contentsp. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77p. 78p. 79p. 80p. 81p.
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Issue Table of ContentsBlack Music Research Journal, Vol. 25,
No. 1/2 (Spring - Fall, 2005), pp. 1-233Volume InformationFront
MatterEditor's Note [pp. 1-1]Representing America, Instructing
Europe: The Hampton Choir Tours Europe [pp. 3-42]This House, This
Music: Exploring the Interdependent Interpretive Relationship
between the Contemporary Black Church and Contemporary Gospel Music
[pp. 43-72]Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music [pp. 73-92]The
Disappearing Dance: Maxixe's Imperial Erasure [pp. 93-117]Current
Research Twelve Years after the William Grant Still Centennial [pp.
119-154]Reflexive Ethnography: An Ethnomusicologist's Experience as
a Jazz Musician in Zimbabwe [pp. 155-165]The African Matrix in Jazz
Harmonic Practices [pp. 167-222]Back Matter