by Leila Taylor
But aside from the darkness of the theme and the gruesome lyrics, what makes “Strange Fruit” a gothic song? It’s the contrast between the beautiful and the terrible (and I mean terrible in the classic sense to evoke terror), the scent of magnolias clashing with the stench of burnt bodies. The lyrics are both bucolic and grotesque, melancholic and horrific, enticing and repulsive, pastoral and visceral. And then there’s the unique vocality of Holiday’s voice. She sings from her head, it’s shallow and seems a bit creaky, with unusual fluctuations of pitch and with sharp pronunciation of key words. The song is in B-flat minor, a gloomy key and ends on an unresolved F with a wavering, creaking, elongation of the word “crop.” David Margolick, author of Strange Fruit: Biography of a Song, compares it to the dangling “dead man on the branch.” Then, of course, there is the performance which is delivered with a ritualized drama and received with an almost religious reverence.
Claudia Rankine says, “Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against.” “Strange Fruit,” no matter how many times it is sung, no matter who performs it, will always be positioned against the context in which it was written. Critics of “Strange Fruit” covers, often talk about the “displacement” of the song as an erasure of the political, sociological condition that created it, making it symbolic and transient. The cover song is always situated in comparison to a canonical version, the One True recording, and that version is always situated historically, leaving the cover vulnerable to temporal drift, re-contextualization and subject to new meanings and associations.
So, what happens when the song is shifted (spatially, temporally, culturally) from its original context: a Black woman singing in a jazz club in 1939 and relocated to an album by British post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees? What happens when Benjamin’s “historical testimony,” is deleted from the narrative? Positioned against other cover songs on Through the Looking Glass, it is reduced from a polemical indictment to a stylistic influence and an aesthetic atmosphere. It’s normalized. As much as I love Siouxsie Sioux, in her hands, “Strange Fruit” is just not that strange.
Through the Looking Glass, is a collection of cover songs with artists like Roxy Music, Kraftwerk, and Bob Dylan. It also includes a sultry version of “Trust in Me” from the Disney film The Jungle Book (which has its own problematic colonial issues). I get why she covered “Strange Fruit”, I can understand how the song and the story behind it would be evocative and have meaning for Siouxsie Sioux, how Billie Holiday may have influenced her (she influenced a lot of people) and lyrically how it fits within the Banshees’ wheelhouse. “The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” sits comfortably next to Budgie’s “pop eyed, horns, bushy tailed, long teeth and claws” of “Rawhead and Bloodybones”.
Holiday’s rendition is relatively minimalist in comparison. There’s a long intro with a trumpet solo and then accompanied by the piano. The Banshees’ version begins with the soft sound of whistling wind then dramatic violins interject in a classic horror movie soundtrack. A slow New Orleans jazz dirge is inserted in the middle with a little soulful “woo-woo,” a little “performed anachronism” of Blackness to pad it with some authenticity. Just when you think it can’t get any cornier, it ends with the sound of a distant bell toll. Siouxsie Sioux’s rendition is actually more reminiscent of the idyllic antebellum South that the song denounces. It’s closer to Porgy and Bess than “Cities in Dust.” When she sings “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” I cringe, a bit embarrassed for her. These theatrical additives end up diluting, not enhancing the message. For an audience that may have never heard the original or recognize the metaphor, the song becomes just another example of spooky glamour in the Siouxsie and the Banshees repertoire.
I’m not suggesting that Siouxsie’s version is less “authentic” than the Holiday version, but I am saying that it’s a different song. The problem with remakes and covers of “Strange Fruit,” is that it comes jam packed with a whole lot of meaning already and anything that complicates it further is doomed to fuck it up. “Strange Fruit” has been covered many, many times over the years by many different people, but there has always been some debate over who is “allowed” to sing it. Nina Simone’s version was recorded in the Sixties during the height of the civil rights movement, which feels absolutely right. In 2015, Jill Scott sang it at a benefit concert called Shining a Light: A Concert for Progress on Race in America, so that makes sense. And even more recently, British singer Rebecca Ferguson publicly declined an invitation from President Donald Trump to sing at his inauguration, saying that she would perform only if she could sing “Strange Fruit.”
For the record, I don’t think it is inherently “wrong” for non-Black people to sing “Strange Fruit.” I don’t think it’s wrong for Taylor Swift to do a country-western version of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September.” I don’t believe only Black Americans are allowed to sing “Strange Fruit.” But recognizing the recontextualization that takes place with a cover, means recognizing that moving cultural artifacts from one time and place to another, risks erasing the artist and the story it was intending to honor.
Even though Siouxsie denounces the label goth, they are known as a quintessential goth band, and anything associated with that band is going to have a goth filter put over it. People buying the album are buying a Siouxsie and the Banshees album and unless the listener proactively searches out the original and its origin, the story of J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith and the thousands of other victims, goes unknown, and the original tribute, honoring those swinging black bodies risks being lost.
There is a long history of Black music being remade by white musicians to make the songs and the artists who sung them more palatable to a white consumer audience, but “Strange Fruit” was never meant to be palatable… for anyone… Black or white.
Annie Lennox covered “Strange Fruit” on her album Nostalgia in 2014, which include such classics from the Black music catalog as “God Bless the Child,” and “Summertime.” I would like to ask her who exactly is nostalgic and for what? In an interview with the Black talk show host Tavis Smiley, Lennox said of her cover of “Strange Fruit,” “[violence as a theme] is expressed in all kinds of different ways, whether it be racism, domestic violence, warfare, or terrorism, or simply one person attacking another person. This is something that we as human beings have to deal with.”4
Annie Lennox never had to “deal” with lynching which she doesn’t mention once in this interview. Insisting on a universality of “Strange Fruit” threatens Black erasure, taking Black Lives Matter and making it “All Lives Matter.” It takes away the horror, the haunt, the discomfort that Billie Holiday and Cafe Society worked so hard to maintain. It takes away its bite and just makes it pretty. Van Elferen says, “The Gothic ostentatiously pushes the uncanny into its audience’s face, demanding that they confront their own specters,” which is exactly what “Strange Fruit” intended, and succeeded in doing. Taking away the Blackness of the song takes away its gothic-ness.
I resist the notion of thinking about “Strange Fruit” just as an old-standard from The Great American Songbook. It’s not de-lovely or too damn hot and unfortunately remains too damn relevant. In November of 2018, shortly after the Midterm elections in the US, Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi praised and thanked her friend and supporter, Colin Hutchinson, to a group of reporters and said, “I would fight a circle saw for him. If he invited me to a public hanging, I would be on the front row,” evoking laughter from the crowd. Out of all of the states post-Civil War, Mississippi had the highest number of lynchings. 581 Black people were hung in public from 1882-1968.5
“The Passenger” is probably my favorite cover on Through the Looking Glass and like “Strange Fruit,” I knew this version before Iggy Pop’s original. It’s an easy song to like; the lyrics are dreamy and hopeful with a danceable beat and sing-along la, la, las. But Siouxsie
singing Iggy Pop is a lateral move. “The Passenger” doesn’t have the weight of representation behind it and requires no authoritative voice to carry the heavy load of history behind it. “The Passenger” doesn’t represent a people the way “Strange Fruit” does and it has the luxury of just existing on its own — light enough for anyone to pick up. Singing “Strange Fruit” requires the burden of speaking for legions.
The history of rock music is a history of theft, of white singers profiting from Black voices, stealing styles, picking up Blackness when it’s popular and putting it down when it’s not. In a way, the lyrics of “The Passenger” are representational of the privilege of their whiteness, and the need to claim everything:
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
‘Cause it just belongs to you and me
So let’s take a ride and see what’s mine
I’m almost ashamed of my childish critique of Holiday, but I was a kid; I didn’t know any better. I really hate to admit that I probably heard the Siouxsie and the Banshees version of “Strange Fruit” before Billie Holiday’s, which is even more embarrassing since I was fifteen at the time and really should have known better. But I think it’s because I skipped right over it most of the time. It was never one of my favorite tracks. The cultural erasure of the song muted it for me, made it something unrecognizable as something that was from my own story.
Now when I listen to Billie Holiday I know exactly where that voice comes from and it’s not strange or wrong at all. It’s exactly right and it seems preposterous to me that there could have been a time when I thought she was talking about rotten peaches. Now when I hear her voice and listen to those lyrics I don’t see a “strange and bitter crop,” I see Eric Garner face down on a sidewalk in Staten Island surrounded by white men in uniforms.
I Put a Spell on You
I went to New Orleans for Halloween and as my friends and I strolled along the parade on Frenchmen Street admiring the costumes, I saw a white man in blackface, dressed as some kind of “African Savage” with a leopard skin loincloth, a giant afro with a bone sticking through it, a spear in one hand and a red Solo cup in the other. We were there for Anne Rice’s Vampire Ball and despite spending most of our night in campy queer glamour, despite being in the protective comfort of my multicultural cohort of Yankee liberals, a wave of anxiety washed over for me as I remembered that I was in “The South.” This is also why I have a complicated relationship with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
Jalacy Hawkins, the godfather of shock rock and the forebear to Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, and Rob Zombie, wrote “I Put a Spell on You” in 1956 and claims that he was so drunk at the time he doesn’t remember recording it. He intended for it to be a serious ballad, he was trained in opera and wanted to be a traditional blues singer, but what came out were the screams of wild man that didn’t match the face of a suave crooner, and Screamin’ Jay was born. When he recorded it the second time around he said, “I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death.”6 In his television debut performance on the Merv Griffin Show in 1966, Griffin introduced the audience to “one of the wildest singing gimmicks I’ve ever heard.” Griffin said, “He may not scare you, but when he’s performing you won’t be going to the refrigerator.” I’m not sure if that means the audience would be too enwrapped in the performance to take a snack break or if his performance would make them sick to their stomachs, but it’s telling that he prefaces the act with the assurance that he won’t scare them, that despite what they may come to expect, those in the studio audience were perfectly safe.
On the stage floor a skeletal, severed hand creeps its way through the curtains. Then the pompadoured Hawkins appears jumping over it, a cape flowing behind him shaking a tambourine in one hand and a staff with a skull with a cigarette out of its mouth impaled at the end. He punctuates the blast of the horn section with wild kicks and shaking legs, with a warbling “ooga-booga” chant like a schlocky B-horror movie version of a voodoo witch doctor. He looks around at the audience, wide eyed and confused as if he’s not sure why they are there. There’s nervous laughter from the audience as he hops bow-legged across the stage. He grunts, barks, howls, grumbles, and screams, the ramblings of a man possessed in some mysterious ritual from the darkest depths of Africa.
But there’s this one moment where he appears to be on the verge of laughter himself, barely holding it in. It’s a rock & roll cakewalk, making fun of white people’s fears, giving them exactly what they thought Black people really were: savage, unintelligible, overly sexual, and scary. When he’s done he gives a dignified bow and gracefully exits the stage reminding us that it was all an act. He was urged on by DJ Alan Freed, who convinced Hawkins to double down on the spooky imagery by rising from a coffin. He resisted at first saying, “No black dude gets in a coffin alive — they don’t expect to get out!”7
The NAACP hated him. In the Talented Tenth rules of respectability, there is little space for the camp, the low, the ridiculous. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins did not “uplift.” Nina Simone uplifts. Her version of “I Put a Spell on You” from 1967 lifted it out of its vaudevillian gutter and into the sophisticated jazz club where Hawkins always intended it to be. It’s a strange backwards evolution to take something originally performed as a novelty and treating it with gravitas; the words of a woman trying to reclaim the man who’s been treating her wrong. It makes sense coming from Nina. It’s played as a metaphor — what we want the song to be and what we expect a song to be. Her version is slow, raw, and sexy but without the speaking in tongues. It’s the classy version.
Like Merv said, it’s unlikely that anyone in the audience was afraid of Hawkins conjuring a spirit, or hexing them through the gamma rays and into their living rooms. It’s more likely that they were afraid of being found out, of being exposed as people who deep down still believed that Black people went to witch doctors and shrunk the heads of their enemies. It’s a fear of discomfort, like the audience at the Cafe Society, they were just there to have a good time, they weren’t there to be schooled. Hawkins took full advantage of that discomfort by charging promoters an extra $5,000 to pop out of the coffin.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was brilliant, and goth owes him a debt of gratitude, but I still get squeamish watching his performance. Was he a groundbreaking Black performer struggling to make it in a business owned by white people, fighting to keep his image under his own control, or would he forever just be a novelty act with his most famous song legitimized by other artists who played it straight (including Annie Lennox)? He resented being pigeon-holed saying, “Why can’t people take me as a regular singer without making a bogeyman out of me?”8 The performance, the visual presentation, the power of drama surpassed the song, assigning an identity for the artist that he couldn’t shake. He screamed and so he became Screamin.’
I saw Bauhaus play at Coachella in 2005. Peter Murphy, still rail thin and vampiric pale, his spikey mop of black hair was now white as he sang, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” suspended upside down like a bat. It was fantastic and just the right amount of theatrics. Bauhaus became the goth archetype, but lead singer Peter Murphy said:
It was a very tongue-in-cheek song which sounded extremely serious, very heavy-weight and quite dark. The mistake we made is that we performed it with naïve seriousness! That’s what pushed the audience into it as a much more serious thing. The intense intention going into the performance actually overshadowed the humor of it. Because of that, the Gothic tag was always there.9
Hawkins’s caricature is so cartoonish, so outrageous that it’s hard to believe there could be any truth to it, but he claimed he really did practice voodoo. Director Jim Jarmusch cast Hawkins as the manager of a rundown hotel in his 1989 film Mystery Train. During the filming, production was halted due to relentless rain. Jarmusch relates in the documentary, I Put a Spell on Me:
Jay took out all these bones he had in a little leather bag. He rolled them out on
this table and said, “Alright, go set your cameras up because it’s gonna stop raining.” We said, “Come on Jay are you serious?” He said, “Well I’m half serious. Let’s go see.” And, like five minutes later it stopped raining and it didn’t rain again the whole time we were shooting.
Regardless of whether or not he had any powers, I think he liked freaking white people out and must have gotten some satisfaction that they would give him money for the privilege. To put a finer point on it, in 1991 he released an album called Black Music for White People.
LeRoi Jones says that “each phase of the Negro’s music issued directly from the dictates of his social and psychological environment,” and nothing quite encapsulates the sound of the contemporary Black gothic as horrorcore, a subgenre of hip-hop in which the classic themes of racism, gang violence, drugs, police brutality, and poverty use the language of horror movies to tell their story. Hip-hop has always been a vehicle for telling stories about the Black urban experience, but horrorcore goes deeper and darker into the B-movie, slasher nightmare of psychosis, Satanism, cannibalism, mutilation, necrophilia, suicide, murder, and torture. The bands and their members have puny names like the Gravediggaz’, Prince Paul (The Undertaker), Frukwan (The Gatekeeper), Poetic (The Grym Reaper) and RZA (The RZArector). Gravediggaz’s album, 6 Feet Deep, was released overseas as Niggamortis. While the names might have a dark humor to them the lyrics and the stories they tell speak to the real condition of Black lives under centuries of white suppression and its psychological ramifications.10
In “Diary of a Madman,” the Gravediggaz are in court, pleading insanity on a murder charge. The defense: the conditions of being a Black man in America, of surviving centuries of subjugation and inherited trauma and the attempt to thrive in a society that values you as a commodity but condemns you as a person is enough to drive a person insane. Living as a Black person is to exist in a state of madness and violence, which is not only inevitable, but it is a form of normalcy. RZArector raps: