Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  DEDICATION

  FOR ROBERT CHRISTGAU

  AND CAROLA DIBBELL,

  THE SEXIEST COUPLE I KNOW

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  1. THE TABOO BABY

  NEW ORLEANS, 1800–1900

  2. THAT DA DA STRAIN: SHIMMYING, SHAKING, SEXOLOGY

  NEW YORK, 1900–1929

  3. LET IT BREATHE ON ME: SPIRITUAL EROTICS

  CHICAGO, BIRMINGHAM, MEMPHIS, 1929–1956

  4. TEEN DREAMS AND GROWN-UP URGES

  THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND, 1950–1960

  5. THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  NEW YORK, DETROIT, SAN FRANCISCO, LOS ANGELES, 1961–1970

  6. HARD AND SOFT REALITIES

  LONDON, LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK, 1971–1979

  7. OH NO, IT HURTS: AIDS, REAGAN, AND THE BACKLASH

  NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO, SEATTLE, 1977–1997

  8. HUNGRY CYBORGS: BRITNEY, BEYONCÉ, AND THE VIRTUAL FRONTIER

  CYBERSPACE, 1999–2016

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ANN POWERS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PREFACE

  I think I was around nine years old when I realized music is sexy. From the first time I heard the songs that moved me to distraction in childhood, by the Beatles and the Jackson 5, I loved them because they affected my whole body, making me think hard and respond deeply and jump like a jelly bean. Music gave me a way to engage with those “funny feelings” my friend Lisa said rose up in her when she looked at a picture of Keith Richards slouching around in the Rolling Stones, feelings my mother wouldn’t mention and the boys in the schoolyard snickered about but wouldn’t own. The girls in my life were the ones who wanted to name those feelings, and we did it by dancing to the beat of the Bee Gees and Queen and Blondie, and once we all hit college, Prince. We became sexual by playing records, sweating in the crowd at rock shows, making out with boys in bands or other fans or each other while music played loud in cars and basements and through the walls of the bathrooms at the Odd Fellows Hall.

  When I started writing about music for a living, I felt driven not to merely acknowledge its erotic pull, but to really understand it. This took time, a lot of listening, more sweating in clubs, more dancing. I eventually realized that in order to grasp how the sounds I loved related to the sex I was having—that everyone was having—I’d need to learn more about how music factored into the history of the places where it originated. Rock and jazz and soul and hip-hop are American inventions, born of and nurtured by people mixing and mingling, claiming themselves and reaching for others. I knew that; I could see the connections forming all around me in the music world. Digging into record crates and spending time with my nose buried in books helped me understand the context for these developments.

  My own movement back and forth from the archive to the audience has continually shaped my understanding. I’ve learned more than I can easily express from the examples of women, queer folk, and people of color who’ve refused to remain on the margins, both as musicians and as writers filling in the gaps in the standard histories of the American experience. I gained my rebel attitude from punk, my joy from disco, my openness from singer-songwriters, my seriousness from soul. I went to thousands of shows. What I remember most from them is the physicality of it all: the heat of the Metallica mosh pit and the tenderness of tears shared at a Tori Amos sing-along; the way someone I’d never met before grabbed my hand while Kirk Franklin led his gospel choir toward an anointing. The growing literature of popular music scholarship and criticism helped me understand the lost histories and inner drives that lie behind these experiences. I came to understand that American popular music, our nation’s first original art form, is made of our best impulses toward freedom, community, and self-realization, and our worst legacies of racial oppression and sexual hypocrisy. I decided I wanted to write a book about American music and American sex, one that would really be about American dreaming, violence, pleasure, hunger, lies, and love.

  This book is my offering: a collection of scenes from behind the veil of propriety about a subject we don’t discuss openly anywhere near as much as we should. It’s grounded in testimonies about the way music ripped down that veil, or made it into a costume its makers could drop to reveal themselves. This is not the standard history of guitar heroes and superstars, though some do appear here. It belongs equally to the dancers in the crowd, the groupies backstage, the couples huddled in the corner as a greasy band lays down the blues.

  My account doesn’t contain everything I wish it could. Another volume would give Latin music much more of its due, and reach across the ocean to England more often, and go into inner space on the electronic waves of techno and rave. A whole volume could be written on the rap life of Nicki Minaj, someone who makes only a brief appearance here. That’s one thing about popular music: despite the canonizing efforts of certain thinkers and industry types, at its heart it’s anti-hierarchical and inexhaustible, always renewing itself and skewing its own history in the process. As I explored its many avenues, I found that certain ones connected to illuminate the story I wanted to tell, of how the people of a nation founded on both liberty and oppression found a way to abide together by dancing and singing together, and, eventually, by listening to strangers who did those things in different ways. The story of how music shows us our beauty and our ugliness. The pride it can conjure. The longing it shapes and that sometimes undoes it, as such longing undoes and remakes us.

  INTRODUCTION

  American music originates in the bodies of its people, in the pull of a moan from the throat and a spine-loosening roll of the hips. From the beginning, it scandalized those who didn’t understand it, or maybe felt its impact all too well. Do you think the birth of rock and roll happened in 1956? Try 1819, when John F. Watson, a Methodist layman, noticed that throughout Philadelphia, worshipers were not sticking to the script of the hymnals they held in their hands.

  Watson saw and heard the behavior that so worried him not only in churches, but also in camp meetings held outdoors, where pretty much anyone could wander in. He described what he witnessed in a religious tract with the finger-wagging title Methodist Error, or Friendly Christian Advice to Those Methodists Who Indulge in Extravagant Religious Emotions and Bodily Exercises: “We have, too, a growing evil, in the practices of singing in our places of public and society worship, merry airs, adapted from old songs, to hymns of our composing; often miserable as poetry, and senseless as matter, and most frequently composed and first sung by the illiterate blacks of the society.”1 These combinations of holy and profane texts, and of African and European musical sources, stimulated excessive behavior (folks would just keep going all night long) and spiritual vanity in participants, Watson thought. “In the meantime, one and another of musical feelings, and consonant animal spirits, has been heard stepping the merry strains with all the precision of an avowed dancer.” In other words, the subjects of Watson’s concern weren’t just singing. They were shaking it, baby, shaking it.

  The religious practice he observed—a form that eventually became crystallized within the ring shout, a fluid series of movements blended with call-and-response singing that Africans had carried over through the horrific Middle Passage and into their enslavement—had parallels outside the church, in dances from around the world performed in the streets of new cities and at rural fairs and holiday celebrations. It also echoed the rituals of the natives that early Americans encountered. But what
were the “animal spirits” he mentioned? The phrase sounds racist to contemporary ears, invoking ideas of the primitive often attached to both African Americans and native people. In Watson’s time, it signified something else: an ancient philosophical concept that also shows up in Descartes and many post-Enlightenment religious writings, rooted in the word anima, a name for the soul. Perhaps it’s more useful now to call them animating spirits, the ineffable mobilizing forces that make people feel alive.

  These spirits, the philosophers thought, were elements within the human bloodstream that conveyed the stirrings of the soul throughout the body. They enabled and regulated the passions. Music was often invoked as a similar catalyst. Later, Freud’s concept of the libido would refocus thinking about the animal spirits on the sex drive, while the economist John Maynard Keynes would connect the phrase to the vitality behind capitalism. Combine all these different ways of trying to grasp what animates both the spiritual and the emotional—what inner surge awakens people to themselves and makes them reach out to others—and you might also hit upon a new way of thinking about the erotic, one that goes beyond simple assumptions about sexual arousal.

  What Watson encountered was an erotic exchange that’s at the heart of American popular music. This method of sharing and communicating the most personal, difficult to articulate, and indeed intimate aspects of the human experience has been taken up by every kind of American as a conduit for both joy and pain. Through it, communities formed and sustained themselves. From the beginning, music’s ability to open people to each other also made it an avenue for exploitation, and a kind of theater where Americans acted out the ways they violated and oppressed one another and dreamed up ways they might heal those wounds. But the erotic as a force in music is rarely discussed in these more complicated terms. Instead, it’s the subject that makes people squirm—misunderstood, feared, underestimated, and oversimplified for more than two centuries. Call it sex to keep it simple, and often this vital spirit is reduced to a litany of crude gestures and lewd jokes, or, even in our age of so-called liberation, held up as a threat. Waxing poetic, however, can lead to resurrecting old stereotypes that equate sexiness with a kind of raw instinctiveness, ideas rooted in the racism and sexism that assume that certain people have superpowers in the dark and are menaces to society everywhere else.

  The real reason American popular music is all about sex is that we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality’s power through music. This music, infinite in its variety, is rooted in the experiences of people who made a new nation within a dynamic of unprecedented mobility, horrific exploitation and oppression, constant mixing, and the ongoing renegotiation of limits. From colonial times onward, the sounds that inspired dancing and loud sing-alongs in the streets, in ballrooms, in bars, and in people’s homes exuded erotic energy and often directly discussed the problems and possibilities of sex and love that people were facing in their times. This was always rhythmic music, too, grounded in those drumbeats carried from Africa within enslaved people’s bodies, because their instruments had been taken from them. They stomped and slapped out its meanings in ways that were arousing and miraculous. Popular music’s very form, its ebb and flow of excitement so closely resembling the libido, drew people to it as a way to speak what, according to propriety, couldn’t be spoken.

  And always, this music was a mix, and about mixing. It arose from those streets and semi-private places as a product of Afro-Caribbean, European, Latin American, and native cultures colliding and mingling. America’s erotic drive emerged inseparable from the fact of its troubled multiculturalism, rooted in both oppression and the hope for freedom. American music came into being as a bastard child refusing that damning label, shaking off the guilt of perceived illegitimacy. True erotic expression is a kind of truth-telling, bringing out into the open the most joyful and painful aspects of living in a particular body at a particular place and time. It’s also a vehicle for what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “somebodiness . . . the sense of selfhood and dignity that nothing in all the world can take away.”2 Music, which runs through the body, has been able to encompass this profound and necessary aspect of human experience. And it gave us a way to bring it out in the open and share it.

  It’s impossible to talk about American bodies without acknowledging the legacy of gross inequality that begins in the enslavement of Africans. That’s another quality American eroticism shares with American music. It is very difficult to speak of race and sex together in language that’s not corrupted by centuries of violent oppression; terms like miscegenation, conveying legacies of forced unions across color lines, instantly evoke dangerous prejudices. Yet because the struggle to be human together while acknowledging a legacy of wrongdoing—the struggle to absorb the stain of slavery without erasing it, and to fully acknowledge the countless acts of violence that are elemental to our hybrid national character—is central to what it means to be American, it’s no surprise that American eroticism is as much a means to reflect upon these differences, written in the body, as it is a route to the pleasures that can sometimes seem to erase them. This is why Dr. King’s “somebodiness” matters so much: eroticism is the full experience of being human, every inch of flesh and spirit, nothing denied.

  In the twenty-first century, mainstream popular music often feels very disconnected from this ideal. It has become the product of a global industry, branded and rebranded through the images of stars who can seem interchangeable and are certainly objectified. How does somebodiness survive within a body that doesn’t even seem real, due to plastic surgery, vocal Auto-Tuning, and a performer’s seeming adherence to a porn script? In 1998 a former Mouseketeer, Britney Spears, donned a schoolgirl fetish costume in a music-video high school hallway and sang an ode to sadomasochism; “Hit me, baby, one more time,” Spears cooed. In 2004, Janet Jackson, a superstar known for balancing raciness with a wholesome demeanor, lost half of her bustier during the halftime show at the Super Bowl; actually, it was torn off by the overeager teen idol Justin Timberlake in what became known as “Nipplegate.” American families munching chips and dip in their dens were exposed to the horrors of a finely crafted metallic sunburst jewel decorating Jackson’s pierced nipple. The fallout was considerable: morally outraged lawmakers soon enacted new restrictions governing the broadcast of explicit material, and Jackson’s own career arc took a deep downward turn. Yet predictions of a chilling effect on sexual explicitness in the music world proved inaccurate.

  As the age of social media dawned, more people than ever were sampling “blue” material in wide-open cyberspace. Song lyrics grew franker than ever—one mid-decade hit, “Wait (The Whisper Song)” by the Ying Yang Twins, turned on the phrase “Wait ’til you see my dick”—and this ever more explicit language was matched by visuals that often seemed indistinguishable from pornography. In the 2000s, the videos that promoted pop hits became more like sex tapes, those hybrid products of reality television’s connections to the Triple-XXX industry, especially in Los Angeles, where heavy metal stars dated sex workers, and their bedroom performances, leaked on the Internet, became yet another marker of the rock and roll lifestyle.

  Simulated sex became a predictable climax during arena shows when stars would pull audience members onstage and dry hump them to the roar of the crowd. Topics once limited to innuendo, from sadomasochism to multiple-partner encounters to vibrator play, were frankly discussed in Top 10 hits. Former teen idols like Justin Bieber hurried to prove themselves as adult pop stars with thorough descriptions of what they enjoyed during the act: “From the door to the wall, coffee table, girl, get ready . . . From the stove to the countertop, dining room table, are you ready?” Bieber sang in 2013’s “PYD”—short for the distinctly unromantic “Put You Down.”

  The elevated feelings brought on by contemplating the nineteenth-century ring shout do not come easily when the mind turns to the outbreak of explicit behavior that’s overtaken mainstream pop in the past few years. The movements and soun
ds that scandalized John F. Watson two hundred years ago now strike most people as affirmative and beautiful; the ring shout is considered foundational within American music and dance, the kind of thing that’s taught on educational television. This is what happens to the erotic in music as its expressions fade into history. The lessons it offers are forgotten, and new scenarios arise stimulating the same old debates and anxieties, always perceived as far more shocking than anything that’s come before.

  The connection between the scandals of 1819 and those surrounding stars like Spears today are actually quite clear once you consider popular music’s long tail. A resonant example is the transformation of the former schoolchildren’s sweetheart Miley Cyrus, which culminated in her shocking appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2013. During that summer, one of America’s nicest girls became its naughtiest. Her blossoming, as it were, as booty-popping, tongue-wagging, nudity-flaunting provocateur was the logical end of the cycle that Spears had begun anew a decade earlier. Like the older gamine, Cyrus was raised on a Disney lot, nabbing the lead role in the series Hannah Montana at fourteen. Her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, had been a one-hit wonder in the 1990s, cashing in on a country music line-dance craze that was the G-rated equivalent of burlesque. He raised his daughter to be a performer, and she was never not commodified and objectified, never not, in some way, working what God gave her.

  How do you grow up when you’re an object of other people’s desires? Reaching sexual maturity at a time when pop’s culture of pleasure and sensual awareness had never been more frankly explicit, Cyrus did the sensible thing. She performed awakening, the same way she’d performed awkward adolescence for years on prime time. Cyrus devoted herself to twerking—performing a street dance that had long been popular among African Americans in cities like New Orleans. The dance’s rapid-fire hip movements lead to an earthquake of jiggle in the buttocks. The slender, tomboyish Cyrus performed her tricky undulations on awards shows and the late-night talk circuit; in the video for her hit “We Can’t Stop,” she showed herself learning how to make her butt wag harder from a couple of more prodigiously endowed African American friends. The public was shocked, for about six months. Debates raged over whether Cyrus was being racist, sexist, or simply crass with her faux-primitive dance.