by Ann Powers
In fact, Cyrus had chased a rhythm from the ring shout to the present day, one that connects the weekend recreation of slaves in New Orleans’s Congo Square with the faux-exotic Middle Eastern “hootchie kootch” performed by Algerian immigrants at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893; turn-of-the-twentieth-century vernacular dances like the Funky Butt and the Snake Hips with Elvis’s famous pelvis; and the heightened theatrics of African American gospel quartets who dazzled worshipers in the 1950s with the self-styled sanctified perversity of Prince and Madonna in the 1980s. Nothing, it seems, is ever really new in the way the inner surge manifests in music. The specifics change in each period, with different kinds of music better capturing the spark of the moment, and different communities—urban immigrants, African Americans of the Great Migration, teenagers in the South, hippies in the West—pushing the conversation forward. This book explores many of the key stories that illuminate how this American conversation about sexuality and the erotic has developed. These scenes show how eroticism, at the deeper level of physical and soulful joy enriching people’s understandings of themselves and connections with one other, has given American popular music its central force of meaning. These same stories show how music takes on forbidden topics, opens them up, and makes them irresistible.
Yearning and satisfaction in the body and the psyche are universal experiences, but they come clothed in different guises, depending on the time. Some fundamentals, like that pelvic shake that Cyrus mastered, can be traced from the beginning. Other expressions now seem quaint. What connects the sublime spiritualized need expressed in the 1932 gospel love song “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” to Donna Summer’s moaning epiphanies in the disco classic “I Feel Love” is a feeling that can be recognized only if we understand that as morality shifts, music does, too, helping people navigate those boundaries. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, for example, the risky thrills that women and men felt dancing the quadrille at the dozens of balls that took place every week allowed them to imagine intimate connections with new neighbors who were nothing like themselves. Love stories of Creole life, often written by white men about (or stolen from) women of color, were surprisingly frank in describing the perilous closeness between masters and those subject to them, and suggested ways to negotiate the kinds of intimacies that might topple an entire societal structure. Close encounters between slaves dancing in Congo Square and white observers established an element of voyeurism that runs through popular music culture from the days of minstrelsy onward, while also creating the framework for rock and roll spectacle, a performance ritual that, a century later, would lend carnal power to many a white man “channeling” black legacies.
When America was a young country just beginning to grasp the means of creating its own culture, newcomers from disparate homelands made hybrids from the seeds of very different heritages. Central to this process was the absorption of African fundamentals into the very core of American cultural expression, through the appropriations the white owner class made both unthinkingly and in fear and unspoken desire; and through the remarkable perseverance of those enslaved people who, against all odds, became American, and continued to bless the culture with inimitable creativity, virtuosity, and depth. The historian Eric Lott famously called this grounding process “love and theft”; that term aptly illustrates the way the animating spirits in American music are simultaneously earnest and unscrupulous, lofty and corrupt. In every era, expressing the erotic through music has required Americans to confront the ways in which this culture is grounded in exploitation and violation as well as democratic openness and liberty. Americans have continually transformed themselves, but not everyone has the opportunity to do so in the same ways. The sex scenes of American music reveal the most intimate cruelties we have wrought upon each other, alongside the pleasures and kindnesses.
As the country’s first full century gave way to its second, new scenarios expanded people’s notions of what they could become. The first decades of the 1900s saw women asserting themselves in new ways; the next few made possible the Great Migration that allowed African Americans to begin to take control of their own social realities. Youths emerged as a cultural force in mid-century and redefined both leisure and the life cycle. By the 1980s, communities demanding acknowledgment and civil rights for myriad gender and sexual identities were challenging long-held assumptions and inspiring a new generation toward openness. In each of these phases, music moved people to dare, to keep pushing the edge, even as it helped them negotiate the limits they sometimes chose or still had to endure.
All of this happened in spaces that were social and commercial, where money was exchanged and people sought not just status and fame, but real physical satisfaction. In the original, explicit version of what would become his breakthrough hit “Tutti Frutti”—a song that defines the spirit of rock and roll as succinctly as did anything by Elvis or the Beatles—the unstoppably libidinal superstar Little Richard called his music’s (and life’s) governing force “good booty.” Within those two words are all the glories and contradictions raised—aroused—by American eroticism as expressed through popular music. There’s the unapologetic crudeness, an openness that refuses to veil sex in niceties. There is an acknowledgment that this is also a realm of commerce and plunder, of booty earned and stolen. There is, of course, that reference to the ass, the centrifuge in a dancer’s body, which can be both an exploited fetish object and a partner’s cherished private pleasure. And there is the assurance that, fundamentally, the desire for the erotic is good, something that can make a person whole, make them shout and sing.
Music has created the spaces where Americans can publicly share deep experiences of selfhood and connection. Through the drum and the guitar and the electronic thrum, people feel their own physical drives and longings for emotional connection. Rhythm is quite literally the reason. It’s the musical element that guarantees what scientists call “entrainment”—the merging of two ongoing processes, like a heartbeat and a drumbeat. Scientists also call this “coupling”: forgetting where one ends and the other begins. The musical experience of entrainment unites a listener with what is being played, the performers playing it, and everyone around her enjoying it, too; it encourages identification and produces sympathy. Entrainment is the reason people dance and what makes them feel a song speaks for them.
Musical rhythms thrive in places where people gather freely—cabarets and dive bars, arenas that rock and festival fields that bloom with a thousand naked flowers. The performance studies scholar Joseph Roach describes such environments as “behavioral vortices”: hot spots occupied by hot bodies where concentrated cultural meanings surface. A vortex is a storm that grabs you, but is also made stronger by the motion you contribute. In such a whorl, overlooked or deliberately unacknowledged realities can come to light. Seemingly improper feelings can flourish. What emerges within the vortex would otherwise have remained in the shadows: not only pleasure and physical pride, but anxiety, fear, repulsion. The everyday experience of American eroticism arises from buried prejudices and violent impulses as well as tender ones. In specific places and times, including within the space of a musical recording or live performance, all that hunger and rage, yearning and hope, become visible and audible. The storm throws open a closet and empties out its contents.3
To talk about what’s revealed within the sexiest moments of American music (and they may not be the most obviously lascivious or titillating ones) is to recast its history in terms that are more inclusive, and less dominated by old ideas of artistic genius or great works, than what’s been offered in the past. The conversation calls for celebrating the unsung—the domestic servant, the tango dance instructor, the church mother, the street corner singer, the groupie, the local DJ, the kid making a YouTube video—next to the legendary. This is what acknowledging the erotic does: it expands definitions and switches up hierarchies. This retelling of American popular music doesn’t always focus on the big stories. It has gaps. It is necessarily inco
mplete, and open. Other music lovers will have different perspectives on what turned them on and turned them around. Taking the turn-on seriously is the point: every moment’s pleasure illuminates whole worlds of need, conflict, and possibility, and in its own way, sets the stage for the next.
The vortex abounds with complexities. Music allows people—players, dancers, observers—to ride the storm that arises when desire encounters the roadblocks of prejudice, moral judgment, or cruel circumstance. American eroticism wants to be easy, but for most of history, American life has been hard. Our music grinds pleasure from hardship. It creates whirlwinds but also provides a means to manage them. Music is not chaos, and even though the sounds that became rock and roll have often been discussed or even dismissed as too wild to have sophisticated meanings, in fact the skilled player or dancer has always known exactly which note or step comes next. Sexual experience is most pleasurable when it involves finesse, great attention to detail, and the best kind of surprise. The same is true of the erotic power of American music: cultivating joy, acknowledging vulnerability, it comes in multiple, unexpected ways.
1
THE TABOO BABY
NEW ORLEANS, 1800–1900
Popular music gives shape, in time, to desire; and desire always crosses boundaries. In the United States, one line underlies all the rest: the artificial one separating the citizens who came to be called “white” from all the other people who inhabited the soil and shaped the nation. Music is so much more than the clearly delineated racial dialogue that several early-twentieth-century jazz musicians slyly called “black notes on white paper,” but it is that, too—a means for understanding the racial limits power imposes and the ways that, in lust, love, or careless leisure, people challenge, deny, reinforce, and momentarily obscure those limits. And so any discussion of America’s erotic musical life must confront the complexities of American race relations. It’s impossible to talk about it otherwise.
A close encounter with someone dangerously different was one of the most explosive possibilities of life in a young America. The fear of racial “mixing”—a more useful and musical term than the overused and stigmatized “miscegenation”—is as old as our colonial past, tied to an ideal of whiteness that was never pure and always embattled. Laws against intermarriage were adopted in Virginia and Maryland as early as 1691. Yet the mobility that kept America expanding continually challenged these hierarchies. In nascent culture capitals, immigrant cities like New York, frontier towns like St. Louis and San Francisco, and most of all in the cosmopolitan Southern center of New Orleans, daily life required the forward thinking to venture beyond their own kind—to exploit others and to learn from them. Able bodies worked together in the bustling streets of these entrepreneurial towns despite language barriers and wildly different points of origin, because the work had to be done; hierarchies of oppression temporarily unraveled in the processes of building and selling, though they were quickly reimposed. At leisure, men took pleasure from women as various as themselves, exploiting them, but sometimes also forging long intimacies. Many of these women danced in the saloons where they met their men: they danced Spanish cachuchas, Moorish alahambras, Greek romaikas. Music granted mobility, however provisional, to those marked as nonwhite—not just for these dancers but for leaders of all-black bands like James Hemmenway and Francis Johnson, who in the early nineteenth century forged a “Negro” sound that blended German military elements with Latin touches and an underlying African current.1 Music was often the language people employed to talk across lines of prejudice. On one level this tolerance and the leeway it afforded was all a delusion. Yet a vocabulary of freedom, not directly verbalized but written in the beats and tones between those black notes on white paper, began to form. It took well over a century for that feeling to gain the name rock and roll.
Here’s one story that says a lot about its time. Thomas C. Nicholls, a decorous military school student of seventeen, had spent all his years within fifty miles of Washington, DC, when, in 1805, his diplomat father summoned his family to join him at a new outpost: the recently acquired American port of New Orleans. Nicholls the younger left his studies at Maryland’s Charlotte Hall and joined his siblings and mother on an unpleasant journey aboard the ship Comet. Finally, they landed in the city on the southern banks of the Mississippi, which struck Nicholls as “revolting”—the buildings were ramshackle and windowless, the streets muddy, the tavern where he and his brother had to stay had no glass in the windows. But Nicholls found one aspect of his new home beautiful: its female residents, who lived to dance.
One night Nicholls relaxed at the home of a wealthy new friend, watching the women of the house prepare to attend a grand ball at one of the fifteen ballrooms that served this city of around ten thousand people. (The population would double within just a few years.) The women, attended by silent slaves, donned elaborate finery and then stood for inspection in front of their menfolk. The scene, as described by our young Northerner, evokes more brutal ones of slave and livestock auctions. But when they left the house, these human ornaments broke their bonds and became regular people out for fun. Nicholls wrote of this startling development in his memoir forty years later:
Everything prepared, the order was given to march; when, to my horror and astonishment, the young ladies doffed their shoes and stockings, which were carefully tied up in silk handkerchiefs, and took up the line of march, barefooted, for the ballroom. After paddling through mud and mire, lighted by lanterns carried by Negro slaves, we reached the scene of action without accident. The young ladies halted before the door and shook one foot after another in a pool of water close by. After repeating this process some half a dozen times, the feet were freed of the accumulated mud and were in a proper state to be wiped dry by the slaves, who had carried towels for the purpose. Then silk stockings and satin slippers were put on again, cloaks were thrown aside, tucked-up trains were let down, and the ladies entered the ballroom, dry-shod and lovely in the candle-light.2
The slaves were not permitted to join in the moment of disorder that put their mistresses in the mood to dance.
This remembrance is a pioneer story glorifying vigor at civilization’s edge. Had Nicholls been waxing poetic about discoveries he’d had a few states to the West, the ladies might have climbed into a covered wagon assisted by “noble savages.” Instead, his details reflected a different kind of American exoticism, whose elements were muggy heat, the romance languages of France and Spain, and the skin—from warm brown to earthy rust to coffee-with-milk to peachy—of a populace that called itself Creole and, according to Nicholls, was nearly as diverse as America would ever get.
The people themselves differed in complection [sic], costume, manners and language, from anything we had ever seen. The eternal jabbering of French in the street was a sealed book to us. Drums beat occasionally at the corners of the streets, suspended for a moment to allow the worthy little drummer to inform the public that on such and such a night there would be a Grand Ball at the Salle de Conde, or make announcements of a ball of another sort, for colored ladies and white gentlemen. Such were our visions of New Orleans in 1805.
At this time, New Orleans, which leaders had recently bought, was barely part of the new nation. Yet it already had many of the characteristics of a twenty-first-century megalopolis. The years of French and Spanish rule that preceded the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 established its polyglot nature, as did the city’s role as a hub of the slave trade, which connected it to the Caribbean and to Africa. In the streets, African-born residents of this active port carried heritage on their heads, in woven baskets containing the ingredients for gumbo z’herbes, an Americanized version of the diaspora stew callaloo. History rolled off their tongues in newly forming dialects. Free blacks mingled with Irish and Italian immigrants, mixed-blood Creoles, and slave artisans, who ran small shops for the profit of their owners.
Scenes like the ones Nicholls recalled, which became commonplace among travel writers as the century u
nfolded, created the image of New Orleans as the kitchen garden of American hedonism. To be intrepid here was to seek pleasure as much as material prospects, and this desire to be sensually fulfilled was often attributed to the mixed-up blood of the city’s residents. Not only did African people, slave and free, move more freely in New Orleans than they did in many other cities; deep connections to the Latin and French communities differentiated even the so-called whites of the town.
“Those called the Whites are principally brunettes with deep black eyes; dark hair, and good teeth,” wrote Thomas Ashe, an Irish travel writer primarily known for spinning tall tales of the American West, in 1806. “Their persons are eminently lovely, and their movements indescribably graceful, far superior to any thing I ever witnessed in Europe. It would seem that a hot climate ‘calls to life each latent grace’ . . . In the dance these fascinating endowments are peculiarly displayed.”3
Such descriptions of languid, vaguely Mediterranean Louisiana belles fed into the widespread belief that the South was a place where morals ran as loose as the temperatures ran hot. Abolitionist rhetoric furthered the linkage of plantation life and debauchery. Historian Ronald G. Walters calls this “the Erotic South.” “Plantations, like a moralist’s equivalent for the settings of pornographic novels, were simply places where the repressed could come out of hiding. Abolitionists saw both what was actually there—erotic encounters did occur—and what associations of power with sex prepared them to see.”4