The World Turned Inside Out

by James Livingston

  Rock and roll was supposedly the reunion of these musics, but the blues as such makes a point of blurring the distinction between minor and major keys—those “blue notes” are neither/nor—so it’s always audible in country as well as rock. The difference between these two genres is by now only lyrical. But the blues has endured as the foundation of twentieth-century American music by forging the template of a secular, commercial, improvisational dance music. The blues, like every other American music, specializes in transformation by repetition, by singing the same thing over and over again, only differently. It borrows the European tonal-harmonic structure of I-IV-V, root, tonic, subtonic, and so on—blues in the key of E normally goes E, A, B—but it superimposes an African sound, the pentatonic scale and a call-and-response pattern, on this basic structure. In doing so, the blues makes the color line audible but also moveable. It enunciates the difference between Europe and Africa but doesn’t leave it at that; both aural regions are changed by the mixture of their musical conventions.

  For example, the blues guitar is always answering the stated chord, sometimes with a pentatonic “fill” that complicates the sound of the fading chord, sometimes with a lead that completes (or challenges) the melody heard in the vocal. The second verse in a twelve-bar blues is almost always an answer to the first because it repeats the words but usually changes the chord—it sounds different, so it is different, even though it’s an exact lyrical repetition of what has come before. The third verse is typically a response to the first two, which changes their original meanings by converting the tragedy marked there into comedy, by converting despair to hope. “It has optimism that’s not naïve,” as Wynton Marsalis, a student of Albert Murray, puts it. “You accept tragedy and move forward.” The tonal-harmonic tension created by playing the V chord is resolved by the return to the root (the I chord), but that musical resolution is both amplified and questioned by the lyrical conclusion.

  The foundational American music is, then, the exemplar of what Harold Cruse called “a black aesthetic” and what he defined as the real promise of American culture. The “Negro group,” as he named it, from which this aesthetic sprang was, however, a hybrid of European, African, and Indian strains, so it contained most of America as such. Its music—our music, America’s music—was, and is, secular, commercial, and technologically driven. In the twentieth century, it was never a folk music produced by people who could afford to stand outside the market and play for fun. Its habitat was the club or the street, not the church, and, then as now, it thrived on the mechanical reproduction permitted by the phonograph and the records the machine could play. It was always electric, even before T-Bone Walker hooked his guitar up to an amplifier in 1939—recording technology required microphones as well as phonographs in the 1920s. So this technology was not a formal apparatus that was somehow external to the music; instead, it infused the sound, it determined the content of the music we now take for granted.

  American music in the twentieth century is, then, always a commercial, technological phenomenon, but it comes and goes—rock and roll, for example, died out between 1958 and 1963—and when it returns it usually arrives as the renewal of rhythm, timbre, voice, and dance, in other words, as a restatement of the black aesthetic. Disco, in these terms, did not announce the death of American music, by then codified as rock and roll, but rather the early, awkward sign of its rebirth. In the early to mid-1970s, rock had become esoteric, even enervating FM music, all soaring lyrics and poetic effects. It meandered so earnestly through major scales and masculine themes that it got boring.

  Disco cured us of this affliction by returning us to the dance floor—that is, by making rhythm the central element of the music and by restoring sexuality to its proper place in American music as such. But this time around, heterosexuality was in question. Disco was the music of a new, more open, more playful gay America, and everybody understood that, especially the yahoos who gathered to burn records in defense of “real” rock and roll at Comiskey Park, on the South Side of Chicago, in 1977. Disco propelled Michael Jackson’s early solo career in part because it restored rhythm and dance—movement and style—to the foreground of song, in part because we knew as we watched him that there was a new identity in the making here, something neither black nor white, maybe even something neither male nor female. MTV’s videos helped, of course, but our assumption that dance is an integral part of the singer’s performance, which we now take for granted unless we’re listening to Tony Bennett or Johnny Cash, owes everything to the rise and fall of disco in the 1970s and 1980s.

  Punk rock was another kind of restoration. Its urgent attempt to get back to the doctrines and the practices and the attitudes of the founders—this ain’t rocket science, this is three-chord rockabilly!—produced a brand new music, just as the Protestants’ urgent attempt to get back to their roots produced a brand new theology. Unlike disco, the pretend simplicity of punk, particularly the British version, often sounded angrily masculine, and so its gender-bending functions were disguised unless you saw the performers in action or saw the picture of the band on the album cover. Then you knew this music was dangerous.

  One of the telltale signs of the impending danger is the simple fact that three women are the memorable “front men” of punk rock in the 1970s—Deborah Harry of Blondie, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, and Patti Smith, the hypochondriac poet turned muse for Robert Mappelthorpe. Not to mention the material girl, Madonna, who kept refusing any version of authenticity and, as a result, kept us wondering about our own identities. She wasn’t exactly a punk rocker, to be sure, but she bent the music of the 1980s and 1990s with her “feminine endings,” as Susan McClary puts it—Madonna’s songs, which she was typically a cowriter, were “about staying in motion for the sake of survival,” always suspending or delaying tonal-harmonic resolution.

  Another telltale sign of the danger—the gender trouble—that punk brought to our world was the New York Dolls, a leering, androgynous, trash-rock, glam band with remarkable musical knowledge, background, and skills. In high heels. This band took over the Manhattan music scene in the early 1970s and became the touchstone of punk rock for the rest of the century. Like the Ramones, but unlike the Clash, the Dolls embodied the future of rock and roll, the future in which authenticity became obsolete. As a contemporary journalist wrote in Crawdaddy, a lowbrow magazine about popular music, “While these groups and their fans on this burgeoning scene profess to be parodying or ‘camping on’ various sexual styles (bisexuality, transvestitism, sadomasochism), it is difficult to say where affectation ends and reality begins.” Indeed. The world was turning inside out as male and female traded places and hard rock began to look softer—or at least more feminine in its appearance, its performance.

  Another indication that gender trouble was the regnant mode of musical arrangement at the end of the twentieth century is, of all things, heavy metal, a genre supposed to be by, for, and about angry white men who have enough stamina to hoist huge triangular guitars and scream for hours about evil, suicide, and such, meanwhile watching as large male bodies pass through the mosh pit, pointing themselves toward deliverance. In fact, metal was, like punk, a stage for experimentation with the newly various meanings of masculinity in terms of dress, style, voice, and sound. The great difference between the two genres was not the increasingly insistent androgyny of the performers, from Ozzy Osbourne to Poison to White Snake and, yes, Kiss, all in high heels and mascara like the New York Dolls—Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie sported very similar wardrobes in the 1970s—no, the great difference was heavy metal’s self-conscious reanimation of classical music, even of Bach, and its consequent departure from the blues idiom of other popular American musics.

  To be sure, Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoades were admirers of the blues and always used it as a point of departure, but their guitar work, which inspired a whole generation of heavy metal musicians, was based on classical modes, sequences, riffs, and virtuosity. The very sound of meta
l, as it constantly sinks into the dark Aeolian mode and the Baroque note cycles it copies, amplifies, and distorts, is, as Robert Walser explains, “archaic, directional, and thus fateful.” The unfamiliar harmonic progression (it typically goes VI-VII-I as against I-IV-V) prepares us for a resolution that we expect but may not want; it produces a sexual politics that is at least risky. For in heavy metal, you can hear the ending of the era of the ego—if you listen closely enough, you may even hear the end of male supremacy.

  Hip-Hop Nation

  But the signature sound of the end of the twentieth century was, as we all know, hip-hop, from the Sugar Hill Gang to NWA to Ice-T and on unto P. Diddy and Queen Latifah. Everyone listened in as urban renewal became the project of the objects, the goal of the ghetto itself, not the program of the local government—that is, as young black men and women decided to reinvent their lives, their streets, their neighborhoods, and their nation through music, dance, clothes, and, not least, subway graffiti. As Tricia Rose put it long ago, “hip hop style is black urban renewal,” national liberation from the bottom up. The South Bronx, once the scene on which Ronald Reagan could compare this part of the United States to a ravaged Third World country, pulled itself up by its own musical bootstraps and changed America as well as every other place on the planet.

  It wasn’t just Public Enemy that had a more or less nationalist agenda of racial solidarity and suspicion of the powers that be (particularly the police). All rappers appealed to the same “Cop Killer” code that Ice-T perfected in 1992 because they knew that a colonized people, no matter where it is found, must try to protect its own with the weapons at hand—as Malcolm X always said. They also knew that parity between the races could be a function of cultural segregation rather than a result of equal rights for individuals regardless of race, as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey (a favorite of The Last Poets, who were the inspiration for Chuck D. of Public Enemy), and, yes, even W. E. B. DuBois proposed. In this sense, S. H. Fernando Jr. is right to insist in The New Beats (1994) that hip-hop culture signifies the “rebirth of a Nation.”

  But whose nation? Why do white boys from the suburbs dig this music, and how did they make it the mainstream of American culture if it’s the chorus of a black nation? Good questions. Here are some tentative answers. It’s a music of decolonization, a way of asserting the black aesthetic as the voice of the nation as a whole, just as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s could be the anthem of the “New Negro” and the fulfillment of the promise of American life as such. That aesthetic and that promise are neither black nor white, so the nation conjured by the music can be inhabited and honored by anybody, of any race, just like the Fourteenth Amendment says. If the black aesthetic speaks to and for all of us, our country has finally come of age. Perhaps it came of age in the 1990s, when Michael Jordan’s aesthetic changed the way basketball got played and perceived, when five black starters became commonplace in the NBA, even as its TV audience swelled, and when the Chicago Bulls became America’s team.

  Hip-hop is also an answer to the downsizing of Dad, a way of reasserting, restating, and reconfiguring masculinity—or manhood. Andrew Ross has explained how this musical debate works. On the one hand, we hear the falsetto tones of the Motown ballads in which apologies and pledges organize a fragile, possibly equal relation between males and females and, on the other hand, we hear the strident bass lines and angry vocals of hip-hop, which reorganize this sexual relation as hierarchy, as male supremacy personified by the Gangsta. But not quite supremacy—the Gangsta was, and is, both an appreciation and an exaggeration of the new anxieties attached to the meanings of manhood at the end of the twentieth century.

  When William James worried in “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910) about how to reinstate the “masculine virtues” in the presence of structural unemployment and the absence of real work, and, not incidentally, in the face of impending world war—violence on a scale never seen—nobody accused him of ignorance. Nor should we accuse the early rappers of ignoring the reality of their neighborhoods, of tarrying too long with the negative, of worrying too much about the fate of black manhood. They had good reasons to fear the future, just as James did, but they reasoned in music. Their reasoning still makes sense.

  The age of hip-hop is, after all, the age of the “war on drugs,” which created incarceration rates in the United States higher than any other so-called developed country and which not incidentally, put almost one in every five black men in jail, even as rates of violent crime plummeted in the 1990s. The filmic gangster was born in the 1920s as the early war on drugs called Prohibition got started, and he matured very early in the 1930s, in the astonishing characterizations of Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar), James Cagney (Public Enemy), and Paul Muni (Scarface). Like the sonic Gangsta of rap music, he was a meditation on the kind of manhood available to American males who had no recognizable function, no place in the mode of production authorized by the law and the government. Unlike the hero of Western movies, however, that strong, silent type who talks mainly to the horse, the early gangster couldn’t stay still and wouldn’t be quiet—he would not wait for redemption. He was determined to disturb you.

  So, too, will the sonic Gangsta of hip-hop, the man who makes his own laws in homage to the Corleone family of The Godfather. But look at the hip-hop nation’s heir apparent in Brian De Palma’s remake of Scarface (1983)—he speaks broken English, but he’s clearly Michael Corleone reborn as a Cuban refugee—and what you see is an Oedipal drama in which the son is cast as the father, the immigrant original. It’s as if we have’ve been invited to a remake of The Godfather, Part 2, but Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro have somehow been replaced (erased?) by Al Pacino. The patrimonial succession, the generational order of things that made sense even in the violent world of The Godfather, has somehow been disturbed by the insertion of the new immigrant from an inarticulate elsewhere, from outside the United States: this man is foreign, and yet familiar; he turns the world inside out just by going about his business. Like the first Tony Carmonte (Paul Muni), who also seemed to come from another world, this man can’t stay still, he won’t be quiet, and he is not waiting for redemption.

  As a later would-be Gangsta, 50 Cent, put it, he’s going to “get rich or die trying.” He’s the embodiment of the American Dream: he’s breaking the rules out on the new frontier of the inner city; he’s outside the law, but he loves his country; he wants a family, and he can provide for it. So the sonic Gangsta of hip-hop is the transformation by repetition of the filmic gangster who got his start in 1931, just as Brian De Palma’s Scarface is the transformation by repetition of Tony Carmonte’s career. Sexuality, masculinity, and the meaning of success on the American scene are crucial issues in every rendition of this man on the make. For him, manhood is always in question, or, rather, a question that has no definitive answer.

  Hip-hop completes, or at least consolidates, the black aesthetic—and thus the American nation—in three other ways. First, it amplifies the imperative of transformation by repetition. It constantly “samples,” that is, it treats already recorded phrases as the raw materials of its compositional urge by removing them from their original contexts so that you are forced to recognize the old even as you hear the new; the original is not displaced, but it acquires a new function, a new meaning, in its new musical setting. The either/or choice between past and present, between previous truth and novel fact, is thereby adjourned—precedent is honored by its incorporation in the sound being produced right now, in this improvisational moment but it is also changed by its insertion in that sound. Second, hip-hop returns us to the dance floor by reinstating rhythm, timbre, timing, rhyme, and style as the key elements of American music as such. This restoration is more important than it may seem at first glance. For it transformed every genre, even country, as its propulsive beats became the bottom line of popular music.

  Third, and most important, hip-hop reminds us that recording technology is the content, not merely the form, of modern
American music. It is the culmination of the age of mechanical reproduction, as Walter Benjamin named the twentieth century. Rap music is the culmination of that historical moment when reproducibility became constitutive of the work of art—think of film, ask yourself, where’s the original? and then try, who’s the author?—and when machines made it hard to distinguish between the producer and the consumer of the work. Hip-hop is unimaginable in the absence of the microphone, the turntables, and the vinyl, the apparatus of twentieth-century American music. These devices are not mere vehicles for delivering a certain sound that could exist outside of them; they determine the sound itself—that scratching sound is just noise, except now it functions as a manic rhythm section. Again, the technology is the content of the music, not merely its electric form.

  The dissolution of the distinction between producer and consumer of such industrialized music derives from the same recording technology. Rappers compose by listening, they produce by consuming, that is, by placing already recorded music in new settings, making it new by resituating it, by amplifying it, by changing its place in the scheme of things. In this sense, they are members of the intellectual avant-garde that forced us, at the end of

  the twentieth century, to question the difference between active subject (the producer) and passive object (the consumer)—just like the poststructuralist and postmodernist professors did. Again, the rappers reasoned in music, but as a result their cultural effect has been greater than that of the professors.

  The Technology of Desire

  The technological sources of this cultural effect—that is, the adjournment of the subject-object distinction that has animated Western philosophy since Plato and his footnotes—cannot be exaggerated. Not that technology is a set of inert machines, mere matter absent human purpose or presence, which somehow causes cultural change, as if Louis Althusser, an influential French theorist of the 1970s, had returned from the grave to refurbish the vulgar Marxist notion of base/superstructure (economy/ideology). No, technology is a social movement, a social process, through which we express ourselves in material realities and come to know ourselves in that embodiment of our mostly irrational purposes. Charles Peirce, the original pragmatist, got it right in 1893: “Matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.” Or as Donna Haraway put it more recently in her Manifesto for Cyborgs (1986), “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.”