Civil Rights Music Page 4
Hence, here the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement can be said to represent what Michel Foucault (1980, 81) called “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” which he defined as ways of thinking and doing that have been eclipsed, devalued, or rendered invisible within the dominant institutions of power/knowledge, but which nonetheless counter, disrupt, and provide progressive alternatives to the dominant institutions of power/knowledge. It is important to emphasize, however, that Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges” actually has two distinct meanings:
By subjugated knowledges I mean two things: on the one hand, I am referring to the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemization. Concretely, it is not a semiology of the life of the asylum, it is not even a sociology of delinquency, that has made it possible to produce an effective criticism of the asylum and likewise of the prison, but rather the immediate emergence of historical contents. And this is simply because only the historical contents allow us to rediscover the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle that the order imposed by functionalist or systematizing thought is designed to mask. Subjugated knowledges are thus those blocs of historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory and which criticism—which obviously draws upon scholarship—has been able to reveal. (81-82)
Here I wish to transpose Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges” and apply it to civil rights music and civil rights popular culture in an effort to chronicle and clarify the Civil Rights Movement’s history, politics, and social justice agenda. As a consequence, when Foucault contended that “only the historical contents allow us to rediscover the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle that the order imposed by functionalist or systematizing thought is designed to mask,” there is a sense in which more nuanced and alternative histories of the Civil Rights Movement that “allow us to rediscover the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle” within the movement will enable us to move away from the “order imposed by functionalist [famous figure-centered] or systematizing thought is designed to mask.” “Subjugated knowledges” within the world of civil rights studies are essentially “those blocs of historical knowledge” which historically have been and remain “present but disguised” and buried beneath the conventional histories of the Civil Rights Movement.
All of this is to say that Foucault’s double-sided concept of “subjugated knowledges” is applicable to civil rights studies, especially civil rights music. And, in many senses, the concept allows civil rights scholars and students to paint a more detailed and discursively dense picture of the history, politics, economics, and aesthetics of the whole of the Civil Rights Movement because of its focus on forgotten, un-inherited, or outright erased aspects of marginalized civil rights communities’ thoughts and practices. The quotation above, however, is only one-side of Foucault’s double-sided concept of “subjugated knowledges.” He importantly further explained:
On the other hand, I believe that by subjugated knowledges one should understand something else, something which in a sense is altogether different, namely, a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity. I also believe that it is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges (such as that of the psychiatric patient, of the ill person, of the nurse, of the doctor—parallel and marginal as they are to the knowledge of medicine—that of the delinquent, etc.), and which involve what I would call a popular knowledge (le savoir des gens) though it is far from being a general commonsense knowledge, but is on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it—that it is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work. (82)
Civil Rights Music is a work of music criticism, indeed. But, it is also a work of historical, social, political, and cultural criticism. It seeks to highlight and historize “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated” within the world of civil rights studies and within the wider society. It seeks to chronicle and, at times, critique, the “naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” and to develop an epistemology of African American musicology specifically aimed at revealing the “subjugated knowledges” of the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement. The emphasis here, then, is on the “parallel and marginal” histories and knowledges that have been and remain at the heart of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and its soundtracks, but which have been hidden as a consequence of ahistorical, apolitical, Eurocentric, and bourgeois famous-figure interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement, or interpretations that otherwise privilege Civil Rights Movement politics over Civil Rights Movement aesthetics.
In other words, Civil Rights Music seeks to set afoot a new version of civil rights history and cultural criticism that is grounded in black popular music, black popular culture, and black popular movement-based “popular knowledges” that break through the borders and boundaries of ahistorical, apolitical, Eurocentric, and bourgeois famous-figure interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement. It aims to articulate a new, Civil Rights Movement-inspired “popular knowledge,” a “particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it.” It is through the re-emergence of these new, Civil Rights Movement-inspired “popular knowledges,” these “parallel and marginal,” “local [social justice-based] popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges,” that Civil Rights Music ultimately advances an alternative history and critical theory of the Civil Rights Movement and its soundtracks.[6]
When black popular music and black popular culture are conceived of as “subjugated knowledge” and “cognitive praxis” (as Eyerman and Jamison emphasized above), then it is possible to perceive the ways that they historically have and currently continue to indelibly influence and inform race relations, gender identity, sexuality, spirituality, religiosity, class struggles, cultural conventions, social views, and broader political values. Revealingly, black popular music and black popular culture are often relegated to the realm of “low culture” (as opposed to “high culture”), which means they are frequently overlooked and, accordingly, under-scrutinized as “serious” sites of historical, cultural, social, and political study. This lame line of logic also overlooks the fact that black popular music and black popular culture, in their own sometimes warped and sometimes wicked ways, represent distinct sites of ideological and counter-ideological production, articulation, and contestation. Consequently, the chapters to follow aim to critically engage the ideological and counter-ideological currents and undercurrents deeply embedded in the Civil Rights Movement, its popular culture and, most especially, its popular music.
The next chapter, “The Musicology of the Civil Rights Movement,” will provide a substantive analysis of the unique role of music in black popular movements. In essence, it will discursively develop a musicology of the Civil Rights Movement. In specific it will place the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement within the African American movement music tradition. If, indeed, “music is more than merely music” for many, if not most, African Americans (especially those actively involved in social, political, and cultural movements), when, where, how, and why did such a distinct aesthetic develop? How was it historically handed down to the non-violent singing soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement? Why was there so much singing during the Civil Rights Movement? What meaning did these songs have for movement members? Who were the
musicians who created “movement music,” and what special, “extra-musical” meaning did this music and the broader movement have for them? These questions, among others, will be addressed in this chapter.
Chapter 3, “Gospel and the Civil Rights Movement,” posits that gospel and its freedom songs subgenre are the major sacred soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement in much the manner that rhythm & blues and rock & roll represent the major secular soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of sonically segregating the most popular expressions of black sacred song from the most popular expressions of black secular song during the Civil Rights Movement, in this chapter I utilize the elastic gospel aesthetic of the “Golden Age” of gospel music (circa 1945 to 1965) to bring disparate elements together and discursively develop a fresh interpretation of golden age gospel that places its musical and extra-musical contributions on par with the other major musics encapsulating the ideals and ethos of the Civil Rights Movement, specifically rhythm & blues and rock & roll. Whether we turn to freedom songs, rhythm & blues, or rock & roll, during its golden age gospel served as a kind of musical midwife, helping to birth, and then rear and raise the secular soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement.
The fourth chapter, “Rhythm & Blues and the Civil Rights Movement,” will examine classic rhythm & blues in relationship to the overarching aesthetics and politics of the Civil Rights Movement. Strongly stressing the notion that black popular music in essence serves as a barometer with which to measure the political, social, and cultural climate in black America, in this chapter classic rhythm & blues will be critically engaged as one of the major black popular music mouthpieces of the Civil Rights Movement. It will be argued that even though classic rhythm & blues obviously built on and borrowed much from classic gospel (and its freedom songs subgenre), at times it lyrically and musically expressed views and values that coincided with the gospel aesthetic and then, at other times, lyrically and musically it conveyed qualitatively different, if not new and novel, aspects of African American life-worlds and life-struggles during the Civil Rights Movement. Flying in the face of analyses that downplay and diminish the connections between black popular music and black popular movements, this chapter challenges those scholars and students of black popular music who speak and write about classic rhythm & blues as though it was not significantly grounded in and grew out of the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of the Civil Rights Movement.
The fifth and final chapter of the book will explore early rhythm & blues-based rock & roll as a major soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement. In particular it will critically treat rhythm & blues-cum-rock & roll’s—even if only implicit—emphasis on desegregation, integration, and youth activism. The chapter’s emphasis will be on the ways in which rock & roll’s relationship with the Civil Rights Movement, even if often unwittingly and often unacknowledged, built on, and in many ways went beyond gospel and rhythm & blues’ relationship with the Civil Rights Movement in the sense that it was able to capture and convey the movement’s integrationist ethos and integrationist impulse in ways that gospel and rhythm & blues quite simply did not. The book will end by strongly stressing the sonic segregation, musical colonization, and economic exploitation that eventually befell the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement, especially as they culminated in rock & roll and the movement came to a close.
Notes
1. For further discussion of Ralph Ellison’s contention that black popular music constitutes an indispensable element and cultural indicator of African Americans’ life-worlds and life-struggles, and for the most noteworthy works that influenced my interpretation here, see P. A. Anderson (2005), Bell (2003), Ellison (1995a, 1995b, 2001), Ellison and Murray (2000), Maxwell (2004), Muyumba (2009), O’Meally (2001), Porter (2001), Posnock (2005), Radford (2003), and Spaulding (2004). Ellison’s influence on the subsequent analysis cannot be stressed strongly enough.
2. It is interesting here to observe how Ellison’s assessment of the instrumentality and functionality of African American music mirrors Du Bois’s turn of the twentieth century music criticism in The Souls of Black Folk (1903b), where he declared: “Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people” (251). What is truly amazing here is that Du Bois’s age-old words could conceivably be applied to the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement, essentially the “Negro folk-song[s]—the rhythmic cry of the slave[s]” of mid-twentieth century American apartheid. Certainly, gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and early African American rock & roll have been “neglected,” they have been, and in many instances remain, “half despised,” and above all they have been “persistently mistaken and misunderstood,” but none of this negates the fact that in their own varied ways gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and early African American rock & roll expressed the rhetoric, politics and aesthetics of the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, if it is conceded that for black America music is much more than music, then, the framework and major foci of Civil Rights Music can be said to have been dictated by the longstanding instrumentality and multifunctionality of African American music, as asserted above by Du Bois and Ellison, among many others to be discussed below.
3. With regard to my periodization of the Civil Rights Movement as essentially beginning with the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision and more or less ending with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I have drawn on a number of noteworthy works in Civil Rights Movement studies, including Branch (1988, 1998), Bullard (1993), Carson, Garrow, Gill, Harding, and Hine (1997), J. E. Davis (2001), Dierenfield (2008), Lawson and Payne (2006), Klarman (2007), Levine (1993), Levy (1998), Ling and Monteith (2004), Morris (1984), M. Newman (2004b), Patterson (2002), Weisbrot (1990), J. Williams (1987), and Winters (2000).
4. I am not alone in acknowledging or emphasizing the deep musicological implications of W. E. B. Du Bois’s discourse, or the fact that a serious case could be made for Du Bois as “arguably the first great African American musicologist.” For further discussion of Du Bois’s musicology and relationship to African American music, and for the most noteworthy works that influenced my interpretation here, see P. A. Anderson (2001), Bilbija (2011), Kerkering (2001), Lutz (1991), Radano (1995), Schenbeck (2012), and Spencer (1990, 1993, 1995, 1997).
5. With regard to “civil rights studies,” a number of noteworthy works have factored into my interpretation, including Armstrong (2015), Carson, Garrow, Gill, Harding and Hine (1997), Crawford, Rouse and Woods (1990), Collier-Thomas and Franklin (2001), J. E. Davis (2001), Dierenfield (2008), Glasrud and Pitre (2013), Houck and Dixon (2009), Lawson and Payne (2006), Lee (1992), Luders (2010), Morris (1984), Olson (2001), Romano and Raiford (2006), and Sugrue (2008).
6. The alternative history and critical theory of the Civil Rights Movement elaborated in the chapters to follow not only builds on Foucault’s conception of “subjugated knowledges” but, perhaps even more importantly, on his discursively distinct conceptions of “archaeology” and “genealogy.” For instance, my critical theory of the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement critically follows Foucault’s philosophical histories and/or historicist philosophies: from his critique of psychiatry in The History of Madness in the Classical Age (2009) to his critique of the evolution of the medical industry in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1994); from his critique of the evolution of the human sciences in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1971) to his critique of
the historical-situatedness of truth, meaning, and reason (i.e., the episteme of an epoch), and the very methodologies through which they are arrived at or comprehended in his extremely innovative The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974) (see also Foucault 1973). According to Foucault (1994, 195), archaeology is distinguished from “the confused, under-structured, and ill-structured domain of the history of ideas.” He, therefore, rejected the history of ideas as an idealist and liberal humanist, purely academic or ivory tower mode of writing that traces an uninterrupted evolution of thought in terms of the conscious construction of a tradition or the conscious production of subjects and objects. Against the bourgeois liberalism of the history of ideas approach, Foucaultian archaeology endeavors to identify the states and stages for the creation and critique of ongoing and open-ended or, rather, more nuanced knowledge, as well as the hidden rules and regulations (re)structuring and ultimately determining the form and focus of discursive rationality that are deeply embedded within and often obfuscatingly operate below the perceived borders and boundaries of disciplinary development, methodological maneuvers, or interpretive intention. For instance, at the outset of The Order of Things (1971), Foucault contended: “It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called . . . archaeological” (xi).
Moreover, this critical theory of the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement also draws from Foucault’s more mature materialist genealogies, such as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979), The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (1990a), The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1990b), and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self (1990c), where he deepened and developed his articulation of archaeology and evolved it into a unique conception of genealogy, which signaled an intensification of his critical theorization of power relations, social institutions, and social practices (see also Foucault 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996). However, my critical theory of the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement does not understand Foucault’s later focus on genealogy to be a break with his earlier archaeological studies as much as it is taken to represent a shift of discursive direction and, even more, an extension and expansion of his discursive domain. Similar to his archaeologies, Foucault characterized his later genealogical studies as a new method of investigation, a new means of interpretation, and a new mode of historical writing.