Paper

al

Rhythm: Race, Sex, and t

Great variety and quick transi-

tions from one measure or

tone to another are contrary to

the genius of the beautiful in

music. Such transitions often

excite mirth, or other sudden

and tumultuous passions; but

not that sinking, that melting,

that languor, which is the

characteristical effect of the

beautiful, as it regards every

sense.

Edmund Burke

The Red Hot Chil! Peppers are putting

the three most important letters back

into FUNK, taking the piss out of the

idiots who forgot what it was for in the

first place and are being censored left,

right and centre because of it.

"From our viewpoint it's impossible to

ignore the correlation between music

and sex because, being so incredibly

rhythmic as it is. It's very deeply corre-

lated to sex and the rhythm of sex, and

the rhythm of your heart pounding and

intercourse motions and just the way it

makes you feel when you hear it. We try

to make our music give you an erection."

Melody Maker

Everyone seems agreed, the music's lovers and leathers alike, that rock and roll means sex; everyone assumes that this meaning comes with the beat. I don't, and in.this chapter I suggest mat if rock does sometimes mean sex it is for sociological, not musicological reasons. (And besides, as the Red Hot Chili Peppers' casual male chauvinism makes clear, in this context sex is an essentially sociological sort of thing, anyway.) Deliberately misreading the Chili's point, then, I will start this chapter with the concept of fun.

"Fun" can only be defined against something else, in contrast to the "serious" and the "respectable," and in musical discourses the opposition of "serious" and "fun" sounds (the aesthetic versus the hedonistic) involves both a moral-cum-artistic judgment and a distinction between a mental and a physical response. In classical music criticism, "fun" thus describes concerts

which are not the real thing—benefit or charity shows, the Last Night of the Proms; the critical tone is a kind of forced, condescending bonhomie: "it was just a bit of fun!" In pop criticism "art" and "fun" define each other in a running dialectic—if 1970s progressive rockers dismissed first Motown and then disco as "only" entertainment, 1980s progressive popsters saw off rock's pretensions with the tee-shirt slogan "Fuck Art, Let's Dance!"3

As I noted in Chapter 2, the equation of the serious with the mind and fun with the body was an aspect of the way in which high culture was established in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. John Kassan quotes Mark Twain's description of the audience "at the shrine of St. Wagner" in Bayreuth: ,

Absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a relief to free their pent, emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utter- ance till the curtain swings together and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died.4

Twain then watched the audience burst into "thunderous applause" Other observers, more ideologically correct Wagnerians, claimed that even after the performance there was just intense silence. Such complete physical

' control—or mental transportation?—did not become a classical concert con- vention (orchestras would be dismayed to get no applause at the end of a show), but the denial of any bodily response while the music plays is now taken for granted. A good classical performance is therefore measured by the stillness it commands, by the intensity of the audience's mental concentration, by the lack of any physical distraction, any coughs or shuffles. And it is equally important, as we have seen, to disguise the physical effort that goes into classical music-making—-Wagner kept the orchestra hidden at Bayreuth, and "from early in his career ridiculed those who enjoyed 'looking at the music instead of listening to it,"'5

A good rock concert, by contrast, is measured by the audience's physical response, by how quickly people get out of their seats, onto the dance floor, by how loudly they shout and scream. And rock performers are expected to revel in their own physicality too, to strain and sweat and collapse with tiredness. Rock stage clothes (like sports clothes) are designed to show the

musician's body as instrumental (as well as sexual), and not for nothing does a performer like Bruce Springsteen end a show huddled with his band, as if he'd just won the Super Bowl. Rock acts conceal not the physical but the technological sources of their sounds; rock audiences remain uneasy about musical instruments that appear to require no effort to be played.

The key point here, though, is that the musical mind/body split does not just mark off classical from rock concert conventions; it also operates within the popular music domain. When rock (or jazz) acts move into seated concert halls, for example, it is often to register that the music is now "serious," should now be appreciated quietly. (I sometimes suspect that it is at such sit-down shows—for Leonard Cohen, say, or the Cure, or P. J. Harvey—that one best gets a sense of what the mid-nineteenth century battles over classical concert behavior were like, as the listening and the dancing sections of the crowd get equally annoyed with each other, and as the attendants struggle to keep everyone seated.) The underlying contrast here between listening with the mind and listening with the body is well captured by photography: the classical audience rapt, the rock audience abandoned; both sorts of listener oblivious to their neighbors, both with eyes shut and bodies open, but the classical listener obviously quite still, the rock listener held in the throes of movement.6

The question that interests me in this chapter, then, is how the musical mind/body split works. Why is some music heard as physical (fun), other music as cerebral (serious)? Is there nothing of the mind in the former? Nothing of the body in the latter? And in approaching these questions the first point to make is that just as "sin" is defined by the virtuous (or would-be virtuous), so fun (or music-for-the-body) is, in ideological practice, defined in contrast to serious music, music-for-the-mind. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' crude equation of musical pleasure, rhythm, and sex derives, in short, from a high cultural argument.

The musical equation "of aesthetic/mind and hedonistic/ body is one , effect of the mental/manual division of labor built into the Industrial Revo- lution, and into the consequent organization of education.7 In the mid- nineteenth century this was mapped onto the original Romantic dichotomy between feeling and reason: feelings were now taken (as at Bayreuth) to be best expressed spiritually and mentally, in silent contemplation of great art or great music. Bodily responses became, by definition, mind-less. ."The

.brain," wrote Frank Howes in the British Journal of Aesthetics in 1962, is associated with art music; "brainlessness" with pop. Popular music, agreed Peter Stadler, is music requiring "a minimum of brain activity."8

For Stadler, this isn't necessarily to devalue popular music, which (thanks

to its rhythms) may well be sexy and humorous; jazz, in particular, he suggests, gives us direct access to bodily sensation; it is not a music that has to be interpreted, it is not a music that has to be thought about.9 A decade later Raymond Durgnat celebrated rock in much the same way, as a music which in its use of rhythm was immediately, gloriously, sensual.10

The meaning of-popular music is being explained here by intellectuals who value (or abhor) it because it offers them a different experience from art music. A telling example of such a celebration of otherness carj be found in Guy Scarpetta's description of going with friends from the French art and music magazine Art-Press to see Johnny Halliday, the rock 'n' roll singer, perform in Nice. For these self-conscious intellectuals, the "flagrant" pleasure of the show began with the opportunity to slough off their class distinction,

to identify with their generation, but what most struck these young men about this particular experience of "encanaillement" (or slumming) was the corporal presence of the music. Scarpetta heard in rock "une intensite or- ganique, une force pulsionelle," saw in Halliday "une fantasmatique directe- ment sexuelle." This was not something on offer from the essentially "conceptuel" Parisian avant-garde of the time—Halliday's performance was "fun," in short, because it stressed the physical pleasure of music in ways repressed elsewhere; for Scarpetta and his friends it articulated something

otherwise forbidden.11 Two points emerge from this passage. First, it describes a musical expe-

rience which can only be understood in high cultural terms (it tells us nothing of what Halliday's low-class fans made of his music). The organization of high culture in terms of bourgeois respectability has meant, inevitably, the identification of low culture with the unrespectable (and obviously, in insti- tutional terms, while high art took its nineteenth-century place in the secular temples of gallery, museum, and concert hall, low music continued to be associated with the bodily pleasures of the bar and the brothel).12 By the beginning of this century, in other words, low music was both a real and a

fantasy site for casting off bourgeois inhibitions. The second point here concerns race. In 1922, forty years before Johnny

Halliday's Nice concert, another French avant-garde intellectual, Darius Mil- haud, was taken by a friend to a Harlem "which had not yet been discovered by the snobs and the aesthetes." As Bernard Gendron explains, "in a club in which 'they were the only white folks' he encountered a music that was

'absolutely different from anything [he] had ever heard before.'"

This surprising experience moved him from an exclusively formalist

and experimentalist preoccupation with jazz to one tempered by a

strong interest in its lyricism and primitivism. Such "authentic mu- sic," he was sure, had "its roots in the darkest corner of negro soul, the vestigial traces of Africa." It is in this "primitive African side," this "savage" "African character," "still profoundly anchored" in black North American music, "that we find the source of this formidable rhythmic, as well as of such expressive melodies, which are endowed with a lyricism which only oppressed races can produce."

Milhaud starkly contrasted the archaic lyricism of negro blues with the hyper-modernity, worldliness (la mondanite), and mechanical-

ness, of white jazz.13

There is, indeed, a long history in Romanticism of defining black culture,

specifically African culture, as the body, the other of the bourgeois mind. Such a contrast is derived from the Romantic opposition of nature and culture: the primitive or pre-civilized can thus be held up against thf sophis- ticated or over-civilized—one strand of the Romantic argument was that primitive people were innocent people, uncorrupted by culture, still close to

a human "essence."14 It's important to understand how this argument works, because it lies at

the heart of claims about rock, rhythm, and sex. The logic here is not that African music (and African-derived musics) are more "physical," more "di- rectly" sexual than European and European-derived musics. Rather, the ar- gument is that because "the African" is more primitive, more "natural" than the European, then African music must be more directly in touch with the body, with unsymbolized and unmediated sensual states and expectations. And given that African musics are most obviously different from European musics in their uses of rhythm, then rhythm must be how the primitive, the sexual, is expressed. The cultural ideology produces the way of hearing the music, in short; it is not the music which gives rise to the ideology. Or, as Marianna Torgovnick puts it, "within Western culture, the idiom 'going primitive' is in fact congruent in many ways with the idiom 'getting physi-

cal.'"15 I can best illustrate this argument by quotation: the histories of both jazz

and rock 'n' roll are littered with such racist readings. The Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell, for example, complained in the New Republic in 1921 about the people "who sat drinking their cocktails and listening to nigger b a n d s . . . Niggers can be admired artists without any gift more singular than high spirits: so why drag in the intellect?" For Bell, as D. L. LeMahieu notes, jazz represented a rebellion not only of "the lower instincts," but of "an inferior

race" against European "civilization."16

In France after World War I, wrote the ethnographer Michel Leiris, a newly adult generation ("the generation that made Josephine Baker a star") colluded in "an abandonment to the animal joy of experiencing the influence of a modern rhythm . . . In jazz, too, came the first public appearances of Negroes, the manifestation and the myth of black Edens which were to lead me to Africa and, beyond Africa, to ethnography."17 In the United States, as Lawrence Levine writes, "jazz was seen by many contemporaries as a cultural form independent of a number of the basic central beliefs of bourgeois society, free of its repressions, in rebellion against many of its grosser stereo- types. Jazz became associated with what [Aaron] Esman has called the Vital libidinal impulses . . . precisely the id drives that the surperego of the bour- geois culture sought to repress.'" Young white musicians were attracted by jazz because it seemed to promise cultural as well as musical freedom; it gave them live opportunity "to be and express themselves, the sense of being natural"™ '

Ted Gioia has shown how these strands of white thought about black music—as instinctive, as free—became entangled in jazz criticism. The French intellectual ideology of the primitive, the myth of the noble savage, meant that jazz was heard as a "music charged with emotion but largely devoid of intellectual content," while the jazz musician was taken to be an "inarticulate and unsophisticated practitioner of an art which he himself scarcely understands." (As late as 1938 Winthrop Sergeant could write that "those who create [jazz] are the ones who know the least about its abstract structure. The Negro, like all folk musicians, expresses himself intuitively.") At the same time, young white musicians (and fans) had their own reasons for asserting that jazz was quite different from art music: "cerebral" became a term of jazz critical abuse ("energy" the contrasting term of praise). Robert O'Meally notes that John Hammond, for example, objected to Billie Holiday's work after "Strange Fruif'.as "too arty." Holiday herself "felt that she had finally begun to discover herself as a singer."19

Gioia notes that the underlying body/mind split here—the supposed opposition of "inspired spontaneous creativity" and "cold inlellectualism"— makes no sense of what jazz musicians do at all. All music-making is about the inind-in-the-body; the "immediacy" of improvisation no more makes unscd'red music "mindless" than the immediacy of talking makes unscripted speech somehow without thought. Whatever the differences between African- and European-derived musics, they cannot be explained in terms of African (or African-American) musicians' lack of formal training, their ignorance of technical issues, their simple "intuition" (any more than what European musicians do can really be described as non-physical).

The matrix of race, rhythm, and sex through which white critics and fans made ideological sense of jazz was just as important for the interpretation of rock 'n' roll. As Charles Shaar Murray writes in his illuminating study of Jimi Hendrix:

-" The "cultural dowry" Jimi Hendrix brought with him into the pop market-place included not only his immense talent and the years of experience acquired in a particularly hard school of show business, but the accumulated weight of the fantasies and mythologies con- structed around black music and black people by whites, hipsters and reactionaries alike. Both shared one common article of faith: that black people represent the personification of the untrammelled id—intrinsically wild, sensual, dangerous, "untamed" in every sense of the word.20

And Linda Martin and Kerry Seagrove's study of "the opposition to rock 'n' roll" shows how appalled 1950s observers automatically equated the rhythm of rock 'n' roll with savagery of various sorts, whether they were moralists like the Bishop of Woolwich ("the hypnotic rhythm and wild gestures in [Rock Around the Clock] had a maddening effect on a rhythm-loving age group"), high musicians like Sir Malcolm Sergeant ("nothing more than an exhibition of primitive tom-tom thumping ... rock 'n' roll has been played in the jungle for centuries") or Herbert von Karajan ("strange things happen in the blood- stream when a musical resonance coincides with the beat of the human pulse"), or psychologists like Dr. Francis J. Braceland, director of the Institute of Living, who explained that rock 'n' roll was both "cannibalistic and tribal- istic." The various strands of the argument were brought together in an editorial in the academic Music Journal in February 1958. Adolescents were, it seemed, "definitely influenced in their lawlessness by this throwback to jungle rhythms. Either it actually stirs them to orgies of sex and violence (as its model did for the savages themselves), or they use it as an excuse for the removal of all inhibitions and the complete disregard of the conventions of decency."21

The academic witnesses who lined up against rock 'n' roll (historians and anthropologists, psychologists and music analysts) conflated a number of different arguments about rhythm and the primitive. "Experts Propose Study of 'Craze,'" ran a rock 'n' roll headline in the New York Times on February 23, 1957, "Liken It to Medieval Lunacy, 'Contagious Dance Furies' and Bite of Tarantula." A Dr. Joost A. M. Meerlo, Associate in Psychiatry at Columbia University, explained that, as in the late fourteenth century, there was now a "contagious epidemic of dance fury." He himself had observed young people

moved by a juke box to dance themselves "more and more into a prehistoric rhythmic trance until it had gone far beyond all the accepted versions of human dancing."

Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: "Duce! Ducel Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions . . . as in drug addiction, a thou- sand years of civilization fall away in a moment . . . Rock 'n' roll is a sign'pf depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity. If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis . . . we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances. The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world.22

The primitive in music (rhythm), the primitive in social evolution (the medieval, the African), and the primitive in human development (the infan- tile) are thus reflections of each other. In the words of the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, "the rocking of disturbed children and of schizophrenics, and the ecstatic rites of primitive tribes" are thus equally examples of the "regres- sive" function of rhythm. From a psychoanalytic perspective, people's pleasure in music is clearly "a catharsis of primitive sexual tension under cover." Under cover, that is to say, of melody and harmony. "The weaker the aesthetic disguise of such rhythmic experiences," the less "artistic" the music.23

Eric Lott suggests that in the United States, at least, what may be at issue here in terms of racial ideology is not so much the infantile as "the state of arrested adolescence . . . to which dominant codes of masculinity aspire . . . These common white associations of black maleness with the onset of pu- bescent sexuality indicate that the assumption of dominant codes of mascu- linity in the United States was (and still is) partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor."24

And if "black culture in the guise of an attractive masculinity" was "the stock in trade of the exchange so central to minstrelsy," it was equally essential for the use value of rock 'n' roll. As Bernard Gendron has argued, "the claim that rock and roll brought real sexuality to popular music is usually under- stood to be related to the claim that it brought real blackness," and from this perspective it certainly does seem "reasonable to place [Jerry Lee] Lewis's 'Whole Lotta Shakin' in the tradition of black-faced minstrelsy." "If 'Whole Lotta Shakin' was to succeed in advertising itself as white-boy-wildly-sings- black, it had to do so quickly and simply. The result had to be a coarsely

outlined cartoon of what it means to sing black. That is, the result had to be a caricature."25

The racism endemic to rock 'n' roll, in other words, was not that white musicians stole from black culture but that they burlesqued it. The issue is not how "raw" and "earthy" and "authentic" African-American sounds were "diluted" or "whitened" for mass consumption, but the opposite process: how gospel and r&b and doo-wop were blacked-up. Thanks to rock 'n' roll, black performers now reached a white audience, but only if they met "the tests of 'blackness'—that they embody sensuality, spontaneity, and gritty soulful- ness." 26 As Gendron writes:

The black pioneers of rock and roll were also driven to produce caricatures of singing-black. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Ray Charles . . . quite radically changed their styles as their audience shifted from predominantly black to largely white. Though all three began their careers by singing the blues in a rather sedate manner (at least by rock and roll standards), they later accelerated their singing speed, resorted to raspy-voiced shrieks and cries, and dressed up their stage acts with manic piano-pounding or guitar acrobatics. According to rock and roll mythology, they went from singing less black (like Nat King Cole or the Mills Brothers) to singing more black. In my judgement it would be better to say that they adopted a more caricaturized version of singing black wildly, thus paving the way for soul music and the British invasion.27

The problem of rock and roll arguments about rhythm and sex (the arguments still made by bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers) is not just their racist starting point, but also their confusion about what's meant by rhythm, by musical rhythm in particular. The assumption that a musical "beat" is equivalent to a bodily beat (the heartbeat, the .pulse) doesn't stand up to much examination (why isn't musical regularity compared to mechani- cal repetition—neither metronomes nor clocks are thought to rouse their listeners to a frenzy).

There is equally little evidence that Western readings of African rhythmic patterns as "sexual" have anything at all to do with their actual use, musical or otherwise. As John Miller Chernoff points out, "African music and dance are not performed as an unrestrained emotional expression." They are, rather, ways of realizing aesthetic and ethical structures. "Ecstatic" is, in fact, the most inappropriate adjective to apply to African music: "The feelings the music brings may be exhilarating but not overpowering, intense but not frenzied. Ecstasy as we see it would imply for most Africans a separation from all that

is good and beautiful, and generally, in fact, any such loss of control is viewed

by them as tasteless, ridiculous, or even sinful."28

In her study of African oral poetry, Ruth Finnegan notes similarly that "cultural factors help to determine what is appreciated as 'rhythmic' in any given group or period: it is not purely physical." If some oral poetry is bound up with a regular physical action (as in a work song), nevertheless "the rhythmic movements are accepted by current convention rather than dictated

by universal physiological or material requirements." As Maurice Halbwachs

once put it, "Rhythm does not exist in nature; it, too, is a result of living in

society."29 - The point here seems so obvious that it's surprising that it still has to be

made: musical rhythm is as much a mental as a physical matter; deciding when to play a note is as much a matter of thought as deciding what note to

play (and, in practice, such decisions are anyway not separable).30 In analyzing the differences between African and European musics, then, we can't start

from a distinction between body and mind; that distinction, while now an important aspect of musical meaning, is ideological, not musicological.

What are the alternatives? One common analytic strategy is to rework the nature/culture metaphor in terms of the simple and the complex: African

music is simple, European music is complex. There is an obvious evolutionary claim here: European music, it is implied, was once simple too—that's what we mean by "folk music." Tims, although this argument may not be biologi- cally racist (blacks as "naturally" more rhythmic than whites), it remains historically racist: African cultures, it seems, haven't yet "advanced" to the European level. In short, the association of the rhythmic with the primitive

is retained: simple music is music driven by rhythmic rules; music becomes

"complex" when it is concerned with melodic and harmonic structure. Lawrence Levine notes a particularly lucid statement of the combined

musical and social assumptions of this attitude in a 1918 issue of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. There were, the paper suggested, "many mansions in the houses of the muses." There was the "great assembly hall of melody," where "most of us take our seats." There were the "inner sanctums of harmony" where a lesser number enjoyed "truly great music." Finally, there

was, "down in the basement, a kind of servants' hall of rhythm. It is there we hear the hum of the Indian dance, the throb of the Oriental tambourines and ,

kettledrums, the clatter of the clogs, the click of Slavic heels, the thumpty-

tumpty of the negro banjo, and, in fact, the native dances of the world."31

The different pleasures offered by the musically "simple" and the musi- cally "complex" are, then, still being related to differences between body and mind. Leonard Meyer suggests that "the differentia between art music and ;

primitive music lies in speed of tendency gratification. The primitive seeks

almost immediate gratification for his tendencies whether these be biological or musical." Meyer's definition of "primitive" here refers to music that is "dull syntactically" rather than to music "produced by non-literate peoples," but it is difficult not to read the familiar equation of musical, social, psychological, and racial infantility into an assertion like the following:

One aspect of maturity both of the individual and of the culture

within which a style arises consists then in the willingness to forego

immediate, and perhaps lesser gratification. Understood generally, not with reference to any specific musical work, self-imposed ten-

dency-inhibition and the willingness to bear uncertainty are indica- tions of maturity. They are signs, that is, that the animal is becoming a man. And this, I take it, is not without relevance to considerations of value.32

Musicologists themselves have criticized the simple/complex, African/ European distinction in two ways. Some accept Meyer's broad descriptive terms but reverse his evaluative conclusions—the spontaneous, human ex-

pression of African communities contrasts positively with the alienated ra- tionalism of the European bourgeoisie; improvised musical creativity is valued over rule-bound musical interpretation, "jes* grew" over "The Wall- flower Order."33

Others dismiss Meyer's position as ethnocentric. The argument here is that African music is just as complex as European music, but complex

1 according to its own conventions. Andrew Chester, for example, contrasts the

"extensional" form of Western musical construction—"theme and variations, counterpoint, tonality are all devices that build diachronically and synchron- ically outward from basic musical atoms"—with the "intensional" develop- ment of non-European music: "In this mode of construction the basic musical units (played/sung notes) are not combined through space and time

' as simple elements into complex structures. The simple entity is that consti- tuted by the parameters of melody, harmony and beat, while the complex is

built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflection of the basic -beat."34

What's still taken for granted in these arguments—that African music's "simplicity" is a sign of its superiority; that African music is complex in-its-

* own-way—is that African and European musics do work and mean differ-

ently. And this assumption, as Philip Tagg has argued, is still rooted in ideology rather than musicology, still concerns not different musical princi- ples as such, but different institutional uses of these principles.35

Further, sweeping comparisons of "African" and "European" musics are

decidedly unhistorical. Ernest Borneman makes the point most clearly:

When I hear the enthusiast talking lightly of the "African roots" of jazz, I wonder invariably what part of Africa they are talking about. Africa is the largest of all continents. It has a greater variety of genetic and lingual groups than any comparable land mass. Negroes, gener-

ally considered the typical Africans, actually form a comparatively

small part of the continent's population. Their music differs more profoundly from that of the Berbers in the North or the Bushmen

in the South than the music of any two European nations ever differed from each other during the whole history of the European

tradition. During the 325 years that have elapsed since the first Negroes reached America, African music has changed more deeply

than our music between Palestrina and Schoenberg. And even within each lingually coherent group of African musics there is a complex

gradation from folksong through dance music to the highly skilled

and highly specialised activities of the professional dancers and mu-

sicians. These gradations are never stable over any length of time and within any single community: their patterns have altered so much over the last three hundred years that any parallel drawn between

the present-day music" of African and American Negroes is highly suspect in its applicability to the key period of the seventeenth

century when American Negro music split off from its African 36roots.

From an ethnomusicological point of view, then, an understanding of

how rhythm works in African music has to begin with the question of how

the music works in its particular historical and social contexts; it cannot be

deduced from what it means to white listeners in quite different situations altogether.37 And here two (related) arguments come into play, one concern- ing the function of music in African societies, the other having to do with music-making practices. Borneman, for instance, suggests:

What we do know with a fair degree of accuracy is the strictly functional nature of seventeenth century West-African music and the

complete absence of "art music" in the European sense of the term. All West-African music from the Gold Coast to the Ivory Coast had

a strict purpose in the cultural pattern of the community. Each type

of song was used by one group within the community, and by that

group alone, to exert an effect on another group or on the gods who

controlled the affairs of the group . . . All social occasions had their

distinct functional music . . . each funning a distinct pattern, but all of them united by a common quality: they could be danced as well as sung, and it was in their function as dance music that all these songs transcended the level of functionalism and were raised to the level of artistic integrity . . . Geoffrey Gorer in Africa Dances goes so

far as to say that . . . "the West-African Negro is not so much the blackish man or the cannibal man or the primitive man as he is the man who expresses every emotion with rhythmical bodily move-

ment."38

As Chernoff's 1970s studies make clear, what is being invoked here is not

African nature but African society—"very few villagers can themselves play the drums . . . most/drummers' rarely progress beyond the lesser drums,"

but "there is a special kind of sophistication to the ways that rhythms work in African music," there is a particular "sensibility," an "orientation to music

and to life which defines the significant dimensions of excellence within the

total configuration of a musical event."39 Music defined in these terms describes a form of communication. One

aspect of this in some African cultures is the integration of verbal and physical

means of expression. In Borneman's words, "language and music are not strictly divided." On the one hand, many African languages use what Euro-

peans would regard as "sung" elements (variations of pitch, vibrato, and timing)—these elements are as essential to what an utterance means as the use of vowels and consonants; on the other hand, African musicians expect

to "talk" instrumentally: African drummers, for example, vary the pitch,

vibrato, and timing of their sounds just as skillfully as African singers. "It is

high time," writes Borneman, "that the myth of African 'jungle rhythm' were

put in perspective by the propagation of some concrete facts and data on the use of timbre in African music which is the invariable and inseparable

complement of its rhythmical structure."40 The significance of rhythm for African music and culture, then, lies not

in its simplicity and "directness" but in its flexibility and sophistication, not

in its physical expressivity but in its communicative subtlety, its ability to make coherent all the movements of the body. As Richard Waterman once

put it, "Essentially, this simply means that African music, with few exceptions, is to be regarded as music for the dance, although 'the dance' involved may

be entirely a mental one."41 In his history of African-American culture and consciousness, Lawrence

Levine cites a study of schoolyard games in St. Louis in 1944 in which the researcher found that children were still singing and dancing to songs she remembered from the 1890s:

Little Sally Water, Sitting in a saucer,

Weeping and crying for someone to love her. Rise, Sally rise, Wipe off your eyes; Turn to the east, Turn to the west,

Turn to the one that you love the best.

Young black children, however, sang their own version:

Little Sally Walker, Silting in a saucer,

Weeping and crying for a nice young man. Rise, Sally, Rise;

Wipe your weeping eyes. Put your hand on your hip, Let your backbone slip; Shake it to the east, O baby; Shake it to the west;

Shake it to the one you love the best.

Not only the words but the gestures accompanying these play songs differed from those of the white children: "They have syncopated the rhythm, and they accompany the hand-clapping with a 'jazz' and 'swing' rhythm of the body."42

The point here is not that young black children were naturally more physical than white children, more "sexual" (though one can easily imagine disapproving white teachers and admiring white peers both thinking so), but that they were more rhythmically articulate, better able to bring together verbal and bodily expressive devices, bring them together, that is, under the name of "rhythm."

This is clearly an aspect of what is involved when white musicians learn to play black musics. Art Hodes remembers the process this way:

Many times they'd ask me to play. I was kidded plenty. Someone would holler, "Play the blues, Art," and when I played they would laugh. Not mean, but they would laugh. That hurt but I couldn't blame them. I hadn't as yet learned the idiom. I was entranced by

their language but I hadn't learned to speak it. The next night I was there again, putting my nickels into that piano. That music did something to me. I can't explain. I had to hear it. That's one feeling that never left me. Jackson would say to me, "Art, I'll show you how to play the blues; just watch my hands." And I'd answer him, "No, don't teach me, just play." Because I knew I couldn't learn that way. I knew that I had to feel the blues myself and then they'd flow easily.43

It was not that Hodes had somehow to become black to play black, nor that the blues could only be expressive of a specifically racial experience, but rather that to "feel" the music he had to get inside it. And this is as true for listeners as players. How is this different for other sorts of musicians? The European, suggests Christopher Small, "tends to think of music primarily in terms of entities, which are composed by one person and performed to listeners by another." "Pieces" of music thus exist "over and above any possible performance of them ... Composition and performance are separate activities, and the composer dominates the performer as the performer domi- nates the audience."

The African musician, on the other hand, thinks of music primarily as action, as process, in which all are able to participate. In so far as musical entities exist at all, they are regarded not as sacrosanct, but rather as material for the musicians, whose primary responsibility is to the listeners and to the occasion for which they have come to- gether, to work on ... Composition and performance are thus part of a single act which Europeans call improvisation but others call, simply, playing.44

Music, in other words, is defined by its performance, only exists as it is performed. This has profound aesthetic consequences. In general terms, it reflects

the idea that the arts, and especially that great performance art of

music-dance-drama-masking-costume for which we lack a name, are vital means by which human identities and relationships are ex- plored, affirmed and celebrated, and Jiuman societies criticized [This idea] is not unique to Africa but it is without doubt there that it is most highly developed and best understood; it is the unique and precious contribution of Africans to human culture.4/

More specifically, as Charles Keil has brilliantly argued, it means that we can distinguish between African and African-derived and European and Euro-

pean-derived musics aesthetically: not in terms of body and mind, the simple and the complex, or even the "intensional" and the "extensional" (though these terms come closer to what is at issue); rather, what's at stake is the difference between "embodied meaning" and "engendered feeling." The for- mer term refers to the way in which the meaning of a piece of music is embodied "within" it, formally, structurally, and syntactically; the analytic assumption (this is the norm of Western musical aesthetics) is that it is in response to these embodied meanings that we, as listeners, "experience" music. Interpreting, feeling, and evaluating thus constitute a single process. But in musical cultures where the emphasis is on performance (not compo- sition), there is "an on-going musical progress that can be subsumed under the general heading of'engendered feeling.'" Obviously this distinction is not absolute (after all, European music is performed, African music has syntax; European music engenders feeling, African music embodies meaning), but there are, nonetheless, clear, contrasts of aesthetic emphasis, differences in what is being referred to when music sounds "right."45

Alan Durant makes this point lucidly in a commentary on Pierre Boulez's disdain for improvisation. First, Boulez:

Instrumentalists do not possess invention—otherwise they would be composers. There has been a lot of talk of "irnprovisation,".but even taken in the best sense of the word it cannot replace invention. True invention entails reflections on problems that in principle have never been posed, or at least not in a manner which is readily apparent, and reflection upon the act of creation implies an obstacle to be overcome. Instrumentalists are not superhuman, and their response to the problem of invention is normally to manipulate what is stored in the memory. They recall what has already been played, in order to manipulate and transform it.

And this is Duranl's comment:

Boulez repeatedly implies that interest in music lies in posing and solving intellectual problems. But playing and listening to music are material activities, and also involve potential cross-fertilisation be- tween intellectual, sensual and physical pleasures. For all its own unresolved conceptual difficulties, it has been a major accomplish- ment of improvised music that it has helped wrestle contemporary musical argument away from increasingly arid post-serialist debates

over formal complexity and artistry into more direct consideration of issues of pleasure, which can come just as effectively from repe-

tition and simple contrast as from complex combination or trans- formation. The idea of taking pleasure as freely from repetition as from permutation and combination—which is fundamental to jazz, rock and most non-Western musics—challenges the formalist ideas of composers such as Berio and Boulez; and when these alternative ways of gaining pleasure then combine with pleasures of physical activity in making music, a challenge is also made to the distinction Boulez everywhere confidently assumes between categories of "in- strumentalists," "composers," and "audiences."47

In a "processual" aesthetic the decision of what (and when) is the "right" next note is a decision for which the musician has to take personal respon- sibility—but in a social setting. As Chernoff notes in his study of African drumming, "A rhythm which cuts and defines another rhythm must leave room for the other rhythm to be heard clearly, and the African drummer concerns himself as much with the notes he does not play as with the accents he

• delivers."48 African music may, then, be improvised, but it is not "made up on the spot, nor is it particularly loosely structured," and, as Keil suggests, from the musicians' point of view what matters most here is movement (not architecture), the perceived "vital drive" of what they are doing. Improvised music is, in this sense, a permanent presence; there's no time to wonder where it's going, where it has come from; the only thing to do is indicate where one

•

is, now. From this perspective, as Chernoff repeatedly emphasizes, "improvisa-/

lion" describes an ethical commitment -to social participation rather than purely individual or "random" expression—"African music is improvised in the sense that a musician's responsibility extends from the music itself into the movement of its social setting."49 And listeners also-have a responsibility— to engage with the music (rather than just to contemplate it), to follow the

{; musicians' decisions as they are made, and to respond to them. On the one ^ hand, this is because, as in any other communicative performance, the music's

success, in rhetorical terms, depends on that response (and on the musicians' ?\r response to it); on the other hand, it is because the combination of

feeling, interpreting, and evaluating involved here depends on listeners en- *> tering into the performing process (rather than the compositional one). To

put this another way, the only response that matters here is the first response: what we feel about the music is what it means; like the musicians, we don't

• have time to interpret the sounds first, and respond to them laten This comes

back to Richard Waterman's point: the ideal way of listening to music is to *,' dance to it, if only in one's head.50 This is the only way, in Chernoff's words,

"to mediate the rhythms actively," by engaging with the same vital drive as the musicians. Ron Brown, himself a Motown bassist, thus describes listening to James Jainerson:

He had a unique ability to set your ear up in terms of listening to music. Like a rider on a horse, it would be like . . . he'd start you off at a nice galloping pace and race clown the track; and all of a sudden, he'd take a right turn and throw you and you'd be out (lying in space not knowing where you are. Then just before you touch the earth, he's right back there and you land in the saddle. You see, he had the • ability to suggest to your ear where he wanted you to think that he was going . . . but then he wouldn't go there. But then somehow, he'd always manage to wind up back on his feet when beat one came around.51

One can imagine both technological and technical reasons why percussive i skills might become central to a process-based musical aesthetic. In some; societies the most complex musical instruments doubtless tend to be things, that can be hit and plucked (rather than bowed or blown), while in all oral,; cultures musicians have to store their techniques and traditions in the body.' Both playing and listening tend to deploy (and develop) an elaborate sense1; of rhythm, and the ability to make precise decisions about the timing of a;^ note. Some African musicians are therefore certainly used to doing things^ that Western musicians are not—-they hear complex polyphony in rule- bound, patterned terms; they maintain a complex rhythmic drive and struc-*i ture without needing an external guiding force (a conductor or a* metronome). A. M. Jones was startled to find that African musicians could-i "hear" time intervals as small as one twenty-fifth of a second: "When we' Europeans imagine we are beating strict time, the African will merely smile i' at the 'roughness' of our beating."52 Chernoff adds:

I have a cousin who trained as a pianist to the point that she , J< contemplated a professional career. During a discussion we had about African music, I asked her to beat a steady rhythm on a table fe lop, and she of course did so quite well until 1 added the off-beats ^ between her beats. She became so erratic in her beating, speeding up and slowing down, that she accused me, incorrectly, I would think, ,| of deliberately syncopating my beats in an effort to confuse her. I '̂ '|| replied that she should have been able to maintain her rhythm anyway. That such an apparently simple task should have presented her with such difficulties is an indication, particularly in view of her

specialization, that the Western and African orientations to rhythm are almost opposite.

It should be obvious by now that the equation of rhythm and sex is a ||: product of European high cultural ideology rather than of African popular

i ' musical practice. It is, in fact, the rhythm-focused experience of music-in-the- <J: process-of-production that explains the appeal of African-American music and |fe not its supposed "direct" sensuality. The body, that is to say, is engaged with

this music in a way that it is not engaged with European musics, but in |fc musical rather than sexual terms.

"In African music," writes Chernoff, "it is the listener or dancer who has I to supply the beat: the listener must be actively engaged in making sense of 3i'~,

| the music; the music itself does not become the concentrated focus of an Ifc event, as at a concert."54 John Blacking, who of all ethnomusicologists has |i argued this point most eloquently, concludes that rhythm describes not a &' sound but the making of a sound, the relationship with a "non-sound," the | hand being lifted as well as the hand coming down on the drum skin.55 If to

describe either melody or harmony is immediately to move into an abstrac- §;, tion, the relationship of notes to each other in the imagination, to describe |/'a rhythm is always to describe an action, to describe that which produces the |f sound (and, indeed, rhythmic description need not .refer to sounds at all). K.; Keil describes the jazz drummer's "attack" as "the type of contact the player |:• makes with.his instrument in the initial production of a note." What's at issue |; musicologically is the drummer's relationship to the musical pulse—"on top" |ii.pr "laid back"-—and the bass player's sonic mode of "plucking"—"chunky" If or "stringy"; but such terms inevitably describe physical actions, the move- Kments that create the sounds as much as the sounds themselves.56

What we mean by "feeling" in popular music (what Art Hodes meant by I "feeling" the blues) is, then, a physical as much as a mental experience; |"feeling" describes the way the body feels as it produces sounds, whether by ij'hitting, plucking, or- blowing things, or by singing (and, of course, even IpVestern classical music involves physical feeling too—the first instruction in i-the middle-class piano lesson is to "relax," to "feel" the music). As John ^Blacking argued so persuasively, if grasping music means feeling it, then |musical understanding is a bodily as well as a mental process (with which

pairgument Stravinsky agreed, writing that "the sight of the gestures and |i|novements of the various parts of the body producing the music is funda- if mentally necessary if it is to be grasped in all its fullness").57 "££.•*''?'

pi;1'. People who play musical instruments,therefofe, do hear music played on instrument differently from the way people who don't play the instru-

hear it—they listen with a felt, physical empathy. But my general point

is that for the popular music audience the easiest way into the music is almost always rhythmically, through regular body movements (we can all participate in the music's percussive action, even if we have no instrumental skills at all). Prom this perspective, the difference between African- and European-based musics just describes the conventional requirements of different sorts of musical events: more participatory musics are more rhythmically complex (and harmonically simple); more contemplative musics are rhythmically sim-

pler (and more harmonically complex). It is in this context that one can begin to see clearly why "African" and

"European" are somewhat arbitrary labels. The musical differences at issue (the focus on performative participation; the emphasis on structural cogni- tion) are really differences between ideologies of listening. And, in the end, "structural cognition" is a peculiar approach to music even in Europe: it describes the high cultural ideal (but not necessarily normal listening prac- tice) only of the last two hundred years or so.58 In musical terms, which is the odder event: a classical music concert where we expect to see musicians bodily producing the music which we listen to thoughtfully, silent and still; or a club night at which we don't expect to see the musicians (or even the deejays) producing the sounds, but in which our physical movement is a

necessary part of what it means to listen? This is to reiterate that dance matters not just as a way of expressing

music but as a way of listening to it, a way into the music in its unfolding— which is why dancing to music is both a way of losing oneself in it, physically, and a way of thinking about it, hearing it with a degree of concentration that is clearly not "brainless": "One who 'hears' the music 'understands' it with a dance, and the participation of the dancer is therefore the rhythmic interpre- tation which we have described as the aesthetic foundation of appreciation, the essential foothold on the music, so to speak."59 In short, it is through rhythm, through decisions regarding when to move, at what pace, with what sort of regularity and repetition, that we most easily participate in a piece of music, if only by tapping our feet, clapping our hands, or just jigging our head up and down. And in terms of live performance this is certainly experienced both as collective participation, our movements tied in with those of other people, and as musical participation, our response (as. in the classic African call-and-response tradition) a necessary part of the music in itself.60

Having said that, it is also true that how we enter music bodily and take pleasure in it is a matter of the discursive conventions and expectations we bring to it—"artless" movement (idiot dancing) involves as significant a statement about what music means as artful dance (like ballet).61 And it is

l$i, here, in what we bring to music rather than in what we find in it, that sexual suggestions lie. Dancing, after all, is, as Wendy Wolf put it to me, the socially

•' sanctioned way of being physically with "someone you fancy." The sensual meaning of music, in other words, may be coded "in the rhythm," but how

v those codes are constructed, how rhythms are read, is a matter of cultural, Ajnot musical politics. Arguments about "sex" in music have always also been If arguments about public behavior (and about the public which is so behav-

. The implicit suggestion about public and private music listening here is

aesthetically misleading. Listening to classical music is taken to be a more j private, "in the head" sort 'of experience than listening to heavy metal, head JK banging, even though empirically speaking the latter is probably a more

"•private or at least individualized affair, whether the listener is using a walkman or has her ears shoved up against the speakers at a live show. In the same

'/way, because sex is usually an intimate activity, "sexy" music (music to have sex by) is conventionally not, in fact, the rock 'n' roll that inspired teenagers

j^to orgy in the 1950s or the Red Hot Chili Peppers to strip on stage today, i', but the yearning, lush balladry of Johnny Mathis and Luther Vandross, the I' -Romantic porno-classical sounds of a Francis "Emmanuelle" Lai. (And it may J, reveal something of the poverty of the Chilis' sexual ideology that they

'associate good sex with a 4:4 beat.) |( There's a familiar elision of categories in the usual rhythm/sex arguments: •the mind is associated with individuality, the self; the body with the mass, *the crowd, the public. African-American music is heard as more "bodily" jbecause it is more collective (which does indeed make both historical and •**

^musical sense), but then descriptions of the music become confused with , attitudes toward its collectivity. (Music, to put this another way, is seen as , "orderly" or "disorderly" by reference not to different types of audience

^participation but simply to different types of audience.62

frThe reason why rhythm is particularly significant for popular music is that ^ a steady tempo and an interestingly patterned beat offer the easiest ways into

musical event; they enable listeners without instrumental expertise to re- fn,spond "actively," to experience music as a bodily as well as a mental matter. & rThis has nothing to do with going wild. Rather, a regular beat, some sense

wV*Jof order, is necessary for the participatory process which rhythm describes ^ (we talk about the tempo being "strict" as a source of discipline). Rhythm, ^like dance, is always about bodily control (not the lack of it). Polyphony, for

example, first came into European music, replacing the monody of plain t, through peasant dances, which required mensuration and therefore

made possible the rhythmic order on which polyphony depended. In Philip Tagg's words, "The more music is used in connection with bodily movements (dancing, working, marching, etc.) the greater the probability of regular tempo and periodicity."63

While different dance styles have different textures, different pulses and tempos, the most popular dance musics in the West during this century have used tightly repetitive rhythms and firmly fixed time signatures. "It is par- ticularly difficult to dance to white rock music," concludes Chernoff, from his Africanist perspective, "because the main-beat emphasis is retained and the use of off-beat accentuation and multiple rhythms is restricted. There is no room inside the music for movement."64

This makes it all the more striking that the pleasures of rock music continue to be explained by intellectuals in terms of jouissance, the escape from structure, reason, form, and so forth. As should by now be obvious, what's involved in such assertions is not a musical (or empirical) judgment at all, but an ideological gesture, a deviant expression of respectable taste. So-called "hot" rhythms, that is to say, don't actually mean bodily abandon but signify it, signify it in a particular ideological context.

It may seem to follow from this that the erotics of pop has nothing to do with rhythm at all. But rny argument is, rather, that it is an erotics of the orderly. The sexual charge of most pop music comes, in fact, from the tension between the (fluid) coding of the body in the voice (in the instrumental voice) and the (disciplined) coding of the body in the beat—hence the classic disco (and rave) sound of the soul diva mixed over electronic machines.65

In the end, music is "sexy" not because it makes us move, but because (through that movement) it makes us feel; makes us feel (like sex itself) intensely present. Rhythm, in short, is "sexual" in that it isn't just about the experience of the body but also (the two things are inseparable) about the experience of time.