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The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series Editorial Board

Craig Bartholomäus', Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley Laurie Celia, Shippensburg University Robert Cummings, University of Mississippi Lynée Lewis Gaillet, Georgia State University Karen Gardiner, University of Alabama Christine Howell, Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley Samantha Rooker-Koenigs, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Derek Malone-France, George Washington University Stephanie Odoin, University of Texas at Austin Megan O'Neill, Stetson University Michelle Sidler, Auburn University Carrie Wastal, University of California, San Diego

Writing Music A BEDFORD SPOTLIGHT READER

Jeff Ousborne Suffolk University

bedford/st. martin’s Macmillan Learning Boston I New York

For Bedford/St. Martin's Vice Présidait, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Senior Program Director for English: Leasa Burton Program Manager: John É. Sullivan,III Executive Marketing Manager: Joy Tisher Williams Director of Content Development: Jane Knetzgei Developmental Editor: Cara Kaufman Content Project Manager: Louis C. Bruno Jr. Senior Workflow Manager: Jennifer Wetzel Production Assistant: Briarina Lester Media Project Manager': Rand Thomas Manager of Publishing-Services: Andrea Cava Project Management-Tiiminä Datamatics, Inc. Composition: Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Photo Editor: Hilary Newman Photo Researcher: Sheri Blaney Permissions Editor: Kalina Ingham Permissions Researcher: Arthur Johnson Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik ’• Text Design: Castle Design; Janis Owens; Books By Design, Inc.; Claire

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Copyright © 2018 by Bedford/St. Martin's.

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ISBN 978-1-319-02015-6

Acknowledgments Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 330-32, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the art selections they cover.

Spotlight Reader Series

The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is a line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford's trademark care and quality. The ..readers in the series collect thoughtfully chosen readings sufficient for an entire

writing course — about thirty-five selections—to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives,, opening up topics such as money, food, sustainability, gender, happiness, borders, monsters, American subcultures, language diversity and academic-writing, and humor to critical analysis. An editorial board of a dozen compositionists whose programs focus on specific themes has assisted in the development of the series.

Spotlight Readers offer plenty of material for a composition course while keeping the price low. Each volume in the series includes multi­ ple perspectives on the topic and its effects on individuals and society. Chapters are built around central questions such as "How Do We Make and Consume Music?" and "What Rituals Shape Our Gender?" and so offer numerous entry points for inquiry and discussion. High-interest readings, chosen for their suitability in the classroom, represent a mix of genres and disciplines as well as a choice of accessible and challenging selections to allow instructors to tailor their approach. Each chapter thus brings to light related—even surprising—questions and ideas.

A rich editorial apparatus provides a sound pedagogical foundation. A general introduction, chapter introductions, and headnotes supply context. Following each selection, writing prompts provide avenues of inquiry tuned to different levels of engagement, from reading compre­ hension ("Understanding the Text"), to critical analysis ("Reflection and Response"), to the kind of integrative analysis appropriate to the research paper ("Making Connections"). A website for the series offers support for teaching, with sample syllabi, additional assignments, web links, and more; visit macmillanlearning.com/spotlight.

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20 What Is Music — and Why Do We Love It?

This formula does not imply that different wavelengths or frequencies of sound travel at different velocities. The speed of sound does not depend on either of these quantities. A change in wavelength does not change the velocity: it changes the frequency, and vice versa. The speed of sound depends only on the properties of the medium it is moving through.

Understanding the Text 1. What kind of vibratory motion is “critical” to music? How is it defined? 2. What are the two types of waves described in the essay? Which type of

wave is sound? 3. What does the speed of sound depend upon?

Reflection and Response 4. The writer offers one definition of music: “Music is sound that is

organized” (2). How do you respond to that definition? What are its strengths and weaknesses as an explanation?

5. Parker is a physicist and his essay — excerpted from the book, Good Vibra­ tions: The Physics of Music — incorporates principles from mathematics and physics. Does he explain these concepts clearly? What does he assume about his readers? Does he seem to be writing for a general audience or an audience already familiar with the basics of physics? Point to specific examples to support your answers.

Making Connections 6. Parker asks, “Why does [music] have such a powerful force on people?”

(5). In some ways, all the writers in this chapter wrestle with that question. Do you think exploring the physics of sound helps us answer it? Does this analytical framework broaden the mystery of music’s appeal, or reduce it? Is Parker’s approach compatible with other ways of investigating music — for example, Stephen A. Diamond’s “Why We Love Music —and Freud Despised It” (p. 26) or Oliver Sacks’s “Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes” (p. 46)? Why or why not?

7. In "Beethoven’s Kapow” (p. 61), Justin Davidson writes about a “thrilling” version of the “Eroica” by conductor John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchèstre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Does Parker’s discussion of the physics of music suggest any insight into why this performance might have been so startling and memorable?

Blank Expressions: Brad Mehldau and the Essence of Music Brad Mehldau

In this piece, jazz pianist and composer Brad Mehldau seeks to clarify not so much what music means, but how it means. Along the way, he addresses common accounts of music — particularly ones that seem smug, mislead­ ing, or even empty. For Mehldau, the primary agent of musical

meaning is neither the composer nor the musicians. He reflects on “musical wisdom,” and interrogates the supposed representational and expressive qualities of the medium.

Brad Mehldau’s albums include Introducing Brad Mehldau (1995), Largo (2002), and Live in Marciac (2006). He has collaborated with many musicians and composers, including Pat Metheny, Joshua Redman, Willie Nelson, and Daniel Lanois.

Music often seems to suggest an emotion or a state of being—we reach a consensus, for example, that one piece of music expresses carefree youth, while another expresses world-weary wisdom. But is

music properly expressing anything? Here's Stravinsky on the subject in 1936, from his autobiography: "For 1 consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. . .. Expression has never been an inherent property of music ... It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention — in short, an aspect unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being."

Alas, Stravinsky does not tell us what music's "essential being" is, only that we have mistaken the property of expression with it. He seems to be repeating the gambit of thinkers from Plato onward—he tells us that what we observe is false, posits another realm that is more real, but gives us no concrete information about it. There is no information to give, after all—what is essential lies beyond our reach; we're stuck in our empirical shallowness. Essentialist tropes are everywhere in discussions about music, smugly short circuiting further inquiry, maintaining: "We cannot put in words what is essential about music."

It is probably more reasonable to say we cannot put in words what is essential about anything. Essence is a cipher, a phantom, and a perilous one at that—by the time Stravinsky was writing those words, essentialist

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22 What Is Music — and Why Do We Love It?

ideas were being stapled on to notions of race and nation with horrific results. These kinds of tropes about music always persist, though, because music acts like language in its ability to represent things, yet its mode of expression, if Stravinsky will pardon us, is free of language. So we see it as the ideal form of communication—one that supersedes language. The irony and ultimately the weakness of this viewpoint is that our ability to posit this idealised communication is dependent on the very language that we wish to transcend. Language is simply feasting on itself, on its own poverty—it has revealed nothing about music.

Was Stravinsky merely perpetuating a kind of sophistry? For years, his statement confounded and bothered people who took it at face value, assuming that he meant music is not expressive, period. In 1962, he clarified what he meant — a little grumpily: "The over-publicised bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real, and as such, beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea 'expressed in terms of’ music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself." So Stravinsky wanted to do away with a subtle but pervasive notion: that of a pre-existing idea or emotion that a composer will then set to music. A composer does not "feel sad" and then write "sad" music; that is a childishly reductive view of how music­ is created. It is the listener, after all, who assigns meaning, ideas and emotions to music once he or she hears it. We commit a blunder when we imagine a transcendental idea that existed before music, like one of Plato's ideal forms.

When Stravinsky says "music expresses itself," he is speaking of the 5 process by which it comes into being—for himself at least. It does not borrow from language to generate itself; the composer does not have to have a particular feeling as he composes. Music's abstract quality—the way in which it does not refer to something other than itself—gives it autonomy in this reasoning.

This is not cut and dried, of course. Someone could point to any number of works that seem to be driven by a specific idea, or music that we retrospectively know was inspired by specific feelings—happy, sad, what have you—that came about from an event in the composer or per­ former's life. Many of Stravinsky's works seem to be related to a concrete

MEHLDAU Blank Expressions 23

' A musician does not necessarily need a wealth of experiences to express something that others will find profound. He or she obviously needs some — you can’t live in a cave and pop out and start waxing profound — but not as many as one would expect. '

idea—an imagined primitive ceremony, famously, in The Rite of Spring. And I'm excluding music with words, which is a whole other matter.

Stravinsky's statement was probably born out of frustration, as he repeatedly encountered reductive, mistaken characterisations of the com­ poser's creative process. To the extent that he is correcting that reduc­ tion, I agree with him. It is easy to demonstrate the validity of his view by considering perceived youth in one work, and wisdom in another.

Consider two examples among many: Schubert's perfect song, "Gretchen am Spinnrade". This song changed the expressive possibility of song, upping the ante forever. He wrote it when he was 17. Or there is Jimi Hendrix's album, Are You Experienced, recorded when he was 24. The guitar was never the same again; rock music was never the same again; music was never the same again.

How was Schubert able to think up music like that — music that telegraphed the emotions of desire, fear, passion and unrest so uncan­ nily? Doesn't it take wisdom to portray emotions like that? From where did young Schubert's psychological insight into female desire come? From what deep, sad place did a song like Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" emerge; what informed the ecstasy of his "Third Stone from the Sun"—memories of high school?

It was not wisdom that comes with age, strictly speaking, in any of 10 those cases. In day-to-day life, wisdom means we have grown older, we have learned much through numerous experiences, some painful and some pleasurable, we have reflected on them, and we base our observa­ tions, judgments and actions on them. Music is different. A musician does not necessarily need a wealth of experiences to express something that others will find profound. He or she obviously needs some—you can't live in a cave and pop out and start waxing profound — but not as many as one would expect. A musician can demand our attention without having necessarily lived many years.

That suggests musical wisdom has different rules than the wisdom that tells someone, for instance, not to argue a point, because he's argued it so many times before and it's an argu­ ment he can't win; or the wisdom that helps an older guy win the affection of a beautiful younger woman for a night because he understands her—he knows what she wants to hear more than the twentysomething guy vying for

24 What Is Music — and Why Do We Love It?

her attention. The twentysomething guy, on the other hand, might be arguing shrilly about politics, full of youthful stridency, sounding self- important to everyone except himself; he might be saying all the wrong stuff to the girl at the bar while the silver fox steals her away. But that night he might go home and write some music of profundity, music that has no stridency, music that bewitches us and soothes us.

Should we say, then, that musical wisdom arrives somehow faster than normal wisdom? That hypothesis won't do, though, because, in cssen- tialist fashion, it brackets out the experience of composing and playing music from other experiences. There must be some way to account for the ability of musical expression to arrive before the depth of experience it seems to convey. The key word there is "seems" — it takes us back to Stravinsky, who would say, simply, that music only "seems" to convey wisdom; there is not a shred of actual wisdom in it at all. Music is only representing wisdom for a group of listeners; it is not properly exuding it. So let us not assign this agency to music; let us more accurately say that the group of listeners is attaching a quality to the music—it comes from them.

That works the other way around as well: Older musicians and com­ posers create "youthful" music—music that sounds quirky, full of anx­ ious energy, untamed—awkward, jagged, rhapsodic, or even foolish—at a station in their lives where they are not particularly anxious, foolish or awkward in their bearing at all. (Brahms' Double Concerto is a beloved example for me.)

This should be good news for the listener. I propose that we never grow out of good music—the whole idea is nonsense. Anything that is strong stays with us our whole lives. We forget about music sometimes, but then we come back to it, and it yields fresh pleasure and insight, along with a beautiful, bittersweet cadence of our past merging with the present moment. Thank goodness it is this way; thank goodness great music isn't "age sensitive"—what a sad world that would be!

Rock'n'roll is often by definition a young man's game—Led Zeppelin, 15 the Who, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones released some of their most enduring music before they were 30. We don't stop listen­ ing to their music past the age of 30, though. Any music that is strong will speak to us in different ways at different points in our lives, and will never truly grow irrelevant.

MEHLDAU Blank Expressions 25

Understanding the Text 1. According to Mehldau, "Essentialist tropes are everywhere in discus­

sions about music” (2). What is he referring to? What is the problem with “essentialist tropes”?

2. In paragraph 4, Mehldau asks, “Was Stravinsky merely perpetuating a kind of sophistry?” What does “sophistry” mean? Does Mehldau think Stravinsky’s argument is sophistic? Explain your answer with quotations from the text.

Reflection and Response 3. According to the writer, what is the relationship between music and wisdom?

How are the two different? What is “musical wisdom”? Do you agree with these distinctions and claims? Why or why not?

4. Mehldau writes: “We forget about music sometimes, but then we come back to it, and it yields fresh pleasure and insight, along with a beautiful, bittersweet cadence of our past merging with the present moment. Thank goodness it is this way; thank goodness great music isn’t ‘age sensi­ tive’ — what a sad world that would be!” (14). Do you agree? Can you think of specific musical examples of this process or experience in your own life? What do you think he means by “age sensitive” in this context?

Making Connections 5. In “Beethoven’s Kapow” (p. 61), Justin Davidson writes about Beethoven’s

“Eroica” symphony — and about how perceptions of music change over time: “Beethoven toyed with expectations we do not have and dismantled conventions that no longer guide us. As a result, the ‘Eroica,’ which emerged with such blinding energy that some of its first listeners thought its composer must be insane, sounds like settled wisdom to us” (4). Would Mehldau agree with Davidson’s argument, particularly with regard to the meaning of music and the role of the listener? Why or why not?

6. According to Leonid Perlovsky in “Music and Consciousness” (p. 35), the “key to music’s mysterious power lies in its unique relationship to the basic mechanisms of the mind” (3). Do you think Perlovsky’s account of music’s power and effects on listeners is compatible with Mehldau’s? Explain your answer with specific quotations from the essays.

In this illuminating essay on the art of Billie Holiday, writer and literary critic Robert O’Meally evokes the powerful and idio­

syncratic voice of perhaps the greatest female American jazz singer. He pays special attention to her signature song, the anti-lynching lament “Strange Fruit.” But he also addresses her skill as a stylistic interpreter and a cultural icon of the blues and beyond — a figure who transcended music and “became a story.” Robert O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Columbia University, as well as the founder and former director of the Cen­ ter for Jazz Studies. His works include Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (author) (1989) and Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (editor) (2003).

Lady Day Robert O’Meally

Billie Holiday's greatest achievement was the unfolding of a distinc­tive and dramatically alluring style. She was born in Philadelphia in 1915, grew up in Baltimore, and died in New York City in 1959—born

into poverty, she grew up subjected to rape and juvenile detention and prostitution (one might call many of the singer's business arrangements with manager-boyfriends a form of prostitution), and she died under house arrest and police guard in the hospital, where she was being treated for liver failure. One cannot pin down, in her life, a single specific history-making moment of action in the way we can, say, a declaration of war or a vote of Congress.

Hers was an art of understatement: a mode of creation that Zora Neale Hurston called "dynamic suggestion" and "compelling insinuation." Space, timing, and the shaping of words were definitive. Holiday's first studio recordings, made in 1933 when she was eighteen, and her appear­ ance with Duke Ellington's band in the short film Symphony in Black, made two years later, already reveal a storyteller's voice, with a graininess that gave it a been-there-and-gone authority. Her voice itself was thin, her pitch sometimes uncertain, her range narrow—and then narrower

"Hers was an art of under­ statement: a mode of cre­ ation that Zora Neale Hurston called “dynamic suggestion” and “compelling insinuation.” Space, timing, and the shap­ ing of words were definitive."

and lower with the years. She was one of the only great black American singers of the twentieth century who did not emerge from the Baptist church (Hol­ iday's family was Catholic); her voice did not evoke the gospel setting. And yet sometimes her song "God Bless the Child" is sung in a black church set­ ting. "The blues to me," she told a TV

84

O’MEALLY Lady Day 85

interviewer, "is like being very sad, very sick, going to church, being very happy." Listening to these words, one can perhaps find one moment, not beyond but focusing others, when Holiday reached a verge, when she made her own event.

Holiday first recorded the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" in 1939; she performed it for the rest of her life. The story of the song is now well known: it was composed by Abel Meeropol, a member of the Communist Party who wrote under the name Lewis Allan and taught for many years at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx (Meeropol and his wife adopted the two young sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their parents' execution in 1953 for treason). After seeing Holiday at Café Society, one of the only integrated nightclubs in Manhattan, Meeropol offered her the song, and her presentation of the piece there caused a sensation and a scandal. Seeking to record the song, Holiday was refused by her label, Columbia, and even by her producer, John Hammond, him­ self once a jazz critic for the New Masses; it was the small label Com­ modore that was willing to risk such a forthrightly political song. The words Meeropol wrote and Holiday sang have become part of American literature.

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Although the song was Meeropol's and was not, as Holiday often claimed, written especially for her, as art—as American speech—Holiday came to own "Strange Fruit," and she made plain her displeasure when others presumed to sing it. Comparisons of the original sheet music with Holiday's various recordings make clear that she painstakingly disas­ sembled and then rebuilt the song in her own style—just as she rou­ tinely undid and redid songs from Broadway or Tin Pan Alley. For the first recording of "Strange Fruit," Holiday compressed the song's melody and slowed its pace to increase its searing power. Recordings from the 1940s and '50s show that, increasingly, she intensified the drama of the weighted language by extending the silences between phrases—spaces for the audience to take in the meaning, to reflect. A television clip of a performance in the mid-1950s shows, too, how she twists and extends the vowel sounds of certain words ("drop," "crop") until they become a mournful, accusatory wail. She cuts short the final, full-throated cry of "crop"; she does so with a suddenness that leaves her audience no room for sentimentality or self-pity, but instead confronts it with a void of silence — before the nervous applause — that is almost unbearably charged.

86 How Does Music Express and Shape the Self?

Holiday was an improvising jazz artist who recomposed or co-composed 5 not only "Strange Fruit" but everything she sang. The pianist Teddy I Wilson reported that, contrary to all stories, she rehearsed at length with him for their landmark recording dates in the mid- to late-1930s, run- ' ning over the melodies of new songs until she could begin to shape them to her own purposes. Wilson presented Holiday as an improvising solo­ ist whose statements of the melody made up each work's central solo invention—and Holiday's inventions made up one event after another. Consider her two recordings of "These Foolish Things," from 1936 and 1952. In the later recording, her once-buoyant and youthful voice has become dark and oracular: the foolish things have become at once more foolish than ever, foolish beyond description, as well as more mightily alluring: beautiful but tragically lost forever. Close to the meaning of the blues.

Despite the title of her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday was not primarily a blues singer, but she could take songs that were not framed in the blues form per se and charge them with the spirit of the blues. Sometimes this had to do with the technical ability to flatten cer­ tain notes or to swing the music in the train-travel/dance-beat manner associated with the blues. ("Billie could swing you into bad health," said Carmen McRae.) But most significant of all was her ability to make a Broadway song, or a cabaret torch song, yield a complexity of meaning that elevated it beyond its original setting, and made it part of a narrative of love, trouble, confrontation, and triumph. Ralph Ellison's 1945 essay "Richard Wright's Blues" is pertinent:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically . . . they at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer tough­ ness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.

Ellison ends by noting that imperatives for social action are implied in Wright's work, and, by extension, in the blues. "Nowhere in America today is there social or political action based upon the solid realities of Negro life depicted in Black Boy; perhaps that is why, with its refusal to offer solutions, it is like the blues."

O'MEALLY Lady Day 87

The subject of the blues, wrote James Baldwin in 1964 in "The Uses of the Blues," is that as a human being you are born to suffer. But the blues also record the life of a black American: "I am talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless against the forces of the world that are out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive." This was one of the stories Holiday told.

She herself became a story; save John Coltrane, no jazz musician appears as often in the pages of American writing as Billie Holiday. Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died" records in stark language the shock of learning, via a newspaper's bald headline, that Holiday was gone. Langston Hughes's "Song for Billie" speaks of the power of her music to purge feelings of despair, and yet there is no satisfactory resolution:

What can purge my heart Of the sadness Of the song?

There are striking appearances by Holiday in The Autobiography of 10 Malcolm X and Maya Angelou's Heart of a Woman. Malcolm uses his friendship with Holiday in the mid-1940s, as she teeters on the brink of decline into serious drug addiction, to indicate how, once, as the hustler Detroit Red, he was part of the world of Lady Day, the queen of the night herself. Malcolm presents her not only as a marker of his own decline — against which he would measure his rise, once he is saved, through Islam — but also as a singer in an ancient Greek cho­ rus, calling out to the lost. Onstage at a club on 52nd Street, Holiday spots Malcolm walking in: "Her white gown glittered under the spot­ light, her face had that coppery, Indianish look, and her hair was in that trademark ponytail. For her next number she did the one she knew I always liked so: 'You Don't Know What Love Is' — ‘until you face each dawn with sleepless eyes • • • until you've lost a love you hate to lose.'" Holiday had unearthed a blues message in the middle of the ballad, and as James Baldwin would write, it warned of a society spun out of control: of helplessness, misery, and hunger. Malcolm goes on to pres­ ent the tragedy of Holiday's own circumstances and early death to sug­ gest a larger historical drama of race and nation: "She's dead; dope and

88 How Does Music Express and Shape the Self?

heartbreak stopped that heart as big as a barn and that sound and style that no one successfully copies. Lady Day sang with the soul of Negroes from the centuries of sorrow and oppression. What a shame that proud, fine, black woman never lived where the true greatness of the black race was appreciated!"

Maya Angelou presents Holiday just months before the end, an unsteady old lady (forty-four years old), picking her way across the room in Angelou's home in Los Angeles. She surprises Angelou (and the reader) by spending so much time with Guy, Angelou's twelve-year-old son, to whom she sings an a cappella lullaby each night—but one incident Angelou offers is a parable about the artist as an oracle, telling more of the truth than her listeners are quite ready to take in. When Guy asks Holiday to define the words "pastoral scene" in "Strange Fruit," which she sings to him on her last night in the house, the answer she gives him is frightening:

Billie looked up slowly and studied Guy for a second. Her face became cruel, and when she spoke her voice was scornful. "It means when the crackers are killing the niggers. It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That's what it means." The thrust of rage repelled Guy and stunned me.

Billie continued, "That's what they do. That's a goddam pastoral scene."

This is one voice in which Billie Holiday, who sang in many voices, sang the blues.

Bibliography .................. •................ . ----- ..— Angelou, Maya. The Heart of a Woman. 1981. Baldwin, James. "The Uses of the Blues." Playboy, Jan. 1964. Ellison, Ralph. "Richard Wright's Blues." Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz

Writings, edited by Robert O'Meally, 2001. Malcolm, X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X with the Assistance of Alex Haley.

1965. Margolick, David and Hilton Als. Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. 2001.

O'MEALLY Lady Day 89

Understanding the Text 1. While “Strange Fruit” became one of Holiday’s most famous songs, why

did she have to release it on a small record label, rather than her own label, Columbia?

2. Holiday grew up in a Catholic family. Why does this background make her unusual among “great black American singers of the twentieth century” (2)?

3. What was Holiday’s most significant ability or talent as a singer, according to O’Meally?

Reflection and Response 4. O’Meally writes, “Holiday was an improvising jazz artist who recomposed

or co-composed not only ‘Strange Fruit’ but everything she sang” (5). What do you think he means by this? What does it suggest about the rela­ tionship between songs and singers, as well as between songwriters and performers?

5. According to the writer, “Holiday was not primarily a blues singer, but she could take songs that were not framed in the blues form per se and charge them with the spirit of the blues” (6). How do you understand the “spirit of the blues”? Does O’Meally define it? In what ways does its meaning emerge in the text?

6. O’Meally claims that “no jazz musician appears as often in the pages of American writing as Billie Holiday” (9). He then includes references to — and textual passages from — writers such as Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. What do these references add to his discussion and argu­ ment? How do they contribute to his portrait of Billie Holiday?

Making Connections 7. O’Meally refers to several literary texts in this essay, including Frank O’Hara’s

poem “The Day Lady Died.” Read the O’Hara poem. Does it seem to be about Billie Holiday or her music? How do you interpret its meaning in the context of her death?

8. “Consider her two recordings of ‘These Foolish Things,’ from 1936 and 1952,” writes O’Meally. “In the later recording, her once-buoyant and youth­ ful voice has become dark and oracular: the foolish things have become at once more foolish than ever, foolish beyond description, as well as more mightily alluring: beautiful but tragically lost forever” (5). Listen to both of these recordings, which are available online. Do you agree with O’Meally’s “reading” of the two songs? Can you hear the contrast he describes? Explain your answer.

In this sharp essay that blends personal narrative and reflection with perceptive cultural analysis, Laina Dawes writes about the

dilemma and bind of being a black, female heavy metal fan: “A black metal­ head can be perceived not only as an affront,to the past and present struggles black people have endured, but as a personal insult to those closest to them.” Placing her struggle in the context of other fans and social critics, Dawes strives to reconcile the power and obligation of a collective identity with the need to be tẁè-to her own aesthetic sensibility and "persona.”

Mu si emeriti cand writer Laina Dawes is the author of What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (2013).

Hardcore Persona Laina Dawes

Talking to people for the first time about my favorite music, I catch myself preparing for the inevitable. I mentally rehearse my replies before the questions about my musical preference arise. 1 find the process

stressful—and wonder if I am being paranoid for thinking I will have to defend myself. "I call it parochial blackness," says Mashadi Matabane from Emory University in Georgia, author of a blog on black women gui­ tarists from the blues era to today. "It's something that infects our minds and our decision-making process, because it forces you to always think, 'What are they thinking about me now?'"

Many of the women in this book discussing their lives in the metal, , hardcore, and punk scenes felt the threat of losing their black cultural identity. They worried about being perceived as wanting to distance themselves from their culture or race. Believe it or not, blacks and non­ blacks both commonly assume that black people get into heavier musical genres to shed their blackness—that we do not like ourselves and, worse, ] that we do not like others who look like us. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When I first met Pisso, a beautiful black woman with a proud Afro and a vast knowledge of punk and Oil music. I was stunned that she was once involved in the skinhead scene in Chicago. She just looked very different from the stereotype I had in my head. But being involved in the skinhead scene didn't necessarily mean that you were a racist, white-power Nazi. From a Caribbean family, Pisso is fluent in German and explains some of her experiences in Berlin, where she moved after­ graduating from college. "A big part of West Indian culture is to pres­ ent yourself in a nice way: always clean, nice clothes. When I switched; from punk to being a skinhead, my mom definitely noticed when 1 shaved my head. I had gone over to a friend's house to do it, and when

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DAWES Hardcore Persona 91

I got home, she freaked out. She was very upset, like I had shaved her hair.

"With my dad, it was definitely more of a problem," she adds. "He actually stopped talking to me from the time I was 15 until I was like twenty-something. He eventually told me that he didn't like that I was into that 'punk stuff'."

"I started hanging out with the skinheads," she continues, "and I felt 5 that I had a place. I always had to work, as I was going to school, and they respected that. They respected my heritage from the West Indies and they loved the music. I would hang out with them when I was 18, and I started college and we eventually grew apart and 1 started growing out my hair again. Since then, I've found myself longing to belong to a group again."

Writing this book, I found other black women who had felt rejected by friends, family members, or their communities because of their musical preferences. At one point, I distributed a mass questionnaire, and nearly three-quarters of the replies described negative reactions to listening to heavy metal.

Many of the replies were predictable: "Many people say the style of music I like isn't really music; it's just loud noise. Or that I'm not black because I like rock or punk music."

Others were encouraging: "Especially when I say I like rock, they think it's like devil or white music. I find it hilarious. I revel in my musical tastes and find audio joy wherever I can."

Some were unfortunate: "When I was younger, I was criticized for listening to 'white' music and told I was weird and [that] there was something wrong with me for being a black girl listening to rock 'n' roll.. .. [Then] I learned that black folks actually created it."

And many stories were downright infuriating: "Especially when I 10 was in my teens and twenties, comments from some family and friends if I was listening to rock or punk music were like: 'Why you listening to that white shit?' I once dated a white guy who grew up in a black neighborhood, and was trying to be 'down,' and he yelled at me for lis­ tening to Led Zeppelin: 'Don't you listen to any black music? What do you listen to that white music for?'—the funniest thing I ever heard. Now that I'm in my forties, I don't tend to associate with anyone who is so narrow-minded about me or my tastes in life."

A black metalhead can be perceived not only as an affront to the past and

11A black metalhead can be perceived not only as an affront to the past and present struggles black people have endured, but as a personal insult to those closest to them."

present struggles black people have endured, but as a personal insult to those closest to them. "Some people, especially older people, feel that you are indifferent-to being black because you are not listening to or respecting 'our' music," says Sameerah Blue. "They think you're indiffer­ ent to your culture, you're indifferent to being a black person."

Every black person in North America is somewhat aware of prevail- | ing societal assumptions and must struggle to rise above them. Shar­ ing certain commonalities —like dialect, dress, dating, and music preferences-^Signifies to other blacks that you show pride in who you are as a black person. For anyone who chooses not to adopt those cultural signifiers for whatever reason, the choice is seen as a rejection, even an insult.

In the 1903 essay "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," from The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois wrote about the polarization between blacks and whites at that time. He identified the danger of people trying to change their identities to conform to how others perceive them, abandoning what they know to be their true selves. He described this process as a loss that leads to self-doubt,' depression, and isolation. Perceptions of black people already led to sweeping generalizations about the entire population, limiting creative and professional opportunities and hinder­ ing them from developing their individual identities. Why impose limits from within?

As DuBois wrote, and Patricia Hill Collins later redefined explicitly for black women, we live with a "dual consciousness" that reconciles how we perceive the outside world with how the outside world per­ ceives us. "The effort to interact with those who |see] you as inferior to them while remaining expressionless was and is an arduous task," wrote Collins. "Behind the mask of behavioral conformity imposed on African-American women, acts of resistance, both organized and anon­ ymous, have long existed." She specifies that black women struggle to leave stereotypes about their sexuality, physicality, and intelligence at the threshold when they come home every night.

Collins credits the arts as one of the only places where a black woman may be above criticism, whether she chooses to be a performer, a writer, or a visual artist. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, Collins suggests cre­ ating an emotional and psychological vehicle to get yourself out of the mental oppression that can hinder your life. Thinking of this cre­ ative channel in terms of heavy metal is a great way to explain Keidra Chaney's upbringing as a metal fan on the south side of Chicago. In her essay "Sister Outsider Headbanger," written for Bitch magazine in 2000, she says:

DAWES Hardcore Persona 93

I buried my metal affection at first, not wanting to seetn like too much of a freak to my friends, sneaking Metallica songs in between Salt-N-Pepa and Dig­ ital Underground on mixtapes. What could I possibly find appealing about heavy metal, seeing as how it didn't reflect my life experience or cultural iden­ tity in any tangible way? And yet I think that contradiction was what appealed to me in the first place... allowed me to imagine myself as... someone who wouldn't take shit from anyone and didn't give a fuck about rules.

When I first read Chaney's essay, I thought she could have been writing about me. Even a decade after her piece was published, Chaney still occasionally gets e-mails from young black women relieved to dis­ cover someone else out there like themselves. "The fact that we are still dealing with that in this day and age is ridiculous," she says.

Chaney admits that she didn't really know any white people until she was in university. "It was very difficult to find other people into [heavy metal]," she says. "There was the band Living Colour, and Liv­ ing Colour was the only common language I could pull out for people at my school. They were like: 'Well, they can do some shit with their guitars so I guess it's all right.' But it was difficult. I still liked hip hop, R&B, and new jack swing and all that, but I had this love for metal that I had to keep hidden. I could listen to it but not get too excited from it in case someone wanted to kick my ass or call me 'that white chick' or whatever."

From a historical standpoint, black people have sometimes depended on community for survival, such as when warning others of impending danger, or banding together as powerless people during the civil rights era in mass demonstrations and boycotts to become a unified force for social and political change. Our elders sometimes had to put their own needs and desires aside in order to work as a collective. In that context, black identity can exert a powerful pressure.

"Black people have a certain type of trauma, anxiety, and fear of being consumed by white American culture," says journalist and musician Greg Tate. "There is a certain basis for it because it goes back to the slave expe­ rience. It just has a hysterical dimension to it, this late in the day, the twenty-first century. I just think it's from people not being fundamentally secure in who they are, in their ability to move freely in the society. Peo­ ple cling to things that they are familiar with, and things that are unfa­ miliar represent limits that they have imposed within their own lives."

Ignoring negativity based on racial stereotypes is difficult when one is 20 faced every day with perceived racial slights. In Color Conscious: The Polit­ ical Morality of Race. Amy Gutmann writes "We can neither reflectively

94 How Does Music Express and Shape the Self?

choose our color identity nor downplay its social significance simply by willing it to be unimportant. . . but our color no more binds us to send a predetermined·gj'pup message to our fellow human beings than our lan­ guage binds us to convey ^predetermined thoughts." Amen.

Some of our parents told us that conforming was the only way to make it in North American society. "My mother's generation and my j parents' generation was about making black people who were very prim and proper," says singer Camille Atkinson. "People who were very light skinned or yçŵ’ỳ' dark skinned, as they were, made sure that they never went out oft&Hiue, made very good babies, and spread the good word of Catholicism; They didn't know that a couple of generations later, they | were going to have queers, they were going to have punks, they were going to have feminists who were going to go to school for thirty years before they were .going to have kids, so it shifted everyone's expectations. What it means to be black is constantly being redefined."

But for Tamar-kali, hardcore punk was a path to blackness. She looked | at her family roots and stopped worrying about being accepted or rejected i by her community. "I took the next step and started becoming aware of race in general and my history and my path in terms of being a descen­ dant of enslaved Africans," she says. "I was interested in the history, and the hardcore scene really suited the emotions that I was experiencing and the things that I was finding out. So there was definitely a lock and a seal on me really embracing the music, and leading me emotionally. The sound of hardcore matched my emotions."

Among black women heavy metal and punk fans, there is a quiet movement to build allegiances, or at least a desire that I hope becomes . reality before much longer. In the meantime, the general disapproval is J strong enough to dissuade women who want to become involved from participating, and that is just sad. Rejection by friends or even family W

als and tribulations experienced by the white kid from the suburbs whose i parents threaten to send him to private school over his Slayer and Gwar i posters.

"In high school, a lot of my friends were these long-haired freaks lis- r tening to nothing but death, black metal, and rock music," says Ashley [ Greenwood, singer and guitarist for the New Jersey-based hard-rock ii band Rise from Ashes. "The other black kids didn't understand who I was; I as a person. This one girl called me the devil because I was listening to Black Sabbath. I said, 'How can you call me the devil and say that I'm an | evil person and that I'm going to hell, when you are having premarital1 ; sex with your boyfriend? Doesn't God say that you're not supposed to do I that? Who's the hypocrite?' She got very upset about that."

DAWts Hardcore persona va

Figure 2.1 “You wanna change who I am”: Alexis Brown, lead singer of. Metalcore band Straight Line Stitch. Roger Kisby/Getty Images ■

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The need to find a place to fit in is universal, and many black women experience painful emotions when they are made to feel ashamed of metal, punk, and hardcore scenes—the only places where they truly feel they belong. r

Understanding the Text 1. According to Dawes, what do people commonly assume about black peopi

who "get into heavier musical genres”? 2. Citing the iconic civil rights activist and reformer W. E. B. DuBois, as well as

the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, Dawes refers to the concept of a “dual, consciousness.” What does this term mean? Why is it important to her ¡ j essay?

In early 2009, Afronerd.com invited director Raymond Gayle, creator of the documentary : Electric Purgatory: The Fate of the Black Rocker, to talk about the CQiitëmporary state of black rock artists. I was pleased when Gayle and thV host expressed confusion as to why black rock, punk, and metal artists,,cannot do what they do, reaching across racial lines however j they wish. "Kłusie is music," the host exclaimed, recounting a story about being rejected by an international film festival because the board that reviewed films for the festival was perplexed by the subject matter, "Why can't people just write the lyrics and play the music that they want?" !

I understand a little resistance to loud, pounding music that incorpo-; rates screaming and yelling and references to the devil and hell. But I am outraged by the classism that stereotypes metal as music for angry, racist; sexist white men and the snobbery that questions the racial authenticity and legitimacy of the black heavy metal fan. Are black heavy metal fans supposed to be ashamed of their taste—or should the music establish­ ment be ashamed of their own ignorance about where heavy metal came, I from?

"We are simply going to say. This is what it is. This is what 1 enjoy.'';1 Lay down the law," says Tamar-kali. "Whenever somebody says no, we ■ have got to stand on our core experiences of being women of color. We can't separate any of this. We can't compartmentalize things because-peo- ■ pie are not used to women of color and how we live our lives. We have¡ ¡ to set the tone of how we understand ourselves. We have to create ou| own framework of understanding ourselves and how we function in the / world. We know our reality."

naiuuuie rersona »7

Reflection and Response 3. Paraphrasing Patricia Hill Collins, Dawes writes: "Collins credits the arts

as one of the only places where a black woman may be above criticism, whether she chooses to be a performer, a writer, or a visual artist. .. [she] suggests creating an emotional and psychological vehicle to get yourself out of the mental oppression that can hinder your life.” How can music, in partic­ ular, serve as an "emotional and psychological vehicle’' for those who want to escape "mental oppression”? Can you think of examples?

4. According to Dawes, “Our elders sometimes had to put their own needs and desires aside in order to work as a collective (18). In that context, black iden­ tity can exert a powerful pressure.” What is Dawes’s view of this community “pressure”? (18) In what ways is it a positive force? In what ways is it a nega­ tive force?

Making Connections 5. Dawes quotes the writer (and black, female heavy metal fan) Keirda Chaney:

“What could I possibly find appealing about heavy metal, seeing as how it didn’t reflect my life experience or cultural identity in any tangible way?" How might Brad Mehldau ("Blank Expressions: Brad Mehldau and the Essence of Music," p. 21) answer this question, particularly in light of his claims about “musical wisdom”? Are there forms of music you find appealing and reso­ nant, even though they do not “reflect” your identity and experience “in any tangible way”? What might account for their allure?

6. In “Black Rhythm, White Power" (p. 193), Samantha Ainsley writes about "the ethics of cross-cultural musical appropriation." Is her topic and argu­ ment similar to Dawes's? How do you think she might respond to Dawes’s argument? Explain your answer.