University of California Press Blog

Music and Transformation in 1989: New UC Press Podcast with Joshua Clover

We are pleased to announce that Episode 25 of the UC Press podcast series is now available. In this episode, Chris Gondek of Heron and Crane Productions interviews Joshua Clover, author of 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. Clover explores how the massive geopolitical shifts of 1989 mirrored pop music's transformation in the same era, and how a song or artist can come to represent a particular historical moment. 

You may subscribe to the monthly podcast feed that contains the individual episodes using your RSS aggregator or directly via the iTunes store. You can listen to individual author interviews from the episodes at our podcast page. Listen to the podcast with Joshua Clover, author of 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About.

Beautiful Monster: The Cinema of Michael Jackson

by Michael Long, Author of Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (2008)

Like plenty of others, I wondered what shape Michael Jackson’s memorial service in the Staples Center would ultimately take. One thing I was sure of was that it would almost certainly feature a big-moment performance of “Smile.” (It did. See video below to watch the performance.) The musical icon of Jackson’s last phase, and one of the songs featured on Neverland’s carousel, “Smile” reflects what I described in my book as Jackson’s engagement with musical aphorism and his idiosyncratic perspective on music history.

Proverbs and morals were often woven into the lyrics of girl and boy group songs of the 1960s. Jackson’s family background, especially his mother’s churchy spirituality, fed his creative sensibility too. Michael, though, would eventually take sermonizing to his own place, a characteristic register, fitting it with particular styles of vocalizing and musical arrangements.

By the time of his notorious interview with Martin Bashir these performance decisions had bled over into Jackson’s public rhetoric, especially during conversations about children. Peter Pan or not, Jackson in his forties had formulated a mature and highly stylized oratorical mode. It reflected a thoroughly integrated but essentially mass-mediated program of ethics and moral argument. In the days immediately following Jackson’s death, I began to get a better sense of how he might have reached this stage of self-presentation.

A theme that ran through televised and printed interviews with acquaintances immediately following his death was Michael Jackson’s extraordinary memory for acoustical and visual detail, his ability to pull from a memory inventory virtually every gesture from records, film, and television. That memory served him as a resource for improvisation. For example, confronted with questions about the appropriateness of sharing his bed with young friends, Jackson told Bashir that this is how he was taught, concluding: “It’s love, love...that’s what the world needs now.”

Hal David’s lyric was delivered in this case as a semi-rhythmic proverb, a rhetorical trope ornamenting a sermon on love linked to a sort of general political critique. The citation could have been retrieved from any corner of his musical memory -- from the pure pop of Jackie DeShannon’s original 1965 hit to the gospel-inflected cover by the Sweet Inspirations. But they were romantic fluff; they didn’t preach the message. Michael, the boy eternally teetering at the edge of manhood, was probably channeling Detroit DJ Tom Clay’s 1971 remix of “What the World Needs Now,” released on Motown’s Mo-west label. It was quasi-cinematic, opening with a dramatic dialogue on race: a boy is questioned by an adult man about the meaning of words (“segregation,” “bigotry,” “hatred”) which the child (touchingly) cannot pronounce correctly. Speeches by the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. are intercut with two pop refrains: Dion’s 1968 explicit musical sermon “Abraham, Martin, and John,” and DeShannon’s “What the World Needs Now.” Clay’s version turned “What the World Needs Now” into part of a screenplay, featuring a man-boy tutorial on civil rights and prejudice.

Young Michael fully merged with his own mediated persona in 1978, when he appeared as the proverb-spouting Scarecrow in the film version of The Wiz. Lifelong father figure Quincy Jones had coached him (and taught him how to pronounce “Socrates”). Their friendship goes back to the early 1970s, though, around the same time Jackson met another male role model, Bill Cosby, who appeared with the Jackson 5 in ABC’s Goin’ Back to Indiana in 1971. The following year Cosby made a feature film, Man and Boy (with music supervision by Jones). He played a nineteenth-century African-American cowboy, Caleb Revers, who – according to the intertitle appearing on screen right after the opening credits – had “acquired 14 acres of land upon which he intended to build his life.”

That text yields to the first shot: the cabin’s bedroom at dawn. Caleb’s pre-adolescent son Billy sleeps between his parents in the bed they share. For most of the film, though, Caleb and Billy travel together on their own, battling racial prejudice and ignorance. Man and Boy, released during Jackson’s critical tween years, likely impressed itself on his memory as a cinematic life model. Jackson’s rural Neverland ranch (its style seemingly out of synch with his edgy pop persona) was perhaps a recreation of Caleb’s cabin, blown out to Californian proportions of a century later. Dedicated to the love and education of pre-adolescents (Caleb Revers’s first lecture to a confused Billy is on God, love, and sex), Neverland was not just Peter Pan’s Island of Lost Boys. It was a cinematic fantasy of the old West: a place where hatred, bigotry, and prejudice might be overcome, or at least temporarily drowned out, by the faithful recitation of Sunday School scripture and the power of a finely-crafted soundtrack.

Watch the Trailer for Man and Boy:

Amiri Baraka A Finalist for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism

Amiri Baraka, author of Digging, was a finalist for the Lifetime Achievement Award in Jazz Journalism from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). At its thirteenth annual awards ceremony last week, the JJA recognized winners and nominees in 42 categories, from the best musicians and records of the year to photographers, writers, and more. Baraka was one of five finalists in the Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism category, in which the winner was Mike Zwerin. View the full list of winners and nominees on the JJA Awards website.

Interview with Amiri Baraka, author of Digging

On June 4, Sophie Erskine of 3:AM Magazine interviewed Amiri Baraka about music, politics, the origins of his name, and controversial comments he has made in the past. Baraka is known as the Father of the Black Arts Movement and author of many books and essays on music, including most recently, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (UC Press, May 2009).

Below is an excerpt of the interview. 

3:AM: You said that “poetry is music and nothing but music”. Can you describe the influence of Sun Ra in particular on the evolution of your poetry-music?

AB: On the cover of my latest book, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (University of California Press), there is a photograph of the front of the Black Arts Repertory Theater School, with me at the bottom of the steps bringing back some refreshments and at the top of the steps, left, is Sun Ra, who used to come up to Harlem, and hang out with us almost every day. He also played a concert weekly there where he introduced his “space organ” which he had outfitted with lights - dark lights for low sounds, brights for high sounds. This was before Bill Graham hooked up the light show for the rockers in San Francisco.

Sun Ra had great influence on us, not only with his music but his philosophy, but I always thought poetry was heightened and intensified by music, which is the influence of the black church…

To read the interview in its entirety, please visit Art is a Weapon in the Struggle for Ideas: Amiri Baraka.

Marl Young, Musician and author, dies at 92

Marl Young, a pianist, music director, and author who helped desegregate L.A. musician unions died last Wednesday at the age of 92.  The Los Angeles Times published an obituary this past Sunday. Young co-edited Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, which was published by UC Press in March 1998.

Christian Youth Culture and Music

On April 30th, Brittany Shoot of Religion Dispatches, interviewed Eileen Luhr, author of Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture (UC Press, January 2009). Below, are a couple of questions Luhr answered. Please read the rest of the interview entitled, "Christian Punk Meets American Pop; Evangelicals in the ’Burbs."

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In Witnessing Suburbia, you briefly explain the roots of your academic interest in the convergence of popular culture, music, and evangelism. Can you say more about how you came to write the book?

My interest in Christian conservatism began when I was home from college and watching the 1992 Republican National Convention. The convention took place at a bad time for Republicans—the Cold War had ended and George H.W. Bush had raised taxes despite a pledge not to. As a result, he didn’t have much to run on other than the concept of “family values,” which the Republicans invoked following the riots in Los Angeles (this was when Dan Quayle condemned the TV character “Murphy Brown” for having a child out of wedlock in a speech to the Commonwealth Club).

In Houston, Pat Buchanan gave a primetime speech in which he declared a “cultural war” for the “soul of America.” I was appalled by the speech, but I had siblings who thought it was great. So my initial interest in the topic was that “family values” could provoke vastly different reactions—I found it exclusive, but others found it inclusive. A few years later, I went to graduate school to write about the culture of “family values,” and I found that not much had been written about the music and popular culture of Christians.

What was your favorite part of your research?

My favorite research was for the chapter about Christian metal bands. I was never a fan of “mainstream” metal music, so I felt that I could treat both Christian and “secular” bands fairly. Still, I found the claims and the stunts to be pretty outrageous.

Christian bands had some really strange ideas and some interesting justifications for wearing makeup and having long hair. I had a database of hundreds of Christian metal bands, and I poured through all kinds of fan magazines to follow them. My favorite anecdote is the one about an obscure band from Texas called Stryken. They attended a Motley Crue concert wearing futuristic suits of armor. They somehow managed to get a 14’ x 8’ wooden cross into the arena (who knows what people bring to these shows?) and took it to the area in front of the stage. They were eventually kicked out of the concert for proselytizing.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered?

In researching chapter two, which looks at Christian youth subcultures, I found a really interesting punk zine called “Thieves and Prostitutes” that had intricate artwork (I believe one of the editors is now a tattoo artist) and articles that tried to claim Jesus as the original punk. A student in Florida was suspended from school for distributing the zine, in part because the principal misunderstood what the art signified—he was afraid it was blasphemous. The 700 Club featured the suspended student because they felt his religious rights were violated by the school. This was one of the moments where political and cultural activism intersected.

* To read the rest of the interview, please visit the Religion Dispatches website.

* Special thanks to Religion Dispatches for letting us post an excerpt of the article.

The 40th Anniversary of Woodstock

Steve Waksman is Associate Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. In January 2009, UC Press published his latest book, This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. For more information on the author and his book, please read his blog, The Metal/Punk Continuum. In the interview below, he talks about music and the special, 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

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1) What is the meaning of the anniversary?

The anniversary is an occasion to look back on the connection between rock music and the counterculture of the 1960s.  In part, it’s an opportunity to recall a lot of great music and musicians, some of whom are no longer with us anymore, such as Jimi Hendrix, and some of whom are still very much with us, such as Carlos Santana and Neil Young.  But it’s also an opportunity to think about the ways in which rock music, or any form of music, can create a sense of collective purpose.  To what extent did the roughly half a million people who attended Woodstock share a common social or political vision?  To what extent was their connection grounded in something more than rock music itself?  These are questions about which it’s easy to be either nostalgic (“We were all one, man!”) or cynical (“Just a bunch of hippies getting high and listening to rock!”).  The real answer to those questions, though, is not a simple one, and it’s something to take seriously, because it has a lot to tell us about how music shapes our values and maybe makes it possible for us to relate to each other in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.

2) What was the significance of Woodstock?

The late cultural critic Ellen Willis described Woodstock as the culmination of a dream of mass freedom that had arisen in the years after World War II and was connected to rock and roll.  Mass freedom meant that people believed they could best achieve their fullest freedom in the context of a group, rather than isolated, as individuals.  At Woodstock, it was precisely the coming together of so many thousands of young people that gave the event its power, and that power was at once symbolic and real.  People there felt a sense of connection, and felt that the connection was tied to something bigger than the fact that there was a big rock festival going on.  It was tied to youth, above all, but it was tied to a particular image of youth as a part of the population who could transform the existing cultural and political order, could potentially create the basis for a culture in which peace was valued over war, in which pleasure was valued over productivity, and in which rules and conventions were not to be followed if they were found to be corrupt.

At the same time, Woodstock also showed, in a less utopian vein, that one could gather enormous crowds of young people together at once and not have a catastrophe follow.  This was an important lesson for the music industry, which at the end of the 1960s was still trying to figure out how best to capitalize on the enormous audience that existed for rock.  After Woodstock, rock concerts grew larger and larger in size; there was less need for festivals after a certain point, because concerts were routinely happening in arenas and stadiums that held thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people.  So Woodstock also contributed to the further incorporation of rock into the profit-making structures of the music industry.

3) What happened to rock music in the years that followed?

Well, most immediately, about four months after Woodstock came Altamont, the large festival outside San Francisco organized by the Rolling Stones, which was marked by some bad vibes due to the presence of a row of Hell’s Angels in front of the stage, and culminated in the widely publicized death of a young black man, Meredith Hunter.  Altamont made the achievement of Woodstock seem to many a fluke, and made crowds of young people seem dangerous again.  The shift from festivals to arena and stadium concerts that occurred in the 1970s was in many ways driven by concerns over crowd control as much as by concerns over profit.  It’s easier to maintain order in a space that’s enclosed and has clear boundaries around it, where people sit in rows.

More broadly, rock’s connection to its young audience changed.  This was partly because some of rock’s audience was no longer so young; people who had come of age through the countercultural years of the late 1960s were now entering their twenties and were looking for music that was still rock but that was more “mature.”  Meanwhile, younger fans were looking for something they could call their own, and so a generation gap of sorts began to emerge within rock rather than between rock and other styles of popular music.  This is where new genres like heavy metal and punk come into play, as forms of rock that are still very much concerned with the relationship between rock and youth, and that try to reimagine what kinds of communal or collective identity rock might create in the wake of the sixties counterculture.  That, in effect, is what my new book, This Ain’t the Summer of Love, is about.

George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93

The composer, author, theorist, teacher, and Pulitzer Prize winner for music, George Perle, died last Friday at the age of 93.  The New York Times published an obituary this past Saturday.  The University of California Press published The Operas of Alban Berg, Volume 1: Wozzeck in 1980, The Operas of Alban Berg, Volume 2: Lulu in 1984, The Listening Composer in 1990, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, Sixth Edition, Revised in 1991, and Twelve-Tone Tonality, Second Edition in 1996.

Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk

Steve Waksman is Associate Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience, and most recently, This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (UC Press, January 2009). Please visit Steve's blog, The Metal/Punk Continuum.

By: Steve Waksman

The cover of This Ain’t the Summer of Love has a great, iconic photo of Iggy Pop surfing the crowd at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, 1970.  I love this photo, as it captures a perfect 1970s rock moment.  Large crowds like the one that gathered that day at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium were becoming more and more common at the dawn of the Seventies.  The age of arena rock was upon us and most observers took that to mean also the age of the rock superstar, whose larger-than-life persona towered above the crowd.  But in this photo, and at this concert, Iggy towered above the crowd in a completely different way.  He wasn’t a superstar and never would be in the sense of Mick Jagger or Robert Plant.  Rather than take his place above the crowd for granted, he tested it, messed with it, and made it tangible rather than an abstraction.  Lester Bangs captured it best in his great 1970 article on the Stooges that appeared in Creem:

“Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront him – he enters the audience frequently to see what’s what and even from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who’re seldom able to stare him down.  It’s your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it.  But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and the authority, and few can.  In this sense Ig is a true star of the rarest kind – he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.”

Since my publisher and I decided to put Iggy on the cover of my book, my sense of connection to the Stooges has grown even stronger than it used to be.  I’ve dug their music for years, although I came to it later than I would have liked.  Back when I was a teenager, I went through a phase when I used the Rolling Stone Record Guide as my main source for navigating through the back history of rock records.  Even though the Guide was co-edited by Michigan rock refugee Dave Marsh, the Stooges were nowhere to be found in there because their records were out of print at the time (late 1970s).  I read about them elsewhere but it wasn’t until the early 1990s when their original albums were being re-released on CD that I finally had my first hearing of Fun House, which definitely blew my head open.  By that time I’d been listening to varieties of hard rock, metal and punk for years, and had also heard my fair share of avant-garde and experimental music, especially free jazz.  Fun House was one of the few albums I’d encountered that seemed to combine the two and I took to it immediately.

For obvious reasons, Iggy gets the bulk of the attention and acclaim for what the Stooges accomplished.  But as with any great band, he didn’t work as a lone figurehead.  The team of brothers who played first guitar and drums, then bass and drums – Ron and Scott Asheton – were the true heart of the Stooges sound.  All you need to do for proof is listen to “TV Eye” from Fun House, which gets my vote for best Stooges song ever and one of the best, most pounding, unrelenting and downright intense rock songs ever released.  Ron’s guitar and Scott’s drums drive the song forward from start to finish, and Ron’s main riff is a stunner, working the powerful combination of an open throbbing. A string with some crashing barre chords, brutal and basic three-chord rock but with added rhythmic crunch and a touch of dissonance to boot.

I was back in Simi Valley, California, paying my annual winter visit to my parents, when I heard the news that Ron Asheton had died, now just a little over two weeks ago.  He will be missed.  Rather than a moment of silence he deserves a moment of unreserved noise, the most suitable tribute for a true metal/punk pioneer.

Here’s a link to some thoughts by Mike Watt on the Stooges and playing with Ron:

latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/01/mike-watt-riffs.html

Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow Wins Marjorie Weston Emerson Award

The Mozart Society of America presented Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow with its annual Marjorie Weston Emerson Award, which honors the year's best Mozart-related scholarly writing. In the book, Karol Berger examines music's role in the emerging concept of linear time in 18th century Europe. He contrasts Bach's cyclical approach to musical time with Mozart's chronological, "storytelling" approach, to illustrate the changing perception of past and future at the onset of modernity. He moves from Bach's St Matthew Passion to Mozart's Faust and Don Giovanni and beyond, locating the origins of modern music and temporal thought with precise elegance.