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Jews, Race and Popular Music

by Jon Stratton
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009)
Reviewer: Erik Steinskog, University of Copenhagen
 

There can be little doubt that the discourse on race and popular music has been dominated for a long time by questions of “black” and “white.” Think about “Hound Dog,” Elvis Presley’s 1956-hit, a cover of the original 1952-recording by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. As Michael T. Bertrand writes, in Race, Rock, and Elvis: “In reality, two white youths, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, had written ‘Hound Dog’ for Thornton.”[i] That these two “white” authors were Jewish, raises a host of different questions. As Jon Stratton writes in the book under review: “Leiber was born in 1933 and ‘grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in a largely Catholic neighbourhood on the edge of Baltimore’s black ghetto’. After the death of his father, Leiber’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1945. Born the same year in Belle Harbor, Long Island, Stoller spent twelve years growing up in Sunnyside, Queens, before his parents moved the family to Los Angeles in 1949. By this time, Stoller had developed an interest in African-American music and had even taken lessons from the stride pianist, James P. Johnson” (p. 41). Here we have two “white” writers personally related to African-American (or “black”) music, their song being re-made by the future King of Rock ‘n’ Roll – a “white” Southerner. But the question of race becomes more complex when introducing their Jewishess.

The question of Jewishness is a key to Jon Stratton’s book, as he employs discursive frameworks developed across a wide range of disciplines. The literature on popular music and Jews is growing, and Stratton adds an interesting dimension to this literature. He has earlier published two articles on punk and Jewishness, both in a US and UK context, that in many ways communicate with Steven Lee Beeber’s The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s, which notably are not included in his book.[ii] The book is a more or less chronological history. After the introduction, Chapter 1 takes up a discussion of torch singing, where the important notion of “blackface” is introduced, a notion employed to different results throughout the book. Chapter 2 takes the reader to the Brill Building, focusing upon the Jewish writers and composers who worked there in the years around 1960. Here a broad range of characters is introduced, from Leiber and Stoller, to Phil Spector, Carol King and Neil Sedaka. In Chapter 3, the 1960s and 1970s are addressed, with artists, such as Barbra Streisand, Janis Joplin, and Bette Midler referred to. Chapter 4, “Jews and Blues” returns the reader to the 1960s blues revival. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965), an album that Stratton suggests is indeed “Jewish blues” (p. 100), is central, although different American blues-artists are considered alongside the developments within popular music, including “the British invasion.” With Chapter 5, Stratton takes a leap in history by moving on to the Beastie Boys. In this chapter we find one of the most creative uses of the blackface-trope through which the author interprets the Beastie Boys as “Jews in Whiteface.” Taking the blackface/whiteface discussion into the area of the sonic rather than the visual, he then proceeds to discussing Renée Geyer, “a Jew singing like a black woman in Australia” in Chapter 6. This change of location opens up for several discussions, although the sound of Geyer remains central in this chapter. The last two chapters take the reader to England; Chapter 7 enters into a discussion of Helen Shapiro (and thus back to the 60s), while Chapter 8 deals with Amy Winehouse, taking the text again into a contemporary setting.

In his introduction Stratton explicitly writes: “for me, ‘Jew’ is a cultural construction” (p. 4). He then goes on to state: “‘Jew’, in this book, is a construction of those who identify as Jews” (p. 4), immediately pointing to this not being a “simple category.” Some of the complexities related to the different categories are described in the following quote:

“‘Jew’ is also a construction of those who identify certain people as Jews. Sometimes these two constructions overlap, which gives an impression of an essential quality to being a Jew. Often, the way those who self-identify as Jews construct the quality of ‘Jew’ is quite different from the way that groups who do not identify as ‘Jews’ construct the category. In its constructedness, ‘Jew’ can blur into Jewishness, but we do need to be clear here about the constructed quality of the ‘Jew’ because in my later discussions of Jewish performers I take this constructedness for granted and I do not want any reader to mistake my apparently easy use of the term Jew for some kind of essentialism.” (p. 3)

The complexities, however, go way beyond the category of “Jew.” Stratton also assumes “race” to be a constructed category (p. 3), and, thus, two of the three terms in the book’s title are instantly inserted into this play of constructed categories. The functions of “race” as a “strategy of exclusion” (p. 4) are blatantly obvious by now, although the categories still operate in a very complex interrelation. Stratton points to how the racialized structures of the three societies he is discussing have been different. For instance, along the way he describes “Englishness” as “a complicated discursive category,” and, in no doubt, this is a constructed category as well. While not having any difficulties in agreeing with Stratton on the constructedness of these different categories, I feel there seems to be quite a difference in how “Jew,” “race,” and “English” are used as categories. They do not seem to exist on the same level, even if they might intersect in different ways. Thus, when discussing Dusty Springfield, her “Englishness,” her “Irishness” and her singing in an “African-American” (or “black”) tradition, all might enter the discussion – even before including dimensions of gender and/or sexuality.[iii] And when Springfield is evoked as a predecessor of Amy Winehouse, Winehouse’s “Jewishness” becomes a category comparable with Springfield’s “Irishness.” Yet, as Stratton makes clear, these differences still do not function in the exact same way.

In the case of Amy Winehouse, a history of racial stereotypes is at stake. The orientalization of the Jew is a central issue, and Stratton discusses “the beautiful Jewess,” a long-standing image of the female Jew within European culture. This image of the belle juive is found throughout Europe in the previous fin-de-siècle (around 1900), and seemingly continues to haunt parts of the European imagination. And, as Sander Gilman points out when reading Sarah Bernhardt’s relation to the legend of Salome, the belle juive is “as dangerous as she is seductive.”[iv] This image is indeed complex, as the Jewish male has often been perceived as feminized within the same cultural context. This shows how categories of gender are intersected with those of “race.” And when Winehouse’s music is understood as imitating an African-American musical tradition, the picture becomes even more complex. A sign of this complexity is expressed critically by Kandia Crazy Horse, in her article “Digital Venuses,” where she describes Joss Stone, Lily Allen, and Amy Winehouse as “daughters of Al Jolson, removing their Jewish foreignness by sonically and visually blacking up as he did in The Jazz Singer.”[v]

Al Jolson’s role in The Jazz Singer (1927, directed by Alan Crosland) is crucial here, as it testifies to the complexities of race. The fact is that Jolson – born Asa Yoelson – performed in blackface, demonstrating how putting on a black mask could be a way for Jews to be integrated into white society. As Stratton writes in his first chapter: “In this chapter, I will argue that, structurally speaking, the Jewish use of blackface was closely connected with dominant American and, more generally, English-speaking understandings of race and the situation of Jews in the racial order during the second half of the nineteenth century” (p. 13).[vi] The most interesting twist in Stratton’s discourse is in his reading of The Beastie Boys as “Jews in Whiteface.” Referencing what he calls “the racialized music politics of American culture,” he discusses how the Beastie Boys move from the white genre of hardcore to become “the breakthrough ‘white’ rap group” (p. 105). Marking the term “white,” he obviously wants to direct attention to how “whiteness” too is a constructed category, and, moreover, that this construction is dependent upon the cultural context where the categories are employed. Why is it, then, that the Beasties are seen not as “white” but as “Jewish?” Stratton claims that “the Jewish background of the Beastie Boys made them the ideal group to take rap to a white American audience” (p. 106), and this he argues throughout the chapter. The “whiteness” of the Jews is, in this context, ambivalent. Employing the term “whiteface,” clearly modelled on the understandings of blackface, Stratton shows how the Beastie Boys challenge crucial divisions of racialized inclusion/exclusion. One of the dimensions highlighted in the discussion of the Beastie Boys is the impression of a “nasal” delivery (Stratton quotes from Mike Rubin) (p. 114). Which brings us to the sound of the Jew, the Jewish voice, understood – as Sander Gilman and others have pointed out – as “nasal” from the mid-nineteenth century.[vii]

In these different intersections of visuality and sound, of face and voice, of “black,” and “white” and “Jew”, the book contributes with important questions concerning different ways of reading popular music’s history. The last word on popular music and race will be a long time coming, but along the way Stratton’s discussions are going to contribute significantly to this on-going debate.

 
Notes

[i] Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005, p. 190

[ii] Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk and the Holocaust: From the Velvet Underground to the Ramones – the Jewish-American Story,” Popular Music 24/1 (2005), pp. 79-115 and Stratton, “Punk, Jews and the Holocaust – the English Story,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 26/4 (2007), pp. 124-149. Steven Lee Beeber, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006

[iii] Springfield is only mentioned in Stratton’s book, and primarily as a musical predecessor of Amy Winehouse. For more on Springfield, see Annie J. Randall, Dusty: Queen of the Postmods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009

[iv] Sander Gilman, Love + Marriage = Death: And Other Essays on Representing Difference. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 81

[v] Kandia Crazy Horse, “Digital Venuses: UK pop starlets vie for America’s heart of darkness,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 9, 2007. See also Daphne A. Brooks, “‘This voice which is not one’: Amy Winehouse sings the ballad of sonic blue(s)face culture,” Woman & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 20/1 (2010), pp. 37-60

[vi] Discussing blackface Stratton is clearly indebted to Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996

[vii] See Sander Gilman’s discussion of the Jewish voice in operas, from Rossini to Strauss, in the chapter “Opera, Homosexuality, and Models of Disease: Richard Strauss’s Salome in the Context of Images of Disease in the Fin de Siècle,” in Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988: pp. 155-181 as well as the chapter “The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding Too Jewish,” in The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 10-37