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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
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