Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy

Much of the academic writing about Jews and popular music (of which there is nowhere near enough) places Jews as intermediaries between black and white cultures. Jewish songwriters have taken black musical forms and re-written them for white audiences (Carole King, Leiber and Stoller); Jewish producers have taken black artists and sold them to white audiences (Phil Spector, the Chess brothers); Jewish artists have repackaged black musical styles for white audiences (the Beastie Boys, Amy Winehouse). In an earlier post, I followed this line when talking about hair and popular music, claiming that the Jewfro provides a link between black and white styles. I wheeled into service a quote from Jon Stratton, who states that ‘being positioned between the ideologically driven binary of black and white, Jews have mediated between African-American culture and the hegemonic white American culture’.

            Stratton’s work is focused on post-World War II popular music and like many popular music historians he gives precedence to black musical styles. However, if we trace history back further, Jewish musicians and writers cannot be cast as go-betweens, their input is central to the popular music form.

            Michael Kantor’s film Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy redresses the balance. It begins with Eric Idle’s song ‘You Won’t Succeed on Broadway (If You Don’t Have Any Jews)’ and then provides evidence of the Jewish dominance of American musical theatre. Even Cole Porter, the one notable non-Jew amongst early Broadway writers, stated that he could only achieve success by composing ‘Jewish tunes’.

The film acknowledges the fit between black and Jewish musical forms, demonstrating an over-lapping use of minor scales. It also notes the influence of jazz on Broadway songwriters, while at the same time insisting that the Jewish influence shines through. For example, as well as examining the jazz inflections in Rhapsody in Blue, the film points out that Gershwin employed a klezmer clarinet for its famous opening. Elsewhere, there is illustration of the extent to which Broadway songwriters wove Jewish religious motifs into their tunes, most interestingly in the case of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’, which uses a melody from a Jewish prayer to help explode the myths of the bible. It transpires that the Great American Songbook is also the Great Yiddish Hymnbook.

            The film has an incisive take on the themes of Broadway musicals. Some writers focused on African-Americans (Show Boat, Porgy and Bess), while others explored inter-racial subjects (South Pacific). It is suggested, however, that these musicals were really about Jews. Josh Kun states that:

One of the ways that Jewish songwriters on Broadway wrote about the experience of being Jewish is by writing about other outsiders: ‘I’m not going to tell you the story of Jews in America, but I am going to tell you the story of an African-American on a riverboat, I’m going to use somebody’s else’s story to tell you mine’. The more the Jews are not writing about Jews, I think you could argue is when they are actually writing the most about Jews.

If he’s right we should perhaps revisit Jon Stratton’s statement. In the history of American popular music the hegemonic whites are still observers, but what they are watching is Jews and African-American artists speaking amongst themselves. 

In Modernism I Trusted

One of the most shameful records that I own is ‘Fuck a Mod’ by the Exploited. ‘Kick him in the head/Beat him in the balls/Jump up on his head/How much fun it is to fuck a mod until he’s dead’. That’s how it goes, sung to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’.

            Why bring this up? Well, mostly to grab attention about pop modernism. That’s modernism as in the high art theory: the belief that art should progress; that it should experiment with form; that new technologies should be embraced. As such, the mod revival that the Exploited are singing about is about as far from modernism as it’s possible to be. What pop modernists have in common with mod revivalists, though, is a sense that they are being fucked over.

            At least that’s what Simon Reynolds thinks. The real reason for his pessimism in Retromania is that he feels pop’s modernist spirit has died. How can this be? There are those who argue that there’s no such thing as modernism in popular music. In the first instance, the term modernism should be applied to a period of artistic endeavour that took place prior to the second world war; popular music, in contrast, didn’t really get going until the rock ‘n’ roll revolution of the mid-1950s. Secondly, modernism is elitist in nature, it shunned the opinions of the general public; popular music, in contrast, is popular.

            And yet I think Simon Reynolds is right. A modernist tendency has been at large within popular music. The Beatles have much to answer for here. Despite their overwhelming popularity, the second half of their career was essentially modernist in nature: they turned their backs on the public, choosing studio work over live performance; they were pioneers of new technology; they explored the parameters of the pop form. Those who lived through the punk era, which was as much about ‘no past’ as it was about ‘no future’, or the house music movement, which provided the ultimate example of stretching pop’s form to match its function, will also have been touched by the modernist spirit.

            Reynolds goes further. He argues that, out of all art forms, ‘pop music could be said to have held out against the onset of postmodernism the longest’. As evidence he cites ‘vanguards like hip hop and rave’ and ‘isolated modernist hero figures within rock or pop itself’. I think there’s something in this too. Postmodernism’s lack of affect hasn’t sat well with pop’s libidinous drive. Conversely, the music’s canonisation is distinctly modernist in tone. Think of those ‘best albums of all time’ lists: Sgt. Pepper; Dark Side of the Moon; Innervisions; Computer World.

            For me, Reynolds is on less sure ground when identifying the modernist audience. He claims that ‘chavs are Britain’s last bastion of futurist taste’, largely on the grounds that Britain's white underclass has a preference for black music, including ‘R&B and lumpen post-techno styles like donk’. I’d be reluctant to say that anyone from any class or ethnic background has a monopoly on forward-looking taste. What I would suggest, though, is that it is more likely to be those from middle-class and/or art-educated backgrounds who would filter that taste through a belief in modernism. This would include critics such as Simon Reynolds and, if I’m honest, myself. You would be able to see this in our taste for black musicians (James Brown rather than Bobby Bland; Stevie Wonder rather than Al Green; Public Enemy rather than 2Pac; Missy Elliot rather than Beyonce), as well as for middle-class artists influenced by black pioneers (Pink Floyd’s cosmic take on the blues; Radiohead’s dystopian jazz; James Blake’s austere dubstep).

            There is a reason why this matters: pop modernism has wielded power. It is has been an agenda-setting taste, not just in constructing popular music’s canons, but also in encouraging certain types of artists to be signed and promoted by the media. It can be witnessed in the demand that new artists be innovative and original, and maybe even difficult. There are residual bastions of modernism amongst journalists, documentary commissioners and prize-giving panelists (hence James Blake was a shoo-in to win this year’s Mercury Music Prize). Their viewpoint is being overtaken, however, and as a consequence we have Reynolds’ worried fretting. Many new acts favour the past over the future, or rather than searching for ‘newness’ they are focused on ‘nowness’ (see my previous post). Should we mourn modernism’s passing; or should we kick it in the head, beat it in the balls and jump up on its head?

Thicke as Copyright Thieves

Copyright is racist. It’s an emotive argument, but one that has been employed frequently by music academics. The thinking goes something like this: music copyright has it roots in print culture and thus favours elements that can be captured in notation, such as melody and harmony. These musical characteristics are at the forefront of the western art music tradition. In contrast, musical qualities that are central to black music, such as rhythm, ‘feel’ and record production, are poorly protected by copyright. Consequently, white musicians, including the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Marty McFly, have felt free to borrow from black music and to profit from what they have taken. Simon Frith, for example, has stated that:

Copyright law defines music in terms of nineteenth-century Western conventions and is not well suited to the protection of Afro-American musicians’ improvisation art or rhythmic skills.

Although there is a basic truth to this theory, it is not without is own problems. It reinforces stereotypes: black musicians are depicted as being rhythmic rather than literary; black music as the product of the community rather than artistic genius. It also ignores the fact that much black music is supremely melodic and harmonic. In addition, it should be noted that some black musicians have a nuanced understanding of copyright law and have used it strategically. Herbie Hancock shrugged off accusations that the version of ‘Watermelon Man’ on Headhunters is heavily indebted to a recording from the Central African Republic, by invoking the racist nature of copyright:

we’re the people who’ve lost the most, who’ve had the most stolen from us. We know what it means to come up with, you know, a sound or a tune, then to have it copped and turned into a big hit or something like that. We’ve been through all of that. But this isn’t like that. This is a different thing, you see, brothers, we’re all making African music, that’s what I’m talking about.

Employing a different tactic, we now have Pharrell Williams, who has shown that ‘Blurred Lines’ owes nothing to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ by employing the biases of musical notation:

If you read music, all you have to do is read the sheet music. It's completely different. Anybody that plays music and reads music, just simply go to the piano and play the two. One's minor and one's major. And not even in the same key.

Hmm. YouTube views of ‘Blurred Lines’ are currently hovering around the 225 million mark and the recording has been number one in 14 different countries. How many people are consuming this song via its printed score?

I Ain't No Square with My Corkscrew Hair (and Moustache)

Students taking my Popular Music degree have included me in a team for Movember, all of us growing moustaches in aid of testicular cancer research (to donate click here). Inevitably this has made me think about the use of the moustache in popular music. There are clearly different tendencies: the beatnik moustache (Acker Bilk, Frank Zappa); the gay biker look (Freddie Mercury, Paul Rutherford, Glenn Hughes of the Village People); the metal moustache (Tony Iommi, Lemmy, Derek Smalls), the eccentric’s moustache (Ron Mael, Nick Cave), the European moustache (Gorgio Moroder) and the moustache to signal a burgeoning seriousness (the Beatles). However, I’m struggling to draw any historical conclusions.

            In contrast, men’s hairstyles have been an indicator of crossover in popular music. This goes back at least as far as Elvis Presley, who used Royal Crown Pomade hair grease in order to slick back his hair. This was a popular product among black Americans, who used it in order to style their hair into white styles. Nelson George has remarked that ‘in a typical pop music example of cross-cultural collision, there was Elvis adapting black styles from blacks adapting white looks’.

            In contrast, the Beatles mop-top look was not so easy for black fans and artists to adopt. Ben E. King has held this hairstyle responsible for terminating the racially mixed musical culture of the early 1960s:

But when they came along – because you know black people can’t grow their hair long and straight, now forget that – so they came along with long, straight hair, and that changed the whole attitude of the music in a racial way.

By the mid-1960s, however, white artists were adopting black hairstyles: witness the afro grown by Eric Clapton and the similar cut that helped Noel Redding to pass his audition for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. This period of miscegenation was short-lived. White hippies went in one direction, growing their hair very long and loose, a style that was even harder for black people to adopt than the Beatles’ cut. Conversely, as the black power movement grew more militant, its afros grew bigger and more magnificent, laying down a gauntlet that few outside the black community could take up.

            Few, but not all. There is another ethnic element to consider: Jews. Jon Stratton has written that ‘being positioned between the ideologically driven binary of black and white, Jews have mediated between African-American culture and the hegemonic white American culture’. This is as true of Jewish hair as it is of Jewish songwriting. Although some people have remarked on the similarities between the Beatles’ mop tops and the pudding-basin cut modeled by the Jewish comedian Ish Kabibble, more commonly Jewish hair has signalled an affinity with black culture. Witness the fantastic afro-growing ability of Bob Dylan, Phil Spector, Marc Bolan, Mick Farren, Charles Shaar Murray and Geoff Travis. Apparently there's even a word for what's going on here: the Jewfro.