On his book Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
Cover Interview of February 28, 2017
In a nutshell
Just around Midnight is about the entanglements of
popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and particularly the
question of how rock and roll music “became white.” By the time Jimi Hendrix
died in 1970, many of his obituarists found it remarkable that a black man
would be playing electric rock and roll guitar, in a way that no one would have
thought odd when Chuck Berry was doing it just a decade earlier. My book is
about how this happened, and also about how it happened during a decade that’s
often thought to be marked by unprecedented amounts of commercial crossover and
aesthetic exchange. For instance, you have the extraordinary rise of Motown and
Southern soul on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other side of the Atlantic
a whole host of bands who “invade” America while having spent their formative
years deeply steeped in black American musical traditions, most famously the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And of course there were individual stars like
Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Jimi Hendrix himself, all of whom
crossed racial boundaries in both their music and their audiences.
All of these artists and entities were described as “rock”
or “rock and roll” performers at various points in the 1960s; how, then, did we
end up with a notion that rock music is something that only white people do? My
book charts this shift, and argues that the real story is one of reception
rather than production: in other words, “rock” didn’t become white because of
choices musicians made, or because white musicians “stole” the music, or
because black musicians chose to leave it behind. Rather, it happened due to
the way audiences and writers and, subsequently, marketers and radio
programmers and the music industry generally decided that different kinds of
people made different kinds of music. The book is an academic book but I’ve
tried to write it in a lively and readable style, so that it can reach as many
readers as possible. This is music that a lot of people really love—I myself
really love it—and at best I’d like to think my book offers us a chance to hear
it differently than we often do, and also to correct some of the more tired and
ill-founded myths about Sixties musical culture.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
Just around Midnight is about the entanglements of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and particularly the question of how rock and roll music “became white.” By the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, many of his obituarists found it remarkable that a black man would be playing electric rock and roll guitar, in a way that no one would have thought odd when Chuck Berry was doing it just a decade earlier. My book is about how this happened, and also about how it happened during a decade that’s often thought to be marked by unprecedented amounts of commercial crossover and aesthetic exchange. For instance, you have the extraordinary rise of Motown and Southern soul on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other side of the Atlantic a whole host of bands who “invade” America while having spent their formative years deeply steeped in black American musical traditions, most famously the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And of course there were individual stars like Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Jimi Hendrix himself, all of whom crossed racial boundaries in both their music and their audiences.
All of these artists and entities were described as “rock” or “rock and roll” performers at various points in the 1960s; how, then, did we end up with a notion that rock music is something that only white people do? My book charts this shift, and argues that the real story is one of reception rather than production: in other words, “rock” didn’t become white because of choices musicians made, or because white musicians “stole” the music, or because black musicians chose to leave it behind. Rather, it happened due to the way audiences and writers and, subsequently, marketers and radio programmers and the music industry generally decided that different kinds of people made different kinds of music. The book is an academic book but I’ve tried to write it in a lively and readable style, so that it can reach as many readers as possible. This is music that a lot of people really love—I myself really love it—and at best I’d like to think my book offers us a chance to hear it differently than we often do, and also to correct some of the more tired and ill-founded myths about Sixties musical culture.