On his book Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
Cover Interview of March 01, 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.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
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.