On his book Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
Cover Interview of February 28, 2017
The wide angle
There’s been a lot of discussion of “cultural appropriation”
in our culture recently—this is obviously a perennial topic but it seems to be
a particularly charged subject in the current moment. It’s obviously an
incredibly complex and difficult subject, one that resists any sort of easy answers.
I’d like to think that my book offers a different way into that conversation by
exploring the ways that the identities of people who consume art often come to
structure our understanding of that art as much as the identities of the people
who make it, which are often more varied and diffuse than we’d expect. I also
think we often tend to use artists and cultural works as conduits through which
to have debates and conversations that can quickly far exceed the specifics of those
artists and works themselves. This can obviously be useful but it also has its
limits, and can become obfuscating if it starts to drown out the art itself.
This book is about a period when that tendency, which is as old as America
itself, became particularly pronounced. So I think the book will definitely
hold interest for people who are drawn to broader questions about how race and
racial thought interact with culture, and I also think it’ll be of interest to
people who enjoy reading about 1960s music, which I’d like to hope is quite a
lot of people!
In terms of my professional path, I actually spent a few
years as a full-time musician in my late teens and early twenties, which was an
incredibly formative time for me, both the experience of playing music for a
living and being surrounded by others who’d chosen to do so, many of whom were
older than me and came from a wide array of circumstances and backgrounds.
Among many other things, that experience left me deeply fascinated by the ways
musicians think about what they do, and how musicians approach music-making.
After returning to college I worked for a while as a music critic and
journalist, which was also a great experience, and left me interested in the
ways that music writers think about what they do, and how the venues that
publish them frame that work as well. And of course, throughout all of it I was
interested in the way the “music industry”—in 2016 that term is so vague and
toothless that it’s hard not to scare-quote it, but that hasn’t always been the
case—exerts pressures on both these parties, the people who make their living
making music and people who make their living commenting upon it.
[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
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
The wide angle
There’s been a lot of discussion of “cultural appropriation” in our culture recently—this is obviously a perennial topic but it seems to be a particularly charged subject in the current moment. It’s obviously an incredibly complex and difficult subject, one that resists any sort of easy answers. I’d like to think that my book offers a different way into that conversation by exploring the ways that the identities of people who consume art often come to structure our understanding of that art as much as the identities of the people who make it, which are often more varied and diffuse than we’d expect. I also think we often tend to use artists and cultural works as conduits through which to have debates and conversations that can quickly far exceed the specifics of those artists and works themselves. This can obviously be useful but it also has its limits, and can become obfuscating if it starts to drown out the art itself. This book is about a period when that tendency, which is as old as America itself, became particularly pronounced. So I think the book will definitely hold interest for people who are drawn to broader questions about how race and racial thought interact with culture, and I also think it’ll be of interest to people who enjoy reading about 1960s music, which I’d like to hope is quite a lot of people!
In terms of my professional path, I actually spent a few years as a full-time musician in my late teens and early twenties, which was an incredibly formative time for me, both the experience of playing music for a living and being surrounded by others who’d chosen to do so, many of whom were older than me and came from a wide array of circumstances and backgrounds. Among many other things, that experience left me deeply fascinated by the ways musicians think about what they do, and how musicians approach music-making. After returning to college I worked for a while as a music critic and journalist, which was also a great experience, and left me interested in the ways that music writers think about what they do, and how the venues that publish them frame that work as well. And of course, throughout all of it I was interested in the way the “music industry”—in 2016 that term is so vague and toothless that it’s hard not to scare-quote it, but that hasn’t always been the case—exerts pressures on both these parties, the people who make their living making music and people who make their living commenting upon it.