Loving Music and Loving People PDF

2 Prelude and teasing out tears. Hurts because a musician you love is no longer alive to hear you declare how much they’ve meant to y...

2 Prelude and teasing out tears. Hurts because a musician you love is no longer alive to hear you declare how much they’ve meant to you. Hurts because a part of you wants a sublime harmony or high note to last forever, yet you realize the Prelude moment means something precisely because it is, as with the searing paradox of mortal existence, gone too soon. In the grandest scheme, maybe loving Loving Music and Loving People music can hurt because you’re all but overwhelmed with gratitude for the sheer fact of music’s existence in a universe that didn’t owe us music, or really owe us anything at all. We love music so much that we might talk about it as an animate, sen- Love is not based on great works as unperformed abstractions. tient being. Music theorist Joseph Straus explains how some scholars analyze —Carolyn Abbate1 a composition as if it were “a human body, a living creature with form and motion, and often with blood, organs, limbs, and skin as well.”3 We anthro- Love is the core of it all. The rest is just sounding brass and tinkling pomorphize music the way we anthropomorphize—well, just about every- cymbal. thing. But does a musical work have dignity? Can it sense pain? Does it have —Cornel West2 rights? Of course not, one might reason. Yet think of the colloquialisms we use for music, especially when we believe music has been violated. An un- derrehearsed cover band made a mockery (dignity) of Led Zeppelin’s classics. A singer butchered or mangled (pain) the “Star-Spangled Banner.” An or- People love music for how it sounds and how it feels. At least this is the chestra didn’t quite do justice (rights) to the grandiosity of Mozart’s Requiem. way many of us, through our early years, fall in love with music: the ears As art historian W. J. T. Mitchell points out, similar language and feelings magnetized by a croon on the radio, the broken heart soothed by a ballad pop up when people witness the “violation” and “mutilation” of visual art and on infinite loop, the limbs ensorcelled by the perfect groove, the deaf body physical objects—a painting slashed by a knife, a teddy bear with a torn arm, attuned to the creative powers of vibrational experience. We come to love a sofa abandoned on the curb, a violin broken in two.4 music for its palpable events, less so for its status as an unsounded ob- As music vibrates our bodies sympathetically, it can move us to react em- ject. True, people can declare a love of music without overt mention of pathetically. When we perceive our beloved music hurting, we hurt a little, performances, and instead with shorthand references to specific musicians, too. It sounds illogical. We know music isn’t truly an organism, so we should works, or genres. I love Prince. I love Cats. I love K-pop. With any of these rest easy knowing it’s free of pain receptors. In another sense, the fantasy is loves, nonetheless, a sensory encounter is likely what once kindled the flame. not strange at all. As a companion, music can do so much for us, mean so For me, it’s the voice of Eva Cassidy. In high school, I came across her ex- much to us, and even grant us a profound sense of self and humanity. We feel quisite cover of “Autumn Leaves,” which led me to discover her solo album called to love and protect music, as parents would defend their young, or as Live at Blues Alley, which led me to an Internet search revealing she had died lovers would guard each other. of cancer in 1996 at age thirty-three, just months after Blues Alley’s release. Is it possible for our love and protection of music to go too far? Can such Ever since, I’ve never gone more than a few months without finding my way devotion ever do more harm than good? Can our intense allegiances to music back to Cassidy, if only nowadays to stream a song or two, and falling in love distract, release, or hinder us from attending to matters of social justice? all over again. You probably have musical treasures you call your own, along Consider a 2012 Washington Post article by music critic Anne Midgette, with vivid stories of how you chanced upon them. who recalled an unpleasant experience at the Port Authority Bus Terminal So you probably also know how it feels to love music so much, it hurts. in New York. She described hearing a recording of a Franz Schubert piano Hurts because music can be excruciatingly beautiful, quickening the breath trio piped through overhead loudspeakers. “I’ve long heard that the Port Loving Music Till It Hurts. William Cheng, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190620134.003.0001  Loving Music and Loving People 3 4 Prelude Authority is one of many public spaces across the country that uses classical It’s only fair to ask the same questions of ourselves. Had I found myself music to help control vagrancy,” Midgette noted. Upon hearing this music in a similar situation—enjoying some recordings of Chopin or Eva Cassidy firsthand, she started to believe its efficacy. “Schubert’s piano trios are among through a transit hub’s crystal-clear loudspeakers, despite harboring vague my favorite pieces in the universe,” she declared, “but as I listened, I found suspicions of this music’s anti-loitering functions—would I have thought to that I wasn’t relaxing; quite the contrary. The music sounded awful: tinny, object? I’m not sure. I would like to think so. Yet chances are just as good that hard-edged, aggressive. I wanted to get away.”5 Although Midgette pru- I would have ended up lulled into auditory bliss by music I thoroughly love. dently acknowledged that playing classical music “to ‘civilize’ a space” is a Audible performances aren’t the only manifestations of music that acti- form of “supreme elitism,” her article focused on the insults to this music. vate our protective instincts. Although the origins of our love for music may In short, she took issue with the reduction of Schubert to the status of depend on, as musicologist Carolyn Abbate points out, how its performed sonic wallpaper, saying “what we’re actually talking about is Muzak,” while “realities” profoundly speak to us, we can be ferociously defensive of the idea lamenting how the subpar speakers and acoustics could not do right by of music as well—namely, our differing ideas about what qualifies as good the repertoire she profoundly loved. “In that windowless, ugly space, with music, where this music should be played, under which circumstances, with pigeons strutting across the grimy floor, announcements blaring unintelli- what technologies, how and how loudly, and by and for whom.8 Instincts to gibly over the loudspeaker and the sound system giving the music a harsh protect music (and one’s own ideal of music) can crop up in the insistence edge, as if impaling it on a jagged chunk of metal, my sympathies were all that not a single sacred note of Beethoven’s sonatas must ever be changed, with the homeless people that such music is widely thought of as attempting or that someone who posthumously seeks to finish a composer’s unfinished to repel,” Midgette concluded. “If I’d had a choice, it would have driven me symphony is as presumptuous as “an archaeologist adding a missing arm away, too.”6 (Implied here is that Midgette couldn’t choose to leave. With an of his own making to a recovered Venus.”9 Preservationist instincts toward eventual bus to catch, yet having arrived somewhat early at Port Authority music can come out more coarsely, as when a chorus of shhhh! descends on a “with enough time” so that she “actually noticed the music,” she found her- fellow concertgoer whose vibrating cell phone has sorely punctured a pair of self ostensibly stuck.) lovers’ onstage duet. More grievously, a protectiveness of your favorite music Midgette might be correct that some of the homeless people at Port could motivate you to defend and continue to patronize the music of a su- Authority were irked by grating renditions of Schubert. Or maybe these perstar who has been multiply accused of sex crimes. In all of these cases, concerns are only a fraction of daily crises involving the bare necessities of it’s not just about protecting music itself, but also about safeguarding one’s food, warmth, and shelter. Despite Midgette’s sympathies, this Washington entitlements to musical pleasures. Post article dwelled far more on the metaphorical wounds inflicted on an At times, it’s as if people care more about music—and in particular about “impaled” Schubert than on the material injuries and structural injustices their own beloved music and musical ideals—than about fellow human perpetrated against homeless individuals. Not that compassion is a zero-sum beings. This attitude isn’t unthinkable when we realize how love in general, game. One can feel pain on behalf of music while trying to feel and assuage and the fierce loyalty it engenders, can make us do things far out of the or- the pain of people. But here’s a useful hypothetical. If Anne Midgette had dinary, often beyond the typical sweeps of our moral compasses. Chaotic heard a high-fidelity, captivating rendition of Schubert at the Port Authority minds, irrational actions, questionable ethics: these are ingredients of love that day—say, an undistorted recording of his piano trios by the legendary stories writ large. Why would people’s lifelong love affairs with music prove Beaux Arts Trio—would she have thought to document her outrage about any less complicated? the recording’s gentrifying utility? Would she have ended up writing an Impassioned and vigilant, one can love music to the point of hurting or op-ed denouncing, as she astutely states, the “supreme elitism” of this anti- neglecting other people, whether directly or indirectly, consciously or not. vagrancy practice? Or would she have been content to bask in the beauty of Conversely, one’s own enjoyment of music can come under fire. You might what she calls her “favorite pieces in the universe,” even praising the good be “singing and dancing around the apartment” to the rhymes of Notorious taste of Port Authority’s administrators?7 B.I.G., or relaxing to a “bikram yoga CD” in your parked car, and someone  Loving Music and Loving People 5 6 Prelude might call the cops on you. It’s what happened respectively in mid-2018 to Orbiting this answer is a burning constellation of interrogative asterisks. Mary Branch and Ezekiel Phillips—both black, both playing music they Why prioritize people? Is it simply because people are mortal beings who feel loved.10 Such cases bring up questions about why some people’s displays of pain—and sometimes need alleviation from suffering—whereas music does music loving face higher evidentiary thresholds of legitimacy and respecta- not? Why would we ever need to choose between music and people anyway? bility. Here, with feasible elements of race and prejudice in play, one takeaway Can’t we have it all? And must we love all people? What about the people is how disputes involving music are rarely just about the music itself, even who hurt us? Crucial considerations all around. More than insisting that we or especially when arguments flare over whether there’s such a thing as “the always blithely choose a love of people over a love of music, my answer is an music itself.”11 If, while listening to music you love, you find yourself shamed, invitation to contemplate the potential falsity of the choice itself. In other chided, or reported to the authorities, then music is likely only one factor in a words, it’s an opportunity to ask why there’s ever doubt in the first place, much larger, messier equation. and indeed who or what is even capable of making us choose or making Loving Music Till It Hurts explores how we can love music to the point us believe a choice does or doesn’t exist. Plenty of internal and external of hurting one another. It is a book about how such interpersonal hurt forces—stubborn personal habits and loyalties, or powerful institutions and emanates in part from our fantasy that music itself can be hurt and therefore creeds—can seemingly present us with a choice between loving music and must be protected. Ultimately, this book is about how human relationships loving people. In this book, we will encounter examples of human beings with music—relationships often founded on an aching love, yes, but also who do appear to pick sides. Some choose music, opting to lovingly protect potentially rooted in ambivalence, pragmatism, dysfunction, or covetous it even to the detriment of other people. Some choose people, letting musical intensity—resonate with the just and unjust relationships among people. concerns take a back seat. Some implicitly challenge the choice, resisting the Driving this book is a single question: either/or. And some, all the while, show amazing ways of channeling mu- sical love to empower interpersonal love, and vice versa. How do we love music, even embrace it as vital to human thriving, without intentionally or unintentionally weaponizing this love—that is, without allowing such love to serve oppressive, discriminatory, and violent purposes? Your instinct might be to read this question as a rhetorical one. Its aims are not achievable, you could say. And you’d likely be right, for humans have al- ways found ways to make weapons out of tools, and music is a tool because it can do things. More than lovable, music is useful. It can appease or annoy, heal or harm, bring people together or break communities apart. At the heart of this book, however, is a naive refusal to hear the preceding question as merely rhetorical. Taking an optimistic page from feminist and queer scholars such as Sara Ahmed, José Esteban Muñoz, and Michael Snediker, I want to think that a better world is possible—or recursively, at the very least, to think that a better world is thinkable.12 Here, then, is my answer to the question. Love music and love people. If ever in doubt—or if forced to choose— choose people. From William Cheng, Loving Music Till It Hurts 12 Loving Music till It Hurts a leap of faith (or dogma, per the -ism) bridging artistic taste with moral 1 humanity.4 In practical terms, then, what are the consequences of overestimating Misjudgments of Humanity music’s ability to tell us things—that is, of judging people by their beloved music, and of mysticizing music as a second sight into human minds, bodies, and souls? We should know, logically speaking, that no music can sound out the full measure of a person. We’re also taught that jumping to conclusions We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. [...] And above all, in general can be impolite, unethical, and perilous. But conventional wisdom we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every isn’t always enough to stop us from rushing to judgment. And to be clear, the person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. validity of prejudging people, whether on the basis of music or other lim- —President Donald J. Trump, 2017 speech in Warsaw1 ited information, isn’t dependent on whether the appraisal turns out to be right or wrong. Warnings of don’t judge a book by its cover aren’t appended with... unless you happen to judge correctly. Landing one lucky guess doesn’t foreclose the broader hazards of continuous guesswork and stereotypes. What can music tell us about people? Specifically, what can the music With a parade of vignettes, this chapter shows how our love of music someone loves (or otherwise feels strongly about) reveal about that person’s can compel us to buy into its mystique, enticing us to attribute mu- character and values? Plenty, insists the romantic. Pretty much nothing, sical performances and ideas alike with preternatural powers of revela- scoffs the skeptic. Probably something but who really knows? shrugs the tion. I underscore the immediately hurtful as well as systemically harmful agnostic. ramifications of judging and misjudging people by their musical tastes, In a 2007 New Republic article, “The Musical Mystique,” Richard Taruskin affinities, and abilities. I also ask why we are susceptible to mystiques if, as the reviewed three books. Each book, in its own way, voiced a passionate defense word itself implies, we should rationally know better. The staying power of of classical music and its role in the twenty-first century.2 As Taruskin read the musical mystique, I argue, is indebted to a trio of partners in crime. First these volumes, he recalled how in this trio is what I call the musicological mystique—the idea that know- ledge about the musical mystique necessarily makes one immune to its over- the question that throbbed and pounded in my head was whether it was whelming seductions. Second is the limitation of language when it comes to still possible to defend my beloved repertoire without recourse to pious defining some of the big ideas around the musical mystique: love, human, tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian and music, all of which invite poetic yet evasive tautology, as in our soaring delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, in- declarations that love is love, or people are people. Last in this trio is the loud nuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery. On the evidence silence around love altogether in critical dialogues about music, insofar as before me, the answer is no. ideas of intimacy, pleasure, and erotics have long been treated as irrelevant or even (in music theorist Marion Guck’s terms) “embarrassing.” Following this litany, Taruskin described how some defenders of classical music evince a dangerous elitism that, in turn, perpetuates myths of this music as a civilizing and humanizing force. Western art music has long The Musical Mystique: Humanization, served ambitions to colonize land, educate “noble savages,” edify children, Dehumanization, Superhumanization and, increasingly today, rehabilitate prisoners.3 Any genre of music, though, can generate mystique, so long as this music is perceived to have human and On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with believing your beloved music and moral value. All told, the musical mystique is a kind of aesthetic moralism, your moral center are somehow connected. You’re entitled to derive a sense Loving Music Till It Hurts. William Cheng, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190620134.003.0002  Misjudgments of Humanity 13 14 Loving Music till It Hurts of self, self-love, and existential awareness from your musical craft or per- (nearly always pernicious, despite the lofty prefix): by deifying, say, a brilliant sonal playlist. So far, so good. But the problem is we rarely stop with self- conductor, thereby allowing such idol worship to mitigate or cover up his appraisal; we tend to judge other people, too.5 What happens when someone history of grave misconduct. else sees or hears your musicality as a precondition—a prerequisite—for Let’s begin with music’s humanizing potential. Recall one of the most your humanity? “Black music serves as durable cultural and social evidence popular YouTube clips ever, singer Susan Boyle’s 2009 audition for the re- that blacks have survived America,” wrote the black jazz musician and ac- ality competition show Britain’s Got Talent. Judges and audience members tivist William H. McClendon in 1976.6 “[But] Blacks did not and never have initially sneered and rolled their eyes at this middle-aged woman who needed to find themselves and learn of their humanity in order to produce prefaced her performance by stating a desire to be as successful as the music.”7 Alas, the same cannot be said, McClendon remarks, for the many musical theater star Elaine Paige.11 As Boyle began singing “I Dreamed a white people who have become alerted to the fact of black humanity pri- Dream” from Les Misérables, however, the room’s condescending milieu marily through delightful encounters with jazz, blues, spirituals, and gospel melted into warm smiles and dropped jaws. The rest became viral-video his- music. A beautiful performance by a black musician can jolt a previously tory, with the web feasting on a real-life “ugly duckling” tale.12 As observed racist or indifferent listener into epiphanic acceptance of this musician’s hu- by ethnomusicologist Katherine Meizel, motifs of the “noble savage” manity. Yet surely the listener’s change of heart must not derail the question peppered the media’s exaltation of Boyle’s “natural voice” and romantici- of why any epiphany was ever required, much less the question of how, going zation of this amateur singer’s “village background, her self-described vir- forward, one should make amends for prior racist actions.8 ginity, and the mild brain damage she suffered at birth.”13 Or as a Sun writer Even if lovable music has the power to humanize, we cannot lose track characterized: “Untouched by human hand, this girl. Literally. Kicking of why the burdens of proof for humanity weigh more heavily on some 50, never had a boyfriend. Eyebrows you could knit into a jumper, dress individuals than on others to begin with. sense nicked from the drag queens on the paper towel adverts. But the To grasp the word humanize, we can bring in two of its lexical companions— voice? Borrowed from heaven itself.”14 Despite judges and fans eventually dehumanize and superhumanize. I situate these terms in part within the showering Boyle with praise, the shock value of the narrative arc can make vantages of moral philosophy and critical race theory. Alexander Weheliye, us wonder how people would have treated this woman had she not sung for example, has offered the phrase “pernicious logics of racialization” to de- beautifully and elevated herself as someone deserving of human decency. scribe a culture’s “sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full Not that there was anything inherently wrong with celebrating Boyle; re- humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans”—people treated humanely, ality shows are, by their nature, premised on the sensationalism of unlikely people treated poorly, and people, such as slaves or detainees, treated with triumphs. What’s problematic is that people were able to prejudge Boyle utmost cruelty.9 An addition to Weheliye’s catalog is the superhuman, an terribly—for her appearance, class (perhaps discernible by her accent and insidious construct for a pair of diametric reasons: one, because someone dialect during her pre-audition remarks), and comportment—and then, lionized as a superhuman lives above the law; two, because the superhuman, after the big musical reveal, to anoint themselves as founding members of in some cases, is actually a dehumanizing label wrapped up in a bow (the pre- the Susan Boyle fan club. Amid the thunderous applause and consequent ternaturally musical “Magic Negro,” the “supercrip” who “overcomes” disa- lovefest, all is forgiven, and earlier prejudice forgotten. bility by dint of specialized proficiencies, and similar patronizing tropes that Again: someone’s display of musicality can awaken others to this person’s fetishize freakery and circle back to the not-quite-human).10 humanity. It just shouldn’t be necessary. People have found countless ways to humanize, dehumanize, and With the musical mystique at work, a beautiful singing voice ended up superhumanize themselves and others through music. Humanize: by validating Boyle in the eyes of her prior skeptics. Most listeners didn’t know attaching a sense of self or self-worth to the music one loves, performs, or anything about Boyle before her audition, and this is why they prejudged her. promotes. Dehumanize: by degrading, mistreating, or harming someone else Yet the humanizing powers of the musical mystique can just as easily creep for their perceived lapses in musical taste, ability, or decorum. Superhumanize into cases of people about whom a great deal is already known. Consider,  Misjudgments of Humanity 15 16 Loving Music till It Hurts in the arena of high-stakes politics, the Russian president Vladimir Putin, you, they clearly have plenty of tactical options. Musical judgments are one whose well-documented actions have been variously called authoritarian, such option. cruel, and inhumane. In May 2017, Putin attended a “One Belt, One Road” Staying in the twin realms of reality television and politics, let’s rewind summit hosted in Beijing. As he waited at the state guesthouse for the ar- to January 2017 and Donald Trump’s inauguration, which lacked the kinds rival of Chinese president Xi Jinping, Putin sat down at a grand piano of big-name performers who fêted predecessor Barack Obama during the and played excerpts of two Soviet pieces from the 1950s: Vasily Solovyov- 2009 and 2013 ceremonies. President Obama had welcomed the likes of Sedoi’s “Evening Song” and Tikhon Khrennikov’s “Moscow Windows.” Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé Knowles, and Putin played hesitantly, falteringly. By his own admission, he is an ama- Bruce Springsteen. For President Trump’s festivities, by contrast, even a teur, “someone who plays with two fingers.”15 Cameras were present to cap- Bruce Springsteen cover band backed out at the last minute.25 Dozens of ture the minute-long performance. In a New York Times report, journalist left-leaning news outlets pounced on the inauguration’s sparse lineup as Ivan Nechepurenko perceived in this impromptu pianism “a softer side of proof of the commander-in-chief ’s wholesale repulsiveness. Reports of Mr. Putin, an authoritarian leader who has been in power since 1999 and performers’ mass demurral held up these musicians, and by extension their has often appeared eager to be seen as manly.”16 (Nechepurenko’s assump- music, as ethical barometers. But anti-Trumpers didn’t just lean on music tion is that piano playing doesn’t qualify as “manly,” because manliness is and musicians, or the lack thereof, for confirmation bias. Some people portrayed by the Internet’s copious photos of Putin’s judo training, weight brashly derided and dehumanized the musicians who did end up agreeing to lifting, hunting, and bare-chested horseback riding.)17 A Boston Globe ar- perform in Trump’s honor. ticle similarly described how Putin, “known for his passion for the outdoors, One of these musicians was an especially easy target, the sixteen-year-old showed off his softer side during a visit to China when he sat down to play “classical-crossover” singer Jackie Evancho, who had risen to fame as the the piano Sunday.”18 And a Financial Express piece bore the title, “Russian runner-up in the 2010 season of America’s Got Talent. Upon accepting an in- President Vladimir Putin Shows His Soft Skills, Plays Piano.”19 Several of vitation to sing the national anthem at the swearing-in ceremony, Evancho these articles took care to note that the two pieces performed by Putin were began to face extensive cyberbullying and accusations of being a “sellout, “tunes from his childhood,” as if this remembrance of songs of yesteryear has-been, puppet, and pawn.”26 (Accusations of selling out were hypocrit- were a lifeline to an innocent and vulnerable child nesting within the brawny ical given that commercial interests were probably no less instrumental for adult body of a nefarious world leader.20 Remarks about Putin’s amateurism the musicians who declined to perform.) Evancho’s defenders quickly fired and how he “plays piano like a 3rd grader” compounded this fantasy of illu- back. In particular, people who admired both Evancho and Trump were sory infantility.21 Some readers agreed with the sentimental gloss of Putin’s able to argue that Trump is obviously a good person and a great leader be- musicality, whereas others rebuffed the reports as false narratives that were cause the talented Evancho agreed to sing for him. As musicologist Dana “normalizing” and “humanizing” the president by sole virtue of pianistic ap- Gorzelany-Mostak has thoroughly documented, plenty of Evancho’s fans titude.22 Comparisons to Adolf Hitler popped up on cue. Hitler loved music, already regarded this white Christian starlet as more than simply talented; loved theater, and loved to paint.23 men in particular have idolized her as a rare, angelic, saintly gift to music Intentionally or not, we sometimes mysticize music as a humanizing force. and to society at large. “Evancho’s male fans [...] laud their idol’s moral up- What about music’s dehumanizing force? In his book Less Than Human, phi- rightness and the transformative potential her character and music confer losopher David Livingstone Smith posits that dehumanization is not a kink in upon them,” observed Gorzelany-Mostak on the basis of her interviews human relationships. It’s a feature. Proof, argues Smith, is everywhere, from with the singer’s admirers. “Put simply, many male fans believe their love the way people climb corporate ladders by stepping on others, to the homo for Jackie Evancho makes them better men.”27 As for Jackie Evancho’s own sapiens survivalist instincts of tribalism and natural selection, to human reasons for agreeing to perform at Trump’s inauguration? In an interview vocabularies in general (calling one another bitches, dogs, cockroaches, on Good Morning Britain, the singer explained: “My reason for doing this leeches, rats, snakes, pigs, and vermin).24 If someone intends to dehumanize has nothing to do with politics. It’s all about the honor of performing for  Misjudgments of Humanity 17 18 Loving Music till It Hurts my country.”28 Minutes later, when asked if she had any parting remarks, conductor’s multiple victims: “At the time, I thought that Levine was being Evancho repeated, almost word for word: “My decision has nothing to do victimized by false rumors. I was disastrously wrong, and am ashamed with politics. It’s all based off of the honor that I feel to perform for my to have written this [2001 article].”34 Ross’s regret is important, but his country that I love.”29 initial defense of Levine is revealing all the same. As musicologist Linda Numerous critics have called Donald Trump’s policies inhumane. Shaver- Gleason points out, among the most telling aspects of Ross’s Whether or not you believe this to be true, musical mystiques come into original article is how this prominent critic “had once considered play when we start believing that music—including Trump’s ability to court Levine’s performances as an appropriate response to accusations of performers, which ones, for what reasons—is germane to the accuracy of impropriety [...]; he places music and moral behavior on the same this criticism. scale, contrasting the smallness of the motivation behind the rumors Besides our humanizing and dehumanizing judgments involving against the implied immensity of Levine’s performances.”35 Ross’s 2001 music, moral slippages prove no less precarious in cases of judgments that statement invoked, furthermore, the figura-tive as well as literal superhumanize. In late 2017, old scandals were beginning to rock the clas- capability of Levine’s beautiful performances to quell any murmurs about sical music world anew. One scandal involved James Levine, the famed con- this conductor’s impropriety.36 When the superhuman Levine is ductor and then-director of the Metropolitan Opera. Several men had come conducting, the audience has to hush; a maestro’s hands command music forward to accuse Levine of sexual assault, citing his coercive relationships and silence alike. with them long ago. By December, the Met suspended Levine.30 Within weeks, in January 2018, London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra also cut ties ------------- with Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit after four women accused him of sexual assault, including rape.31 Superhumanized musicians show just how forcefully music can Damningly, allegations of Levine’s and Dutoit’s indiscretions had long beguile us into magical thinking. Music’s mystique can lead us to been open secrets in classical music circles. In Levine’s case, rumors reached imagine that we know far more about ourselves— and about other back thirty-plus years.32 Music critic Alex Ross, in a 2001 New Yorker ar- people— than we actually do or ever could. Now, you might agree ticle, had written off these rumors about the “affable, untouchable Levine” as with the excuses and rationalizations people have made on behalf products of pot-stirring antagonism: of Levine and Dutoit. You might viscerally disagree. Or you might feel torn. From what these apologists have written, nev-ertheless, Creepier than the rumors [about Levine] themselves is the delight with one thing is hard to deny: they love music a great deal. As do many which people in the music world have repeated them. Some have done so of us, surely. And it is this head-over-heels love of music that lays out of professional envy, some out of sheer malice. Levine has denied the some of the sharpest snares of the musical mystique. Although we rumors, but his most effective response has been his performances, which might not always like to admit it, any of us can wander into these make all the gossip sound bitter and small.33 snares. We’re only human, after all. Sixteen years blew by, and the whispers about Levine stayed whispers. He remained untouchable. It took the ramming speed of #MeToo—a movement (originating with activist Tarana Burke in 2006 and catching a fierce second wind in 2017) that was already pushing into pretty much every other polit- ical, workplace, and entertainment sector—to thrust this heretofore deified man under glaring light. As soon as the Met announced Levine’s suspension, Alex Ross took to Twitter to apologize for having so confidently doubted this Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques 65 Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques - ---- - ------------ - - ---- - -·----- What remains to be explained, however, is how women and teenage Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: girls came to be the demeaned "outsiders" of rock culture, despite their Girls and Women and Rock Culture contributions as performers and fans. I now tum to the theoretical work of in the 1960s and early 1970s literary critics Peter Stallybrass and Allon White to explain the very neces­sary function of ostensibly ostracized teenyboppers and groupies in creat­ing and cohering normative masculinity in and of rock culture. The Norma Coates treat­ment and discussion of teenyboppers and groupies in rock discourse University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and rock culture in general is, I argue, a prime example of what Stallybrass and White call "displaced abjection," an operation whereby a "low" I like to boast that the first record I ever bought was the Beatles' social group turns its power and disdain against a group that is even lower "Hey Jude" single on the Apple label. Or, I tell the story about the (1986, p. 53). Although rock culture, as it emerged in the late 1960s, was Christmas of 1969, when my mother, nervous about opening Pandora's box largely populated by upwardly-mobile white middle-class youth, it (which, as it turned out, she should have been), and annoyed by a sulking embraced and honed an oppositional relationship to mainstream daughter, found that Santa had left a copy of Abbey Road for me in her culture. It was not enough to designate women as low Others and to closet. I am now compelled to come clean. Before I fell in love with the ignore their contributions to rock culture. They had to be actively Beatles, my heart belonged to another band. I speak, of course, of the disdained and kept in their place. At the same time, women were very Monkees. I adored Davy's English accent and Mike's dry wit. I liked his necessary for the maintenance and coherence of rock masculinity, as sideburns, too. I joined their fan club. I put their pictures on my wall. I read sexual objects as well as adoring sub­jects. This contradictory need and 16 magazine voraciously. I never missed an episode of their television pro­ disdain for women in rock culture exemplifies displaced abjection. gram. I bought their albums, and asked for them for Christmas and birth­ Combined with the Modernist aesthetics mapped onto rock music and days. I snarled at critics who wrote anything bad about them. I was, in culture by early rock critics, strategies of displaced abjection succeeded in short, a teenybopper. making women and girls marginal in and to rock culture. Their combined As someone who is passionate about popular music, and who prides effects linger still. herself on her exquisite taste and refined ear, I've denied my Monkees This article argues that masculinity became naturalized in rock in obsession for years, preferring to present my 4th and 5 th grade self as a pre­ the 1960s and, as a result, women became marginal and/or subservient to cocious fan of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Since I'm confessing, I'll men in rock culture and its discursive formations. To support my argument I also admit that I watched the Partridge Family television show - although interrogate two particular sites of discourse about rock in which I wouldn't have been caught dead buying their music. Rock critic aesthet­ opera­tions of naturalization and marginalization took place. I begin ics had already entered my thinking. Even so, "teenybopper" is not a term with an analysis of rock discourse about "teenybopper TV," notably I've ever cared to be labeled with. Nor is "groupie," a term used in teasing, ABC's American Bandstand, NBC's The Monkees, and ABC's The and even by myself on occasion, in order to justify my almost lifelong pas­ Partridge amily, and the subsequent disparagement of their teenage sion for hard rock music. Jokes aside, the use of "teenyboppers" or female audience in rock journalism, even decades after the programs "groupies" to identify female fans of popular music belies a disturbing real­ appeared. I next explore the negative characterization and analyses of ity of rock culture for women: for decades, those were essentially the two groupies in rock jour­nalism of the late 1960s as an example of rock ways to imagine the relation of women to rock. The normative power of culture's contradictory rela- these prescribed identities remains potent, even though women are increas­ ingly visible in rock culture as musicians and critics.  68 Norma Coates Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques 69 ~ -~ ~~ tionship to female sexuality. Ultimately, I suggest that rock journalism’s In her study of teen idols, critic Gael Sweeney points out that, "[T]heories construction of women and teenage girls as groupies and teenyboppers, as of spectatorship hold that whenever men perform they are, to some extent, well as the elevation of select rock star girlfriends to the not-quite-as-bad objectified and feminized because they are put in the position of being category of “rock chick” foreclosed other possibilities for and ways to looked at, rather than being in the dominant position of looking" ( 1994, p. imagine the relationship of women to rock culture, even as the social and 51 ). I suggest that rock and roll mythology and discourses of authenticity discursive formation coalesced in the late 1960s. serve to defer and diminish the feminizing influence of the gaze on "acceptable" pop stars. That is, through this move, a suggestive poster of Teenybopper lV Jim Morrison becomes symbolic of his authentic phallic power rather than Although I’ve come a long way, chronologically and aesthetically, a site of homoerotic fetishism. from my pre-adolescent fascination with everything Monkee, I still feel a This particular discursive move is further bolstered by the binary need to disassociate myself from it, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Why? The positioning of the teen idol created by television as the opposite of the easy answer to that deceptively simple question is that, in the vaunted work authentic rock star. In this section, I discuss how the "teen idol" television, of popular music scholarship and journalistic criticism, “teenybopper” is a as represented by American Bandstand, The Monkees, and The Partridge very dirty word. Originally bandied about in entertainment industry trade Family were mobilized by rock and roll critics in the service of creating magazines as shorthand for the pre- and mid-teen adolescent cohort and discursive authenticity myths. In the case of American Bandstand and to “their” music, it acquired its current, less savory and thoroughly value- some degree, The Monkees, the discursive work was done in hindsight, laden meaning in the mid-l960s, or more accurately, as a result of later given that rock criticism had not emerged, or in the case of the latter, was analyses of mid-1960s music and trends. Today, the term is used much just emerging at the time of initial broadcast. In any case, the term "teeny­ more promiscuously, applied indiscriminately to fans of performers like bopper" was naturalized to represent types of music, fans and performers the sexually charged (at least in the minds of their critics) Spice Girls and that were the inauthentic opposites of "true" rock and rollers. This natural­ Britney Spears to the oh-so-cute-and-dreamy boy bands. It doesn’t matter ization is now so complete as to ignore or disavow the appeal of teenybop­ whether the teenyboppers in question are 9 or 17. What unites them is their per music to young males of the same age. 4 I argue that a further conse­ bad taste, as perceived by the critics and scholars who “know better.” That quence of this discursive move is the gendering of the disparaged, inau­ contemporary critics do not care to acknowledge that teenybopper taste is thentic teenybopper as female. I link this move, which continues to do dis­ not “bad,” but more likely undeveloped (who among us does not have aes- cursive damage to women in all aspects of popular music, to the specific thetic skeletons in our [pre-] pubescent musical closet) exemplifies the address of television pop to pre- and mid-teenage audiences. continuing power of discourses that feminize mass culture in general and valorize the “authentic masculine” in rock, even ~ubtextually.~ One other thing characterizes the discursive teenybopper, her femaleness. I cannot recollect the term “teenybopper” being applied to male fans of these performers and groups, or to the scores of pre- and mid- adolescent males who worship the male equivalent of teenybopper pop stars, professional wrestlers, or the legions of young males who continue to hang the well-known poster of Jim Morrison, shirtless and pouty, on their bedroom walls. Indeed, worship of musical teen idols is as much about fetishism of their images as it is about music. It is this aspect of (continued next page) teenybopperdom, I assert, that is most problematic for critics and scholars who draw boundaries around rock and other “serious” and more aestheti- cally valued forms of popular music to protect it from less authentic forms. Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques 71 Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques 73 - --- - -- -------- ------- ------ - The female teenybopper, defined in opposition to the true, male, rock and roller, fan or artist, was discursively invented and subsequently naturalized as the binary opposite of the "authentic" rock fan in the mid­l 960s. This naturalization was abetted by early works of popular music studies that set up dichotomies between male and female practices as musi­cal enthusiasts. The Monkees television program continues to exemplify the bad things that happen to good rock music when teenyboppers are its primary audience - and market. The developing discourses of rock authenticity in the mid- to late­l960s implicitly justified the money made by successful rock artists as sec­ondary to the quest for artistic integrity and purity. That from the start, managers and other players, including rock critics, contrived to make money out of rock and roll for themselves and its creators, was shoved under the discursive rug and has only recently been documented in detail. 8 The Monkees' greatest sin, for rock critics, was that they made an enormous amount of merchandising money from immature hordes of young girls who watched them on television, the epitome of "plastic" media. Teenyboppers were as removed from the rock and roll "authentic" as anything could be. Rock critics were able to divorce the Monkees music, accepted as "good pop," from the immensity of Monkees success. I suggest that the way that the Monkees television program and its fans were invoked in subsequent rock critic discourses incorporated the opinions and gender politics of middle-aged writers for trade magazines in the 1960s, and reflected the normative gender roles of the 1950s and early 1960s that informed the opinions of even countercultural journalists. 9 Teenybopper Monkees fans are characterized in articles in trade magazines as being even more extreme than the female Beatlemaniacs who howled and screamed and threw jellybeans at George. 10  Norma Coates Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques 77 courses that has yet to be resolved, or even acknowledged. On the one hand, these programs benefit from the prevalent nostalgia for the campy aspects of the 1960s and 1970s, rather than the social, political and eco­ nomic turmoil that marked those decades. Additionally, the female teeny­ boppers of the 1960s and especially the 1970s are today at the height of their power and desirability as consumers of big-ticket items, a fact not lost upon the marketers of luxury cars and other high-priced items advertised during episodes of VHl 's Behind the Music. The Monkees, the Partridge Family, and David Cassidy have all On the other hand, without female teenyboppers, rock mythology been profiled on VH 1 's Behind the Music. All three are recent subjects and its various discourses, particularly those of authenticity and a vibrant, of network as well as cable made-for-television movies. The "disposable" outlaw masculinity and sexuality, could not have coalesced. 17 For rock and television programs of the 1960s and 1970s all have cable channels rock culture to be authentic, something had to be inauthentic. Television, devoted to replaying them, with equally devoted audiences of old as television pop, and those who flocked to it were appropriate foils. well as new fans. Meanwhile, many of the "authentic" artists profiled Moreover, the exclusion of female teenyboppers from the discursive con­ in rock magazines of the period have faded into obscurity, or have fines of rock authenticity gave rock an air of aesthetic exclusivity, justify­ been revised in rock historiography as not being all too authentic ing the examination of rock as "serious" art. Poking fun at teenyboppers themselves. (I refer here to groups like the Lovin' Spoonful and the deflected criticism or even acknowledgment of the same basic impulses Association, raved about in early issues of Crawdaddy and now toward hero worship of the fans of so-called "authentic" rock. Authentic relegated to cheesy K-Tel collections advertised on the same cable rock could not survive without adulation, especially the adulation of female channels that lionize the pre-fab sitcom groups of the period.) fans, despite what the critics wrote. The display of unbridled heterosexual masculinity, and sexuality, was a crucial part of the rock myth, and wor­ I would like to argue that the nostalgia for these programs shipful female fans are important for its maintenance. represents the redemption of the teenybopper, but I cannot. I can argue, Even more important are groupies, who may be characterized, to however, that it represents a contradiction within rock and roll mythology some extent, as grown-up, hypersexual teenyboppers. The matur sexual and dis- desire of female groupies for rock stars was as scorned in and by rock cul­ ture as the virginal desire o teenyboppers. This contradiction is, as I dis­ cuss below, entirely coherent with and necessary to rock culture's particu­ lar inflection of masculinity. Rock journals, Rolling Stone in particular, played an important role in creating and circulating the masculine mytholo­ gies that held rock culture together, and in placing women in specific roles on its margins. On the cover of the Rolling Stone...alas (continued next page) Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques 79... some of the contradictions at the heart of naturalized masculinity in rock. That is, rock masculinity is discursively constructed as to bolster as well as reiterate itself; at the same time, rock masculinity requires the existence, illusory or real, of a subordinate femininity to support it and give it the appearance of "truth."