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Da Kine Sounds: The Function of Music as Social Protest in

the New Hawaiian Renaissance

Author(s): George H. Lewis
Source: American Music, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 38-52
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3051657
Accessed: 17-07-2019 20:51 UTC

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GEORGE H. LEWIS

Da Kine Sounds: The Function
of Music as Social Protest in

the New Hawaiian Renaissance

Deep in this tortured island all alone
Hear the winds cry, the mountains moan …
A culture, a land, destroyed by white man’s greed
Taking our pride and honor, they planted their seed …
We followed their rules much too long.
Our protests are heard in our music and song …

“Hawaiian Awakening”
by Debbie Maxwell

Until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became evident that ignoring the im-
pact of popular music on social and cultural protest movements was sociological
folly, there were few serious studies of the impact of popular music as political ex-
pression. Although some ethnomusicologists, such as Alan P. Merriam,1 were ar-
guing that “songs lead as well as follow, and political and social movements, often
expressed through song because of the license it gives, shape and force the mould-
ing of public opinion,” there were only a handful of social scientists who took such
an idea seriously enough to allow it to inform their own work. Therefore, with a
few exceptions,2 most treatments of popular music as political expression were
likely to be journalistic or historicaP rather than sociological.

Although the 1970s and the early 1980s saw some studies of this important
phenomenon by sociologists,4 it has been a topic that, strangely, has had compara-
tively little attention accorded to it, given its importance in the study of social and
political stability and change.

This paper is an attempt to analyze the role of da kine (pidgin for “right on”)
music in an ongoing social movement that is an important and focal concern of the
people of Hawaii-a contemporary movement both political and cultural in nature,
which is popularly known as the Hawaiian Renaissance. In contrast to most pre-

George H. Lewis is a member of the Department of Sociology at the University of the Pacific,
Stockton, California.

American Music Summer 1984

? 1984 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 39

vious studies of the place of music in social movements, this study does not focus
heavily on a content analysis of lyrics, as many of the most influential songs are
sung entirely in Hawaiian, a language a majority of those in the audience either do
not understand or are familiar with only certain key words and phrases. Although
lyric content is considered in this study, the larger focus will be on the symbolic
meaning of the Hawaiian song,5 as well as on nonverbal aspects of the music and
accompanying dance-an area of analysis that is sadly lacking in most studies of
musical performance.6

Social movements arise not only in response to conditions of inequality or in-
justice but, more important, because of changing definitions of these conditions.
Those involved must recognize and define their plight as an injustice, and one that
is intolerable to live with, rather than just passing it off as the result of luck or a cruel

twist of fate.7 In addition, participants in such a movement must come to believe
that an alleviation of these intolerable conditions is possible and that their efforts
will be important in obtaining the desired changes in political and social condi-
tions.8

There are four major stages in “consciousness raising” associated with social
movements. (1) Social discontent must be associated with the social conditions in
which persons find themselves.9 (2) These problematic social conditions must be
defined not as unchangeable and due to fate, but, instead, as due to the policies of
the present social order, which can be changed-thus moving persons from social
discontent to social unrest, or a readiness to challenge the political structure to
change social conditions.10 (3) From this base of social unrest, a definition of what is

wrong with present social conditions and proposed solutions to these problems, as
well as accepted rationales for participation, and assurances that such participation
is both necessary and efficacious must be developed-in other words, a social ideol-
ogy must be created.” (4) Social legitimization of the ideology and the goals of the
movement must be sought by tying it to the common values of the larger popula-
tion in which the movement is operating.12 This process of social redefinition, or the
mobilizing and eventual legitimization of discontent which turns mere dissatisfac-
tion with the social order into a force for change, is a crucial and relatively un-
studied topic in the literature of social movements.

Music and popular songs can play an important role in this process of symbolic
redefinition and the creation of a social ideology for social movements. As Finlay13
has noted, if one examines just the lyrics of protest songs associated with social
movements, one can find many examples of diagnoses of what is wrong with the
present order of things, proposed solutions to these wrongs, and rationales for par-
ticipation in the movement-all key elements in the definition of a social move-
ment ideology.

In addition to the development of ideology through the content of lyrics,
something that has been to some extent examined,14 a second important function
of music in social movements is in the development of social solidarity among
members and potential members.15 The songs of social movements attempt to ap-

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40 Lewis

peal to and reinforce common values and social identities among potential and ac-
tive members. The fact that music is not often taken seriously as a political activity
often gives musicians and singers more license to reach a broad range of audiences
than would be possible for other types of political activists, something I have exam-
ined earlier with respect to the “youth movement” of the 1960s16 and Afro-
American protests and social movements in the United States.17 By musically ap-
pealing to common values and traditional roots of a larger audience, the goals of
the social movement may more easily be linked with these values and thus legiti-
matized within the larger system.18
In addition, there are symbolic aspects of the music of most protest move-
ments that help to both define ideology and develop solidarity that are not con-
tained strictly in the lyrics of the songs themselves. The musical forms chosen by
protest musicians usually involve elements drawn from the “traditional” music of
the oppressed group. These elements usually involve the use of traditional melo-
dies, transformed by the use of new lyrics, but which are recognized by most par-
ticipants as deriving from “the people’s” music.19
Also, familiar forms of musical structure may be used, such as rhythm pat-

terns or traditional dance forms, as well as the special use of traditional instruments
that are a part of the specific cultural heritage of the oppressed group, to define
symbolically the music as that of the people. Finally, the style of presentation of the
music, the body language of the performers, and the styles of dress they choose-
usually in opposition to the established way of presenting popular music in the
larger society-all serve to identify symbolically these players and their perform-
ances as part of the culture of the oppressed group.
In considering the presentation and performance of protest songs, one has to

take note also of the ritual nature of music and the effect of this ritual in creating

feelings of identification and solidarity in the audience. Once an individual has
been brought into the sphere of a movement’s activities, the use of music in gather-
ings can, unquestionably, reinforce the feelings of communal belonging and social
solidarity. Such social rituals, when they are effective, help to charge emotionally
the interests members of these groups hold in common, elevating them to moral
rights and surrounding them with a “kind of symbolic halo of righteousness.”20
This function of emotionally charging the interests of group members is done more

effectively through music, a nonrational medium, than through speeches, pam-
phlets, or other rational, language-based means. Thus, as Durkheim suggested in
the context of religion, musical events can provide the sorts of emotional, euphoric,
vitalizing, and integrative experiences that more rationalistic appeals cannot. This
function of music is doubly important in the context of social movements, when
one considers the high proportion of the nonliterate in most oppressed popula-
tions, for whom rational, language-based arguments are, at the most, ineffective
and, at the least, totally inappropriate means of communication.
Therefore, in summary, music is a unique and effective force in the mobilizing
of discontent within an oppressed population because: (1) it can clearly define the

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 41

state of social discontent and develop the elements of a social ideology to reinforce
and rationalize the social movement; (2) it is less likely to be taken seriously, and
thus less likely to be censored or repressed, than the more rational and literal forms
of communication, such as speeches or pamphlets; (3) it can powerfully tie social
protest to the traditional values and symbols of the group through the use of tradi-

tional musical forms, instruments, dress, and modes of presentation; (4) it can pro-
ject a powerful emotional message that may be more effective in promoting solidar-
ity than more “rational” modes of communication; and (5) music, in this emotional
communication, can charge the interests of the group, elevating them to the inten-
sity of moral rights.

In the remainder of this paper, I shall present an analysis of the music of what

has become known as the “Hawaiian Renaissance,” a contemporary sociocultural
movement that illustrates and amplifies the points made in the discussion so far.

On March 22, 1977, George Kanahele addressed the Rotary Club of Honolulu
on the subject of the resurgence of interest in Hawaiian culture that had been build-

ing around the state since the beginning of the decade. “Some had called it a ‘psy-
chological renewal,’ a purging of feelings of alienation and inferiority. For others it

is a reassertion of self-dignity and self-importance. . . . What is happening among
Hawaiians today is probably the most significant chapter in their modern history
since the overthrow of the monarchy and loss of nationhood in 1893. For, concomi-
tant with this cultural rebirth, is a new political awareness which is gradually being
transformed into an articulate, organized but unmonolithic, movement.”21

This speech, published in full by the Honolulu Advertiser, has since been
quoted extensively by local politicians, social activists, and those involved in reviv-
ing the arts and culture of Hawaii. Kanahele entitled his speech, “Hawaiian Ren-
aissance,” thus giving a name to this fast coalescing value-oriented social move-
ment.

The movement was anticipated in Hawaii. As early as 1959, the Kamehameha
School faculty were discussing the “psychological rebirth” of Hawaiians, as they
began showing interest in, and exploring, their culture.2 This interest in Hawaiian
culture at Kamehameha revolved around the efforts of Nona Beamer, who fought
in earlier years to establish a Hawaiian Club at the school. By the 1950s, Beamer-
who had obtained a graduate degree in anthropology at Columbia while studying
Hawaiian culture-was teaching part-time in Kamehameha.

“I coined the word Hawaiiana in 1949. The word ‘ana’ is a very important
word to me, because it means to measure, to evaluate, to glean the very best of the
Hawaiian culture. This is what we choose to teach, the very best of the culture. So it
wasn’t chosen idly. I think Kamehameha was the first to pick Hawaiian Studies as a
cultural program for students, and then the University of Hawaii picked it up for
their summer sessions.”23

Then, in 1964, John Dominis Holt published an important essay entitled, “On
Being Hawaiian.” This essay, which called for a definition of identity in cultural

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42 Lewis

terms, was circulated and debated heavily in the mid to late 1960s, thus setting the
stage for what was to explode from 1969 to 1972 as a genuine rebirth of awareness
in, and response to, Hawaiian culture.
This cultural flowering is usually identified most strongly with developments

in the field of Hawaiian music and dance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Up to
this time, Hawaiian song and dance of the twentieth century was, in the main,
commercial music heavily influenced and produced by the middle-of-the-road
mainland American recording industry.
This commercialization of Hawaiian culture began in 1915, when a group of

Hawaiian musicians, singers, and dancers–featuring George E. K. Awai’s Royal
Hawaiian Quartet-were headline acts at the Panama-Pacific International Exposi-
tion in San Francisco. Their popularity sparked a craze that swept the United States
and, later, Western Europe.24 The popularity of Hawaiian music prompted main-
land music composers, the Tin Pan Alley people, to begin writing imitative mate-
rial for mass consumption.
The result was a series of “phony” Hawaiian songs, many with nonsense lyr-

ics like those of the Al Jolson hit, “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula.” Hawaiian musicians
who came to the mainland to tour gradually incorporated these much requested
songs into their repertoires–as well as rearranging Hawaiian classics to the newly
popular jazz beat that was sweeping America.25
As the first tourist hotels opened on Waikiki, this commercial “Hawaiian” mu-

sic was the natural sound for the stage shows and dance bands that sprang up with
the tourist industry. Ragtime, jazz, blues, foxtrot-all were used in creating songs
with Hawaiian themes, but with English lyrics. These hapa haole songs, played live
in Waikiki and across America by touring bands, were also broadcast throughout
the world on the famous radio program, “Hawaii Calls,” as well as being featured
in films such as Bing Crosby’s 1937 Waikiki Wedding, from which the hapa haole song,

“Sweet Leilani” won the Oscar for best song.26
This music, much of it commercially produced by non-Hawaiians, came to be

defined as authentic Hawaiian music, even by many Hawaiians, and it was mistak-
enly assumed to represent and reflect the cultural identity of the people. From 1930
and into the 1960s, the “Hawaiian sound,” much of it created in Tin Pan Alley,
flourished commercially both on the American mainland (especially in the 1930s
and 1940s) and in the lounges and supper clubs of Waikiki.
Paralleling this commercial creation and definition of Hawaiian music was the

development of the hula dance style. From 1915 through the 1920s, the hula be-
came a rage in vaudeville and mainland circus sideshows.27 Called “cootch”
dancers, most performers (who were seldom Hawaiian) created their own steps
and movements, most centered around an overtly sexual theme. By the 1930s, this
form of “hula” was cleaned up and used by Hollywood in films starring Bing
Crosby. Thus, it became a symbol of Hawaiian culture in the minds of many and
was incorporated into Waikiki stage shows along with the hapa haole music.28
By the late 1960s, perhaps fueled by the efforts of mainland American cultural

minorities to assert their own identities, dissatisfaction with the slick and symboli-

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 43

cally empty commercial music and dance of Hawaii fused with social and political
concerns revolving around identity to create the beginnings of a social movement
in Hawaii.

In November, 1966, a local radio station, KCCN, made the decision to broad-

cast Hawaiian music only, twenty-four hours a day. Although a good deal of this
music was of the hapa haole variety, some of it was authentic and traditional, the
work of a few (such as Andy Cummings, Gabby Pahinui, Genoa Keawe, and Nona
Beamer) who were performing in the old styles and keeping alive a tenuous and
fragile musical tradition.

In 1969, the station entertained the idea of dropping the all-Hawaiian format,
but abandoned their plans when they received 4,200 letters of protest in one week’s
time.29 In April, 1971, KCCN sponsored a four-hour concert at the Waikiki Shell
that featured over fifty local musicians, many of whom played traditional music in
the old styles. The concert was a sellout and a symbolic watershed in the resur-
gence of interest in authentic Hawaiian music.

Much of this interest was from the young Hawaiians who were searching for
some sort of cultural roots. In so doing, not only did they begin to support the mu-
sic of the few traditionalists who were still performing, but they also began to play
this music-and to create new music within the old traditional forms. As Krash

Kealoha, then station manager of KCCN, explained it in 1973: “Up until that point
(1970) we were playing old Hawaiian music and hapa haole tunes. Then several kids
started talking to me, and it turned out they were disappointed because they were
writing their own music and coming up with their own style, and some were even
going into the studios and spending their own money-$5,000 or whatever it
cost-to produce a record. But when the record came out, it wouldn’t get on any
radio stations … At first there was a lot of resistance from our steady listeners (to
us playing the music), some of the older people who felt anything that wasn’t sung

in Hawaiian was rock and roll.”‘3 KCCN, with its exclusive focus, became a key in
dissemination and popularization of the music of the Hawaiian renaissance, as
well as a source of information about the music and the people who were creating
it.

A second key to the launching of this movement was the interaction between
an aging traditional singer, Phillip Pahinui, and two young musicians, Peter Moon
and Palani Vaughn. Pahinui, better known as “Gabby” or “Pops,” had been active
musically in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, playing mostly traditional music,
though he was, at times, heavily influenced by mainland jazz. But his music had
not been popular enough on which to base a career, and he made his living work-
ing on street crews for the city of Honolulu. By the 1960s, he remembered: “I had
just about given up, was working with the City and County then. The only time
we’d play music was when we’d finish work on the road and sit down under a tree
and strum.”31 In addition, Pahinui had been a heavy drinker his whole life, and this
had influenced his behavior-making him erratic enough so that he could never
sustain the effort to develop a successful career.

Peter Moon, and others, attracted by Gabby’s knowledge of the old songs and

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44 Lewis

the techniques of slack-key guitar playing, haunted him for lessons. “Gabby is a
genius, you know. He really is. The guy still knows his stuff. And he’s a storehouse
of 40 years being in the business … He’s just uncanny, he baffles us four or five
times a year. He’ll play slack key in these real old tunings, then smile at Cyril and
me as if to say, ‘See, you didn’t think I had it, did you?’ “32 Not only was Peter
Moon to learn from Gabby, he also encouraged him to record again, and eventually
became Pahinui’s agent and producer-launching a successful mid-life musical ca-
reer that was to last until the singer’s death in 1980.

At the same time that Peter Moon was learning slack-key guitar from Gabby
Pahinui, Palani Vaughn was seriously researching Hawaii’s musical past, in search
of material upon which to build a career. “We’ve had chanters and dancers in our
family going back several generations. I started out just looking for songs, you
know, but then I got into the origins of the music …. Peter Moon and I were in
the same graduate course in Hawaiian art history. . . . We had mutual friends and
I asked him if he’d like to work on an album with me. In the process, the Sunday
Manoa was formed.”33

The Sunday Manoa, first recorded in 1969 and the most influential of the new
Hawaiian groups, originally consisted of Moon, Vaughn, Baby Kalima, and two of
Gabby Pahinui’s sons, Cyril and Bla.34 Also important for the early success of the
group was a young songwriter who was another member of that Hawaiian art his-
tory course, Larry Kimwa. Kimwa wrote five of the songs for the first Sunday Ma-
noa album, and went on to become one of the most influential and prolific of the
songwriters of the renaissance.

Later, as Vaughn left the Sunday Manoa to begin his solo career resurrecting
musical material from Hawaii’s last monarchical era, the Cazimero brothers-

products of Kamehameha School and its emphasis on Hawaiian culture-joined
the group and helped to shape its distinct sound throughout the early 1970s. To-
day, in addition to The Brothers Cazimero’s highly successful career in Hawaiian
music, Roland Cazimero also teaches music, singing, and hula at Kamehameha,
while Peter Moon continues to record as The Peter Moon Band and sponsors an
annual concert of traditional Hawaiian music, Kanikapila, held at the University of
Hawaii since 1971.

Moon, whose considerable talents were responsible throughout the 1970s for
the organization and developmnent of Hawaiian music, eventually hopes to focus
on the teaching of slack-key guitar and to open a school of music. “All I’ve done,”
he says, “is organize. My real contribution has been in working with people. That
is, enhancing people by developing their talents and ideas … I know how to
teach and I enjoy developing people’s talents. I want to help young people
grow. “3

The third factor in the musical launching of the renaissance in the early 1970s
was the establishment, in February 1971, of the Hawaiian Music Foundation, set
up by George Kanahele to preserve and perpetuate Hawaiian music. In 1972 the
Foundation held its first slack-key guitar contest and, in 1973, began sponsoring
falsetto and steel guitar contests. Since 1975, the Hawaiian Music Foundation has

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 45

published Hacilono Mele, a monthly (now quarterly) newsletter dealing with Hawai-
ian music, and, in cooperation with St. Louis High School, offers classes in Hawai-
ian music which, over the 1970s, were taken by well over one thousand students.36

As Kanahele said, looking back over the decade, in 1979: “There appears to be
more young and old people learning to play Hawaiian music, more teaching and
more performing it, than at any time in the past 20 or 30 years. . . . Significantly,
the impetus for the resurgence in Hawaiian music has come essentially, if not en-
tirely, from the local community: The lyrics are in Hawaiian, the themes are Hawai-
ian, the composers, for the most part, are Hawaiian. It has not come from the out-
side, nor from the tourism industry; the most popular Hawaiian groups almost
disdain the tastes of the visitors.”37

Along with this resurgence in the performance and the creation of Hawaiian
music came a renewed interest in the traditional forms of the hula.38 The Merrie

Monarch Festival, a hula competition begun in 1964, was attracting large numbers
of contestants by 1971 and, in 1972, the King Kamehameha Celebration hula com-
petition was begun. Both events became increasingly popular throughout the
1970s, drawing sellout crowds by the end of the decade.

In 1969, the Nanahuli dance troupe, devoted to preserving traditional forms of
the hula, was formed by lolani Luahine, who used the troupe to spearhead her
successful efforts to get the State Commission on Hawaiian Heritage formed.39 The
Commission, since the early 1970s, has sponsored annual dance conferences
which are always sellout events.

Also, in 1972, Maciki Aiu began a school for hula instructors and, in 1973,
turned out a first class of twenty-eight. Most of these instructors, graduated
throughout the 1970s, began their own schools of hula during the decade.40 As
Kanuhele remarked. “It is important to note that today’s interest is for the ancient,
rather than the modern or hapa haole, hula. The more traditional the dance, the
keener the interest. It is as if people want to get as close as they possibly can to the
first hula and, because of this, the Hawaiians have finally retaken the hula from the
tourists.”41

Thus, the hula-perhaps the world’s best-known symbol of tropic sensuality
and, since the early 1900s, a trademark of foreign exploitation of Hawaii-was
transformed in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s into a potent symbol of re-
discovered pride and one of the most important signposts of the Hawaiian renais-
sance.

Although centered around music and dance, the Hawaiian cultural rebirth is
not exclusive to these activities. The 1970s saw a concomitant increase in interest in

the Hawaiian language, as well. In 1972 an organization, cAhahui cOlelo Hawaici,
was formed around those who wished to retain the traditional tongue. cAhahui
cOlelo Hawaici grew in numbers and activities throughout the decade,
sponsoring-among other things-a weekly talk show, “Ka Leo O Hawaii,” on
KCCN radio, conducted entirely in Hawaiian.

Increasingly, since the early 1970s, Hawaiian words and phrases have been
entering the common language of Hawaii, serving as symbolic identifiers of

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46 Lewis

Hawaiian-ness. Such phrases are used in the musical patter and pidgin of perform-
ers and movement people to help establish identification. If one understands-and
responds appropriately-one is a “brother” or a “sister.”
The decade saw, as well, the introduction of classes in Hawaiian in most island

high schools and a course of instruction at the University of Hawaii. In 1978, the
Hawaiian State Constitution was amended to make Hawaiian, though still under-
stood and spoken by very few on the islands, an official language (along with En-
glish) of the state.

Ancient crafts, such as featherwork and traditional lei making, were revived in
the 1970s, as was canoe racing and traditional forms of surfing. Interest in canoes
reached a high point in 1975, with the creation and sailing of a double-hulled canoe,

the Hokuleca, to Tahiti-thus recreating, in reverse, the initial voyage of discovery
of the first Hawaiians.

This voyage, the materialization of Hawaii’s cultural heritage, was commemo-
rated in a song cycle written by members of various renaissance musical groups
and performed by them, banded together for this purpose as Hokuleca. Kelici
Tauca, a member of Hokuleca, explains. “When the canoe was dedicated I was part
of the ceremonies. I was the assistant Kahuna to the rituals, the chanting and all.
And that’s where I was inspired to write my first song on the general feeling of the
launching. … Anyone who has seen the boat, to say ‘wow’ or something can’t be
enough to capture what you feel inside. . . . Because it is still living today, it is so
instrumental and very important to us, to everyone who wants to feel Hawaiian, to
take from it and understand for themselves. . . . It’s like a shrine.”42

The new songs of Hawaii have much in common with the songs of many pro-
test movements, performing ideological, motivational, and integrative functions.
They are nationalistic and celebrate the traditions of native Hawaiians in opposi-
tion to the cultural domination of the mainland United States and the entertain-

ment needs of the booming tourist industry.
Groups formed in the 1970s refused to continue the tradition of “cute” names

of the past, like the Royal Hawaiian Serenaders or the Waikiki Beachboys-names
that conjured up images of happy-go-lucky brown lackeys of the Hawaiian films
and nightclubs. Instead, they named themselves after Hawaii, the land: The Sun-
day Manoa, Hui Ohana, the Makaha Sons of Nicihau, Olomana.

This concern with the land is a theme strongly reflected in the lyrics of the new
songs (such as “E Kuu Morning Dew” and “Nanakuli Blues”), which celebrate the
beauty of various island places and lament their destruction by contemporary off-
island concerns, or the fact that the land-once Hawaiian-is now owned by for-
eigners who refuse to treat it with the care and reverence it demands. As the late

George Helm, musician and political activist, said in description of these songs:
“Hawaiian views on nature are the subject of many songs and contain a true re-
spect for nature. Many of the songs now openly express, if one understands the
words, the language-pain, revolution; it’s expressing the emotional reaction the
Hawaiians are feeling to the subversion of their lifestyle.”43

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 47

Such songs have been written and sung in support of political demonstrations
since early 1970, when protesters sought to prevent the Bishop Estate from evicting
a pig farmer from their lands in Ohaucs Kalama Valley. Such crusades against
actions of the large landowners and real-estate developers gained momentum
through the 1970s and are a major consideration in the political equation of Hawaii
in the early 1980s. As Olomana’s Jerry Santos put it: “Kawela Bay and Turtle Bay
have been rezoned for resort areas, and the people who lived there for 20 years
have to move out because their leases were traded suddenly to an insurance com-
pany on the mainland. And nobody even knew about it. . . . But if you sing a song
about it, all kinds of people will know. .. .”44

Perhaps the most significant social protest of the 1970s that involved both con-
cern for the land and the support of the new music was the movement to get the
U.S. Navy to stop using the island of Kahocolawe for bombing practice, something
they had been doing for many years. Activists such as George Helm and Walter
Ritte, supported by local musicians, held huge rallies in protest of the Navy’s poli-
cies and, in January 1976, crept onto the island and “occupied” it in protest.
Among other efforts in support of this occupation was the recording of a traditional
chant by Kelici Tauca, a member of Hokuleca, and the writing of such new songs of
protest as Debbie Maxwell’s “Hawaiian Awakening,” and Harry Mitchell’s “Mele
O Kahocolawe.”

Such efforts have been critical in legitimatizing the goals of the activists and
obtaining popular support for them. The Kahocolawe movement is now accepted
even by members of the traditional Hawaiian Civic Clubs, who earlier took out
newspaper ads in opposition to it. Even more significant is the fact that the earlier
militant image of the movement has now taken on mystical and spiritual overtones
and its goals have become almost a cultural demand of the people, a phenomenon
aided to a great extent by its legitimization and incorporation as a part of the cul-
tural renaissance. “What we needed was to get Hawaiians active. . . . Music is the
easiest way I know, because people tune into music. . . . That’s what I use music
for.”45

Another related topic addressed in the lyrics of the new music is hostility to-
ward tourists and criticism of their impact on Hawaii in terms of land use, real-
estate development, and bastardization and cooptation of traditional Hawaiian
culture. “I hate tourists. Oh, I don’t hate the tourist person-I hate the industry. We
have no control over that industry. It’s like a giant malignant cancer and it’s eating
up all our beaches, all the places that are profound for our culture. It’s grabbing
them. They take the best.”46

Songs like “Hawaii ’78” can be quite blunt in their condemnation of tourism,
or they can be very subtle, focusing on the daily lives of people in some romantic
past before the influx of tourism, making their points in the traditional Hawaiian
style of Kaona, or hidden meaning. “Hawaiian music reflects the attitudes toward
life and nature. These are basically clean protests and not harsh, but with a deep
hidden meaning, which Anglo-Saxon reasoning cannot appreciate.”47

A third theme, that of an urgent concern for preserving the traditional ways of

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48 Lewis

Hawaii, and even the Hawaiian race, is the subject of a good number of these
songs, such as “All Hawaii Stands Together” and “E Na Hawaici.” As Palani
Vaughn said of his work: “By the third album, the content got rather political, say-
ing things like ‘The race is dying, we must survive.’ In fact I’ve been called a racist,
but my answer is the Hawaiian race is a dying one and I don’t find it a crime to
foster its survival.”48

With respect to this third major theme, the song cycle about the canoe Hoku-
le Ca is a clear and significant example-as is the more recent (1982) song cycle writ-
ten by Roland Cazimaro on Pele, the goddess of fire, or Olomana’s song which
ends with: “Why must they always wipe out all our past?” Jerry Santos, of Olo-
mana, notes: “The new interest in the music is tied to the diminishing factor of the
Hawaiian lifestyle. With the buildings and the condominiums and the thousands
of people, a lot of the old things vanish very quickly. There is more of an urgency to
remember the old values correctly.”49
Many of these songs are written and sung in Hawaiian. This is of special im-

port because-even with the increased study of the language evidenced in the
1970s-the majority of Hawaiians do not understand it. Thus, they rely on transla-
tions given by performers during their live shows or, in some cases, appearing as
liner notes on their record albums.

Because of this, songs are more likely to be recognized by their melodies than
by their titles, and the fact that they are sung in Hawaiian takes on the larger and
more general symbolic significance of a protest against the destruction of the lan-
guage and its replacement with English. In this way, the very act of singing or lis-
tening to songs sung in Hawaiian becomes an act of social protest at the same time
that it is a reaffirmation of cultural identity.

Many of the songs use musical forms that are associated with native
tradition-from the chants of early Hawaii to the song stylings of the slack-key gui-
tarists. Many also will use some lyrics from the older songs, brought into the cul-
tural repertoire of the new composers by artists such as Gabby Pahinui or Genoa
Keawe, with only parts of the lyrics changed to “update” the songs for their pur-
pose. Thus, the new songs are located in a well-established tradition of the people’s
music, which enhances their appeal to a wide range of listeners and provides a ba-
sis for identification with the movement.

The instrumentation of the new songs is also an important characteristic of
their appeal. Many of the most popular performers, such as the Beamer Brothers or

Hokuleca, use indigenous folk instruments in their arrangements-instruments
that had not been a part of popular music until their introduction in the 1970s.

The slack-key guitar regained its central place in the music of the 1970s, but
along with it came strings like the tiple and the requinta and percussions like the ipu

(a gourd drum), cili cili (stone castanets), pahu (a sharkskin drum), and a culili (triple
gourd rattle). The music played on these instruments is more polished than tradi-
tional rural songs and chants, and many of them are played in ways that would
never have occurred in traditional settings. Nevertheless, the use of these instru-
ments has emphasized nationalistic pride in the traditions of the people and is

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 49

aimed at establishing an identification with those traditions and people. Too, the
use of such instruments is a self-conscious act in opposition to the forms of instru-
mentation found in mainland “pop” music or the tourist lounges of Waikiki. Thus,
the selection of instruments is also a political statement about the need to respect
Hawaiian traditions and to oppose mainland domination and cultural cooptation
by the tourist industry.

Many of these musical groups will perform with hula dancers as interpreters
of the music into the symbolic form of the dance or, in other cases, as a traditional

musical accompaniment for the dance, thus tying the two cultural forms together
as symbolic expressions of new ethnic pride and identity. The Cazimero brothers
have a halau of dancers, trained by Roland, who have become part of their regular

show5? and, since the late 1970s, the music journal Hacilono Mele has been devoting
equal time to both music and hula. Many of the new groups will perform musically
for various halaus in the Merrie Monarch and King Kamehameha competitions and
support the dancers at many local shows and benefits.51

Finally, mention should be made of the general style of presentation of the
singers, groups, and dancers. In dress, they often wear the simple clothing of the
Hawaiian working class or the traditional clothes and leis of the Hawaiian past-as
opposed to the flashy uniforms and suits of many of the Waikiki performers. As
Israel Kamakawiwaole of the Makaha Sons of Nicihau says; “We just us, man. We
wear our own clothes, what our momma made for us. You don’t like us, that’s

tough. You better leave, yeah?”52

The development of a “new” music in Hawaii in the late 1960s and early 1970s
and its focal position in what has been termed the Hawaiian Renaissance clearly
illustrates the points made concerning the place of music in social movements
made in the first part of this paper.

The new music, in its choice of lyrics, its use of the Hawaiian language, and its
modes of presentation, serves to identify sources of discontent of the local popula-
tion and to address, to a great extent, three major issues prominent as social con-
cerns in Hawaii: (1) land use issues, (2) ecological and cultural impacts of mass tour-
ism, and (3) the destruction of traditional culture and the dying out of the Hawaiian
race.

Although not pointing specifically at modes of solution to these problems in
most cases-the Naval bombing of Kahocolawe being a strong exception-the mu-
sic is more apt to imply solutions in a more traditional and subtle manner of Kaona,

or hidden meaning in the lyrics and the style of presentation. That it has been effec-
tive is implied in the comments of John Waihee, leader of the 1978 State Constitu-
tional Convention, at which amendments were passed to establish the Office of
Hawaiian Affairs and to address problems of traditional Hawaiian rights, educa-
tion, and lands. Waihee stated flatly that the renaissance was “the glue that kept
the package together,” and that “you cannot understand how it all happened with-
out understanding the renaissance.””53

In addition, by tying these pressing social issues to the traditional cultural and

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50 Lewis

musical forms, the artists have also tied them to the central values and symbols of
the Hawaiian people, giving them at the same time cultural legitimacy and emo-
tional urgency. “The Renaissance was the incubator for a lot of the sympathetic
feelings that Kahocolawe received from among Hawaiians, especially young Ha-
waiians. . . . The protest songs written by young composers were part and parcel
of the resurgence of Hawaiian music. The rhetoric of aloha caina symbolized the
whole movement of going back to the source, listening to our kupuna, finding our
roots.”54

As George Kanahele implies, the new music is also extremely effective as a
unifier, a vehicle through which general social solidarity can be achieved. Kanahele
has remarked elsewhere, “We are seeing the ‘Great Gathering’ of the Hawaiians–
at hula competitions, musical concerts, song contests, . . . and church meetings.
There are far more occasions for Hawaiians to gather today than at any other time
in recent memory, and consequently, many more are being thrown together, lead-
ing to better communication and acquaintanceships-what the Maoris call ‘group
rhythm.’ “55

That these social rituals, with Hawaiian music and dance as the focal point in
many cases, have been effective in helping to establish a common consciousness
and concern with pressing social issues on the part of Hawaiians can be seen in
many areas of life in the state. The Honolulu Advertiser remarked in an editorial on
March 23, 1982: “A movement which some people dismissed as short-lived and
superficial has become well established in many areas. Political changes have been
the most visible. The unique office of Hawaiian Affairs is now a reality and fact
finding by the Native Hawaiian Study Commission is well underway. . . . Most
people here have a special concern for the Hawaiian people and culture, stemming
in part from a sense of injustice at the disadvantaged circumstances in which many
find themselves.”56

The contribution of the music of the Hawaiian Renaissance to the social

changes underway in the state should not be overlooked. Before dismissing music
as “epiphenomenal,” as some do, one should at least consider the question of
whether it may be of more basic influence as an impetus to social change and as a
support and legitimizer of social protest movements-as the case study reported
on in this paper clearly suggests it to be.

NOTES

1. Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of
Music (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), p. 147.

2. R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming:
Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1971); R. Serge
Denisoff and R. A. Peterson, The Sounds of
Social Change (Chicago: Rand McNally,
1972); Archie Green, “American Labor

Lore: Its Meanings and Uses,” Industrial Re-
lations, 4 (1965), 51-68; Charles Keil, Urban
Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966).

3. Phillippe Carles and Jean-Louis Cor-
nolli, Free Jazz, Black Power (Paris: Champ
Libre, 1971); Joe Ferrandino, “Rock Culture
and the Development of Social Conscious-
ness,” Radical America, 3 (1969), 11-34;

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Da Kine Sounds: Music as Social Protest 51

Jerome Rodnitzky, Minstrels of the Dawn
(New York: Nelson-Hall, 1976).

4. Ernest Cashmore, Rastaman: The Ras-
tafarian Movement in England (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1979), pp. 1-134;
Marco d’Eramo, “The Rhetorics of Protest:
Brassens and Dylan,” Cultures, 2 (1975), 53-
104; Barbara Finlay, “Nonverbal Aspects of
Nationalism in Musical Protest,” (Corval-
lis, Oregon: unpublished); George H.
Lewis, “This Bitter Earth: Protest and Style
in Black Popular Music,” National Forum,
Summer (1982), 37-41; Joseph Nalven,
“Some Notes on Chicano Music as a Path-

way to Community Identity,” The New
Scholar, 5 (1973), 73-93; Tim Patterson,
“Popular Culture and Organic Intellectual-
ity,” Insurgent Sociologist, 5 (1974), 67-72;
John Robinson, R. Pilskain, and P. Hirsch,
“Protest Rock and Drugs,” Journal of Com-
munication, 25 (1976), 125-36.

5. George H. Lewis, “Popular Music:
Symbolic Transformer of Meaning in Soci-
ety,” International Review of the Sociology of
Music, 12 (1983), 247-58; George H. Lewis,
“The Meaning’s in the Music: Popular Mu-
sic As Symbolic Communication,” Theory,
Culture and Society, 3 (1983), 56-68.

6. Norman Denzin, “Problems in Ana-
lyzing Elements of Mass Cultures: Notes on
the Popular Song and Other Artistic Pro-
ductions,” American Journal of Sociology, 75
(1970), 1035-38; George H. Lewis, “The So-
ciology of Popular Culture,” Current Sociol-
ogy, 26 (1978), 26-28.

7. David Aberle, “A Note on Relative
Deprivation Theory as Applied to Millenar-
ian and Other Cult Movements,” Reader in
Comparative Religion, Lessa & Vogt, eds.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 84-
98; Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior
(New York: Free Press, 1963), pp. 36-57;
Ralph Turner, “The Theme of Contempo-
rary Social Movements,” British Journal of
Sociology, 20 (1969), 390-405.

8. John Wilson, Social Movements (Bos-
ton: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 12-74.

9. David Aberle, Reader in Comparative
Religion (New York: Harper and Row,
1965), pp. 214-36.

10. Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict
and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 7-38.

11. Mayer Zald and J. McCarthy, The Dy-
namics of Social Movements (Cambridge,
Mass.: Winthrop, 1979), pp. 1-12; Louis

Zurcher and D. Snow, “Collective Behavior
and Social Movements,” Sociological Contri-
butions to Social Psychology, Rosenberg and
Turner, eds. (New York: Basic Books, 1981),
pp. 247-61.

12. Malcolm Spector and N. Kitsuse,
Constructing Social Problems (Menlo Park,
Ca.: Cummings, 1977), pp. 111-29.

13. Barbara Finlay, “Nonverbal Aspects
of Nationalism in Musical Protest” (Corval-
lis, Ore.: Unpublished, 1980).

14. d’Eramo, “The Rhetorics of Protest:
Brassens and Dylan,” pp. 53-104; Joe Fer-
randino, “Rock Culture and the Develop-
ment of Social Consciousness,” Radical
America, 3 (1969), 11-34.

15. Cashmore, Rastaman pp. 64-124; Wil-
liam Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest
(Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1975), pp. 51-89.

16. George H. Lewis, “The Structure of
Support in Social Movements,” British Jour-
nal of Sociology, 27 (1976), 311-26.

17. George H. Lewis, “Social Protest and
Self Awareness in Black Popular Music,”
Popular Music and Society, 4 (1973), 37-42;
Lewis, ‘This Bitter Earth: Protest and Style in
Black Popular Music,” pp. 37-41.

18. Malcolm Spector and N. Kitsuse,
Constructing Social Problems (Menlo Park,
CA: Cummings, 1977), pp. 47-89.

19. Lewis, “Social Protest and Self
Awareness in Black Popular Music,” pp.
37-42.

20. Randall Collins, Sociologist Insight
(New York: Oxford, 1982) p. 71.

21. George Kanahele, “Hawaiian Renais-
sance,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 24,
1977, p. 1.

22. Jerry Hopkins, The Hula (Hong Kong:
Apa, 1982), pp. 14-18.

23. Nona Beamer, “Interview,” Da Kine
Sound (Hawaii: Press Pacifica, 1978), p. 142.

24. George E. K. Awai, “Interview,”
Hacilono Mele, 3, 8 (1977) 5.

25. Jerry Hopkins, “Hawaiian Music and
Dance,” Insight (Hong Kong: Apa, 1980),
pp. 319-28; Johnny Noble, “Hawaiian Mu-
sicians in the Jazz Era,” Paradise of the Pa-
cific, 45 (1943), 22.

26. Tony Todaro, The Golden Years of Ha-
waiian Entertainment (Honolulu: Tony To-
daro, 1974), p. 17.

27. Hopkins, The Hula, p. 5-8.
28. Nathan Kent, “A New Kind of Sugar,” A

New Kind of Sugar (Honolulu: East-West
Center, 1977), pp. 172-77.

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52 Lewis

29. Krash Kealoha, “Krash Kealoha Tells
Why He Left KCCN,” Hacilono Mele, 7, 4
(1981) 1 and 6-8.

30. Krash Kealoha, “Interview,” Hono-
lulu, 10 (1973), 35.

31. Phillips Pahinui, “Interview,” Hono-
lulu, 13 (1978), 38.

32. Peter Moon, “Moon Bridges Gap,”
Hacilono Mele, 3, 2 (1977), 7.

33. Palani Vaughn, “Interview,” Hono-
lulu, 14 (1979), 146.

34. Moon, “Moon Bridges Gap,” p. 6.
35. Peter Moon, “Peter Moon: A Man For

All Seasons,” Hacilono Mele, 1 (1981), 5.
36. Hacilono Mele, “HMF’s Tenth Anni-

versary,” Hacilono Mele, 7, 3 (1983), 1-8.
37. George Kanahele, “Hawaiian Renais-

sance Grips, Changes Island History,”
Hacilono Mele, 5, 7 (1979), 4-5.

38. Jerry Hopkins, “Interview,” Hacilono
Mele, 7, 7 (1981), 9-11; Hopkins, The Hula p.
136.

39. Ibid.

40. Jerry Hopkins, personal conversa-
tions, Honolulu, 1983.

41. George Kanahele, Hawaiian Renais-
sance (Honolulu: WAIAHA Press, 1982), 15.

42. Robert Kamohalu and B. Burlingame,
Da Kine Sound (Hawaii: Press Pacifica,
1978), p. 122.

43. George Helm, “Language-Pain Revo-
lution,” Hacilono Mele, 2, 6 (1976), 3.

44. Olomana, “Interview,’ Da Kine Sound
(Hawaii: Press Pacifica, 1978), p. 47.

45. Helm, “Language-Pain Revolution,”
p. 3.

46. Walter Ritte, “Interview,” Honolulu,
15 (1982), 68.

47. Helm, “Language-Pain Revolution,”
p. 3.

48. Vaughn, “Interview,” p. 147.
49. Olomana, “Interview,” p. 45.
50. Roland Cazimero, “Interview,” Da

Kine Sound (Hawaii: Press Pacifica, 1978), p.
113.

51. Israel Kamakawiwaole, personal con-
versation, Honolulu, 1982.

52. Ibid.

53. George Kanahele, “Hawaiian Renais-
sance Grips, Changes Island History,” p. 7.

54. Ibid., 8.
55. Kanahele, Hawaiian Renaissance p. 30.
56. Honolulu Advertiser, “Editorial,”

March 23, 1982, p. 8.

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• Contents

[38]
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52

• Issue Table of Contents

American Music, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 1-118
Front Matter
Conlon Nancarrow: Interviews in Mexico City and San Francisco [pp. 1-24]
Toward a Reevaluation of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess [pp. 25-37]
Da Kine Sounds: The Function of Music as Social Protest in the New Hawaiian Renaissance [pp. 38-52]
New York City Concert Life, 1801-5 [pp. 53-69]
The Search for Identity in American Music, 1890-1920 [pp. 70-81]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 82-86]
Review: untitled [pp. 86-88]
Review: untitled [pp. 88-89]
Review: untitled [pp. 89-90]
Review: untitled [pp. 90-92]
Review: untitled [pp. 92-94]
Review: untitled [p. 94]
Review: untitled [pp. 94-95]
Review: untitled [pp. 95-97]
Review: untitled [pp. 97-98]
Review: untitled [pp. 98-100]
Review: untitled [pp. 100-101]
Review: untitled [pp. 101-102]
Review: untitled [pp. 102-103]
Review: untitled [pp. 103-105]
Review: untitled [pp. 105-108]
Review: untitled [pp. 108-110]
Review: untitled [pp. 110-111]
Review: untitled [pp. 111-114]
Review: untitled [pp. 114-115]
Review: untitled [pp. 115-117]
Review: untitled [pp. 117-118]
Back Matter

Nina Simone’s Triple Play

Daphne A. Brooks

Callaloo, Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 176-197 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI:

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Washington @ Seattle (19 Mar 2018 20:38 GMT)

https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2011.0036

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/418422

https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2011.0036

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/418422

176 Callaloo 34.1 (2011) 176–197

NINA SIMONE’S TRIPLE PLAY

by Daphne A. Brooks

Listen to the opening notes of Nina Simone’s remarkable 1957 debut album Little Girl
Blue and one hears a performer asserting her intentions, throwing down the glove: the
exuberant “motor running-running” (Dobie 232) trademark vocals, the playfully virtuosic
dance of a pianist’s velocity that turns the tempo of a Duke Ellington classic inside out
and breaks open the melody to mine the ironically pulsating energy, the propulsive beat
of non-stop “indigo” heartbreak. As jazz critic Scott Yanow states in the liner notes to the
album, Simone’s take on Ellington was one of many “unexpected” and “memorable”
twists that introduced the artist to the world. “[R]ather than begin the [recording] with
one of her more accessible vocals,” says Yanow, “Simone starts out with a surprisingly up
tempo and abstract piano exploration of ‘Mood Indigo’ before her vocal makes the song a
bit more recognizable” (Yanow). It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone’s
counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and
wove together “highbrow” and “lowbrow” forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was,
some might argue, “emo” before “emo,” Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.1

No one critical apparatus can sustain a sufficient reading of Nina Simone, an artist cel-
ebrated in part for having stylized a heterogeneous musical repertory of songs for nearly
four decades. A classically-trained pianist who shifted into jazz, pop, cabaret, and folk
performing in the mid 1950s as a way to support her education and subsequently to shore
up her income, Simone gained notoriety for having moved fluidly from playing the music
hall chanteuse by covering Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy” (inspired by Billie Holiday’s
interpretation) and the Norwegian folk lilt of “Black is the Color of My True Lover’s Hair”
to “Duke Ellington compositions, Israeli folk songs, and songs by the Bee Gees” (Bernstein
B6). She was the ultimate queen of popular music “crossover” in the most exhilarating
and unconventional sense of the word, and she deftly and consistently called upon this
ability to mix and match musical forms as a way to break free of the racial and gender
circumscriptions placed upon her in popular music culture. Simone frequently commented
on the significance of her generic moves, boldly proclaiming that “’It’s always been my
aim to stay outside any category’. ‘That’s my freedom,’” she insisted to one reporter. But
it was a “freedom” that, according to biographer David Nathan, “drove industry pundits
and the music press crazy as they tried to categorize her” (Nathan 232).

Mike Kohfeld

Mike Kohfeld

177

C A L L A L O O

“There Must Be Some Kind of a Way
Out of This Place”: Nina Simone’s Musical Maroonage

In many ways, Nina Simone would shape the bulk of her career in response to an
aesthetic conundrum: what should a black female artist sound like? Some of Simone’s
most famous song titles summed up this query. Through her music she sought to make
her listeners grasp how “it would feel to be free” and to be “young, gifted, and black,” as
well as female. Her songs thus served as sonic struggles in and of themselves, as embattled
efforts to elude generic categorizations as a black female performer. These points would
likewise resonate throughout much of Simone’s intense and absorbing memoir, I Put a
Spell On You, a text in which the artist assails the cultural myopia of critics too obtuse to
read the aesthetic range and complexities of her material. “[S]aying what sort of music
I played,” Simone observes, “gave the critics problems because there was something
from everything in there” (Simone and Cleary 68–69). For Simone, the constant (and, in
her mind, completely erroneous) comparisons to Billie Holiday were signs of the music
press’s inability to read the depth of diversity in black female musical expression. People,
she argues, “couldn’t get past the fact we were both black. . . . Calling me a jazz singer
was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn’t fit into white ideas of
what a black performer should be” (Simone and Cleary 68–69). As a response to these
narrow definitions of black sound, Simone turned other corners and crossed over and
out of constricting musical divides, challenging her audiences to consider and perhaps
more importantly to listen for the meaning of liberation in black female performance. In
this way, to rock critic Dave Marsh, she was the consummate “Freedom Singer,” someone
who “lived and sang like a person who not only counted on the promise but lived in the
actuality of the American Dream” (Marsh v).2

No doubt, she lived that “Dream” of aesthetic entitlement with tenacity in the Jim Crow
south while being raised as a child prodigy whose virtuosic capabilities would realize the
perfectionist strivings of middle-class parents. Born Eunice Waymon in 1933 to a family
headed by a father who was a business entrepreneur and a mother who was an ordained
Methodist minister in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone began playing piano when she was
three years old and went on to perform hymns and gospel music at her mother’s church.
By the age of five and with the help of local community fundraising, she was studying
classical music. But according to Simone (who adopted her stage name, in part, from her
favorite French film actress Simone Signoret), it was her musical genius that also set her
apart from her family as well as her peers. “I knew,” she observes, “I wasn’t like everybody
else, I wasn’t like them anymore” (Simone and Cleary 25). “No one in the family,” she
continues, “knew how isolated my music made me” (Simone and Cleary 30).

The I Put A Spell On You memoir in fact frames this social and cultural isolation as a
factor that fostered and nurtured in Simone her experimental wanderlust as a musician, as
well as a kind of fearless, non-conformist streak. Simone recalls how, from the earliest age
forward, she “had no preference for any individual style. In fact, I liked to play as many
different styles as possible” (Simone and Cleary 17). Obsessed with aesthetic excellence
and performative virtuosity instilled in her in part by her beloved English piano instructor
“Miss Mazzy,” Simone argues that she was less interested in defining the terms of “what”
she played as she was invested in playing whatever she tackled very well. Although her

Mike Kohfeld

178

C A L L A L O O

initial intent was to pursue a career as a classical pianist, financial woes forced her to take
work as a nightclub performer. As if to underscore her fundamental resistance to fitting
neatly into the conventional role of the black female chanteuse, Simone, for economic
reasons, ultimately embraced her role as a vocalist and committed herself to performing
“a diversity of material” that, in turn, became her trademark and signature appeal to such
an extent that, as music critic Adam Bernstein sees it, she cultivated and perfected a “love
for contrasting sounds and defying predictability. Her version of the pop staple ‘Love
Me or Leave Me,’” for instance, “plays a dazzling classical run with a throaty jazz vocal”
(Bernstein).3 As historian Ruth Feldstein has noted in her work on the artist’s socio-political
activism, on albums such as the 1964 landmark In Concert album, Nina Simone “rejected
any singular definition of African American womanhood” and this effort “remained
central to Simone’s participation in black activism” beyond the album itself (Feldstein
1353,1358). What I would add here is that we also consider how Simone’s social activism
was not only overtly incorporated into the content of her material, but, just as well, that it
permeated the form of her musical heterogeneity that worked to free African Americans
from cultural and representational stasis.

Simone was as equally invested in social activism as she was in musical experimen-
tation and pushing herself artistically. As she demonstrates in her effortless (generic)
movements between mid-1960s agitprop folk and cabaret spectacle and as she maintains
in her autobiography, her “music was dedicated to a purpose more important than clas-
sical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and [what
she referred to as] the historical destiny” of African Americans (Simone and Cleary 91).
Liberation is thus derived, in part, not only from her more overt protest songs but also
from the sheer ideological and generic mobility manifested in her material. Repeatedly,
Nina Simone staged a kind of performative sit-in that yielded what we might think of
as a kind of socio-politicized musical crossover—one that was less about achieving con-
ventional success on the pop charts and more concerned with barreling into putatively
forbidden representational territories. In turn she worked to generate a kind of aesthetic
“protest music” of a different order from that traditionally associated with black (female)
musicians of the 1960s.4

Below I consider Nina Simone’s work as a critical template for examining the politics
and poetics of counter-hegemonic, black feminist popular music “crossover.” I explore
Simone’s varying modes of socio-cultural transgressiveness in song, and I read several
of her specific musical recordings and performances that challenge facile perceptions
of the socio-political utility of black female musicianship in American culture. Like her
blues era forebears who, as Hazel Carby reveals, had “ramblin on their minds’ and who
intended to ‘ease on down the line’” since “the power of movement was theirs” (Carby,
243), Nina Simone translated blues women’s mobility into broadly-realized aesthetic and
socio-political intent. Her fluid musical movements amounted to formal disturbances
that upset the order and cultural logic of “protest.” By engaging in a rigorous, internal,
socio-political dialogue with her own audiences, she repeatedly questioned, examined,
and tested the limits of agitprop popular music as well as the complex range of power
dynamics between black performers and predominantly white audiences.5 Nina Simone’s
singular forms of “freedom songs” would lead her into some of the most provocative musi-
cal spaces, and it was her experimentation with the compositions of German avant-garde

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theater pioneers Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill that, I argue, are perhaps the most crucial
examples of the way that she manipulated and re-calibrated notions of both conventional
protest music and pop music “crossover” into strategies of what we might think of as black
feminist distanciation. Undoubtedly the most prominent African American interpreter
of Brecht and Weill’s dense and disruptive songbook, Simone drew inspiration from the
duo’s Weimar Republic epic theater aesthetics and redeployed them in the context of Civil
Rights era turmoil. Along the way she forged her own form of musical integration and
performative agitation, crossing the lines of musical genres as well as, on certain occasions,
performative propriety, and defamiliarizing cultural expectations of where black women
can and should articulate their voices and musicianship aesthetically and politically.6
In this essay, I argue for ways to listen for Simone’s spectacular acts of distanciation as
they manifest themselves in her interpretations of Brecht and Weill compositions “Pirate
Jenny” and “The Alabama Song,” as well as in her own song “Mississippi Goddamn,”
a work inspired by the duo’s “Alabama.” As we shall see, in each of these visceral and
yet slyly ironic performances, Simone manipulates excess and dissonance—generic, vo-
cal, musical—as interventionist aesthetic weapons in song that re-write the category of
1960s “protest music.” From leveling an insurgent pirate’s revenge aria in “Pirate Jenny”
to her nimble performance of multiple voices in both “Mississippi Goddamn” and “The
Alabama Song,” Simone swerves off the beaten path of stalwart and stirring Civil Rights
musical performances by the likes of Fanny Lou Hamer and Odetta. In these particular
cases, rather than singing clear-eyed folk anthems as did Hamer or historically resonant
work songs and spirituals as did Odetta, Simone, in these performances, draws from the
ideological crux of Brecht and Weill’s repertoire to craft a poetics of sonic alienation as
coruscating socio-political commentary.7

Perhaps, then, we might liken her phonic, lyrical, and generic modes of disturbance to
something loosely akin to the “triple play” that Houston Baker famously outlined some
twenty years ago in relation to Caliban’s subaltern moves. To Baker, it is Caliban’s “su-
praliteracy” which amounts to “a maroon or guerilla action carried out within linguistic
territories of the erstwhile masters, bringing forth sounds that have been taken for crude
hooting, but which are, in reality, racial poetry” (Baker 195). Like Caliban, Nina Simone
staged her own form of (musical) maroonage by living inside of the purposefully offbeat,
experimental theater song structures of Brecht and Weill, performatively re-inhabiting this
material with her own eccentric narrative voice. Baker’s landmark study of the insurgency
of “indigenous language” is of most interest to me in the way that it might enable us to
think about Nina Simone’s musical acts of social impropriety and linguistic insurgency,
what Nathaniel Mackey might in fact call her “Calibanization” of Brecht and Weill’s com-
positions.8 Hearing the poetics of Simone’s “maroon or guerilla action,” her “profane” acts
in song, and her alienating gestures in musical performance allow for ways to interpret
uniquely articulated forms of sonic black womanhood.

Think, then, of the tripling in this study as a series of counterintuitive cultural practices
that Simone negotiates across three different versions of her most famous protest song,
“Mississippi Godamn.” I explore these multiple versions of the track as different itera-
tions of black feminist distanciation, but I travel to Simone’s “Mississippi” first by way
of “Pirate Jenny,” the artist’s most famous traditional Brecht and Weill cover in order to
illustrate her daring aesthetic engagement with the kinds of dramatic alienation effects

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that she would ultimately redeploy in her legendary cursing anthem. I argue that only by
shifting our socio-cultural expectations of black female vocalists and only by dislodging
from what Hortense Spillers has rightly identified as the tendentious “emphasis on the
female vocalist’s . . . biographies” (Spillers 166) rather than her art, only by reading against
the grain of narrow constructions of the black female subject in song as Farah Griffin does
in her landmark work on Billie Holiday, only then are we able to consider the “ontological
edge” (Spillers 166), the luxuriant excess, and the masterfully strategic dissonance of Nina
Simone’s triple play in popular music culture.9

Epic Nina: Long Distance Running on In Concert

Stories of Nina Simone’s notoriously “hostile” and “difficult” relationship with her
audiences are well known. The tales of a “temperamental” and “angry” artist have circu-
lated and received their fair due critique from feminist scholars and journalists who have
exposed the gender biases in, for instance, the pathologizing representations of Simone
versus the laudatory fetishization of Miles Davis’s back-turning solos. Still, Simone was a
boldly aggressive figure at different stages of her career in concert, at varying times call-
ing for her black audience members to stand and directing her songs only to them. Other
times she was known for admonishing her fans when to applaud, give standing ovations,
and be silent (as she did when I saw her on one of her last US concert tours in 2001).10 Cer-
tainly these and other anecdotes lend themselves to a portrait of an artist who cultivated
a cultural persona as a virtuosic performer, a challenging and demanding entertainer,
and a bold social activist who was unafraid to manipulate the sometimes charged power
dynamics and politics of desire that coursed through her relationship with her fans. In
landmark ways as well, Simone’s fraught relationship with her audience played out in
her performances of the songs themselves, and this uniquely tense push and pull with her
audiences would prefigure the kinds of (un)ironic modes of haughty aggression and direct
critique that we more often associate with the postmodern glam of a David Bowie, the
punk aesthetics of the Sex Pistols, or the hip hop spectacle of a Kanye West. In the decades
before such artists would create headlines as a result of their cool or adversarial relation-
ship with fans, Simone was cultivating a kind of performative distanciation embedded
in her eccentric covers of German “epic” theater songs composed by Bertolt Brecht and
Kurt Weill that she would exploit to great and different effect at very different moments
in her career. Considering the ways that Simone interpolates Brecht into her work and
the ways that she interpolates herself into Brecht and Weill’s work thus enables us to read
Simone’s own forms of musical and lyrical alienation as epistemic insurgency, and radical,
sounded, black female agency in the age of Civil Rights agitation.

“Pirate Jenny,” the better-known Nina Simone cover of a Brecht and Weill song, appears
on the In Concert album, recorded on March 21, 1964, at Carnegie Hall. In her smoldering
rendition of Brecht and Weill’s classic Three Penny Opera revenge aria, the singer executes
a spectacular performance of subterfuge, one that finds her inhabiting the voice of insur-
rectionist “Jenny” who “scrubs” away at the hotel floors while the master class (mis)reads
her prostrate alias. Simone observes with biting and snide satisfaction that, “once ya tip me

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. . . it makes ya feel swell . . . But you’ll never guess to who you’re talking.’” “Slipping on”
(Hartman 17–48) the parodic voices of the ruling class, the singer mocks the “gentleman”
who “can say, ‘Hey gal, finish them floors!” all the while failing to read the bloody revolu-
tion brewing in his midst. Like Melville’s 1855 slave revolt novella Benito Cereno, with its
sharp critique of hegemonic myopia, Simone’s “Pirate Jenny” taunts the obtuse, master
(class) dupe who watches her performance like that of Babo’s slave “put-on.” Simone here
covers a song that allows her to oscillate between a servant with a gleam in her eye and
“a smile” on her face and the gentlemen who frantically scramble to re-instantiate their
power by desperately demanding that she continue to “earn her keep.” Akin as well to the
parodic strategies of white characterization invoked by black abolitionist William Wells
Brown in his antebellum drama The Escape (1858), Simone’s rendition of “Jenny” affords
her the room to experiment with multiple subject positions: master and servant, gentry
class and rebel (female) outlaw, narrator and actor. The singer’s articulation of simmering
rage ties all of these parts together in a performance that cycles dialectically back and forth
and through the booming chorus where Simone sings victoriously of “the ship/ the Black
Freighter” that “runs a flag up its masthead,” finally in the last stanza “disappear[ing] out
to see/ And/ On/ It/ Is/ Me” (“Pirate Jenny”). Without ever mentioning race explicitly,
Simone’s cover of “Pirate Jenny” would, in the midst of evolving black enfranchisement
struggles, generate all sorts of rich historical allusions to the trajectory of African Ameri-
can forced migration, with a “Black Freighter” coming and going, making a passage in
the middle of the song toward our heroine who prophesies her own reversed stowage of
escape on board the ship.

We might hear in Simone’s performance the kind of “massive itinerancy” that Fred
Moten traces, the kind of “fugitivity” that announces itself in shifting subject positions,
and which, in turn, creates a productive excess that obfuscates the putative transparency of
the black female singer. We might ask, what can’t Simone’s predominantly white, liberal,
Carnegie Hall audience who lives “outside the veil” of historical subjection hear or see?
“Pirate Jenny” wears the phanaric mask of black feminist musical resistance and signifies
on the ideological opacity of white spectators—figurative and literal—who fail to grasp
the existence, let alone the utility of that mask. With “Pirate Jenny” alone, then, Simone
emerges on In Concert as a brilliant cultural and political satirist of American race relations
who, like her contemporary Moms Mabley, confronted and lampooned white patriarchal
power head on in her work. Her performance joined in with the comedy of her contem-
porary Dick Gregory to deliver a sardonic indictment of Jim Crow white supremacy and
likewise anticipated the work of a seasoned Richard Pryor (who, in the early years of his
career, would open for her) by staging a charged socio-political encounter in song and
signifying on “the socioeconomic and gendered dimensions of racism” (Feldstein 34).11

Yet it is precisely this kind of “racial, regional, and class specificity” that has led German
studies scholar Russell Berman to argue that Simone’s epic theater covers are anything
but Brechtian. If Brecht and Weill’s far-reaching and influential dramaturgical project was,
in part, to innovate theater aesthetics that would in turn serve as cold and “alienating”
forms of socio-political commentary, then, as Berman sees it, Simone’s “Jenny” could not
diverge any further from these tenets. Rather, Simone’s “dramatic emotionality and rich
texturing” stand at odds with Brecht-Weill songstress Lotte Lenya’s standard-bearing “crisp,
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the fulcrum of their sound. To Berman, Simone’s performances of Brecht songs are ones
not of “distance and abstraction” that cleave to the putative orthodoxy of epic theater,
but are instead enactments of “proximity and precision.” Her combination of “strident
politics” and “greater emotionality” ultimately “imputes a more emphatic engagement
and specificity of reference.” For this reason, Berman concludes, Simone’s performances
are at a “distance from distanciation” (Berman 177–179).12

Any strict interpretation of Brecht and Weill’s classic anti-operas would no doubt un-
derscore how Weill opposed “any exaggeration in the direction of emotion” and likewise
how Brecht held contempt for those who appealed to “emotion, terror, and pity” through
their art as well (Hirsch 94; Buck-Morss 40). However, Simone’s invocation of their work,
I argue, is a project less invested in remaining faithful to the literal tenets of Brechtian
ideology and more focused on producing interpretative deformations of Brechtian text
that paradoxically generate an alienation effect; her work dares audiences to see and hear
“America” differently and on a different frequency. Rather than mounting a dichotomy
wherein Brecht “stages . . . collectivity” while Simone “dwells on a private, subjective
response to political events” (Berman 180), my aim here is to demonstrate the ways that
Nina Simone innovates and enacts her own distinct critique of tyranny and apathy in
western contemporary culture, and in the process, stops the audience from losing them-
selves in the romance of the black female singing voice (Griffin, “When Malindy Sings”).
Read in this way, Simone’s Brecht-Weill performances emerge as re-imagined executions
of black feminist distanciation and as bids that ultimately make “strange” and new the
socio-political activism of black female vocalists—extending the work of Billie Holiday,
marching lockstep with a newly politicized 1960s Abbey Lincoln, and paving the way for
the 1970s Afrofuturist feminism of the group Labelle.13

Damning & Distanciation in “Mississippi Goddam”

No song would manifest the far-reaching dimensions of Nina Simone’s political aes-
thetic and the aesthetics of her politics on In Concert perhaps more masterfully than her
own original protest composition “Mississippi Goddam.” A song that was written by the
artist immediately in the wake of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in
which four school age African American girls were murdered while attending Sunday
school, “Mississippi Goddam” remains one of the most powerful pop music protest songs
of the Civil Rights era, and it uses irony as a central tool to critique the persistent Southern
white supremacist terror endured by African Americans in the midst of the burgeoning
Civil Rights movement. Much later in Nina Simone’s career, the artist discussed how she
had composed “Mississippi Goddam” with Brecht and Weill’s work in mind, specifically
“The Alabama Song”—the most famous number from their anti-opera The Rise and Fall of
the City of Mahagonny. As we shall see, “Alabama” is the latent text in Simone’s damned
“Mississippi,” but it is only one of the many devices that Simone made use of as a song-
writer and performer to generate varying modes of political distanciation and musical
dissonance that she would articulate throughout her performance of the song on In Concert.
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I’ll return later, in order to imagine the ways that Simone positioned herself at odds with
Civil Rights nonviolent coalition building and laid what Feldstein pointedly argues were
the early seeds of black nationalist militancy, prefiguring Amiri Baraka’s aim to write
“poems that kill” by some two years (1365).14 Across her long and dynamic career, Nina
Simone’s performances of “Mississippi Goddam” would highlight the ways that the artist
utilized different kinds of surplus representational and metanarrative tactics to deploy
biting socio-political as well as cultural critiques and to complicate the utility of the black
female singing voice in American culture.

First captured on vinyl on In Concert, Simone’s early performance of “Mississippi
Goddam” audibly highlights her at times tense relationship with her Carnegie Hall audi-
ence, surely a predominantly white, liberal, cosmopolitan crowd if ever there was one. In
Concert’s version of “Mississippi Goddam” encapsulates the interactive drama unfolding
as the artist introduced it to many listeners who were presumably hearing the song for
the first time. In what has become something of a trademark in this recording of the song,
Simone declares in the opening seconds of her performance that “the name of this tune is
‘Mississippi Goddam’” to audible laughter and applause from the audience. The euphoria
of the song’s tempo—with Simone on piano, Rudy Stevenson on guitar, Lisle Atkinson on
bass, and Bobby Hamilton on drums—and Simone’s near ebullient introduction sets a sly
trap for the audience who, with their robust laughter, is seduced into a suspended state of
disbelief as to the dire seriousness of the song’s subject matter. Several beats later the singer
ominously adds: “and I mean every word of it.” Her sobering refrain here reinforces the
J. L. Austin(ian) dimensions of the title’s malediction (Brown and Kushner 544), how her
utterance does not merely “describe or report but performs an action” (Austin). In one fell
swoop, Simone interpolates her own audience into the doomed collective of the song itself,
the blind men and women who, like the “gentlemen” of Pirate Jenny’s hotel, are unable
to recognize the rebellion as it unfolds before their very ears. By the time Simone would
turn mid-song back to her audience in this performance, asking of them “bet you thought
I was kidding ya’?” Pirate Jenny’s venomous parting whisper to her obtuse oppressors,
“that’ll learn ya!” hovers dangerously close by in the air. Simone wields audience patter
on “Mississippi Goddam” as a disciplinary, metanarrative threat much like her Jenny’s
searing retort delivered in the wake of revolution’s carnage, as the bodies pile up.

The crowd’s laughter that punctuates the opening seconds of “Mississippi Goddam”
remains a remarkable sonic documentation of the kinds of tense (dis)connections with
her audience that Simone maintained throughout her career. Here in her Carnegie Hall
performance, the shifting (dis)identifications between the performer and her fans open
up a series of questions as to the ways in which the In Concert crowd was actively and
audibly working through its own repertoire of desires and anxieties in relation to Simone’s
performance. What to make of this confident, full-bodied first round of audience laughter?
Do we hear the sounds of a crowd delighting (with delusion) in the putative distance
between worldly New York and God damn(ed) rural Mississippi? Is this decidedly un-
easy second round of laughter, markedly less hearty and far more tentative, an anxious
reaction to the social and cultural impropriety sounded by one black female vocalist In
Concert? In either instance, the distance in social and political hierarchy as well as the
affective bonds between that of Simone and her audience would noisily fluctuate as the
performance unfolds.

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What is especially important to recognize in this pattern of sounded relations between
the singer and her audience is how it demonstrates the extent to which Nina Simone’s live
performances were exercises in what we might call black feminist Brechtian musical events.
If Brecht’s theater envisions the actor as a figure who measures and modulates the audi-
ence’s affective distance from the drama itself in order to encourage critical commentary,
Simone’s musical performances aggravate that affective distance in musical terms. Although
in many ways her self-referential outrage distances the song “Mississippi Goddam” itself
from orthodox modes of alienation in epic theater, below I suggest that we might hear
how, at its core, Brecht is ideologically present in Simone’s song of the South. By way of
her propulsive In Concert performance, Simone brings her listeners close(r) to the voices
of trauma and obstinacy coursing through her song; she delivers the sonic equivalent of
African Americans’ utter discontent living under quotidian Jim Crow subjugation—dodging
and countenancing hound dogs, imprisonment, and police brutality. At the same time, it
is precisely this musical testimony of a visceral open wound that Simone seeks to expose,
to articulate, to sing in contestation of here. The agitated musical discontent of “Missis-
sippi Goddam” that she masters exacerbates her audience’s “sentimental gaze” and their
emotional appropriation of the narrative (Blau 6). In her remarkable original composition,
the black female (singing) subject splits, moves, and inhabits multiple positions in order
to generate a productive distance between her audience, herself, and “Mississippi,” a
synecdoche for the American (un)scene/seen.
The first “political anthem” in Nina Simone’s evolving career as an activist and agitator,
“Mississippi Goddamn” showcases the artist’s then newly articulated fearlessness as a
songwriter willing to yoke combative political ideology line by line into her composition
(Feldstein 1–2; Simone and Cleary 88; Kernodle 301). With energetic force, Simone sings
in her Carnegie Hall appearance of how
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can’t you see it
Can’t you feel it
It’s all in the air
I can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

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This is a show tune
But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don’t belong here
I don’t belong there
I’ve even stopped believing in prayer
Don’t tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
I’ve been there so I know
They keep on saying “Go slow!”
But that’s just the trouble
“do it slow”
Washing the windows
“do it slow”
Picking the cotton
“do it slow”
You’re just plain rotten
“do it slow”
You’re too damn lazy
“do it slow”
The thinking’s crazy
“do it slow”
Where am I going
What am I doing
I don’t know
I don’t know
Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I bet you thought I was kiddin’—didn’t you?
Picket lines
School boycotts

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They try to say it’s a communist plot
All I want is equality
for my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You’re all gonna die and die like flies
I don’t trust you any more
You keep on saying “Go slow!”
“Go slow!”
But that’s just the trouble
“do it slow”
Desegregation
“do it slow”
Mass participation
“do it slow”
Reunification
“do it slow”
Do things gradually
“do it slow”
But bring more tragedy
“do it slow”
Why don’t you see it
Why don’t you feel it
I don’t know
I don’t know
You don’t have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about Mississippi
Everybody knows about Alabama
Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Simone’s In Concert rendition of the song finds a singer who is strategic with her nar-
rative gestures that disrupt, disturb, and intervene in the fallacies of a Civil Rights era
cultural imaginary that is full of potholes, elisions, and silences with regards to America’s
racial crisis. One hears her belting out the third stanza lines, “can’t you see it/ can’t you
feel it” with full, show tune vigor and bravado, but it is a line that owes much to drama-
tist Brecht and composer Weill’s aim in their epic theater endeavors to “awaken” their
audiences to history. “Can’t you feel it?” The song is addressed precisely to those who

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are numb and sleeping through the tyranny of history, the assassination of NAACP field
secretaries, and church bombings that murder little girls; they are deaf, dumb, and blind,
Simone’s song asserts, to the American catastrophe at hand. At its core, “Mississippi
Goddam” aims to expose the myth of American collectivity that the insult of Jim Crow
culture repeats and plays out in the everyday lives of black folks. Simone here “plays out,”
in her jaunty piano riffs, in her darkly candid lyrics, in the shifting fever of her vocals,
the triple rift between what “everybody knows,” what no one but her will say, and what
she prophetically reads in her jeremiad moments as the fire, brimstone, and locust future
at which the nation is hurling.15 Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it? We ain’t in Oklahoma
(1943) anymore, Simone’s song proclaims. Her infamous interjection—”This is a show
tune but the show hasn’t been written for it yet”—signifies on the politically expressive
limitations of that very genre.
To be sure, “Mississippi Goddam” is a song that owes much to the American Broadway
musical art form and the classic structure of Tin Pan Alley show tune euphoria. Simone
evokes the sound of traditional musical theater songs from Showboat to South Pacific in her
ballad of Southern social chaos, even as she simultaneously empties out the traditional
Broadway show tune of its putative social frivolity, replacing its content with a narrative
that sounds nothing like “Ol’ Man River.” Her performance both theatricalizes the histo-
political narrative she unveils and (re)historicizes musical theater by using the form to
make a political intervention in Civil Rights culture. Situating herself at the temporal
crossroads—sitting in, as it were, at the piano—she both alludes to the negation of “the
(racial) show” in the hegemonic imaginary and writes a musical of black revolt directed
equally against Southern terror and (Northern) American socio-political apathy.
Like “Pirate Jenny,” but even more pronounced here, Simone enunciates multiple social
positions in her anti-love song of the South. Piling on an accretion of pronouns—I, me, you,
everybody—her point of address shifts repeatedly throughout the song. In the remarkable
eighth stanza alone, Simone (as singer-songwriter) interfaces arduous black labor—”washing
the windows, picking the cotton”—with the ironic voices of white supremacist hypocrisy
(“you’re just plain rotten!” “you’re too damn lazy!”) with the “do it slow” chant yelled in
the background by her band. The ambiguity of this call and response, one in which we
might read the responding chant as a call for civil (servant) disobedience, amplifies and
inverts itself five stanzas later when the art of nonviolent protest (“desegregation,” “mass
participation,” “reunification,” “do[ing] things gradually”), as Simone observes, “brings
more tragedy.” “Do[ing] it slow” is both a mark of resistance and a failure on the part of
movement leaders to face the time bomb that keeps ticking (off) in the race against Civil
Rights era white supremacist terror. Simone and her band effectively check the tempo of
the nation, calling attention to the historically glacial pace of this country’s racial reform
even as the galloping, staccato rhythm section marches forward and forecasts the nation’s
impending damnation.16 Simone as singer here holds the compositional narrative together,
bobbing and weaving across a variety of ideological positions pitted against one another.
In a devastating confluence of characters, she emerges in song as the Bull Connor “they,”
the “me” that’s reeling from Southern terrorism, part of the “everybody” who knows
about Mississippi and quite centrally the brave and singular “I” bold enough to utter the
malediction that propels the incendiary chorus of the song.

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The Curse of the Black Pearl
No other song in contemporary popular music culture history has made such radically
subversive political use of profanity other than “Mississippi Goddam.” Simone’s cursing
chorus, what Derek Miller reads as a linguistic “ejaculation” that sets off the irregular
rhythmic patterns of the song, opens up the field of alienation that the singer cultivates
from beginning to end in her performance, drawing the ire of Southern segregationists,
religious leaders, and some civil rights progressives alike which resulted in the song
being banned in Mississippi and other Southern states. Well beyond merely causing a
commotion in social manners though, Simone’s profanity would serve as the insurgent
fulcrum of her song. For it is by way of cursing that Nina Simone articulates her own af-
fective disidentification with the South and likewise challenges her listeners to reconsider
their own connections to her. The malediction, then, sits at the center of a fraught set of
relations in Simone’s performance of “Mississippi Goddam” and functions as the opera-
tive iteration that generates multiple social and political interventions in Simone’s self-
construction as a black female musician as well as the critical dimensions of her protest
ideology (Miller).17
Within the realm of the politics of black female respectability, as Evelyn Brooks Hig-
ginbotham has made so clear, the salty language and the religious disavowals of the
pianist chanteuse would no doubt transgress multiple realms of social propriety.18 On In
Concert’s version of the song, the profanity that serves as the central theme of “Missis-
sippi Goddam” distances Simone and her composition from conventional, faith-based
protest music performed by activist peers—from the SNCC Freedom Singers to Fannie
Lou Hamer—as well as her initially incredulous and increasingly anxious Carnegie Hall
audience. With regards to that latter context, the curse is the most powerful mode of
distancing that Simone generates. Simone’s reiteration of the “Mississippi Goddamn”
malediction, along with her infamous mid-song declaration—”I’ve even stopped believing
in prayer”—marks the inflammatory pinnacle of the song and typifies her performative
distanciation in the song.
On the surface, it is the most alienating utterance in a song that sings a ballad of social
alienation. For cursing is clearly, as Kate E. Brown and Howard I. Kushner have pointed
out in their cogent work on the subject, “the linguistic mode of alienation from language
and culture” (544).19 Yet even this act of verbal dissonance remains, in certain ways, deeply
rooted in ultimately affirming rather than disavowing one’s relationship to God. Linguist
Ruth Wanjyrb illuminates, for instance, the ways in which cursing has historically been
grounded in “strong faith” and that the word “damn” in particular exposes a speaker’s
complex relationship to her faith. As she points out, “the English DAMN dates back to
1280. Derived from the Latin damnum (‘damage,’ ‘loss,’ and ‘hurt’), it means to inflict harm
or damage or loss upon [an other]; to condemn or doom to punishment” (Wanjyrb 128).
This, then, is the double work of Simone’s curse: to engage in a fraught relationship with
a God that she now rejects and yet simultaneously needs in order to fulfill her condemna-
tion of the South. Just as well, this is “the fantasy of malediction”; it conjoins revenge and
alienation, transforming them into an utterance so “that the body . . . can generate a voice
so powerful as to translate outrage into vengeance, disrupting the narrative of its own
exclusion” (Brown and Kushner 546). But to Brown and Kushner, it is the historical subject

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who suffers as a result of swearing since “cursing ahistoricizes the body as it gives rise to
the eruptive rather than the expressive.” Cursing is something, they argue, that “happens
to a subject” (539). It encourages the disavowal of self-possession, in turn, re-affirming
“the success of cultural discipline” (539). But where then does this leave Nina Simone in
concert? In the negated “non-presence” (546) that Brown and Kushner assert that cursing
creates, caught in the vortex of the “agrammatical and ahistorical” (549) profane utterance?
What of the black female vocalist who sings her curses?
Only by hearing a “profane” Simone through the prism of musicality can we recognize
the ways in which her spectacular acts of swearing ultimately reconstitute the steadfast
socio-historical “value” of the black female performer in song. As Lindon Barrett demon-
strates in his groundbreaking work on the subject, the black singing voice “provides the
allowance for African Americans to enter or subvert symbolic, legal, material, and imagi-
native economies to which we are most usually denied access” (57). Here in the context of
“Mississippi Goddam,” singing fills the historical void that the curse burns open. It keeps
Simone in (her own) time. Her musical curse conversely reminds us of Barrett’s power-
ful contention that “the singing voice sounds of the most enduring of African American
testimonies to the exigencies of our presence in the Americas” (57).
Cursing and singing. Their social utility is perhaps more entwined than one might
think. Consider the “catharsis, aggression, and” as Ruth Wanjyrb convincingly notes, the
“social connection” engendered by foul language. Simone’s singing curse grants her access
to aggression with a score; it allows her to be “symbolically violent” and to “achieve [her]
purpose without breaking the prohibition on actual bodily harm” (Wanjyrb 120). Instead,
through cursing, Simone’s performative violence “breaks” the conventional musicologi-
cal structure of the song itself, thus creating what Miller reads as a kind of “rhythmic”
alienation effect. As he brilliantly observes, Simone delivers the chorus “in an irregular
5/8 bar,” thus “the State of Mississippi is fundamentally out of sync with the rest of the
world, just as ‘Mississippi’ is out of sync with the rhythmic world of the song” (Miller).
To make our world anew, Nina Simone, ideologically in sync with her song and musically
out of sync with her own accompaniment and her band, profanely vocalizes her state(s)
of (dis)affected rage.
Surrogation of the King
Throughout Nina Simone’s career, the malediction’s utility would transfigure in song,
most stirringly in a version recorded on April 7, 1968, just four days after the assassina-
tion of Martin Luther King, Jr., in a performance at the Westbury Music Fair in Westbury,
NY. In the raw, corrosive aftermath of King’s murder, Nina’s curse emerges as the sonic
site of cathartic exorcism, a wished-for choral effort to simultaneously “damn” to hell
another ugly chapter of American race relations and at the same time open the door to
post-Civil Rights possibility. A substantially subdued Simone opens the song, speaking
over the familiar rhythmic piano pulse of “Mississippi” and replacing 1964’s feigned
ebullience with a eulogy:

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of course a couple of years ago, four little girls were killed in Alabama
and at that time we got the inspiration to do this song. But Dr. King’s
murder has left me so numb, I don’t know where I’m at really. And
of course you heard this song that was composed by Gene Taylor
especially for today. But I hope that between now and the end of
the year, it’ll all be together enough that we will have songs that go
down in history for these wonderful, brave people who are no longer
with us (Simone, “Mississippi Goddam” 1968).
Simone “goes numb” in this version of the song, singing behind the beat, manifesting
in the shifted tempo of her performance the (historical) weight and feel of how “slow”
it really goes in the early aftermath of King’s murder. If, on the one hand, the maledic-
tion is “uttered . . . from a position in which no social consensus is possible” (Brown and
Kushner 561), this version of Simone’s “Mississippi,” predicated yet again on the curse
itself, operates conversely as the site of viscerally palpable social bonding and politically
re-energized coalition building. A surrogation of the previous performances of the song,
this radically altered version of “Mississippi” finds Simone playing the role of historical
mediator and performative figurehead whose passionate aim, this time around, is to forge
emotional affiliations with her audience and to make King’s movement a regenerative
force in the present tense. Midway through her performance, Simone addresses listeners
in order to make King’s voice audible once more, to interpolate him into the crowd and,
in turn, to interpolate them into her resurrected musical movement (Brown and Kushner
539). “Now you heard him,” Simone declares. “He’s one of you. If you have been moved
at all and you know my songs at all. FOR GOD’S SAKES JOIN ME. Don’t sit back there.
The time is too late now. Good God! You know . . . The King is dead. The King of Love
is Dead. I ain’t ‘BOUT to be nonviolent, honey!” (Simone, “Mississippi Goddam” 1968).
Still, like she was in 1964, “not kidding” around, Simone nonetheless punctuates her
remarks this time with her own deeply knowing, spontaneous laugh that bubbles over
the refrain of her chorus here, creating a kind of ironic counter response to the Carnegie
Hall audience’s obtuse joviality.
This 1968 version of “Mississippi Goddam” pronounces more overtly the dimensions
of dislocation and grief embedded in the song (“Where am I going/ What am I doing?/
I don’t know”) and performs the inevitable Civil Rights effigy, “to evoke an absence, to
body . . . forth” the King of the immediate past and the synecdoche for a much larger
social revolution (Roach 2–3). Simone rallies her audience, urging them not to “just stand
back there” but to step up and move forward, in the process performing a surrogated
1955 King in Montgomery, Alabama, walking—not riding—alongside Coretta Scott, Rosa
Parks, Bayard Rustin, and a legion of other young, upstart activists who refused to sit in
the zone of the underclass. She, effectively, re-values the militant roots of King’s activism
and recuperates the insurgency of Rosa’s front seat strike. Like Clark Johnson’s stunning
2001 film Boycott, Simone here resuscitates the radical social protest tactics of early civil
rights activism, and she translates King’s vision into insurgent musical language.20

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Alabama Meets Mississippi
King is therefore central in this distinct version of “Mississippi Goddam,” but the con-
nections between his iconography and the song would return yet again in an even later
version of the song captured on film live at the London jazz pub Ronnie Scott’s on Novem-
ber 17, 1984. In an interview taken at the time of the gig, the artist reflects on her reasons
for continuing to sing her most famous “protest anthem,” arguing that “it’s important in
1984, because no one ever really commemorated or remembered . . . enough Martin Luther
King. And ‘Mississippi Goddam’ brings him back” (Simone, Live at Ronnie Scott’s).21 Some
years into the Reagan-Thatcher era, then, Simone used her west end platform to revive
the political work of her “Mississippi” composition and, likewise, to explain her aesthetic
inspiration. On stage, she describes “this song” which is, “as you know . . . written by Nina
Simone. It’s very much like 1932 . . . at that time Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill wrote another
song called ‘Moon Over Alabama’—in fact they wrote several songs from Mahagonny. But
there isn’t time to do them all. What we’re going to do is combine ‘Mississippi Goddam’
with ‘Moon Over Alabama’” (Live at Ronnie Scott’s). Here for the first and perhaps only
time one sees and hears Simone publicly aligning her song of the South with Brecht and
Weill’s most famous tune from their anti-opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,
“the Alabama song” (or, as she refers to it here, “Moon Over Alabama”). The alliances that
she forges between her own composition and the Mahagonny musical are subsequently
made all the more potent by Simone’s dynamic reinterpretation of both songs.
First performed on July 17, 1927, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is, in part, the
tale of “a great city obsessed with pleasure” and teetering on the brink of ruin. No doubt
Simone would allusively draw an analogy between America and Mahagonny, the Ameri-
can masses and the Brechtian pilgrims on their unstoppable march in search of material
and sexual pleasure. Mahagonny is a moral tale, as is Simone’s. Weill scholar Foster Hirsch
argues that in their imagining of the Mahagonny narrative, Brecht and Weill envisioned “a
cheeky assault on propriety” (Hirsch 11). Mahagonny, Hirsch contends, “trespasse[s] accept-
able boundaries of literary, musical and theatrical decency” and “refuses categorization”
(11, 12). In this regard, one can see how Brecht and Weill’s material would have appealed
broadly to Simone in her own “assault” on decorum and social propriety.
Moreover, Simone’s specific reference to Mahagonny the musical brings her use of the
song’s malediction full circle and poses yet another provocative link to the Brechtian
narrative. Simone’s damning vocals, for instance, reference the convicted rebel Jimmy’s
lines in scene 17 of Mahagonny when he sings of how “It begins to grow light/ It must not
lighten/ There must be no sunrise/ That means a new goddam day begins” (Brecht 56).
In Jimmy’s song, the curse here emerges as an erstwhile attempt on the part of the out-
cast to stop the sun from rising on this godforsaken land. Just the same, we hear Simone
imparting the curse so as to ensure that day will not break on the hell that is Mississippi/
America. Perhaps, then, there is something to be made of a musical link between Simone
and Jimmy, a character who is convicted for (among many other things) “singing forbid-
den songs” in the midst of the threat of a “big typhoon” (Brecht, Rise and Fall 56). Most
powerfully, however, it is Simone’s interpolation of the “Alabama Song” into this later
version of “Mississippi Goddam” that would do multiple kinds of work to reinforce the
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In the musical Mahagonny, a “contingent of female pilgrims” perform their ode “on
their way to the new city” (Hirsch 9). Weill’s wife, the legendary actress (turned singer)
Lotte Lenya, would perform her signature version of the song with vigor and precision
while belting out the chorus: “Oh show us the way to the next whiskey bar! Oh don’t ask
why! Oh don’t ask why! . . . Oh moon of Alabama . . . we’ve lost our dear old mama . . .”
(Hirsch 9; Lenya). At odds with Lenya’s cold and regimented gests in the song, Simone’s
trademark deep, ominous vocals would seemingly transform the economy of the “Ala-
bama Song.” Interfacing classical precision with improvisational play, Nina Simone drew
on her much-lauded chops as a musician combined with her own political sophistication
to sing themes from Mahagonny and “Mississippi” once more with feeling.22 And it is for
this reason that Russell Berman reads her Ronnie Scott’s performance as straying so radi-
cally from Brechtian intention.
Yet I would argue that we might instead read the ways that Simone re-signifies and
critically re-deploys “Alabama” in order to evoke her own methods of distanciation in
“Mississippi.” In tempo alone the two songs resemble each other—the polka style march
of “Alabama” and Simone’s fidgety pedal tone embedded in the riff.23 Both songs are about
certain kinds of escapism and denial. Brecht and Weill’s women assert that “we just want
liquor” while Nina Simone’s America lives in the fantasy that it can hold back time, that
it can freeze its beloved “Sister Sadie” in a cotton-picking stoop. The key figures of course
that Simone exploits and transforms in her performance are the “us” and the “mama”
whom she swiftly translates into “mammy” for the final verse of the song. Simone’s Ronnie
Scott’s performance ultimately exposes the connection between the “us” who’s lost their
good old “mammy” and “the everybody” who knows but refuses to accept her passing. In
effect, the singer reminds her audience that she ain’t their mammy, that mammy is dead.
The genius move that Simone makes in this performance is to utilize the “Alabama Song”
as a way in which to extend and signify on the narrative of hegemonic resistance to black
empowerment that “everybody” knows but that some still can’t bear to face.
Boldly and yet obliquely, she hints as well in the song’s closing lines about how “ev-
erybody knows about” presumably the dangers in everyone from a Ronald Reagan to
a Jesse Jackson godhead figure in the ominous year of 1984. Here again one witnesses
Simone staging a “sit-in” at the piano—as she had in 1964—”sitting in” via the pedal tone
to critique the collective “everybody” that’s got her so upset—not just Southern states this
time. Indeed, the “everybody” of Simone’s “Mississippi” versus the “us” of “Alabama”
perhaps poses the most intriguing intersections between the two songs. Berman reads
these two collective pronouns as at odds with one another. Somehow for him, Simone’s
“everybody” is a mythically congruous unit, one that is fundamentally at odds with the
“us” in search of whiskey and sex. For him, the racial and gender specificities inherent in
“Mississippi Goddam” are ultimately indicative of Simone’s effort to “stage individual-
ity,” an “American cultural politics of anti-Communism, which” he argues, “she would
have hardly endorsed, even while participating in it” (Berman 180).
But this kind of a reading both fails to consider the political value of Simone’s inscription
of racial and gender specificity into the American imaginary, and it neglects to consider
Simone’s articulation of disenfranchisement at the heart of the song. For if nothing else,
“Mississippi Goddam” is about the inability to join in the collective in the first place. Read-
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critiques, that is, the ways that Simone conjoins oppressive forms of “knowing” to awaken
audiences to their own abjection. In her rendition of “The Alabama Song,” Nina Simone
repeatedly juxtaposes the second verse, “don’t ask why” and the later verse, a robust
“you know why.” The duality of these two verses taken together back-to-back provokes
its own commentary: “Show us the way to the next whiskey bar. Don’t ask why. YOU
KNOW WHY.” Complacency and collective suppression are pushed side by side in this
reinterpretation of the Mahagonny song. Simone’s performance makes clear that it’s the
subject of “knowing” that fundamentally links these two songs together. It is a lyrical
juxtaposition that generates its own alluring, epistemological question.
Coda: Sweet Home Alabama
By the time of her Ronnie Scott’s gig in 1984, Nina Simone had long since left the
States, first moving to Barbados and later to Africa, throughout Europe, finally settling in
France for the remainder of her life. Late into her career, she would maintain the status of
a much-heralded musical outsider, a fiercely enigmatic artist who voiced strong opinions
about everything she saw wrong with “black” and “white” America—from Reaganom-
ics to Michael Jackson’s phantasmagoric skin color. An expatriate vocalist musician, she
was literally on the “outside” of her “Mississippi” America, but even from abroad she
negotiated ways of entering back into America’s primal pop musical scene, the “rock
and roll” that Greil Marcus so affectionately celebrates for “dramatizing a sense of what
it is to be an American, what it means, what it’s worth, what the stakes of life in America
might be” (4).
What was “The Alabama Song” by the time of her 1984 performance but a song best
known in popular culture for having been a hit single for the Doors in 1967 and a curi-
ous 1980 David Bowie b-side? No surprise that Jim Morrison, the Lizard King himself,
would cathect onto a song that epitomizes what Simon Reynolds and Joy Press see as the
“nomadism, estrangement and flight” at the heart of the Doors’ “psychedelic experience”
(44). Morrison’s fatal “headlong hurtle towards ruinous self-expenditure” would serve as
the crux of the Doors’ “Alabama,” a Bacchanalian march in search of booze and women
(Reynolds and Press 118). Bowie, the Brit, a self-described “Brecht fan,” a sometime Berlin
resident, and a friend of Simone’s would cleave closer to the critical spirit of Mahagonny,
releasing his version of the song on the heels of 1979’s “Boys Keep Swinging,” an overt
mockery of male bonding and “phallic delirium” not unlike the pilgrims in Brecht and
Weill’s musical.24 But it is Nina Simone, herself, who stages a final trespass by (re)engag-
ing the song. Her intervention in rock masculinist narratives interrupts the hedonistic
boys-are-back-in-town versions of the song and instead choreographs a guerilla action
that re-sounds, re-centers, that surrogates black female voices buried at the bottom of the
rock and roll archive.
For Simone, then, her performances would serve throughout her career as spectacularly
ruminative occasions to dramatize and sonically bring to life the most potent affective
dimensions of her public persona. In the 1970s, she built on her reputation for staging
live concerts that were at once viscerally torrential and emotionally captivating in ways

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that extended and reanimated the jarring spirit of her 1960s alienated protest material.
Think for instance of Simone’s appearance at the Montreaux jazz festival in 1976, when
the artist unleashed a ten-minute tour-de-force litany of feelings and a re-ordering of
“Feelings”—the then-current radio hit. In her performance of Morris Albert’s maudlin
pop song, Simone the expatriate tensely and yet magnetically moves from the position of
introspective “reflection” (about “feelings, nothing more than feelings/ trying to forget
these feelings of love”) to that of sheer willed improvisational invention, immersing her-
self in extended and dazzlingly intricate runs across the piano ivories. Pushing the scene
of performance to “the edge of the event” (to borrow a line from Fred Moten), openly
castigating the song itself for its melancholic origins (“I do not believe the conditions
that produced a situation that demanded a song like that!”), Simone repeatedly takes her
audience in this reading of the song to a place where she mediates affective dissonance,
musical virtuosity, and generic hybridity (between classical and pop), just as she had done
in 1964 at Carnegie Hall.25
NOTES
1. Feminist rock music critic Kathy Dobie likens Simone’s voice to “a motor running, running.” Dobie
observes that Simone’s “voice seems to trigger grief, in the same way that certain sounds do—a
fog horn, light rain on an empty lake, trucks rolling down the highway in the middle of the night”
(232).
2. I Put A Spell On You illustrates this journey in great detail, and in this regard it remains a stunning
discursive record of black female popular music eclecticism and virtuosity. A first person account of
the artist’s life as a musical prodigy-turned-popular music sensation and 1960s Civil Rights activ-
ist, the book follows Simone’s life-long pursuit of “freedom” as an aesthetic as well as a political
endeavor. Ruth Feldstein calls the book “a biography of defiance,” and she offers a rigorous reading
of Simone and Cleary’s savvy and yet ideologically complicated text (25).
3. From high school in North Carolina, Nina Simone moved on to The Juilliard School in New York
City before taking a detour into the world of Atlantic City nightclub performing as a way to pay
the bills in the 1950s. She has often stated it was this need to support herself that led her to begin
singing in addition to playing the piano. See Simone and Cleary 44–53.
4. I Put a Spell On You demands more analytical attention than I am able to give it here. Nonetheless,
following the lead of both Shane Vogel and Thomas Postlewait, I am reading Simone’s autobiography
as a “document” not of performance history but of “performance theory” in which we can hear and
see her making sense of a complex web of racially, gendered, class, and sexually charged politics
that shaped her career. See Vogel 167–93, Postelwait. Tammy Kernodle explores Simone’s centrality
as an innovator of the contemporary freedom song, and she focuses in part on interrogating the
musicological complexities of Simone’s composition “Mississippi Goddamn.” While Kernodle and I
diverge in our methodological approaches to examining this song, we nonetheless share an interest
in demonstrating the virtuosic aesthetic strategies of Nina Simone’s protest music. See Kernodle
295–317. Simone’s activist efforts in many ways resemble that of Abbey Lincoln, an artist who fully
embraced her role as a jazz musician and protest performer. For more on Lincoln’s remarkable career,
see Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free 161–192. See also Porter 149–190.
5. On the politics of black women’s eccentric movements, see Peterson xi–xii.
6. Shane Vogel examines an equally provocative aesthetics of what he calls performative “impersona”
in the career of Lena Horne (167–193).
7. For more on Hamer’s Civil Rights song activism, see Reagon. For more on Odetta, see Jacobson.
8. In his essay “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Mackey illustrates the ways that poet and critic Edward
Kamau Brathwaite transforms the noun Caliban into a “fugitive” linguistic verb, a discursive tool
of maroonage. “’Calibanization’ insists,” he argues,
that in West Indian folk speech English is not so much broken as broken into,
that a struggle for turf is taking place in language. . . . As in the anagrammatic

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‘derangement’ Shakespeare had recourse to in fashioning Caliban from cannibal, the
puns, malapropisms, odd spellings, neologisms, and straining means Brathwaite
resorts to speak of the disturbances outside as well as inside the language, social
disruptions the word is thus made to register. (272)
9. Hortense Spillers argues that “if we can draw out the emphasis on the female vocalist’s art, rather
than her biographies, then we gather from the singer that power and control [to] maintain an onto-
logical edge” (166). See also Wald.
10. Pop critic Jennifer Gilmour maintains that Simone’s relationship with her audience “endured”
throughout her career and that she sustained a lack of tolerance for “talk during a performance”
in which case she would “stop playing. She might even leave the stage. Claiming that it broke her
concentration, at the bar she’d wait until the loud drunks were thrown into the street to resume her
playing.”
11. For an example of Moms Mabley’s incisive Civil Rights protest humor, see Moms Mabley, Comedy Ain’t
Pretty. See also Gregory. In 1960, Colpix recorded Nina Simone’s landmark sets at the Village Gate
in New York City, and a young Richard Pryor served as her opening act. Simone recounts meeting
the comedian in her autobiography. See Simone and Cleary 70–71.
12. For more on alienation effects, see Brecht.
13. On Billie Holiday’s social protest work in song, see Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free. On Abbey Lincoln’s
Civil Rights and black cultural nationalist politics as a performer, see Porter 149–190. On Labelle see
Echols 71–120.
14. See also Baraka 219.
15. Kernodle describes how the “song begins in C major in an up-tempo 4/4 that is established by the
drummer playing each beat, the bassist playing double octave stops, and Simone’s piano vamping
on the main harmonies” (303).
16. In short, “Mississippi Goddam” is a song that invokes temporal shifts in historical, musical, and
performative time as forms of narrative critique. As performance studies scholar Derek Miller has
brilliantly pointed out to me, Simone’s In Concert rendition of the song “resists rhythm.” “Particularly
when she sings ‘they try to say it’s a Communist plot,’” Miller argues, “it is as though the absurdity
of the FBI’s charges against [Martin Luther King Jr.] throw her out of time and she has to find her way
back by the end of the verse.” Thanks also to Katia Washington for her helpful comments regarding
tempo in “Mississippi Goddam.”
17. See also Munoz; Simone and Cleary 91.
18. As Feldstein makes clear, Simone rejected “the impulse to talk like a lady,” and she defied “expecta.
tions of respectable womanhood” altogether in her musical repertoire (1365–1366).
19. Cursing, Brown and Kushner argue, is a “breach of communicative propriety” (537).
20. See also Smith.
21. In her interview, Simone also reflects on the contemporary success of Irish modern rock group U2,
and their 1984 hit “Pride (In the Name of Love),” observing that their song as well “about the story
of Martin Luther King” proves that the movement is “not dead in their minds. The youth need to
know the history of America . . . They need to know what we did there. And so I’m happy that I’m
still singing it because obviously that group [was] still thinking about it too. And in 1984 they were
able to put together a sound that became a hit which means that he is still now alive in the eyes and
the ears and the brains of many young people. I think that’s important and that’s my contribution
. . .”
22. Simone balanced her classical training with her gospel church culture’s emphasis on deep improvi-
sational experimentation and adventure (Simone and Cleary 19). She outlines her politics at length
in I Put A Spell on You as well, and particularly underscores the intellectual dimensions of her shared
politics with playwright and friend Lorraine Hansberry (Simone and Cleary 86–87).
23. Thanks to Reginald Jackson for his helpful feedback regarding Simone’s piano performance.
24. My thanks to Maureen Mahon for her helpful feedback regarding Bowie’s version of Brecht and
Weill.
25. See Simone’s 1976 Montreaux jazz festival performance at .

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Songs in Black and Lavender
Eileen M. Hayes

Published by University of Illinois Press

Hayes, Eileen M.
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music.
University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/18462. https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

[ Access provided at 25 Sep 2020 00:27 GMT from University of Washington @ Seattle ]

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/18462

https://muse.jhu.edu

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/18462

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9

Is it reasonable to characterize nine thousand
white women as “a bunch”?—eileen m. hayes,
diary entry

chapter 1

Diary of a Mad Black Woman Festigoer

In the typical arrival story, a familiar aspect of traditional ethnography,
the anthropologist acquaints herself with persons unknown and prepares to
settle in so that she can begin her “real work.” Although technically this diary
does not do precisely that, my intent is that readers will find it a useful intro-
duction to themes raised in this book. This includes, but is not limited to, the
experience of festivals from the perspectives of black women.
Although some readers will be familiar with the women’s music festival
scene, most will probably not. Therefore, I sought a vehicle through which I
could both describe and signify on women’s music festivals from the perspec-
tive of a black attendee. This diary is the result. With an attitude reminiscent of
Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the narrative genre of the travel diary
provides me entrée to the representation of this different world.1 At six feet, six
inches tall, Perry, an Atlanta-based thespian, has made a career of portraying
the African American wise-woman-cum-superhero Madea in the plays upon
which his films are based, and some of her comedic spirit influences the diary I

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offer.2 That many white readers are unfamiliar with Perry’s work neither detracts
from nor influences its success. African Americans who comprise Perry’s target
audience for live performances may experience a reality that differs dramati-
cally, in their time away from integrated work sites, from the lived experience
of whites.
A parallel sensibility might be acknowledged in regard to African Americans
and the consumer base for women’s music festivals. African American male
friends and acquaintances with whom I discussed this book frequently posed
the question “What about the [soul] brothers?” Therefore, I emphasize that
these festivals are women-centered events—indeed, in the case of Michigan,
women-born women events.3 It would not be far off the mark to say that black
male-bodied persons identifying as men don’t count in these environments
except as infrequent audience members. And as a comedian as sharp as the
late Bernie Mac might say, “The brothers don’t get to many lesbian events.”
Within these pages, I do not presume to inhabit a black lesbian subject
position. I say this not to disavow associations between myself and members
of the community in which I conducted research, but rather to underscore, as
Michael Awkward relates, that markers of identity ought not necessarily to be
deemed sufficient grounds upon which to grant one authority to speak the cul-
tural truths.4 This idea undergirds my attempts to intervene in representations
of blackness, black femaleness, black lesbianness, and black feminism, but it
echoes a formulation put forth earlier by Valerie Smith and Hazel Carby.5 I raise
my own identities as a straight, black, and, arguably, old-school feminist activist
precisely to question what these inflections mean, singly and in combination.
Still, it is telling, as anthropologist Ellen Lewin and linguist William Leap sug-
gest, that gay or lesbian identity is almost always attributed to scholars conduct-
ing research in lesbian and gay communities.6 The diary entries, or field notes,
that follow are a reminder that work in the field of identity politics requires care.
The post–Stuart Hall generation has come to expect that positionalities align
unevenly, and in unexpected ways.7 This is as true in relation to race identity as
it is for gender, sexual identity, class, politics, and so on. In none of these areas
does this book assume a unitary subject.
My use of the first-person narrative in the diary that follows (and, indeed,
throughout this book) is a mode of representation so fundamental to anthropo-
logical practice that it requires no justification. And while a number of influences
are felt in these pages, that of John Gwaltney’s Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black
America (1981) must be credited at the outset. Gwaltney’s recorded conversa-
tions with blacks living in a dozen black communities in the northeastern U.S.
in the early 1970s reveal not only their perspectives about their own lives but
also their perceptions of blacks as a people and of whites both individually and
collectively. Drylongso was just one of Gwaltney’s prescient studies in which he

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argued for a “native anthropology,” an intellectual cause that was taken up by
successive generations of anthropologists of color, women, and, later, scholars
conducting ethnography in lesbian and gay communities.8 In his comments for
the dust jacket for Drylongso, the writer Ralph Ellison maintained that Gwaltney
painted a portrait of “core Black America” (Gwaltney’s phrase) that was designed
to instruct and entertain. I have tried to infuse some of those qualities into this
essay, nodding toward the African American tradition of indirect social criticism
through humor.
For reasons that will become clear, some readers may never have the oppor-
tunity to attend a women’s music festival. I offer the following polyglot (mis)ad-
ventures in feminism, lesbian identity, race matters, and music—replete with its
reverberations of African American autoethnographical and oral traditions—in
the hope that you, too, can experience a real vacation in lesbian utopia.9

The Diary

In August 1995 my friend Cindy Spillane and I drove from Maryland to the twen-
tieth anniversary of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. In previous years
I had attended the festival alone; now I was glad to have Spillane’s company.
She and I had met as members of the DC Area Feminist Chorus (Washington,
DC), now called the Bread and Roses Feminist Singers.10 Both of us dropped
out eventually, for different reasons. I grew weary of being “the only one”—the
sistahs know what I mean. Spillane felt strongly that the chorus’s engagement
with feminist praxis and music had, in her words, “petrified at about 1975.”
“How much Holly Near arranged for four-part women’s voices can one take?”
she would ask. I didn’t begrudge the second-wave radical feminism sound track
that the chorus’s Near-Williamson-Christian repertoire evoked. Indeed, my own
feminist resolve had been fortified by the music of women’s music founders
during the years of my young adulthood, and though those years were decid-
edly over, women’s music was my music, too. Yet despite attempts to “multi-
culturalize” (is that a word?) the chorus’ repertoire with the occasional song
by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Spillane and I concluded independently that the
group’s raison d’etre was better fulfilled as a voluntary association for social
networking than as a choir.
Our bond with each other was as feminist activists in the Washington, DC,
area. Spillane, a white lesbian, frequently led workshops in the women’s com-
munity on antiracism; she was also a fat women’s activist—that is, a fat, fat-issues
activist. My feminist organizing had been predominantly with other black women
and women of color in reproductive rights advocacy and anti-sterilization abuse.
I had been trained by lesbian feminists in the early 1980s and in part was still

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working out the repayment of a symbolic debt owed to the women from whom I
learned feminist engagement. For the most part, Spillane “got it” about racism;
I won’t make it sound as though she didn’t. I was a veteran feminist activist and
didn’t buy into narratives about black women not identifying with the f-word
(feminism). It didn’t take an Angela Davis to know that advocating on behalf of
oneself as a black and as a woman was part and parcel of black women’s activist
heritage (although I’m glad Davis pointed that out).11

gender, play, and transgression

A source of our amusement during the road trip involved our speculating about
how festigoers might assume we were girlfriends in the romantic rather than
the platonic sense. There would be many couples at this festival, because for
many lesbian and bisexual women this particular festival was a favorite place
to vacation. Part of the pleasure participants derive from a large festival such as
Michigan comes from attendees’ opportunities to be both actors and audience
members in the larger social drama that is the festival. In the festival arena,
participants enact numerous social performances that contest, combine, and
turn identity categories held by many to be fixed—particularly those of gender
and sexuality—on their heads. These acts take place onstage, but even more
often offstage, as festigoers, “virgin” (first-time attendees) and otherwise, con-
duct everyday life at the festival. I looked forward to highlighting in my study
what was happening at the ground level in the lives of black women performers
and festival attendees.
We were going to have a long ride. To pass the time in the car, Spillane and
I constructed butch and femme personas for ourselves. Thwarting expectations
about what some observers consider markers of butch and femme identities,
Spillane and I adopted the aliases of “Bunnie” and “Lambert” respectively. Spill-
ane performed “Bunnie” as overtly femme; I enacted “Lambert” as decisively
butch. We were playing with stereotypes, but at the same time we understood
that we would be subjected to an essentializing gaze while at the festival. Given
the recurring trope of the “big, black butch,” it struck us as clever that I, five feet
tall and slightly built at one hundred pounds, would play that role, while “built
for comfort” Spillane would occupy the femme space.12 We took delight in our
theatrics and enacted these personas privately throughout the festival for our
own amusement.
We listened to the radio and to CDs we had brought along. Since we knew
that Michigan, like some other women’s music festivals, strongly encouraged
women not to play men’s voices over sound systems, we wanted to get in all
the Mick Jagger, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Luther Vandross we
could. A self-conscious awareness accompanied our creation of the list. Every

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performer mentioned occupied, if not a gay positionality, an “in-betweenness”
with regard to gender, sexual identity, race, or some combination of these. We
also listened to Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading, Melissa Etheridge, and k.
d. lang during our trip. They were our “girls,” and we wished they were coming
to Michigan, too.

black and lavender

About halfway into our road trip, Spillane, who was driving, glanced in my
direction: “How is our flag coming?” she asked. Before we left Maryland, I
had described how women personalize their tents, recreational vehicles, and
grounds in the immediate vicinity of their camps. Festigoers tack clotheslines
in the woods so that they might hang beautiful/outrageous quilts, banners,
and posters, many of which pay homage to women’s history, lesbian/bisexual/
transgender pride, and other politics. I had heard via the rumor mill that the
Michigan festival would be conferring an award for the “best home exterior de-
sign” that year. I suggested we enter the contest. Spillane asked what we could
do, since neither of us had talents in the domestic arts. I suggested that we take
a flag and post it outside the tent. Spillane replied, “You mean a rainbow flag?”
I shrugged. “Child, we need something black and lesbian,” I said. “Where will
you get that type of flag?” Spillane asked. Reversing herself suddenly, she ex-
claimed, “You’re a het [heterosexual]; you can sew!” Little did we know it then,
but our hand-sewn nylon flag, the design of which was a black triangle against
a background of deep lavender, would become an object of admiration in our
campsite neighborhood.

city on a hill

Though I had attended several women’s music festivals previously, including
Michigan, Spillane looked forward to her first one. She had wanted to be pre-
pared, so before the trip she talked with me and her other friends about what
she could expect. I am not sure if, once we arrived, she got what she came for or
not. The Michigan ideal is that women will replicate an entire outdoor city—less
Athens and more a poor people’s tent city à la 1960s Washington, DC—into
which some semipermanent structures, such as stages and commissaries, are
introduced. Michigan is about long queues for food, open-air showers, ice cream,
infrequent portions of meat, and a public transportation system comprised of
flatbed trucks. These vehicles take festigoers from the registration site to camp-
ing areas, from the main stage concert area to the special constituency tents
at which workshops are held. Each August, those who are familiar with the
experience harbor a hope that is familiar to attendees at all residential music
festivals, if not participants in utopian projects. “If we build it, they will come,”

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the saying goes, and come they do: some alone, others towing babies and small
children, male and female.13 There are a fair number of two-mom families,
crones, teens and young adults, and others in recreational vehicles, differently
bodied women, interracial couples, dyed blondes and towheads, women with
dreads and those with weaves, transgenders, femmes, straight women who re-
member what women-identified means, butches, wannabe butches, sexy women
and others looking for sex or for Mr. Goodbar (the candy), and—I swear—several
hundred men. A few “hopelessly straight” women come, too—some of whom
have been lied to about what to expect. After a flash thunderstorm, probably
hundreds from each identity group wonder why the hell they’re there.
There is no “hill” as the word is used in military parlance, but if there were,
we could take it. This is part of the Michigan experience, too: big talk, big Windy
City, four-star-general talk by women who are fixed (as my grandmother would
have put it) on doing big things. We had heard through the grapevine that more
than nine thousand women (predominantly white lesbians) were expected for
this outdoor, five- to seven-day event, billed as the largest women’s music festival
in the world. What was it about this festival that made it occupy a central place
in the women’s music festival imaginary?

women only

In contrast to other women’s (lesbian-oriented) music festivals, Michigan is a
women-only gathering; men are not allowed. Indeed, at other festivals, men
are now invited to participate both as audience members and sometimes as
sidemen, though not as instrumental or vocal leads during performances. Ad-
dressing, in the course of Spillane’s preparation for the festival, the various
inconsistencies in festival inclusion policies that have arisen over time and
location would have been too complicated.
Michigan welcomes women-born women of all ages and ethnicities and
male children under the age of eleven. During the day, male youngsters go to
the Brother Sun Boys Camp; the counterpart to the festival’s day programming
for girls is the Gaia Girls Camp.14 The camps are age- and sex-specific. Brother
Sun is for young boys ages five through ten; additionally, families with boys
agree to reside in the Brother Sun camp for the entire week. The girls camp
provides a range of activities and oversight for young females five and older.
These accommodations for children are a festival offering that has evolved over
the years—and not without debate by festival planners and attendees. Michigan
also offers the Sprouts Family Campground for mothers and all children four
years of age and under. I am afraid that given my “single woman with no chil-
dren or nieces or nephews” centricity, I never sought to visit the boys or girls
camp and don’t know if it is possible for nonparents to do so.

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dyke spotting

Toward evening, Spillane and I stretched our legs at a truck-stop diner in Hart,
Michigan, the town nearest to the festival site in Walhalla, a small community
in west-central Michigan. We were in a rural area and admittedly had been a
bit spooked by a small flurry of anti-lesbian sentiment from passersby along
the road. This was the last leg of the trip, and we had exhausted our supply of
the best and worst scenarios that might befall us at the festival. We hoped our
job assignments there would not be too taxing and that Spillane’s tent, which
she was borrowing from a friend, would not flood.
As we walked into the diner, Spillane joked nervously that the other cus-
tomers could “spot us as dykes,” a statement based on the belief that people
engage in shared assumptions about visible markers of lesbian identity. She
and I were temporarily relieved, however, by the proximity of three large, and
as they say, dark-skinned, butch-looking black women in black leather jackets
seated at a table near the door. “We are not alone,” I thought to myself. Spillane
urged me to approach the women for an interview because, in her words, they
were “dykes going to Michigan.” Her comment was audible confirmation that
even my longtime feminist associate had lapsed into an essentialist notion of
black lesbians.

arrival and registration

The festival was held on a plat of 650 acres of privately owned land in the woods.
Upon arriving at the site and walking through registration, which included a
brief orientation film, it was time for us to choose our work-shift assignments.
From talking with her friends before the trip, Spillane knew that festival partici-
pants were required to complete three four-hour shifts as part of their Michigan
stay. Various posts were available, but at least one kitchen stint was strongly
encouraged. On the one hand, work shifts are voluntary, but on the other, they
are vital to the functioning of the festival itself and help foster a spirit of com-
munity. At some festivals, attendees can pay a lower registration fee through
work exchange. The rules of the workaday world don’t seem to apply here. The
work-shift leader may be given a list of her volunteer charges, but I’ve never
heard of anyone getting in trouble for not showing up for an assignment. Still,
it seems that most follow through on their commitments. Fulfilling one’s work-
shift assignments is a part of establishing one’s festival cred.
Food preparation and serving occurs under large mega-tarps—the size
of those big-ass tents rich people use for their wedding receptions, but not as
nice. The kitchen, if one could call it that, is a wide expanse of outdoor grounds
divided into areas for food preparation, cooking, serving, and cleanup. Rank-

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and-file festival attendees service these areas. Paid festival “professionals” man
(possibly I’ve used the wrong word here) the large cauldrons of cooking food:
vegetarian chili, soup, tofu and vegetables, and the like. Noting the allure of
ritualized infatuations that permeate festival environments, Spillane opined,
“The pretty girls always get crushes on the paid staff.”

sister (mammy) act

Unlike Spillane, I did not yearn to work in the “kitchen,” no matter how “cute”
the “girls” were. I especially did not want to volunteer in the dining area ap-
portioning food to a bunch of white women. (Is it reasonable to characterize
nine thousand white women as “a bunch”?) The possibility made me think not
only of the numbers of black women, past and present, who earned their living
in the food service industry but also of the career trajectories of two superb
black film actors of the 1930s, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen. Both
were cast in David Selznick’s Gone with the Wind as servants in the O’Hara
household. McDaniel successfully parlayed the portrayal of an insubordinate
mammy into a lucrative career. Less recognized today is McQueen, who, closer
to my body type perhaps, left black audiences laughing and shaking their
heads at her incisive portrayals of black house servants. The opportunity to
staff one of the long conjoined tables in the dining area struck me as a little
“too historical,” and I was not sure I could play the role as well as either of
those brilliant performers. If I could pull off the kitchen stint with style and
the right combination of performative moves, that would be one thing. There
was, however, always the chance that my act would pass unnoticed and that
my role-playing would appear naturalized. How many times, after all, has a
brother been caught holding the door for a line of whites because they think—
granted, on a subliminal level—that he’s the doorman? In the early 1970s my
black piano teacher related that white parents would frequently appear at the
front door of her home and ask her to announce their presence to the “lady
of the house.” From talking with numerous black women at women’s music
festivals, I knew that many brought a similar memory of place and race to
the kitchen work-shift experience. “You don’t look anything like Butterfly
McQueen,” Spillane said. “It’s not about McQueen,” I retorted. “Oh,” Spillane
replied, “I thought it was.”
It’s not that the white women were racists; I was too sophisticated to sub-
scribe to that level of overdetermined analysis. In fact, such a sentiment is no
analysis at all; it’s the starting point for everyday conversation. “And besides,”
Spillane said, “a few of the white women here have black girlfriends.” Okay,
I’m thinking. Is that like saying that white folks aren’t racist because they adopt
Chinese national baby girls? I know it’s controversial, but dang—couldn’t they

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adopt some black kids? I did not give voice to these thoughts, and Spillane
laughed before I had a chance to utter my usual “Don’t get me started.” To
their credit, at least the white women of my generation who I passed at the
festival extended a nod of acknowledgment. The same doesn’t always happen
in civilian life.

racing the imagination

On the evening of our arrival, we pitched Spillane’s four-person tent, the ca-
pacity of which I questioned. I related that at my first women’s music festival,
a white woman attendee who I’ll call Jerry warned me that a “cute gal such as
yourself ” should be careful “what with all the black studs around.” I am not
sure she attended the event first and foremost for the music—but then, many
women do not. “That’s so crude,” Spillane said, reacting to the story I told her.
She added, “But you are cute.” “Yeah, right,” I said. Though I was struck by the
depth of Jerry’s racialized imagination packaged in a well-meaning wrap, I do
not mean to conjure her as a working-class fall guy for her silenced middle-class
counterparts. Rather, I found Jerry’s remark a disturbing, but perhaps also il-
luminating, peephole into some consumer perceptions of music, embodiment,
and sexual identity.
This reminds me how broad the scope of this book project was in the first
place. As my heart raced and my palms began to sweat, I resolved that next
time I would narrow it down. How does one cover 650 acres in one week?
What guarantees that by attending one event I won’t miss another one of com-
parable value? These questions were symptomatic that I was in the middle of
a breakdown—what Gayatri Spivak called “cognitive failure,” or that moment
when a project is faced by its own impossibility.15 An exaggeration? Perhaps,
but things were only going to get worse.
What about incidents I had only heard about but hadn’t experienced—the
alleged brothel set up for the festival’s paid staff in the weeks leading up to the
festival, for example? What operations of race were at play there? According
to women I talked with, none of whom were black, the brothel event sparked
controversy along the following lines. First, it was open only to those women
categorized as festival workers, and not to festigoers in general. Second, it in-
spired concerns about the enactment of sadomasochism only in the brothel
area. It’s ironic that if the brothel had been situated in a heterosexual context,
the nuances of its value might have been missed. The controversy revealed
long-standing tensions in lesbian feminist communities between proponents
of prostitution and/or sadomasochism between consenting adults, activists’
concern with domestic violence in lesbian relationships or households, and
other perspectives.

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stratification in utopia

The Michigan festival is a great communal experiment. Everyone eats the same
food, and although it is apportioned buffet style, it is not cafeteria style: there
are set menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. As the event is designed to be
self-contained, it would be almost inconceivable for one to go off-land in search
of kung pao chicken or a hamburger. Even if you could leave to find food, our
experience driving down the road suggests that you might not feel comfortable
doing so. After all, it’s west-central Michigan, not the Bronx.
The only vendors at Michigan are the craftswomen in the festival market-
place, stretches of land devoted to the selling of lesbian- and feminist-inspired
art and work by artisans. The store set up by the festival sells camping-related
supplies (batteries, rain gear, personal hygiene products, candy), but festigoers
can bring in supplemental food and other items,
Even in paradise, everyone is not equal. Musicians may have specific re-
quests that the performer care staff can accommodate: special water; private
accommodations in a recreational vehicle, tent, or two-star hotel room; or an
extra piece of chicken on meat night. (The latter is no unsubstantiated conspiracy
theory, although most of those are true, too.) When musicians aren’t giving
workshops or performing, they are seldom visible elsewhere on the land. But,
then, how would one find them in crowds of Michigan’s magnitude? My guess
is that you can’t be a star 24/7—not even in the promised land.

breasts and more breasts

Michigan facilitates one of the largest aggregates of women’s breasts in the
world: boobs of all sizes, shapes, nationalities, and colors attached to bodies
and minds of varied physical and political dimensions. There are indicators of
the failed pink ribbon campaign: some breasts have been surgically removed.
Others are enhanced, a few (about two thousand) stand at attention, most droop
with pride. It’s this wide expanse of bare-breasted women jamming or dancing
together that is described in the literature as “nudity.” In reality, it’s that folks
are topless; a much smaller number of women go bottomless, too.
The circumstances under which toplessness en masse occurs are interesting
to observe. The large aggregates of boobs seem to occur spontaneously and are
often spurred on or accompanied by music—say, an informal jam session begun
by four or five (white) women playing djembe drums or congas. The combination
of the August heat, the euphoria of a predominantly lesbian gathering outdoors,
and a “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” attitude inspires some women
to de-shirt ceremoniously, with a striptease flair. A few women look reluctant
to disrobe. As though coerced by the will of the crowd, they also end up taking
off their shirts. This is a reminder, as my mother always said, to wear clean un-

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derwear, and not just in case that car accident happens to you. The spontaneous
combustion or performance of the crowd does not extend to evening concerts,
where a greater sense of formality reigns. In the evening it’s generally cooler,
and festigoers wear clothes—sometimes lots of them in an effort to stay warm.
At the concerts, whether held on the day stage (lesser status) or the evening stage
(highest status), there is also a tacit recognition that the professionals provide the
entertainment so that the audience does not have to.
At one point, Spillane hoped that her favorite musicians would go topless on
stage. Outside of a white butch comedian, however, I had never seen one of the
professional musicians—white, Latina, or black—go nude or disrobe to briefs
and brassiere during a performance. To answer the inevitable question, yes, I
have seen black women at Michigan, in a dancing crowd, enact the dramatic
core of Sojourner Truth’s reported speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention in
Akron, Ohio, and bare their breasts.16 Alternatively, they might go topless in
their campsite neighborhoods. If ever asked at a McCarthy-style Senate hearing,
however, I can honestly say, “I am not now nor have I ever have been coerced
by a crowd to de-shirt, nor have I chosen to do so.” Simply put, going topless
was never the way I enacted my feminist identity. That wasn’t the only reason,
however. I also had, as historian Mary Frances Berry might say, a long memory
of crowd behavior gone badly, whether at a civil rights march or at an ostensibly
peaceable demonstration. I could neither trust crowd behavior nor predict it
with certainty.

the crush

Working around food makes me hungry. At Michigan, the predominantly volun-
teer kitchen staff serves meals for five thousand or more. By kitchen staff I refer
not to the professionals paid by the festival, but rather to the supervisory person-
nel who provide instruction during the orientation sessions (that is, proper cut-
ting of broccoli, efficient corn-husking, pan-scrubbing procedures). Competence
in the kitchen, traditionally the domain of women, is highly regarded, especially
by festival attendees, many of whom are participants in or spectators of outdoor
mass meal production for the first time. After our breakfast of granola and yo-
gurt the next morning—I know you know the joke: granola is the white lesbian
national food, whatever—anyway, after breakfast the orientation team of which
I was a member received corn-husking instruction from a tall, lithe, butchlike,
levelheaded blonde. She had an attractive and appealing yet distant and unat-
tainable look, similar to that of the lesbian-appropriated heroine of the television
adventure series Xena: Warrior Princess.17 I found myself getting a crush on a
staff member, just like so many others. The uncompensated physical labor of my
African American ancestors notwithstanding, I remember thinking that under
our instructor’s supervision, I could husk corn for the rest of my life.

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pressures are rising

After my work shift, I wandered the grounds trying to gain my bearings, looking
as though I knew where I was going and that it was my intention to be there.
After lunch I washed my dishes (those nonbreakable camping sets work best)
in the dishwashing trough—the kind of watering system you find on Texas
ranches for horses. I was glad to have brought the biodegradable soap. Privately,
I was already craving a Dove bar, a designer ice cream treat I don’t even buy at
home, but then again, there was a lot of stress. How was I going to get to the
Women of Color tent, meet up with a potential interviewee I met briefly last
night, see if it would be possible to visit activists protesting the women-born
women admission policy outside the festival proper, and get a psychic reading
at the Village Marketplace? For five dollars I could ask Lady Abundantia, self-
named after a minor Roman goddess of good fortune and prosperity, if I would
finish this book or not. Everyone knows that African American women comprise
the highest percentage of American consumers who purchase the services of
psychics, fortune tellers, tarot card readers, and crystal-ball seers.18 Holding
out hope against a sociological literature that suggests otherwise, black women
collectively seem to believe that there is promise at the end of the rainbow, ap-
pearances notwithstanding.

doing research

What the fortune teller said is private. Afterward, I retrieved the clipboard and
pen from my backpack; it was time to begin my interviews with black festigoers.
After establishing a bit of rapport, I would ask the interviewee to tell me her
favorite black women-identified musicians so that we could talk about them.
“Women-identified” is the name proponents eventually used to refer to the
genre; just one reason is that the term women’s music seemed to invoke white,
middle-class norms and inspired raised eyebrows. Responses I received initially
included mainstream artists such as Janet Jackson and Tina Turner. “Oh, no,” I
said to Spillane later. “The women are giving me the wrong answers.” Although
we went on to have interesting exchanges, I had really wanted festigoers to talk
about artists associated with the women’s music circuit. “Maybe you should
change your research design and write a book on Tina Turner,” Spillane said, ref-
erencing the rock star we had loved since the days when Ike was a nice guy.19

imagine my surprise

Imagine my surprise—that was also the name of my favorite Holly Near song—
when Spillane and another woman, blonde and “well-kept for her age,” trudged
in my direction.20 The searing heat would make anybody wilt. Though she was
fit, Spillane looked beat; her white companion, on the other hand, chugged

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away as though powered by an Everready battery. “Kathy wanted to meet you,”
Spillane said. “Oh,” I replied, “great, I’m Eileen,” and extended my hand. “It’s
good to meet you,” said Kathy. Her handshake was limp, like those of some of
the undergraduate women I now teach. “Cindy said I could ask a few questions
about what it’s like for you as a straight woman at the festival. I’m straight, too,
and it’s soooooo different being here.” “Oh, no,” I thought, “I hope she gets to the
ten o’clock workshop titled ‘Heterosexual and Bisexual Support.’ Spillane better
not plan to bring me stray straight white women throughout our stay here.”
I asked the visitor how she was finding the festival—not that I was inter-
ested, but she was Spillane’s guest. “Everyone is pretty nice . . . I’m here with a
couple girls who tell me that at the concert tonight the emcee will undoubtedly
ask the straight women to stand so that everyone can acknowledge them. That’s
so cool.” Spillane, who had been wiping the dirt from her hiking boots, raised
her head, smirking under her Jane Deere baseball cap. It seemed that Kathy’s
friends had deliberately fed her misinformation concerning the benign nature
of that “welcome,” and Spillane knew it. Public humiliation via the punch
line is a more accurate description of the event that would ensue. “Actually,” I
said, “I suggest that you don’t raise your hand—or stand up, for that matter.”
“Why not?” Kathy asked. All of a sudden, Spillane rushed away as though she
had to catch the last train out of Manhattan, leaving me alone to explain to her
friend that her volunteer outing in the concert context would set her up to be
humiliated by the comedienne, who routinely made a joke at the expense of
straight women.

no shades of gray

At a concert held on the day stage the next afternoon, Spillane and I met some
new festival friends, one white and three black lesbians, the latter of whom
were an engineer, a firefighter, and a naval officer. I learned that only two of
them had known each other before the festival. They were fit, fine—like brown
sugar that wouldn’t melt—in a word, cute. The engineer mentioned the cost of
traveling to the festival: “Michigan is expensive. Every year you spend a couple
hundred bucks on the ticket . . . then about eight hundred dollars to get here
and be comfortable.” The naval officer from Virginia asked if I were a “porcelain
girl.” She continued, “I just mean, do you like to camp? You either like to camp
or you don’t.” Her question about my camping affinities—one that left no room
for a middle ground—sparked the thought that I had met few, if any, black fes-
tigoers, or musicians for that matter, who identified as bisexual. Sure, a good
portion of women had been attached to men at some point in their lives—their
children were testimony to that—but no one intimated that such women were
bisexual rather than lesbian.21 The naval officer continued, “You either are the
type who brings your TV and porcelain dishes to Michigan, or you rough it like

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the rest of us.” I thought, “Geez, is there no space in between? I hate to camp,
but I don’t have any of the fineries advertised in upscale camping magazines.”
For the naval officer, there was no room for ambivalence. I excused myself.

language matters

I found the PortaJane—but so had two hundred others. Lines moved pretty
fast. The festival lexicon as we know it is a legacy of 1970s cultural feminism,
when language was used as a tool to raise consciousness.22 For feminist and
lesbian participants in the women-identified music network, for example, the
respelling of “women” as “womyn” or “wimmin” (omitting the root “man”)
was a marker of sexuality as well as of gender. I say “was” because people seem
to apply the spellings with a greater sense of irony now. Maybe it’s a sign that
time is passing.

gender flow/race flow

Spillane was pleased with her work-shift assignments. After careful delibera-
tions, she opted for three shifts: one in the kitchen, one that could employ her
skills and experience as an antiracism trainer and activist, and one in security.
Security detail included various functions, some pragmatic, such as parking,
traffic flow management, and tending to emergencies, and others that were
more symbolic. Security team personnel helped regulate and monitor the flow
of gendered bodies onto the festival grounds, referred to by participants wist-
fully as “the land.”23 One of their duties was to enforce the festival’s policy of
admitting women-born women only, the effect of which meant that not only
were men (and boys over age eleven) barred from the festival but also those who
identified as male-to-female transgenderists.
The plethora of references to “the land,” the multicolored dream-catchers
on display at the festival marketplace, the burning of herbs, and an “essen-
tialist vision of women’s intrinsic connection to the earth,” proves, as Philip
Deloria observes, that anyone can “play Indian,” to which I add, feminist or
not.24 Over the years, Native American festival attendees—not those whose
heritage includes black, Scottish, Irish, and Cherokee, but women who identify
as Indian 24/7—have worked to raise festival consciousness in regard to their
inappropriateness of “Indian play” by non-Indian Americans. Something tells
me they need to work harder.
Following our exchange about the Michigan admittance policy, Spillane
asked me to share instances of exclusion women of color have experienced. I
immediately thought of the Women of Color tent. Founded by Amoja Three
Rivers, the Women of Color tent was one of the large networking tents spon-
sored by the festival.25 For many years, Three Rivers, Blanche Jackson, and

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others advocated for a greater voice for black, Latina, Asian American, and
Native American women at the music event. Participants describe being drawn
to the tent because of the opportunities it provides to meet with other women
of color. Moreover, it gives them a physical and discursive space that is sepa-
rate from the madding crowds of white women. According to the African
American women I interviewed, although festivals are generally thought to
be lesbian-friendly places of recreation, women of color often experience what
one black woman described as “white overload.” Black women therefore may
seek refuge from whites for a while. It is ironic that the type of white overload
that black women and other women of color might experience at women’s
music festivals may in fact mirror their experiences at their workplaces or,
possibly, in their neighborhoods. I made a note to ask someone about this.
Black women related incidents in which the politics of skin color were
played out in the Women of Color tent a few years earlier. The ethnic/political
allegiance of lighter-skinned women was questioned by women of darker hues.
“That’s deep,” Spillane said. Next, I told her about an incident I had observed
firsthand: an evidently white mother stood near the open-sided Women of Color
tent, providing visual supervision for her mixed-heritage (biracial) daughter,
who was participating in a drumming workshop for women of color. It did not
take a mother to realize the poignancy of the moment. “Wow, this race s——t
is f——d up,” Spillane said. “I know,” I replied, “I know.”

white looks

Spillane learned that over the years, many white women have yearned for their
own space at the festival, similar to that occupied by the Women of Color tent.
“But the whole festival is white!” I said. In response, the White Women’s Patio
was accepted as a programmed event at the festival.26 The Patio itself consisted
of several chairs in a designated area of grass and dirt several hundred feet from
the Women of Color tent. That year, the Patio sponsored antiracism workshops,
in which activists worked with women on feelings of entitlement that inspired
them—ironically, given the ratio of whites to nonwhites at the event—to yearn
for a white-identified space comparable to that of the Women of Color tent. The
Patio staff also worked as patrollers, encouraging traffic flow around the Women
of Color tent, as visual surveillance by white curiosity seekers was frequently
reported by those inside. Having experienced this type of visual surveillance at
the festival as well as in public venues off-land, I remarked to Spillane that things
were “better this year in part, because of the Patio’s efforts.” We laughed over
the event’s appellation and were smug in our recognition that Patio participants
would be credited for their efforts in diverting the hard and steady gazes of white
festival attendees from the Women of Color tent.

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to be real

It surprised me that there were not more women of color at the Women of
Color tent when I went there to hang out in the afternoons. On the positive side,
fewer women at the tent gave me more time to spend with each person who
was willing to fill out my survey. The questionnaire was my way of getting to
know people so that we could talk more in depth at a later time. Most everyone,
it seemed, assumed I was lesbian. In the festival environment, white women
gave me a metaphorical lesbian pass; if black women didn’t extend to me the
same benefit of the doubt, they never let on.

appropriating africa

Toward the end of the third day, it seemed as though I had walked for miles.
In the late afternoon, I rested near the area reserved for stacks of watermelons.
That simple gesture struck me also as historical, and I was awash in self-con-
sciousness. Momentarily, I observed a trio of black festigoers begin to play a
shekere, cowbell, and calabash—instruments often considered to be African—in
interlocking patterns. Clearly, they were enjoying the interaction. Soon after-
ward, two white women playing African instruments joined them, and before
long, many more white women joined the informal jam session. Some time
passed, and eventually the three black women left the group. The next day, in
the Women of Color tent, I overheard one of them talking about how the white
women always take over. Another woman voiced a version of this sentiment in
expressing her regret about missing a drumming workshop with Ubaka Hill,
ostensibly, she suggested, because of its enormous popularity with white festival
participants. Her question, “How come the white women get Ubaka and we
don’t?” reverberated in my consciousness throughout the festival. Later I learned
that it was precisely the sense of exclusion festigoers described that prompted
festival producers and the Women of Color series to schedule drumming work-
shops for women of color only. The incident revealed that group lessons with
Ubaka Hill, a musician whom many festigoers, black and white, considered a
drumming goddess, was also one of our civil rights.

getting ready for the concert

After dinner we dashed to the tent for a quick nap before the evening’s show.
Spillane was lying on her Snugpak mummy sleeping bag, a bag that supposedly
could withstand temperatures of five degrees Fahrenheit. (My ultralight bag didn’t
have a name; I got it on sale at a local discounter.) Lying on her back, Spillane was
absorbed in the festival program booklet, already so wrinkled it looked as though it
wouldn’t last the week. “Anybody black playing tonight?” I asked. Spillane shook
her head. “You know they save the best ’til last,” she said. What she meant was

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that the veteran black musicians would perform later in the week. I looked for
a clean pair of socks; Spillane kept reading. Every once in a while, we broke the
silence and talked about how we had slayed the dragon and survived for another
day. To hear us tell it, you would have thought we had climbed Mount Everest.
When we awoke ninety minutes later, we were almost late. Grabbing our blankets,
insect repellant, and folding chairs, Spillane wondered whether she should go
with the lavender or pink jacket. “Choose one,” I said, and off we went to enjoy
an evening of music and comedy with six thousand others.

lights out

We returned to the campsite on foot rather than wait in line for a truck. As we
stuffed ourselves into our sleeping bags, Spillane reflected on our experiences
leading up to our arrival. “I hope I meet somebody,” Spillane said. “You’ll always
have me, just in case you don’t,” I replied. She continued, as though my words
did not register. “Remember that diner we went to?” I nodded affirmatively,
but really, I was dead tired. “You gotta admit they [the women in the diner]
looked a lot like Bessie Smith,” she said, referring to a narrative, frequently
circulated in women-identified music spheres (by white women), about the
popular black vaudeville blues singer and reports of her lesbian (but, signifi-
cantly, not bisexual) identity. I was too exhausted to explore racialized elements
of thought and feeling, identity politics and music. I squeezed her hand, said
that we would “process” the issue in the morning, and rolled over.

Unpacking My Bags at This Location

To a certain extent, this book engages in the very project of processing that I
promised Spillane we would get to the next morning—though what I aim to
theorize is a much wider range of issues that emanate from black women’s
participation in the women’s music festival scene. The diary is singular in the
women’s music festival literature in that it privileges the perspective of a black
festigoer as opposed to that of a musician or white festival attendee. In fact, this
book’s underlying theme derives from an understanding I gleaned from black
festigoers in the early years of my research: according to some black women
I interviewed—a triangle that was half black, indicating black racial identity,
and half lavender, indexing lesbian collectivity—was symbolic of their identities
as black lesbians. Lisa Powell, an attorney and black activist I met at the now-
defunct West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival (California), was one
of the first festigoers to voice this formulation aloud. Powell shared her plans to
reinvigorate with music a weekend retreat for the group she cofounded in 1990,
United Lesbians of African Heritage (ULOAH).27 Speaking of “sisters [black

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women] who don’t pass” but who have not “assimilated into lesbian culture,”
Powell said, “I have to encourage them to like black and lavender.”
Black women said that the colors of black and lavender spoke to black
women’s experiences “more loudly” than did those of the rainbow flag, the
multicolored banner designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978 and adopted as the sym-
bol of the gay and lesbian nation.28 A critique of the queer nation’s discourses
of inclusion—and the skills in semiotics necessary to read the indicators of
citizenship—emerges from my interviews. The firefighter I interviewed at the
MWMF put it this way: “How come there is no black in the rainbow flag?” This
statement alone was worth the price of the ticket. Who knows whether she had
taken courses in African American history as part of her college degree? Indeed, I
do not know that she had a degree, but in her critique, levied as a question, there
were echoes of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech before the Credential Committee
of the 1964 Democratic Convention held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The civil
rights leader and former sharecropper is remembered for her powerful entreaty
that the Mississippi delegation seating be opened to include blacks. Hamer’s
address, punctuated with the phrase “I question America,” was a scathing indict-
ment of the failures of participatory democracy.29 As black political philosopher
Joy James observes, African American attachments to historical figures such as
Hamer and Emma Lou Baker have deep political and emotional resonance and
rootedness.30 I heard the firefighter say all of that.
In the chapters that follow, I attempt to unpack my interactions with women
at festivals I attended and interpret them alongside interviews and other research
that I conducted over a number of years.31 In its tendency to eschew conven-
tional distinctions between musicians and consumers, this book contributes
to discussions carried on by those who are fascinated by the complete range of
black women’s “musicking,” a term coined by ethnomusicologist Christopher
Small to refer to everything and everybody in the music environment.32 In light
of that understanding, now commonplace in ethnomusicology, I draw attention
to the aesthetics of women’s music and intervene in the politics of representa-
tion of those same systems. While this book might knock on the door of leisure
studies, I do not hold out hope for that, outside of the literature on tourism. By
and large, studies of African American leisure attempt to correlate and quantify
risk factors, such as heart disease, with certain leisure activities, such as bass
fishing.33 The women whose participation facilitated the completion of this book
experience a different type of risk.
One of the goals of this book is to connect the black pathways in women’s
music to larger processes of African American life in terms of music and com-
munity membership. In shedding light on salient issues, I take the discursive
liberty of making festivals the center of a much larger world. Throughout this
book, I refer to women’s music festival sites as metropoles—a redeployment of

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a term some postcolonial scholars use as a gloss for the urban centers to which
they migrate from their native countries.34 I also borrow from U.S. voter theory
when I propose that gay and lesbian cultural geographies and examinations of
African American musical soundscapes be redistricted so as to inspire greater
representation of black gay and lesbian cultural and social life. Both black music
studies and gay and lesbian studies can benefit from a centripetal force of such
magnitude that previously marginalized or spectacularized voices are catapulted
to the epicenter of theory and analysis. This effort entails decentering not just
whiteness but also received ways of thinking about women’s music culture, the
workings of race, and, as numerous observers contend, notions of citizenship
in overlapping and competing communities.35

To many living in predominantly Latino or African American communi-
ties, the suggestion of redistricting is tantamount to the issuance of fighting
words. I draw on the notion of “fighting words” articulated by both philosopher
Judith Butler and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins as the conceptual bridge to
ameliorate two manifestations of a neglect in scholarship.36 The neglect of black
gay and lesbian life in all aspects of scholarship outside of literature and film is
paralleled by the omission of black women, and women’s music in particular,
from the history and discourse of black cultural production, including music.
The music scene that is the focus of this book is a reminder that not all facets of
African American musical life can be neatly accommodated through a historical
lens or through examinations organized around notions of stylistic develop-
ment. The latter is evident in curricula that suggest that the blues evolved into
polyphonic New Orleans–style jazz, which transitioned into the big band sound,
which morphed into bebop. The latter mode of analysis might make for efficient
pedagogy, but it actually sheds less light on the persistence of musical styles over
different time periods and music making that falls outside of contexts typically
investigated by scholars. The privileging of stylistic development tends to elide
musical influences from unanticipated sources, and it places certain types of
musical hybridity outside the master narrative of black music. These modes of
analyses also render the music making of black women invisible, wherein their
experience of gender is treated as an afterthought.
While it is true that the music of the vaudeville blueswomen of the 1920s
gave voice to a sexual politics that reflected and influenced the lived experience
of working-class black women at the time, it would be wrong to assume that the
musicians of this study are the “daughters,” or, to carry the metaphor of the fam-
ily further, the “granddaughters,” of those earlier musicians. Although inspiring
and useful in building broad arguments, assumptions of the latter are reductive
and belie the numerous influences and differences that distinguish the context
for the emergence of classic blues in the 1920s from that of women’s music in
the 1970s.37 Moreover, metaphors associated with the family prove inadequate

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for unraveling the threads that contribute to black women’s subordination.38
An overemphasis of lines of continuity between the sexual identity politics of
the vaudeville blueswomen and the musicians of this study fails to shed light
on the specificity of factors, musical and political, that account for the presence
of black women collectively in women’s music.
The redistricting I offer in the presentation of this book has been influenced
by postcolonial, African American, and white scholars whose challenges to re-
ceived epistemological frameworks have enabled many to imagine new vistas
in theory and retool old ones. Taking an investigatory road less traveled would
mean that the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival would be decentered in analy-
ses of women’s music culture. To discuss the Michigan festival as though it is
representative of all women’s music (lesbian-identified) festivals underestimates
the significance of those that are regionally based and attract women from more
localized geographical areas. A focus on the Michigan festival to the exclusion of
others deflects attention from sites of all-black women’s lesbian festivals, or all-
Chicana women’s music events, or other women’s music festivals geared toward
different constituencies of lesbian-identified women. As critics have said for more
than three decades, there is no unitary and homogeneous lesbian culture. Even
if women’s music festival purists insisted that newer festivals (such as those
that started in 1995 or later, for instance) needed to demonstrate a political or
cultural connection to the other festivals before they would be officially consid-
ered part of the network, reinscribing a smaller, rather than broader, palette of
lesbian festivals would serve the “women’s community,” if this term has valence
anymore, in ways that run counter to its own goal of inclusivity.

This book is organized by theme rather than by chronology or festival location.
Perhaps sociologist Howard Becker says it best: “The ideas within are not a seam-
less web of logically connected propositions . . . but they are an organic whole.”39
Indeed, the book’s organization underscores that this is not a study of women’s
music but, as Clifford Geertz might have reminded us, is one that has been done
in that context.40 The next chapter, under the guise of “reconnaissance,” offers
a discussion of my research methods and approaches, as well as a look at how
women’s music and black women’s participation in it figures as a vanished sub-
ject. I take care to distinguish the festivals of this book from some other women-
centered events in popular culture because of my belief that greater rather than
less orientation is necessary for the general reader—especially those who are
familiar with the logics of black feminisms that have, in the public sphere, been
commodified, mainstreamed, or de-radicalized, as argued by Joy James.41

The third chapter offers a way of thinking about black women’s involvement
in women’s music in the aftermath of the passing of the golden age. I propose an

28 ch a p t er 1

Hayes_Songs text.indd 28 1/25/10 11:05:21 AM

approach to understanding differences between an early generation of musicians
and audience members and more recent arrivals to the scene. In a section that
might otherwise have been titled “How I Got Over,” first-generation musicians
share their assessments of the women’s music ideal in both sonic and political
terms. Headliners critique and participate in the circulation of nostalgia as they
address the musical underneath or musical aspects of a white cultural feminism.
The fourth chapter maintains this focus on perspective but shifts to consider the
“nappy roots” of women’s music—that is, an American music discourse that is
richly imbricated by uneven exchanges between black and white musical cultures
and rich, intertwining, and contested feminist legacies. This chapter’s exploration
is predicated upon multiple streams of musical and political influence. The point
is that numerous musical traditions have mattered to black women in women’s
music—from soul, pop, and funk of the sort that Spillane and I listened to in the
car on the way to Michigan—to the African-influenced drumming of artists like
Ubaka Hill, the urban folk-infused music of an artist like Tracy Chapman, and
the fusion of many of these traditions in the performances of Sweet Honey in the
Rock. The chapter concludes with the “coming out” stories of several musicians
of the first generation describing how, through involvement in various social and
musical networks, they became involved in women’s music. This section reveals
and is revealing of how these overlapping histories at the local and national levels
are entangled with their own lives and musical careers.
Far from being a project of the past, activism in the women’s music scene
is emphatically a large part of what continues to draw women to festivals and to
make their participation as festigoers and musicians meaningful. The outcome of
these efforts, however, reveals ambivalences and disjunctures. The fifth chapter
considers both the ideals and idealism that continues to animate the women’s
music scene—utopian ideals of community of the sort expressed in the very
creation of a “city on a hill” like the Michigan festival. Some of the fissures in
the women’s music community that persist despite (and in some cases because
of ) these ideals are present as well. I devote particular attention in this chapter
to attempts to promote multiculturalism at women’s music festivals and how
they fall short or fail, as well as to how black women have responded to the open
invitation of festival organizers to join them—meaning white lesbians—often
in the woods.
In chapter six, I dream of a world—an all-black lesbian world, that is—and
explore ramifications of dreams that actually come true. The focus of this chapter
is twofold: a music festival for queer women of color and an all-black lesbian
retreat. Themes include relationships between different political generations
of black lesbians and the familiar trope of returning home. The reconstitution
of the feminist project in a changed social and political context reverberates
in the last three chapters of this study, the first two of which take up issues of

Diary of a Mad Black Woman Festigoer 29

Hayes_Songs text.indd 29 1/25/10 11:05:21 AM

identity politics, feminist activism, and the future of women’s music festivals
through interviews with two groups of women who are largely invisible in the
Michigan diary: a younger cohort of musicians and festival organizers. Chapter
7 weaves a set of interviews with a “next” generation of black women musicians
in which they address how they came into the women’s music scene; their rela-
tionship to an earlier political and musical generation; and their understandings
of feminism, queer identities, blackness, and music. Chapter 8 uses interviews
with women to reveal their roles in supporting festival production, whether as
board members, volunteers, or festival “workers.”
Chapter 9, finally, considers the phenomenon of “drag kinging” (the staged
performance of masculinity) and the decades-long controversy over the Michigan
festival’s exclusion of male-to-female transgenders on the grounds that they are
not “womyn-born womyn.” Here, I interrogate the central role that the Michigan
festival played in the community’s definition of the boundaries of membership,
with special attention to black women musicians’ and festigoers’ views on these
subjects. The events recorded in the diary make clear that sexual identity is
often at least seemingly on display at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival,
with butch- and femme-identified lesbians performing and searching for visible
cues of sexual identities, as Spillane and I anticipated with our “Bunnie” and
“Lambert” personas, and as Spillane reinforced with her statement about the
“dykes going to Michigan.” It is worth asking how such understandings map
onto drag king performances, which make the performance of masculinity (by
women) a spectacle to be enjoyed by festigoers (almost always women, usually
lesbians, and often self-identified feminists), as well as onto the controversy over
Michigan’s now-relaxed admittance policy, which denied the rights of festival
citizenship to male-to-female transgenders.
The book concludes with some final reflections on the contours of the
study and a few words about areas for future research. Although true appen-
dixes are typically held to be tangential to books of this type, the list of artists
that appears in the section titled “Dreamgirls” will be of particular interest
to those who are intimately familiar with this music scene. While the hopes
of some women’s music festival culture veterans might be thwarted by the
lack of pictorial references, I would offer that the latter can be accessed via
musicians’ Web sites. For decades, women’s music festivals discouraged the
taking of photographs or video at festival events, a directive that bears on the
researcher’s ability to offer visual (and aural) ephemera that attest to being
there. Even so, visual images are not transparent vehicles of representation.
Given that this book does not address musicians’ roles in producing such
images, I thought it best not to ignore the rhetorical ambivalence that per-
vades black women’s relationship to visual culture or to reinscribe its practice,
however well-intentioned.42

30 ch a p t er 1

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Songs in Black and Lavender reveals women’s music festivals as sites of
black women’s musicking and theorizing about gender, race, sexual identity,
and other issues that fall broadly under the rubric of politics with a small p. If
this book exhibits a multiple address, it is because it is directed to a readership
comprised of different, and sometimes overlapping, factions of interest. It is
now a widely adopted convention for authors to assert as much. While I do not
wish for otherwise, I admit to having a more specific audience in mind as well. I
write thinking of a young black man in my life, college age, who maintains that
he is “homo-tolerant, but not homo-friendly.” I think of young adult women of
all backgrounds, who, in contrast to the ways their collective political conscious-
ness is represented in the media, seek a way in—to feminism, lesbian cultures,
activism on their own behalf, and, yes, perhaps, to guitar lessons. A black Marxist
scholar friend of mine insists that there is no place for examination of gay and
lesbian cultures in African American studies. As scholar Charles Nero points
out, gay neighborhoods are still white, and, I add, it is worth inquiring what
kinds of political distresses are reflected in segregations of all types.43 I believe
that there is hope for the hopelessly straight kin among us to grasp the signifi-
cance of the issues discussed herein and to go forward in the quest for justice.
These potential readers, known and unbeknownst by me, are members of the
families I choose, and I write with them in mind.44

Recalling the vignette sketched in the diary entry, the hand-sewn flag peeks
out from behind a cabinet in my office. This flag is symbolic of a special journey—
one that has been traveled by more “brave” women than I can acknowledge here.45
This book builds on early touchstones in the continuum of influences along my
path of intellectual and activist engagement with this topic. My intent is not to
contribute to an African American cultural analysis that is overdetermined by an
emphasis on black women’s activism and resistance, even if it is through music.
All too often, black women’s “racial awareness,” as scholar Paula Stewart Brush
calls it, is represented as though, like Topsy, it also “jes’ grew.”46 In the complex
field of politics, resistance is by no means always subversive of power, and so in
all of these matters a more nuanced approach is warranted.
A productive way to think about women’s music is through the lenses of
containment and possibility. The improbability of black women “coming to voice”
through women’s music is as sobering as the potential for doing so is inspiring.47
Through music performance, consumption, and their involvement in women’s
music festivals, predominantly black lesbian musicians and music consumers
enact their affinities with both lesbian (lavender) and African American (black)
communities. Over the years, African American women identifying in various
ways have performed at or attended women’s music festivals. This book argues
that their collective experience in those venues represents a significant moment
in the history of African American thought.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman Festigoer 31

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‘I Will Survive’: Musical Mappings of Queer Social Space in a Disco Anthem

Author(s): Nadine Hubbs

Source: Popular Music , May, 2007, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 2007), pp. 231-244

Published by: Cambridge University Press

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http://www.jstor.com/stable/4500315

Popular Music (2007) Volume 26/2. Copyright ? 2007 Cambridge University Press, pp. 231-244
doi:10.1017/S0261143007001250 Printed in the United Kingdom

‘I Will Survive’: musical

mappings of queer social space
in a disco anthem

NADINE HUBBS

U-M Women’s Studies Program, 2229 Lane Hall, 204 S. State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290, USA
E-mail: nhubbs@umich.edu

Abstract

This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at prime and bursting
1970s dicsos. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of discos multiracial ‘gay’ revellers
and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American
youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago’s
Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, today
a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest
anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol
are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated power
to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of
inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production
instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and
profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of
minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and is
among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.

On 12 July 1979 the Chicago White Sox hosted the Detroit Tigers in a double header at
Comiskey Park. Also scheduled was a promotional event for the Chicago album-
oriented rock (AOR) station WLUP ‘The Loop’, led by a young disc jockey named
Steve Dahl. Against the chant of some 90,000 present – ‘Disco sucks!’ – Dahl towed a
dumpster-load of disco records onto centre field and detonated it. A mob of young
white males stormed the field, torching records and wreaking mayhem. Among the
displays of anti-disco backlash in the late Carter-early Reagan years, including
incarnations of the ‘Disco sucks’ motto as bumper-sticker slogan, punk song,
and tee-shirt inscription, that day’s near-riot in the heartland stands as the most
menacingly emblematic.1

Such a violent reaction must seem impossibly disproportionate to its object, if
that object is taken to be nothing more than a style of popular music. But there was
more at work and at stake than such a surface-bound reading can admit. The cultural
crusaders of Comiskey were defending not just themselves but society from the
encroachment of the racial other, of ‘foreign’ values, and of ‘disco fags’ – symbolised
Hollywood-style in the bodily and dramatic extravagances of John Travolta’s Saturday
Night Fever (1977) protagonist Tony Manero, whose marked ethnicity and Qiana-
swathed chic was counterbalanced by conspicuous whiteness and heterosexuality.2

231

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232 Nadine Hubbs

By now various writers have retrospectively located disco’s origins in DJs spinning
black music at gay Manhattan dance clubs (e.g. Cummings 1975; Tucker 1986; Thomas
1989), and many sources rightly locate both racist and homophobic impetuses in the
anti-disco backlash (e.g. Tucker 1986; EMP 2002). But in 1979 the word homophobic was
not in general circulation.3 And in 1980 Diana Ross could proclaim ‘I’m Coming Out’
against a disco beat without raising mainstream eyebrows or controversy: The song
rose to number five on the pop charts, its double-voiced meaning hidden from all but
a scattering of insiders.4

Thus, in the event, the threats against which the Comiskey Park mob reacted
surely included such ‘faggotries’ as ballroom dancing, fashion consciousness, and
music that used horns, strings and harps.5 Real men ca 1979 found their music at AOR
arena concerts, adhered to a jeans-and-tee-shirt dress code, and by their inept dancing
and off-key singing affirmed the redoubtability of their gender and sexual identities.6
We can only imagine the disco inferno in centre field had many of those guys known
about the real, live faggots, dykes, and others who created and thrilled to disco’s
endless beat.

Phantom attacks: homophobia and the unreal enemy
In the historical scene just sketched I would highlight two points that diverge from
familiar representations. First, I regard disco as a musical, social, and cultural space
with critical African-American, Latino/a, and variously queer involvements. The
customary naming of gay men in this last slot perpetuates an effacement of queer
women in male-centred narrations of ‘gay’ history, and of dance-clubbing queer
persons of other configurations of sex, gender identity, and object choice. Historical
accounts locate disco’s origins in Manhattan clubs whose clientele were African
American and Latino, and gay – meaning: gay men. But we need to extend our
perspective on disco beyond the instant and place of its birth – beyond New York,
beyond that moment ca 1969-1970 and the handful of dance clubs in which DJs first
spun mixes now identifiable as disco or proto-disco. Outside Manhattan, in large,
medium-sized, and small cities across the US, many gay bars and clubs of the era were
gender- and sex-integrated. And their male and female clientele alike often called
themselves ‘gay’ with no thought that the term applied more to one sex than another.
Gay men and lesbians, drag queens and ‘fag hags’ were all part of the 1970s-1980s
disco scene in countless queer locales, whether or not at disco’s New York debut.7

Second, in pointing to the presence of homophobia in the anti-disco backlash, I
expressly am not using ‘homophobia’ as simply equivalent to ‘fear of known homo-
sexual persons’ in the disco world. Certainly this is one meaning I intend to invoke
here. But I would cast a broader definition of ‘homophobia’ so as to capture also the
far greater phenomenon of fear and loathing towards any perceived aura of homo-
sexuality (often figured as gender crossing) in a culture in which knowledge of actual
homosexuals and homosexuality was taboo, avoided and denied. Thus I view disco as
a musical and social phenomenon situated within the overarching twentieth-century
Anglo-American condition of ‘homosexual panic’ theorised by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (1985, pp. 88-9 etc.; 1990, pp. 184-8 esp.).

In Sedgwick’s formulation, the establishment of proper masculine heterosexual
subjectivity simultaneously requires and stigmatises male homosocial bonds, whose
rules of engagement are shifting, arbitrary, and often self-contradictory. Only men
who successfully navigate the brutalities of this double-binding path may claim the

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‘I Will Survive’ 233

privileges of material, power and knowledge that constitute masculine entitlement.
Meanwhile, the threat of the unsuccessful alternative motivates considerable anxiety,
and many violent eruptions. And it motivates a great deal more: In modern patriar-
chy, a cultural system structured by relations of exchange between men, the impera-
tives of male homo/heterosexual definition regulate definition, representation, and
knowledge of every kind, and thus give rise to an ‘epistemology of the closet’.8

Sedgwick’s theory can lend support to my assertion that homophobic reaction to
disco in the 1970s and 1980s was often focused on the mere (attributed) style of
homosexuality: The culture of homosexual panic rendered its actual substance so
taboo as to be irrelevant, if not irreal. Under a regime in which male homosocial
relations are ‘at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds’, as
Sedgwick (1990, pp. 186-7) notes, ‘self-ignorance [is] constitutively enforce[d]’. To
possess knowledge about homosexuality is itself suspicious. Thus, the function of
secrecy in the modern social and sexual economy is ‘not to conceal knowledge, so
much as to conceal knowledge of the knowledge’ (Miller 1988, p. 206). And so, we
shouldn’t be surprised that homophobia in Anglo-American modernity has fre-
quently manifested itself not only in explicit anti-homosexual statements and acts, but
in violent attacks on a homosexuality evoked subliminally, as phantom. This mech-
anism is illustrated vividly throughout Vito Russo’s (1987) analyses of mid-twentieth-
century Hollywood cinema: In one instance after another, implicitly homosexual
relationships and characters are killed off in horrific fashion. But even before their
extinguishment these unfortunate creatures smoulder. What precedes their gruesome
deaths is something less than real life.

In our twenty-first-century present, homophobia is often overt and directed at
queer persons who are granted realness, their actual existence explicitly acknowl-
edged – as the current US battle over gay marriage illustrates. We must therefore
summon a historicising perspective to apprehend the homophobia in Middle Ameri-
ca’s anti-disco furore ca 1979, for homophobia in this context was frequently enacted
through assaults on queerness that simultaneously denied queer existence. This same
perspective can help us understand and appreciate the role of twentieth-century
queer subcultural space, including that of disco: It served not just to provide contact,
safety and acceptance, but crucially to confirm queer persons’ very existence and
intact survival in a world that would make of them, if not monsters, then walking
ghosts, nonentities.9

Transcendence in A-minor: the musical rhetoric of difference in
‘Survive’

The historical context just outlined grounds the analytic frame into which I will place
my consideration of Gloria Gaynor’s disco anthem ‘I Will Survive’. Released in 1978,
the song attained platinum-single status, pinning the No. 1 spot on the pop charts
from 20 January through 25 May 1979 in the weeks leading up to South Chicago’s
anti-disco tumult. But the track enjoyed even greater success in club rotation and
endures still as a queer dance classic. In my reading, ‘Survive’ stands as the archetypal
emblem of disco as a musico-social movement born of and bespeaking a cross-
subcultural mingling in the margins. I hear in the song a rich interplay of musical and
verbal discourses of difference, yielding a pop-cultural trope whose residual signs of
otherness were perceptible in the following ways: (i) they could elude apprehension,
and thus ‘pass’ in mainstream culture, or (ii) they could be apprehended, and so, (a)

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234 Nadine Hubbs

A A A A A

8 -7 6 5 #7

Am Dm G C F BW Esus4 E

//// //// //// //// //// //// //// ////

i iv WVII III WVI ii”7 V4
Figure 1. ‘I Will survive’ (Fekaris-Perren): basic vocal melody over ostinato.

provoke disfavour, fear and loathing, on behalf of the status quo or, alternately, (b)
inspire identification on the basis of experienced marginalisation.

Vis-a-vis this last possibility, (ii)(b): from a marginal subject standpoint, the title
and lyrics of ‘I Will Survive’, particularly given their appearance around the time of
the Comiskey Park fracas, already resonate beyond their narrative surface10 – which
depicts, in the first person, one woman’s experience of romantic abandonment and
eventual hard-won transcendence. Vis-a-vis possibilities (ii)(a) and (b) both: given
music’s mysterious, often subliminal, seemingly inscrutable powers, we might expect
special potency to attach to musical markers of difference – that these would be
potently threatening or potently cathartic, depending on the perceiver.

A host of musical signifiers in ‘Survive’ serve to telegraph, embroider upon, and
reinforce its textual thematics of marginalisation and transcendence. The first of these
to greet the listener is the song’s high-drama opening gambit, which launches with a
sweeping, Liberace-esque piano arpeggio, up and down several octaves of an E
dominant-seven-flat-nine chord. The singer then enters andante and, with quasi-
recitative accompaniment from the rhythm section, presents the song’s essential vocal
melody over the eight-bar A-minor falling-fifths harmonic ostinato (i.e. chord pattern)
that will repeat throughout (see the Figure).”1 In its repetition the ostinato determines
the song’s form – which proceeds gradually by the addition and subsequent sub-
traction of instrumental layers, and so exemplifies pop-rock ‘accumulative form’ (see
Spicer 2004). Rhetorically, the ostinato, in its descending course and minor mode,
evokes the Baroque lament. All these features combine for a mise en scene in which
‘Survive’ musically asserts difference from its first notes and establishes a distinct
conversance with imported and ‘exotic’ musical idioms. With the start of the second
stanza, the slow intro shifts to an upbeat groove, and the sparse recitative-like scoring
is abandoned for a denser mix: the dance track begins.

I mentioned the use of minor mode in ‘Survive’. In concert music, minor is
semantically marked as the ‘sad’ mode and, in relation to the conventionally norma-
tive major, the ‘other’ mode. A shift from minor to major here can powerfully signify
a move from tragedy to transcendence – as exemplified in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’
Symphony, with its journey from C-minor death to Eb-major transcendence. Minor-
mode usage in 1970s album-oriented rock is largely comparable. The minor frequently
arises in slow-tempo tender or tragic love ballads – the Rolling Stones’ ‘Angie’ (No. 1,
1973), for example – and in slow-to-mid-tempo ‘meaning’ songs like Led Zeppelin’s
‘Stairway to Heaven’ (1971) and Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’ (No. 6,1976). But up-tempo,
danceable AOR anthems are typically in major. Examples from 1979 include Cheap
Trick’s ‘I Want You to Want Me’ (No. 7, 1979) and Billboard’s Number One song

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‘I Will Survive’ 235

throughout the latter half of that Comiskey summer, The Knack’s ‘My Sharona’
(arguably in C, though it spends much of its time on a G-blues riff signifying heavy
sexual tension). A list of representative songs from earlier in the decade could include
Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ (No. 12,1976), the Stones’ ‘It’s Only Rock ‘N
Roll’ (No. 16, 1974), and Grand Funk’s ‘We’re an American Band’ (No. 1, 1973), all
characteristic rock anthems in major.

Like Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’, ‘Survive’ begins in the realm of minor-mode
tragedy. The change of tempo at the second stanza corresponds to a shift of tone in the
lyrics and a new direction in the narrative, leaving tragedy behind. The protagonist
has gone from abandonment and misery to Signifyin(g) sass, signalled straightaway
by the line ‘And so you’re back from outer space’ (see below for further discussion of
Signifyin[g] practices). The rest of the song will stay in the up-tempo groove without
ever moving from the minor mode. In thus employing minor, this disco anthem
differs from contemporary rock anthems of comparable upbeat tempo and narrative
tone. Interestingly, disco anthems in general very often used the minor mode, even in
the most celebratory instances, like KC and the Sunshine Band’s ‘Shake Your Booty’
(No. 1, 1976), Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ (No. 36, 1979), and the
Weather Girls’ ‘It’s Raining Men’ (1982). All of these songs deploy a verse-chorus
scheme in which the verses are in minor, and the euphoric choruses emphasise major
sonorities. Minor-ness in ‘Survive’, on the other hand, is unyielding. As such it
extends disco’s preoccupation with minor mode, while offering narrative implica-
tions that the protagonist even in her triumph always carries some mark of her past,
formative tragedy. Overall, the frequent use of minor in upbeat disco anthems
including ‘I Will Survive’ was a marker of difference in relation to contemporary
AOR, and this difference registered syntactically as well as semantically – in the latter
instance, as a difference of affect, of feeling-tone.

Another crucial signifier here is vocalism. In her book Hole in Our Soul, Martha
Bayles (1994, p. 281) writes that Gloria Gaynor cannot sing (an assessment she
elsewhere levels at Jimi Hendrix, among others). Bayles calls Gaynor a ‘panting,
sighing, yelping, moaning amateur’. She may be simply confused in casting Gaynor’s
lot among the ‘Love to Love You’ Babies – that is, with Donna Summer and other
climax queens of disco.12 For in fact Gaynor made no conspicuous entries into what
Bayles calls the ‘orgasmic sound effects’ genre. Still, it seems perfectly logical, and
somewhat telling, that Bayles wouldn’t like her singing: It’s not Aretha’s, Chaka’s, or
even Mariah’s singing, and in songs like ‘I Will Survive’ it undoubtedly stands outside
the vocal traditions of R&B and gospel. Such vocalism has drawn fire from certain
R&B devotees including Bayles and Nelson George, who criticise disco in terms
of its alleged ‘inflectionless vocals’, ‘metronomelike beat’, and cold, passionless,
dehumanised affect (George 1988, p. 154).

Queer jouissance on the ‘borderline’
Shoulder to shoulder with Bayles’s and George’s statements I will place those of
Richard Dyer and John Gill, both writing on queer experiences of disco. In his classic
essay ‘In defence of disco’, Dyer (1979, p. 413) wrote that an “‘escape” from the
confines of popular song into ecstasy is very characteristic of disco’. And Gill (1995,
p. 134) more recently exalted disco-dance music as ‘the one form of music which..,. is
bound up in something that closely resembles Roland Barthes’s notion of jouissance,
that is, rapture, bliss, or transcendence’.

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236 Nadine Hubbs

By constructing a view that embraces both the adulations of Dyer and Gill and
the vitriol of Bayles and George, I find a coherent basis for interpretation of disco
language in ‘I Will Survive’. I have to agree with Bayles (1994, p. 278) that disco
‘leached all the emotion out of the vocals’, at least by the standards of gospel, blues,
and R&B styles, with their expressive pitch bending, melisma, and other vocal
inflections.13 Although many of disco’s most celebrated vocalists – most of whom
were African-American women – came out of these traditions, and although disco’s
musical language is rooted in the fundamentally African-American language of
pop, still it eschews the established rhetoric of emotionalism and expression in
African-American musics.

Bayles and George would end the story here, but the disco jouissance of Dyer and
Gill only begins at this point. Thus in my reading, the affect and passion that find such
brilliant expression in African-American popular idioms are not forsaken in ‘Survive’.
Rather, these are relocated in the music, by means of a troping move that also
transforms the emotional palette. In place of the vocal (or vocally conceived) inflec-
tions and timbral shadings of African-American music, the song’s construction of
sentiment instrumentally invokes timbres and gestures imported from European and
Latin music – specifically that of the cafe, street and carnival. In this regard we hear,
for instance, the Latin percussion in ‘Survive’ and likewise its trumpets and
saxophone, which invoke the bright, broadly vibrating timbre characteristic of both
Gallic torch singer and mariachi brass. The timbres of strings and harp are highbrow
Europeanisms and thus here, as in Motown and Philly Soul, bespeak upward
mobility, while the strings’ particular idiom in ‘Survive’ further infuses them with a
tragic vernacular elegance redolent of cabaret and tango.

The affective sensibility that issues from this semiotic juncture is distinctly
foreign. Its musical symbols mark it as Latin-Mediterranean and Catholic, but it’s the
Catholicism not so much of the Vatican as of Mardi Gras, less Sunday morning than
Saturday night: the Catholicism not of the Church but of the streets, the little people.
Musical affect here occupies the marked category of the sentimental – a sentimentality
further marked by virtue of its explicitly foreign flavour: adult, worldly and sensual,
as compared with the adolescent, naive, and sexually neurotic rock of the time;
indulgent, in-your-face and theatrical, compared with the stoical-else-childlike
Protestant sentimentality that’s channelled through Disney to mainstream America.
The distinctive emotionalism emergent from this minor-mode trope is that of a frank
sentimentality at once tragic and richly celebratory, earthy and embodied, and ulti-
mately triumphant, transcendent – but on a human, not monumental, scale: That is,
triumph is tethered to a vulnerable humility and candid reckoning of la condition
humaine.14

Analysis of this musical trope in ‘Survive’ can suggest some of the ways in which
disco might have served the identification needs of its amalgamated audience in the
margins, and even become a vehicle for their rapture. Unpacking the language of
‘Survive’ reveals it as a commingling of high and low, art and life, that is neither one
nor another of these: Like Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian carnival it ‘belongs to the borderline
between art and life’ – though while it lasts ‘there is no other life outside it’ (Bakhtin
1984, p. 7). The affective and semantic richness arising from such commingling
distinguishes disco in its musical and other dimensions, as some commentators have
apprehended. Ken Tucker, for example, amidst other critics’ mutually parroting
characterisations of disco as emotionally flat and essentially superficial, has
listened perceptively to songs and uncovered possibilities for coded meaning within

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‘I Will Survive’ 237

ostensibly shallow surfaces. In the flat, emotionless voices of Chic in ‘Good Times’ and
their endless repetition of the song’s titular opening line, Tucker (1986, p. 531)
recognises ‘an achingly ironic anthem for the recession 1970s’. He hears the song, in
other words, in an integrated domain of musical form, vocalism and lyrics, as a
double-voiced discourse.

Comparably, various phrases throughout the lyrics of ‘Survive’ are readable as
figures of Signifyin(g), a style-focused, troping, double-voiced mode of discourse that
juxtaposes playful performativity and serious intent, and has functioned centrally in
African-American discursive culture (Gates 1998, pp. 44-124). In noting the Signify-
in(g) flavour in ‘Survive’ we might underline (i) its congruity with both the African-
American involvements in disco production and reception, and the troping and
multivalence I read in other, musical dimensions of ‘Survive’; and (ii) queer culture’s
long, admiring engagement with African-American Signifyin(g) and testifyin’ speech,
which has fundamentally influenced camp expressive codes. Like Signifyin(g), camp
speech is double voiced and trafficks in ambiguity, affording a surface meaning to
hostile outsiders and another, deeper meaning to attuned allies. Camp speech and
sensibility are distinguished, too, by piquant juxtaposition in the realms of style and
intention, characteristically through a Wildean convergence of grave seriousness
and transparent artifice.

In ‘Survive’, at the second stanza, Gaynor sings, ‘So you’re back from outer
space / I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face’; and in the
sixth stanza, ‘You see me – somebody new / I’m not that chained-up little person still
in love with you’. These lyrics foreground emotional ambiguity, juxtaposed tragedy
and flippancy, and pungent irony, all of which resonate simultaneously with gay
camp and African-American Signifyin(g). These subcultural expressive codes are also
evoked by the heroine’s insistent engagement with earthbound, trivial tangibles
(‘I shoulda changed that stupid lock, I shoulda made you leave your key’) in the face
of her existential crisis (‘At first I was afraid, I was petrified / Kept thinkin’ I could
never live without you by my side’).

A similarly shared sensibility is readable in disco’s thematics of sophistication
– a sophistication peculiarly inflected by a sort of gritty candour. This species of
sophistication emanated from the racial and sexual margins, and was little repre-
sented in mainstream culture. Its representation in disco arose from the resourceful
troping of musical emblems of high Europeanism with emblems of the vernacular:
European, Latin, and African American – though the impulse seems less to access
the sophistication of privilege and entitlement than to assert a sophistication ‘of
one’s own’, of difference.15 A bolder, more defiant assertion of difference in
‘Survive’ may be read in the song’s lyrics, at the pivotal line, ‘Oh, as long as I know
how to love I know I’ll stay alive’. In this radically trans-valuative statement, the
(anti-) heroine, in direct address to her once-oppressor, locates the condition for her
survival in her ability to love – thus in the very ability (or, vulnerability) that had
brought her to the brink of disaster. Having cast off her chains she does not ascend
but rather, digs more deeply into the patchy terrain of flesh-and-blood human
existence.

This story is not that of the winners and masters of the world: Indeed, her
narrative and its emphases reveal our protagonist as a sort of anti-Bill Gates, or
anti-Trump. One classic interpretive strategy would be to explain the song’s pivotal
statement, in connection with the narrator’s gender, in the familiar terms of Freudian
‘female masochism’, and thereby add it to the annals of status-quo misogynist

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238 Nadine Hubbs

knowledge. And perhaps that is how some listeners have interpreted ‘Survive’; we
know that many people found much to despise in this music. But the song’s multi-
dimensional assertion of difference militates against its relegation to the status quo.
Moreover, its singer, as a ‘disco queen’, occupied a special subject position, possessing
polygendrous, polyracial powers of voice. Iain Chambers (1985, p. 246, n. 8) alludes
to this: ‘Doubly emarginated by sex and race’, he writes, ‘the more “extreme”
accounts of sexual and social margins were widely deemed – by both white and black
audiences – to be the “natural” property of black women singers’.

I read the singer’s statement – of openness to life and love despite her
suffering – as trans-valuative rather than normative, and as occupying a subject
position demarcated not by feminine gender, but by its cognate, otherness, embrac-
ing here various racial and sexual others of both genders. I further hear this textual
message of asserted difference and resilience echoed musically in the song’s uncon-
ventional use of mode. ‘Survive’ modally constructs transcendence in the margins
of ‘minor-ity’, and so here too, musically as narratively, reverses the norms of
triumph and tragedy. Difference in ‘Survive’, as I have argued, is also conveyed
musically by the use of classical and other ‘exotic’ style markers; relatively un-
inflected vocalism; and salient (non-rock) instrumentals, which carry much of the
expressive weight in this track and invoke (by timbre and idiom) a ‘foreign’,
carnivalesque sentimentality. The song’s lyrics and narrative further link with dif-
ference and marginality in evoking African-American and queer discursive styles;
non-hegemonic, un-masterful values; and a distinctly mortal, non-epic transcend-
ence. Here, in such freighted, tropic intersections of textual and musical discourses,
we might well perceive the possibility of queer rapture and bliss, of Barthesian
jouissance in a disco song.

And indeed, the disco revellers in Andrew Holleran’s 1978 novel Dancer from the
Dance live for the next song that will leave them ‘on the dance floor with heads back,
eyes nearly closed, in the ecstasy of saints receiving the stigmata’. Some, on drugs,
‘enter the discotheque with the radiant faces of the Magi coming to the Christ child’
(Holleran 1978, pp. 38, 115). For Holleran’s gay discotheque is a site of consecration,
and his central characters Malone and Sutherland are, ultimately, martyrs to its cause:
the pursuit of male beauty and the ecstatic pleasures of dancing. Throughout the
novel these pursuits are figured (albeit amidst a gay society depicted as ethnically
and religiously diverse) in terms of a Catholic religiosity, which also grounds a
sacralisation of the abject:

What can you say about a success? Nothing! But the failures – that tiny subspecies of homo-
sexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff! That fascinates
me. The fags who consider themselves worthless because they are queer, and who fall into
degradation and sordidness! It was those Christ befriended, not the assholes in the ad agencies
uptown who go to St. Kitts in February!16 (Holleran 1978, p. 18)

In passages like this one Holleran articulates a particular camp thematics – a senti-
mentalised trans-valuation of failure and success that resonates sympathetically with
the central, defiantly ‘un-masterful’ message of ‘I Will Survive’ (in what I have
labelled the song’s pivotal line). In doing so he also expresses a Catholicist preoccu-
pation that surfaces frequently in camp imagery and, I have argued, imbues the
musical rhetoric of ‘Survive’. 17

Holleran’s queer disco scene further makes vivid, in visual and social realms, the
carnivalesque note that I remark in the music of ‘Survive’. His 1970s discotheque is
painted in expressly carnivalesque tones, and parallels in multiple dimensions the

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‘I Will Survive’ 239

Medieval-Renaissance European carnival anatomised by Bakhtin (1984, p. 10). This
latter celebrated in chaotic, colourful and sensuous fashion a ‘temporary liberation
from the prevailing truth and from the established order … [and] suspension of all
hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’. It is thus indistinguishable
from Holleran’s Manhattan gay disco:

They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other’s desire, in a strange democracy whose
only ticket of admission was physical beauty – and not even that sometimes. All else was strictly
classless. … It was a democracy such as the world … never permits, but which flourished in the
little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building on West Thirty-third Street, because its
central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love.

What a carnival of people. (Holleran 1978, pp. 40-1)

We might note that this gay disco is further indistinguishable from the gay nightclub
of pre-disco and pre-Stonewall times. Indeed, queer bars and clubs had long served to
reproduce the carnival’s collapsings and reversals of social norms, hierarchies and
castes. I would suggest that one factor in disco’s extraordinary power over queer
listeners was its abstract encoding of the gay bar’s carnivalesque ecstasies, including
high-low collapsings, into musical language – whose decoding (however uncon-
scious) by its audience was cued by disco’s concrete invocation of musical emblems of
the carnival via Latin-Mediterranean popular idioms.

Survival signs
Since its original appearance, the polysemic richness and queer resonances readable
in ‘Survive’ have helped to inspire multiple applications and reincarnations of the
song. Its textual message of defiant and enduring presence was already well tailored
to queer identification needs, but this message and the song’s titular statement took on
even deeper meaning with the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. As Wayne
Studer (1994, p. 269) notes, ‘It’s no accident that this Number One smash… became an
anthem for the gay community in 1979 and remained so for several years thereafter.
Given all that’s happened since then, it resonated more than ever’. Thus, from the
1980s until now Gloria Gaynor’s rendition has survived as a gay anthem. It has also
inspired cover versions, often non-disco and non-queer-attuned in style, by Billie Jo
Spears (country, 1979), Chantay Savage (house/dance, 1995), Diana Ross (dance,
1995), Cake (alternative rock, 1996), and others.

But the paradigmatic status of ‘I Will Survive’ as gay anthem is also vividly
illustrated in a pair of discursive and performative sites in which the song does not
appear literally. Close listening reveals the presence of ‘Survive’ as musical and
text-thematic basis for highly queer-inflected singles by two of the most queer-
identified acts in popular music: Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s a Sin’ (No. 9, 1987) and Erasure’s
‘Love to Hate You’ (1991). Each song uses ‘Survive”s falling-fifths harmonic ostinato
as its own harmonic structure and sets this to an upbeat dance groove. Erasure also
cops the distinctive string riff from ‘Survive’, unveiling it as the climactic foreground
event (not mere counter-melody) in ‘Love to Hate You’, carried here on the voice of a
colossal swirling string synth. Moreover, both duos made their homages explicit in
1990s concert tours featuring medley renditions that segued or morphed their own
songs into excerpts from ‘I Will Survive’.1s

Particularly noteworthy is Pet Shop Boys’s use of ‘Survive’ in their stunning,
highly theatrical exit number, ‘It’s a Sin / I Will Survive’. Again Catholicism

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240 Nadine Hubbs

surfaces vividly, at once fetishised and repudiated here: vocalist Neil Tennant
personifies a decadently gilded and red-sequined pope (or perhaps cardinal), and
the onstage dancers monk-acolytes. The performance begins with Tennant’s
black female co-singer intoning on the darkened stage, in all-white nun’s garb, the
slow intro of ‘I Will Survive’. Then Tennant enters in papal procession to sing
‘It’s a Sin’, an inexorable dance groove whose lyrics and onstage drama create a
battle between good and evil in the form of religiosity and sensuality, accompanied
throughout by strange and beautiful video (projected behind the live performers)
created by the late gay film-maker Derek Jarman. Ultimately the performance
presents a reversal of the warring terms’ conventional values, with a polymor-
phously queer sensuality winning out over Church authority at the climactic
moment: The nun rips off her wimple and habit to reveal a sultry sequined
gown, and reclaims the soloist’s role with a florid, full-throated, a tempo return to
‘Survive’.

The medley closes with the singers trading title lines from each song and so
recapping the drama’s outcome – ‘It’s a sin … I will survive’ having come to
convey: ‘Though condemned and maligned, I will survive’. Pet Shop Boys’ troping
of ‘Survive’ mines it for gay emblematisation and for a dramatic-narrative progres-
sion from tragedy to transcendence, thus staging the queer significance that had
undoubtedly attached to the song for many fans. Enacting scenes from a queer
imaginary, their performance reveals rich identificatory affordances – of the song as
a sort of queer Bildungsroman, modelling a triumphant queer subjectivity that has
been idealised in prescriptive and descriptive, individual and collective queer
realms; and of disco as queer religion.19 Pet Shop Boys’ use of religious imagery in
such a queer context is also suggestive vis-a-vis the Catholicism that surfaces in
Holleran’s gay-disco novel and in my reading of disco’s musical semiotics: In all
these instances the Church is rendered as Ur-source of fetishised theatricality, and
of passionate sensuality. And all three instances manage to invoke a Catholic
religiosity while ultimately averting and even inverting Christian condemnations of
extra-marital and homo-configured sexuality – though, notably, without ever
deglamourising the Church. These Catholiphilic moments are not, in my reading,
merely religious kitsch. Camp, however – in which juxtaposition of artifice and
seriousness is of the essence – is surely a factor. For the uses of religious imagery
here spotlight the ritual, visual and sensual splendour of Catholicism – that is,
reveal and revel in its elaborate artifice – while implicitly undercutting the
associated doctrine by bracketing its (now) evident self-seriousness.

A somewhat different invocation of ‘Survive’ as gay anthem surfaced in the
mid-1990s, as the song began to appear as an audible indicator of queerness in media
products targeted to mainstream audiences. These included movies like Adventures of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and In and Out (1997), and the TV sitcom Will and
Grace (in a 1999 episode). The ‘Survive’ usage of In and Out typifies the genre: In this
comedy Kevin Kline, playing the sexually ambivalent main character, is forcibly
outed by a disco song. The pivotal scene shows Kline’s usually reserved character
rendered helpless, compelled wildly and with abandon to move his feet and shake his
booty when a disco record comes on. Thus at last, according to the (comedic) logic of
the narrative, are Kline’s true essence and sexuality revealed to himself and the
audience: as irrepressible disco fool, and (formerly) repressed gay man. In this
mass-release moment, the song that functions as gay/straight acid test is Gloria
Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’.20

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‘I Will Survive’ 241

Conclusion: sounds of queer social space
All these references to ‘Survive’ draw on its singular semiotic potency as gay-
disco emblem. But the foregoing analysis of signification in ‘Survive’ may also
have relevance for other, less emblematic disco anthems. One might infer as much
from Ken Barnes’s liner notes for Rhino Records’ Disco Years collection: Comment-

ing on Vicki Sue Robinson’s ‘Turn the Beat Around’, Barnes (1990) notes that ‘most
exceptional disco songs … are in minor keys’, and wonders as to ‘the significance of
this phenomenon’. I have argued here that its significance is one of difference,
created and played out in disco within a rich web of signifying elements,
musical, textual and social. The difference thus articulated registered with disco’s
worshippers and enemies alike, engendering ‘the most self-contained genre in the
history of pop, the most clearly defined, and the most despised’ (Tucker 1986,
p. 524).

But as I noted at the outset, disco was despised not simply as a music, but as a
social and cultural phenomenon. It has been called ‘the most truly interracial popular
music since early rock ‘n’ roll’ (Hamm 1995, p. 205). While it may be true, this
statement, constructing a coalition across racial difference, omits the further relevant
subject inflections, of gender and sexuality, by which disco constituted a coalition
around shared experiences of difference, including stigmatisation, marginalisation
and invisibilisation. This point was not lost on everyone, however. As Comiskey Park
suggests, some saw in disco not just blacks, Latino/as and queers, but blacks,
Latino/as and queers coming together in ecstasy.21

Disco has been accused of brazen commercialism and criticised in its

function as fodder for the global glitterati at exclusive venues like Studio 54
(though Dyer [1979] has argued that disco was simply more transparent in its
materialism than rock, and thus the authentic/inauthentic opposition typically
assumed here is false). But disco served, too, as soundtrack for a big party
among various little people, a ritual of radical embodiment enacted by radically
stigmatised bodies. As a musical discourse, disco’s power ‘both to describe and to
induce rapture’ (Gill 1995, p. 134) had much to do with its reverberant troping
of other, also othered, musical and verbal discourses.22 As such, its beat pulsed
with the revels of sinners and pleasures of the scorned. And its ecstasies were
the improbable, transcendent ecstasies of persons against whose ecstasy sanctions
were drawn and punishments exacted, but who proclaimed nevertheless, ‘I Will
Survive’.

Acknowledgements
The first incarnation of this essay was a paper presented at Feminist Theory
and Music 4 in June 1997 at the University of Virginia. I am grateful to
Suzanne Cusick and Fred Maus for organising that conference, and to my session
audience for their enthusiastic and embodied input. I am grateful also to two
anonymous Popular Music reviewers for their helpful critical input; to Andy Mead
for invaluable dialogue and support; to the late Philip Brett for his generous
attention; and to the students in my classes who have read and responded to this
material, particularly Kimberly D. Robertson and Michelle T. Lin, who launched
related projects that have extended my thinking about disco culture and its
reverberations.

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242 Nadine Hubbs

Endnotes

1. We might also note that in 1979 ‘disco
sucks’ constituted more aggressive, obscene
phraseology. Photos and clippings from the
1979 Comiskey rally are viewable at WLUP’s
25th anniversary ‘Disco Demolition’ website:
www.discodemolition.com/pr.htm (viewed 16
December 2005). This site includes the 90,000
crowd-estimate figure (also variously cited else-
where), and it links to Dahl’s radio-show page:
now silver haired, he is still a popular DJ in
Chicago.

2. Qiana was a ‘luxury fabric’ created by DuPont
Corporation, a silky, shiny polyester weave that
was the stuff of disco-era elegance in Travolta/
Manero’s shirts, Donna Summer’s dresses, and
more.

3. The term had made its print debut seven years
earlier in Weinberg (1972). I am grateful to the
late Philip Brett for this reference.

4. Among such insiders the phrase was still recog-
nisable as an arch appropriation of the ‘coming
out’ that constitutes the debutante’s shining
hour. Since its ‘outing’ in the 1980s, the expres-
sion has lost this semantic sparkle not only for
the larger culture, but for queers themselves: It
is now a commonplace, understood as abbrevia-
tion for ‘coming out of the closet’, whose puri-
tanical, decidedly un-celebratory overtones are
applied to all manner of formerly-hidden-now-
exposed activity: drinking, talk show viewing,
junk food indulgence. Interestingly, according
to Sedgwick (1990, pp. 72-3) such ubiquitous
usage of the ‘closet’ figure attests to the semantic
centrality of homo/heterosexual definition,
rather than any amnesia around its queer-
specific meaning.
Billboard rankings throughout this essay

indicate the highest chart positions attained by a
given song. All are from Whitburn (1996).

5. Relatedly, a contemporary lyric by Mark
Knopfler provides this description of an audi-
ence for a bar-band gig: ‘They don’t give a damn
for any trumpet-playing band / That ain’t what
they call rock and roll’. The source-song, ‘Sultans
of Swing’, was a number four (non-disco) hit in
1979 for Knopfler’s band Dire Straits.

6. My statement suggests that singerly incompe-
tency can contribute to a performance of manly
competency. The claim finds corroboration in
Suzanne Cusick’s theorisation of song as a field
of embodiment and performance that serves, in
our time, to delineate sharp gender differen-
tials. She reads the cultural script for puberty as
engendering a change of vocal register for boys
but not girls (though such change, in both cases,
is physically possible but not inevitable) and
notes that youths/men rarely relearn their
envoicement so as to continue singing after
this mandated change. Thus, in contemporary
Euro-American culture, girls sing, boys sing,
and women sing, but men normatively do not
sing, and these facts shape the embodied per-
formance of sex and gender difference. Cusick

(1999, pp. 31-3) further speculates that post-
pubescent males’ relearning of envoicement in
speech but not song (which involves more
deeply one’s ‘interior spaces’) might reflect the
cultural anxiety about penetration of the male
body, in conjunction with ‘the prevailing idea
that masculinity is about being fully individu-
ated, body and soul’.

7. A number of writers have revealed the inad-

equacies and omissions of homosexual (and in-
version) models of identity hinted at here,
including Chauncey (1989), Halperin (1990 and
2000), and Sedgwick (1990, pp. 44-8, 157-63,
etc.).

8. The phrase is Sedgwick’s. She presents some of
the work I summarise here in Between Men

(1985), but my passage is drawn exclusively
from Epistemology (1990, pp. 184-6), parts of
which recap the argument advanced in Between
Men.

9. A pivotal cultural medium for queer effacement
ca 1930-1968 is illumined in Vito Russo’s (1987)
analysis of Hollywood movies from the era of
Hays Code censorship. The individual effects
and costs of invisibilisation and denial of queer
existence in post-war American culture are
drawn lucidly in the autobiography of the late
gay novelist Paul Monette (1992).

10. That is, the song appeared within six months’
proximity to the Comiskey Park rally: Billboard
records 20 January 1979 as the date when
‘Survive’ charted (Whitburn 1996).

11. The ostinato shown in the Figure is from my
aural transcription of ‘I Will Survive’ (the
7:56 mix), as are all song lyrics given below.

12. I refer to the climactic performance in Summer’s
1975 hit ‘Love to Love You Baby’. Bayles’s
apparent confusion here (1994, p. 281) consti-
tutes one instance, among others throughout
her book, that raises questions about the extent
of her familiarity with some of the material on
which she registers her contentious opinions.

13. Melisma is the classical European term for a
musical device wherein a single syllable of text
is set melodically by multiple pitches, usually to
expressive effect. In pop-rock contexts the term
gospel run, or simply run, is sometimes used.

14. I refer to a complex sensibility that can be ex-
pressed simply, via Gallic shrug and the dictum,
‘Je suis comme je suis’ (I am as I am). Interest-
ingly, the latter phrase would translate (liter-
ally) into another Gloria Gaynor gay-club
classic and quintessential pride anthem: her
1983 disco cover of ‘I Am What I Am’ – however

innocent many US gay-club patrons must have
been to the phrase’s prior existence and conno-
tative richness as Frenchformule. This phenom-
enon suggests possibilities for extra-linguistic
sympathy- and sensibility-sharing between
Mediterranean folk wisdom and American

queer subculture – possibilities, in other words,
of the kinds of cross-cultural resonance I sketch

herein. Undoubtedly the song’s origin in the

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‘I Will Survive’ 243

queer context of La Cage aux folles is also rel-
evant, although it reached iconic status (as ‘The
great gay pride song of the American musical
theatre’, according to Studer [1994, p. 270]) not
in George Hearn’s show-tune rendition but in
Gaynor’s disco remake.

15. The ‘playa’ and ‘pimp’ culture of 1990s and
current hip-hop seems a later relative of this
strain of sophistication. And one could argue
that its unabashed emphasis on ‘bling’ also links
it to disco, which has long been identified with
conspicuous materialism.

16. The novel’s Christian imagery is explicitly
Catholic in various passages, though not the one
quoted here.

17. Elsewhere, crucial connections between Ca-
tholicism and homosexuality have been drawn
by Michel Foucault (1978, pp. 37-41), who re-
veals the Catholic confessional (in conjunction
with the courts) as the locus of conception for
homosexuality, among other ‘sexual perver-
sions’. By Foucault’s account, a Western
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explosion
of discourses on sex, motivated by the Christian
pastoral, sharpened surveillance of sexual prac-
tices and produced discursive ‘sexual hetero-
geneities’ of which the homo/heterosexual
binarism would emerge, from later nineteenth-
century medico-juridical discourses, as most
consequential.

See Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism

(1997), for exploration of cross-linkages be-
tween the queer and the Catholic in late-
nineteenth-century symbolist, or decadent,
literature. For a discussion of linkages among
these former two categories and twentieth-
century US concert music, see my book The
Queer Composition of America’s Sound (Hubbs
2004), especially chapter 1, ‘Modernist Abstrac-
tion and the Abstract Art: Four Saints and the

Queer Composition of America’s Sound’.
18. Pet Shop Boys and Erasure are both British

synth-pop duos formed in the 1980s and com-
prising a (now-out) gay vocalist as theatrical
front-man in partnership with a (comparatively
back-grounded) keyboard-synth wiz. I thank
Fred Maus for pointing out the resonances

between ‘I Will Survive’ and ‘It’s a Sin’, for our
conversations on these, and for lending me the
Pet Shop Boys 1994 tour video Discovery: Live in
Rio. My discussion of ‘It’s a Sin / I Will Survive’
is based on the performance included on this
video.

Perhaps there is evidence of some subliminal
effect from ‘Survive”s embedded presence
in Wayne Studer’s (1994, pp. 166-7) notice
towards ‘pronounced gay overtones’ in Pet
Shop Boys’ ‘trenchant, marvellously overblown
“It’s a Sin”‘, even while giving no hint of any
connection between this song and ‘Survive’.

19. The Bildungsroman, a novelistic genre modelling
(most characteristically: white middle-class
male) coming of age, has already been reread in
terms of homoeroticism by Michael Moon
(1987).

20. Also of interest is Victor Navone’s 45-second

digital animation ‘Alien Song’, a word-of-
Internet phenomenon since its 1999 appearance.
It depicts a drag-queen-like performance of
Gaynor’s ‘Survive’ by a green, one-eyed alien,
vaguely male in form but unmistakably
African-American-diva in gesture. The creature
thus exemplifies the ‘polygendrous, polyracial’
disco-queen qualities discussed above, and its
sudden demise, when crushed rudely under its
own mirror ball, poignantly mirrors disco’s fate.
See http://www.scores.de/movie/alien.shtml
(viewed 16 December 2005).

21. In connection with my earlier discussion of
markers of queerness (or, in the above, ‘faggot-
ries’) in the context of homosexual panic, the
word queers here should be taken to include not
only known homosexual persons but others
marked in various ways as ‘queerly suspicious’.

Saturday Night Fever also provides at least
subtle allusion to black-queer solidarity, as
Russo (1987, p. 230) noted: Travolta’s Tony
Manero at one point yells, ‘Attica, Attica!’ echo-
ing his hero Al Pacino in his role as a gay bank
robber in Dog Day Afternoon (a poster from
which hangs on Tony’s bedroom wall), where
the line served to link gay and black oppression.

22. Gill’s reference is to dance music in general,
subsuming disco.

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Popular Music, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 2007) pp. i-iv+195-384
Front Matter [pp. i-iv]
Erratum: Introduction [pp. ii]
t.A.T.u. You! Russia, the Global Politics of Eurovision, and Lesbian Pop [pp. 195-210]
From Blatant to Latent Protest (And Back Again): On the Politics of Theatrical Spectacle in Madonna’s ‘American Life’ [pp. 211-229]
‘I Will Survive’: Musical Mappings of Queer Social Space in a Disco Anthem [pp. 231-244]
Marketing Androgyny: The Evolution of the Backstreet Boys [pp. 245-258]
Techno, “Frankenstein” and Copyright [pp. 259-280]
Inventing Recorded Music: The Recorded Repertoire in Scandinavia 1899-1925 [pp. 281-304]
Rethinking the Music Industry [pp. 305-322]
The Melodic-Harmonic ‘Divorce’ in Rock [pp. 323-342]
The Hendrix Chord: Blues, Flexible Pitch Relationships, and Self-Standing Harmony [pp. 343-364]
Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 365-368]
Review: untitled [pp. 369-370]
Review: untitled [pp. 371-373]
Review: untitled [pp. 373-375]
Review: untitled [pp. 375-377]
Review: untitled [pp. 377-379]
Review: untitled [pp. 379-381]
Review: untitled [pp. 382-384]
Back Matter