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COPYRIGHT 2000 Center For Black Music Research
It is worth stating the obvious. The music of the African diaspora is not a recent import to Europe; rather, it has been an integral part of numerous European societies since the eighteenth century. In England, these sounds were introduced through the hands and voices of slave musicians, jubilee singers, jazz orchestras, reggae sound-system operators, and hip-hop DJs. It is--or should be--impossible to think about the social history of Europe in general, or England in particular, without understanding the place of black music within it.
In Victorian England, the sounds of jubilees and spirituals were assimilated across the lines of class and political division. Karl Marx, who lived in London for over thirty years, would render "German folk-songs and Negro spirituals" while walking with his daughters in Highgate (Wheen 1999, 221). The Fisk Jubilee Singers enjoyed adulation from aristocrats and paupers alike. They entertained Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone (Gilroy 1993, 90), and their memoir recounts a particularly eventful concert introduced by the Earl of Shaftesbury at the annual meeting of the Freedmen's Mission Aid society, the City Temple, London, on May 31, 1875:
So great was the gathering about the building that to get even to the doors was a formidable task, and the chairman, Lord Shaftesbury, was delayed some minutes in reaching the platform by the difficulty of penetrating the dense crowd that filled the corridors. In ascending the stand his eye caught sight of the singers in the gallery, whom he greeted with a cordial salutation, and in his remarks on taking the chair he said: "I am delighted to see so large a congregation of the citizens of London come to offer a renewal of their hospitality to these noble brethren and sisters of ours, who are here to-night to charm us with their sweet songs. They have returned here, not for anything in their own behalf, but to advance the interests of the coloured race in America, and then to what in them lies to send missionaries of their own colour to the nations spread over Africa. When I find these young people, gifted to an extent that does not often fall to the lot of man, coming here in such a spirit. I don't want them to become white, but I have a strong disposition myself to become black. If I thought colour was anything--if it brought with it their truth, piety, and talent, I would willingly exchange my complexion to-morrow." (Marsh 1900, 79-80).
It is strange, a century later, to read that the sounds of the black gospel moved this peer of the realm to indulge in a fantasy of self-transformation.
Doug Seroff has documented a parallel story of the infatuation with gospel singing at the other end of the social scale. He points out that another legacy of the Fisk visit was the formation of groups of white working-class jubilee singers. One such choir was formed in Hackney, in east London. Thirty young singers from the local "Ragged School" toured London, raising money for Hackney Mission, in 1875--the same year that the Earl of Shaftesbury introduced the Fisk Singers on the London stage (Seroff 1986, 48).
Although Marx may have cheerfully lent his voice to spiritual melodies, the reaction by twentieth-century European Marxists to black music was often less than positive. Theodor Adorno's criticism is perhaps the best known, particularly for his denunciation of jazz and recorded music. Adorno's argument is easily misrepresented, in large part due to his own rhetorical excesses (for example, in one article entitled "Uber Jazz," he wrote that jazz most closely resembled "the spontaneous singing of servant girls" [Adorno 1990, 53]). His objection is sometimes characterized as rooted in a racially loaded form of European aesthetics, but such attempts to read his position through some kind of implicit "racial bad sense" risk missing an important nuance in his argument. Fundamentally, Adorno opposed jazz not because it was archaic or "primitive" but because it provided the ultimate theme tune for modern capitalism. In part, he objected that the commercialization of jazz reinforced stereotypes, a judgment affected at least in part by his own experience of studying at Oxford in the 1930s, where he encountered the ways in which jazz was assimilated within the elite circle of the English aristocracy (Wilcock 1997). He argued that modern capitalism exploited blackness: "Like commodity consumption itself, the manufacture [Herstellung] of jazz is also an urban phenomenon, and the skin of the black man functions as much as a colouristic effect as does the silver of the saxophone" (Adorno 1990, 53). Adorno's point is that this results in little more than a parody of colonial imperialism. Nothing that is vital or sensuous is embodied in what he refers to as these "bright musical commodities."
The reason for invoking Adorno here is that he provided an important insight to the ways in which the commercialization of music was packaged through racial fetish. Paul Gilroy has recently picked up this line of critique. He argues that similar processes of commercial exploitation have reinforced racist ideologies and reduced black music to the "marketing of hollow defiance" (Gilroy 2000, 206). Yet paradoxically, the mechanical reproduction of music through recording also enabled black music to travel in ways that were previously unthinkable. The sounds of black music circulated within the African diaspora and enabled connections between dispersed peoples through place and time (Gilroy 1987). In addition, black music entered and was embraced and practiced in new worlds.
In order to understand these processes, it is necessary to develop a close understanding of the web of social relations into which black musics are received, enjoyed, and ultimately practiced. For the purposes of this article, I concentrate on black music in white worlds. Roger Hewitt (1983) has referred to this phenomenon as the "black through white" syndrome. I draw on two particular music scenes in order to situate these questions in a particular English social and historical setting. I will examine the broad issues referred to in this introduction in the context of the emergence of English skinhead styles and what came to be referred to as the English "northern soul" phenomenon. What follows is an attempt to recover the story of these movements through oral history and ethnography. Through this, I want to address a larger question: How does the fascination with and love of black music fit with the cultural configurations of English racism?
Skinhead Moonstomp and the Rhythms of White Chauvinism
In his seminal book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige (1979) argued that one can find within postwar British youth styles the traces of an embodied history of "race relations" that both assimilate and expunge. So a deep-seated and profound cultural hybridity could exist even in those styles most associated with racism. The best and most dramatic example is skinhead style, whose early proponents were compulsive collectors of black American soul and Jamaican rocksteady music. As Kobena Mercer (1987; 1994) has noted, black music became a register of white pride and identity like the equivalent of a photographic negative. In an excellent discussion of skinheadism, Anoop Nayak (1999, 76-77) emphasizes that this form of identity is a tightly choreographed performance. What is interesting and perplexing is the degree to which black music provides its signature.
Skinhead style had its origins in Britain and, more specifically, in the working-class districts to the south and east of London in the mid to late 1960s. Characterized by cropped hairstyles, braces, Doc Marten boots, and tight Levi jeans, this style used industrial working-class imagery to produce a conservative masculinity in a period of political, economic, and cultural upheaval. Skinheadism came of age in 1969 in an era when urban protest, gay politics, feminism, and a host of other social movements were also emerging. Early writers viewed the style as a symbolic attempt to resolve the social transformations and communal breakdown taking place within working-class districts in postwar Britain (Cohen 1972; Hebdige 1981). This was achieved through the assertion of a white working-class identity, albeit in a burlesque form. Skinhead style was understood as deeply imbued with the domestic semiotics of class, masculinity, race, and power. The whole nature of skinhead performance was predicated on the performance...
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