{"id":11303,"date":"2011-01-07T01:02:44","date_gmt":"2011-01-07T01:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11303"},"modified":"2012-10-25T16:54:17","modified_gmt":"2012-10-25T16:54:17","slug":"musical-miscegenation-rock-music-and-the-history-of-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11303","title":{"rendered":"Musical Miscegenation? Rock Music and the History of Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Musical Miscegenation? Rock Music and the History of Sex<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

e-misf\u00e9rica<\/a>
\nHemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics<\/a>
\nIssue 5.2: Race and its Others<\/a> (December 2008)<\/p>\n

Tavia Nyong\u2019o<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Performance Studies
\nNew York University<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nImage by Bruce Yonemoto<\/small><\/p>\n

Countering facile analogies between musical hybridity and sex across the color line that characterize certain popular discourses about American popular music, this essay explores the genealogy of \u201cmiscegenation<\/a>\u201d in U.S. political discourse. Undermining claims that \u201cmusical miscegenation\u201d explains black influence in rock music, the essay shows how \u201cmiscegenation\u201d emerged precisely as a means of policing and proscribing black citizenship and black\/white social equality.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSo, when it comes, miscegenation will be a terror \u2026\u201d
\n\u2014Norman Mailer<\/a>, \u201cThe White Negro<\/a>,\u201d 1957<\/p>\n

When pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones<\/a> wondered aloud in the New Yorker<\/em> magazine as to how, when, and why \u201cindie rock lost its soul\u201d in the mid-1990s, he provoked a small controversy among popular music critics, bloggers, and fans. Lamenting rock\u2019s decreasing reliance on what he described as \u201cthe ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century,\u201d Frere-Jones targeted contemporary musicians that he considered to be guilty of divorcing (white) rock from its (black) roots (Frere-Jones 2007a). Part of his argument resembled prior cases made by music critics like Albert Murray<\/a> (1990) and Kandia Crazy Horse<\/a> (2004), who have also extolled the universal basis and relevance of black music. But it took a peculiar turn when he attributed the steady diminution of black heat, rhythm, and ecstasy in 1990s and 2000s rock to a cultural separatism jointly enforced by hip hop and academic political correctness…<\/p>\n

…Miscegenation as Political Coinage<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scholars and journalists routinely employ miscegenation, with or without scare quotes, to denote the \u201cmixing\u201d of the so-called races. Even when they pause to think about it, even when, as with Frere-Jones when they are challenged on their use of it, they typically ignore or seem unaware that the word appeared at a particular time and place, and for a particular purpose. Whatever Ralph Emerson<\/a> meant by the \u201csmelting pot,\u201d for example, he could not have meant \u201cmiscegenation\u201d musical or otherwise, simply because the word did not yet exist, and because he chose not to use the closest variant with a racial connotation that did exist at the time, amalgamation. While a variety of terms for race, caste, and color \u201cmixing\u201d have emerged from the time of the Encounter with the New World, no single term can accurately index all of that history. Miscegenation is not the translation of the Spanish mestizaje<\/em> or the Portuguese mestizagem<\/em> it is commonly assumed to be, as both terms long predate it. Nor does it have any etymological relation to words like \u201cmulatto,\u201d \u201cmestizo,\u201d or, for that matter, \u201chybrid.\u201d It is, to quote William Carlos Williams, a \u201cpure product\u201d of the U.S., a specimen of rhetorical chicanery and pseudo-scientific quackery whose astonishing success at infiltrating the language should only surprise those who doubt the immense resources of racial disavowal in the shaping of our culture…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Musical Miscegenation? Rock Music and the History of Sex e-misf\u00e9rica Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008) Tavia Nyong\u2019o, Associate Professor of Performance Studies New York University Image by Bruce Yonemoto Countering facile analogies between musical hybridity and sex across the color line that characterize certain popular discourses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[5077,1392,151],"class_list":["post-11303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-e-misferica","tag-music","tag-tavia-nyongo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}