Musical Miscegenation? Rock Music and the History of Sex

Musical Miscegenation? Rock Music and the History of Sex

e-misférica
Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
Issue 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)

Tavia Nyong’o, 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 about American popular music, this essay explores the genealogy of “miscegenation” in U.S. political discourse. Undermining claims that “musical miscegenation” explains black influence in rock music, the essay shows how “miscegenation” emerged precisely as a means of policing and proscribing black citizenship and black/white social equality.

“So, when it comes, miscegenation will be a terror …”
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” 1957

When pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wondered aloud in the New Yorker magazine as to how, when, and why “indie rock lost its soul” in the mid-1990s, he provoked a small controversy among popular music critics, bloggers, and fans. Lamenting rock’s decreasing reliance on what he described as “the 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,” 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 (1990) and Kandia Crazy Horse (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…

…Miscegenation as Political Coinage

Scholars and journalists routinely employ miscegenation, with or without scare quotes, to denote the “mixing” 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 meant by the “smelting pot,” for example, he could not have meant “miscegenation” 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 “mixing” 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 or the Portuguese mestizagem it is commonly assumed to be, as both terms long predate it. Nor does it have any etymological relation to words like “mulatto,” “mestizo,” or, for that matter, “hybrid.” It is, to quote William Carlos Williams, a “pure product” 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…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , ,