‘Good Booty’: The Sexual Power of Music
“The sexiest moments of American music”: Little Richard, Madonna and Prince.CreditFrom left: Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times; Gill Allen/Associated Press; Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images
“Tutti frutti, good booty,” ran the pre-bowdlerized version of Little Richard’s hit song, one of the lyrics the NPR music critic Ann Powers cites to demonstrate the intersection of evocative gibberish and open, transgressive eroticism that, she says, is “at the heart of American popular music.” The line encompasses sexual frankness, piratical rapine, the backside in fetish and dance and a wordless endorsement of the pleasure principle. All this through the flamboyant vessel of a performer who himself embodied complexities of sexuality, race and the slippage between the spiritual and the carnal.
And “embodiment” is the relevant term for Powers. Her argument, that “we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality’s power through music,” is intimately tied to the body: enslaved and objectified black bodies, the erotic sublimation and liberation of dance, the dialogue between charismatic performer and enraptured audience and the problem of “cyborg” singers like Britney Spears. She stresses the primacy of the voice, the flesh and the communion of bodies in a room together over the atomized experience of listening to disembodied sound (while acknowledging new forms of intimacy introduced by the age of recording). Powers connects her early attraction to popular music explicitly to its “erotic pull,” the “physicality” of live performance, and the centrality of music to the sexual awakenings of herself and her friends. She decided, she says, “to write a book about American music and American sex, one that would really be about American dreaming, violence, pleasure, hunger, lies and love.”Photo
It’s a self-consciously ambitious program (the jacket copy prepares the reader for a “magnum opus over two decades in the making”) befitting one of the rare rock critics with a national audience, and a key female voice in the field. It’s also one that Powers admits will be necessarily incomplete: “To talk about what’s revealed within the sexiest moments of American music … is to recast its history in terms that are more inclusive, and less dominated by old ideas of artistic genius or great works. … This retelling of American popular music doesn’t always focus on the big stories. It has gaps.” Powers does spend time with obscure artists like Florence Mills and Jobriath, and fruitfully explores the colorful, gender-fluid world of early gospel music. However, her story hews to a broadly conventional narrative — the intersection of African-American expression, white curiosity and appropriation, and the dialogue between the spiritual and the secular — that begins in Congo Square ring shouts and leads with inexorable circularity back to the New Orleans of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Familiar figures like the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison stand in for “the sexual revolution and its discontents,” while Madonna and Prince do the same for the MTV ’80s. Meanwhile, the centrality of eroticism in Powers’s narrative necessitates a de-emphasis on canonical artists without an obvious erotic component to their personas (Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan), and inconclusive glosses on others (Chuck Berry, Michael Jackson) whose sexual and racial stories are more complicated.
Powers allows herself the veteran rock critic’s slangy informality (Buddy Holly “was … getting laid on the regular”), which can create a tonal instability when set against historical filler (“By 2000 … people spent more and more time within the virtual realm made possible by a new phenomenon called the World Wide Web”) and quotations from academic sources. She has a zest for bold assertions, and some of them land: Her attention to the physical intimacy between Creole women and their black servants, the domestic eroticism of “gospel mothers,” the sensuous intimacy of soft rock, and the puritan sexual disgust of punk are all useful diversifications from the bawdy journey through national puberty that is the book’s primary narrative. Some are more debatable: Was Mick Jagger’s appropriation of blues “codes of potency” really a result of LSD? Do girl group and doo-wop’s “nonsense syllables” and “baby talk” really constitute inarticulate “play preceding full adult sexuality,” the “revelatory babble of an emerging generation”? Did Jim Morrison’s “sacrifice” of his member “on the altar of silence … strike like a final blow” to the ’60s?Continue reading the main story
The subtitle of “Good Booty” lays claim to “American music,” but Powers quickly acknowledges that she means “American popular music,” and her central point of reference for the erotic potential of music remains rock (Creole dandies, gospel performers, rappers and music as “a vocabulary of freedom” are all described in terms of rock). Jazz and country music are largely dispensed with in a three-page summary, along with the Great Depression, Great Migration and World War II, in a rush to get to teenagers and rock ’n’ roll. (Country music’s more ambivalent attitudes toward sex — Dolly Parton and “The Pill” notwithstanding — are inconvenient for the book’s whiggish thesis. Books like Nadine Hubbs’s “Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music,” though, offer intriguing counternarratives of the kind it would’ve been interesting to find here.) Musical theater, which combines traditional romantic plots with queer and camp appeal, shares a paragraph with the art-music world in a brief consideration of AIDS-related work.
At its core, this is a story of the exceptional nature of American popular music. But if there is something sui generis about the explosive admixture of race and desire Powers declares essential to that music, arguably its world-conquering power has as much to do with the development of mass commercial culture industries as it does with something inherently liberating in its content. The musical and erotic thrill of miscegenation, of contact with an exoticized other-among-us imbued with projected musical, sexual and possibly criminal power, is hardly unique to the American imagination: Brazil, or the Roma diaspora, comes to mind. (And one can’t help noticing that African-American writers on African-American music tend not to underscore its erotic nature: Baraka points to blues as a result of a new black experience of solitude and individualism, Du Bois to sorrow, and Ellison to a kind of existential syncopation.) Unexceptional as well is the sublimation of multifarious desire into music and the “jaunty polyamory” of dance, as Susan McClary and others have argued in feminist readings of the European classical canon. Music has been central to the ritualized sexuality of fertility, circumcision, puberty and wedding ceremonies cross-culturally and from time immemorial. The ultimate novelty in American music is not eros and race-mixing, but technology, capital and global distribution.
Powers concludes, “When we think we can’t move, the music is always there to say we can.” But as Pascal Quignard and a growing number of scholars writing on music, war and torture have pointed out, sound and rhythm can act as much as a tool for control and violation of the body as one for emancipation. Communal noise, wrote Elias Canetti, is crucial to the unity of the bloodthirsty crowd. The experience of dissociation, of disembodiment, is as common a reaction to trauma as it is to the liberating pulse of the dance floor. Music is, indeed, a slippery and complicated force — especially for the optimistic narrative of the pop critic.
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