"Tell Tchaikovsky the news": postmodernism, popular culture, and the emergence of rock 'n' roll.

The contemporary notion of the postmodern, developed in the early 1970s and being argued almost to meaninglessness today, arose in the context of pop in the broadest sense of the term (Huyssen 1984). In its most significant manifestations, postmodernism has challenged the official culture of modernism and .its underlying aesthetic categories and assumptions. One of the original inspirations for that challenge came from early rock 'n' roll performers, most notably Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, all of whom first appeared when modernism, having lost its original adversarial character, had become the basis of mainstream cultural authority in America. I want to argue that postmodernism, though a problematical concept, gives us a way of better understanding those early musicians and that those early musicians are our culture's proto-postmodernists.

This will require a brief excursion into the history of modernism and its place in postwar America, a definition of the highly controversial notion of the postmodern, and a discussion of each of these early rock 'n' rollers in terms of one aspect of their postmodernism--their trafficking in significations of the Other and of marginality. As these terms suggest, I will be calling on a number of poststructuralist critical discourses to help unfold the postmodernist nature of some early rock 'n' roll, though I do not for a moment assume that poststructuralism and postmodernism are synonymous, that the former is merely the critical voice of the artistic practices of the latter. Finally, I will suggest some general ways in which a rereading of early rock 'n' roll in light of postmodernism may help unsnarl some of the conceptual tangles--themselves rooted in modernist assumptions--that impede black music research.

I am risking the absurdity of bringing all this critical apparatus to bear on rock 'n' roll because in a quite straightforward sense rock is now one of our dominant cultural practices. I hope also to defend early rock 'n' roll from its cultured despisers as well as rescue it from its simple-minded supporters. But before embarking on such an immodest project, I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not arguing that postmodernism is somehow inherently superior to modernism or that modernist works are not good. Nor am I saying that low culture is superior to "elitist" high culture, a position which accepts the modernist distinction between high and low and merely inverts the value judgment. Further, I am neither absolving the numerous white musicians and music industry figures of guilt for their unconscionable exploitation of black artists nor denying the black musical provenance of rock 'n' roll. However, I am saying that a reductionist concentration on the history of exploitation or of musical influence misunderstands cultural production, obscures the accomplishments of these early rock 'n' rollers, and, in rendering early rock 'n' roll nearly invisible in black music research, deforms the critical discourse of the discipline.

None of these early figures was consciously postmodernist. They formulated no explicit theory about mid-fifties modernism; rather, their musical, sartorial, and performing styles proposed what, following Foucault (1977), I would call a counter-discourse. (1) And it is in this counter-discourse that we glimpse postmodernism not merely as a style or as the latest chapter in the unending revolt of modernism against itself, but as a historical condition, the understanding of which can unlock whatever critical potential remains in the much-abused concept of the postmodern.

Modernism was many things--expressionism, dadaism, surrealism, futurism, and constructivism in the visual arts; epic theater and theater of cruelty in the drama; Eisensteinian montage in film; serialism and the twelve-tone row in music; International Style and the Bauhaus in architecture; the polysemous texts of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound in literature. Each art form produced its distinctive works, polemics, criticism, and politics. But in all these manifestations modernism was quite consciously adversarial--opposing the artist and the art object to the larger culture, whether conceiving that culture as decadent, dehumanizing, bourgeois, or massified. For Eliot, art was the last holdout against the twentieth century's rising tide of industrialism, secularization, and egalitarianism. For the Bauhaus, art (read architecture) offered utopian possibilities of transforming a bloated, complacent, hierarchized society into an efficient and egalitarian "machine for living." For an avant-gardist like Artaud, art as transgression was the only cultural practice capable of freeing the energy of life itself. But whatever their political differences, these modernists all accepted the distinction between high culture and low culture and located the activity of the artist firmly within the realm of the high, privileging the notions of art and the artist, even when the aim was a wider transformation of society.

Following the failure of utopian modernism on the one hand and the recuperation of the avant-garde on the other, the modernism that emerged at mid-century in America was, as Hal Foster (1985, 130) argues, "an apolitical, adamantly high-cultural paradigm of art, which shifted the discursive 'essence' of modernism from utopianism and transgression to aesthetic purity." Thus insulated in its aesthetic autonomy from the left and the right, American modernism became perfectly compatible with the dominant culture of the period, the liberal-conservative consensus, such as is described in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Vital Center (1962). Finding expression in the New Critics, who kept alive Eliot's visions of organic society--visions he had based on a romanticized conception of the American South--fifties' literary modernism not only formed a powerful justification for racial inequality but its apolitical formalism dovetailed nicely with the "end-of-ideology" ideology of the technocracy. Similarly, modernist architecture, far from realizing its utopian dreams, became a means of social control, seen most clearly in high-rise housing projects for the poor. And modern art, especially abstract expressionism, became the official art of the gallery and the museum; and through its pretensions to universality of form, it allied itself ontologically and epistemologically with justifications for Western political domination.

Except for a few determinedly modernist works like Cane (Jean Toomer, 1923) and Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952), there was little place in the modernist pantheon for Afro-American art, music, and literature. Langston Hughes was regarded as a charming naif, instead of as heir to Whitman (who was himself accorded little respect by the New Critics). Armstrong and Ellington were viewed as entertainers, debarred from serious critical consideration by the rigid high culture/low culture distinction of modernism. The beboppers, steeped in the rhetoric of modernist avant-gardism and determined to turn jazz into an art music, appear to have been the most conventionally modernist in sensibility; nevertheless, they too suffered from their association with entertainment and from the widespread misconception of bebop as primitivist, drug-inspired wailing, instead of the exacting discipline it was. (2)

It is against this official, affirmative, and far from adversarial modernism that postmodernism arrays itself. Mostly trenchantly mapped by Andreas Huyssen (1984), the long road to this postmodernism can only be sketched here. The fifties saw the rebellion of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns against abstract expressionism, the Beats against high literary modernism, and John Cage against the exalted notion of the composer. In the sixties there was an attempt along the Duchamp-Cage-Warhol axis to revive the notion of the avant-garde as an antidote to the official modernism of the fifties. Alternatively, the decade also witnessed the championing of popular culture--folk musics, rock music, popular literature, popular film--against the canon of modernism and, indeed, all high art. In the early seventies, as the rhetoric of avant-gardism was all but exhausted, there appeared in the visual and performing arts artistic practices that combined styles from many historical periods, often conflated high and popular culture, and tended to treat art works as "texts" to be read rather than cult objects to be worshiped. Postmodernism, as this often confusing set of artistic practices came to be known, soon developed along several lines not easily disentangled. Three may be distinguished, if not always in fact, then at least for purposes of discussion: an affirmative eclecticism, a critical deconstructionism, and a postmodernism of resistance that is non-modernist and non-avant-gardist.

Philip Johnson's AT&T building with its neoclassical mid-section, Roman colonnades, and Chippendale pediment has become a convenient marker for the affirmative eclecticism of an "anything goes" postmodernism. Its bold return to ornament, far from offering any cultural resistance, simply provides an opportunity for the nostalgic deployment of signifiers from various architectural styles and periods in a pastiche that ignores history and veils the real play of power in the present. To be sure, this "anything goes" postmodernism opposes the arid formalism of fifties modernism, but it extends the charge of aridity to all of modernism, not merely its American postwar phase. Ignoring all that was adversarial in earlier modernism, such eclecticism replicates the political function of mid-fifties modernism in the guise of transcending all modernism. In fact, this kind of cheerful pastiche surrounds us in advertising, in music videos, in clothing--and for commentators like Fredric Jameson (1983) it merely reinforces the fragmenting effects of commodity capitalism.

Deconstructionist postmodernism casts postmodernism as the latest avant-garde and assumes that poststructuralism is its critical voice. The work of art is turned into a "text" among many such texts in an endless chain of signifiers without origin, fixity of meaning, or authorship; indeed, it quite consciously mocks such logocentric notions. Mike Bidlo's 1988 exhibit "Picasso's Women" consists of 150 or so paintings copied from all phases of Picasso's career, unified only by the presence of a female image in each and by the fact that each is recognizably, even famously, a "Picasso." (And when I visited the exhibit, there was someone with a video camera soliciting the presumably shocked responses of viewers--a dead giveaway of the exhibit's avant-gardist orientation.) The colors of the paintings, however, appear to be slightly off, as if Bidlo had copied from an art book rather than the originals, thus suggesting yet another link in an endless intertextual chain that decenters the art work, the artist, the idea of style, and conventions governing intellectual property. Such artistic practices, like deconstruction itself, enunciate the "death of the subject," the dispersal of the illusions of individuality, originality, and subjectivity into the social codes that constitute them. But, as Jameson (1983) and Foster (1985) have both suggested, claims about the death of the subject seem to reflect the same fragmentation by capital expressed in affirmative eclecticism.

As Foster (1985, 136) goes on to argue, there may be something more at stake in the dispersal of the subject into its representations:

   For what is this subject that, threatened by loss, is so bemoaned?
   Bourgeois perhaps, but patriarchal and phallocentric certainly. For
   some, for many, this may indeed be a great loss, a loss which leads
   to narcissistic laments and hysterical disavowals of the end of
   art, of culture, of the west. But for others, precisely for Others,
   it is no great loss at all.

In deconstructionist postmodernism, there exists, theoretically at least, the possibility that somehow Others, who have historically been rendered nearly invisible by the hegemonic cultural representations of logocentrism, may possibly appear. And it is this critical possibility that is crucial to my third category of postmodernism--the non-modernist, non-avant-gardist postmodernism of cultural resistance. One contemporary example will have to suffice: Cindy Sherman's photographs. Sherman often photographs herself in various guises--femme fatale, dumb blonde, movie star--that simultaneously invite the viewer to supply a fantasy narrative and undermine that narrative by suggesting that the photograph is mere surface. And yet, as Jane Williamson quoting J. L. Baudry put it, "in so far as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as a surface" (Frith and Horne 1987, 156). The "feminine" is made to appear not as if it existed in itself (which is to say as purely Other, a conceit of phallocentrism) but in its always ongoing construction in cultural representation and its deconstruction in Sherman's photographic intervention. Though her work is certainly textualized and deconstructive--to be "read," not worshiped as formally beautiful--it also enacts a pointed cultural politics: the issue is how her identity and the identity of women generally is socially constructed in discourse. But this should not be construed as according art a privileged role in social change. The photographs are simply one highly problematic site where we enter into the drama of cultural representation always going on all around us.

I have used examples from the visual arts not only because that is where the liveliest debate about postmodernism has taken place, but also because visual artists must perforce be directly alive to issues of representation. But I might just as well have used rap music to illustrate all of the specifically postmodern artistic practices I have described. Rap music certainly employs pastiche--rifling soul, funk, rock, reggae, jazz, and even heavy metal for various styles that operate not merely as a seamless web of influences but often as distinct elements in a collage of sound. The rap dee-jays' use of turntables as instruments whose notes consist of other artists' records speeded up, slowed down, or "scratched" introduces intertextuality, deconstructs those records, and decenters the notion of authorship. By turning items that most social critics associate with passive consumption--record players and pop records--into active constituents of their art, rappers not only challenge the aura of the work of art (which despite our age of mechanical reproduction found its way into popular culture through progressive rock and the singer-songwriters of the seventies) but also challenge simpleminded notions about the nature of commodification. Yet rap is by no means avant-garde. The highly rhythmic rhymes of the MC's--by turns moralistic, boastful, and salacious--are of a piece with Afro-American oral traditions of the dozens, signifying, and the toast. And rappers, like the early rock 'n' rollers, have proposed, through their performance practices and their sartorial and behavioral codes, a potent counter-discourse to the culture's dominant discourse about otherness.

What then is at stake when the problematics of otherness or of marginality are made to appear in cultural representations? For white male Westerners the appearance of the Other as a subject, rather than as an object destined for domination and conquest, raises the unsettling possibility that "there are just others, that we ourselves are an 'other' among others" (Ricoeur 1965, 278). From a deconstructionist point of view we might say that whatever was thought to be signified by the Other turns out itself to be merely a signifier in an endless chain of signifiers without beginning or end. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that underlie the inscription of the Other in discourse are the heart of Western logocentrism, the notion that there is a transcendental signified (God, man, nature, soul) that centers language and guarantees that its significations re-present reality rather than chase each other in an endless play of difference. Using "woman" as an example of the Other, Terry Eagleton (1983, 132-133) explores the ambiguities and ambivalences of otherness:

   Woman is the opposite, the "other" of man: she is non-man,
   defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to
   the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by
   virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining
   himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore
   caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to
   assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other
   in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately
   related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an
   essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other
   even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity
   to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being
   parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of
   excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such
   exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other
   after all.... Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside,
   what is alien also intimate--so that man needs to police the
   absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does
   just because it may always be transgressed, has always been
   transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears.

To call attention to those features of the Other or of the marginal is to press on the place where logocentrism undermines itself; it is to put in doubt the entire rigid system of opposites which logocentrism enacts in culture as ideology. (But it is also merely to put in doubt--rather than demystify, as the avant-gardist attempts--because everyone is caught up in the web of signification and in a sense always already defeated by it.) Thus it is the status of representation itself, or re-presenting, that is challenged--the unitary, centered, Western vision, which in its modernist guise depends on the universality attributed to the forms used to produce a work of art, quite apart from the work's particular content or historical context. (The claim to universality is of course the key to modernism's value as a weapon of political domination in the fifties.) Postmodernist practices of cultural resistance do not seek to transcend representation--which is an impossibility--but "to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting, or invalidating others" (Owens 1983, 59).

As Huyssen (1984, 50) argues, the dogmas of modernism and avant-gardism have been eroded by the appearance in the socio-political sphere of multiple forms of otherness as "they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender and sexuality, race and class, ... and spatial geographic locations and dislocations." Modernism has often included an ideology of modernization coupled with an internationalism that plays out in the political sphere as domination of other cultures, subcultures, and social classes. It is just such domination that the emergence of otherness and marginality in politics and in art challenges. Placed in this historical context, culturally resistant postmodernism is seen to be more than merely a matter of style or of the latest avant-garde, but, as in the case of early rock 'n' roll, the locus of a full-blown crisis of cultural authority. This is not to suggest that postmodernism either as historical moment or as artistic practice is merely negativity, for "there are affirmative forms of resistance and resisting forms of affirmation" (52). It is precisely this kind of postmodernism--culturally resistant but not merely negativity--that is prefigured in early rock 'n' roll.

This brings me at last to early rock 'n' roll and the multiple forms of otherness and marginality that fleetingly, elusively appeared therein: those of race, social class, sexuality, and geographical region. Crucial to clearing a cultural space for this counter-discourse of otherness was rock 'n' roll's frontal attack on high culture, which in enforcing rigid distinctions between itself and low culture simply had little meaning for those whom its representations excluded. Chuck Berry's "Roll Over, Beethoven" (1956) provided the most explicit version of the theme:

   There's a jumping little record
   I want my jockey to play.
   Roll over, Beethoven,
   I got to hear it again today.

   You know my temperature's rising,
   the juke box is blowing a fuse.
   My heart's beating rhythm
   and my soul keeps singing the blues.
   Roll over, Beethoven,
   tell Tchaikovsky the news.

Numerous Berry songs celebrated the music itself--"Rock and Roll Music," "Reelin' and Rockin'," "Around and Around," "Hail, Hail Rock and Roll." Though such songs seem harmless today, at the time they affronted widespread notions of musical decorum and good taste. The magnitude of the ensuing battle over whether rock 'n' roll was "good music" confirms the extent to which it challenged entrenched processes of cultural legitimation. And in challenging the dominance of Broadway and the Tin Pan Alley pop song, rock 'n' roll also challenged in subterranean fashion the tradition of the Middle European operetta from which pop songs are descended (Williams 1965). Berry's "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) even took an affectionate swipe at the high-art pretensions of jazz:

   I got no kick against modern jazz
   Unless they try to play it too darn fast
   And change the beauty of the melody
   Until it sounds just like a symphony.

I could go on indefinitely citing rock 'n' roll songs that self-consciously celebrated their own advent, but even more important than these relatively humorous lyrics were the performance practices that were central to the cultural significance of the music: Chuck Berry's "duck walk," Presley's bumps and grinds, Jerry Lee Lewis's wanton destruction of pianos, Little Richard's bizarre stage theatrics. As part of the counter-discourse of early rock 'n' roll, such practices not only assaulted high culture but also brought sexual display into the public realm, which is finally the same thing, for it is the body (except as signifier of the Other) that is excluded by the dominant discourse of mid-century modernism. The assertion that these flamboyant performance practices are merely exaggerations of rhythm & blues practices (see, for example, Chapple and Garofalo 1977, 234) is a reductive and empty claim. It assumes, in good formalist fashion, that the meaning of any music is exhausted by the notes themselves. But seen in the context of the desiccated modernism of the mid-fifties, Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard beating up a Steinway carries a powerful cultural message.

Conventional accounts of rock 'n' roll date its birth by the appearance of some particular record or other ("Rocket 88" in 1951, say, or "Rock Around the Clock" in 1954) and date its passing by reference to some cataclysmic event, usually the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper on February 3, 1959--"the day the music died." This more or less formalist narrative is often accompanied by a narrative about music-business history. Vital and authentic early performers are said to have been quickly absorbed into the deadening routines of the music industry. This account accepts the high culture/low culture distinction of modernism and then judges low culture products, like rock 'n' roll performers, in terms of their authenticity, a formalist standard masquerading as sociology. As Frith and Horne (1987, 148) have observed, this account informs virtually every history of early rock 'n' roll, from Charlie Gillett's Sound of the City (1970) forward. But the production of cultural meaning is not nearly so simple as such accounts assume, nor are these early performers at all "authentic" in any sense that this populist inversion of modernism can finally make coherent.

In the absence of space for a full-fledged history here, let me suggest two events of the kind that help contextualize the trajectory of early rock 'n' roll: (1) the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and (2) the calling out of federal troops to integrate Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. In the same year the court was holding the doctrine of separate but equal educational facilities to be a legal fiction, Berry, Little Richard, and Presley were making their first significant recordings. The Brown decision was the culmination of a long, patient struggle and the beginning of a brief, new hopeful phase that reached its limits when it became necessary to call out federal troops to enforce it. Thereafter, as white intransigence forced the struggle to move from the halls of justice to the streets, the firepower of the state would increasingly be pointed in the other direction. Rock 'n' roll, and the four performers considered here, began to run into trouble and confusion at roughly the same time for roughly the same reasons: the country was not ready for integration, for their early rock 'n' roll was, above all, integrationist music. And like the controversy over school integration, whose trajectory it mimicked, early rock 'n' roll centered on young people. It is in this context that I want to look at my four exemplars and their counter-discourse of race, social class, region, and sexuality.

When I say early rock 'n' roll was integrationist music, I do not mean it was a high-minded, liberal appeal for equality but an often confused and confusing counter-discourse about race. It is to be read not only in the manipulation of ambiguous images in the lyrics but also in the public personae of its performers and in the social, cultural, and crosscultural meanings of their performances--performances that were in no sense "authentic." In fact, the personae and performances of Elvis and Little Richard sometimes resembled minstrelsy. But it was a problematized minstrelsy that struggled mightily, if sometimes exploitatively, with otherness and marginality; as such it was one of the few social phenomena of the period, outside of the black church, that came even close to being adequate to the historical moment.

Rarely did this integrationism find its way into lyrics and even then only in code, as in Berry's "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" (for eyed read skinned). Rather, it was to be found in the music itself, the sometimes perfect, sometimes uneasy amalgams of blues, rhythm & blues, country, and pop styles that define the genre. Berry's first release, "Maybellene" (1955), was an adaptation of an old country song, "Ida Red," originally recorded by, among others, Bob Wills, who had absorbed much from the black territory bands of the Southwest. Though steeped in the guitar styles of Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker and earnestly desiring to become a bluesman, Berry had fully assimilated country music and had included it in his act almost from the first (Berry 1988). During a 1950 stint at the Cosmo Club, a predominantly black nightspot in East St. Louis, he began working hillbilly songs into his repertoire of Muddy Waters blues songs and Nat Cole ballads. By his estimation, the composition of the club's clientele was soon as much as forty percent white on some nights. It was then that he quite consciously began to explore pop, blues, and country styles and his relation to their various audiences:

   Listening to my idol Nat Cole prompted me to sing sentimental songs
   with distinct diction. The songs of Muddy Waters impelled me to
   deliver the down-home blues in the language they came from, Negro
   dialect. When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so
   that it was harder and whiter. All in all it was my intention to
   hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the
   different kinds of songs in their customary tongues (90-91).

By the time he began to make his first recordings for Chess in 1954, he had taken elements from each style and welded them into a seamless whole that defied classification. The call and response of much black music survived in the alternation of his singing with short answering bursts from his guitar. The songs themselves were often comic narratives somewhat in the manner of Louis Jordan, but such songs were rare in black music at the time and Berry's were far more heavily influenced by country songs of that ilk. Robert Christgau (1980, 56) has perhaps most succinctly described the process and the finished product:

   Berry was the first blues-based performer to successfully reclaim
   guitar tricks that country and western innovators had appropriated
   from black people and adapted to their own uses 25 or 50 years
   before. By adding blues tone to some fast country runs, and yoking
   them to a rhythm and blues beat and some unembarrassed
   electrification, he created an instrumental style
   with biracial appeal. Alternating guitar chords augmented the
   beat while Berry sang in an insouciant tenor that, while
   recognizably Afro-American in accent, stayed clear of the melisma
   and blurred overtones of blues singing, both of which enter at
   carefully premeditated moments.

A black, thirty-year-old father of two, he combined all these musical elements with witty and knowing lyrics about white suburban teen culture ("Sweet Little Sixteen," "Almost Grown," "School Days") as well as the frustrations of adult life ("Thirty Days," "Too Much Monkey Business," "No Money Down"), threw in an occasional blues ("Wee Wee Hours"), plus numerous comic narratives ("Maybellene," "Nadine" and the unclassifiable, poignant "Memphis." Charming, debonair, and the virtual inventor of rock's central stage icon--the guitar-man wielding his instrument like a phallus--he was the brown-eyed handsome man of his sly song. The interplay of all these elements enacted in almost every Berry performance an ongoing semiosis of race, age, sex, and culture. Throughout his work, conventional musical, lyrical, and theatrical signifiers of "black" and "white," "city" and "country," "old" and "young," "South" and "North," "working class" and "middle class" jostled each other in a constant play of displacement, undermining rigid categories of otherness on which the culture's dominant discourse depended. Delivered in a context of rising black expectations for social justice and white youths' infatuation with black urban style, Berry's mid-fifties recordings are two-and-a-half minute avowals of social possibilities, strikingly affirmative forms of resistance.

The case for Elvis is more complicated and certainly more controversial. To begin, the explosive nineteen-year-old who appeared at Sun Records in 1954 is obscured for us by what he became--first, the dull mannequin walking through a string of ever sillier movies singing some of the worst garbage in the history of American popular music; and then, latterly, the bloated, pathetic figure of Las Vegas. Moreover, he is often the centerpiece of a "black roots/white fruits" narrative about white exploitation of black music (see, for example, Chapple and Garofalo 1977). That there was unconscionable exploitation, some of it involving Presley and his handlers, there is no doubt. Like Irving Mills with Ellington, Presley often took part of the songwriting credit on tunes by black songwriter Otis Blackwell. And as an artist for RCA, he frequently covered songs recorded by black artists for struggling independent labels. But to reduce the significance of his work to a narrative of pure exploitation is to narrow social history to music-business history and to ignore the cultural and cross-cultural meaning of his music, his persona, and his performances. In short, it is to misunderstand the complicated nature of the production of cultural meaning. The misunderstanding is often encapsulated in the charge that Presley was merely a minstrel. Minstrelsy is certainly apposite for an understanding of Presley, but to make of him only a slightly more subtle version of, say, white minstrel Thomas Rice of "Jump Jim Crow" fame is ludicrous.

As Robert Toll has detailed, white minstrelsy arose in the 1840s in a time of rising egalitarianism and at a time when the nation was heading for a showdown over what to do about slavery, the greatest blight on that egalitarianism. Developed by northerners who had virtually no contact with the enslaved blacks they purported to "delineate" and aimed at an audience of northern, white males who had even less, early minstrelsy assuaged the guilt of its audience by simultaneously and contradictorily depicting slavery as cruel and romanticizing its victims as irrepressibly happy. In the 1850s, when it became obvious that the end of slavery could mean black challenges to whites for jobs and land, the anti-slavery elements dropped out of white minstrelsy altogether, and free northern blacks, the even more immediate threat to northern whites, were depicted as pretentious, foolish dandies. Following the Civil War, the pro-plantation myth became for white minstrels an escapist alternative to the confusing world of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration of the late nineteenth century. In sum, writes Toll (1974, 272), "perhaps most important of all its social and psychological functions, minstrelsy provided a nonthreatening way for vast numbers of white Americans to work out their ambivalence about race at a time when that issue was paramount."

In the twentieth century, white minstrelsy survived in the blackface routines of Al Jolson and other vaudevillians. Ronald Sanders has suggested that blackface provided for these largely Jewish performers a means for expressing their Jewishness through a kind of "ethnic pastiche" (quoted in Howe 1983, 563). As Irving Howe comments, "black became a mask for Jewish expressiveness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another" (563). Elvis, too, in his early music, performances, and sartorial style engaged in ethnic pastiche--of poor southern whites and urban blacks--but he did it without the blackface and condescension of the vaudevillians and in a fashion that was distinctly threatening to a great many whites.

The key to his engagement with black style is to be found in the "cat culture" of Memphis and other southern cities in the early fifties. Cats were poor white kids, like Elvis, who lived in poor neighborhoods with blacks and with whom they often worked side by side at menial jobs: "although few of them thought of blacks as their equals and most were happy to be segregated from them in movie theaters and at school, the cats somehow related more to black culture than to hillbilly culture, yearning for the sophistication they heard in rhythm-and-blues songs" (Ward 1986, 77). Elvis and the other Memphis cats listened to radio station WDIA at night, bought rhythm & blues records, and shopped for clothes on Beale Street at Lansky's, a store patronized largely by young blacks. It was there Elvis bought his trademark clothes, usually in combinations of pink and black--pegged pants, shirts with winged collars, drape jackets with padded shoulders. Thus attired, his blond hair dyed raven black, wearing eyeshadow and sporting sideburns, Elvis made his early professional appearances. Billed as "The Hillbilly Cat," he presented his distinctive mixture of country music and rhythm & blues, and he engaged in stage antics that combined black vernacular dance with the capering of a good old boy at the Saturday night hoedown, all of it galvanized by an erotic challenge.

Viewing the film record of these early public appearances, one is struck by the great good humor of Presley's performance. Greil Marcus, the most astute commentator on Elvis, describes it as "an overwhelming outburst of real emotion and power, combined with a fine refusal to take himself seriously at all" (Marcus 1982, 191-192). Thus his performance included a good bit of conscious parody. But that bit of self-parody should not be confused with the ethnic pastiche that was the source of his great power and threat. Fredric Jameson, in describing postmodernist pastiche, has called it a technique of "blank parody." Parody ordinarily seizes on the most prominent features of some distinctive style and exaggerates them in order to produce an imitation that mocks the original, either sympathetically or maliciously. The blank parody of pastiche, however, is "the wearing of a stylistic mask, ... but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic" (Jameson 1983, 114). As Marcus suggests, the laughter in a Presley performance was directed at his own power, not at the poor white culture from which he sprang or at the black culture whose sartorial and musical styles he wore as a mask. Unlike the mimicry of blacks by white minstrels, Presley's cultural mimicry implied no norms against which it was to be measured.

Like Chuck Berry, Presley offered an endless chain of signifiers of race, sexuality, and social class that in continually displacing each other undermined rigid categories of otherness. Recalling for a moment Eagleton's description of the Other, cited earlier, we may say that Elvis in his early music and performances failed to police the absolute frontiers between black and white, making it disturbingly clear that what is alien is also intimate, that those frontiers are much less absolute than they seem. And like Berry, and the other seminal rock 'n' rollers, he did it at a time when America was facing a showdown over what to do about its black citizens. In that context, Presley was doubly dangerous because of the amused ease with which he achieved the blurring of racial distinctions and because of the evident power it conferred upon him. Had he been a mere minstrel, providing a nonthreatening way for white Americans to work out their ambivalent feelings about race, the reaction against him would hardly have been so virulent or so racist.

Jerry Lee Lewis offered a similar, though not identical, threat. Having listened avidly to boogie piano, rural blues, and jump band R&B during illicit visits to Haney's Big House, a black club near Ferriday, Louisiana, where he grew up, Lewis arrived at Sun Records in 1956 with an instrumental style that combined all those elements with a singing voice that was, in the manner of country music, somewhat nasal and southern, yet not identifiably white. In 1957 his first million-seller, 'Whole Lot of Shakin' Goin' On," reached No. 1 on both the country and western and the rhythm & blues charts and No. 29 on the pop charts. The follow-up, "Great Balls o' Fire," pressed a traditional apocalyptic religious image into the service of a song about lover's nuts. In his stage show, he sang songs of undisguised lust while furiously assaulting his piano--he sat on it, played it with his feet, and sometimes ripped out the keys and trampled them triumphantly underfoot. Between numbers he languidly combed his hair. Though privately, Lewis, like Little Richard, was deeply ambivalent about singing the devil's music, his manner on stage was all sexual swagger and lower-class insolence. And in that insolence lay his threat--and his difference from Elvis. Where Elvis transmuted class resentments into a racially ambiguous persona, Lewis transmuted black musical elements into class resentment.

Like Lewis, Little Richard also knew how to treat a piano. But despite that frontal attack on high culture, he is as problematical as Elvis, for the crucial rhetoric of his act was taken directly from the minstrel and carnival shows in which he worked as a female impersonator while still in his teens. Producing classic rock 'n' roll hits at an astonishing clip and finding himself with a huge interracial audience, he feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls. "I decided," he has said, "that my image should be crazy and way out so that the adults would think I was harmless. I'd appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope" (White 1984, 65-66). In short, he was consciously seeking from adults one of the chief responses for dealing with the threat posed by the Other--that of transforming it into a bit of exotica so other as to be meaningless.

Thus, with glances at two fellow performers from Georgia, Billy Wright and Esquerita, Little Richard developed his unforgettable persona: a pompadour marcelled six inches high, pencil-thin mustache, and eyeliner and lipstick against an ethereal background of pancake 31. Wearing fantastic suits and adopting a stage manner that partly caricatured the preachers (two of them in his family) he had seen as a child, he merged an uninhibited gospel singing style with furious uptempo music and transcendantly nonsensical lyrics. From the beginning, as his segment in the film Mister Rock and Roll attests, his persona and his coy stage antics suggested an ambiguous sexuality. "This is Little Richard, King of the Blues," he would announce during performances, "and the Queen, too" (36).

One is tempted to say that this disarming strategy largely worked--his records, selling in the millions, were rarely banned by radio stations. But that is to forget that his audience was not the adults he disarmed but the young people he entertained. In this context his counter-discourse about sexuality, a discourse in which the premium, like so much else in early rock 'n' roll, was on ambiguity, takes on an entirely new significance. Few things were so clear in the dominant discourse of the period as the rigid boundaries of sexuality and gender--the otherness of homosexuals and of women. Indeed, to grow up was to internalize the social roles decreed by these boundaries just as one's body was gaining the definitive marks of sexual maturity, the biological phenomena serving as a powerful reinforcement in nature of what were in fact largely culturally prescribed (and proscribed) roles. To present the possibility that these boundaries are not inviolable, as Richard did, to people whose sexual and biological selves are still ambiguously in process of formation, and to do it as oneself an object of their desire and consumption, as all pop stars are, and in a context of biracial appeal, is to introduce potentially far-reaching complications into the discourse about Others. Like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, Little Richard offered an endless chain of signifiers, which in their social and historical context unsettled the discourse of the dominant culture. Beyond its immediate effect, such counter-discourse lived on underground only to appear years later in the work of numerous rock artists, most notably David Bowie, Grace Jones, Patti Smith, and Prince, who in their androgynous personae consciously explored representations of gender and sexuality.

The issue of geographical region is inextricably bound with issues of race and social class, for much early rock 'n' roll originated from two of the most despised cultural groups in America--blacks and poor southern whites. Of all the issues that bear on rock 'n' roll, the significance of the South, except as the site for much black and white musical interchange, has perhaps been least well understood. For much of the rest of the country, the South was the regional Other, whether imagined as the nation's exclusive repository of racism, violence, and backwardness or as the last bastion of the cavalier tradition of chivalry and gracious living shadowed by the romantic melancholy of the Lost Cause. Both of those versions of the South rendered many millions of southerners, black and white, invisible. The first version represented all poor southern whites as Kluxers and southern blacks as helpless victims. The second version--what has come to be called the plantation myth and to which many white southerners themselves subscribed--simply erased poor southern whites from the picture and rendered blacks as grateful recipients of paternalistic largesse.

Early southern rock 'n' rollers upset both of those versions of the South. Black performers like Bo Diddley, who took the image of the sexually potent, swaggering bluesman and melded it with the rock 'n' roll icon of the guitar-man, presented a version of the black southern Other that was neither emasculated victim nor contented servitor. White rockabillies like Elvis took poor white southern mannerisms of speech and behavior deeper into mainstream American culture than they had ever before been taken, at the same time he was being reviled for seducing white youth with black music. What was initially regarded as a novelty--a southern white truck driver whose sound created doubt in radio listeners as to his race--carried potentially dangerous implications not only for the South but also for a nation accustomed to projecting its racism onto southern Others like him.

Many white southerners of course had a vested interest in segregation. So did many non-southern whites for whom the South's rigid segregation performed the same psychological function in the 1950s as slavery had in the 1840s; it was comforting proof of their own egalitarianism and seemed to confine the problem of racial equality to the South. Early rock 'n' roll, with its "overt, assertive, social intermingling of black and white" (Frith 1981, 24), exceeded the fears of southern and non-southern whites alike, presenting in the persons of Presley, Little Richard, and many other performers horrifying anticipations of life beyond segregation, de jure and de facto. That these performers were from the South, where the battle was then being fought, created further confusion and, in some quarters, near hysteria.

A consideration of the significance of the South as a region and of the social class of the performers opens other perspectives on their music as well. From its inception rock 'n' roll has extolled the joys of consumption, lyrically celebrating everything from blue suede shoes to automobiles to the latest records themselves. Critics of the left and right are quick to point to this as evidence of rock's complicity in the media-manipulated consumption phase of late capitalism. But early rock 'n' roll's celebration of consumption takes on a new meaning in the context of southern poverty. Since the Civil War, the South had always been the poorest region of the country. Even the remarkable postwar economic boom largely passed it by. Nevertheless, the signs of affluence were everywhere, and while modernist culture critics bewailed the nation's infatuation with tail fins and television sets, the early rock 'n' rollers welcomed the prosperity they portended. Presley, after all, lived with his parents in a public housing project; Carl Perkins was the son of a sharecropper; Little Richard was a dishwasher. Chuck Berry's social class was a little higher than that of the bluesmen he admired, and his childhood, despite a stint in reform school, was not unlike that depicted in his teenage anthems like "School Days"; but this is precisely why his music, unlike that of the bluesmen, is fairly bursting with rising expectations. Though these early performers would not have stated it this way, each was peculiarly alive to the potentially liberating effects of runaway capitalism on people stuck in a more or less feudal position. (Marx of course profoundly admired early capitalism for the same reason.)

Much of the high-modernist disdain for mass culture in the fifties--the snobbish reaction to the appearance of working-class suburbs, for example--concealed an even deeper hostility to the democratizing of wealth. As poor southerners, which is to say as people rendered economically marginal by their geographical location as well as their social class and, in the case of southern blacks, their race, the early rock 'n' rollers in challenging disdain for mass culture thus also challenged hostility to the spreading of wealth. The challenge is not by means of a negativity but by means of affirmation--a distinctly postmodern "affirmative resistance."

The foregoing discussion hardly exhausts the proto-postmodernism of these early rock 'n' rollers. Other figures also offer rich material for reflection. Ray Charles, with his heady brew of gospel, Latin, and country music, and the problematic of his blindness and drug use as conventional signifiers of the otherness of black musicians, comes most immediately to mind. Bo Diddley's bringing of electric blues into the mainstream and Sam Cooke's smooth amalgam of sweet gospel, rock 'n' roll, and pop also invite commentary. But I want now to move on to a consideration of the attacks on early rock 'n' roll and its recuperation by the larger culture. Ideally, such a consideration should help bring into focus the music as a postmodernism of cultural resistance and clarify what is ultimately at stake in significations of the Other.

The ostensible issues in the early attacks on rock 'n' roll were sex and juvenile delinquency. But not far beneath lay centuries of white fears for which the black Other served as signifier--of the primitive, the sensual, and so on--and which had been inscribed in the eating and sexual taboos of Jim Crow laws. The most vicious white southern racists, who sprang from the same social class as Presley and Lewis, were quite clear about the threat rock 'n' roll represented. Asa Carter, executive secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council, was typical. Urging juke box operators to purge "immoral" records, Carter charged that the NAACP had "infiltrated" southern white teenagers with "rock and roll" ("Segregationist Wants Ban" 1956, 39). Calling rock 'n' roll "the basic heavy-beat music of Negroes," he claimed that it "appeals to the base in man, brings out animalism and vulgarity" ("White Council vs. Rock and Roll" 1956, 32).

It is of course significations of the body that organize discourses about race (and gender). Racist discourse ultimately depends on notions of the white body and the black body as the transcendental signifiers that found the rigid boundary of otherness on nature. "Sex" and "rhythm," both of which also are seen as inhering in the body, are often intermediate terms in such discourse. But "race," as the articles collected by Henry Louis Gates Jr., in "Race," Writing, and Difference (1986) forcefully remind us, is an arbitrary and socially constructed signifier in which otherness, difference, and all sorts of racial attributes are inscribed. To cultural authorities of the fifties, what the counter-discourse of rock 'n' roll proposed was the explosive equation of white youth with the black Other through the medium of the body and its accouterments: dance, clothing, rhythm, sex. It was a doubly dangerous equation because it cut the body as signifier loose from what was presumed to be its transcendental signified--the black body--revealing it to be merely another signifier.

In a manner that recalls the initial hysterical response to jazz, the most august social institutions and their spokesmen routinely used racist discourse, centering on significations of the body, to decry rock 'n' roll. A few examples from the scores collected by Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave make the point: Samuel Cardinal Stritch of Chicago, whose remarks were picked up by the wire services and circulated throughout the nation, blasted rock's "tribal rhythms" (Martin and Segrave 1988, 49). Observing the U.S. rock 'n' roll scene, the London Times simply conflated sex and violence and race, reporting that "outbursts of violence spurred by the heavy, pulsing beat of this latest derivative of Negro blues, by the moaning suggestiveness of most of its songs, have occurred all over the country" (50). Jack O'Brien, television critic of the New York Journal-American, likened Elvis's January 28, 1956, performance on the Dorsey Brothers "Stage Show" to "an aborigine's mating dance" (Martin and Segrave 1988, 62). And, as part of ASCAP's vendetta against BMI, whose membership consisted largely of country, rhythm & blues, and rock 'n' roll composers, showman Billy Rose touched all the bases when he said: "It's the current climate on radio and television which makes Elvis Presley and his animal posturings possible, ... it's a set of untalented twitchers and twisters whose appeal is largely to the zoot suiter and the juvenile department" (87-88).

The desperate confusion of issues in such rhetoric--confusion happily sown by rock 'n' roll itself--hints at the way in which its counter-discourse would eventually be recuperated in the discourse of the dominant culture. I am not suggesting a conspiracy, but a culture-wide, even to some extent unconscious, realignment of dominant discourse to assimilate, recuperate, and finally close over the disturbance to itself introduced by the counter-discourse of early rock 'n' roll. This recuperation entailed shifting the discourse away from the issue of the Other embodied in significations of the body and transforming the controversy over rock 'n' roll into a harmless generational conflict. The naked racism of the White Citizens Councils was unpalatable to more moderate (and more devious) Americans, and it had been hopelessly undermined by early rock 'n' roll itself. It was necessary to shift the debate such that the rigid boundaries of otherness could be reestablished. This was accomplished by transmuting racial and class issues into generational ones.

The middle term in this transformation was "juvenile delinquency." The earnest liberalism of the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle, whose theme song "Rock Around the Clock" made rock 'n' roll a national sensation, anticipates this turn rather neatly. The narrative separates Sidney Poitier's character, a threatening black student who turns out to be good and salvageable, from Vic Morrow's Artie West (Western art?), an incorrigible white delinquent. When Morrow and his gang destroy a teacher's collection of jazz records (white jazz it appears from the titles they read derisively before smashing the discs), the Poitier character is nowhere to be found, as the Bill Haley song rises in volume on the sound track. Blacks are doubly invisible in this scene: the music being overthrown--big band jazz--is seen to be all white, and blacks have no part in the social rebellion. The film's relentless liberalism in absolving blacks of any musical responsibility for the upheaval also denies them any credit for rock 'n' roll: in one memorable scene, the Poitier character is shown leading a group of fellow black students in singing "Go Down, Moses" and admonishing them not to "jazz it up"--he respects musical categories.

Thus the debate would subtly move from the attraction of "tribal rhythms" and all it implies to the problem of (white) juvenile delinquency such primitivism was said to cause. Eventually, the story turned from delinquency to an emphasis on the purely juvenile, on the middle-class generational conflict, a subject fit for TV sitcoms, which effectively read blacks and poor southern whites out of the narrative, reestablishing their otherness by ignoring them. In the space of a few years the threat of the racially ambiguous youth became the somewhat less threatening white juvenile delinquent and finally the merely comically exasperating teenager. To a large degree young people themselves bought into this far more manageable notion.

Self-conscious generational conflict is an old story, having arisen with the decline of ascribed social status following the Enlightenment and gaining momentum with romantic movements like Sturm and Drang in Germany and, later, political movements like "Young Italy" and "Young Germany" (Kriegel 1978). But it was only at the turn of the century, contemporaneously with modernism, that generational conflict became a means of explaining social reality. Indeed, it is one of the informing ideas of modernism's revolt against the Victorians. Emptied of that political content, as it was in 1950s America, the idea of generational conflict was reduced to an empty universal truth about human development, the equivalent in the social realm of the aestheticization of change in the arts, perfectly consonant with ideologies of progress and modernization and thus available to the middle class (against which modernism was originally directed) as an acceptable explanation of pop cultural phenomena like rock 'n' roll. In essence, then, the late fifties discourse about rock 'n' roll, in turning from a narrative about cultural miscegenation to one about generational conflict, moved from an unwilling recognition of nascent postmodernism in all its social and political implications to a reassertion of the official culture of modernism within popular culture.

The recuperation of rock 'n' roll by the dominant culture was helped immeasurably by the fates that befell these four seminal performers in the late fifties. In 1957, Little Richard simply retired from rock 'n' roll, confused apparently about religion, secular music, and his sexual orientation. In 1958, Berry was arrested in the company of a young white woman, but initially was charged only with illegal possession of a gun. In 1959, he was charged with violating the Mann Act, when it was discovered that the young Spanish-speaking, part-Apache girl he had brought from El Paso to be a hostess at his Club Bandstand in St. Louis was only fourteen years old and a prostitute with a record. With Berry's interracial nightclub already the subject of their assiduous attention, the police were only too willing to listen to the girl's denunciation of Berry when he fired her. Subsequently, another Mann Act violation was charged in the gun possession case. He was acquitted on that charge but was eventually convicted in the case of the hostess and sentenced to three years in prison. As an exorcism of the cultural implications of his work, it was perfect: charges of "white slavery" with underage girls of other races.

Jerry Lee Lewis suffered a similarly appropriate exorcism. In 1958, when it was revealed that he had married his third cousin, who was not yet fourteen, his career came to an abrupt halt. Bookings disappeared and his recordings were informally blacklisted by radio stations throughout the country, a ban that lasted for nearly ten years. It was Lewis's misfortune to tap into long-standing cultural images of poor white southerners whose sexual precociousness was seen to lead to incestuous intermarrying and even more degenerate offspring, images that were embedded in everything from Tobacco Road to "'Lil Abner" to the legendary drive-in movie shocker of the period, Poor White Trash. As Berry was punished for the racial challenge he represented, so Lewis for his class and regional threat.

Presley, of course, was not exorcised at all, but trivialized, the central figure in the shifting of the discourse from cultural miscegenation to generational conflict. For the press, even the generational debate was settled when it revealed that he worshiped his mother, said his prayers every night, and yes ma'amed and no sired his elders. (Of course, this ignored the social class aspects of his religion--the Pentecostal Assembly of God church.) Thus, in the media, the Hillbilly Cat gave way to the rebel without a cause, and the rebel turned out not to be a rebel at all. When he was drafted in 1958, his recuperation by the dominant culture was complete. Gleefully, the head of the Memphis draft board remarked, "After all, when you take him out of the entertainment business, what have you got left? A truck driver" (Ward 1986, 162). It was also during this period, when rock 'n' roll was being reduced to a generational matter and teen crooners were being drawn from the Philadelphia of American Bandstand, that the falsehood took root that the early hysterical reaction to Elvis Presley had been no different from the bobby-soxers' reaction to Frank Sinatra a decade earlier. Presley was of course complicit in his own trivialization. As he grew ever more popular after emerging from the Army, the counter-discourse of class, race, and region faded from his work. As he aged, the relatively benign generational issue also disappeared, though in the 1960s it raged in the culture at large.

This is a dismayingly downbeat ending to a story that begins so hopefully. But, as I said, my intention is as much to rescue early rock 'n' roll from its simple-minded advocates as to defend it from its numerous despisers. The larger point, however, is what an understanding of these artists as proto-postmodernists might mean to black music research, how this exercise might go beyond the tired critical trick of finding homologies between recent critical discourses and artistic practices that predate them. In the space remaining, I want only to suggest that the refusal to come to terms with rock 'n' roll in any but the most reductive ways not only deforms discourse about rock 'n' roll but also about black music generally.

Much work on black music, whether or not it deals explicitly with rock 'n' roll, is nevertheless often informed by an understandable antipathy to it. This is, I suspect, not only because rock 'n' roll has such a troubled and troubling relationship to black music but also because black music research as a widespread academic discipline arose at a time when the domination of popular music by "white" progressive rock was stifling. Moreover, the discipline flourished in a context of increasing musical polarization. But for whatever reasons--and they are no doubt more complicated than I have suggested--this antipathy could be said to structure two apparently opposed critical strategies.

In the first, the critic accepts the modernist distinction between high and low culture, condemns rock 'n' roll, and then has to find some way to redeem, in terms of high art, the forms of black music the critic admires. For example, rock is derided as a dilution of rhythm & blues, and rhythm & blues is condemned as a dilution of jazz; but then to "save" jazz the critic must insist it is high art.

In the second--and perhaps more familiar--critical strategy, the critic upholds some vague notion of authenticity in music, which often leads to tortured distinctions between folk art, popular art, and fine art. Coupled with a historical narrative that reduces the production of cultural meaning to music-business history, this strategy may also entail a number of sometimes unstated and certainly insupportable assumptions, namely, that early and little-known music is good and that more recent, more popular developments of that music are necessarily bad. This by-now-wearisome simplification of history and culture renders rock 'n' roll, including many of its black performers, all but invisible. For example, the George Nierenberg film That Rhythm, Those Blues (1988) erases a host of interesting mid- and late-fifties rock 'n' roll performers by posing the question of rock 'n' roll as a false choice between the now obscure, supper-club rhythm & blues singer Charles Brown, who stood at the dawn of early rock 'n' roll, and the briefly best-selling, worthless exploiter of black music Pat Boone, who stood at the end of the era. Brown was unquestionably superior to Boone as a singer, but perhaps neither was adequate to his historical moment in the way that Berry, Little Richard, Lewis, and Presley, however briefly, were to theirs.

Though apparently opposed, both of these critical stances implicitly accept the modernist distinction between high and low culture and then proceed along their separate paths, one upholding modernist formalism, the other merely turning it upside down and substituting for formalist beauty the pseudo-sociological standard of authenticity. The first would attempt to write black popular music into a canon whose Eurocentrism necessitates the founding of black music research at all; the second would secede entirely from that canon and found a new one whose defining mark is, negatively, that very canon. But one of the salutary services postmodernism has performed is to challenge the very terms of the modernist dichotomy of high and low culture. Like much black American cultural production itself, postmodernism operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, mass culture and high art, without privileging any of those terms. Thus postmodernism offers to black music research one possibility for breaking a critical impasse whose often-unacknowledged site is early rock 'n' roll. Otherwise, rock 'n' roll, whether conceived as abysmally lowbrow or as laughably inauthentic, will continue to operate as a great absence at the center of black music research, a repressed around which much of the rest of our discourse about black music arrays itself in disguised versions of the very modernism that is so inhospitable to Afro-American cultural production. Such a dilemma does not constitute anything nearly so simple as irony, but rather a powerful reminder of the relentless re-inscription of the Other even in discourses, including this one, that affect to deconstruct it.

Originally published in BMRJ vol. 9, no. 2 (1989)

REFERENCES

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Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary theory: An introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foster, Hal. 1985. Recodings: Art, spectacle, cultural politics. Seattle: Bay Press.

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Frith, Simon. 1981. Sound effects: Youth, leisure, and the politics of rock 'n' roll. New York: Pantheon Books.

Frith, Simon, and Howard Home. 1987. Art into pop. New York: Methuen.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. 1986. "Race," writing, and difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gillett, Charlie. 1970. The sound of the city: The rise of rock and roll, New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey.

Howe, Irving. [1976] 1983. World of our fathers. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1984. Mapping the postmodern. New German Critique 33: 5-52.

Jameson, Fredric. 1983. Postmodernism and consumer society. In The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture, edited by Hal Foster, 111-125. Seattle: Bay Press.

Kriegel, Annie. 1978. Generational difference: The history of an idea. Daedulus (Fall): 23-38.

Marcus, Greil. 1982. Mystery train: Images of America in rock 'n' roll music. Rev. ed. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Martin, Linda, and Kerry Segrave. 1988. Anti-rock: The opposition to rock 'n' roll. Hamden, Conn.: Archon.

Owens, Craig. 1983. The discourse of others: Feminists and postmodernism. In The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture, edited by Hal Foster, 57-77. Seattle: Bay Press.

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Toll, Robert C. 1974. Blacking up: The minstrel show in nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ward, Ed. 1986. The fifties and before. In Rock of ages: The Rolling Stone history of rock & roll, by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker, 17-246. New York: Summit Books.

White, Charles. 1984. The life and times of Little Richard: The quasar of rock. New York: Harmony Books.

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(1.) Thus Foucault, talking of his work with the Groupe d'information de prisons: "When the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents--and not a theory about delinquency" (Foucault and Delouze 1977, 209).

(2.) The larger story of bebop within the international critical and cultural currents of its day remains to be written, however. And when it is, I suspect the modernist-postmodernist tension will inform it.

BRUCE TUCKER is co-author with James Brown, of James Brown: The Godfather of Soul (Macmillan, 1986) and was the guest editor of Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 1 (1991), devoted to Contemporary Theory and Black Music. A freelance writer, he is a consulting editor of Black Music Research Journal.