Million-dollar juke joint: commodifying blues culture.

Like a lot of thirty-something white folks, I had my first musical crush on rock and roll. After wearing out my Beatles and Stones records, along with my parents, I cranked up Cream and Hendrix until my cheapo record player nearly melted. In high school I began unearthing their rhythm and blues antecedents. Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, and the three Kings - Freddie, Albert, and B. B. - were rocking revelations. Brooding yet soothing, their music shook with the raw pains and joys I couldn't articulate on my own. "If you can't dig the blues, you must have a hole in your soul," declared bluesman Jimmy Rodgers. Damn straight, said I.

I thought again about the umbilical link I felt with blues after a visit to the extraordinary House of Blues in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nestled in Harvard Square, America's capital of liberal intellectualism, House of Blues strives to recreate the ambiance of a funky Southern juke joint, but at a cost of over a million dollars. More than just an unusually upscale blues bar, the club presents itself as a shrine to traditional African American culture. Its floorboards replicate those in Muddy Waters' boyhood Mississippi home; works of African American folk art line the walls; and plaster reliefs of blues greats gaze stoically from the ceilings.

For all the artful rootsiness, however, House of Blues's business side is sleek and chic. A state-of-the-art system programs blues CDs while video monitors flash images of old-time album covers. Computerized cash registers silently total patrons' tabs for the "international peasant food" featured on the menu. A blues boutique offers low-rent gear like caps, baseball jackets ($230), sweatshirts, mugs, and lighters, at up-market prices.

The club's founder, Isaac Tigrett, plans to expand House of Blues into a world-wide chain on the model of his previous venture, the Hard Rock Cafe. Houses of Blues recently opened in New Orleans and Los Angeles. Branches in New York, Europe, and Asia are underway. This year Tigrett negotiated a deal with the Walt Disney Company to open clubs in its amusement parks in Orlando, Anaheim, and Tokyo. Turner Broadcasting will reportedly carry a House of Blues television show, and Sony Signatures will merchandise House of Blues apparel.

The logo on House of Blues merchandise depicts the Blues Brothers with their porkpie hats, sunglasses, thin black ties, and tough-customer expressions. In fact, the Blues Brothers share a pedigree with House of Blues. During the 1970s Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, the actors who created the characters, built private clubs in New York and Chicago featuring blues. Later Aykroyd, and John's widow, Judy, helped bankroll the House of Blues venture. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Aykroyd reported giving Tigrett permission to use the Blues Brothers image after Tigrett "got a flash that this could be a real good logo for representing this whole lifestyle" (29).

How did a pair of white actors in retro outfits come to represent the blues "lifestyle"? Why is a high-tech juke joint flourishing in Harvard Square? And from whence the mainstream infatuation, epitomized by House of Blues, with a formerly peripheral music, available chiefly on "race" records? In answering, I hope to show how commercial representations of blues culture exploit key cultural dilemmas posed by gender, race, and class identities.

Consider for a moment the commercialization of blues culture over the past fifteen years. The $30 million Blues Brothers film (1980) and triple-platinum album were milestones. By the mid-1980s, barbecued ribs and chicken wings were perking up restaurant menus nationwide, while leather jackets and shades had become requisite accoutrements for a bumper crop of blues devotees and wannabes. Chicago began billing itself as "The Home of the Blues" as the music began to conjure major tourist revenue.

Jump to George Bush's 1989 inaugural, featuring performances by rhythm-and-blues legends Albert Collins, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Bo Diddley, Percy Sledge, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, and Sam of Sam & Dave, among others. The MC is Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater - like Tigrett, a white Southerner and longtime r&b fan. By the 1990s, Joe Camel sports a Blues Brothers outfit to peddle smokes, and any spin of the radio or TV dial brings forth down-home-bluesy soundtracks behind ads for guy-oriented stuff like beer, gas, and hiking boots. (Commercialized blues culture seems to appeal more to men than to women - don't look for The Blues Sisters anytime soon.)

What is the draw of blues music and the blues "lifestyle"? In part, blues culture seems to offer something appealingly gutsy, sexy, low-down, and dirty. Anglo-Protestant culture, with its premium on controlled, modulated behavior, harbors not-so-secret cravings for blues people's extravagant posturing, their TNT-drinking braggadocio and All-Night-Long abandon. Even performers' flamboyant dress - like the orange shark-skin suit I once saw Lowell Fulson wear - attracts those whose idea of rebellion is shopping J. Press instead of Brooks Brothers.

The blues bar, where audiences whoop and shout at appropriate moments ("Let Me Hear You Say 'Yeah'!"), offers an antidote to toxic emotional repression. Patrons can acknowledge, vicariously, the booty-shaking lewdness, the ruefulness, and killer jealousies nixed by Anglo-Protestant mores. Within this bounded space, they can transgress safely, loosening the dominant culture's constraints like an overtight necktie, and adapt a peripheral culture's imagined exoticism to their own emotional needs.

Blues culture also addresses a conundrum of masculine identity. Most young males (and not a few older ones) will go to any length to be judged cool by male peers and girls. The Blues Brothers characters respond to this crucial problem. Their deadpan inscrutability and undertaker ensembles convey gravity and purpose. So does their signature line, "We're on a mission from God," which House of Blues has adopted as a motto. In fact, The Blues Brothers film has but a single running gag: the brothers' unflappable cool in life-threatening situations. The only thing that can rouse them from their lock-jawed sangfroid is gospel and blues music. They are transformed on hearing it. They gyrate and get wild, possessed by the big blues spirit. Unlike their cop, redneck, and neo-Nazi nemeses, they got soul. The Blues Brothers' aesthetic is thus cool yet passionate. It prizes nonchalance while circumventing emotional deadness through contact with "hot" African American culture.

House of Blues exoticizes select elements of African American culture by removing them from their social context. On a recent visit, I listened as a staff member pointed out the display of African American folk art. Tigrett, he said, "has a whole trainload of stuff like this. He collects it." I thought of wealthy people I have known who twirl through a rolodex of cultural fascinations - today Tibetan, tomorrow Toltec or Tarahumara. Tigrett, whose wife Maureen is the former Mrs. Ringo Starr, gives a portrait of his Indian guru pride of place at House of Blues.

The allure of the exotic is fundamental to the appeal blues culture holds for the mainstream. Besides the artwork, whose themes are mainly sin and death, House of Blues displays skulls, coffins, and other hoodoo paraphernalia that impart a frisson of danger, and convince the mainly white audiences that they are party to something primal and uninhibited. The tradition of improvising the "primitive" stretches back at least as far as Harlem's whites-only Cotton Club, amidst whose jungle decor black stars of the twenties and thirties crossed-over to mainstream fame.

Defining and distorting other people's culture is the dubious prerogative of the culturally dominant. And because dominant cultures remain the frame of reference, even when presenting or appreciating other cultures, it is Tigrett's personal relationship with African America that becomes the focus of a visit to House of Blues. Rather than discuss the music itself, the staff repeats the story of Tigrett's Memphis boyhood, his discomfort with segregation, his determination to help bridge racial barriers, and his devotion to his guru.

Tigrett's story, the slogan "Unity in Diversity" that hangs over the bar - I'm pretty sure these weren't constructed cynically. But what does it mean that the audiences I've seen at House of Blues are 98 percent white? The focus on the benevolent white man's story appeals to those who identify with The Blues Brothers fantasy of bridging black and white cultures, and reflects the strains of life in a racially divided society.

The New Republic articulated this fantasy in its review of a boxed set of blues legend Robert Johnson's recordings, rhapsodizing,

Whether you are white or black, middle class or working class, rural or urban, Northern or Southern, the blues in general, and Robert Johnson in particular, define and dramatize in song the central American experience. It's our only history without lies. (Banks 30)

The fantasy element of such visions shows up as a desire for limited contact with select decontextualized aspects of African American culture, rather than with all its complexity and internal diversity.

In this sense, House of Blues partakes of a long line of white fantasies about (temporarily) crossing racial divides. Legions of righteous American adventure stories feature white males who cross the tracks to aid those with more melanin and fewer material advantages. In the 1986 film Crossroads, for instance, a white teenage guitarist rescues a forgotten black bluesman. In The Blues Brothers, the "brothers" save an elderly black father-figure (played by r&b titan Cab Calloway) from losing his home. The prize for over-the-top revisionism, though, probably goes to the Spielberg production Back to the Future (1985), in which yet another white teenage guitarist gets credit for teaching Chuck Berry how to rock and roll!

House of Blues is founded on such fantasies of helping African Americans and others perennially typecast in underdog roles. Just as Hard Rock Cafe products carried committed-sounding injunctions to "Love all, serve all," and "Save the planet," House of Blues's (trademarked) motto, "Help ever, hurt never," seems suitable for emblazoning on the costume of a comic-book superhero. What the idea of helping ever, hurting never really helps is to assuage the consciences of well-meaning haves who would rather not oppress have-nots. Whether in an oppressor or emancipator role, however, whites remain the subjects, and blacks the objects, of their fantasies.

Broadly, blues and gospel traditions-House of Blues offers a $25 Gospel Brunch - sprang from collective efforts for group survival. Rituals of communal catharsis traditionally afforded African Americans compensation for the self-denial needed to survive under vicious, systematic oppression. So when B. B. sings, "I've been mistreated," he enfolds his audience by adding, "and people, you know what I'm talkin' about." Empathic connection with a preacher/singer's outpourings and exhortations turns both the church and the juke joint into sites of communal burden-lifting and constitutes the houserocking heart of gospel and blues. Anglo-Protestant cultural ideals, on the other hand, gravitate towards individual attainment. But pressures for conformity make achieving a sense of individuality in such a culture especially challenging.

Within the dominant culture, the problem thus becomes how to either rebel safely or conform dangerously. The ad world's manipulative response is to tie free-spirited individualism to brand affiliation. By inviting patrons to imbibe the blues mythos, House of Blues offers up a lure of risk-free rebellion. With the right accessories, it seems to say - the logo, leather jacket, and Ray Bans - one can possess the whole mystical jalapeno.

Because of blues culture's commercialization and accompanying loss of social context, the white imagination ignores or romanticizes the poverty, violence, and endurance that bred and fed the blues. When Otis Rush cut his smokingest recordings, he couldn't afford decent instruments. Many of the greatest, like Magic Sam, Guitar Slim, and Little Walter, died young, from an "overdose of dues." Others, like Hound Dog Taylor, Earl Hooker, and Big Walter, spent their last years Goin' Down Slow - sick, inebriated, and/or broke. (The temptation to attribute blues performers' incandescence to self-immolating lives-on-the-edge can be fatal: Another investor in House of Blues, actor River Phoenix, died of a cocaine overdose similar to the one that killed Belushi.)

In place of such disconcertingly complex realities, House of Blues proffers a blues theme-park in the recreational and commercial backyard of the world's wealthiest university. No one has to go anywhere grimy, hear anyone talking all out of they head, or, for that matter, encounter blacks in positions of authority. It's possible to groove along to a song about being Broke and Hongry and Ain't Got a Lousy Dime, and then order another $4.50 beer from one of the club's predominantly white wait-staff.

Blues surely evokes universal emotions: "I'm So Glad," "Crazy 'Bout You Baby," "Troubled in Mind," "Down on the Killin' Floor." Somebody loves me; nobody loves me - these are the irreducibles of social experience. If, because it gives voice to universal feelings, blues is not moribund, neither is it dynamic and vital. While rap now reflects the social contexts that once shaped classic blues forms, most of today's blues bands continue to cleave to arrangements by Sonny Boy Williamson, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, and others whose main contributions came some 30 or 40 years ago. Expert imitators like Stevie Ray Vaughn and Bobby Radcliffe can cover a variety of styles with terrific fire and intensity. But while claiming to be "keeping the blues alive," most of today's performances seem to be doing so on a respirator. In part, they lack the social relevance they had when people really said things like "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom."

With most of the remaining giants like John Lee Hooker and Bobby "Blue" Bland ensconced in the homage phase of their careers, many blues fans entertain a nostalgia for a golden-age when mythic figures like Blind Willie Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Nighthawk, and T-Bone Walker strode the earth. The Greek-temple ceiling at House of Blues with its plaster pantheon of blues immortals (at $3,000-5,000 per panel) symbolically "friezes" the blues in time.

The House of Blues Foundation which Tigrett established (and which figures prominently in the club's publicity) also reflects the inability of commodified blues culture to connect with present-day realities. While the foundation's goal is "promoting racial harmony through educational outreach," at the time I visited its activities were limited to offering schoolchildren tours of the House of Blues.

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois expresses the hope that "some day on American soil [blacks and whites] may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack" (11). Cultural borrowing, highly adaptive at times, can also take place under terms that distort and objectify the subordinate culture. Such outcomes are nearly inevitable since institutions of the dominant culture, particularly the media and academia, shape perceptions of African American and other "minority" cultures.

I write here less to condemn House of Blues than to probe how, often with moral aspirations, America's dominant culture uses aspects of peripheralized cultures to manage its dilemmas of individuality and race and class relations, and to make money in the process. Can commercial and idealistic motives coexist harmoniously, or is this idea a conscience-salving rationalization? Certainly there is nothing reprehensible in expanding appreciation of blues as an art form. I like the idea of presenting aspects of traditional African American culture in a way that should promote respect, if not always understanding. People who might otherwise not have may end up loving blues music (as I still do, viscerally, but also with a bit more detachment than in my teens). And, hey, Taco Bell isn't the essence of Latino culture either.

But through its authoritative presentation, House of Blues perpetuates the distortions and commodification that have rendered this diverse, eclectic form less dynamic and more predictable. The contexts for African American culture, its complexity, and its pervasive interaction with the cultural mainstream are ignored and diminished by a reductionist spotlight zooming from the exotic to the universal. What starts out as appreciation winds up as appropriation. House of Blues did not start these trends; rather, it is their latest, slickest extension.

Works Cited

Banks, R. "The Devil and Robert Johnson: The Blues and the 1990s." New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-31.

Morse, S. "Back to the Blues." Boston Globe 13 Nov. 1992: 29.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. Millwood: Kraus, 1973.

Filmography 

Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemekis. Universal, 1985.

The Blues Brothers. Dir. John Landis. Universal, 1980.

Crossroads. Dir. Walter Hill. Columbia, 1986.

Daniel Lieberfeld has recently published articles on culture in Film Quarterly and The American Scholar, and on race relations in Mediation Quarterly. He is a doctoral candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a research fellow at Harvard University. Mr. Lieberfeld would like to thank Judith Sanders, Robert "Rex" Welshon, and Kate Masur for their generous and insightful comments on a draft of this article.