Voices of hate, sounds of hybridity: black music and the complexities of racism.

It is worth stating the obvious. The music of the African diaspora is not a recent import to Europe; rather, it has been an integral part of numerous European societies since the eighteenth century. In England, these sounds were introduced through the hands and voices of slave musicians, jubilee singers, jazz orchestras, reggae sound-system operators, and hip-hop DJs. It is--or should be--impossible to think about the social history of Europe in general, or England in particular, without understanding the place of black music within it.

In Victorian England, the sounds of jubilees and spirituals were assimilated across the lines of class and political division. Karl Marx, who lived in London for over thirty years, would render "German folk-songs and Negro spirituals" while walking with his daughters in Highgate (Wheen 1999, 221). The Fisk Jubilee Singers enjoyed adulation from aristocrats and paupers alike. They entertained Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone (Gilroy 1993, 90), and their memoir recounts a particularly eventful concert introduced by the Earl of Shaftesbury at the annual meeting of the Freedmen's Mission Aid society, the City Temple, London, on May 31, 1875:

   So great was the gathering about the building that to get even to the doors
   was a formidable task, and the chairman, Lord Shaftesbury, was delayed some
   minutes in reaching the platform by the difficulty of penetrating the dense
   crowd that filled the corridors. In ascending the stand his eye caught
   sight of the singers in the gallery, whom he greeted with a cordial
   salutation, and in his remarks on taking the chair he said: "I am delighted
   to see so large a congregation of the citizens of London come to offer a
   renewal of their hospitality to these noble brethren and sisters of ours,
   who are here to-night to charm us with their sweet songs. They have
   returned here, not for anything in their own behalf, but to advance the
   interests of the coloured race in America, and then to what in them lies to
   send missionaries of their own colour to the nations spread over Africa.
   When I find these young people, gifted to an extent that does not often
   fall to the lot of man, coming here in such a spirit. I don't want them to
   become white, but I have a strong disposition myself to become black. If I
   thought colour was anything--if it brought with it their truth, piety, and
   talent, I would willingly exchange my complexion to-morrow." (Marsh 1900,
   79-80).

It is strange, a century later, to read that the sounds of the black gospel moved this peer of the realm to indulge in a fantasy of self-transformation.

Doug Seroff has documented a parallel story of the infatuation with gospel singing at the other end of the social scale. He points out that another legacy of the Fisk visit was the formation of groups of white working-class jubilee singers. One such choir was formed in Hackney, in east London. Thirty young singers from the local "Ragged School" toured London, raising money for Hackney Mission, in 1875--the same year that the Earl of Shaftesbury introduced the Fisk Singers on the London stage (Seroff 1986, 48).

Although Marx may have cheerfully lent his voice to spiritual melodies, the reaction by twentieth-century European Marxists to black music was often less than positive. Theodor Adorno's criticism is perhaps the best known, particularly for his denunciation of jazz and recorded music. Adorno's argument is easily misrepresented, in large part due to his own rhetorical excesses (for example, in one article entitled "Uber Jazz," he wrote that jazz most closely resembled "the spontaneous singing of servant girls" [Adorno 1990, 53]). His objection is sometimes characterized as rooted in a racially loaded form of European aesthetics, but such attempts to read his position through some kind of implicit "racial bad sense" risk missing an important nuance in his argument. Fundamentally, Adorno opposed jazz not because it was archaic or "primitive" but because it provided the ultimate theme tune for modern capitalism. In part, he objected that the commercialization of jazz reinforced stereotypes, a judgment affected at least in part by his own experience of studying at Oxford in the 1930s, where he encountered the ways in which jazz was assimilated within the elite circle of the English aristocracy (Wilcock 1997). He argued that modern capitalism exploited blackness: "Like commodity consumption itself, the manufacture [Herstellung] of jazz is also an urban phenomenon, and the skin of the black man functions as much as a colouristic effect as does the silver of the saxophone" (Adorno 1990, 53). Adorno's point is that this results in little more than a parody of colonial imperialism. Nothing that is vital or sensuous is embodied in what he refers to as these "bright musical commodities."

The reason for invoking Adorno here is that he provided an important insight to the ways in which the commercialization of music was packaged through racial fetish. Paul Gilroy has recently picked up this line of critique. He argues that similar processes of commercial exploitation have reinforced racist ideologies and reduced black music to the "marketing of hollow defiance" (Gilroy 2000, 206). Yet paradoxically, the mechanical reproduction of music through recording also enabled black music to travel in ways that were previously unthinkable. The sounds of black music circulated within the African diaspora and enabled connections between dispersed peoples through place and time (Gilroy 1987). In addition, black music entered and was embraced and practiced in new worlds.

In order to understand these processes, it is necessary to develop a close understanding of the web of social relations into which black musics are received, enjoyed, and ultimately practiced. For the purposes of this article, I concentrate on black music in white worlds. Roger Hewitt (1983) has referred to this phenomenon as the "black through white" syndrome. I draw on two particular music scenes in order to situate these questions in a particular English social and historical setting. I will examine the broad issues referred to in this introduction in the context of the emergence of English skinhead styles and what came to be referred to as the English "northern soul" phenomenon. What follows is an attempt to recover the story of these movements through oral history and ethnography. Through this, I want to address a larger question: How does the fascination with and love of black music fit with the cultural configurations of English racism?

Skinhead Moonstomp and the Rhythms of White Chauvinism 

In his seminal book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige (1979) argued that one can find within postwar British youth styles the traces of an embodied history of "race relations" that both assimilate and expunge. So a deep-seated and profound cultural hybridity could exist even in those styles most associated with racism. The best and most dramatic example is skinhead style, whose early proponents were compulsive collectors of black American soul and Jamaican rocksteady music. As Kobena Mercer (1987; 1994) has noted, black music became a register of white pride and identity like the equivalent of a photographic negative. In an excellent discussion of skinheadism, Anoop Nayak (1999, 76-77) emphasizes that this form of identity is a tightly choreographed performance. What is interesting and perplexing is the degree to which black music provides its signature.

Skinhead style had its origins in Britain and, more specifically, in the working-class districts to the south and east of London in the mid to late 1960s. Characterized by cropped hairstyles, braces, Doc Marten boots, and tight Levi jeans, this style used industrial working-class imagery to produce a conservative masculinity in a period of political, economic, and cultural upheaval. Skinheadism came of age in 1969 in an era when urban protest, gay politics, feminism, and a host of other social movements were also emerging. Early writers viewed the style as a symbolic attempt to resolve the social transformations and communal breakdown taking place within working-class districts in postwar Britain (Cohen 1972; Hebdige 1981). This was achieved through the assertion of a white working-class identity, albeit in a burlesque form. Skinhead style was understood as deeply imbued with the domestic semiotics of class, masculinity, race, and power. The whole nature of skinhead performance was predicated on the performance of a very particular masculine culture. "The dance of the Skin is, then," commented Dick Hebdige (1982, 28), "even for the girls, a mime of awkward masculinity--the geometry of menace" (Hebdige 1982, 28) (see Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Although skinheadism was imbued with heterosexual, masculinized, and conservative class symbolism, its attraction was not confined to white straight men. The style from its very inception had an ambivalent gender politics. For women skinheads (referred to as "rennes"), fashion would combine styles considered to be masculine (Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts, penny loafer shoes, or monkey boots) with women's clothing (miniskirts and fishnet stockings). This complex male/female stylistic composite was best expressed in "The Feather" hairstyle, which combined the "short crop-top" style worn by men with a feathered fringe that fell down over the eyes and neck. Equally, the masculinism expressed through dance--often resulting in groups of men dancing together bare chested and in large numbers--possessed a kind of homoerotic quality, and from the very beginnings of the skinhead culture a small number of gay skinheads set up their own scene, particularly in the working-class districts of inner London. Murray Healy (1996, 72), in his excellent study of gay skins, quotes one account by a gay skinhead of club night held at The Union Tavern in Camberwell in the late 1960s: "Tuesday night was skinhead night and you could walk into the pub and there'd be a sea of crops. Fantastic! And everyone was gay! We'd dance to reggae all night, you know, the real Jamaican stuff, and all in rows, strict step. It was a right sight seeing all those skins dancing in rows. The atmosphere was electric." These connections complicate any idea that this was a simplistically chauvinistic culture. But equally, one might ask: Why did the masculine tales of gangster "rude boy" life extolled in rocksteady and ska music resonate in this constituency?

According to Hebdige (1982), two particular maxims held the skinhead movement together in the early days: the recovery of Englishness/ Britishness and the preservation of authenticity. This is not to say that the culture of first-wave skinheads did not assimilate the black registers of metropolitan multiculture. Indeed, a kind of opaque hybridity coexisted alongside open racism and racial nationalism. Roger Hewitt (1995, 24) recounts a story offered to him by a skinhead of a conflict in 1969 at a dance hall called the Locarno in Streatham, south London. The skinhead gave his version of the racialized dynamics of the respective scenes, a white fantasy of urban dominion:

   [Skinheads] formed a big massive movement. We had control of a place called
   the Locarno, it's up Streatham. There were thousands of skinheads come from
   all over the place. And the Old Bill never touched us. (1) And one night
   the nig-nogs came up. They were called "soul boys" then, the niggers them
   days, and they came, about five hundred of them, from a place called the
   Ram Jam. Do you know Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band? Well that was
   their scene--Brixton. (2) And our area was Streatham--a white man's area.
   And we run that place, doing the Skinhead Moonstomp and all that. And they
   came up and reckoned they wanted to take it over. Our place. So we said,
   "Fair enough." The word got around London and thousands of skins drove
   down. By nine o'clock there was 1,000, 500 in. By ten o'clock there were
   3,000 skins. The nig-nogs started then and we ran them all the way to
   Brixton and we walked through Brixton after that. We didn't touch their
   area before but we ran through Brixton and you couldn't see a nig-nog on
   the street. Any nig-nog walked on the street was dead. We could smash em to
   pieces. That's the way it should be today.

Such a fantasy of racist street power would be unthinkable in contemporary Brixton, a place in which a black community has established itself and where popular racism has been muted. Perhaps the accuracy of this account was questionable even in its day, but this particular "skin" embodied some of the culture's complexities and ambiguities. Hewitt comments: "He was a mandarin of Nazi books and pamphlets. He was a committed racist. He was also Jewish and wrestled with some fierce demons. `Them' and `Us' were within him as well as without, a syncretism in desperate need of relief" (24). The skinhead subculture retains this discordant hybridity at another layer beyond Hewitt's insightful account. The Skinhead Moonstomp, invoked in the story as the dance of the whiteskins of London, was in fact pounded out on dance floors to Jamaican artists and black records. The white devotees of the style adopted Jamaican forms of music (such as ska and bluebeat), producing a genre that came to be known as "skinhead reggae" (Griffiths 1995). A black Jamaican group called Symaryp cut "Skinhead Moonstomp," a record that defined the attitude of the genre: "I want all you skinheads to get up on your feet, put your braces together and boots on your feet and gimme some of that ole moonstomping." The ghetto rude boy celebrated in rocksteady and ska music mirrored and enabled the expression of a commensurable white masculinity and its fantasies of urban mastery.

A small number of black skinheads were involved in the scene (see Fig. 2). Elsewhere in south London clubs such as The Galaxy in Lower Sydenham played Jamaican music to audiences of black and white club-goers. The involvement of some of these people was caught between the style's putative racism and what it symbolized from the outside view. Darryl, a black skinhead from Bournemouth, (3) commented on this syndrome: "I've had it from all sides. Some skinheads don't believe I should be one because of my colour. Then I get black people coming up to me and saying, `You're a disgrace to your race'" (quoted in Marshall 1991, 122). These complications were part of this music scene from the beginning. In the 1970s and early 1980s, multiracial elements seemed to be superseded, as skinhead style converged with neofascist politics through the British Movement and the National Front, both of which were openly racist organizations that explicitly courted soldiers for their "race war." The color of the laces worn in their characteristic Doc Marten boots also signified the political affiliations of the skins: white laces indicated support for the National Front, and red laces attested British Movement affiliation (Hewitt 1986, 30). Musical tastes mirrored this, with the emergence of the postpunk Oi! music scene with bands like Sham 69 and the Cockney Rejects. In 1979, the National Front sponsored White Noise Music Club, set up by two key young fascist activists, Patrick Harrington and Nick Griffin, and the British Nazi musician Ian Stuart Donaldson.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

London has been the focus for much of the account of the rise of skinheadism, but it also had a provincial development from the Midlands of England to Scotland, which took a variety of forms. As the racial politics of the music scene unfolded in the industrial towns of the Midlands and north of England, some aspects of the skinhead scene and the soul dance music cultures that had also developed there, and which were completely focused around the playing and enjoying of rare soul music, converged. It is this music scene that I take as my second main example.

Out on the Floor: Soul Music, Club Culture, and "Northerness"

In the early 1970s, industrial towns such as Stoke-on-Trent (in the northern part of the English Midlands) and Wigan (a Lancashire town to the west of Manchester) contained small dispersed black communities. In contrast, in the large cities such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester, alternative public spheres had been established within the black communities themselves, in which black music from the Caribbean and the United States was enjoyed (Gilroy 1987). The soul scenes that I want to discuss developed in neither of these types of contexts; rather, they were largely organized and hosted by white-soul music fanatics.

By this time, clubs such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Va Va's in Bolton, (4) and the Torch in Stoke had established soul clubs and all-night venues (Hollows and Milestone 1998). Blues and Soul writer Dave Godin coined the phrase northern soul as a way of capturing the distinct soul culture of the north of England and the Midlands. The scene was built on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of black music and unknown great soul records, largely recorded in Detroit and Chicago and drawn from labels such as Okeh, Ric Tic, Sansu, La Beat, Revilot, and Backbeat. (5)

Many of the top northern soul DJs built their reputations by seeking out these 45s in American ghetto record shops and dusty warehouses and by owning exclusive records. The identities of these rare demos or acetates was fiercely defended, and DJs would literally cover up the label of the record and give its artist and title a false name in order to deter rival DJs. (Ironically, more copies of great northern soul records probably exist in Britain today than in the United States--so much so that American record dealers now use the term northern soul to describe this genre of black music.)

The best-known venue was the Wigan Casino and featured DJs Russ Winstanley, Richard Searling, and John Vincent. It opened its doors in 1973 and staged regular all-night rare soul extravaganzas for up to fifteen hundred fans (Winstanley and Nowell 1996). The scene's patrons were predominantly young, sharp-witted, stylish, and white working-class. This was a black music culture being hosted by whites.

The dress of the day incorporated and adapted aspects of skinhead style, which for men was Spencer's soul bags (trousers), Ben Shermans, bowling shirts, red or lime-green socks and loafers or brogues, whereas women wore long, flowing full-circle skirts, Mary Quant look-alike fashions, and sandals. The loose-fitting style was perfect for the flamboyant and acrobatic forms of dancing that were invented inside the scene (see Fig. 3). Fans would throw talcum power on the floor to lessen the friction on their leather-soled shoes. The "niters" were peaceful and an alternative to the glitz of mainstream 1970s pop culture. "It was such a big fuck off to record companies and clothes companies and all these folk that were trying to sell you something and tell you the way you should be," comments Keb Darge (1997), who attended the Wigan Casino regularly. "Everyone was so pleased to have something that was theirs, that was created by them."

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Keb was first exposed to soul music at a disco on a local RAF base in his native Elgin, Scotland. Soon he joined the ranks of thousands of Scottish soul fans--or "Troups"--who regularly visited the English northern soul clubs. His first trip to England was to attend the Casino:

   We got on this local coach and there was Dundee (6) boys on there who had
   moved to Bolton to live so that they could go to the all-nighters. This
   gives you an idea of what the northern punters were like.... There was a
   couple of young Northern boys sitting at the front of the coach and three
   or four of the local thugs were picking on them. One of the Dundee boys
   shit into this paper bag on the back of the bus, ran up and smacked it into
   this thug's face and said in his strong Dundee voice, "You yer fucker." I
   thought, "Whey, this is a great big family thing." You felt you belonged!
   (Darge 1997)

The story--although not for the squeamish--illustrates the point that the "northern scene" brought people together in unexpected ways. The "Dundee boys," a product of tough working-class male cultures who would not shirk from violent confrontation, became the protectors of a pair of soul fans being persecuted by vindictive local men who objected to soul boys' deviation from working-class masculinity.

Tim Ashibende, a black soul fan from Stoke and a regular at the Wigan Casino, remembers the heat generated in the all-nighters: "You just walked in and it just hit you instantly. There was all these smells as well. You'd walk into the toilets and it would stink of Brut [an inexpensive men's cologne]. It stank. People would go in there with a sweaty T-shirt, change into a new one and spray the Brut on. You'd go into the Casino in a white T-Shirt and you'd come out with orange stains on it. There would be liquid nicotine coming off the ceiling, a combination of condensation from the sweat and the cigarette smoke." Butch, a white DJ and close friend of Tim's, added: "The scene was predominantly working class and the music was and is black American. The dedication and love of the music is incredible. It was addictive--the raw emotion of it. There are people who have a predisposition to northern [soul]. The emotional make up has to be right. On the dance floor you'll see the `soul grimace' on their face" (Dobson 1997).

As Butch's remark indicates, the scene is still in existence. It has lasted precisely because it captures a dramatic tension between the personal testimony of triumph, love, and despair and uplifting and transcendent dance arrangements. (For example, Danny Monday's "Baby, without You" or Linda Jones' ecstatic "I Just Can't Live My Life (without You Babe)" are deep soul records appropriate for dancing.) The prosaic passion of its devotees defies and protects the scene from the incursion of any trendy affectedness, but keeping track of the latest big records--many of which are covered up with false titles by DJs--is sometimes plain hard work. "It's research," as one fan told me.

Women have always been centrally involved in the scene, but the men are the main collectors and DJs. "Women can be just as obsessed with vinyl as the men, but on the whole the boyfriends buy the records and spend the women's hard-earned cash," suggests fan Elaine Constantine (1997). Elaine was first exposed to northern soul at school in Bury, north of Manchester, and later became a devoted soul fan after becoming disillusioned with the "Scooter" scene. (7) She continues, "I saw one guy outside The Ritz in Manchester a few months ago and he had scratches all over his neck. They were that deep that they'd gone green. I said to him, `Oh, what happened to you?' He said, `Oh, me wife attacked me and she burnt all me dancing shoes so I couldn't go to any more niters.' I looked down at his feet and he was wearing carpet slippers." Many women on the scene said that one of its attractions is that it is a safe place to go alone. Sue Henderson (1997) comments, "I could go down to niters by myself and different people would talk to me. But I am not going to get some drunken slob come and chat me up because I'm a girl sitting by myself. I can't think of anywhere else which is like that."

The 1970s were characterized by violence and a crisis around popular racism. "Soulies" looking back now speak of the enduring friendliness within the scene that also offered a relatively safe place for black fans. Tim Ashibende (1997) recalls, "For me, socializing in general during the seventies wasn't the safest thing to do as a black person. That's what I loved about the northern scene--if you were into the music, that was all the credentials you needed. I don't doubt there were a whole bunch of racists on the scene, but I've never actually had any problems." Yet, traveling to venues could be dangerous, particularly because drinkers would be leaving the local pubs just as the all-nighters were about to begin. (8) Dean Anderson (1997), a black fan and well-known DJ from Newark, near Nottingham, remembers a particularly harrowing journey to the Casino:

   I was always very paranoid about stopping at service stations. In the old
   days on the M62, you'd always get coach loads of football fans. This night
   we stopped and I was playing on one of the pinball machines close to the
   entrance. Clive who was mixed race was across the room. All of a sudden the
   doors opened and these lads walked in, must have been twelve blokes, and
   they took one look at me and in unison they started chanting "Sieg Heil,
   Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil."

Dean and his friend made for the crowded restaurant, where they hoped that they would be safe:

   One by one each of these blokes came up to us right in our faces and said
   things like, "We don't want to beat you up lads, we want you to come
   outside so that we can kill yer." It was [as] if it was rehearsed and
   saying everything under the sun, they thought they could terrorize us into
   going outside. My white mates were just ashamed. They'd never experienced
   anything like that, and they really felt as black as we did when we were
   sat at the table. When they realised they couldn't get us, they turned to
   one of the white lads, got him by the scruff of the neck and said "Don't
   mix!" Those words just ring in my mind....

   There was a table behind us and there were two ladies and two men. The lady
   was from Liverpool. She stood up in the restaurant and she said "Are you
   people in this restaurant so weak, have you seen what these two lads have
   been through for the last fifteen minutes? Is anyone willing to stand up
   with them?" The whole restaurant went quiet. She said, "Look lads, we'll be
   with you, we'll walk you out to your car." Honestly, for ten minutes we
   didn't dare go anywhere. Ten minutes we plucked up the courage and they
   said, "Come on we'll walk with you to your car." So there was these two
   women from Liverpool with their husbands and they walked with us to our
   car. They were the only people who spoke up in the whole restaurant, and
   they dragged their husbands and said, "Come on are you going to walk out
   with these lads? If they get it, you get it." They walked with us to the
   car. It was the worst moment in my life, that whole half an hour seemed
   like a day and I went to the all nighter and I don't know what happened
   that night. It wasn't the first night I'd been to the Casino luckily
   because if it had been I wouldn't have gone again.

This incident offers a microcosm of the cultural politics of 1970s Britain. The racist skinheads confronted and attacked not only black people but also "race traitors," admonished for their "mixing." Also, the white onlookers in the service station were silent bystanders until two women from Liverpool broke the spell of white complicity. Through embarrassing their husbands into action they sanctioned a moment of brave antiracist concert.

For all these palpable moments of solidarity and the overt antiracist ethos of the northern scene, the orientation of northern fans to toward black music also shows ambivalences. Tim Ashibende has noted the gap between the professed devotion to the music and the lack of understanding of the people who made it: "[P]recious little is known about the people behind the music we love; the artists, songwriters, producers. Label owners and so on who've given us those vinyl masterpieces. In contrast, we know plenty about labels, matrix numbers, discographies, alternative versions, label connections and the like; the lack of available knowledge and information about the former is conspicuous in its absence, and has historically given rise to misinformation, myths, and in some instances, downright fiction!" (Ashibende 1995, 3). The end result has been to generate elaborate and sometimes pernicious "ghetto lore": "How many times have you heard that such-and-such an artist must now be `washing cars' or `waiting tables' in Detroit.... I would suggest that it renders us somewhat guilty of racial stereotyping; a paradox for a scene which prides itself on being socially aware, and open-minded" (3).

Tim Ashibende has visited the United States on numerous occasions since 1979. During these visits, he has recorded interviews with numerous musicians and singers. He reflected in an interview: "Maybe it is because I am a black guy, but I want to know about the people who made the music and the stories that are behind the great northern records. You see for a lot of people it's just about owning the vinyl.... It's a commodity to buy and own. The thing, is there's almost no interest beyond that. I'm not sure if some of the white guys who are on the scene really care about the people who made the music.... I wonder what people think they're doing when they're buying that piece of rare vinyl." The interest for some white soul fans in black people is only as deep as the grooves in their beloved records.

Echoing the point raised by Adorno, quoted earlier on in this article, blackness thus becomes a "coloristic effect" and not a reflection of the everyday existence of black America. For Tim, reaching out and making connections with the ordinary lives of black artists offers a potential to bring the human traces frozen on those 45s to life.

   It's only when you start to speak to artists that you get a sense of the
   kind of people they are. Many of them are doing OK, they're not down in the
   gutter of some ghetto. They're just struggling to lead a good life. The
   amount of times those people have said, "Oh you've got that record? I've
   never even seen that record. I didn't think the company released that
   record." Or, they'd say it was only released to radio stations. You are
   talking to the artists and they don't have a copy of the records
   themselves. It's when you're doing that that you start to realise, "Christ,
   these records are as rare as rocking horse shit!" (Ashibende 1997)

Soul singers often received shoddy treatment from label owners and were too often subjected to crass exploitation. That fans such as Tim are returning to black artists the lost voice of their youth by reuniting them with their records is a wondrous irony. The routes of vinyl traffic are reversed as these sounds are returned from the industrial heartland of England where, unbeknownst to the people who made them, they have been filling dance floors for close to thirty years.

Although the beginnings of the movement are distinctly "northern," the culture of northern soul itself is almost placeless. Toward the end of the 1970s, the attendance at the Wigan Casino started to wane on some nights. The playing of white pop records and custom-made "British soul" disillusioned the die-hard soul fraternity. This came to head when the Casino DJs pushed a version of Doris Troy's "I'll Do Anything" covered under the name Lenny Gamble. The tune was in fact recorded by none other than BBC Radio 1 DJ Tony Blackburn, an icon of ersatz mainstream pop culture. A rift emerged, partly as the result of the increasing presence of white pop music combined with a disagreement over the programming of modern (1970s and 1980s) versus 1960s soul. In the 1980s, the Top of the World club in Stafford brought the focus back to the pursuit of "newies"--unknown 1960s tracks--under the direction of DJs Keb Darge and Guy Hennigan, dubbed the "Sixties Mafia." Today, the most highly reputed northern soul niter is hosted at the 100 Club in London, run by Ady Croasdell. He remembers: "Towards the late seventies I think people had got fed up with the `northernness' of the northern soul scene, in that it was only the dance beat and the speed of the record that seem to matter. The soulfulness of the records was getting less and less, it was more of a dance culture than a soul culture. In 1979 I started the 6Ts club with my partner Randy Cozens and that coincided with a Mod revival, and here we are 18 years later" (Croasdell 1997).

Today, its almost total disregard for the trappings of contemporary style and fashion makes the northern soul scene unique. At the 100 Club in London, newly converted mods mix with thirty-year soul veterans; obsessive collectors perch over boxes of vinyl as if praying for an elusive discovery. The one thing that holds these disparate people together is an obsession with the music. "As long as you're respectful of the scene, then you're accepted regardless of who you are," comments Rob Holmes (1997), a 100 Club regular. "People in the niters are there for the same reason, spinning away to some fucking good sounds. You remember the records that were played there, you remember a particularly good spin and where you were when you heard that new tune for the first time. There are people who go who can't dance at all but they are totally accepted because their hearts are in the right place." The typical 100 Club crowd is composed of a diverse mixture of people from France, Spain, and all over Britain assembled to hear exclusive tunes played by the roster of DJs.

Ady Croasdell (1997) sums up his clientele as "anybody from the permanently unemployed to the bank managing director." Today the scene is torn between two impulses. As fans return to the scene, there is a growing tendency toward nostalgia. Guy Hennigan (1997) comments: "The soul scene in the North is overexposed. The people who are coming back on the scene are forty years old and don't have the patience to listen to something they haven't heard before, and there are people who want to play to that and reinforce it." The openness and transgenerational strength of northern soul can also be a weakness. Butch, also known as Mark Dobson, widely recognized as the country's leading "new" 1960s DJ and a regular at the 100 Club, maintains that in order for the scene to sustain itself, it needs other DJs to push new discoveries: "I get a buzz when I'm at the 100 Club, but at other venues I can't wait to get off. It's simple for DJ's who play `oldies' because they just stick with the established big records. The real challenge is to break a new record and to run the risk of clearing the dance floor" (Dobson 1997). Inflated record prices resulting from the advent of affluent "cheque book soulies" will make it harder for new DJs to acquire exclusive records. Equally, in the 1990s DJs played more R&B in an attempt to find new music that for some purists had no place in the northern soul canon.

Well before the British rave scene of the late 1980s, northern soul made traveling and after-hours dance culture a way of life. Its music has weathered the test of time in ways that few of its contemporary equivalents could hope to match. The great northern soul records, many of which were recorded in one or two takes, capture a transcendent moment of hope that somehow defies the boundaries of time, space, and culture. Paradoxically, it is the apparent openness of the northern soul scene alongside the opaque nature of its inner workings that make it one of the most influential and durable underground movements in the history of British popular culture.

White Noise: Music, Racism, and Hybridity

Returning now to the relationship between skinhead culture and black music, I want to examine the ways in which skinheadism was whitened in terms of the music that became associated with it. The music of the first generation of skinheads--that is, Jamaican ska and rocksteady--enjoyed a revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This "second-wave revival" of Jamaican music, this time played by bands like the Specials, Madness, and Selecter, whose members were all born and raised in Britain, made explicit the imprint of Jamaican music that was partially concealed in skinhead culture. This racially mixed music scene came to be known as "2 Tone," after the record label of the same name, and took transracial dialogue to new levels (Gilroy and Lawrence 1988). It was also met with hostility by racist skinheads both inside and outside the scene (Marshall, 1991, 99). At this time, expressly white-power rock bands were also emerging as an offshoot of the more ambiguous connection between skinheadism and white chauvinism. A key figure in this development was Ian Stuart Donaldson, who broke away from the National Front's White Noise Music Club and set up under the name Blood and Honour. Donaldson's career bears closer discussion, because as a leading figure in the European racist rock scene, he is unrivaled.

Stuart Donaldson was born in Poulton-le-Fylde in Lancashire in the late 1950s. A fan of the Rolling Stones and other blues-inspired 1960s rock bands, he formed a band called the Tumbling Dice in the mid-1970s that played the local working-men's clubs (Loow 1998, 139). In 1977, the band changed its name to Skrewdriver and released its first single entitled "You're So Dumb" on Chiswick Records. The band veered away from the anarchism of the punk scene toward racist politics and a heavy metal/hard-rock sound.

As part of this shift, on its album After the Fire Skrewdriver covered Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." They did so as an expression of redneck sympathy, missing the nuances contained within the song and its defense of a more complicated Southern whiteness but providing interesting evidence that even within the voices of hate there are sometimes unconscious traces of sonic hybridity.

Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded the original "Sweet Home Alabama" in 1973, and it fast became a quintessential Southern rock anthem. The record was largely a response to Neil Young's 1970 song "Southern Man" (from his album After the Gold Rush) and "Alabama" (from his Harvest album), both of which included pronouncements against Southern racism. Lynyrd Skynyrd were from Jacksonville, Florida, but spent their early recording careers in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. The area was known primarily as an R&B and soul-music recording center and was renowned for its studios (Wexler 1993, 193). Many of the session musicians were white and included such figures as the drummer Roger Hawkins, who recorded extensively with Aretha Franklin, and guitarist Jimmy Johnson, who worked with Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Clarence Carter, and Bobby Womack. Despite the intensities of segregation and racism during the 1960s, behind the door of the studio there existed an integrated studio culture where black and white musicians associated freely.

In 1970, Lynyrd Skynyrd's manager, Alan Walden, who mostly managed soul groups and was the brother of Otis Redding's manager Phil Walden, arranged for the band to record at Quinvy Studios in neighboring Sheffield, Alabama. This was the studio where Percy Sledge cut the timeless hit "When a Man Loves a Woman." The band went on to forge a relationship with Jimmy Johnson and cut tracks at Muscle Shoals Sound, including the first version of their epic "Freebird." It is interesting to note that "Sweet Home Alabama" acknowledges the involvement of white Southern musicians in black music as a response to the image of the redneck that is very much central to Neil Young's portrayal of the South. Leon Russell had dubbed the all-white Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section "The Swampers" after he had recorded with them. The rhythm section included Roger Hawkins on drums, Jimmy Johnson on guitar, David Hood on bass, and Barry Beckett on keyboards. Their list of recording credits reads like a who's who of soul music, including artists from James Brown to Millie Jackson (Fuqua 1991, 41). Lynyrd Skynyrd honored the band by dedicating a verse of "Sweet Home Alabama" to them:

   Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers They've been know to pick a song or
   two (Yes, they do) Lord they get me off so much They pick me up when I am
   feeling blue Now how about you?

The song is typically interpreted as a redneck cri de coeur, but in fact it combines a subtle rejection of George Wallace's segregationist politics and a celebration of Muscle Shoals' integrated recording culture. Lead singer Ronnie Van Zant himself grew up in a racially mixed working-class neighborhood and as a young person first sang in church with a choir of black women gospel singers. All this complicated the "rebel image" that in large part was encouraged as a marketing tool by the band's record company.

In its cover of the song, Skrewdriver replaced the verse commemorating the Muscle Shoals Swampers with a eulogy to the Ku Klux Klan, rewriting the last verse in the following way:

   Them carpetbaggers tried to swamp her But to the Klan we all came through
   Lord the Klan they give me so much They pick me up when I am feeling blue
   How about you?'

It is impossible to know whether the excision and insertion of this new

version was done consciously or not. The original verse probably just did not make sense to Donaldson and his band of white supremacists. The end result was that the the nuances contained within the song and its defense of a more complicated Southern whiteness were missing. All the sonic traces of racial dialogue were written over with the voice of an insurgent racism. (9)

The significance of Skrewdriver is hard to overstate; it became a touchstone of racist authenticity and established the heavy-metal sound as the form among white supremacist bands. Skrewdriver also toured, making connections with racist music scenes in East and West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, France, Canada, Brazil, and Australia (Hamm 1993, 35). Indeed, the international networks evident in the racist rock scene today were mapped initially through Skrewdriver's international circuit of live gigs. What was important about Ian Stuart Donaldson was his view of the potential for music to unite racists across Europe through guitars and sound, without the cumbersome apparatus and regalia of political parties.

Conclusion

Two points require emphasis by way of conclusion. First, black music can be situated within racist cultures that bear a complex hybrid history. Some of these traces remain opaque, be they in the form of the blues roots (via the Rolling Stones) of the white-power group Skrewdriver or the Jamaican rhythms that bring the Skinhead Moonstomp to life. What I want to stress here is that in the everyday lives of white people, infatuation with black music can exist alongside overt racism without a necessary contradiction. This was brought into sharp focus for me personally in the 1990s during an argument I once had while working on a project with my colleague Anoop Nayak (see also Nayak 1999). Daniel was a fifteen-year-old skinhead from the English Midlands. He was not a follower of Skrewdriver but rather a devotee of rave and house music. I tried to use the fact that house music was crucially influenced by black gay DJs in Chicago before it was imported to Britain. Something of an antiracist pantomime ensued in which I insisted, "Oh yes, it is black," and Daniel replied, "Oh no, it isn't." I cautioned Daniel that if he threw all black people out of the country, then his music would go with it. A moment of silent reflection ensued, and Daniel cocked his head to one side. He finally replied, "No, because we will still have the tapes, won't we!" Black culture without black people: problem solved. It struck me afterward that this was a kind of a triumph and perversion of Walter Benjamin's well-known ideas about the possibilities of the mechanical reproduction of culture. Here, black music becomes, to use Franz Fanon's phrase, "an object amongst objects," where its sonic effects and pleasures can be separated from any responsibilty to the human beings that created it. Ultimately, the music has no flesh or sinew because it lives on in "the tapes" alone.

Second, I want to argue cautiously that the embrace of black music in white worlds can possess a latent and transgressive dowry. As I pointed out in the introduction, critics such as Theodor Adorno emphasized that the commodification of music both ossified human creativity and produced soporific effects in its listeners. But this view does not appreciate that also preserved in the grooves of the vinyl are the voices and sounds of those who created the music. One of the limits of much sociological writing on music is that it often pays little attention to the content and sound of black music. Rather, what are privileged are its social effects to the degree that little attention is paid to why particular genres of music are so compelling.

Common to all the early recordings of reggae and soul is that they apprehend a live moment that encapsulates all of the nuances and conditions of production in the studio. That these records were made with minimal amounts of overdubbing or multitrack recording emphasizes their immediacy and intensity. Their allure is largely derived from this "real-time" quality. There is no index to help us recover these registers or to identify those responsible for creating them. However, their existence offers an invitation, which is not obligatory, to respond. As the white vinyl archaeologists scrutinize record labels for scraps of information about production or songwriting credits, they are reaching into a world where black people lived not as a coloristic effect but as complicated human beings. As Tim Ashibende noted, putting the "sounds" and the "people" back together may disrupt racism's objectifying caricatures and stereotypes. It is certainly true that for some of the soul fans that I have interviewed, their encounter with black music has led them to read about the political culture of the Civil Rights movement and to understand the historic social forces embodied in their favorite records. It is easy to dismiss this as trivial, but to do so would be to miss the role that black music can play engendering critical thinking in the space of everyday life. This form of reckoning with racism and racial supremacy is by no means automatic; rather, it is a latent potential because history and meaning are enshrined--both explicitly and implicitly--in the music itself.

Finally, the voices of hate can also conceal the sounds of hybridity. Deracinated and severed from its British roots, skinheadism has spread to Germany, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and France (Pilkington 1996; Fangen 1999). As I have tried to argue, the politics of the reception of black music need to be evaluated carefully in terms of time and place. But it is not just the racist incarnations of skinheadism that have been globalized; its complexities, hitherto hidden from public view, have also been offered up to the forces of global dissemination. Germany, where young people have embraced some of the styles of English chauvinism and which has also become something of a mecca for racist skinheads, has also imported some other aspects of its cognate styles. On a cold December night in 1997, I made my way to meet my old friend, poet and sociological traveler Flemming Rogilds--somewhat in disbelief--at a northern soul all-nighter in East Berlin. Arriving at the Volksbuhne, a Brechtian theater on Rosa Luxembourg Platz, I found a dance floor full of young Germans and a few Turks and Africans immaculately turned out in Ben Sherman shirts, Fred Perrys, Crombies, Levi jeans, and Mary Quant styles. Records by Melba Moore, Major Lance, and Gene Chandler filled the dance floor. Here, black music was being used as a resource to foster a more tolerant way of being a young European. At the end of a long and inspiring night I remember walking out in the dazzle of daylight. Through the mist, I could see the red-and-white television tower that dominates the East Berlin skyline. This was northern soul a long way from Wigan and black music finding a new home.

(1.) "Old Bill" is slang for police.

(2.) Brixton is an area of south London adjacent to Streatham, with a racially mixed population.

(3.) Boumemouth is a resort and retirement center on the south coast of England.

(4.) Bolton is another Lancashire town near Manchester.

(5.) The "northerness" of this soul scene refers to the clubs that hosted it in England and not to the areas in the United States where many of the records were made.

(6.) Dundee is a town on the east coast of Scotland, north of Edinburgh.

(7.) The "Scooter" scene was an offshoot of mod subculture.

(8.) According to the licensing law in the United Kingdom, public houses--"pubs"--could not serve alcohol after 11:00 P.M.

(9.) The best postmodern antidote to Skrewdriver's bile is the Leningrad Cowboys' version of "Sweet Home Alabama" (Leningrad Cowboys and the Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble, Total Balalaika Show). This live recording includes a faithful reproduction of the Lynyrd Skynyrd version, complete with a tribute verse about Muscle Shoals and with the addition of a Rusian orchestra leitmotif provided by the Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble. The result is an extraordinary cocktail of southern rock, Finnish surrealism, and the meter of the Soviet parade ground.

DISCOGRAPHY 

Jones, Linda. I just can't live my life (without you babe). WB 7278 (1969).

Leningrad Cowboys and the Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble. Total balalaika show: Helsinki concert. Pluto CD 7004 (1993).

Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sweet home Alabama. (1974).

Monday, Danny. Baby, without you. Modern 1025 (1966).

Skrewdriver. After the fire. Rock-O-Rama RRR75 (1988).

Symaryp. Skinhead moonstomp. Skinhead moonstomp-ha album. Trojan 187 (1980).

Young, Neil. After the gold rush. Reprise 7599-27243-2 (1970).

--. Harvest. Reprise 7599-27239-2 (1972).

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This article is adapted from Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture, Vron Ware and Les Back, eds., to be published by University of Chicago Press. Copyright 2002 by Vron Ware and Les Back. All rights reserved.

LES BACK is a Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths College. London.