Listening to the Political

In 1999 Moby released his multiplatinum-selling album Play. Most of this album consists of a blend of sampled gospel and blues with electronica-dance instrumentation and beats, exemplifying through its mixture of racially coded genres one of the most common strains of crossover success in American popular music, the recasting of black musical traditions for the profit of white musicians. Initial critical response was mixed, with quite a bit of commentary focusing on Moby's use of the older material. At Pitchfork, Brent DiCrescenzo wrote, "The sampling and processing of passionate folk and blues roots music drains whatever emotional ballast kept the music so spiritually afloat.... A performance loses raw magnetism after being chopped up in ProTools, cut from its atmosphere, cleaned, and gutted from its accompanying guitar." In the Village Voice, Frank Owen was slightly more positive, misdescribing Alan Lomax's source recordings as "field recordings from the '20s, '30s and '40s," but also noting that the "weary but hopeful '40s gospel singer Vera Hall in 'Natural Blues' ... wouldn't sound out of place at the old Paradise Garage, a dancehall where space-age Baptists regularly congregated in the '80s." Writing for Salon, Scott Marc Becker noted, "She's [Hall] as potent in Moby's hands as she was a cappella, the ghost of her voice resonating as if she were still alive." But "luxnigra," writing as recently as 2007 for a blog titled The Last Angel of History, declares that Moby is just another in a long line of white appropriators of black music: "Moby is the Elvis or Benny Goodman or Beastie Boys of his genre and generation. He directly appropriates African-American music, such that he is the white mediator through which the blues records he samples are 'brought to life,' as one critic, in 'The Big Takeover,' commented. In fashioning a career while seemingly unaware of how his whiteness functioned and functions at every point in his career, he is fully complicit with white supremacy in the US." Well, yes. And no. Not fully. To racially code technology as white and heartfelt emotion as black is complicit with the history of white supremacy. Although Moby cannot be held uniquely responsible for that—the critical response to the album indicates that the racial coding of its musical signs preceded the album itself and structured its reception for many listeners—it is clear that Play does not resist that reading. What is also clear is that Play—one song in particular, "Natural Blues"—is a way of working through that history.

Throughout the twentieth century, white musicians drew heavily from black musical traditions in an effort to achieve major commercial success. A continual strain of critical debate accompanied this phenomenon, arguing the merits and the crimes of such cultural borrowing. The market success of such acts as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, Elvis Presley, Eminem, and so many others has been challenged by critics asserting the superior musical and social value of musicians like Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Chuck Berry, and Tupac. Karl Hagstrom Miller has recently shown, however, that the very idea of racially separated music traditions was an invention of the music industry who sought to streamline the distribution of particular musical commodities to specific audiences. Scholars from Ronald Radano to Marybeth Hamilton have uncovered the deep white investment in the very category of black music even as the aural consistency and political significance of genres identified as black has been demonstrated by generations of scholars and critics, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Portia Maultsby, Samuel Floyd, and Mark Anthony Neal. The racial coding of particular sounds and specific genres has varied historically. Before the twentieth century, the sounds of a banjo evoked blackness; after the invention of "old-timey music," the same sounds indexed an image of white communities. In the past ten years, scholars such as Maureen Mahon, Greg Tate, and Kandia Crazy Horse have insisted that black rock musicians be returned to the discussion of this presumably white form. Further complicating the racialization of musical genres, George Lipsitz, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Frances Aparicio, and Josh Kun have reminded us of the interweaving of black and Latino styles, while Deborah Wong and E. Taylor Atkins have explored the convergence of East Asian and African American musics. The ever-more intricate and self-reflexive nature of this struggle over musical traditions and cultural borrowing was captured by Roshanak Kheshti in her discussion of Sasha Frere-Jones's use of miscegenation to describe the white use of black-identified sounds in rock. Kheshti neatly uncovers the homosocial nature of the white-male use of the musical signs of black passion for cultural reproduction.

Throughout this critical history, musical traditions and their political significance have been linked to racialized populations whose boundaries have been momentarily stabilized in part through the very processes of musical performance and reception that form the heart of the debate. This is the truth that ethnomusicology explores. Ethnomusicology establishes the expressive connection between the social real of an ethnos and the songs that both move and solidify the identity of that group. Within the operating assumptions of ethnomusicology, it is not too difficult to comprehend the musical resonance of social belonging, or the longing to belong. It is not a stretch to imagine the pleasure of identification or the warmth of a social connection that ensures fellow feeling—even where the feeling is in response to a threat. In traditional country blues, a constantly humming minor third is played by a guitarist alternating a down-tuned D with an F natural, bumping that bass line twice a second with the right thumb while the fingers of the left hand map a descending array of sevenths, fifths, and thirds across the fretboard, and a male voice sketches the outlines of a cypress grove within which he sings the insecurity of love; this pattern of harmony and rhythm not only enacts a solidarity of masculine vulnerability, a vulnerability made more palpable by the history of slavery and Jim Crow, but also evokes the work of the hands that counter that vulnerability through the sheer fluid ability to sound and resound again the irrepressible presence of desire. That unending movement back and forth from the D to the F structures the ineluctable. A voice maps a melodic arc that immediately falls upon its rise, that breaks itself in two and then four, and then recombines its wholeness through a downward slope that returns to a home that simply cannot feel...