LITMIR.BIZ

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politics.” Nowadays the notion of identity politics has come into a significant degree of disrepute. The “culture wars” of 1980s America tended to reduce to rather blunt choices between passionately held versions of relativism (“identity politics”) and universalism (no “special treatment”): only each position was so filled with internal contradictions and obvious spots of willful blindness that the justifiable larger points they each might have made were lost in acrimony over particulars. At the same time, within relativist camps there was a constant process of fissure. (I think of this as the result of a buried radical Protestant imperative still lurking in secular academic culture—there is no end to the making of smaller and more specific denominations.) The demonization of “political correctness” as the enemy of free thought completed the rubbishing of identity politics.³⁹ What the denigration of identity politics during the 1980s and 1990s surrendered is the sense of possibility that such notions created during the 1970s. There was no reason to suppose that the rise of one or another form of “power” always meant the decline of others. It was hoped during much of the 1970s that social negotiation was not a matter of “either/or” but rather a matter of “both/and.” As a result, I see the musical representations of the songs in this book as fundamentally optimistic. Even at their most melancholy, they hope for something better. I take one of my most important tasks to be articulating the nature of those hopes.

      Chapter 2 marks my first attempt to explore the connections between economic improvement and the authoring of subjectivity. In “Black Masculinity and the Sound of Wealth: Barry White in the Early 1970s,” I link the opulent sound world of White’s proto-disco with important shifts in the public representation of black male power. The social gains of the 1960s, particularly connected with the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, briefly enabled a significant degree of embourgeoisement among some segments of the African American population during the early 1970s. In popular culture (especially in media such as film, television, and music, where money is most crucial), an imaginative space opened up in which it was possible to explore alternative ways of constructing a specifically black masculine presence. White’s music projected a sonic vision of male authority predicated on female pleasure; his skill at evoking such erotic satisfaction furthermore depended on a lushness of material circumstance that is metaphorically present in numerous details of the arrangements of his recordings. The purpose of my discussion is to show how the specifics of White’s music can be heard as inflecting a complicated dialogue about black masculinity that was developing during the 1960s and 1970s.

      I expand on questions of money and black subjectivities in chapter 3, “Transport and Interiority in Soft Soul.” Unlike the other chapters in this book, this discussion does not center on a single artist, but rather a sonic ethos: music of a lifestyle rather than that of an exemplary life. And the shift away from the irresistible glamour of stardom is connected to important aspects of the way this music was created. There were crucial changes in the ethos of production and the sound ideal at Motown and Stax in the late 1960s; these were directly connected to the changes in money flow that came with the restructuring of the record industry. The aural mix of the early 1970s “public soundtrack” was further complicated by the addition of the “Philadelphia sound” of Philadelphia International Records, enormously important in the early 1970s with respect both to listenership and to influence. This kind of music was often called “soft soul”; though its descent from the spare and vigorous music of early Motown and Stax was apparent, the music had acquired expensive tastes and luxurious habits: complex habits of harmony, classicizing orchestrations, and a characteristic focus on fervid eroticism. Chapter 3 presents studies of several hit songs from the genre of soft soul in order to develop my notions of situation as they apply to modest songs. In each case, tricky problems of audience relationship, when taken into account, complicate our sense of the songs’ meanings in fascinating ways; I see these ambiguities as central to the songs’ construction of the subjectivities of African American embourgeoisement in the 1970s.

      With chapter 4, “The Audience and Barry Manilow,” I again look at masculinity, but from a different point of view. This is “white” music. That is, in the 1970s, it appears detached from any foregrounded racial specificity. But its connections to class and gender are anything but subdued. Manilow’s musical connections to commerce and “showbiz,” the lessons learned from his early experience with urban gay audiences, and his unending appeal to women are all decisive features in a “problem” that his music has had with masculinity. The African American artists discussed in chapters 2 and 3 had an easier time among rock critics and other gender-panicked listeners because their racial difference allowed their interest in commerce and the pleasure of the audience to be disattended. With Manilow, no such strategy was available, and the questions of kitsch and effeminacy come to the fore. But analyzing the discomfort that led to critical disrepute and outright hatred is less interesting than the question of audience. What is it about Barry Manilow that won the devotion of so many fans, most of them “women of a certain age”? I think that part of the answer has to do with the kinds of disadvantagement felt most strongly by women whose economic positions were strong enough that they had time to become aware of their psychic impoverishment. Accordingly, I explicate the characteristic moves of Manilow’s music and his performance style as they seem to offer an answer to the concerns of women.

      The question of feminism is equally important to chapter 5, “The Voice of Karen Carpenter,” but I address it by examining the emblematic figure of the singer, whose death from complications of anorexia in 1983 set off a process of popular canonization. In Carpenter’s mythologization, the melancholy she so ably projected as a vocalist has been bound up with the difficulties of control and nurture that probably lay at the root of her anorexia. Not surprisingly, girls, who make up the majority of teenagers who suffer from eating disorders, have found Karen Carpenter especially attractive; but young gay men, as well, have been persuaded by her formulation of an identity that seeks out the pleasures of abjection. The formulation of abject identities was of course of major importance in teen culture of the 1980s, culminating in the success of alternative rock at the beginning of the 1990s; but rather than focusing on the historical situation of Carpenter’s music, I will spend the majority of the chapter articulating what I take to be the central features of the musical identity she developed so persuasively.

      The last two chapters of the book take up the questions of gender examined in the essays on Manilow and Carpenter and juxtapose them with additional considerations of race and class. Chapter 6, “Cher’s ‘Dark Ladies’: Showbiz Liberation,” follows the career of Cher during the 1970s and beyond to the near perfect abstraction of her complicated “farewell tours” and other moments of quasi-retirement. Cher’s solo career in the 1970s was marked by uncertainty about her racial and class location. This uncertainty did not result in her assumption of a specific identity, but rather in a revival of the older Vegas-cum-Hollywood styles of ethnic drag as pure spectacle. Race and class tended to be folded together as a kind of biographical ornament to her struggle as a woman— the real point for Cher’s audiences was her triumph over stigmatized origins. As such, she represents an unusually powerful incarnation of the diva figure (known from opera and then Hollywood cinema) in 1970s pop music, and her plot of liberation allegorizes the increasing social freedoms experienced by many of her fans. In the book’s final chapter, “Crossing Over with Dolly Parton,” I take up the issue of country music and abjection—the susceptibility to humiliation visited upon impoverished rural Southerners—together with gender as the point of origin for a career that shows some resemblance to that of Cher. The particularities of country music and its focal audience, however, have demanded a different set of musical and performative strategies that have led Parton to a more ambiguous and still-evolving career.

      In each of these essays, I want to show something of the imaginative power of this music, not only in its ways of negotiating pressing cultural concerns in 1970s America, but also in its skillfulness and the sheer beauty with which presentations of subjectivity are managed. As music for commerce, the songs I will discuss are carefully crafted, immensely appealing in their musical details. But they are indeed of limited relevance at best to listeners who seek unambiguous effects of authenticity—they are demonstrably vague and elusive with respect to authorship in the larger senses of that word. This very slipperiness is the ground of their broader circulation during the 1970s and into the present.

      CHAPTER

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