Hamilton — Just Around Midnight

Author: Jack Hamilton
Title: Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
Year: 2016
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Academic book

Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination is a book by Jack Hamilton, a scholar of media studies and American studies at the University of Virginia, published by Harvard University Press in 2016. It asks how rock and roll, a music with Black roots and many Black early stars, came to be heard as white, and why that happened in the 1960s, a decade generally understood as one of interracial exchange and crossover. Hamilton’s answer is that it became white largely because of the stories people told themselves about it, a change in how the music was received, made by audiences and writers and, after them, the music industry. Rock’s “ideology of authenticity,” he argues, set a double standard: Black musicians’ versatility was heard as racial betrayal, while for white musicians, engaging with Black musical forms while keeping Black performers at arm’s length “became, simply, a new way of being white.” His chapters run from Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan through the British Invasion, Motown and the Beatles, soul singers from Aretha Franklin to Dusty Springfield, and Jimi Hendrix to the Rolling Stones. Reviews in 2016 praised it, two of them with reservations: Colin Vanderburg found its written sources narrow, and Emma Rees found it “disappointingly canonical” and short on women. David McCarthy’s review of 2018 argued that Hamilton’s methods pushed aside interpretive questions, particularly about how rock became white, and that the book leaves unaddressed where rock’s whiteness stood in an emerging middle-class society; he read it as “two equally provocative volumes in one.”

Hamilton, who took his doctorate in American studies at Harvard, joined the University of Virginia’s media studies faculty in 2014 and was an assistant professor there when the book appeared; he holds a joint appointment in American studies. He had been the pop critic for Slate since 2013.¹ Harvard University Press published the book on September 26, 2016, and Slate ran an adapted excerpt, “How Rock and Roll Became White,” the following month.²

The introduction opens on Margo Jefferson’s article “Ripping Off Black Music,” published in Harper’s in January 1973, in which she recalled a dream she had the night Hendrix died: that his death was “the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites.” Her nightmare, Hamilton writes, “had in fact come true before she wrote her article,” even before Hendrix’s death: throughout his brief stardom his race had been an incessant topic, and when Hendrix died in 1970, one obituary described him as “a black man in the alien world of rock.”³ Hamilton writes that “a fundamental panic that engulfed rock and roll’s emergence was that the music’s overtones of racial intermixture would threaten the social order.” The “Don’t Buy Negro Records” flyers of White Citizens’ Councils in the 1950s South, he writes, “were not so much about stopping the circulation of black music in general, but rather about stopping the circulation of black music to young whites.” By the end of the 1960s, Hamilton writes, the music “had lost this character of racial disruption, to the point that black involvement was seen as flatly incongruous.” He calls his book “a story of the forced marriage of musical and racial ideology.” It asks how rock and roll, a genre “rooted in African American traditions” and many of whose earliest stars were Black, came to be understood “as the natural province of whites” in a decade generally understood as one of crossover, and its answer is that “rock and roll became white in large part because of stories people told themselves about it.”⁴ In a 2017 interview he described the change as one “of reception rather than production,” made by the way audiences and writers, and then marketers, radio programmers and the music industry, decided that different kinds of people made different kinds of music.⁵ His frame is the “racial imagination” of the scholars Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, which accepts a notion of race as “profoundly extra-visual,” lying beyond what can be seen, while avoiding ideas of fixed racial essence. He writes that the book reproduces a two-sided, Black-and-white notion of race, one “by now thoroughly antiquated.”⁶

Hamilton sets aside three common accounts of the change. The first is white theft, whose most reductive versions include the recurrent accusation that “Elvis stole rock and roll.” The second holds that “as the 1960s progressed, black music effectively self-segregated,” an argument he calls “intriguing” and finds to have “some amount of truth,” though it “tends to conflate music and activism” when musicians’ political commitments were often hazier. The third and most common, he writes, is not to discuss the whitening at all.⁷ He finds what he calls “rock’s peculiar racial denialism” in the dismissiveness and “sometimes outright vitriol” that met essays on rock and race by Lester Bangs in 1979 and Sasha Frere-Jones in 2007, neither of them, he writes, a perfect work. In historiography, he writes, the denialism “conceals itself more subtly,” most often as “a tendency toward stories of individual rock ‘genius’” that shut out discussion of race by celebrating individual artistry and intellect. Many Black performers of the 1960s, he writes, have often been relegated to book-length histories of Black music in general, while white artists like Dylan or the Beatles “receive their own increasingly lavish biographies.” He links the disparity to what Fred Moten calls a “white avant-gardism whose seriousness requires either an active forgetting of black performances or a relegation of them to mere source material.”⁸

Hamilton calls authenticity the “enormously powerful and enormously vague conceptual engine” behind the omissions and fallacies he has described. Rock ideology “is first and foremost an ideology of authenticity,” which functions “as a way of delineating what constitutes ‘real’ rock music,” and “by the end of the 1960s ‘real’ rock music had been colored white.”⁹ Artists like Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, he writes, “were lauded for casting off the shackles of racial conformity,” while artists like those at Motown “were derided for being insufficiently black.” “In these formulations,” he writes, “cosmopolitan versatility among African American artists was not heard as identity transcendence but rather as racial betrayal.” Imaginatively engaging with and “putting on” Black musical authenticity, he writes, “while keeping black bodies at arm’s length became, simply, a new way of being white.”¹⁰ Hamilton also quotes Mike Gershman, who in the Los Angeles Times in January 1969 excoriated contemporary Black music, in Hamilton’s words, “for not living up to the author’s own ideas of blues tradition,” complaining of “denatured Negroes” who had “learned only too well… the value of getting Top 40 airplay.”¹¹ Hamilton carries the argument to the debates over rockism in the twenty-first century, quoting Eric Weisbard’s gloss of rockism as guitars, bass and drums, nostalgia for Dylan and the Stones at their peak, and “ideals of sweaty authenticity,” and Kelefa Sanneh’s question of 2004 whether it could be a coincidence that rockist complaints often set straight white men against everyone else.¹²

The first chapter pairs Sam Cooke and Dylan: Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” was, in Hamilton’s account, a civil rights anthem partly inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”. Hamilton calls Cooke’s two live albums “a fascinating study in contrasts and versatility.” At Miami’s Harlem Square Club in January 1963 Cooke sang “in full gospel fury,” in a set not released until 1985, as Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, while Sam Cooke at the Copa (1964) is “debonair and refined.” Hamilton calls Cooke’s decision to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the Copa “both a politically and culturally transgressive act.”¹³ The belief that real Black music had to be raw was an old one, but its outsized influence on rock criticism, Hamilton argues, came from the folk revival of midcentury; one place it showed was the Little Sandy Review, a magazine co-edited in the early 1960s by Paul Nelson. One of its contributors praised the songster Robert Pete Williams, a penitentiary inmate, in terms Hamilton calls “a celebration of authenticity-through-incarceration.” When Thomas Meehan wrote in the New York Times that Dylan’s songs “mix for the first time the sounds of Negro blues with the twang of country music,” Hamilton adds, “One imagines Elvis Presley canceling his subscription.”¹⁴

The second chapter, “The White Atlantic,” takes up what Hamilton calls the British Invasion myth, whose most common version holds that American rock and roll had fallen into the doldrums by the early 1960s. He finds the myth faulty most of all “for the denial of porosity implicit in its central metaphor,” the invasion.¹⁵ Motown and the Beatles share the third chapter, which follows the influence of Motown’s bassist James Jamerson on Paul McCartney’s playing on Rubber Soul and Revolver. Hamilton cites Peter Guralnick, who excluded Motown from his “otherwise excellent” history of 1960s rhythm and blues, Sweet Soul Music (1986), on the grounds that it is not “soul music” because it “appeal[ed] far more to a pop, white, and industry-slanted kind of audience.”¹⁶

Soul music, Hamilton writes in the fourth chapter, on Franklin, Joplin and Springfield, before anything else “was mass culture, performed by professional musicians and marketed by record labels.” In the rhythm and blues of the period, he writes, many of the singers were Black and many of the session musicians and songwriters were not.¹⁷ He opens the fifth chapter by arguing that Hendrix’s and the Rolling Stones’ “preoccupations with violence can be heard as responses to hardening racial ideologies in popular music that left each in an embattled and precarious position in the late 1960s.”¹⁸ The last chapter follows the Stones to the Altamont Free Concert and “Brown Sugar”, and Hamilton calls the lyric of “Gimme Shelter” “an apocalyptic flood blues.” The book ends on the bands of the 1970s that “made musical violence just another marker of white male hegemony.” That violence, Hamilton writes, “simply became another way of being white, which was one thing that, for better and worse, the Rolling Stones were never interested in being.”¹⁹

Emma Rees, in Times Higher Education in 2016, admired Hamilton’s “at times glorious prose” but called the book “brilliant but uneven” and “disappointingly canonical,” with whole chapters on the Beatles and the Stones while women artists are almost completely neglected.²⁰ Adam Ellsworth, in The Arts Fuse, wrote that Hamilton “doesn’t pretend to have all the answers” but “asks all the right questions.”²¹ In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Colin Vanderburg praised its account of how rockism’s whiteness depended on confining ideas of Blackness. Given what he called the inherent visuality of racial identity, he found that “Hamilton’s reliance on a narrow range of written sources seems needlessly limiting.”²² David McCarthy, reviewing the book in Volume! in 2018, described how Hamilton builds his account of rock’s whiteness from “a bevy of clippings from rock criticism of the 1960s” and tells the musicians’ own stories through two methods, readings of the music and attention to their working lives, and wrote that in favoring those methods Hamilton pushes aside interpretive issues, “particularly those concerning the question of how rock became white.” Reading Hamilton’s joke about Elvis canceling his subscription, he argued that rock and roll “became a uniquely privileged way of being white.” Elvis is absent from the book’s index, McCarthy wrote, with good reason: “he is not part of the story of how rock became white, not in the way Dylan is.” But that absence, he wrote, “only betrays an unaddressed aspect of Hamilton’s story”: where rock’s whiteness stood in a rising middle-class society. He read the book as “two equally provocative volumes in one,” an annotated anthology of “the racial imaginary” of the 1960s and a richer study of rock grounded in the working lives of artists in pursuit of creative freedom, and thought Hamilton “right to want to weave these two volumes together.”²³

Key contributions

• The question of how rock and roll, a Black-rooted music, came to be understood as white during a decade generally understood as one of crossover.
• The argument that the change was one of reception, made by “stories people told themselves” about the music.
• A critique of three common accounts: white theft, Black self-segregation and silence.
• An account of rock’s ideology of authenticity as a double standard, which took Black versatility for betrayal and made white engagement with Black forms, kept apart from Black performers, a new way of being white.
• Case studies of Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan, the British Invasion, Motown and the Beatles, soul singers, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.

See also

• The color line in pop — the debate over race and the categories of popular music
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music