Mahon — Right to Rock

Author: Maureen Mahon
Title: Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race
Year: 2004
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)

Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race is an ethnography by the anthropologist Maureen Mahon, published by Duke University Press in June 2004. Its subject is the Black Rock Coalition, which Black musicians and writers in New York, among them Vernon Reid and Greg Tate, formed in 1985 to make room for Black rock in an industry that assumed nobody wanted it. Mahon writes that Black rockers meet skepticism from all sides, “at once too black to be real rockers and not black enough because they rock,” and she argues that race shapes the industry’s radio formats, its hiring and its marketing. Borrowing from Tate, she calls the coalition’s members the “postliberated generation.” Her evidence is her own fieldwork with the coalition in both its cities and her interviews with its members. The New York group invited her to serve as its secretary. Reviewers praised the book’s research and ethnographic detail. Matt Stahl, reviewing it for IASPM, also argued that it takes up the coalition’s discourse of rights without examining it closely enough.

Mahon, then an assistant professor of anthropology and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, published the book with Duke University Press in June 2004.¹ Duke’s description says that by the 1980s the music business took it for granted that Black rock had no market, among Black or white listeners, and no takers among Black musicians either, and that the coalition was formed in New York in 1985 “to challenge that notion and create outlets for black rock music.”¹ Its founders were the guitarist Vernon Reid, the journalist Greg Tate and the producer Konda Mason.² A second branch began in Los Angeles in 1989.¹ Mahon’s research combined fieldwork in both of the coalition’s chapters with interviews of more than two dozen of its members.¹ Shortly after her research began, Matt Stahl wrote, the New York group invited her to be its secretary.³

In her chapter “Living Colored in the Music Industry,” Mahon writes that Black rockers must explain why Black Americans are involved with “white boy” music, and that “skepticism about their identities, music, professional viability, and sanity comes from all sides”: “Black rockers are at once too black to be real rockers and not black enough because they rock.”⁴ She goes on to argue that “the ways artists are marketed, the positions executives are assigned to, and the organization of radio and cable television stations are shaped by patterns and practices of racialization that have a deep and deleterious effect on black participants.” “Segregation already in place for reasons of social tradition,” she writes, “was transferred to segregation for economic expediency.”⁴

Her ten chapters run from the coalition’s founding and “The ‘Postliberated Generation’” through its music and the industry to Jimi Hendrix and a closing chapter, “Until the Levee Breaks.”¹ She takes the term from Tate’s “postliberated black aesthetic” and applies it to members born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, who grew up after the civil rights era, and she writes that these artists “were not interested in downplaying their blackness.”⁴ In Stahl’s summary, Mick Jagger, having hired Reid, “threw his weight around” to get Reid’s band, Living Colour, heard by the industry. That “spawned something of a split in the BRC,” between members who objected to a signing that came through “an apparently paternalistic process” and those who welcomed any route into the mainstream.³

Reviewers praised the book’s research and detail, and one questioned its framing. Duke’s page quotes Elizabeth L. Wollman, in Ethnomusicology, calling it “a tightly researched, rich, and insightful study,” and Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer, in American Anthropologist, calling it “a jewel of a read.”¹ Matt Stahl, reviewing it for IASPM, praised its “wealth of ethnographic detail” but objected to Mahon’s “seemingly uncritical importation of other actors’ categories,” above all the coalition’s language of rights. He found “an unremarked tension” between the members as politicized identities and as entrepreneurs seeking a place in the market, and argued that these gaps make possible “an uptempo conclusion.” Reid, he wrote, had run politics and the market together, and “Mahon, in my opinion, ought to have examined this conflation critically,” asking whether a civil rights movement in music would amount to a collection of entrepreneurs seeking market power.³

Key contributions

• An ethnography of the Black Rock Coalition from inside, built on participation and more than two dozen interviews.
• The racialization of the music industry’s marketing, staffing and radio formats, and the double bind that makes Black rockers “at once too black to be real rockers and not black enough because they rock.”
• The coalition’s members read as a “postliberated generation,” a term Mahon borrows from Greg Tate.

See also

• Reconsidering Rock — Keir Keightley’s 2001 essay on rock as a culture of distinction
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music