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Edited by Eric Weisbard
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
eric weisbard
1
1. Whittling on Dynamite: The Difference Bert Williams Makes
w. t. lhamon, jr.
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2. Searching for the Blues: James McKune, Collectors,
and a Different Crossroads
marybeth hamilton
26
3. Abie the Fishman: On Masks, Birthmarks, and Hunchbacks
josh kun
50
4. The Kingsmen and the Cha-Cha-Chá
.de ned sublette
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.sserP 95 david thomas
ytisrevin 6. Magic Moments, the Ghost of Folk-Rock, and the Ring
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kuD .7 103 david brackett
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giryp 120 holly george-warren
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8. ‘‘Is That All There Is?’’ and the Uses of Disenchantment
franklin bruno
137
9. Ghetto Brother Power: The Bronx Gangs, the Beatles, the
Aguinaldo, and a Pre-History of Hip-Hop
benjamin melendez, as told to henry chalfant
150
and jeff chang
10. Grand Funk Live! Staging Rock in the Age of the Arena
steve waksman
157
11. The Sound of Velvet Melting: The Power of ‘‘Vibe’’ in the
Music of Roberta Flack
jason king
172
12. All Roads Lead to ‘‘Apache’’
michaelangelo matos
200
13. On Punk Rock and Not Being a Girl
lavinia greenlaw
210
14. The Buddy Holocaust Story: A Necromusicology
eric weisbard
219
15. ORCH5, or the Classical Ghost in the Hip-Hop Machine
robert fink
231
16. White Chocolate Soul: Teena Marie and Lewis Taylor
mark anthony neal
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.sserP 286 1d8r. eHwow d toa nAcite Llike Darby Crash
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vi contents
Eric Weisbard
Introduction
Pop music turns on moments more than movements:
mysteries, like the proverbial song you hear on the radio
and have to know everything about immediately. The
categories we impose on its bloomings, as would-be
scholars, lovelorn fans, or harried entrepreneurs, are
necessary afterthoughts. But these frameworks are also
profanations: an irritant, usually, to the performers, who
feel stereotyped, and often just as bothersome to hard-
core participants who exactly value the singular irreduc-
ibility of their experiences. Does rock and roll belong in
a museum like the one, Experience Music Project, that
has sponsored this book? Many would say no: don’t put
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ser sth issues, databases, blogs, exhibitry, and bookshelves of
gir llA analysis and memoir all ultimately work to corrupt only
.sse the consumerist boundaries of genre and taste, not the
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02 ing, what should take their place? Perhaps an expanded
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identity, and commercial crazes of every sort, remains
the best word for all that is heard, loved, and yet rarely ennobled. Like its
predecessor, This Is Pop, this book represents work that was presented at
the annual emp Pop Conference—a gathering dedicated to the notion that
mixing academics, journalists, musicians, and other culturemongers into
one place for one long weekend might produce an intellectual product
equal to the clamor of contexts lurking underneath any given Billboard
week’s Hot 100 and Top 200. Each year, the theme of the conference has
changed, yet a certain range of concerns remains perennial. Artists who
fall between genre lines, songs that sponge up influences from every-
where, strange species of cultural transmission, and studio accidents with
unforeseen consequences all register as intellectual hooks: catchy in-
stances of a larger history we are better able to evoke than summarize.
Still, it is possible, using the material collected here, to speculate about
what may turn out to be landmarks of a revisionist popular music history
focused explicitly on pop itself, the neither completely glorious nor com-
pletely odious intersection of music and modernity.
Switch blackface minstrelsy and ragtime vaudeville for blues at the
start of the story: a masquerade that allowed what W. T. Lhamon, Jr., calls
‘‘subaltern song’’ only within the context of a racialized landscape as
polarized and entrenched as our own. Bert Williams, who failed to re-
lease an album in the twentieth century, now bridges the nineteenth
and twenty-first with his comic speak singing and an identity (New York
based, West Indian derived, outlandish and yet showbiz to the core) that
many a rapper might recognize. In a linked vein, Marybeth Hamilton
resurrects James McKune, the record collector who persuaded jazz obses-
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ser sth purist fanship just in time for rock to arrive. Ned Sublette summons up
gir llA all that was forgotten in a post-Castro heartbeat about hundreds of years
.sse of Latin music hybrids, so that ‘‘Louie Louie,’’ a cha-cha-chá, sedimented
rP ytisre icnutlotu trhael ac ogrennerres taosn reo cokf aanlld s ruoblsl eeqvuere nptr ogdauracgede .r Aocnkd: Jsoesehm Kinugnl yim asa gminoenso a-
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oppositions of white and black, with minstrelsy and record collecting
2 eric weisbard
recontextualizing the ‘‘birth’’ of the blues, pop history becomes the one
thing that pop itself can never a√ord to be: defamiliarized. Several pieces
here, for example, intersect at a complicated angle with hip-hop—a music
that has called rock assumptions into constant question with its pop
vitality, continued coherence as a genre, and non–baby boomer relation-
ship to the musical and sociocultural past. Michaelangelo Matos looks at
the entirely ersatz history of ‘‘Apache,’’ which began in the head of a Lon-
doner watching Burt Lancaster playing an Indian and just got stranger
from there, yet ultimately became the quintessential b-boy dj track. Ben-
jamin Melendez, from a surreptitiously Jewish Puerto Rican family (Josh
Kun in reverse!), played in a band, the Ghetto Brothers, that Latinized the
Beatles (Ned Sublette in reverse!), and led a South Bronx gang, the Ghetto
Brothers. His musical and political successor, Afrika Bambaataa, turns up
next in Robert Fink’s essay, which adds a third element, ‘‘post-canonic’’
classical music, to Bambaataa’s well-known incorporation of the German
art band Kraftwerk.
Another cluster of essays tries to defamiliarize punk rock, too, by
turning it into a story that is less about rock reclamation than pop cultural
mediation. David Thomas, a punk legend as the leader of Pere Ubu,
invokes as his and the Ohio scene’s key influence the unlikely figure of
Ernie Anderson, a horror film tv host in the early 1960s and later the
voice of The Love Boat. Lavinia Greenlaw presents punk in terms of the
gendered opportunities it presented an Essex girl who hung out in discos:
a new masquerade, no better necessarily, that simply ‘‘did what it could.’’
Still, as bildungsroman, it’s a happier outcome than the tale of Bill Tate,
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ser sth was then never heard from again, yet whose less than magic moment still
gir llA strikes me as a mass cultural product in all that made him and unmade
.sse him. Drew Daniel, whose holidays from graduate school backing Björk
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irypo Mann short story into a Peggy Lee adult pop cabaret song has as much
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place as the long-repeated narrative of how the duo’s earlier hit, ‘‘Hound
introduction 3
