What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture

Abstract

Mark Anthony Neal. What Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp. $19.99. Mark Anthony Neal's What Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture interprets volatile political and cultural issues that arise from clash between black music's two separate but overlapping lives. The first is black music's single lived in connection to formal and informal institutions of Black Public Sphere. Symbolized by backwoods social clubs, or jook joints, and Chitlin' Circuit, venues which served largely segregated audiences in North and South, music of this sphere provided (provides?) an autonomous soundtrack to black social life. Neal, second life of black music has been a tumultuous marriage between black cultural production and mass consumerism-one in which black is largely subsumed by market interests. In many ways, What Music Said is a torch song for black music's tragic entanglement in a bad marriage. What Music Said chronicles another bad marriage even more compellingly--if apparently unwittingly. That is wedding of African American culture to jargon of late-twentieth-century professional academic cultural critique. As it bears witness to this marriage, What Music Said consistently distances, simplifies, even silences musical voices whose complexity and struggle for agency is point. While Neal opens work with an invocation of cultural critiques that happened in Jesse Hodges's barbershop in Bronx and consistently invokes organic call-and-response dynamics of vibrant counterpublic(s) in Black Public Sphere, he devotes far more space to problems of intra-racial class antagonism, inter-racial entanglement, and cultural events. instance, Neal's attention to most thoroughly commodified kinds of contemporary black music--hip-hop and hip-hop-influenced R&B--to total exclusion of other forms--House, Techo, Go-Go-- which have resist ed mainstream market saturation and remained more covert signals analytical preferences of work. In Literary Theory and Claims of History Satya Mohanty suggests that one of limitations of postmodern literary and cultural criticism has been how anti-foundationalist epistemological claims have eroded perceived existence of facts. This philosophical issue has led to a methodological turn away from evidence. At times, supporting points of analysis is mere fact that a present theorist's claim mirrors another theorist's previous theoretical claim. What Music Said suffers from its reliance on circular references to discourse of cultural critique where evidence apropos to music itself might appear. As a result, in What Music Said, beauty and subtle complexity of music, even that which occurs within Black Public Sphere, is often ensconced in complex--long--sentences and simplified by conceptual abstraction. Among abstractions which supplant historical evidence and primary accounts are uniformly stifling effects of liberal bourgeois models of black public life, middle-class sensibilities, and mass-consumer markets on mass-mediated counternarratives of artists. The strongest aspect of What Music Said is Neal's meditation on convergence of consumer economics, hip-hop, and would-be legacy of oppositional Black Power rhetoric as score and soundtrack of contemporary inner-city black life. His work counters uncritical approaches to hip-hop which construe music as authentic voice of inner-city black youth and reveals extent to which integrity of art is threatened by For Love of Money ethics which permeate much of American culture. Neal's portrayal of hip-hop artists' attachment to the real and their efforts to create present through a reconstituted past presents a valuable portrait of artists' struggle for sovereignty in post-industrial America. …

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