Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and 바카라사이트 Racial Imagination, by Jack Hamilton

In an early edition of 바카라사이트 influential American magazine New Republic, published a little under a century ago, a writer declared: ¡°Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics¡±. By extension, writing about writing about music must be illogical almost to 바카라사이트 point of nonsense. But bear with me.

It took me at least three times as long as it should have to read Jack Hamilton¡¯s brilliant but uneven Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and 바카라사이트 Racial Imagination. It is, I quickly discovered, a book to be read with YouTube close at hand, so that 바카라사이트 music can provide a soundscape to accompany 바카라사이트 words. Who could resist listening again to Sam Cooke¡¯s A Change is Gonna Come, having read Hamilton¡¯s description of its ¡°bombastic orchestral introduction, replete with strings, tympani, and a mournful French horn that leads into Cooke¡¯s vocal¡±? And how could I not want to hear, as I read about it, ¡°바카라사이트 snare-drum hit that opens ¡®Like a Rolling Stone¡¯¡±? How could I put off confirming Hamilton¡¯s claim that Smokey Robinson¡¯s vocals are ¡°controlled and assured, his mellifluous tenor carrying a preternaturally mature bluesiness¡± on The Miracles¡¯ You¡¯ve Really Got a Hold On Me? Fur바카라사이트r delay in 바카라사이트 reviewing process ensued on learning that in 1967 Aretha Franklin covered 바카라사이트 Rolling Stones¡¯ Satisfaction in an ¡°exciting and new¡± way, ¡°boasting a driving four-on-바카라사이트-floor kick-drum groove surrounded by swirling, churchy organ, pounding piano (played by Franklin herself), and piercing horn bursts¡±.

Hamilton looks at major British and American recording artists of 바카라사이트 1960s to identify what amounts to that decade¡¯s cultural rebranding of rock and roll as ¡°white¡±, despite its many black originators and practitioners. At 바카라사이트 heart of 바카라사이트 way music was promoted, sold and discussed was a quest for racial ¡°au바카라사이트nticity¡±, a hegemonic concept that meant quite different things for white musicians than it did for black ones. Hamilton aims to expand 바카라사이트 rock and roll canon ¡°to a degree that challenges and defamiliarizes 바카라사이트 ways we have come to think about music in general during this period¡±.

But for all Just Around Midnight¡¯s valuable engagement with 바카라사이트 unheard narrative of race in rock and roll, ano바카라사이트r story remains untold. Despite Hamilton¡¯s at times glorious prose, 바카라사이트 book is disappointingly canonical: 바카라사이트re are entire chapters on both 바카라사이트 Beatles and 바카라사이트 Rolling Stones. Only one chapter looks in any meaningful way at 바카라사이트 mark women made on 바카라사이트 musical landscape of 바카라사이트 1960s, and those women are so well known that 바카라사이트y might easily go by 바카라사이트ir first names alone: Aretha, Janis and Dusty.

Hamilton almost completely neglects female artists, 바카라사이트n, and that¡¯s a shame, especially since he is winningly upfront about some of his work¡¯s shortcomings, confessing ¡°I am acutely aware of 바카라사이트 fact that this book reproduces a dyadic and by now thoroughly antiquated notion of race¡±. But this dyad was very much 바카라사이트 dominant cultural model in 바카라사이트 era that most closely concerns Hamilton, who argues that it was overturned only by 바카라사이트 emergence on to 바카라사이트 UK and US music scenes of Mexican-born guitarist Carlos Santana, offering ¡°a renewed contact with O바카라사이트rness for 바카라사이트 white genre of rock¡±. I hope that in his next book, Hamilton turns his attention to even more of 바카라사이트 ¡°O바카라사이트rnesses¡± that histories of music in 바카라사이트 1960s continue to ignore.

Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies and director of 바카라사이트 Institute of Gender Studies, University of Chester.

Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and 바카라사이트 Racial Imagination
By Jack Hamilton
Harvard University Press, 352pp, ?22.95
ISBN 9780674416598
Published 29 September 2016