1970s Identity on the Disco Floor (and 1980s Identity on the Sitcom)

I want to start by offering an apology to our dedicated readers.  My apology is not for my recent hiatus, which has been necessary due to numerous recent changes in my life.  But I do want to apologize for not posting this gem sooner because it is things like this that make us fully appreciate the potential that the internet has to enhance our daily lives:

If you're curious, here is the original Stevie Wonder performance from 1973.

Why is this such a gem?  First, because the editing could not be better.  In fact, the first time I saw this video, my immediate reaction was to declare Daft Punk to be genii of the nth degree for making this happen--for a split second, I thought that they had somehow recreated a near-perfect replica of an episode of Soul Train for the official video (nope).  Second, because this song belongs without question to the aesthetics of 70s music while maintaining a contemporary sound, as a quick comparison to Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition' performance makes clear.  Both songs rely heavily on repetition.  In 'Superstition,' this can be heard in the opening line, which comes back frequently in the song.  Overall, though, 'Superstition' still adheres to the basic form of pop music, including a refrain, verses, and even a bridge.  Daft Punk has moved away from these conventions, taking instead what can best be summarized as a minimalist approach (which is to say very little musical material that is repeated many times) while integrating a pop aesthetic of layering a variety of different ideas together.  You hear the exact same thing in the BeeGee's 'Night Fever,' for instance (WARNING: Travolta is in his undies in that clip); you just need to follow that fantastic opening scratchy bit that comes back at times, then think about how many layers are in the 'Night Fever' chorus.

It's worth watching that clip even if you skip the Travolta underwear part because you should see the scene where they are dancing on the world's most amazing lit-up disco dance floor.  What strikes me here is how little individuality is conveyed.  Indeed, that is part of the function of this scene within Saturday Night Fever: the local disco is a place where Tony [Travolta] and his gang have carved out their very small world, one where they can get away from nagging parents and dead-end jobs.  Our first introduction in the movie to the disco is in the 'Night Fever' scene, where we see how carefully Tony has prepared for this night, but also how he fits into the place, as represented by the group all dancing together (yet alone!).  It is their version of losing themselves to dance, but it is a place where they primarily want to feel that they fit in.  Certainly Tony is the most talented of the dancers there--and therefore often stands out--but we also see that he has a lot he tries to escape from.  The importance of this territory is attested to later in the movie, when this space will be threatened by Puerto Rican dancers during a contest.  While Tony is declared victorious by the home-disco crowd, he believes that they were the better dancers and starts to see his world as limited.  As any good 1970s New York movie character does, ultimately Tony seeks the glitz and glamor of Manhattan over Brooklyn, even after he prevails at the disco in his famous white suit:

Escaping Brooklyn via seriously graffiti-laden subway car

 
If you compare the dance that introduces the viewer to Tony's disco with the Soul Train clip, you will see a remarkable contrast.  In Soul Train, each of the featured dancers is doing his or her own thing, particularly during the walk down the line.  But there is very little here that is uniform.  The fashion is strikingly different from person to person.  The plaid is found in unexpected places, mostly as pants.  The hair is also notable.  In fact, the hair is really notable because--with the exception of topknots--there is a lack of obvious attempts to conceal natural hair (unless, of course, people have very fancy wigs).  This is 1973, people.  And these are black people looking like black people and delineating themselves as individuals through their dancing.

Soul Train was extremely popular, airing in markets across the country and--even more significantly--in both black and white households.  So it is hard not to make a connection between it and a show that had the same kind of impact a decade later: The Cosby Show.  Take the season 2 introduction, for instance:

A few things here: we see each member of the family dance along to the theme song.  Having two people in the frame is somewhat reminiscent of the Soul Train Line, particularly as each person does his or her own thing.  However, there is no question of the individuality of each family member in question.  The one that stands out the most, of course, is Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby), who seems less able to dance than the rest of his family.  Undoubtedly, part of this is simply Cosby hamming it up, as he is prone to do (in the best possible way).  But could this be a statement about the image of black people projected by Soul Train?  Perhaps Cosby is covertly saying that some black people can't dance, a point that might be missed by white audience members accustomed to seeing African-Americans in limited roles on television.  Unlike on Soul Train though, they are not limited to demonstrating their dancing prowess; indeed, they have a voice.

It's entirely possible that I am reading too much into this and that I need to take a break from Daft Punk/Soul Train mashups, but then again, it is more fun sometimes to lose yourself to dance.

The Aesthetics of Hate

Over this long summer break at SGS, the following three events happened:

1. I attended a workshop on the Holocaust at Northwestern University in Chicago:

2. I visited a plantation in North Carolina:

3. Against all common sense, against all previous warnings, against the advice of serious film-goers, and against his own better judgment, my husband watched another Lars von Trier film by himself again:

Lars von Trier's film, Nymphoniac, like his last film, Melancholia, made Joel have a sad.

All three events, believe it or not, have led me to think about this one topic all summer, which is the relationship between aesthetics and hatred, or what I'm choosing to call the aesthetics of hate.

I'd written before on this blog about the Viennese architect Otto Wagner, who preached and practiced beauty and utility in his work. What makes Otto Wagner's so great, I argued, was that he showed us how art -- modernist art, no less - can serve the public. That it could be integrated in daily life and into public infrastructures.

But this summer has made me think more seriously about how art and architecture can also be used for horrible purposes. What I've become especially fascinated by is the idea that the more aesthetically pleasing the artistic portrayal of hatred is, the more powerful the creator's message can be.

Our first (and lightest) example of this is Lars von Trier's film, Melancholia, which I was completely fascinated by in 2012:

The first five minutes were breathtakingly beautiful. Stunning.

Against the backdrop of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" overture, you watch the world as you know it explode. It's haunting, beautifully filmed, visually stunning, a wonder. No, really. Watch the first 5-10 minutes or so. It's so aesthetically pleasing. It's so beautiful.

But, numerous critics pointed out, this film is really hateful. NPR's film critic David Edelstein called it "as hateful as it is hate-filled." Lars von Trier brings out the worst in us all, makes us turn against each other, and by the end of the film condemns humanity to a violent and horrible fate. There's no redemption in this film because he thinks we're really not worth saving. But von Trier's aesthetic is so beautiful, so totalizing, so completely realized that he makes it difficult to resist watching as the main characters' lives get destroyed (in both a physical and metaphysical sense). Beauty is Lars von Trier's weapon; it lures us into a film intent on destroying our will to live.

The other two examples of beauty and the worst of humanity coming together that I'd like to share with you all are two different architectural sites that I visited or discussed at length this summer: Auschwitz-Birkenau and a Southern plantation in North Carolina. Paul Jaskot, an art historian at Northwestern, has written extensively on the fact that architects helped to design concentration camps like Auschwitz. Not "Nazi architects," as in Himmler, Hitler, and the rest (although they of course played a role in this, too) but actual architects who had been trained to design and construct buildings, who had most likely at some point taken an architecture history class and been exposed to Romanesque architecture, Baroque ornamentation, and neo-Gothic design. Some had even trained in the avant-garde and modernist Bauhaus style under the direction of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. These Nazi architects' buildings were functional, yes, but also aesthetically pleasing and referenced to older historical styles and traditions:

This famous view of Auschwitz, for example, is haunting and horrible, true, but it's haunting and horrible because it's aesthetically pleasing. We remember it because it's appealing for the eye to look at. It's easy for us to remember. Look at how the tower centers the structure, how the buildings on the left and right are perfectly symmetrical. Our eye like this image, it likes this view. It likes this building. Jaskot taught us this summer that this is no coincidence; again, by making this entry into Auschwitz aesthetically appealing, the architects made this passageway to a death camp powerful. 

In early August, I experienced aesthetic pleasure in another setting that was also a site of oppression, torture, and death: a plantation in North Carolina. Prior to visiting, I was really ambivalent about taking a tour of a plantation that used to enslave nearly 1,000 people. But I'm glad that I did. The historic state-run Stagville Plantation was a wonderful example of public historians getting it right, resisting the usual Gone With The Wind narrative and focusing on the lives of those who transformed the economy of the South into the economic wonder it became. If you're going to go to a plantation, go to Stagville. Be very wary of the others, especially those that focus on the good ol' days before Abraham Lincoln ruined everything.

Again, what was striking at this site was the beauty and simplicity of the buildings that housed slaves:

Built in the woods, these slave cabins comprised of 4 rooms, with 1 family in each room. But considering that each family consisted usually of at least 7-13 members, you're looking at a cabin that housed roughly 50 people. There was no insulation, of course, no glass windows.

The builders and laborers who erected these structures were the slaves themselves, who, our tour guide said, were masterful in their work. Look at the chimney they built out of brick. Notice how tight the construction is:

This 1850s chimney, our guide said, could probably be fired up today and work just fine. There's something simple yet beautiful about this construction, which, to me, explains why these sites still have the power to haunt us.

In a weird way, because of the seminars I attended this summer, I'm now especially intrigued by/appreciative of directors Steve McQueen and Quentin Tarantino, both of whom I'm starting to suspect understood the aesthetic power of hate and used it in their works in subversive ways. Quentin Tarantino chose a beautiful site to tell a story of hate for his film Django Unchained:

Isn't this house so beautiful? Doesn't it then become even more disturbing when we think about its purpose? When we see it as a symbol for humanity at its worst? Quentin Tarantino, of course, revels in this. He revels in taking pure white cotton puffs and spraying them with red blood, making them look pinkish:

That's his aesthetic. Plenty of more erudite and informed film buffs have written loads about this already.

Steve McQueen's film, 12 Years A Slave, also demonstrates the power of beauty in a similar way. Like Tarantino, McQueen chose to film his movie on a historic plantation, thus also making the site function as a symbol of moral depravity:

And Steve McQueen's film worked not just because McQueen was telling a powerful story, but because he told it beautifully. The more beautiful the rendering, the more difficult it is for us to resist the aesthetic object's power. Although this next image is really and truly upsetting, it's also beautifully composed and arranged. Remember that McQueen did so intentionally:

It follows the golden ratio of math that's found in nature but also in art and music: according to this principle, the highlight in a work of art naturally falls at the 2/3 mark. In this still, the dangling, lynched body appears at the 2/3 mark. The victim's body makes the golden ratio complete for it appears at the perfect moment to our eye. It creates the same perfect perpendicular axis that artists and art historians have admired for hundreds of years.

Again: because our eye finds these compositions and arrangements appealing, we find them all the more powerful and capable of truly upsetting us. In Steve McQueen's case, I think he's using these aesthetic principles to make it difficult for the film-goer to deny the realities of the past and to force the viewer to confront the ongoing traumas of the present. Beauty is the blunt instrument that he employs to show us (often against our will!) something appalling.

There's something really powerful, fascinating, and subversive to using beauty for horrible ends. Don't be dismissive of art or aesthetics, these historic structures and these provocative films warn us, don't belittle their power. Beauty is all around us. What's it being used for?

Setting Operas in the Heart of Darkness

To avoid the unpleasant task of writing my book, I've decided to spend a few minutes ruminating on 19th century operas that deal with African settings and characters. Many years ago, I sent out a query to the American Musicological Society's listserve inquiring about operas that have black characters in them. Based on the answers I received, I compiled a list of operas to investigate at some point in my life. Little did I know at the time that some really great scholars were also working on interrogating blackness in opera, and they published a book later that year that's literally called Blackness in Opera:

Coolness, right? Anyway. What I want to focus on, however, are 19th century operas that specifically used an African setting or African character. Because they all share a trait that musicologists have kind of picked up on but I'm not sure anyone's discussed at length: although most of these operas claim to be set in "Africa" (as in "sub-Saharan Africa"), they're really not. 

I think the main example that people are aware of here is Giacomo Meyerbeer's popular 1865 opera, L'Africaine:

Supposedly a tale about Vasco de Gama's adventures around the world, a good chunk of it takes place on an African island where the "natives" practice a religion much more akin to Hinduism. The island also appears to be in the Indian Ocean, perhaps near Madagascar or someplace like that. Here's the wonderful opera singer Shirley Verrett singing part of it with Placido Domingo at the San Francisco Opera in 1988:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoTNo5Zz3RU
(for some reason, the blog won't let me upload the video directly onto the page today)

If you watch the clip, you'll see that Girlfriend is straight-up wearing an Indian sari in the opera. How "African" is Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, I (and numerous musicologists) have wondered?

But Meyerbeer's opera, L'Africaine, isn't the only one that side steps Africanism in its quest to be exotic. Countless scholars have debated how we're supposed to interpret Verdi's Aida:

The opera's set in ancient Egypt, and the main femme fatale/femme fragile is an Ethiopian princess. How "Ethiopian" the opera director chooses to make her has greatly fluctuated over time.

Here's Grace Bumbry as "Aida":

The fabulous diva, Leontyne Price, serving it as usual (girlfriend don't PLAY):

Violetta Urmana at the Met recently (in brownface. Yes, I said it):

And as much as audiences enjoyed the opera when it premiered, some felt uncomfortable with its black African qualities. Here's Hanslick complaining about the work in 1880:

“The politics and religion, the oddities of dress and civilization of the ancient Egyptians are altogether too strange for us [Viennese/Germans]. We do not feel at ease among a lot of brown and black painted men. It may be urged that this is merely external, yet, for all, the spectator's sympathies are chilled…Think of nothing but dark-colored singers on the stage! Then, besides, the ugly, vaulting negroes and the dancing women dressed and painted in the most repulsive manner! An opera should present something of the lovely and agreeable, and no ethnological exactness can compensate for a total lack of beauty."

 (Taken from Dwight's Journal of Music, December 18, 1880, p. 201)

 
Yikes. In Hanslick's review, it seems unimaginable or inconceivable that one could depict black characters in an aesthetically pleasing way.

David Brodbeck has done some really fascinating work looking at Viennese reception of Karl Goldmark's opera, Queen of Sheba (Königin von Saba). Reviews were laced with thinly-veiled (or oftentimes open and hostile) anti-Semitic remarks that claimed that the music and setting reminded the critics of a Jewish service at the synagogue (as if any of them had ever been. But whatever):

Lastly, I want to point out Franz von Suppe's operetta, Die Afrikareise, from 1885:

 Zoe has a fancy fellowship at Harvard this summer to do some digging around, and she's been flipping through the score and libretto for this operetta. So far, she's discovered that the work really isn't set in Africa at all, although they do mention the country Chad at one point. Rather, it seems to have a more traditional orientalist setting (in the Saidian sense of the word).

So what gives, 19th century opera composers? Why this weird avoidance to actually set your "African" operas in Africa? Why limit your stereotyping to Asian characters and North African/Middle Eastern ones?

I wonder, however, if this hesitancy to depict sub-Saharan Africa goes across all of the arts. Orientalist paintings usually focused on North Africa, for example:

Horace Vernet, The Lion Hunt (1836)

And Joseph Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness, might very well be one of the first major cultural products to orientalize Africa that was widely consumed by Europeans:

But it came out in 1899. Were there really so few cultural products that depicted Africa/Africans/Africanness/Blackness that held European popular attention before then?

I remain dissatisfied with our knowledge/lack of knowledge of 19th century musical works dealing with African themes and notions of blackness. All of this stuff is much more fleshed out when it comes to talking about the 20th century (Porgy and Bess, Johnny Spielt Auf, Show Boat, etc.). But there's an earlier history here, ripe for an investigation and analysis, one that can benefit from postcolonial analysis, from a musicologist's fine ear and critical eye looking at the score. Heavens knows that I can't tackle this project right now. But I encourage anyone interested in this blog post to investigate further.